The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  A farmer took pity on Rivka Yosselevska, hid her, and fed her. Later, he helped her to join a group of Jews hiding in the forest. There, she survived until the Soviet forces came in the summer of 1944. Nineteen years after her escape from the pit, she told her story to a court in Jerusalem.2

  In that same eastern region, one thousand Jews had been murdered at Lenino on the previous day, one thousand at Antopol and four hundred at Byten two weeks later. ‘And where are the Jews today?’ Hans Frank asked a Nazi Party meeting at Cracow on August 15. ‘You hardly see them at all any more. If you see them, they are working….’3

  In Warsaw, the round-ups had continued each day. On August 15 they reached the street on which lived the thirty-nine-year-old Henryk Zylberberg, a member of the two-week-old Jewish Fighting Organization. Zylberberg had considerable hopes of acquiring arms from a German policeman, Corporal Kneibel, who had made it clear that ‘he did not give a damn for the Führer and Vaterland and was prepared to sell food to Jews as long as he was paid in gold and diamonds’.

  On August 15, Kneibel was on duty when Zylberberg, his wife, and his daughter Michaela were among those in the street. ‘The Nazis drew up a line in the street,’ Zylberberg recalled twenty-seven years later, ‘separating the men from the women and children. Then a second cordon of Nazis separated the children from the women. Michaela gripped her mother’s hand and screamed, “Mummy, mummy!” I saw Kneibel seize her by the arm and drag her away. She would not let go of her mother. In the end he dragged her behind the line, got hold of her waist and before my eyes smashed her little head against the wall of the house.’4

  Five days after the murder of Zylberberg’s daughter, the Jewish Fighting Organization carried out its first action: the attempted assassination of the commander of the Jewish Police in the Warsaw ghetto, Jozef Szerynski, a convert to Christianity. The man chosen to kill Szerynski was also a member of the Jewish police, Yisrael Kanal. On the evening of August 20 he shot Szerynski in the face, but, as another Jewish police officer later recalled, ‘in a rare fluke, the bullet penetrated his left cheek, a bit high, and exited through his right cheek without touching the tongue, teeth or palate.’5

  Szerynski survived. But the small, clandestine posters which appeared on walls in the ghetto, announcing ‘Death to a Dog’, were, as Alexander Donat recalled, ‘a turning point in the history of the Warsaw ghetto, and perhaps a turning point in the history of the Jewish people’.6

  That same night, other members of the Jewish Fighting Organization, among them Zivia Lubetkin, set on fire a warehouse filled with ‘loot’ collected by the Germans from Jewish houses. ‘We collected mattresses and furniture,’ she recalled, ‘anything inflammable, piled them together and set them on fire. Success! the flames swept into a great blaze and crackled in the night, dancing and twisting in the air. We rejoiced as we saw the reflection of the revenge that was burning inside us, the symbol of the Jewish armed resistance that we had yearned for, for so long.’7

  ***

  Near Auschwitz, a new slave labour camp was opened on August 15 at Jawiszowice.8 In it, one hundred and fifty Jews, sent from the barracks at Birkenau, were used in the underground coal mines of the Hermann Goering Works. Later their number rose to two thousand five hundred. A month earlier, three hundred Jews had been sent from Birkenau to Goleszow, to work in the Portland Cement Factory.9 Here, too, the numbers were to rise, to one thousand. On October 1, a third camp was opened at Chelmek, in which Jews from the barracks at Birkenau spent over two months clearing ponds needed to provide water to the Bata Shoe Factory in the town.10 In these three camps, and eventually in more than twenty others in the Auschwitz region, tens of thousands of Jews died of the harsh conditions. Those who became too weak to work were often returned to Birkenau, and gassed.

  At Auschwitz, gassing was carried out by a commercial pesticide, Cyclon B. At Belzec, Chelmno, Treblinka and Sobibor, the four death camps, Jews were killed by the exhaust from diesel engines: carbon monoxide poisoning. At Treblinka, it was the engines of captured Russian tanks and trucks which provided the exhaust. At his headquarters in Lublin, however, SS General Globocnik was anxious to find ‘a more toxic and faster working gas’, as he explained to the thirty-seven-year-old chief of the Waffen SS Technical Disinfection Services, Kurt Gerstein, who visited him in Lublin on August 17. Globocnik also sought Gerstein’s help in disinfecting ‘large piles of clothing coming from Jews, Poles, Czechs etc.’.

