The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  The sadism of the murderers was in evidence throughout the lands of their occupation. In the Janowska labour camp at Lvov, on the first day of Purim, six Jews were forced to spend the night outside the barracks, on the grounds that they ‘looked sick’ and should not infect the others. The temperature was at freezing point. ‘In the morning,’ Leon Weliczker later recalled, ‘all six people were frozen lying down where they were put out the night before; completely white like long balls of snow.’

  Two days later, early on the morning of March 4, eight more labourers were picked out at Janowska because, according to Dibauer, the Gestapo chief, ‘they didn’t look too clean’. Dibauer ordered a barrel of water to be brought. The eight Jews were then forced to undress, and to stand in it. It was early morning. All day and all night they were not allowed to get out. ‘Next morning’, Weliczker recalled, ‘we had to cut the ice away. Ice. It was frozen. The men were frozen to death.’

  A week after this incident, Dibauer was joined at the camp by SS Second Lieutenant Bilhaus. The two men decided to compete in a shooting game. They would stand at their windows while Jews were being marched to and fro carrying stones, and would shoot, ‘aiming at the tip of a nose or a finger’. In the evening, Weliczker recalled, these two ‘sportsmen’ would go round ‘picking out what they called the kaput people, those who were injured, because as injured people they were no good any more, and finish them off with a shot’.

  Dibauer also had a reputation for enjoying strangling people. ‘In my group,’ Weliczker later recalled, ‘a man who was working alongside me happened to look away, didn’t look so busy; Dibauer approached, took him, and strangled him with his own hands on the spot.’19

  Confronted by such sadism, Jews everywhere sought some means of survival. But even in White Russia, where groups of Red Army partisan groups had begun fighting behind German lines, the path to resistance was perilous. After the Purim massacre in Minsk, many Jews had tried to escape from the ghetto to join the partisans. One group, led by Nahum Feldman, reached the forests just as a battle was being fought between the Germans and the partisans, and, unable to approach the battle zone, was forced to return to the ghetto. Others who escaped were caught by the Germans while on their way to the forests, and shot. One well-known Jewish Communist in Minsk, Hirsh Skovia, reached the partisans, but died when his feet froze during a German attack on the partisan base.20

  News of one act of resistance, reaching the Jews of Warsaw in March, was published in one of the many underground newspapers which kept the ghetto population informed of whatever was known. This particular report came from the town of Nowogrodek, in eastern Poland, scene of the execution of five thousand Jews in December 1941. ‘In the city of Nowogrodek,’ the newspaper wrote, ‘there were two hundred Jews who refused to go to the execution site like beasts driven to the slaughter. They found the courage to rise, weapon in hand, against Hitler’s hangmen. Although they all fell in the unequal fight, before their own death they killed twenty of the murderers.’ The newspaper added: ‘In wonder and respect we bow our heads at the grave of the heroes of Nowogrodek. They are a symbol of the end to surrender and slavish obsequiousness. They are a symbol of the proud bearing of human beings who wish to die as free men.’21

  Although this act of defiance at the massacre site in Nowogrodek has been shown by historical research to be a myth, the report of it certainly gave the Jews of Warsaw cause for pride. At the same time, south-east of Warsaw, in the forests near Wlodawa, a group of young Jews had begun to form a small resistance group. Their fate, however, showed in miniature the stupendous problems of all such resistance. In a remote wood, twenty-five Jews were in hiding, women and children as well as men. They lived in dug-outs in the forest. After some months, more than a hundred peasants, local Ukrainians, came to their hide-out and ordered them to leave it. There was a short fight, but the Jews were outnumbered and overwhelmed.

  The peasants were armed; the Jews were not. The hundred peasants were all able-bodied men; the twenty-five Jews included women and children. The peasants had lived in their villages with food and freedom to move about; the Jews had been in hiding, hungry and alone, so fearful of being betrayed that, while the peasants had been searching for them, a couple had killed their own child so that its crying would not reveal their hiding place.

