The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  From the first days of the German occupation of Prague, thousands of Czech Jews had appealed for asylum in Western Europe, Britain and the United States. Most of them realized that the permitted places were so few that, if fortunate, they might gain admittance only for their children. One such parent was Charles Wessely, Secretary of the Prague Produce Exchange, and a Judge at the Arbitration Court. He was forty-three years old, his wife, thirty-eight, their son Rudolf, fourteen. Charles Wessely’s appeal was sent from Prague to Britain on 11 March 1939. His son was found a home in Britain, arriving in London on July 1. But despite the offers of the Judge and his wife ‘to do any work’ even domestic posts, inconsiderable of our former social standing’, no places could be found for them.35

  The fate of the Jews trapped in central Europe had become a matter of controversy. Those who had to determine the British government’s policy towards Jewish refugees who had reached Poland from the Protectorate were not convinced that these refugees were in any real danger. ‘A great many of these’, wrote one official, Patrick Reilly, on July 24, ‘are not in any sense political refugees, but Jews who panicked unnecessarily and need not have left.’ Many of them, he added, ‘are quite unsuitable as emigrants and would be a very difficult problem if brought here’.36 Six days later, on July 30, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, commented in a private letter on the persecution of German Jews: ‘I believe the persecution arose out of two motives: a desire to rob the Jews of their money and a jealousy of their superior cleverness.’ Chamberlain continued: ‘No doubt Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care about them myself; but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom.’37

  Shortly before a meeting of the British Cabinet on August 4, the Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, who was responsible for policy towards Jewish immigration to Palestine, had asked that the question of ‘illegal’ immigration be put on the agenda. Then he reported that the High Commissioner in Palestine had been authorized to announce that ‘no immigration quota would be issued for the next six-monthly period October 1939—March 1940’. The second step to stop illegal traffic was the Foreign Office’s ‘strong representations’ to certain governments ‘against their laxity’ in the ‘discouragement of this traffic’. MacDonald added:

  Very strong representations had been made in particular to Rumania, Poland and Greece, and the first results of this action had been good. Rumania and Greece had taken action which should secure much stricter surveillance, and while the good effect of our representations might not last, since the power of Jewish money was great, for the present at any rate the results were good.38

  MacDonald’s reference to what he called ‘the power of Jewish money’ was ill-chosen; in reality, the funds of the Jewish charitable institutions were nearly exhausted. Two weeks later, on August 17, news of just how desperate the Jewish situation was in Europe reached the Foreign Office from Slovakia. The report, on the fate of the eighty-five thousand Jews of Slovakia, was distressing. Non-Jews, encouraged by the Germans, ‘do all they can to rob and plunder Jewish property and persecute the Jewish people’. Other Slovaks, ‘unable to show their hatred of the Germans, so vent their wrath instead upon the Jews’. ‘Jew-baiting’ had become a frequent occurrence. All but a small proportion of Jews had been excluded since the previous March from the professions and the universities. Many Jewish shops and businesses had been forced to close.

  Many Slovak Jews were joining the ‘illegal’ movement to Palestine. ‘Their nerves can stand no more,’ the report explained. ‘Fear of the unknown in other countries is more pleasant to them than present persecution and feeling that they are trapped.’ Several thousand had already fled, and some had even succeeded in reaching Palestine. ‘This made the others more reckless,’ the reported added, ‘especially as conditions in Slovakia grew worse.’39

  On 23 August 1939 the world learned of the signature of a non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Suddenly it became clear that if Hitler were to invade Poland, the Soviet Union would stand aside. This pact was ominous news for the 3,250,000 Jews of Poland.

