In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  A large part of the city was finally closed down; even the stock exchange was shut. Rumours were flying about a strike rolling across the country, people had stopped working in Haarlem, Utrecht and the Gooi region as well. The police sympathised, and either refused to intervene or did so only much too late. Pamphlets were being spread everywhere:

  Save the Jewish children from Nazi violence, take them into your homes! Be unified, be courageous! Strike! Strike! Strike!

  Amsterdam's February Strike was a unique gesture of solidarity with the Jews. And within Nazi Europe, it was a case of unheard-of rebellion. The Germans responded immediately: the Generalkommissar zur besonderen Verwendung, F. Schmidt, sent two regiments of the SS Death's Head Division to Amsterdam and the Zaan, there was shooting everywhere, a number of strikers were arrested, eighteen members of the resistance were executed and the leaders of the strike – most of them communists – went into hiding. Within a few days it was all over. On Saturday, 1 March, Goebbels noted in his diary: ‘Calm completely restored in the Netherlands. Schmidt got his way, with the help of measures I proposed. I urgently advised him to clamp down. Which he did. We must show this gang of Jews just how big and sharp our teeth are.’

  That is all the attention he devoted to the matter. We will therefore never know whether there was any truth to the stories that circulated after the war about Hitler flying into a wild rage, and about plans to deport the Dutch and Flemish populations en masse to the Polish province of Lublin. The Dutch would be replaced by ‘sturdy young German farmers’, and would, in turn, introduce a healthy injection of Germanic blood to Poland.

  In fact, plans did exist to deport some three million Dutch people to Poland, and to relocate an equal number of Germans in Holland. Had the war turned out more favourably for the Nazis, in other words, millions of Dutchmen and Flemings would have undergone the same as countless ethnic Germans from Lithuania, Estonia, Poland and Bessarabia. And, in a worse scenario, the Dutch and the Flemish would have met a fate little better than that of the millions of deported Poles.

  From Berlin's Ostbahnhof I took the train east, and now I am travelling through rolling woodlands and fields full of poppies and cornflowers. It is a warm afternoon, the train rocks through the countryside, the girl across from me sleeps a deep and peaceful sleep. White villages slide by, the houses have big, brown wooden barns, then another half-hour of cornfields. We pass a lake, with people fishing and camping on its shores, cattle lolling beneath a clump of trees. In the fields the farmers are mowing, their chests bare, wagons piled high with hay, they are obviously in a hurry, for there is thunder in the offing.

  The station where I must change trains probably once played a central role in a well oiled iron machine, but today it is overgrown and rusty. A long coal train trundles by. The station restaurant sells greasy pastries. There is a computer game there that gives you three minutes to kill hundreds of Arabs with conspicuously Semitic noses. You can hear them, too: Aagh! Ooef! Gnuhuhuh! The sound of someone having his throat cut electronically.

  Later that evening, past Lublin, a cool wind blows into the compartment. We pass a brook, a factory, kitchen gardens and orchards, the air smells of grass, hay and coal-fired stoves. In 1941, this part of the country was given the title ‘General Government of Poland’, and was to be the gigantic laboratory where Nazi theories about Blut und Boden, Volksgemeinschaft and Untermenschen would be put into practice for the first time, where the majority of death camps were concentrated and where, afterwards, the ethnic Germans were to be resettled.

  The train's final stop is Zamość, the birthplace of Rosa Luxemburg, a Renaissance town in south-east Poland. It is already dark in the big market square, there are almost no street lights, but from the pavement cafés comes the murmur of dozens of beer-drinking tourists. Zamość was built by an enthusiastic Polish chancellor as a small ideal community in accordance with sixteenth century Italian norms. The pink and light-blue houses miraculously survived the war, and look today much as they did when the Italian master builders finished them in 1605. The centuries of poverty and grime that lie between have been forgotten.

  Zamość was once a lively place. In 1939 the city had 28,000 inhabitants, including some 10,000 Jews. There was a preparatory school, a cathedral, a courthouse, a synagogue, an orchestra and two local papers, the Zamojski Kurier and the Gazeta Zamojska. The old synagogue, now part of the municipal library, is behind the town hall. There are no Jews in Zamość now.

