Also on August 27, the government of Marshal Pétain abrogated the pre-war French decree of 21 March 1939 which forbade all incitement to race hatred.20 In Luxembourg, just over a week later, on September 5, the German occupation authorities introduced the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and at the same time seized all 355 Jewish-owned businesses and handed them over to ‘Aryans’. In addition to Luxembourg’s pre-1933 Jewish community of 1,171 Jews, a further three thousand Jews from Germany had, between 1933 and 1940, found refuge in the Duchy. Hundreds now sought escape, through France, to Spain or Switzerland. Altogether, seven hundred were able to escape to safety.21
On September 1, in Kovno, the Soviet authorities ordered the Japanese Consul, Sempo Sugihara, to leave the city. Up to that moment he had issued, it was later calculated, about 3,400 visas for Jews in Kovno to travel eastward, through Moscow and Siberia, to Japan and beyond. Even on September 1, on his way to the railway station with his family, Sugihara continued to stamp the precious transit visas. He did so, it was later reported, ‘in the street and at the station, even through the window of the train compartment, until the train actually began to pull away from the platform.’22
In Poland, the isolation of Jews from the rest of the population was being accelerated by regulations forcing Jews to live only in one section of the town. Some of these specially created ghettos were marked by signs on the streets at which they began, and known as ‘open’ ghettos. Others were surrounded by wooden fences, or barbed wire, or by high walls built for the purpose. Many ghettos were on the outskirts of the town, usually in the dirtiest and poorest suburbs, or in some deserted, or even ruined factory area.23
Week by week during 1940, the number of enforced ghettos grew: the Czestochowa ghetto was one of three established in March; the Lodz ghetto was one of two ghettos closed in May. In each ghetto, the German authorities ordered the Jewish Council to carry out its demands, whether for money, forced labour or the reduction in size of the ghettos themselves. In the Lodz ghetto, these responsibilities were carried out by the Chairman of the Council, Chaim Rumkowski, known as the ‘Eldest of the Jews’, who quickly became a controversial figure. On September 6, in Warsaw, Ringelblum noted in his diary:
Today, the 6th of September, there arrived from Lodz, Chaim, or, as he is called, ‘King Chaim’, Rumkowski, an old man of seventy, extraordinarily ambitious and pretty nutty. He recited the marvels of his ghetto. He has a Jewish kingdom there, with four hundred policemen, three gaols. He has a Foreign Ministry, and all the other ministries, too. When asked why, if things were so good there, the mortality is so high, he did not answer. He considers himself God’s annointed.24
As yet, Warsaw had no ghetto. ‘People’s spirits have improved,’ Ringelblum noted on September 9. ‘The Jewish populace believes the war will end in two or three months, because of the recent bombardments.’25 These ‘bombardments’ were the first British air raids on Berlin, beginning on the night of August 25, when eighty British bombers struck at the German capital. In Berlin itself, the Jews of the city were to suffer more than non-Jews in these air raids, which continued with growing intensity. On September 24, William Shirer, one of several American newspaper correspondents in Berlin, noted in his diary:
If Hitler has the best air-raid cellar in Berlin, the Jews have the worst. In many cases they have none at all. Where facilities permit, the Jews have their own special Luftschutzkeller, usually a small basement room next to the main part of the cellar, where the ‘Aryans’ gather. But in many Berlin cellars there is only one room. It is for the ‘Aryans’. The Jews must take refuge on the ground floor, usually in the hall leading from the floor of the flat to the elevator or stairs. This is fairly safe if a bomb hits the roof, since the chances are that it will not penetrate to the ground floor. But experience so far has shown that it is the most dangerous place to be in the entire building if a bomb lands in the street outside. Here where the Jews are hovering, the force of the explosion is felt most; here in the entryway where the Jews are, you get most of the bomb splinters.26
For non-Jews in Berlin, September 24 marked the first night of one of the most formidable propaganda films made in Nazi Germany, Jew Suss. A fictional story, it told of the life and death of an eighteenth-century court Jew, Suss Oppenheimer, Chief Minister of the Duke of Wurttemberg.
