Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  There are children who do indeed understand. In the ghetto, ten-year-old children are mature adults. They already know and understand what is in store for them. They may not as yet know why they are being torn away from their parents – they may not as yet have been told. For the moment it’s enough for them to know that they are being torn away from their devoted guardians, their fathers and their loving and anxious mothers. It’s hard to keep such children in one’s arms or to take them by the hand. Such children weep on their own, with their own tears. Their tears are so sharp and piercing that they fall upon all hearts like poisoned arrows. But hearts in the ghetto have turned to stone. They would rather burst but they can’t, and this is probably the greatest, the harshest curse. …

  The sorrow becomes greater, and the torture more senseless, when one tries to think rationally. Well, an old man is an old man. If he’s lived his sixty-five years, he can convince himself, or others convince him, that he should utter something like: ‘Well, thank God, I’ve had my share of living, in joy and sorrow, weal and woe. That’s life. Probably that’s fate. And anyway, you don’t live for ever. So what’s the difference if it’s a few days, a few weeks, or even a few months sooner? Sooner or later, you’ve got to die, sooner or later everything’s over. That’s life.’

  Maybe they can talk the old man into telling himself these things, maybe they can talk his family into telling themselves. But what about children who have only just been hatched, children who have only seen God’s world in the ghetto, for whom a cow or a chicken is just a legendary creature, who have never in their lives so much as inhaled the fragrance of a flower, laid eyes upon an orange, tasted an apple or a pear, and who are now doomed to die? …

  The sky above the ghetto, like yesterday and the day before, is unclouded. Like yesterday and the day before, the early-autumn sun shines. It shines and smiles at our Jewish grief and agony, as though someone were merely stepping on vermin, as though someone had written a death sentence for bedbugs, a Day of Judgement for rats which must be exterminated and wiped off the face of the earth.

  There are nevertheless still enough people in the ghetto who doubt, still enough people in the ghetto who continue to live with faith. There are even those who reason logically.

  ‘This ghetto, where eighty per cent of the population performs useful work, is not one of your provincial towns which could have been made Judenrein, free of Jews, in half an hour. Here people are necessary, are needed for work. It’s not possible that they would take people from here and send them away.’

  And those who cannot argue rationally, who are just full of faith, they simply believe in miracles:

  ‘Things like this have happened before. All through history, Jews have been threatened with bitter decrees, and deliverance has come at the last minute. There just was an air raid of Łódź for the first time since the war began. So maybe they’ll withdraw the evil decree. Who can tell?’ ...

  Saturday, 5 September 1942.

  It has begun.

  It’s only a few minutes after 7 a.m. now. All the people, practically the entire ghetto, are on the street. Whose nerves don’t drive them out? Who can sit home? Who has peace of mind? Who can just sit with his arms folded? No one! …

  Consequently, from early morning the streets of the ghetto are busier than ever. And what a strange busyness. A silent, lifeless busyness, if one can put it that way. People don’t talk to one another, as though everyone had left his tongue at home or had forgotten how to speak. Acquaintances don’t greet each other, as though they feel ashamed. Everyone is rigid in motion, rigid standing in the long lines at the distribution places and rigid in the enormous lines at the vegetable places. A dead silence dominates the ghetto. No one so much as sighs or moans. Today huge, heavy stones weigh on the hearts of the ghetto residents.

  People run through the ghetto streets like transmigrant spirits, perhaps like sinful souls wandering through the world of chaos. With that same stubborn silence on their clenched lips, with that same dread in their eyes – that’s the way those spirits must look. People stand in line, perhaps like prisoners condemned to death, standing and waiting until their turn comes to go to the gallows. Rigidity, terror, collapse, fear, dread – there is no word to describe all the feelings that swell and grow in these petrified hearts that can’t even weep, can’t even scream. There is no ear that can catch the silent scream that deafens with its rigidity and that rigidifies with its deafening silence.

  They run over the three ghetto bridges, like a host of hundred-headed serpents surging back and forth. The host of serpents extends forward and back. These are people hurrying and hastening. The air is pregnant with oppressiveness. Macabre tidings are in its density. The sky keeps swelling, billowing, and will soon burst, and out of the void will tumble the full horror and the full reality.

  It has begun!

  No one knows what, no one knows where, no one knows how. Supposing that everyone keeps silent, supposing that no one looks at anyone else, supposing that everyone avoids everyone else the way the thief avoids his pursuer, then who was the first to utter these dreadful words: ‘It has begun!’ …

  No one. No one spoke them. No one uttered these macabre tidings. Only the heavens burst and its spilled guts dropped those words: ‘It has begun!’ …

  Where has it begun? People say: ‘They’re already taking out all the residents of the old-age home on Dworska Street.’

  People say: ‘On Rybna Street there’s already a truck, and they’re loading it with old people and children.’

  Alas, all the stories are true: they’re taking them from here, from there, from everywhere, and they’re already loading on Rybna Street.

  It has begun.

