Gens in Vilna, Dr Elkes in Kovno, and Ghetto Elders in a hundred scattered towns and villages throughout the Eastern Territories, sought, in their different ways, to preserve, amid the slaughter, the precarious balance between work and death. Each had to decide how best to serve the needs of his community. At Kleck, on October 31, two members of the Jewish Council, Elisser and Lipe Mishelevski, had been shot together with two hundred other Jews: the ‘crime’ of these Council members was to have tried to make contact with non-Jews outside the ghetto, in an attempt to obtain more food for the ghetto.38 In Minsk, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Eliyahu Myshkin, was active in helping hundreds of young Jews to escape to the forest. He was killed during an ‘action’ in Minsk on November 7, when twelve thousand Jews were slaughtered in pits outside the city.
The heads of several of the Jewish Council departments in Minsk—Rudicer of the economic section, Dulski of the housing section, Goldin of the workshop section, and Serebianski, the police commander—had all cooperated with resistance groups, providing clothing, shoes, hiding places and false documents. Serebianski went so far as to hire members of the resistance into the ghetto police. Also active in helping the resistance in Minsk were two of the secretaries in the labour department, Mira Strogin and Sara Levin.39
The massacre at Minsk on November 7 was followed within three days by the arrival in the city of the first German Jews, one thousand who had been deported from Hamburg. ‘They felt themselves as pioneers who were brought to settle the East,’ one eyewitness later recalled.40 The deportees from Hamburg were followed within days by more than six thousand deportees from Frankfurt, Bremen, and the Rhineland. On November 18 a train arrived from Berlin. The twenty-two-year-old Haim Berendt was among the deportees from Berlin. On reaching Minsk, he later recalled, ‘the carriages were opened and they started beating us up, driving us out of the carriages in a hurry and, within a moment, there was complete chaos. He who succeeded in getting out of the door was beaten up. Women, children and men.’
The Berlin deportees were taken beyond the ghetto of Minsk Jews to a special ghetto for the Jews of Germany, known as ‘Ghetto Hamburg’. There, they became a part of the Jewish labour force in Minsk.41
German Jews were also deported to Riga and Kovno. On November 27 the first of nineteen trains left the Reich for Riga: it came from Berlin. Even as this train was on its way from Berlin, the Riga ghetto was the object of a massive raid, during which 10,600 Jews were seized, taken to pits in the nearby Rumbuli forest, and shot. When the train from Berlin arrived a few days later, most of the thousand German Jews were likewise taken out to Rumbuli, and killed.42 Then, in a second, three-day raid on the Riga ghetto, from December 7 to December 9, a further twenty-five thousand Riga Jews were killed, among them the eighty-one-year-old doyen of Jewish historians, Simon Dubnov.
According to one account, Dubnov was murdered by a Gestapo officer who had formerly been one of his pupils.43 Another account tells of how, sick and with a fever, with enfeebled legs, he could not move quickly enough out of the ghetto, and was shot in the back by a Latvian guard. According to this account, Dubnov’s last words, as he fell, were, ‘Schreibt un farschreibt!’, ‘Write and record!’44 This exhortation in Yiddish was typical of Dubnov, the lover of historical record, and the firm believer in the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jewry, a culture which was being swept away.
With this second Rumbuli massacre, eighty per cent of Riga Jewry had been murdered. The few survivors were put into a forced labour camp, ‘the little ghetto’, the women being imprisoned separately from the men.45 The Riga ghetto was ready for any further deportees from Germany.
The subsequent deportees from Germany, beginning with 714 who left Nuremberg on November 29, and 1,200 sent from Stuttgart on December 1, were sent to labour camps, or to the Riga ghetto: in all, seventeen thousand more Jews were to reach Riga, and forced labour, that winter.46
A further fifteen thousand German Jews were sent to Kovno, principally from Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Breslau and Frankfurt. An eye-witness in Kovno, Dr Aharon Peretz, later recalled how, as the deportees were being led along the road which went past the ghetto, towards the Ninth Fort, they could be heard asking the guards, ‘Is the camp still far?’ They had been told they were being sent to a work camp. But, Peretz added, ‘We know where that road led. It led to the Ninth Fort, to the prepared pits.’ But first, the Jews from Germany were kept for three days in underground cellars, with ice-covered walls, and without food or drink.47 Only then, frozen and starving, were they ordered to undress, taken to the pits, and shot.
