The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  Even for those Jews unaware of Belzec, the spring of 1942 had become a time of horror. ‘When will this terrible bloodshed finally end?’ Dawid Rubinowicz asked in his diary on April 10, after three Jews had been murdered in a village near his own Bodzentyn. ‘If it goes on much longer then people will drop like flies out of sheer horror.’56

  Neither in Jaworow, nor in Warsaw, nor in Bodzentyn, was the truth about Belzec known. Meanwhile, immediately following the Lublin deportations, thousands of Jews from Eastern Galicia had been deported to Belzec and gassed, among them six thousand from Stanislawov on March 31, a thousand from Kolomyja on April 2, twelve hundred from Tlumacz on April 3 and fifteen hundred from Horodenka on April 4.57 Among the Jews deported to Belzec from the Lublin region on April 9 were eight hundred from Lubartow.58

  No day passed without a deportation, the railway routings having been meticulously planned, and the pace of gassing devised to match the number of arrivals. At Chelmno, too, the killings continued throughout April, at least eleven thousand Jews being murdered there in the single month, from more than ten communities in the Warthegau.59 From the Lodz ghetto, more than twenty-four thousand Jews had been deported to Chelmno in March. All had been gassed.60

  To maintain the deception of deportations to labour camps, an SS officer visited the Lodz ghetto on April 12, ten days after this third major ‘resettlement’ had ended, to explain the whereabouts of the forty-four thousand Jews deported from the ghetto since January. All had been sent to Chelmno, and gassed: but the SS officer ‘explained’ to the 115,000 Jews who remained ‘that the deportees had all been brought to a camp near Warthbrucken’, where a total of one hundred thousand Jews were already ‘located’. The SS man added that some thirty thousand Germans, settlers, he said, from Galicia, had earlier stayed in this camp, and had left behind ‘well-equipped barracks and even furniture’. Provisions for the Jews, he assured their worried relatives and friends, ‘were excellent, and deportees fit for work were repairing roads or engaged in agriculture’.61

  Warthbrucken was the German name for Kolo, the town nearest the Chelmno death camp. Workshops were to be set up there ‘in the very near future’, the SS officer explained.62 It was an explanation cleverly designed to put the ghetto dwellers even more at their ease. For in the Lodz ghetto, workshops and survival were synonymous, so that the ‘large influx of new orders’ during April for shoes and knitted goods, as well as for clothing for the German army, gave an even greater sense of security.63

  To maintain the deception that the camp near Kolo was a work camp, the Germans arranged for postcards to be sent from the deportees to say that they were ‘in good health’. One such postcard, sent from a family that had been deported in January to Chelmno, from Turek, reached the Lodz ghetto in mid-April. This single card, with its encouraging message, was of sufficient importance to merit a special mention in the Ghetto Chronicle. No mention was made of the lack of postcards from any of the forty-four thousand Lodz deportees. At the same time there was ominous news: the arrival in the ghetto of large numbers of sewing machines, in the drawers of which notes and printed matter had been found from which ‘one may conclude that they were sent here from small towns in Kolo and Kutno counties’.64 These were in fact the sewing machines of the Jews of Kolo, Bugaj, Dabie, Izbica Kujawska, Klodawa, Sompolno, Kutno, Krosniewice and Zychlin, all of whom had been deported to Chelmno and gassed between mid-December 1941 and mid-April 1942.65

  The Germans were determined to maintain total deception. ‘The Reichsführer desires’, wrote Himmler’s personal secretary to the Inspector for Statistics on April 10, ‘that no mention be made of the “special treatment of the Jews”. It must be called “transportation of the Jews towards the Russian East”.’66 Even ‘special treatment’—sonderbehandlung—was understood to be too explicit a term.