  Since 1921, more than four hundred thousand Polish Jews had emigrated, many to France and Belgium, others to Palestine. One of these emigrants, Ze’ev Sherpski, from the Polish village of Szrensk, arrived in Palestine, as a tourist, together with his daughter, at the very moment of the signature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Sherpski’s wife Hanna, and their son, were to have followed in a few months’ time. But time had run out.40

  On the evening of August 31, as German radio poured out a stream of venom against the Polish Republic, sixty German Jewish children were travelling with their adult escort in a train crowded with German soldiers from Cologne to Cleve, the only point on the Dutch frontier to which trains were still running. Crossing the frontier, the train proceeded to the Hook of Holland. Overnight, the children crossed the North Sea to the British port of Harwich. There, at dawn on September 1, they learned that Germany had invaded Poland.41

  Ze’ev Sherpski was safe in Palestine. The sixty German Jewish children were safe in Britain. But, as German forces broke through the Polish frontier, and German bombs fell on Warsaw, more than three million Polish Jews, the largest single mass of European Jewry, were trapped in a front line of uncertainty and hatred. Among them were Hanna Sherpski and her son. No one had yet determined what their exact future would be; but neither was to survive the war.

  7

  * * *

  September 1939:

  the trapping of Polish Jewry

  The German forces crossed into Poland in the early hours of Friday, 1 September 1939. For six and a half years Poland’s Jews had watched with alarm the violent anti-Semitism imposed by Nazi Germany first upon German, then upon Austrian and finally upon Czech Jewry. They knew, at first hand, from Polish anti-Semites, what mob hatred could do. But Polish Jewry had its own means of defence, its own press, its own institutions, and its own representation in the Polish parliament. With the German invasion, these protective shields were torn away. On the railway carriages bringing German troops into the war zone, were painted crude pictures of Jews with hooked noses, and the slogan: ‘We’re off to Poland—to thrash the Jews’.1

  On that first day of the German invasion, 393,950 Jews lived in Warsaw, the Polish capital. This was a third of Warsaw’s population; a greater number of Jews than were left in Germany. Only in New York, where two million Jews lived, were there more Jews in a single city. In the whole of Palestine there were only a few thousand more Jews than in Warsaw alone.

  At nightfall on September 1, tens of thousands of Warsaw Jews flocked to synagogue to welcome the Sabbath, among them eighteen-year-old Alexander Wojcikiewicz, who worked as a proofreader at his father’s printing press. Forty years later, he recalled how, that Friday night, ‘the Jews of Warsaw prayed as never before. The synagogue at Tlomackie Street was full to overflowing and large crowds stood and prayed outside. People cried to the Almighty to have pity on them and their children. They begged for mercy for themselves and all those who might die on the battlefield.’

  ‘Long after midnight,’ Wojcikiewicz added, ‘my father took me to the press once more. There he hid some of our valuables under one of the linotype machines, deeply cemented in a large hole. I have never found out what happened to those gold coins, patiently saved over the years. Today another building, on another street bearing the same name, stands where our press once stood. The lost treasure was but a tiny speck of the wealth Polish Jewry had gathered for centuries to lose, irretrievably within a single day.’2

  From the first day of the German advance into Poland, Jewish soldiers fought alongside Polish soldiers in the battles for the frontier, and, later, in the battles around Warsaw. Inside Warsaw, more than three thousand Jews were among some ten thousand citizens killed during more than a week of intense aerial bombardment.

  In western Poland, Saturday, September 2, saw the heavy air bombardment of several cities. In Piotrkow, home of fifteen thou
sand Jews, Romek Zaks was killed that day, ‘the first Jewish victim’.3

  On Sunday, 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. They could do nothing to halt, or even to slow down, the pace of the German advance across Poland. As the German forces advanced, and within hours of their occupation of a town or village, Jews were singled out for abuse and massacre by special SS ‘operational groups’, acting in the rear of the German fighting forces. That same Sunday, September 3, a few hours after German troops had entered the frontier town of Wieruszow, one of these SS groups seized twenty Jews, among them several prominent citizens, took them to the market place, and lined them up for execution. Among these Jews was Israel Lewi, a man of sixty-four. When his daughter, Liebe Lewi, ran up to her father to say farewell, a German ordered her to open her mouth for her ‘impudence’, and then fired a bullet into it. Liebe Lewi fell dead on the spot. The twenty men were then executed: among them Abraham Lefkowitz, Moshe Mozes and Usiel Baumatz.4