  On August 18 Globocnik took Gerstein to Belzec. With them was SS Lieutenant-Colonel Dr Wilhelm Pfannenstiel, Professor of Hygiene at the University of Marburg. Two and a half years later Gerstein recalled:

  We saw no dead bodies that day, but a pestilential odour hung over the whole area. Alongside the station there was a ‘dressing’ hut with a window for ‘valuables’. Farther on, a room designated as ‘the barber’. Then a corridor 150 metres long in the open air, barbed wire on both sides, with signs: ‘To the baths and inhalants.’ In front of us a building like a bath-house; to the left and right, large concrete pots of geraniums or other flowers. On the roof, the Star of David. On the building, a sign: ‘Heckenholt Foundation’.

  Gerstein and Professor Pfannenstiel stayed at Belzec village overnight, the guests of the camp commandant, Christian Wirth. As Gerstein recalled:

  The following morning, a little before seven, there was an announcement: ‘The first train will arrive in ten minutes!’ A few minutes later a train arrives from Lemberg: forty-five cars arrive with more than six thousand people; two hundred Ukrainians assigned to this work flung open the doors and drove the Jews out of the cars with leather whips.

  A loudspeaker gave instructions: ‘Strip, even artificial limbs and glasses. Hand all money and valuables in at the “valuables” window. Women and young girls are to have their hair cut in the “barber’s hut”.’ (An SS Sergeant told me: ‘From that they make something special for submarine crews.’)

  Then the march began. Barbed wire on both sides, in the rear two dozen Ukrainians with rifles. They drew near. Wirth and I found ourselves in front of the death-chambers. Stark naked men, women, children and cripples passed by. A tall SS man in the corner called to the unfortunates in a loud minister’s voice: ‘Nothing is going to hurt you! Just breathe deep and it will strengthen your lungs. It’s a way to prevent contagious diseases. It’s a good disinfectant!’

  They asked him what was going to happen and he answered: ‘The men will have to work, build houses and streets. The women won’t have to do that. They will be busy with the housework and the kitchen.’

  This was the last hope for some of these poor people, enough to make them march toward the death-chambers without resistance. The majority knew everything; the smell betrayed it! They climbed a little wooden stair and entered the death-chambers, most of them silently, pushed by those behind them.

  A Jewess of about forty with eyes like fire cursed the murderers: she disappeared into the gas-chambers after being struck several times by Captain Wirth’s whip. Many prayed; others asked: ‘Who will give us the water before we die?’

  SS men pushed the men into the chambers. ‘Fill it up,’ Wirth ordered. Seven to eight hundred people in ninety-three square metres. The doors closed. Then I understood the reason for the ‘Heckenholt’ sign. Heckenholt was the driver of the diesel, whose exhaust was to kill these poor unfortunates.

  Heckenholt tried to start the motor. It wouldn’t start! Captain Wirth came up. You could see he was afraid because I was there to see the disaster. Yes, I saw everything and waited. My stopwatch clocked it all: fifty minutes. Seventy minutes and the diesel still would not start! The men were waiting in the gas-chambers. You could hear them weeping, ‘as though in a synagogue’, said Professor Pfannenstiel, his eyes glued to the window in the wooden door.

  Captain Wirth, furious, struck with his whip the Ukrainian who helped Heckenholt. The diesel engine started up after two hours and forty-nine minutes by my stopwatch. Twenty-five minutes passed. You could see through the w
indow that many were already dead, for an electric light illuminated the interior of the room. All were dead after thirty-two minutes.

  Jewish workers on the other side opened the wooden doors. They had been promised their lives in return for doing this horrible work, plus a small percentage of the money and valuables collected. The people were still standing like columns of stone, with no room to fall or lean. Even in death you could tell the families, all holding hands. It was difficult to separate them while emptying the room for the next batch. The bodies were tossed out, blue, wet with sweat and urine, the legs smeared with excrement and menstrual blood. Two dozen workers were busy checking mouths which they opened with iron hooks…. Dentists knocked out gold teeth, bridges and crowns with hammers.