  While seeking to maintain their deception, the Germans also denounced those Poles who tried to help Jews. ‘It is unfortunate’, declared a German proclamation issued in Lvov on April 11, ‘that the rural population continues—nowadays furtively—to assist Jews, thus doing harm to the community, and hence to themselves, by this disloyal attitude.’ Poles were entering Jewish homes, the proclamation warned, to sell the Jews, ‘at inflated prices’, bread, butter, poultry and potatoes. Together with the money which the peasants took from the Jews, they also ‘carry away from these homes pests, and germs of diseases, and distribute them over the village’.67

  ***

  From throughout the Lublin region, once so vibrant a centre of Jewish life, the deportations to Belzec continued. On April 11, Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary that the Jews of Szczebrzeszyn had heard ‘that today there was a transport of Jews from Chelm’. After their train had reached Belzec, ‘the empty train—the so-called Judenzug—went back to Zamosc. Towards evening came the news that Zamosc was surrounded. Everyone is sure that now the round-up and transportation of the Zamosc Jews to their deaths will begin. In our town, the fear is indescribable. Some are resigned, others are going around the town insanely looking for help. Everyone is convinced that any day now the same thing will happen in Szczebrzeszyn.’68

  As feared, the round-up of Zamosc Jews took place. An eyewitness, David Mekler, later recalled:

  On 11 April 1942, the SS, SD and the mounted police fell like a pack of savages on the Zamosc Jewish quarter. It was a complete surprise. The brutes on horseback in particular created a panic; they raced through the streets shouting insults, slashing out on all sides with their whips. Our community then numbered ten thousand people. In a twinkling, without even realizing what was happening, a crowd of three thousand men, women and children, picked up haphazardly in the streets and in the houses, were driven to the station and deported to an unknown destination.

  The spectacle which the ghetto presented after the attack literally drove the survivors mad. Bodies everywhere, in the streets, in the courtyards, inside the houses; babies thrown from the third or fourth floors lay crushed on the pavements. The Jews themselves had to pick up and bury the dead.69

  News of the Zamosc deportation reached Szczebrzeszyn on the following day, April 12. ‘Several hundred were killed on the spot,’ Klukowski noted, ‘apparently some tried to resist. However, we don’t have any details and we don’t know anything for sure. Among our own Jews there is a great panic. Some old Jewish women were sleeping in the Jewish cemetery, they would rather die here in their own town—among the graves of their own people—than in Belzec, among horrifying tortures.’

  Some Jews, Klukowski added, were taking the risk of ‘running away’ to other villages. Many others were ‘preparing hide-outs on the spot’. Others were sending their children to Warsaw ‘to be cared for by trusted Aryans’.70

  On April 12 there was a rumour in the Warsaw ghetto that an ‘extermination squad’ had reached Warsaw itself. This squad, so rumour reported, had ‘begged’ the local Gestapo for permission ‘to go on a rampage through the ghetto for just two hours’. Permission, Ringelblum noted, ‘was not granted’. ‘One is always hearing reports’, he added, ‘about extermination squads that are wiping complete Jewish settlements off the face of the earth.’

  Ringelblum also made a note of the fate of 164 German Jews who had come to Warsaw in mid-April, ‘the cream of the young people’. They had been sent to the ‘penal camp’ at Treblinka, ‘where most of them were exterminated in a short time’. Also at Treblinka, ‘out of 160 Jewish young people from Otwock only 38 were left’, after only three weeks at the camp.71

  Unknown to Ringelblum, or to the Jews of Warsaw, the labour camp at Treblinka was in the process of being transformed into a death camp, for Warsaw Jewry. The rumours that month were of other places and plans, however. ‘It is said that all the Jews will be settled in Arabia or somewhere,’ Mary Berg noted in her diary on April 15. She added that because the hours of curfew had been reduced, it was said that ‘regular workshops’ were to be set up in the ghetto ‘which would ensure steady jobs for the Jews’. This, Mary B
erg added, ‘seems to contradict the talk of mass deportation’.72

  In those communities where Jews had not yet been deported, the random killings continued. Early in April, in the Mlawa ghetto, a number of Jews were seized, among them several who were sick. They were made to stand on boxes, their hands tied behind their backs, and ropes tied around their necks. Then, for more than an hour, they were kept waiting, while their families were made to stand opposite them. All the while, the German policemen were mocking the victims, laughing, and dancing in front of them.

  As the men stood there, one of them, Leibl Rumaner, died of a heart attack. Another, Mordechai Volarsky, declared: ‘I wish we were the last victims.’

