The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  The smallest act of resistance provoked savage reprisals. In September 1941 a White Russian villager, in explaining to a Soviet partisan parachutist why his village was reluctant to take part in anti-German action behind the lines, told the parachutist this story:

  Horses pulled a cart into Lukoml, and inside the cart was an interpreter who had been shot dead and a German officer who was breathing his last. He was lying there, his face downwards with a knife sticking out of the nape of his neck. People say he just about managed to whisper: ‘A Jude, a Jew, that is, killed me,’ before kicking the bucket. So by the order of the Kommandant they collected the Jews of Lukoml, about one hundred and fifty families, and mowed them all down with machine-guns. One hundred and fifty families, just imagine! The children they buried alive. And you are telling us to attack them in our village!21

  Among the Jews who urged resistance to German rule was a former Polish senator, Dr Jacob Wigodsky, who for twenty years had been the leader of Vilna Jewry. He was arrested in Vilna on August 24 and held in prison.22 He was eighty-six years old. A week later, he was killed at Ponar.

  With the United States still neutral, with Russian forces being driven eastward, and with Britain still on the defensive in North Africa, the German power to treat the Jews as it wished was unchallengeable. News of the killings, however, continued to reach the West, and was thought to be exclusively of Russian defenders in or behind the battle zone. As Hitler’s armies advanced, Churchill broadcast to the British people on August 24, ‘whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.’

  Churchill made no specific reference to the Jews: had he done so, it would have indicated to the Germans that British Intelligence was listening to their most secret messages. But he did make it clear that the Germans were carrying out what he called ‘the most frightful cruelties’, and he added: ‘We are in the presence of a crime without a name.’23 The week following Churchill’s broadcast, seventeen separate reports of the shooting of Jews and Russians, in groups of between 61 and 4,200, were sent to Berlin by secret radio code from the eastern front.24

  Throughout August and September, the scale of killings increased. On August 25, at a conference in Vinnitsa, the German military and civilian authorities discussed the future of eleven thousand Jewish forced labourers who were then at Kamenets Podolsk. These were Hungarian Jews, mostly from the areas annexed by Hungary from Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, who had been deported by the Hungarian government, in an act of mass expulsion. The Germans demanded that these Jews be taken back, as they ‘could not cope’ with them. The Hungarian government refused. A senior SS officer, Lieutenant-General Franz Jaeckeln, then assured the Vinnitsa conference that he would ‘complete the liquidation of those Jews by September 1, 1941’.

  Between August 27 and August 29, the eleven thousand Jews were marched out of Kamenets Podolsk, to a series of bomb craters ten miles outside the town. There, they were ordered to undress, and machine-gunned. Many were buried alive.25 Franz Jaeckeln had kept his promise.26

  One of those who was forced to dig what he believed to be anti-tank ditches at Kamenets Podolsk, Leslie Gordon, later recalled the deportation from Budapest to the east. On reaching a certain eastern town the Jews were forced out of the trucks and told: ‘Go eastward. Don’t come back. Don’t even look back.’ Some people left the group ‘to do the hygienic things on the side, and they were shot right on the spot’. With Leslie Gordon had been his sixty-eight-year-old father, his forty-three-year-old mother, his four brothers aged twenty-two, sixteen, fourteen and five, and his younger sister, aged eight. Only he survived, and he survived only because he had been taken away for a special task:

  I was taken to a group of young men, about twenty-five or thirty young men. We were first given food and then we were given shovels and other tools and were taken about two or three kilometres out of the town beyond the hills.

  We had been taken up there and they told us to start digging ditches. We believed that this was for the tanks, that perhaps the Russians were coming back, and the size of the ditches had almost convinced us that this is what was going to be.

  We finished one of the trenches at about late evening, I don’t know the time. The size of that trench was about twenty metres long on both sides and about five metres wide and about two to two-and-a-half metres deep. That night we were sent to our place to sleep. Before going to sleep they gave us some food.

  Next day we started to dig another trench until about late forenoon when we saw two cars coming to the place. Stepping out were very high ranking SS officers, about six or seven of them. They were talking to our commanders and to our guards. We could not hear what they were saying but they pointed to our trenches we had dug.

  Shortly after this we saw the people coming up also with shovels and different tools in their hands and they had been ordered to lay down their tools.

  These people they ordered to take off all their clothes, they were put in order, and then they were all naked. They were sent to these ditches and SS men, some of them drunk, some of them sober, and some of them photographing, it seems, these people numbering about three hundred to four hundred, I don’t know the exact number, were all executed and most of them only got hurt and got buried alive. Quicklime was brought there too, four or five trucks of quicklime.

  Firstly, after the shooting we were ordered to put some earth back on the bodies, some of them were still crying for help. We put the earth back on the bodies and then the trucks were emptied of the quicklime.

  I am talking about people who are all Jews, no exception. There were some Christians who were trying to hide some Jews and they were hanged.

