Rosenfeld’s comments about the deporation of cripples find a poignant echo in a diary fragment written by an anonymous young girl from the ghetto, covering merely three weeks, from the end of February to mid-March 1942. The diarist tells about her friend, Hania Huberman [mostly HH in the diary], “extremely intelligent and wise. She knows life. A third-year gymnasium student, a very good girl.” The diarist and HH herself were both convinced that HH would not be deported because she had a crippled father who could not walk. Then, on March 3 the news arrived: “Hania H. was leaving.” The diarist could not imagine how her friend and her father would face the future: “Where will she go with her sick, helpless father, without a shirt for him and with nothing for herself? Hungry, exhausted, without money and food. My mom immediately found some shirts for her and her father. My sister and I ran upstairs. When I came back, I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stay there longer because I had to finish the laundry…. I promised to visit her.”218
Rumors spread among some of the Germans working in the Chelmno area—and probably among the local Poles. Heinz May was forest inspector (Forstmeister) in Kolo County, near Lodz. In the fall of 1941 May was informed by Forest Constable Stagemeir that some commandos had arrived in the vicinity. In reporting this “Stagemeier was strangely serious,” a detail to which May did not pay attention at the moment. Somewhat later, as May was traveling through the forest with Kreisleiter Becht, the district chief pointed to Precinct 77 and declared: “The trees will be growing better soon”; by way of explanation, Becht added: “Jews make good fertilizer.” Nothing else.
Strange events occurred in May’s precinct over the following weeks: A closed truck about four meters in length and two meters high, with iron bolt and padlock in the rear, was being pulled out of a ditch by another truck among a group of policemen: “A definitely unpleasant smell came from the truck and from the men standing around it.” May and his son, who arrived on the scene, were quickly chased away. A succession of further incidents and some rumors induced May to drive to Stagemeier’s home for more information.
“Stagemeier explained to me,” May reported in 1945 testimony, “that a large detachment of military police was stationed in Chelmno. The palace [castle] on the western side of Chelmno had been enclosed by a high wooden fence. Military police sentries armed with rifles were standing by the entrance…. I passed by there on the way back to my forest district and confirmed that what Stagemeier had said concerning the wooden fence and the sentries was true. There were row upon row of trucks with improvised canvas tops in Chelmno. Women, men, and even children had been crammed into those trucks…. During the short time I was there I saw the first truck drive up to the wooden fence. The sentries opened the gates. The truck vanished into the palace courtyard and immediately afterwards another closed truck came out of the courtyard and headed for the forest. And then both sentries closed the gates. There was no longer the slightest doubt that terrible things, things never before known in human history, were being played out there.”219
The killing capacity of Chelmno was approximately 1,000 people a day (around fifty people could be crammed into each of the three vans). The first victims were the Jews from villages and small towns in the Lodz area. Then, before the deportation of the Jews from the Lodz ghetto started, came the turn of the Gypsies herded into a special area of the ghetto (the Gypsy camp). “For the last ten days the Gypsies have been taken away in trucks, according to people who live in the immediate vicinity of the [Gypsy] camp,”220 the entry for the first week of January 1942 in the ghetto “Chronicle” indicates. Approximately 4,400 Gypsies were killed in Chelmno but there were few witnesses. After the war some Poles who lived in the area mentioned the Gypsies, as did both the driver of one of the gas vans and another SS member of Lange’s unit. None of the Gypsies survived.221
As mentioned, the vast majority of the Lodz ghetto inhabitants remained unaware of Chelmno, although over the weeks and months information reached them in diverse ways. Strangely enough some information was even sent by mail. Thus on December 31, 1941, three weeks after the beginning of the exterminations, an unknown Jew sent a card later forwarded to Lodz to an acquaintance in Posbebice: “Dear cousin Mote Altszul, as you know from Kolo, Dabie, and other places Jews have been sent to Chelmno to a castle. Two weeks have already passed and it is not known how several thousands have perished. They are gone and you should know, there will be no addresses for them. They were sent to the forest and they were buried…. Do not look upon this as a small matter, they have decided to wipe out, to kill, to destroy. Pass this letter on to learned people to read.”222