In the suitcases of the murdered deportees were later found printed announcements, urging them to prepare for a difficult winter. For this reason, some had brought little heating stoves with them. Later, the Jews inside the Kovno ghetto heard of the resistance of these German Jews when they reached the Ninth Fort. ‘They did not want to undress,’ Peretz explained, ‘and they struggled against the Germans.’48 But it was a hopeless struggle and the killing of these deportees was recorded by the Einsatzkommando with its accustomed precision: on November 25, 1,159 Jews, 1,600 Jewesses and 175 Jewish children, ‘settlers from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurton-Main’; and four days later, 693 Jewish men, 1,155 Jewesses and 152 Jewish children, ‘settlers from Vienna and Breslau’.49
Amid this slaughter, a Lithuanian, Dr Petras Baublis, the head of the Infants’ House in Kovno, risked his own life and the safety of his family by offering to smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto and to hide them in his Infants’ House. To ensure their safety, Dr Baublis, who had a number of close friends among the Lithuanian Catholic priesthood, obtained blank birth certificate forms, which the priests then agreed to authenticate with church seals and signatures, stating that this was a Christian child.
Among the Jewish children saved by Baublis was the two-year-old Ariela Abramovich, whose father later testified that he knew of at least another seven children similarly saved. Another Jewish child, Gitele Mylner, who had been born only a few months before the massacre, was also handed to Baublis by her parents: he gave her the name Berute Iovayshayte, and a certificate stamped by the church authorities stating that she was a Christian child.50
No Jewish community, however small, no Jewish family, however remote, was safe from the questing killers. In a small village east of Chernigov, only one Jewish couple lived. Yakov Gorodetsky and his wife Dvoira were peasants. Forty-three years later their grandson, also Yakov, spoke of how his grandparents, remembering as they did the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918, could not envisage in 1941 the barbarism that was about to be unleashed. Fortunately, their three sons were in safer regions when invasion came.
In June 1941 Dvoira Gorodetsky was fifty-nine years old, her husband Yakov, sixty-two. Both were murdered on October 30. All three of their sons fought in the Red Army, and survived the war.51
***
Throughout the late autumn and early winter of 1941, details had filtered through to the West of many eastern executions. On November 14, in a message to the Jewish Chronicle on its centenary, Winston Churchill gave public recognition to the Jewish suffering. ‘None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew’, he wrote, ‘the unspeakable evils wrought on the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazis’ first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity. He has borne and continues to bear a burden that might have seemed to be beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit: he has never lost the will to resist.’
Churchill’s message continued: ‘Assuredly in the day of victory the Jews’ sufferings and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. Once again, at the appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world. Once again it will be shown that, though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.’52
***
Inside the Warsaw ghetto, the deaths from starvation were
accelerated by the winter cold. ‘The most fearful sight is that of freezing children,’ Ringelblum noted in mid-November. ‘Little children with bare feet, bare knees and torn clothing stand dumbly in the street weeping. Tonight, the 14th, I heard a tot of three or four yammering. The child will probably be found frozen to death tomorrow morning, a few hours off.’ Six weeks earlier, Ringelblum recalled, when the first snow had fallen, some seventy children were found frozen to death on the steps of ruined houses.’53
On the morning of November 17, Warsaw Jewry was shocked to learn of the death sentence carried out on eight Warsaw Jews, for leaving the ghetto ‘without permission’. Six of those sentences were women. All had been caught after crossing into Aryan Warsaw in search of food. ‘One of the victims,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary, ‘a young girl not quite eighteen, asked the Jewish policeman who was present at the execution to tell her family that she had been sent to a concentration camp and would not be seeing them for some time. Another young girl cried out to God imploring Him to accept her as the expiatory sacrifice for her people and to let her be the final victim.’