  ‘When we were taken out of the hole’, the twenty-four-year-old Hersh Werner later recalled, ‘I said, “We must run, or we’re done for.” The father of the dead child said, “I’m not running.” He hadn’t got it in him any more.’

  The peasants took the Jews to their village, Zamolodicze, and locked them in a barn. Then they took the Jews out one by one. Twenty-one of the Jews were killed. Four managed to escape. These four had then to begin again the search for a hide-out, the search for other Jews, the search for the means of survival. ‘You were running from one place to another,’ Werner later recalled. ‘You had no possessions.’22 Eventually this particular group acquired some rifles, and began to ambush German patrols. It also organized, as best it could, the escape of Jews from some of the nearby ghettos. It even succeeded in rescuing several Jewish girls from a farm at Adampol, girls kept there ‘for the pleasure of the German officers’.

  On one occasion the group, when twenty-five strong, killed ten German soldiers. As this battle was in progress, one of the German soldiers, and a German woman who was with him, surrendered. Both were shot. ‘We had seen such brutality inflicted on the Jews,’ Werner later wrote, ‘we had no mercy for them. It was the first time that we saw dead Germans in this war, not only dead Jews.’23

  ***

  In the second week of March 1942, deportations began from central Europe to the region of the new death camp at Belzec. The first deportees were 1,001 Jews from the ghetto at Theresienstadt. Their train, ‘Transport Aa’, left the ghetto on March 11, reaching the village of Izbica Lubelska, north of Belzec, two days later. At Izbica they were kept in the ghetto, made to clear rubble, and later sent to Belzec. Of the 1,001 Jews in this first deportation from Theresienstadt, only six survived the war.24

  On March 12, while the 1,001 Jews in this Theresienstadt transport were crossing central Europe, eight thousand Jews from the southern Polish town of Mielec were ordered to be at the railway station on the following morning. Like the deportees from Theresienstadt, they were told that they were to be sent to ‘work’ further east. Loaded with heavy bundles containing the basic necessities for life in a new region, a few personal mementoes, and whatever small items of value they still possessed after two and a half years of privation, the Jews of Mielec assembled on the morning of March 13. There, without warning, nearly two thousand children and old people were shot down.25 The others were deported, not to work in the east, nor to a labour camp, but to Belzec.

  This deportation from Mielec was among the first of more than two hundred deportations from almost every Jewish community in the Lublin region and Galicia. On March 16 the first sixteen hundred Jews from the Lublin ghetto were deported to Belzec, followed in the next week by a further ten thousand.26

  On reaching Belzec, a few hundred Jews were chosen as forced labourers within the camp. All others were gassed. Of the six hundred thousand Jews deported to this single death camp, only two are known to have survived, Rudolf Reder and Chaim Hirszman. In 1942, Hirszman was a twenty-nine-year-old metal worker. In his eye-witness account to the Jewish Historical District Commission in Lublin on 19 March 1946, he recalled how, in the deportation from Zaklikow, the town to which he and his family had earlier been deported from elsewhere, a ‘selection’ took place. ‘I was sent to the side of those selected for work, but since my wife and my half-a-year-old son were sent to the opposite side, I asked to join them and was permitted to do so.’ Hirszman’s account continued:

  BELZEC

  THE LVOV REGION

  We were entrained and taken to Belzec. The train entered a small forest. Then, the entire crew of the train was changed. SS men from the death camp replaced the railr
oad employees. We were not aware of this at that time.

  The train entered the camp. Other SS men took us off the train. They led us all together—women, men, children—to a barrack. We were told to undress before we go to the bath. I understood immediately what that meant. After undressing we were told to form two groups, one of men and the other of women with children. An SS man, with the strike of a horsewhip, sent the men to the right or to the left, to death—to work.

  I was selected to death, I didn’t know it then. Anyway, I believed that both sides meant the same—death. But, when I jumped in the indicated direction, an SS man called me and said: ‘Du bist ein Militarmensch, dich konnen wir brauchen.’ (‘You have a military bearing, we could use you.’)