Two weeks later a letter based on an eyewitness account was sent by the rabbi of Grabów to his brother-in-law in Lodz: “Until now I have not replied to your letters because I did not know exactly about all the things people have been talking about. Unfortunately, for our great tragedy, now we know it all. I have been visited by an eyewitness who survived only by accident, he managed to escape from hell…. I found out about everything from him. The place where all perish is called Chelmno, not far from Dabie, and all are hidden in the neighboring forest of Lochów. People are killed in two different ways: By firing squad or by poison gas. This is what happened to the cities Dabie, Isbicza, Kujawska, Klodawa, and others. Lately thousands of Gypsies have been brought there from the so-called Gypsy camps of Lodz, and for the past several days, Jews have been brought there from Lodz and the same is done to them. Do not think that I am mad. Alas, this is the tragic cruel truth…. O Creator of the world, help us! Jakob Schulman.”223
The eyewitness was probably the man called the “gravedigger from Chelmno,” Yakov Groyanowski from Izbica, a member of the Jewish commando that dug the pits into which the corpses were thrown in the forest. The gravedigger’s story reached both Ringelblum and Yitzhak Zuckerman, a Zionist youth leader in Warsaw.224 He told of people undressing in the castle for showering and disinfection, then being pushed into the vans and suffocated by the exhaust gas pumped in during the ride to the forest, some sixteen kilometers away. “Many of the people they [the gravediggers] dealt with had suffocated to death in the truck. But there were a few exceptions, including babies who were still alive; this was because mothers held the children in blankets and covered them with their hands so the gas would not get to them. In these cases, the Germans would split the heads of the babies on trees, killing them on the spot.” Groyanowski managed to flee, and hid in small communities (probably also in Grabów) until he reached Warsaw, in early January 1942.
XI
In Western Europe, in the meantime, life—a kind of life—was going on. In Paris the bombing of the synagogues didn’t cause any panic among the Jewish population. Although the round-ups of hostages, the executions, and the sending of thousands of Jews to Compiègne and Drancy signaled a worsening situation, Biélinky’s diary entries did not indicate a sense of upheaval.225 On October 9 it was registration time again, and Biélinky noted the long line of “‘B’s…. It is interesting to notice,” he added, “that in this crowd of Jews, thoroughly Jewish types are rare; all look physically like ordinary Parisians…no trace of a ghetto.”226 Most of his entries in these days dealt with the ongoing difficulties in getting enough food.
For Lambert, in October, the new German victories in the East did not mean the end of the war. “But, what will become of France and what will become of us, the Jews, in the meantime?”227 Lambert’s question was somewhat rhetorical as he immediately added in the same October 12 entry: “Of course, in this immense blaze, Jewish worry is but one element of the universal anxiety and expectation. This quietens me, at least in regard to the future of my sons, as a Pole, a Belgian or a Dutch are not more assured of the next day than I am myself.”228 A few weeks later, at the end of December, one thing at least had become clear: The outcome of the war was no longer in question. “Victory is certain; it could even take place in 1942.”229
In Bucharest in these same days, Sebastian certainly did not feel that his fat
e as a Jew was like that of other Romanians. He wanted to flee: “Never have I thought so intensely about leaving,” he wrote on October 16. “I know it’s absurd, I know it’s impossible, I know it’s pointless, I know it’s too late—but I can’t help it…. In the last few days I have read a number of American magazines…and I suddenly saw in detail another world, another milieu, other cities, another time.”230 He wished to sail on the Struma that was taking some seven hundred “illegal” emigrants to Palestine.231 Maybe he could join.
