The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  For Mary Berg, there was a similar sense of relief, and indeed of pleasure, at the sight of policemen wearing a white armband with the blue Star of David. Their duties, she wrote, included guarding the gates of the ghetto with German and Polish policemen, directing traffic in the ghetto streets, guarding post offices, soup kitchens and community offices, detecting ‘and suppressing’ smugglers, and driving the growing number of beggars from street to street. ‘I experience’, she wrote, ‘a strange and utterly illogical feeling of satisfaction when I see a Jewish policeman at a crossing—such policemen were completely unknown in pre-war Poland.’ From time to time, she added, ‘Gestapo cars rush by, paying no attention whatsoever to the Jewish policeman’s directions….’50

  ***

  The four hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw, and the two million and more Jews under German rule in November 1940, had no means of escape. But Jewish refugees from central Europe who had reached Slovakia some months earlier had been able to go by ship down the Danube and, once at the Black Sea, to sail to Palestine. In the third week of November, as Warsaw Jewry contemplated the grim reality of the ghetto, 1,771 refugees, most of them from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, reached Haifa, on board two tramp steamers, the Milos and the Pacific. A few days later, a further 1,783 refugees arrived on board a third boat, the Atlantic.

  None of these refugees had valid certificates for Palestine. The British authorities therefore ordered them to transfer to another boat, the Patria, for deportation to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. On November 25, as the refugees were being transferred, some of the Jews, determined to remain in Palestine, blew up the Patria. Their aim had been only to disable the ship, to prevent it from sailing, but it sank, and 250 of the refugees were drowned.51

  On November 28, as Palestine Jewry mourned the Patria dead, a second anti-Jewish film was given its premiere in Berlin. Der Ewige Jude, ‘The Eternal Jew’, was to be shown in cinemas throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe. The film sought to explain the part played by the Jews in world history. Scenes of rats and Jews were juxtaposed. The Jews, like the rats, were carriers of diseases, ‘money-mad bits of filth devoid of all higher values, corrupters of the world’.52

  These images fanned the vicious racism of German propaganda, as they were designed to do. When German soldiers entered the Warsaw ghetto, they treated the Jews as vermin, entering houses at will to steal whatever they could find. ‘A Jew does not dare make a sound of protest,’ Chaim Kaplan noted on December 6. ‘There have been cases when courageous Jews were shot in full view of their entire family, and the murderers were not held responsible, because their excuse was that the filthy Jew cursed the Führer and it was their duty to avenge his honour.’53 Four days later Ringelblum recorded how, on December 9, ‘a soldier sprang out of a passing automobile and hit a boy on the head with an iron bar. The boy died.’54

  As 1940 drew to a close, Richard Lichtheim, the head of the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, reported to Palestine, London and New York what he had heard of the plight of the Jews of Europe. From Rumania, he wrote, there were reports of ‘killings and lootings’. From the camp at Gurs came details of barracks with neither floors nor beds: ‘The people are lying on the ground and many of them have not even blankets.’ In Belgium and Holland the German authorities wanted ‘to eliminate the Jews from public life’. In Switzerland there were six thousand Jewish refugees, ‘of whom 2,600 are destitute’. In Poland, the situation of the Jews was ‘even worse than in Germany itself’.

  In his letter, Lichtheim wrote of the hundreds of thousands of European Jews ‘who tried to escape but did not go fast or far enough’: Jews who had earlier fled from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and even Poland, who were now caught in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark.55 Others, while still in Europe, had found refuge in neutral countries, six thousand in Switzerland, ten thousand in Portugal, several thousand interned while trying to pass through Spain, several thousand finding havens in Sweden and Finland, others in Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy.