  We, who were selected for work, were told to dress. I and some other men were appointed to take the people to the kiln. I was sent with the women. The Ukrainian Schmidt, an Ethnic German, was standing at the entrance to the gas-chamber and hitting with a knout every entering woman. Before the door was closed, he fired a few shots from his revolver and then the door closed automatically and forty minutes later we went in and carried the bodies out to a special ramp. We shaved the hair of the bodies, which were afterwards packed into sacks and taken away by Germans.

  The children were thrown into the chamber simply on the women’s heads. In one of the ‘transports’ taken out of the gas chamber, I found the body of my wife and I had to shave her hair.

  The bodies were not buried on the spot, the Germans waited until more bodies were gathered. So, that day we did not bury….27

  Chaim Hirszman’s experiences at Belzec were also set down in 1946 by his second wife, Pola, to whom he often retold them after the war. Among the incidents of which he told her was one, when a transport with children up to three years old arrived. ‘The workers were told to dig one big hole into which the children were thrown and buried alive. My husband recollected this with horror. He couldn’t forget how the earth had been rising until the children suffocated’.

  Later, as Pola Hirszman recalled:

  The Germans discovered that one of the prisoners, a Czechoslovak Jew, had been planning an escape. The SS men ordered the prisoners to build gallows. They gathered all the prisoners and ordered them to participate in the execution. My husband was told to fetch a rope and to tie the convict up. My husband managed somehow to get out of this, since there was one Jew there, an expert in tying up.

  Before he was hanged, the condemned said: ‘I am perishing, but Hitler will die and the Germans will lose the war.’

  The prisoners were constantly beaten and every day many of the workers from the regular staff were killed.

  Typhus was prevailing, but one had to avoid admitting the disease. The sick were murdered on the spot. Getting medical treatment or lying down was out of the question.

  Sick with typhus and with a fever of 40°C, my husband worked and somehow managed to conceal his condition from the Germans….

  Transports arrived every day. Mainly from Poland, but also from other European countries, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and others. In one of the transports there was a Ukrainian woman. She possessed documents that proved she was a genuine Aryan and there was no doubt about it. And yet she went to the gas-chamber.

  Once you crossed the gate to the camp, there was no chance to get out of there alive. Not even any Germans, except for the camp staff, had access to the camp….

  Two Czechoslovak Jewesses were working in the camp office. They, too, had never entered the camp. They even enjoyed a certain freedom of movement. They often went with the SS men to town to arrange different matters. One day they were told that they would visit the camp. The SS men showed them around the camp and in a certain moment they led the women to the gas-chamber and when they were inside, the door closed behind them. They finished with them in spite of the promise that they would live.

  The Germans ordered the prisoners to set up a football team and on Sundays games were being played. Jews played with SS men, the same ones who tortured and murdered them. The SS men treated this as a matter of sport, and when they lost a game, they had no complaints.

  There wasn’t even one day without a transport. Mainly women and children were being conveyed. The Ukrainians employed in the camp treated people even more sadistically than the Germans. The Jews were planning a revolt and a general escape, but due to treason they had to abandon the plan. There were also women employed in the camp, but their number was much smaller than the number of men. There were no children at all.

  Women worked. They were selected from the transports. One had always to look content, never to look sad, because if an SS man didn’t like the look on someone’s face, he would shoot him or send him to the chimney. At work they used to beat terribly. To turn around was forbidden, they shot for that.28

  Trains travelled to Belzec from throughout the Lublin and Galician regions: a smooth pattern of deportation which had needed less than three months of bureaucratic preparation. The trains travelled mostly by night. Luba Krugman, a Jewish woman living in Chorbrzany, a small village near Lublin, later recalled:

  At night the rumbling of the train woke me up. I rushed to the door and found it wide open, with father watching the dark monster, which had only one brightly illuminated car window behind the locomotive.

  ‘It’s a real Cyclops,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ replied father.

  Our voices were drowned out by the clatter of the wheels and the penetrating whistle of the engine. I counted sixty-two cars. Father was breathing heavily, and his temples were moist with sweat. He wiped his forehead and opened his shirt.