  The air bombardment continued to take a heavy toll. On September 4, more than a thousand Jews who had managed to flee from Piotrkow to the nearby village of Sulejow, believing that they would be safe in this remoter corner, were killed as German bombers twice attacked the village, and fighters strafed those who sought to flee. Among the people killed in Sulejow was one of Piotrkow’s leading rabbis, Jacob Glazer, his daughter and his grandchild. The Goldblum family was wiped out in its entirety. Entering Piotrkow itself on September 5, the Germans tried to set fire to the predominantly Jewish section of the city, shooting dead those Jews who ran from the burning buildings. After the fires had died down, German soldiers entered a house which had escaped the flames, took out six Jews, and ordered them to run. As the Jews ran, they were shot. Five died violently; the sixth, Reb Bunem Lebel, died later of his wounds.5

  POLAND

  In the first ten days of the German advance, such onslaughts against unarmed, defenceless civilians were carried out in more than a hundred towns and villages. In the city of Czestochowa, home of thirty thousand Jews, 180 Jews were shot on September 4, ‘Bloody Monday’.6 At the village of Widawa, home of one hundred Jewish families, the Germans ordered the rabbi, Abraham Mordechai Morocco, to burn the Holy books. He refused, whereupon they burned him, with the Scrolls of the Law in his hands.7 On September 8, in the city of Bedzin, where more than twenty thousand Jews lived, two hundred were driven into the synagogue, which was then locked, and set on fire.8 At Mielec, on September 13, thirty-five Jews were arrested in the communal baths, taken to the slaughterhouse, and then burned alive. Another twenty were burned alive in the synagogue.9

  In every conquered town and village, the Germans forced the Jews to clear rubble, to carry heavy loads, to hand over any gold, silver or jewellery, to scrub floors and lavatories with their prayer shawls, and to dance in front of their captors. Elderly Jews had their beards cut off with scissors, or ripped from their chins. Young religious Jews had their sidelocks cut, or torn from their faces, amid much laughter and ribaldry.

  On September 10, General Halder, of the German General Staff, noted in his diary that some SS men, having ordered fifty Jews to work all day repairing a bridge, had then flung them into a synagogue and shot them. Light sentences had been imposed on the killers. But even these light sentences were later overruled, by Himmler personally, on the grounds that they came under a general amnesty. At the trial of one of the killers, the Judge Advocate had pleaded that, ‘as an SS man, he was particularly sensitive to the sight of Jews. He had therefore acted quite thoughtlessly, in a spirit of adventure.’10

  In the first fifty-five days of the German conquest and occupation of western and central Poland five thousand Jews were murdered behind the lines: dragged from their homes, and from their hiding places.11 ‘On the first day’, Eda Lichtmann has recalled, of the occupation of Pilica, ‘the Germans took people, especially men, to work, and forced them to clean and collect the dust with their hands: Jewish men. They were ordered to undress, and behind each Jewish man there was a German soldier with a fixed bayonet who ordered him to run. If the Jew stopped, he would be hit in the back with a bayonet. Almost all the Jewish men returned home bleeding and amongst them—my father.’ Then, a few days later, on September 12, ‘large trucks appeared all of a sudden’, soldiers jumped off the trucks, then went from house to house, seizing men, irrespective of their age.

  Thirty-two Jews were seized that day in Pilica, as well as four Poles. First they were photographed, and their names recorded. Then they were marched into the market place and forced to call out, in German: ‘We are traitors of the people.’ Then they were taken away in trucks. Eda Lichtmann ran after the trucks, with a friend whose father had also been seized. ‘We ran after them until a small forest. All the Jews taken were already dead on the ground. My father as well, shot in many parts of his body.’ Jews and Poles: all were dead. ‘I kissed my father; he was as cold as ice.’12

  In 1939 the Jewish New Year began on Thursday, September 14. That day, German forces entered the Polish city of Przemysl, where seventeen thousand citizens, one third of the population, were Jews. Forty-three leading Jewish citizens were arrested, taken to forced labour, savagely beaten, and then shot.13 Among the forty-three was Asscher Gitter, whose son had emigrated to the United States in 1938, hoping that one day his father would join him. In Sieradz, on New Year’s Day, five Jews and two Poles were shot.14 That same day in Czestochowa, Order No. 7 of the German Civilian Administration transferred all Jewish industrial and commercial enterprises to ‘Aryan’ hands, such enterprises to be taken over ‘without distinction whether the owner fled or remained’.15