  From Varna, in Bulgaria, a tiny craft of some 130 tons, the Salvador, had set out in mid-November with more than three hundred and fifty Jewish refugees crammed on board. The British government, seeking to prevent their entry in Palestine, urged the Turkish and Greek governments not to allow the ship through the Dardanelles, or into the Aegean Sea. These urgings were unnecessary, however, for on December 12, while still in the Sea of Marmora, the Salvador sank: two hundred of the refugees were drowned, including seventy children. Five days later two British officials responsible for refugee policy for central Europe exchanged notes. ‘If anything can deter these poor devils from setting out for Zion, that story should,’ wrote one, to which the other replied: ‘I agree. There could have been no more opportune disaster from the point of view of stopping this traffic….56

  The ‘traffic’ did not stop. But with every passing month, escape became more difficult. Wherever German rule was established, the Jews were deprived of their passports and travel documents, or denied them, while in the streets and concentration camps they continued to be singled out for particular abuse. When the Berlin pastor, Heinrich Grüber, was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on December 17, he was a witness to one such episode. As he later recalled, it was ‘one of the first impressions’ of his imprisonment:

  I myself on that night was on guard in our hut and heard cries all of a sudden. Two SS men—drunk—appeared; they were always at their worst when they were drunk, these SS men. They demanded of the Jews, in the neighbouring hut—because there was a special hut for every kind of prisoner—that they should come out into the cold night, to the frost and ice; they were required and ordered to ‘roll’, as they would call it, in the snow; later, when the SS men themselves were too cold they ordered the Jews back to the unheated cold huts and ordered them to go back to bed under their thin blankets.

  ‘Of course,’ Gruber added, ‘these people contracted pneumonia, and some of them died of pneumonia.’57

  In Warsaw, German soldiers in a car were terrorizing the Jews of the ghetto. ‘Today,’ noted Emanuel Ringelblum on Christmas Eve, 1940, ‘the car appeared at Karmelicka again; the soldiers got out and beat up all the Jews. Men, women and children. A woman was going down the street with her child; the child got so powerful a blow he fell unconscious in the middle of the street.’58 Near Kalisz, a group of British soldiers captured in France in June 1940 were being held in a prisoner-of-war camp. One of them, Sergeant Donald Edgar, later recalled:

  One morning as we were trudging through the snow to work we saw coming towards us a heavy cart being pulled by six… yes, as they came nearer we were sure… by six women. What is more, six young women, thin, emaciated and bent forward in their rope harness. They scarcely looked up as we passed.

  As the cart, which was wheeled and not on sleds as most were at this time of the year, passed I saw that it was loaded with old tombstones and I recognised that they were inscribed with Hebrew characters. Beside the cart marched a black-uniformed SS guard, rifle on shoulder.

  When they had gone I asked a guard whom I was on chatting terms with, who the girls were. ‘Judische Madel,’ ‘Jewish girls,’ he replied curtly, and started to shout at us to get a move on.59

  Thus, for the Jews of German-occupied Europe, the year 1940 ended, and ended without hope of any improvement in their situation. But few imagined that worse brutality, worse sadism, and mass murder, were yet to come.

  11

  * * *

  January–June 1941:

  the spreading net

  In Warsaw, in a ghetto covered with deep snow, the Germans would allow the Jews no fuel for heating. ‘Wherever I go,’ Mary Berg noted on 4 January 1941, ‘I find people wrapped up in blankets or huddling under feather beds, that is, if the Germans have not taken all these warm things for their own soldiers.’ To relieve their boredom, some of the Nazi guards near the ghetto entrances arranged ‘entertainments’ for themselves
, choosing a passer-by at random and ordering him to throw himself in the snow with his face down, ‘and if he is a Jew who wears a beard, they tear it off together with the skin until the snow is red with blood’.

  Even the Jewish policemen did not go unscathed. ‘Yesterday’, Mary Berg recorded, ‘I myself saw a Nazi gendarme “exercise” a Jewish policeman near the passage from the Little to the Big Ghetto on Chlodna Street. The young man finally lost his breath, but the Nazi still forced him to fall and rise until he collapsed in a pool of blood. Then someone called for an ambulance, and the Jewish policeman was put on a stretcher and carried away on a hand truck.’1

  The hunger in the ghetto was made worse by the cold. ‘Walking down Leszno Street,’ Emanuel Ringelblum noted on 5 January 1941, ‘you come across people lying at the street corner, frozen, begging.’ Recently, he added, ‘streetwalking has become notable. Yesterday, a very respectable-looking woman detained me.’ ‘Necessity’, he commented, ‘drives people to anything.’2