  The Jewish police made the first start. They began as if they wanted to practise their work along the line of least resistance – the old-age home. There it was as easy as pie – they were just ready to be taken. And the people there are being taken wholesale, there’s no selecting and rejecting. They’re all old, and so all of them are to go to the scrap heap. It’s really the line of least resistance. Who is going to speak up for them, who’s going to waste words for these old people who have been living on the good graces of the community for weeks and months now? … They are being loaded on the trucks like lambs for slaughter and driven to the staging area. There they may get the condemned man’s last meal consisting, supposedly, of a soup with lots of potatoes, cooked with horse bones, and later they’ll be taken away from this staging area—

  To the scrap heap …

  Over on Rybna Street the police have to take them out of apartments. There they are encountering resistance. There they have to cut living, palpitating limbs from bodies. There they wrench infants from their mothers’ breasts. There they pull healthy molars out of mouths. On Rybna Street they tear grown children from under their parents’ wings. They separate husband from wife, wife from husband, people who’ve been together for forty or fifty years, who’ve lived in sorrow and in joy, who’ve had children together, who’ve reared them together and lost them together. They’ve been with one another for forty or fifty years and become practically one body ...

  The sick, too, are being taken there, sick people who at great risk escaped from the hospital, whom mortal terror gave the strength and courage to leap over barriers, sick people who were given someone’s last crust of bread, last bit of sugar, last potato just to keep them alive one more day, one more week, one more month, because the war might end and then they could perhaps get back on their feet. Also the sick are being taken.

  Living limbs are cut off. Healthy molars are extracted. Palpitating bodies are halved. The anguish is great. Let someone try to describe it, he won’t be able to! Let someone try to depict it, he’ll only collapse! Is it any wonder that people scream? …

  People scream. And their screams are terrible and fearful and senseless, as terrible and fearful and senseless as the actions causing them. The ghetto is no longer rigid; it is now writhing in convulsi
ons. The whole ghetto is one enormous spasm. The whole ghetto jumps out of its own skin and plunges back within its own barbed wires. Ah, if only a fire would come and consume everything! If only a bolt from heaven would strike and destroy us altogether! There is hardly anyone in the ghetto who hasn’t gasped such a wish from his feeble lips, whether he is affected directly, indirectly, or altogether uninvolved in the events which were staged before his very eyes and ears. Everyone is ready to die; already now, at the very start, at this very moment, it is impossible to endure the terror and the horror. Already at this moment it is impossible to endure the screams of hundreds of thousands of bound cattle slaughtered but not yet killed; impossible to endure the twitching of the pierced but unsevered throats, which let them neither die nor live.

  What has happened to the Jewish police, who undertook to do that piece of work? Have their brains atrophied? Have their hearts been torn out and replaced with stones? It’s hard, very hard, to answer these questions. One thing is certain – they are not to be envied. And there are also all sorts of executioners. There is an executioner who for a worthless traitor’s pay would raise his hand against his brother; another, besides getting his traitor’s pay, also has to be gotten drunk, otherwise his ignoble hand will fumble. And there are executioners who do their bloody work for the sake of an idea. They were told: ‘So-and-so is not only useless to society, he’s actually detrimental, he’s got to be cleaned out.’ So they act for the good of society, they do the cleaning out.

  The Jewish police have been bought. They have been intoxicated. They were given hashish – their children have been exempted from the order. They’ve been given three pounds of bread a day for their bloody bit of work – bread to gorge themselves on and an extra portion of sausage and sugar. They work for the sake of an idea, the Jewish police do. Thus our own hands, Jewish hands, extract the molars, cut off the limbs, slice up the bodies ...

  No, they are not to be envied at all, the Jewish police!

  The bloody page of this history should be inscribed with black letters for the so-called ‘White Guard’, the porters of Balut Market and of the Food Supply Office. This rabble, fearful of losing their soup during pedestrian embargo, volunteered to help in the action on condition that they get the same as had been promised the police – bread, sausage, and sugar, and the exemption of their families. Their offer was accepted. They participated voluntarily in the action.

  The bloody page of this history should be inscribed with black letters for all those officials who petitioned to have some role in this action, only in order to get bread and sausage rations instead of the soup they wouldn’t have gotten sitting at home ...

  The Seizures

  O God, Jewish God, how defenceless Jewish blood has become!

  Oh, God, God of all mankind, how defenceless human blood has become!

  Blood flows in the streets. Blood flows over the yards. Blood flows in the buildings. Blood flows in the apartments. Not red, healthy blood. That doesn’t exist in the ghetto. Three years of war, two and a half years of ghetto, have devoured the red corpuscles. All the ghetto has is pus and streaming gall, that drips, flows and gushes from the eyes, and inundates streets, yards, houses, apartments.

  How can such blood satisfy the appetites of the beasts? It can only whet their appetites, nothing more!

  It is no longer just a rumour, not just gossip; it is an established fact. The head of the ghetto administration, Biebow, the man most interested in the ghetto’s existence, in its survival, has put himself in charge of the action. He himself directs the ‘resettlement’.

  People are being seized. The Jewish police are seizing them with mercy, according to orders: children under ten, old people over sixty-five, and the sick whom doctors have diagnosed as incurable ...