  Jews were then taken from the crowd and ordered to pull the boxes from under the feet of the surviving victims. All were killed. That same day, two Jewish women were shot because bread and cakes were found on them. The Jews could no longer control their feelings: they were crying and shouting, to the fury of the Germans, who announced, to calm them, that the punishment was over, that nothing bad would happen to them in the future.

  Two weeks later a hundred more Jews were seized in Mlawa, divided into two groups of fifty, and lined up facing each other. An announcement was then read out, stating that because, during the hangings of two weeks earlier, the Jews of the ghetto ‘have cried and shouted’, so now a new punishment was necessary. A hundred men ought to be shot. But the Gestapo had been ‘kind enough’ to reduce the number to fifty. If any Jew were to weep, however, or if the smallest sound were heard, all hundred would be shot.

  The new victims were surrounded by German policemen with machine guns. All those assembled stood ‘as if blood had frozen in their veins’. No sigh could be heard. The Gestapo chief then addressed the policemen: ‘This is your fate,’ he said, ‘but also your good honour, to annihilate so many Jews. You should be proud, and carry out your task energetically. Shoot straight in the head.’

  Five Jews were taken to the pit. Only then did it become clear which of the two groups was to be shot. The men led to the pit were ordered to face the firing squad. They were not blindfolded. One of the first five moved his head at the moment of firing, and was unscathed. He was ordered to wait at the side.

  As each group of five tumbled into the pit, the commander shook the hands of the firing squad. Finally, the man who had moved his head and avoided death in the first group was taken back to the pit and shot: the fiftieth victim.73

  The fifty who had been spared were then ordered to cover the dead with earth. Shlomo Malevantshik, a deportee from the nearby village of Szrensk, was among the saved. His brother Leibel had been among those shot. As Shlomo began to shovel earth on the bodies he heard his brother’s voice crying: ‘Shlomo, what are you doing, I am still alive!’ But the Gestapo ordered the shovelling to continue. This, noted the historian of Szrensk, was ‘the most dreadful tragedy of those dreadful times’.

  Two of the dead, Yehiel and Jacob Shchepkovski, were the sons of a shoemaker from Szrensk. Before the war, the historian of the village recalled, ‘there was always the sound of singing from his workshop. His love of children was widely known in the town. He was prepared to fight the whole world for his children.’ When his sons Yehiel and Jacob were shot, ‘It is not surprising that he lost his reason.’74

  As the Jews of Mlawa waited, numbed by the savagery of the two mass executions, one Einsatzkommando unit, working deep inside the Soviet Union, reported back to Berlin that the whole Crimea had been ‘purged of Jews’. More than ninety thousand Jews, the Einsatzkommando unit reported, had been murdered in the Crimea in the previous four and a half months.75

  On April 3, 580 Jews were seized in Berlin for deportation ‘to Poland’. On the eve of the deportation, 57 committed suicide. Six months later, when more than nine hundred were seized and sent to Estonia, 208 committed suicide.76 Suicide was the conscious decision to end the unendurable: to refuse to remain at the whim of tormentors whose cruelties were sadistically drawn out: to die at one’s chosen moment.

  On May 4, in Lodz, a deportee from Frankfurt, the sixty-year-old Julia Baum, hanged herself. ‘The reason’, noted the Ghetto Chronicle that same day, was ‘fear of deportation’.77 Within a week, five more German Jews committed suicide in Lodz, rather than face a second ‘resettlement’.78 Fear of the unknown had led to what Michael Etkind, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, has called ‘the courage to commit suicide’.79

  Suicide was a recognition not just of helplessness but of hopelessness. For the better educated, even when thousands were still alive around them, it followed the realization that there was no escape. Rabbinical wisdom opposed suicide. Rabbi Oshry had laid down six months earlier, during one of the German raids on Kovno ghetto, that although a man knew that he would ‘definitely be subjected to unbearable suffering by the abominable murderers, and so hoped to be buried among Jews, he still was not allowed to commit suicide.’ Oshry had gone on to say that permitting suicide, even to avoid witnessing the suffering and death of loved ones, meant ‘surrendering to the abominable enemy’, and as such was not permitted.