  It was the daily, and nightly, danger of Nazi ‘actions’ that was the scourge of the ghetto. On the evening of January 9, Mary Berg was at a meeting of her house committee when, at eleven o’clock, Nazi gendarmes broke into the room, searched the men, took away whatever money they found, and then ordered the women to strip. Her account continued:

  Our subtenant, Mrs R., who happened to be there, courageously protested, declaring that she would not undress in the presence of men. For this she received a resounding slap on the face and was searched even more harshly than the other women. The women were kept naked for more than two hours while the Nazis put their revolvers to their breasts and private parts and threatened to shoot them all if they did not disgorge dollars or diamonds.

  The beasts did not leave until 2.00 a.m., carrying a scanty loot of a few watches, some paltry rings, and a small sum in Polish zlotys. They did not find either diamonds or dollars.

  Such attacks, Mary Berg added, took place nightly in the Warsaw ghetto.3 They had become a commonplace of German actions throughout Poland, and the perpetrators were urged by their superiors not to flag. At a Nazi Party meeting in Lublin on January 22, Hans Frank spoke of the few ‘humanitarian dreamers’ who, out of ‘sheer German good-nature’, were in the habit, as he expressed it, ‘of falling asleep over world history’. But he went on to warn that: ‘We who for twenty years past have been fighting beside the Führer cannot be asked to have any consideration left for the Jews.’ If, he added, ‘the Jews in the world ask for pity today, this leaves us cold’.4

  In the Lodz ghetto, a Chronicle of Events, begun on January 12, recorded the daily deaths. These, the chroniclers wrote, were ‘the result of complete physical exhaustion brought on by hunger and cold’: on January 20 there were three such deaths noted by name, the thirty-four-year-old Icek Brona, the fifty-seven-year-old Ita Kinster and the sixty-nine-year-old Abram Szmulewicz.5 Several suicides were also recalled in the Lodz ghetto in that first week of systematic records, among them a twenty-one-year-old girl, Bluma Lichtensztajn, who jumped from a fourth-floor window on January 29. ‘Her condition leaves no hope for recovery,’ the Chronicle commented.6 Also on January 29, in the Lodz ghetto, hunger led to the death of the seventy-nine-year-old painter Maurycy Trebacz, winner of a Gold Medal at the San Francisco World Exhibition of 1894.7 Trebacz was one of five thousand Jews who died of starvation in the Lodz ghetto between January and June 1941.

  THE GENERAL GOVERNMENT

  Having established the Warsaw ghetto, the Germans now began to uproot Jews from all the smaller towns and villages west of the city, and drive them into the ghetto. On January 31, three thousand such ‘new exiles’, as Chaim Kaplan described them, reached Warsaw, mostly from the nearby town of Pruszkow. Describing the morning of their deportation, Kaplan wrote:

  The exiles were driven out of their beds before dawn, and the Führer’s minions did not let them take money, belongings, or food, threatening all the while to shoot them. Before they left on their exile, a search was made of their pockets and of all the hidden places in their clothes and bodies. Without a penny in their pockets or a covering for the women, children, old people, and invalids—sometimes without shoes on their feet or staffs in their hands—they were forced to leave their homes and possessions and the graves of their ancestors, and go—whither? And in terrible, fierce, unbearable cold!

  On reaching the ghetto boundary, the deportees from Pruszkow were searched once more. If anyone had saved anything of value, Kaplan noted, ‘it was quickly taken away. They even searched the invalids and the sick people in wheelchairs, and if they found a bit of food, it too was stolen.’8

  Mass deportations followed from all the towns and villages west and south of Warsaw. Between the end of January and the end of March, more than seventy thousand Jews were brought into the ghetto, raising its population to nearly half a million. ‘We ourselves’, Zivia Lubetkin later recalled, ‘lived twelve or fifteen people to a room.’ Refugees, she added, were sent to special houses which had somehow been evacuated of their usual inhabitants. These were ‘the worst conditions’ of the ghetto. She remembered vividly a visit to one such house in search of a family she had known before the war, the husband a teacher, the wife a doctor, a well-off couple, with children:

  When I came to look for this family, I found them on the floor, one on top of the other. They were in a corner of a room. I could not come up to them because there was no room to put my foot to cross the room. In this house, there was no lavatory in the whole house and they had a lavatory in the yard and they were on the fourth floor. There was no water in the house. And people lived this way. They degenerated because there was no possibility of getting work, no employment. There was hunger. Sanitary conditions were below description, and of course, the typhoid epidemic began in those houses.