  That, in fact, is the most striking thing about the town: the municipal museum stops at 1939, the Rotunda – the jail complex outside the town – rightly honours and commemorates the local partisans, but nowhere is the real drama of Zamość told or remembered.

  Zamość was to serve as a model for the Nazis’ first ethnic resettlements, the site of the first new, pure German SS colony in Poland: Himmlerstadt.

  On 16 October, 1942, all the Jews of Zamość were loaded into lorries and taken to the Belzec death camp. The original Polish inhabitants of the town died by the thousands during a wintry exodus. The cruelty towards the children was devastating. Of the younger children from Zamość and the surrounding areas, approximately 10,000 died during the deportations, and some 30,000 were taken away from their parents because of their blue eyes, blond hair and other ‘pure’ racial traits. They were sent to the Lebensborn centres that had been set up all over Germany. There they were ‘Nazified’ and ‘Germanised’, then sent to live with SS families. A great number of those children never returned to Poland.

  Zamość was a high-handed initiative on the part of the SS, the fanatical ideologists of racial purity. And the consequences of that high-handedness were not long coming. Partisan units began operating all around Zamość, mounting one raid after another. Eighteen months later, by spring 1943, the German colonists were begging to be allowed to return to the West. Their farms were under constant attack, they slept in the fields at night from fear of being killed by partisans. The Wehrmacht suspended its military operations against the local resistance: the divisions were sorely needed at the front. In July 1944 the Red Army finally took the city.

  Very little is known outside Poland about Zamość and the surrounding villages. Yet it was here that the twentieth century's greatest liquidation of towns and villages took place.

  In most cases of ethnic cleansing, a second process began after the deportations: cultural purification. A new past was invented to go along with the new future, and every memory of the original inhabitants was obliterated as carefully as possible. Monuments were taken down, signs and inscriptions removed, school curricula altered, native languages banned, and sometimes even churchyards were rearranged.

  In Poland and the Baltic States, the gauleiter was ordered to make German provinces of the occupied territories within ten years. The old German names of all of the villages and towns were restored, or new ones were dreamed up. Lódź became Litzmannstadt, Poznań became Posen once more, Zamość became Himmlerstadt.

  When a series of treaties between Germany, the Soviet Union and Italy forced hundreds of thousands of German-speaking nationals to leave South Tyrol, Bessarabia, Poland and the Baltic States, Himmler turned it around into a glorious story: the old blood brothers were returning at last to the ethnic fold.

  Rosie Waldeck, who visited a camp for Bessarabian Germans in Rumania, described how old men sat on benches in the sunshine, how the verandas were covered in greenery, how the women chatted away as they did their laundry, how the young people sang cheerfully and marched around under SS supervision. ‘Now and then a young SS man would affectionately pick up a small child and carry it around on his shoulders, or dangle it on his knee.’ Meals were taken at long tables in the warm afternoon sun.‘These typical descendants of typical colonists, who spoke the antique German of Württemberg from Schiller's day, returned to Hitler's Germany as to the Promised Land.’ In the end, almost half a million German-speaking Europeans took part in this mass migration, and 200,000 of them were assigned
a new home in Eastern Europe.

  On Friday, 27 March, 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary:

  Starting with Lublin, the Jews are now being pushed east out of the General Government. A rather barbaric method, too grisly to mention, is applied, and not much is left of the Jews themselves. Generally speaking, one can note that sixty per cent of them are to be liquidated, while forty per cent can be used for labour details … The Führer's prediction, made to them before this new world war was unleashed, is becoming horrendous reality … The ghettos vacated in the General Government are now being used to house those Jews deported from the Reich, and after a time the procedure will be repeated.

  In Auschwitz the elderflowers are blossoming. Oświeęcim, as it is called in Polish, is a normal town where lovers stroll by the river in the evening, and where the rest of the local young people hang around by the bridge, the boys bald, the girls giggling. They drink beer together from the same glass, with a straw, ‘because then you get drunk faster’. The coal cars go pounding by behind Hotel Glob. At least a dozen tourist buses are parked in front of the former camp. The cow parsley grows high among the trees and the dilapidated gravestones in the old Jewish cemetery. Yes, indeed, Auschwitz has a regular, old Jewish cemetery, with a high wall around it and dozens of names listed on either side, the peaceful dead who have slept through it all.