Sebastian, like most Jews in Romania, knew what was happening to the Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and—Transnistria. “It is an anti-Jewish delirium that nothing can stop,” he wrote on October 20. “There are no brakes, no rhyme or reason. It would be something if there were an anti-Semitic program; you’d know the limits to which it might go. But this is sheer uncontrolled bestiality, without shame or conscience, without goal or purpose. Anything, absolutely anything, is possible. I see the pallor of fear on Jewish faces.”232
In the diary entries that followed from mid-October to mid-December, Sebastian reacted to the daily indignities and threats that targeted Romanian Jewry (before and after Antonescu’s public letter to Filderman) which, in Sebastian’s eyes, was an intentional call for violence.233 Well-intentioned Romanian friends tried to convince the Jewish writer to convert to Catholicism: “The Pope will defend you!” they argued.234 “I don’t need arguments to answer them, nor do I search for any,” he noted on December 17…. Even if it were not so stupid and pointless, I would still need no arguments. Somewhere on an island with sun and shade, in the midst of peace, security, and happiness, I would in the end be indifferent to whether I was or was not Jewish. But here and now, I cannot be anything else. Nor do I think I want to be.”235
In the Reich the Jews not included in the first wave of deportations desperately attempted to understand the new measures and their personal fate. “Even more shocking reports about deportations of Jews to Poland,” Klemperer noted on October 25. “They have to leave almost literally naked and penniless. Thousands from Berlin to Lodz…. Will Dresden be affected and when? It hangs over us all the time.”236 November 1: “Today urgent warning card from Sussman, he must have read something alarming about the deportations, I should immediately renew my USA application…. I wrote back immediately, every route was now blocked. In fact, we heard from several sources that a complete ban on all emigration has just been decreed on the German side.”237 November 28: “The alarm abroad about the deportations must be very great: Without having asked for them, Lissy Meyerhof and Caroli Stern received, by telegram, from relatives in the USA visa and passage to Cuba. But it doesn’t help them; the German side is not issuing any passports…cf. also Sussman’s card to me. We weighed matters up again. Result as always: stay. If we go, then we save our lives and are dependents and beggars for the rest of our lives. If we remain, then our lives are in danger, but we retain the possibility of afterward leading a life worth living. Consolation in spite of it all: going hardly depends on us anymore. Everything is fate, one could be rushing to one’s doom. If, e.g., we had moved to Berlin in the spring, then by now I would probably be in Poland.”238
Klemperer’s rationalizations (ultimately borne out in his case, albeit by pure chance), were common among those who did not immediately board the trains. Hertha Feiner assumed that her status as former wife of an Aryan would save her: “We have serious worries and are living through a very grave time,” she wrote to her daughters on October 16. “I can’t and won’t burden you with details; I am fortunate in being better off than many others. You don’t have to worry about me. Because of my special status, I hope to be able to go on living here as before. Should there be any change, I would notify you immediately, but I don’t think there will be.”239
The only aspects of everyday life shared in various degrees by most Jews living throughout the German-dominated continent at the end of 1941 were the daily struggles for material survival, the sense of complete lack of any control over their own fate, and the passionate hope that, somehow, liberation was on its way. Even in Rubinowicz’s remote hamlet, in the Kielce district, the total uncertainty about the fate of Jews, day in, day out, was inescapable in those winter days. “Yesterday afternoon I went to Bodzentyn to get my tooth filled,” young Dawid noted on December 12. “Early this morning the militia came. As they were driving along the highway, they met a Jew who was going out of town, and they immediately shot him for no reason, then they drove on and shot a Jewess, again for no reason. So two victims have perished for absolutely no reason. All the way home I was frightened I might run across them but didn’t run across anybody.”240 The next day, another Jew was killed, again for no reason.241
A few days later the order came, as in most occupied countries and in the Reich, that the Jews had to deliver all furs to the authorities: “Father said,” Dawid noted on December 26, “an order had come that Jews were to hand over all furs, down to the smallest scrap. And 5 Jews were to be made responsible for those who didn’t hand them over. And whoever they found with any furs would receive the death-penalty—that’s how harsh the regulation was. The militia men gave till 4 p.m. for all furs to be handed over. After a short while the Jews began bringing in small remnants and whole furs. Mother unpicked three furs right away and took the fur collars off all the coats. At 4 o’clock the militia man himself came to our house for the furs and ordered the Polish policeman to make out a list of the furs that the Jews had handed over. Then we put them into 2 sacks, and 2 Jews took them to a peasant who was to take them to the local police at Bieliny.”242