  The Jewish police have addresses. The Jewish police have Jewish concierges, and the concierges have house registers. The addresses inform that in such and such an apartment is a child who was born on such and such a date. The addresses inform that in such and such an apartment is an old man who was born so and so many years ago. A doctor comes into every apartment. He examines the occupants. He observes who is in good health and who just pretends to good health. He’s had so much practice in the ghetto that a mere glance distinguishes the well from the mortally ill.

  Nor does it avail the child to cling to its mother’s neck with both little hands. Nor does it avail the mother to throw herself on the threshold and bellow like a slaughtered cow: ‘Only over my dead body will you take my child!’ It does not avail the old man to clutch the cold walls with his bony fingers and plead: ‘Let me die here in peace.’ It does not avail the old woman to fall on her knees, kiss their boots, and plead: ‘I’ve already got grown-up grandchildren.’ It does not avail the sick man to bury his feverish head in the damp, sweaty pillow, and moan, and shed perhaps his last tears.

  Nothing avails. The police have to supply their quota. They have to seize people. They cannot show pity. But when the Jewish police take people, they do so punctiliously. When they take people, they help them weep, they help them moan. When they take people, they try to comfort them with hoarse voices, to express their anguish …

  It’s totally different when others come!

  They enter a yard and first off is a reckless shot of a revolver. Everyone loses courage. All blood stops coursing. All throats are stopped with hot lead. The lead freezes the gasps and sobs in the throat. You tremble. No! To tremble you have to have flowing blood, but your blood refuses to circulate. It has curdled, it is rigid like water in a frost. The Jews wait, benumbed, paralyzed, helpless. They wait for what happens next.

  Next comes a harsh, terse, draconic order, yelled out, and then repeated by the Jewish police. ‘In two minutes everyone downstairs! No one is permitted to stay inside. All doors must be left open!’

  Who can describe, depict, the crazed and wild stampede on stairways and landings, the rigid and inanimate figures who hasten to obey the order on time? No one.

  Old, rheumatic, twisted sclerotic legs stumble over crooked stairs and angular stones. Young, buoyant, deer legs fly with bird-like speed. The heavy and clumsy legs of the sick heaved from their beds are bent and bowed. Swollen legs of starvelings tap blindly along. All scurry, hurry, rush out into the courtyard.

  Woe to the latecomer. He will never finish that last walk. He will have to swim in his own blood. Woe to him who stumbles and falls. He will never stand up again. He will slip and fall again in his own blood. Woe to the child who is so terrified that all he can do is scream ‘Mama!’ He will never get past the first syllable. A reckless gunshot will sever the word in his throat. The second syllable will tumble down into his heart like a bird shot down in mid-flight. The experience of the last few hours proved this in its stark reality.

  When the Jewish police take people, they take whomever they can, whoever is there. If someone has hidden and can’t be taken, then he remains hidden. But when they come to take people, they take those who are there and those who are not there. If someone is not located, they take another in his place. If the missing man is found, he will not be seized; he will have to be carried out.

  The Jewish police, further, can be bought. Not with ghetto marks of course, but with most valuable items. As long as it’s hush-hush and no one can see or hear, then anyone who’s got something can ransom his way out. But when they come to take you, you can buy your way out only with your rarest and most precious possession – your life. You can take the choice of not wishing to go, and you’ll never have to go anywhere again …

  Sunday, 6 September 1942

  The clock says twelve noon. It is a full-blown summer’s day. It’s impossible to stay indoors. No one can stay at home. Perhaps because you must stay inside, perhaps because you’re surrounded by your family and you have nothing to say to them. You yourself are indeed young. You yourself have your work certificate proving you’re a useful citizen of the ghetto. Your wife is young too, and her papers are fully in order. Younger
than both of you is your fourteen-year-old son, who already works. He is tall and slender and handsome, a fine figure of a lad. You have no reasons to be afraid, not for yourself, not for your wife, and not for your son. But you sit at home, listening to the sighs and shouts and screams of your neighbours, from whom pieces of flesh were torn away yesterday. You sit at home and hear yet another scream every minute from another neighbour, or mute sobs from people sick with sorrow. You sit at home and constantly hear yet another scream from a neighbour who, in his great despair over the children who were seized from him, tries to end his broken existence with a knife or by leaping from a high window. You sit at home, devoured by your own sorrow, your wife’s sorrow, your son’s sorrow, and the sufferings of all your neighbours and all Jews. Sitting at home like this, on and on, every time you glance at the mirror and it reflects a yellowed, sunken, confused contenance: ‘You, too, are a candidate for the scrap heap!’ Sitting at home, casting furtive glances at your wife who has aged dozens of years in these last two days, then looking at your beautiful son, seeing his dark hollow face and the mortal fear lurking in his deep black eyes, then all the terror around you makes you fear for yourself, makes you fear for your wife, makes you fear for your trembling child. All of you are candidates!

  ‘Spectacles and eyeglasses of every kind are to be handed in to the medical office for utilization’: Memorandum on the Disposing of the Possessions of Jews in Lublin and Auschwitz, 26 September 1942

  SS-OBERGRUPPENFÜHRER AUGUST FRANK

  Frank was a senior member of the SS concentration camp administration.

  Top Secret