Kaplan noted that it was the Jewish police who had been ordered to tie the hands and cover the eyes of those about to be executed. The two men among them refused, however, to be bound or blindfolded. Their wish was granted. ‘The execution squad’, Kaplan wrote, ‘was composed of Polish policemen. After carrying out their orders, they wept bitterly.’54
‘All past experience’, Ringelblum noted, ‘pales in the face of the fact that eight people were shot to death for crossing the threshold of the ghetto.’ The execution ‘has set all Warsaw trembling’. A few SS officers had attended, ‘calmly smoking cigarettes and behaving cynically all through the execution’. Three members of the Jewish police were also present; one of them, Jakub Lejkin, was said to have ‘distinguished himself with his zeal in dragging the condemned from their cells’.
One of the six executed women was a beggar, another was a woman with three children. ‘It is said’, Ringelblum added, ‘that the prisoners bore themselves calmly.’55
The deaths from cold continued: ‘In the streets’, Mary Berg noted on November 22, ‘frozen human corpses are an increasingly frequent sight’. Sometimes a mother ‘cuddles a child frozen to death, and tries to warm the inanimate little body. Sometimes a child huddles against his mother, thinking that she is asleep and trying to awaken her, while, in fact, she is dead’.56
Inside the Warsaw ghetto, news of a horrific kind arrived during November. Hearing it, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, summoned the leading members of the underground to hear the messenger. His name was Heniek Grabowski. ‘I came to Czerniakow,’ Zivia Lubetkin later recalled. ‘It was in the evening, there was no electricity, and Heniek told his story.’ Grabowski had been sent by the Jews of Warsaw to Vilna, and he had returned.
The story Grabowski told was about Ponar. ‘For the first time,’ Zivia Lubetkin recalled, ‘we heard that Jews of Vilna are being deported by the thousands and tens of thousands, and being killed, children and women.’57
Yitzhak Zuckerman had also been summoned to hear Grabowski’s report. ‘I am from Vilna myself,’ he later recalled. ‘I was born in Vilna. In Vilna I left behind all my parents and relatives. And here he brought this tragic news from Vilna. While still a child, I had played among the trees in Ponar, and here he spoke about Ponar. My Vilna, the Jews of Vilna, were being killed in Ponar, my playground.’
Zuckerman and his friends realized at once the truth of Grabowski’s report. They realized also that it was now a question of the ‘total destruction’ of the Jews of Europe.58
Forty miles north-east of Warsaw, a labour camp had been set up in the gravel pits near the tiny rural station of Treblinka. The Jewish and Polish prisoners living there were employed loading slag, cleaning drains and levelling the ground in and around the engine sheds at Malkinia junction, on the main Warsaw—Bialystok line. Later, they were put to work repairing and strengthening the embankment along the River Bug. The staff of the camp consisted of twenty SS men and a hundred Ukrainians. The commandant was Captain Theo von Euppen. Franciszek Zabecki, a Polish railway worker at Treblinka station, later recalled that von Euppen was ‘a sadist who ill-treated the Poles and Jews working there, particularly the Jews, taking shots at them as if they were partridges’.59
***
The Eastern murders continued throughout November 1941. At Liepaja, however, all such shootings had been forbidden by direct orders of the Reich Commissar for the ‘Ostland’ region of the Baltic, Hinrich Lohse. Asked by his superiors in Berlin to explain why he had halted the executions, Lohse replied on November 15 that ‘the manner in which they were performed could not be justified’. Not moral, but economic reasons, were his complaint: the destruction of much manpower that could be of use to the war economy. Was it intended, Lohse asked, that Jews were to be killed, ‘irrespective of age, sex or economic factors’.60
A month later Lohse was informed, by the Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories, that ‘as a matter of principle, no economic factors are to be taken into consideration in the solution of the Jewish question’.61 Only a fragment of Eastern Jewry had been kept alive for work purposes. On December 1, the chief of Einsatzkommando 3, SS Colonel Karl Jaeger, reported to Berlin that only fifteen per cent of Lithuanian Jewry remained alive. All of them, he explained, were Arbeitsjuden, working Jews. ‘Today’, Jaeger added, ‘I can confirm that Einsatzkommando 3 has reached the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania.’ The only ‘remaining’ Jews were labourers and their families: about four and a half thousand in Siauliai, fifteen thousand in Kovno and fifteen thousand in Vilna.