  Captain Wirth stood in the middle of them. He was in his element and, showing me a big jam box filled with teeth, said, ‘See the weight of the gold! Just from yesterday and the day before! You can’t imagine what we find every day, dollars, diamonds, gold! You’ll see!’ He took me over to a jeweller who was responsible for all the valuables. They also pointed out to me one of the heads of the big Berlin store Kaufhaus des Westens, and a little man whom they forced to play the violin, the chief of the Jewish workers’ commandos. ‘He is a captain of the Imperial Austrian Army. Chevalier of the German Iron Cross,’ Wirth told me.

  Then the bodies were thrown into big ditches near the gas-chambers, about 100 by 20 by 12 metres. After a few days, the bodies swelled….

  When the swelling went down again, the bodies matted down again. They told me later they poured diesel oil over the bodies and burned them on railway sleepers to make them disappear.11

  Gerstein went on from Belzec to Treblinka, where, on August 21, he witnessed further gassings. Then, on August 22, he took the express train back to Berlin. Also travelling on the train was a Swedish diplomat, Baron von Otter. Less than an hour from Warsaw, the train stopped in open country. ‘We both got down to get a breath of air,’ Otter later recalled. ‘I offered him a cigarette. He refused. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. There were tears in his eyes. And his voice was hoarse when he said, at once, “I saw something awful yesterday—can I come and see you at the Legation?”’

  Otter suggested that they talk on the train. Gerstein agreed. ‘Is it the Jews?’ Otter asked. ‘Yes, it is,’ Gerstein replied. ‘I saw more than ten thousand die yesterday.’12

  ***

  Deception was an essential part of the German plan. At Treblinka it took many forms. In late August, as Soviet aircraft flew over the camp on their bombing raids deep into the General Government, the Germans were forced to turn off the powerful searchlights which normally lit up the main field in the camp, so that any Jews who had been brought to the camp during the day, but had not yet been gassed, would not be able to escape. Brightly lit, the field was under the ever-vigilant eyes of guards with machine guns.

  Jakub Rabinowicz, who escaped from Treblinka two months later, told Emanuel Ringelblum how, one night, when the air-raid sirens sounded, and the searchlights were as usual about to be switched off, the camp commandant, ‘afraid that the Jews would take advantage of the darkness and try to escape’, decided to allay their fears of what might happen to them on the morrow. A roll call was ordered, and the commandant made a speech to the Jews in which he stated ‘with the most serious air’ that an agreement had been negotiated between Hitler and Roosevelt for the sending of Polish Jews to Madagascar, and that the first transports would be sent from Treblinka ‘as early as tomorrow morning’.

  The searchlights were then switched off, as was the diesel engine which operated the gas-chamber. Soviet aircraft then flew over the darkened camp. When the aircraft had passed, Rabinowicz added, ‘everything reverted to its previous state, and the death-trap worked unremittingly.’13

  The pace of deportations to Treblinka was relentless. On August 19 it was the turn of more than a thousand Jews, all those in the ghetto at Rembertow, to be ordered to an assembly point just outside the ghetto. A Polish eye-witness later recalled: ‘They were ushered like a herd, driven quicker and quicker. Those who fell behind or tripped or fell down were killed.’

  At the assembly point, about three hundred were separated from the main group and ordered eastwards, along the road to Wesola. Whether they expected to be resettled in that town, or put to work there, is not known; they were murdered less than a mile along the way.

  The remaining Jews were marched southwards. Rembertow was now ‘free of Jews’. The eye-witness recalled how, on the following day, Poles from the town entered the ghetto ‘looking for gold’. They left the ghetto ‘loaded with whatever they could carry’, furniture, bedding, pots and pans, returning on the following day for a final session of looting.

  The deported Jews had been driven past the woods south of Rembertow, where another Polish eye-witness remembered how ‘one big lament, weeping and shots, shook the sky.’ After they had passed the Catholic cemetery, another witness noted that ‘the rutted sand of the path was covered all over with rags, packets, bundles and, among them, corpses.’ That afternoon, the corpses were loaded on horse-carts and taken to ditches nearby.