  ‘We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom.’ wrote Primo Levi, one of the rare survivors of Auschwitz. ‘They are the “Muslims”, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.’

  Beneath wire netting on the immense parade grounds at Birkenau lie their rusty metal plates and spoons, then so precious, now apparently there for the taking. In the old barracks one can see their toothbrushes, their crutches and artificial legs, their baby clothes, their dusty locks of hair and their shoes. The suitcases bearing all those everyday names: ‘Judith van Gelder-Cohen, the Hague’, ‘Hanna Feitsma, Holland’. Three rooms full of shoes, reflecting better than anything else the faces of those who wore them: workmen's shoes, clogs, brogues, and between them an elegant summer sandal with a high cork sole and cheerful white and red leather straps.

  That, too, is part of our shame and dismay: the absolute innocence with which all those hundreds of thousands went to their death.

  The prisoners knew that what was happening in the camps was too astounding to be believed. Primo Levi writes that he and his friends in the camp were almost all plagued by a recurring nightmare: that they came home and, relieved and impassioned, told a loved one about the horrors they had experienced, but that they were not listened to. In the most cruel variation on this dream, the one they told simply turned his back and walked away.

  That nightmare has, in part, come to pass. For the rest of the world, Auschwitz has gradually become more a symbol than a reality. Yet it is all still there, right amid the factories in the industrial estate of modern-day Oświeęcim. And standing almost casually, a little further along across the tracks, is the famous gateway of Birkenau. For a moment the mind tries to make of it a school building from the 1930s, but there it stands, unmistakable and real, the building you have seen in all those films and all those photographs, the gateway with the rails running through it and the platform beside.

  The camp Auschwitz I was opened on 14 June, 1940. On that day more than 700 Poles arrived for the construction of, among other things, the crematorium. By 15 August it was ready to burn the first bodies. The oven, built by J. A. Topf & Söhne of Erfurt, had a capacity of a hundred bodies a day. At first Auschwitz served largely as a labour camp for companies including I. G. Farben and the Weichsel-Metall-Union. The larger camp, Auschwitz II, opened in 1941. Auschwitz became a labour-annexe-death camp, like Majdanek. Four dedicated extermination factories existed as well: Belzec, Sobibór, Chelmno and Treblinka. Less is known about them, however, because almost none of their prisoners survived.

  The first major shipment of Jews arrived at Auschwitz on 15 February, 1942. The ruse was arranged down to the smallest detail. To this new life one was allowed to bring enough rations for two days, a mess kit, one spoon, no knives, two blankets, warm clothes, a pair of work shoes and a suitcase with personal belongings, with one's name written on it. And most people fell for it: the museum there is still full of pans, buckets, washtubs, shovels, tools and other items useful for starting an orderly new life in the East.

  Dutch deportees hid letters in the cattle cars for those ‘at home’: it did not take the prisoners long to realise that it was always the same train that shuttled back and forth between Camp Westerbork and the East. A few of those letters have been preserved. One of them describes the pushing and squeezing in a packed freight car. ‘The mood is already horrible, everyone is snappish and argumentative.’ One young woman reported that the people in her freight car were in such ‘excellent spirits’ that they organised a cabaret performance on the first evening out. ‘I will always remember one song in particular, sung by a sixteen-year-old girl by the light of a little tea-warmer on the floor of the car. It was “Nederland”.’ Concerning another transport we know that a barber shaved the men, and that a teacher held a ‘fascinating lecture on Zionism, that quickly made everyone forget where we were headed’. And the letters always contain a final sentence, something along the lines of: ‘We've stopped at Auschwitz, we have to get out. It is a big factory town, with lots of smokestacks everywhere.’ Or: ‘In the distance I can see a building, all lit up. So long, my dearest, we'll be coming home soon.’

  The yard at Birkenau is now covered in daisies and clover. Swallows dip and soar above the few barracks that have been left standing, the bare red smokestacks, the groves of birch that grow on human ashes. A bird has built its nest amid the rubble of Crematorium III. Above the gate one can still see the soot from the hundreds of steam locomotives that pulled in here.