  There was no possibility, Zivia Lubetkin added, of separating the sick from the healthy, ‘and sometimes it was impossible to separate the dead from the living, those who died of starvation, children in the arms of their mothers’.

  How well Zivia Lubetkin remembered, also, the evenings after curfew ‘when silence would come to the ghetto and everyone would hide in his corner—and the voice of the small children, “a piece of bread, a piece of bread”. But no one could give us that piece of bread, because very few of us had a piece of bread.’9

  ***

  In Rumania, the anti-Jewish hatred of the Iron Guard burst out anew on 21 January 1941, when gangs of Legionnaires, some armed with guns, others with staves, hunted for Jews in the streets. Thousands of Jews were caught and beaten, hundreds of shops and houses were looted or burned, and twenty-five synagogues desecrated. After three days of these manhunts, 120 Jews had been killed.10 As in German-occupied Europe, these killings were carried out in a repulsive manner: ‘sadistic atrocities unsurpassed in horror’, one of Churchill’s Private Secretaries described them, ‘taking hundreds of Jews to cattle slaughterhouses and killing them according to the Jews’ own ritual practices in slaughtering animals’.11 The bodies of many of those murdered were then hung on meat hooks in the slaughterhouse, with placards around them announcing ‘Kosher meat’.12

  In the Lodz ghetto, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Chaim Rumkowski, negotiated with the Germans for the establishment of workshops in which more than ten thousand Jews had found work by February 1941: many of them as carpenters, tailors and shoemakers, producing goods for Germany. ‘My main slogan’, Rumkowski explained in a speech to Jewish Council officials on February 1, ‘has been to give work to the greatest possible number of people.’ In this way, he hoped, those in the ghetto, and those being deported to it, would be able to survive.13

  Throughout Eastern Europe, the German authorities had begun to make considerable use of local German-speaking groups, the Ethnic Germans, or Volksdeutsch, to carry out their orders. The descendants of German settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ethnic Germans had long felt themselves a deprived minority, cut off from their original homeland, a
nd isolated by language and tradition from the people among whom they lived. The coming of German rule seemed to offer many Ethnic Germans the opportunity to prosper; for some it was the opportunity for revenge. In areas where they were numerically large, they provided Berlin with valuable allies. In Lodz, a city with 350,000 Poles and 250,000 Jews, there were 75,000 Ethnic Germans living on the eve of war. By 1941 their number had doubled, as a result of the deliberate transfer by the German authorities of Ethnic Germans from the Volhynia to western Polish territory. For the Jews of the Lodz ghetto, the presence of so many Ethnic Germans was an added danger. It also meant that the Poles in Lodz and in its surrounding areas were less able to organize resistance and escape routes, Jew and Pole alike being confronted in the Ethnic Germans with a formidable barrier to resistance or escape.14

  Deportations continued throughout February and March 1941, to Warsaw, Lodz and several other ghettos. One deportation, from Plock to Czestochowa, has been described by Moshe Shklarek:

  In the early hours of that morning the house shuddered from violent knocks on the door and from the savage cries of the Germans, ‘Filthy Jews, outside!’ Within a few moments we found ourselves huddled together in a crowd of the town’s Jews on Sheroka Street.

  With the help of the Volksdeutsche and with cruel blows and many murders, they loaded the assembled ones on to trucks, crowding them tightly, and the long convoy drove out of town. We were not permitted to take anything with us, not even something else to wear other than what we had put on in our terrified haste.

  On the same day, after hours of difficult travelling, the trucks came to a stop in the midst of Dzialdowo camp, at the entrance to the town of Mlawa. Two rows of Germans, equipped with clubs and whips, stood in a line several tens of meters long, extending from the trucks to the camp gate.