  At Piotrkow, a decree issued on the eve of the New Year forbade Jews to be outside their homes after five o’clock in the afternoon. The twenty-seven-year-old Getzel Frenkel, coming home five minutes late, was shot dead for his breach of this decree.16

  ***

  Even while these outbursts of confiscation and killing were taking place throughout western Poland, a conference was held in Berlin on September 21 at which the long-term future of Polish Jewry was discussed. The host of the conference was Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Central Security Office. Those present included the commanders of several of the SS operational groups in Poland. Those who could not be present were sent a secret note of the discussion.

  Opening the meeting, Heydrich stressed, as the secret note recorded, that what he called the ‘planned overall measures (i.e., the ultimate aim)’ were to be kept ‘strictly secret’. He also insisted that a ‘distinction’ must be made between what he called ‘the ultimate aim, which requires a prolonged period of time’ and the ‘stages’ leading to the fulfilment of this ultimate aim.

  Heydrich told the conference that, as a prerequisite of the ‘ultimate aim’, Polish Jews were to be concentrated in the larger cities. If possible, large areas of western Poland ‘should be cleared completely of Jews’, or should at least have in them ‘as few concentration centres as possible’. Elsewhere in Poland, Jews should be concentrated only in cities situated at railway junctions, or along a railway, ‘so that future measures may be accomplished more easily’.

  To ensure that all instructions for the movement of Jews were carried out on time, Heydrich added, a Council of Jewish Elders was to be set up in each city. In case of ‘sabotage of such instructions’, these Jewish Councils were to be threatened with ‘the severest measures’.

  This ‘concentration of Jews in cities’ meant the creation of ghettos, such as had not existed in Europe since the Middle Ages. To facilitate this ‘concentration’, Heydrich noted, orders would probably have to be given ‘forbidding Jews to enter certain districts of that city altogether’. At the same time, farmland belonging to Jews should be taken away from them: ‘entrusted to the care’ of neighbouring German ‘or even Polish’ peasants.17

  On September 23, two days after Heydrich’s conference, the Jews celebrated the holiest day in their calendar, the Day of Atonement, a time of repentance, so
lemnity, and hope for the year to come. For the Nazis, it was a time for cruel indignities, as it was to be for the next five years. At Siemiatycze, a town whose Jewish population of five thousand was already much enlarged by two thousand refugees from western Poland, SS men broke into the synagogue in the middle of the opening prayer, and sang their own hymn in its place: then, on the following day of prayer, they again entered the synagogue, already crowded. ‘A great panic’, writes the historian of the Jews of Siemiatycze, ‘broke out among the worshipping Jews. Many jumped out of the windows. In the synagogue on Drogoczyner Street, Yosl the turner was shot while trying to escape, and remained hanging on the window-sill.’18

  At Wegrow, the rabbi was ordered to sweep the streets. Then he was ordered to collect the refuse in his fur hat. While he was bending over to carry out this order, he was bayoneted three times. ‘He continued working,’ it was later learned in Warsaw, ‘and died at work.’19

  At Kielce, home of more than eighteen thousand Jews, hundreds were seized, that Day of Atonement morning, from some of the smaller houses of prayer in the city, and dragged to the market place. There, Maria Feferman-Wasoff has recalled, ‘their beards were sliced off. Bareheaded, and in their fringed prayer shawls, they were forced to dig ditches.’ In the midst of those digging she had caught sight of her own uncle, Abish Kopf, a small, fragile man, and a scholar. ‘Now the sweat was rolling down his face,’ she recalled, ‘and the white prayer shawl was soiled, drenched and twisted on his back. Uncle Abish’s daughters, Andzia, Mania and Dorka, pleaded with the amused guards. “Please,” they cried, “let our father go, can’t you see he is collapsing?” All they received was loud laughter. Someone standing close by remarked with bitterness, “If there is a God, let Him strike these Nazis dead.” Late that night the Jews were set free.’20