Dawid knew little about the course of the war and about the immediate reasons for the fur collection. But elsewhere, East and West, the portents were not missed. In Stanislawów, the town in eastern Galicia where, on October 12, 1941, Hans Krüger had presided over the massacre in the local cemetery, a young woman in her early twenties, Elisheva (Elsa Binder), whom we already briefly met, had started recording her observations in the newly set-up ghetto.243 “Yesterday’s newspaper,” Elisheva noted on December 24, “said that the Great Leader [Hitler] assumed command of the army. Jews are therefore drawing the most optimistic and far-reaching conclusions…. The Reds are marching ahead, slowly but steadily. It is rumored that they took Kharkov (where they didn’t see a single Jew), Kiev and Zhitomir. Some people claim to have ‘heard’ our radio broadcast from Kiev. I wish I could believe it, although I am trying to look into the future with hope and optimism.”244
The lines that follow in the same entry are indicative of the intense doubts that nonetheless assailed some Jews when it came to portents of liberation: “I have to admit,” Elisheva went on, “that I personally don’t believe in early liberation. I want it and I fear it. From today’s perspective a free tomorrow seems to be extremely bright. In my dreams I expect so much from it. But in reality? I am young, I have a right to fight and to demand everything from life. But desiring it so much, I fear it. I realize that under the circumstances such thoughts are irrational, but…. Never mind. What really matters is liberation.”245
“When death strikes,” Kaplan noted in Warsaw on October 9, “the mourner turns the ‘merchandise’ over to the burial office, which then attends to everything. So the black wagon proceeds—sometimes drawn by a horse and sometimes pulled rickshe fashion by the employees of the burial office—from corpse to corpse, loading as many bodies as it can hold and transporting them wholesale to the cemetery. Usually the expedition to ‘the other world’ begins at noon. A long line of horse-drawn and rickshe-drawn wagons then stretches along the length of Gesia Street. This death traffic makes no impression on anyone. Death has become a tangible matter, like the Joint’s Soup Kitchen, the bread card, or the raising of one’s hat to the Germans. At times it is difficult to distinguish who is pushing whom, the living the dead or vice versa. The dead have lost their traditional importance and sanctity. The sanctity of the cemetery is also being profaned; it has been turned into a marketplace. It n
ow resembles a ‘fair’ of the dead.”246
Yet the shift in the war situation sufficed to dispel the gloom, at least for a while. “A firm conviction burns within us,” Kaplan recorded on December 19, “that the beginning of the end has begun for the Nazis. What basis have I for such optimism? A ‘communiqué’ from the battlefield was published yesterday, December 18, which reads as follows: ‘Because of the approach of the Russian winter…the front line must be shortened….’ This is disaster veiled in rhetoric.” News secretly heard on the BBC confirmed the conclusion reached from the German announcement. The ghetto was abuzz with rumors eagerly peddled and amplified: “A wit comes along and reports bona fide information to the effect that Churchill sent a cable to the ghetto saying, ‘let the Jews not run after the Nazis so fast because he has not the strength to follow them.’” And in part melancholy, part hopeful tone, as was his wont, Kaplan added: “This is the way our people are—the bitter reality does not constrain their glowing imaginations: ‘On the very day the Temple was destroyed, Messiah was born.’”247
In Lublin, during these same weeks, the ghetto in the General Government targeted by the worst German brutality and one that, a few months later, would be the first destined for total extermination, the council debated mundane issues, including the sloppy and downright dishonest management of the hospital and various plans for its reorganization.248 Farther north, in Bialystok, the council under Barash’s leadership could even claim some “achievements” at its meeting of November 2, 1941: “As much as possible, mitigation of the [German] demands was achieved; instead of 25 kg of gold—6 kg, instead of 5 million [rubles]—2.5 million. Instead of a ghetto in the quarter of Chanajkes—today’s ghetto. The order for 10 million was annulled. No more than 4,500 persons were evacuated to Pružana. The order to submit lists of the intelligentsia was revoked. All this succeeded after much effort, thanks to our good relations with the authorities.” However, the Germans were demanding ransom money once again: “The Judenrat must pay 700,000–800,000 rubles every three days, starting Thursday the 6th of this month. If a deadline is missed, we will be liable to the ‘ruthless means of the Gestapo…’ If we comply with the demands for work and taxes,” Barash concluded, “we will be sure of our life—otherwise, we are not responsible for the life of the ghetto. God grant that we will meet again and that none of us will be missing.”249
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination Page 42