  From the diary of Auschwitz camp physician SS-Hauptsturmführer Proffessor Dr Kremer:

  31 August, 1942

  Tropical weather here at thirty-eight degrees in the shade, dust and countless flies! Excellent service in the officers’ mess. Tonight, for example, there was pickled goose liver for forty pfennigs, with stuffed tomatoes, tomato salad, etc. First inoculated against typhoid.

  1 September, 1942

  Sent off order to Berlin for officer's cap, belt and suspenders. In the afternoon, attended the gassing of a block, with Zyklon B against louse.

  6 September, 1942

  Today, Sunday, excellent lunch: tomato soup, half a chicken with potatoes and red cabbage (20g fat), sweets and lovely vanilla ice cream. After dinner welcomed the new physician, Obersturmführer Wirths, who hails from Waldbröl … This evening at 8.00 went to another Sonderaktion [special action] outside.

  9 September, 1942

  Early this morning received from my lawyer in Münster, Proffessor Dr Hallerman, the extremely good news that my wife and I are divorced as from the first of this month. I see colours again: a black veil has lifted from my life.

  This evening attended Sonderaktion (fourth time).

  10 September, 1942

  This morning to Sonderaktion (fifth time).

  20 September, 1942

  Today, late Sunday afternoon from 3.00 to 6.00, listened to concert by prisoners’ orchestra in lovely sunlight: orchestra leader was director of the Warsaw State Opera. Eighty musicians. At lunch, braised pork. Dinner, fried tench.

  Camp Birkenau is decaying quickly. Half a century later the rusty barbed wire crumbles in your hands, the piles of shoes are only grey and black, most of the buildings have rotted away. Only the smokestacks still rise above it all, the long rows of the remains of hundreds of barracks that once formed the camp for men and families. The inhabitants of Oświeęcim themselves are already taking steps. At the edge of Birkenau, less than a hundred metres from the camp, is a b
rand new architectural apartment complex. The big living-room windows look out on the brownish-green yards of the camp. The complex itself is generally referred to as ‘the museum’, and that is what it has become for many of those who live here; a sort of park that draws a great many tourists, and nothing more than that.

  I stop to talk to Adriana Warno. She is about eighteen, and has a summer job taking tickets at the gate to Birkenau. ‘We've always lived here, my parents too, and we like it,’ she says. ‘For us the museum is what the Eiffel Tower is for Parisians. The museum is down at one end, and Oświeęcim is up at the other, the two don't have much to do with each other. It's a very normal town, you know, what used to be Auschwitz. We go out and everything, no problem.’

  For her there is, in fact, only one problem: the strangling boredom that has had the town in its grip the last few years. Most of the shop windows now contain only dusty book bags, macramé goods and cheap dinner settings. Oświeęcim today has 50,000 inhabitants, but no form of higher education. ‘We have to go to Krakow for everything.’ Jobs are scarce, and tourism at the camp is declining as well. Far fewer Americans have come to Auschwitz this year, they say it's because of the war in Kosovo. The walls along the streets are full of anarchist symbols and Celtic crosses.

  ‘Of course I think about it sometimes,’ Adriana says. ‘Especially when I'm in the museum. It's not taboo, you know. ‘Oh well, that was back then,’ that's what my parents always say. Everyone here knew what was going on in the camp, you could see it, or smell it at least. But no one thinks about that any more. If you did, you'd go crazy. And you have to live your life, and life here is hard enough as it is.’

  I ask her about the people who visit the camp. She blurts out: ‘You don't hear anything from the real victims and their families. But you should see the rest of the people who come here.’ She tells me about women's clubs with tambourines, gurus who come to drive out the evil spirits, sobbing American ladies who come here to deal with past lives, classes of schoolchildren with Polish flags, classes of schoolchildren with Israeli flags, the French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian tour companies that offer a ‘three-camp tour’, starting in Krakow. ‘They all claim Auschwitz for themselves. They've never suffered for a moment themselves, but my, how they'd like to hitch a ride with the real victims! It's enough to make you sick.’