Suss Oppenheimer is shown in the film as a half-assimilated Jew who goes from ghetto to court within a few years. Through money and black magic he and his fellow Jews scheme to seize power by manipulationg the corrupt, drunken Duke of Wurttemberg whom they see as the archetype of the pliable non-Jew. The Jews who remain in the ghetto appear on the screen physically repulsive. But the message of the film is that they are less dangerous than Suss, who has acquired a veneer of court polish, and that no infamy was too great if it served the Jews in their quest for money and power.
A film suffused with hatred, Jew Suss was shown in cinemas throughout the Reich and occupied Europe, as well as at special sessions for the SS and the Hitler Youth.27 Even the world of film and entertainment had been recruited to serve the cause of race hatred.
The second winter of the war was approaching; in labour camps throughout the Reich, Jews continued to suffer torment. Early in September, Ringelblum had noted, from reports reaching him in Warsaw, that ‘worst of all’ the labour camps in the General Government was the one near Belzec. ‘There have been cases’, he wrote, ‘when weak people were shot to death. Happened to an old man of over sixty.’ At another camp, in Jozefow, ‘four hundred became sick with bleeding diarrhoea. They were dispatched while still sick.’ When Jews in Otwock were seized for forced labour, and a large number escaped, ‘more than ten paid with their lives’.28
Sometimes there were moments of reassurance. In Szczebrzeszyn, on October 1, Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary: ‘Today the Jews had a happy day because almost all of them came back.’ These were the young men sent for forced labour to Belzec. ‘The Jews had paid 20,000 zloty for freeing them,’ Klukowski added.29 On October 16, however, Klukowski noted that at the airfield at Klemensow, just outside Szczebrzeszyn, ‘the workers are complaining that the Germans beat them with rubber truncheons for no reason, and they are beating Poles and Jews alike.’30
From Lodz, in October 1940, some two hundred and fifty young men were taken for work at Ruchocki Mlyn, in the Poznan region, straightening a river bank. One of these young men, Leo Laufer, then aged eighteen, later recalled the deaths of many of his fellow prisoners, forced to live like cattle in a barn: ‘They were dying like flies, not so much from no food, because I believe there was almost sufficient food to sustain yourself. They died from the frost, and mainly they died from lack of hygiene. Never in my life do I recall seeing lice by the bushel.’31
Amid these torments, the Jewish spirit struggled to retain its strength, and sanity. On October 2 the Yiddish song-writer, Mordche Gebirtig, wrote a ballad bidding his fellow Jews to be merry: ‘Jews, be gay, don’t walk about in sadness, but be patient and have faith.’ Gebirtig urged the Jews: ‘Don’t relinquish for a moment your weapon of laughter and gaiety, for it keeps you united.’ His song ended:
Drive us from our dwellings!
Cut off our beards!
Jews! Let’s be gay.
To hell with them!32
***
Of the 400,000 Jews of Warsaw, more than 250,000 lived in the predominantly Jewish district. The remaining 150,000 lived throughout the city, some Jews in almost every street and suburb. On 3 October 1940, at the start of the Jewish New Year, the German Governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, announced that all Jews living outside the predominantly Jewish district would have to leave their homes and to move to the Jewish area. Whatever belongings could be moved by hand, or on carts, could go with them. The rest—the heavy furniture, the furnishings, the stock and equipment from shops and businesses—had to be abandoned.
Warsaw was to be divided into three ‘quarters’: one for Germans, one for Poles, and one for Jews. The Jews, who constituted a
third of Warsaw’s population, were to move into an area less than two and a half per cent of the total city: an area from which even some overwhelmingly Jewish streets were to be excluded.