  ‘Please, close your shirt,’ I implored. ‘It’s bitterly cold.’ He did not hear; his eyes were fixed on the train.

  A few windows opened. Our Gentile neighbours were awakened by the noise. The train passed, leaving behind a cloud of smoke. Windows were closing when one harsh voice came through loudly: ‘Those damned Jews—they won’t even let one sleep at night.’29

  Determined to maintain the deception, the German authorities gave persuasive reasons for each deportation. In the Eastern Galician town of Drohobycz they declared that three thousand Jews were needed ‘for the reclamation of the Pripet marshes’. To secure the necessary numbers, the Jewish Council compiled a list of three hundred poorer Jews, those who were particularly in need of some remunerative work, or at least of a roof over their heads, and fixed the date of their departure. An eye-witness later recalled how these three hundred Jews ‘calmly made preparations for the journey’. Although it was rumoured ‘that while getting into the train the Germans robbed the Jews of their belongings’, nobody had been able to confirm even this rumour.30 As for the destination of the three thousand, it was not the Pripet marshes, it was Belzec.31

  The village-by-village massacres in German-occupied Russia had continued without respite throughout the early months of 1942. No village was too remote, no Jewish community too small, to be overlooked. On the night of March 16 it was upon the 1,816 Jews of the village of Pochep that the execution squads descended. All were ‘brutally killed’ in an anti-tank ditch just outside the village, as a memorial stone in the local cemetery records.32

  On March 20, four days after the Pochep massacre, a train left the Rhineland for the ghetto of Piaski, near Belzec. At Piaski, as at Izbica Lubelska, new deportees were held only until a further deportation train arrived: sometimes for a few weeks, sometimes only for a few days. The train of March 20 included several Jews from Worms, among them Herta Mansbacher, the fifty-seven-year-old teacher who had so courageously sought to prevent the burning down of the synagogue in Worms in November 1938. Among those with whom she was deported were sixteen Jews who had been wounded and decorated in the First World War: three of these German army veterans were Julius Neumann, Manuel Katz and Moritz Mayer.

  From the ghetto at Piaski, Moritz Mayer was allowed to send a postcard. Its message read: ‘We hope and pray with unswerving faith in God that, in ti
me, the Almighty will rectify all things.’33 The historian of the destruction of the Jewry of Worms has commented on this message: ‘There is no greater courage than the one required to sustain hope and faith in the presence of evil.’34

  On March 26 it was the turn of more than two thousand of the Jews in the ghetto at Izbica Lubelska to be deported, to ‘make room’, they were told, for the recent deportees from Theresienstadt. These were the 1,001 Jews from ‘Transport Aa’ of March 11, and a further 1,000 on ‘Transport Ab’, which had left Theresienstadt on March 17. From this second group of 1,000, only three were to survive the war.35 Deportations from the ghetto at Izbica Lubelska to Belzec were to take place each time a new deportation reached the ghetto from the west. None was spared. Nor was escape from Izbica Lubelska possible. ‘The Jews of Izbica are completely disorientated,’ the Polish doctor, Zygmunt Klukowski, of nearby Szczebrzeszyn, was to note in his diary on March 29, ‘don’t know what to do, whether to hide or sit still and wait. They are afraid to go beyond the town because the Germans kill them without question if discovered. We keep hearing of such incidents.’36

  With the daily deportations from the west paralleled by daily deportation to ‘the east’, rumours abounded throughout the Lublin region. On March 26 Klukowski noted in his diary:

  There is great unhappiness and fear among the Jews. From everywhere comes the news about the incredible violence against the Jews. They are bringing trainloads of Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and even from Belgium. They are also resettling the Jews from various towns and villages and taking them somewhere towards Belzec. Today I heard a story about what they did to the Jews in Lublin. It is difficult to believe it’s true. Today they deported the Jews from Izbica—they were also taken to Belzec where there is supposed to be some monstrous camp.37