  Some of the SS men, Gordon later recalled, ‘got almost hysterical’, some were ‘close to a nervous breakdown’, while others ‘were shooting and killing’. ‘All in all,’ he added, ‘it was like a slaughterhouse.’27

  Also on September 3, the Germans carried out their first ‘action’ against the Jews of Dubossary, a town on the banks of the River Dniester where for nearly two months they had tried and failed to find Jews willing to serve on the Jewish Council. Not a single Jew had agreed to do so. The three Barenboim brothers, Itskhok, Idel and Moshe, were among the Jews who, having refused to serve, were hanged in the centre of the town. Three others hanged for this same crime were Dr Fain, Peisakh Glimberg and Sara Shkolnik.

  At the end of August 1941 a Jewish underground organization, led by Yakov Guzanyatskii, had begun to function in Dubossary. In the same square and on the very gallows where the six Jews had been hanged, the underground hanged a local man, Matveenko, who had helped the Germans carry out the six death sentences. The underground also blew up the bridge over the Dniester.

  During the ‘action’ of September 3, six hundred elderly Jews were thrown out of their houses and driven into Dubossary’s eight synagogues. Completely surrounded by Germans, the synagogues were then set on fire. All six hundred died an agonizing death. The very next day, Guzanyatskii’s underground ‘avengers’ carried out the death sentence on the German Commander Kraft, while another underground group, led by Efim Boim, blew up a large store of German arms.

  By the end of the year, five Jewish partisan groups had begun to operate in the environs of Dubossary, their ranks filled by Jews escaping from Dubossary itself, from Tulchin and Mogilev, and by Soviet prisoners of war escaping from captivity. Near Balta, one group of Jews was led by a former Red Air Force pilot, Lyuni Zaltsman. In the Vinnitsa region, another group was commanded by a sixteen-year-old former postal clerk, Zalman Bernshtein.28

  On the Leningrad front, a partisan detachment led by Tevye Yakovlevich disrupted German communications in the region of Gdov. ‘Only our “neighbours”
are restless,’ Yakovlevich wrote on one occasion to his son Zosenka. ‘They keep looking for us. But, as you can see, it’s not that easy. We do not worry. We won’t give ourselves up so easily, and if we die, it won’t be for nothing….’

  Tevye Yakovlevich was killed in action behind the German lines. In 1968 his son was present when a monument in his honour was unveiled in Gdov, amid much ceremonial.29

  ***

  Even in the labour camps in German-occupied Poland, there was no security against random massacre. On August 30 Emanuel Ringelblum received information smuggled out of a labour camp at Osowa, near Chelm. ‘There were a few cases of typhus. The SS men took over, ordered the Jewish workers (around fifty of them) to line up. Five men dug a trench-grave behind the line-up, another five were machine-gunned, then still another five dug and were machine-gunned etc. Finally only five or six men were left of the whole camp….’30

  The security suggested by the creation of ghetto walls and fences, like the security of labour camps, was an illusion. As Dr Aharon Peretz, from Kovno, later recalled:

  A few days after the closing of the ghetto, when we hoped that we would be left alone within the fences, within the hedges, then already during the first days the eldest of the community got an order to gather the intelligentsia (that was the Council of Elders) of the people in order to sort the archives in the town. They asked the people, the young, intelligent, highly educated, well-dressed; and of course it never occurred to us that this was only a trick.

  We collected the best in the ghetto. Some of them volunteered because they thought it would be an interesting job. There were some 530 men. They left the ghetto, left families behind because most of them were young married people, and we waited for them to return—one day, two days, and then we learned they were taken behind Kovno, and all of them were shot down.

  ‘We then realized’, Peretz added, ‘that the fence was no guard.’ Nor was the murder of the 530 educated young Jews of Kovno the end of the agony. As Peretz explained:

  We were being crammed all the time, more and more people into a small area. But within the fences there were gardens and there were potatoes in those gardens. Other vegetables too. People used to go into the gardens to dig for the potatoes and then they were shot from behind the fence by the guards. Especially after those shootings, I had to take care of the wounded. They were the ‘dumdum bullets’ which would split when they hit the body.

  Such shots at the beginning were very frequent and there would always be a victim brought to the hospital. Once it would be a rabbi, who would not remove his hat when he met a German. Once it was a doctor, a friend of mine, who did not notice the SS man immediately and did not remove his hat. He was shot in his kidneys and died on the same day.

  Of course, the shootings would threaten the people and scare them. Then the searches began, the organized plunder. And of course there were daily victims to keep on this rule of terror and force the Jews to hand over all their valuables. There were special orders regarding gold, money, jewels, as in all other ghettos.

  The orders were to hand everything over. And in order to make the instructions effective, searches were conducted. People, women, were undressed. In their homes. To search for money in the intimate parts of their body. I received two such patients in hospitals, who were wounded by SS men with leather gloves. And I had to sew up their intimate parts as a result of those searches.31

  In Minsk, as in Kovno, there was no security behind the ghetto walls. Three times in August, after the establishment of the ghetto, German soldiers broke into the ghetto, killing, looting and raping. On each raid, thousands were rounded up, and ‘disappeared’, the inhabitants of the ghetto did not know where.32 Those seized were taken, not for work, but for execution, in nearby pits. On one occasion, Himmler himself, as SS General Karl Wolff later recalled, ‘asked to see a shooting operation’, and ‘on an inspection of the SS Operations Centre at Minsk’ had a hundred prisoners selected ‘for a demonstration’. Wolff, who was then Himmler’s Liaison Officer at Hitler’s headquarters, was also present. His recollection continued:

  An open grave had been dug and they had to jump into this and lie face downwards. And sometimes when one or two rows had already been shot, they had to lie on top of the people who had already been shot and then they were shot from the edge of the grave. And Himmler had never seen dead people before and in his curiosity he stood right up at the edge of this open grave—a sort of triangular hole—and was looking in.