THE WARSAW GHETTO
More than a hundred thousand Poles, living in the area designated for the Jews, were likewise ordered to move, to the ‘Polish quarter’. They too would lose their houses and their livelihoods. On October 12, the second Day of Atonement of the war, a day of fasting and of prayer, German loudspeakers announced that the move of Poles and Jews into their special quarters must be completed by the end of the month. ‘Black melancholy reigned in our courtyard,’ Ringelblum noted. ‘The mistress of the house’—a Pole—‘had been living there some thirty-seven years, and now has to leave her furniture behind. Thousands of Christian businesses are going to be ruined.’33
The moving began at once. ‘The removal of the Jews from the suburbs,’ Ringelblum noted on October 13, ‘as well as from poverty-stricken Praga’—across the Vistula—‘signifies their complete ruination; they will not even have the money to resettle.’ Ringelblum added: ‘Today was a terrifying day; the sight of Jews moving their old rags and bedding made a horrible impression. Though forbidden to remove their furniture, some Jews did it.’34
Another eye-witness, Toshia Bialer, who later escaped from the ghetto with her husband and son, described just over two years later the events of that third week of October:
Try to picture one-third of a large city’s population moving through the streets in an endless stream, pushing, wheeling, dragging all their belongings from every part of the city to one small section, crowding one another more and more as they converged. No cars, no horses, no help of any sort was available to us by order of the occupying authorities. Pushcarts were about the only method of conveyance we had, and these were piled high with household goods, furnishing much amusement to the German onlookers who delighted in overturning the carts and seeing us scrambling for our effects. Many of the goods were confiscated arbitrarily without any explanation….
In the ghetto, as some of us had begun to call it, half ironically and in jest, there was appalling chaos. Thousands of people were rushing around at the last minute trying to find a place to stay. Everything was already filled up but still they kept coming and somehow more room was found.
The narrow, crooked streets of the most dilapidated section of Warsaw were crowded with pushcarts, their owners going from house to house asking the inevitable question: Have you room? The sidewalks were covered with their belongings. Children wandered, lost and crying, parents ran hither and yon seeking them, their cries drowned in the tremendous hubbub of half a million uprooted people.35
Both Poles and Jews obeyed the fierce decree. Both, Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on October 22, ‘curse the murderer with the wish that his world darken in his lifetime, just as he darkened their world by ordering them to do something against their will’.36
October 22 was also a day of woe elsewhere, for on that day a total of 6,500 German Jews from Baden, the Saar and the Palatinate were sent by train across France to internment camps in the French Pyrenees.37 All the property of the deported Jews, their homes, businesses and belongings, was seized by the local German authorities. They came, these new deportees, from some of the oldest Jewish communities in Germany, two thousand of them from Mannheim, where the first synagogue was built in 1664, and thirty-four from Alt Briesach, where the first Jews settled in 1301. Some of the Jews sent to the camps in the Pyrenees, the largest of which was in the village of Gurs, had been born outside Germany, in Warsaw, Budapest and Zagreb. One deportee, Lieba Lust, had been born in 1875 in the then Austro-Hungarian frontier town of Auschwitz: she died at Gurs, six weeks after deportation, three weeks before her sixty-fifth birthday.38
‘From this camp Gurs,’ Pastor Heinrich Grüber later recalled, ‘we had—in Berlin—very bad news, even worse news than reached us from Poland. They did not have any medicaments or any sanitary arrangements whatsoever.’39 Grüber had tried to go to Gurs, to do what he could to ameliorate the situation, but instead he was arrested, and sent as a prisoner first to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau.
In Warsaw, the creation of the ghetto continued, marked by scenes of chaos and fear as predominantly Jewish streets, into which Jews had moved from elsewhere, were suddenly and arbitrarily excluded. ‘People are walking around crazy with anxiety,’ Ringelblum noted, ‘because they don’t know where to move to. Not a single street is sure of being assigned to the ghetto.’ There were some Jews, Ringelblum added, ‘who said they’d rather be poisoned with gas than tortured so’.
Two lawyers, Ringelblum noted, Koral and Tykoczynski—Koral having been the legal counsel of the French Embassy before the war—‘have committed suicide because of the resettlement decree’. Ringelblum also learned that day that, nine months earlier, in Praga, a Jew called Friedman ‘stood up for the rabbi when the latter was being impressed for work and beaten. Friedman was shot on the spot.’40
The main Jewish hospital in Warsaw, the Czyste hospital, was among one of many Jewish institutions forced to leave its buildings and move to the ghetto, although no suitable premises existed for it there.