  Rabbi Oshry also noted that, in Kovno, the Germans often remarked to the Jews: ‘Why don’t you commit suicide as the Jews of Berlin did?’ Suicide, he said, was viewed ‘as a great desecration of God, for it showed that a person had no trust in God’s capability to save him from the accursed hands of his defilers.’ The murderers’ goal, Oshry commented, ‘was to bring confusion into the lives of the Jews and to cause them the greatest despondency in order to make annihilating them all the easier.’

  Oshry later reflected: ‘I say proudly that in the Kovno ghetto there were only three instances of suicide by people who grew greatly despondent. The rest of the ghetto dwellers trusted and hoped that God would not forsake His people.’80

  ***

  On the evening of Friday, April 17, shortly after the coming of the Sabbath, the Gestapo entered the Warsaw ghetto. Going from building to building with a list of names, they ordered the caretakers to summon those on the list. Six caretakers who hesitated were shot. Alexander Donat has recalled how those on the lists ‘were told to walk straight ahead, and were shot through the back of the head’. Fifty-two corpses, he wrote, ‘were left lying in their own blood that night’.81

  ‘Only when morning came,’ noted Chaim Kaplan, ‘and we found the bodies at the house gates round the ghetto, did we discover the extent of the calamity.’ Kaplan added:

  At 36 Nowolipki Street a man by the name of Goldberg was killed. He was a barber in peacetime, and when the war broke out he went to work in the quarantine house. His wife worked there too. When he was killed, his wife set up a terrible wailing and would not leave his side. To silence her, they killed her too. Both were left lying by the gate. In death as in life they remained inseparable.

  The baker, David Blajman, on Gesia Street, was murdered in the same way. They came to take the husband but the frantic wife ran after him. To rid themselves of this hindrance, the murderers killed her along with her husband. The morning light revealed both bodies at the gate.

  At 52 Leszno Street, Linder was killed. At number 27 on the same street a father and son were killed. So it went down to the last victim.82

  In her diary on April 28, Mary Berg noted that on the night of April 17 ‘fifty-two prisoners were killed, mostly bakers and smugglers’. Her account continued:

  All the bakers are terrified. Epstein and Wagner, who own the bakery in our house, no longer sleep at home. The Germans come to various houses with a prepared list of names and addresses. If they do not find the persons they are looking for, they take another member of the same family instead. They lead him a few steps in front of the house, politely let him precede them, and then shoot him in the back. The next morning these people are found lying dead in the streets. If a janitor fails to open the door for the Germans as quickly as they want him to, he is shot on the spot. If a member of the janitor’s family opens the door the same fate befalls him, and later the janitor is summon
ed to be killed, too.83

  In mid-April a new death camp was ready to receive deportees. This was Sobibor camp, in a remote woodland area near the River Bug. As at Chelmno and Belzec, there were to be almost no survivors: the aim of the camp was to kill, not to segregate and preserve for forced labour.

  One of the sixty-four survivors of Sobibor, Moshe Shklarek, was not quite fifteen years old when, on April 17, he was deported in a train from Zamosc, with 2,500 other Jews. On its journey, the train was guarded by Ukrainians. No food or water was given to the deportees. Three days later, the train reached Sobibor: a journey in normal times of less than four hours. All the deportees were then taken, first to Camp No. 2, the barbers’ huts, and then on to Camp No. 3, the gas-chamber: all except Shklarek. This one young man, out of 2,500 deportees, was chosen to work with the hundred or so Jews in the ‘Corpse Commando’, the ‘Work Commando’ and other camp duties. Shklarek later recalled the characteristics of some of the camp staff, among them SS Technical Sergeant Michel Hermann:

  He treated his servants decently, but his victims rudely and brutally. Because of the slippery-tongued speeches which he delivered to the arrivals at camp, we nicknamed him the ‘Preacher’. When a new transport would arrive Hermann would deliver his lying speech, in which he assured the arrivals that this was a transit camp where they would only undergo classification and disinfection, and from here they would be taken to work in the Ukraine until the war was over.

  In his apartment in the camp there was concentrated the abundant property that the arrivals had brought with them—silver, gold, rings, watches, jewellery and various other valuables. Actually, he was the camp treasurer.