In his report of 1 December 1941, Jaeger set out what he called the ‘Organizational problem’ which had confronted his Einsatzkommando, a problem which had only been surmounted because SS First Lieutenant Hamann ‘shared my views in full’ and knew how to ‘cooperate’ with the Lithuanians. As Jaeger explained:
The decision to free each district of Jews necessitated thorough preparation of each action as well as acquisition of information about local conditions. The Jews had to be collected in one or more towns and a ditch had to be dug at the right site for the right number. The marching distance from collecting points to the ditches averaged about three miles. The Jews were brought in groups of five hundred, separated by at least 1.2 miles, to the place of execution. The sort of difficulties and nerve-scraping work involved in all this is shown by an arbitrarily chosen example:
In Rokiskis 3,208 people had to be transported three miles before they could be liquidated. To manage this job in a twenty-four-hour period, more than sixty of the eighty available Lithuanian partisans had to be detailed to the cordon. The Lithuanians who were left were frequently being relieved while doing the work together with my men.
Vehicles are seldom available. Escapes, which were attempted here and there, were frustrated solely by my men at the risk of their lives. For example, three men of the Commando at Mariampole shot thirty-eight escaping Jews and Communist functionaries on a path in the woods, so that no one got away. Distances to and from actions were never less than 90–120 miles. Only careful planning enabled the Commando to carry out up to five actions a week and at the same time continue the work in Kovno without interruption.
In Kovno itself, Jaeger reported, ‘trained’ Lithuanians were available ‘in sufficient number’. As a result, the city was, as he expressed it, ‘comparatively speaking a shooting paradise’.
Jaeger added that in his view ‘the male work-Jews should be sterilized immediately to prevent any procreation’. A Jewess who, ‘nevertheless’, was pregnant ‘is to be liquidated’.62
In Lithuania, Einsatzkommando 3 had succeeded, as Jaeger phrased it in his report of December 1, in ‘solving the Jewish problem’. In the other eastern regions—in White Russia, the Volhynia and the Ukraine—that same solution continued to be the policy of the other Einsatzkommando units, inhibited only momentarily in D
ecember when the extreme cold made the ground too hard in many places to dig death pits in.63 But no such inhibition prevented the ‘action’ in Nowogrodek which began on December 5, when seven thousand Jews were collected in the yard of the municipal courthouse. ‘It was already very, very cold,’ Idel Kagan later recalled, of the weather in a region which had long been known as ‘the Polish Siberia’.
Throughout December 5, the seven thousand Jews of Nowogrodek were kept in the yard. In the evening, they were taken into the courthouse building. So crowded were they, that most had to remain standing all night. In the morning, the courthouse gates were opened, and German officers came in. They then proceeded to ask each Jew his profession, and how many children he had. On hearing the answer, the German indicated either to the right, or to the left.
No logic dictated who went in which direction. Moshe Kagan was a saddlemaker, and had two children: they were sent to the left. Moshe’s brother Yankel, who was also a saddlemaker with two children, was sent to the right. ‘And so’, Idel Kagan later recalled, ‘my father went to life, my uncle to death.’
Of the seven thousand Jews assembled, five thousand were taken away. The Jewish Council members were also sent to the left. ‘The Germans didn’t need any cooperation from anybody,’ Idel Kagan reflected, and he added: ‘We did not have any idea what happened to the five thousand. When people said, “They have been killed,” we answered, “They took them away to work. Why should they kill them?” But they had been taken to Skridlewe, three miles away, and shot in the ravine. There were no survivors.’
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