  While he was looking in, Himmler had the deserved bad luck that from one or other of the people who had been shot in the head he got a splash of brains on his coat, and I think it also splashed into his face, and he went very green and pale; he wasn’t actually sick, but he was heaving and turned round and swayed and then I had to jump forward and hold him steady and then I led him away from the grave.

  After the shooting was over, Himmler gathered the shooting squad in a semi-circle around him and, standing up in his car, so that he would be a little higher and be able to see the whole unit, he made a speech. He had seen for himself how hard the task which they had to fulfil for Germany in the occupied areas was, but however terrible it all might be, even for him as a mere spectator, and how much worse it must be for them, the people who had to carry it out, he could not see any way round it.

  They must be hard and stand firm. He could not relieve them of this duty; he could not spare them. In the interests of the Reich, in this hopefully Thousand Year Reich, in its first decisive great war after the take-over of power, they must do their duty however hard it may seem. He appealed to their sense of patriotism and their readiness to make sacrifices. Well, yes—and then he drove off. And he left this—this police unit to sort out the future for themselves, to see if and how far they could come to terms with this—within themselves, because for some it was a shock which lasted their whole lives.33

  To calm the Jews, to avert a mass revolt, deception was an essential part of the Nazi plan. After each raid, the Jews who had been left behind in the ghetto consoled themselves with the belief, fostered by the Germans, that those who had been taken away were in labour camps, under duress no doubt, but alive nevertheless. On August 31, in Vilna, before the ghetto had been established there, a young Jew, Abba Kovner, went to the Jewish Council building to try to find out about the whereabouts of some of his friends who had been taken away in the raids and abductions of the previous weeks. ‘I still thought that part of these people, or most of them, would return,’ he later recalled.

  Early that afternoon, the predominantly Jewish section of Vilna was surrounded by an Einsatzkommando unit, together with several hundred armed Lithuanians. It was announced that any Jew who left his home would be killed, and that a search was in progress for those guilty of ambushing a German patrol. ‘The streets were surrounded,’ Abba Kovner recalled, ‘but again a few hours went by, and nothing happened.’ Then, when the sun set, the ‘action’ began:

  People were taken out of their flats, some carrying a few of their possessions, some without any possessions, out of all the courtyards, out of all the flats, they were driven out with cruel beatings. I don’t know whether out of wisdom or instinct or momentary weakness I found myself in a stairway, in a dark recess there and I stood there. Out of a small window I saw what was happening in that narrow street.

  Until one o’clock a.m., past midnight, this operation was still in progress. During those hours, at midnight I saw from the other courtyard on the other side of the street, it was 39 Ostrashun Street, a woman was dragged by the hair by two soldiers, a woman who was holding something in her arms. One of them directed a beam of light into her face, the other one dragged her by her hair and threw her on the pavement.

  Then the infant fell out of her arms. One of the two, the one with the flashlight, I believe, took the infant, raised him into the air, grabbed him by the leg. The woman crawled on the earth, took hold of his boot and pleaded for mercy. But the soldier took the boy and hit him with his head
against the wall, once, twice, smashed him against the wall.34

  That night, 2,019 Jewish women, 864 men and 817 children were taken from Vilna in trucks to the pits at Ponar and murdered.35 Their fate was unknown to those who remained behind.

  Among those deported to Ponar on the night of August 31 were many Jews who were being held in prison, after having been arrested in the previous weeks, among them Dr Jacob Wigodsky and the young Jewish historian Pinkus Kohn. Others were murdered in the prison itself, among them the Yiddish grammarian Noah Prilutzki. Two months earlier, Prilutzki had been brought to the prison with his friend, the Yiddish writer A. I. Goldschmid. Each day the two scholars had been taken from prison to the famous Strashun Library, where they were made to prepare a list of the valuable collection of Yiddish manuscripts for a German specialist on Judaica, Dr Gotthart. After a month, Gotthart returned to Berlin. Prilutzki and Goldschmid were left in their cell, where a fellow prisoner, the librarian Haikel Lunsky, heard them discussing Maimonides. At the time of the ‘Night of Provocation’ of August 31, Prilutzki was seen lying almost naked on the floor of the prison, his shirt wrapped around his head soaked in blood, and near him lay Goldschmid; both were killed.36

  At sunrise on the morning of September 1, there was another scene in Vilna which Abba Kovner has described:

  In the deserted streets—no Jews were in the streets—all over the streets there were scattered their belongings. Diagonally across the street there was a column of armed Lithuanians; behind them and flanking them on their sides—a multitude of men and even more women, neighbours who came from all over the area, from the suburbs.