On October 24, as the uprooting continued, the Jewish calendar reached the night of Simchat Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law. ‘An additional doubt’, wrote Chaim Kaplan, ‘is gnawing at us: Will it be a closed ghetto?’ There were signs, he noted, ‘in both directions, and we hope for a miracle—which doesn’t always happen in time of need. A closed ghetto means gradual death. An open ghetto is only a halfway catastrophe.’41 The uncertainty was deliberate, its effect bewildering. ‘Everyone bites his lip’, Kaplan noted two weeks later, ‘in anger born of helplessness. Everyone is choked up with his own anxieties. When friends meet, each one hastens to ask the standard question: what do you think? Will we be able to hold out?’42
On October 25, in a directive issued from the capital of the General Government, Cracow, any further granting of exit visas to Polish Jews was forbidden, on the grounds that Jewish emigration would lead to a ‘renewal’ of Jewry in the United States, its growth and concentration. If Eastern European Jews were to be allowed to go to America, J. A. Eckhardt explained in a General Government memorandum, it would enable American Jewry to fulfil its plan ‘to create a new platform from which it contemplates to continue its battle most forcibly against Germany’.43
Outside German control, a new phase of the war began with the Italian invasion of Greece on 28 October 1940. Mussolini, too, was eager to extend his empire. But the Greek forces fought fiercely, and the Italian advance was halted. In the fighting, more than twelve thousand Greek Jews served with distinction: 613 Jews from Salonica were killed in action, and 1,412 became total invalids. Among the Jews who fought was the Greek national hero Mordechai Fraggi, who was killed in action.44
***
On 15 November 1940 the Warsaw ghetto was officially declared to be in existence. ‘Jews are forbidden’, noted Mary Berg, ‘to move outside the boundaries formed by certain streets. There is considerable commotion.’ Work had already begun on walls to encircle the ghetto area. These walls were three yards high. ‘Jewish masons,’ Mary Berg wrote, ‘supervised by Nazi soldiers, are laying bricks upon bricks. Those who do not work fast enough are lashed by the overseers.’45 With only twenty-seven thousand apartments available in the area of the ghetto, six or seven people were forced to live in each room.46
Writing in his diary four days later, Ringelblum noted that Jewish women in the ghetto were surprised to discover that the markets outside the ghetto were closed to them. Many items had suddenly disappeared from the ghetto shops. On the first day after the ghetto wall was completed, and the ghetto closed, ‘many Christians brought bread for their Jewish acquaintances and friends’. This, Ringelblum added, ‘was a mass phenomenon. Meanwhile, Christian friends are helping Jews bring produce into the ghetto.’ But that day, November 19, a Christian was killed by the Germans, ‘throwing a sack of bread o
ver the wall’.
At one ghetto street corner, Ringelblum noted, German soldiers were tearing up paper into small pieces, scattering the pieces in the mud, ordering Jews to pick the pieces up, and then ‘beating them as they stoop over’. On another street, a German soldier ‘stopped to beat a Jewish pedestrian. Ordered him to lie down and kiss the pavement.’ A ‘wave of evil’, Ringelblum commented, ‘rolled over the whole city….’47
The four hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw were in a trap, their means of contact with the outside world, and even with the rest of Warsaw, being systematically cut off. ‘Extraordinary meetings are taking place in every house,’ Mary Berg wrote in her diary. ‘The tension is terrific. Some people demand that a protest be organized. This is the voice of the youth; our elders consider this is a dangerous idea. We are cut off from the world. There are no radios, no telephones, no newspapers.’48
With the closing of the Warsaw ghetto, another new feature of Nazi rule was introduced, the Jewish policeman: at German insistence, his was to be the responsibility for maintaining order in the ghetto. At first the Jewish policeman was a welcome, even a prized figure. As Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary a few weeks later:
The residents of the ghetto are beginning to think they are in Tel Aviv. Strong, bona fide policemen from among our brothers, to whom you can speak in Yiddish! First of all, it comes as a godsend to the street vendors. The fear of the Gentile police is gone from their faces. A Jewish policeman, a man of human sensibilities—one of our own brothers would not turn over their baskets or trample their wares. The other citizens of the ghetto are relieved too, because a Jewish shout is not the same as a Gentile one. The latter is coarse, crude, nasty; the former, while it may be threatening, contains a certain gentility, as if to say: ‘Don’t you understand?’49
The Holocaust Page 14