  As the deportees passed the village church at Anin, a Jewish woman broke away from the march. She then managed to lose herself among the crowd of Poles who had gathered in front of the church. A German gendarme tried to follow her, but could not push his way through the crowd. Local Poles believe that the Jewess survived the war hidden in Anin.

  As the march passed through Anin, reaching the main Warsaw—Otwock railway, other Jews tried to escape. A plaque in Anin records the fate of forty-five Jews, shot while trying to escape. Another eye-witness of their escape bid recalled how, before they could reach the forest, ‘all of them were killed by machine-gun fire.’

  The deportees were now driven southwards, along the railway line in the direction of Otwock. ‘They were weak because of the heat, and the dust choked them,’ another eye-witness recalled of this stage of the march, adding that the gendarmes ‘repeated again and again, “Schnell! Schnell!” “Quick! Quick!” and beat them. A Polish traveller passing by the train recalled after the war, how, every few yards along the railway line he had seen ‘the corpses of old men and women’.

  After several hours, the Jews from Rembertow reached the outskirts of the ghetto of Falenica. That same day, throughout Falenica itself, the Germans had gathered the Jews near the railway station, searched for Jews in hiding outside the ghetto, and killed those whom they had found in hiding. Also during August 19, the children of the ghetto were taken out, as if to mark the start of the continuing march and deportation. They were, however, shot in the ghetto itself, and their bodies thrown into a ditch.

  The time had come to send the Jews of Rembertow and Falenica to Treblinka. Two Jews, resisting the order to assemble, killed the first German to enter their apartment, striking him down with an axe. Both were shot. Then, as one of the Jews to survive the deportation, a young man by the name of Najwer, noted in his diary, ‘Latvian auxiliaries sit around and watch. They play. They choose someone from the dense crowd and shoot at that living target. Hit or not? Sometimes someone asks to be killed. But he has to ask again and again. And when he is shot, it is done as an act of grace.’ Najwer himself was later murdered.

  From the railway station of Falenica, just outside the ghetto limits, a train was waiting. On it, that August 19, the Jews of Rembertow and Falenica were taken to Treblinka, the wagons ‘sprinkled’, as a Polish eye-witness later recalled, ‘with undiluted lime and chlorine’.14

  ***

  On August 23 the fifty-two-year-old Jankiel Wiernik was among several thousand Jews deported from Warsaw to Treblinka. One of less than a hundred survivors of the camp, Wiernik later set down his recollections of that first day, when he was among a few Jews separated from the mass of the deportees, and put with the small work squad. The squad’s first task was to remove corpses from a train which arrived that afternoon from Miedzyrzec. ‘Eighty per cent of
its human cargo consisted of corpses,’ he later recalled. ‘We had to carry them out of the train, under the whip-lashes of the guards. At last we completed our gruesome chore. I asked one of my fellow workers what it meant. He merely replied that whoever you talk to today will not live to see tomorrow.’

  Wiernik’s account continued:

  We waited in fear and suspense. After a while we were ordered to form a semicircle. Then Sergeant Franz walked up to us, accompanied by his dog and a Ukrainian guard armed with a machine gun. We were about five hundred persons. We stood in mute suspense. About one hundred of us were picked from the group, lined up five abreast, marched away some distance and ordered to kneel. I was one of those picked out. All of a sudden there was a roar of machine guns and the air was rent with the moans and screams of the victims. I never saw any of these people again. Under a rain of blows from whips and rifle butts the rest of us were driven into the barracks, which were dark and had no floors. I sat down on the sandy ground and dropped off to sleep.

  The next morning we were awakened by loud shouts to get up. We jumped up at once and went out into the yard amid the yells of our Ukrainian guards. The Sergeant continued to beat us with whips and rifle butts at every step as we were being lined up. We stood for quite some time without receiving any orders, but the beatings continued. Day was just breaking and I thought that nature itself would come to our aid and send down streaks of lightning to strike our tormentors. But the sun merely obeyed the law of nature; it rose in shining splendour and its rays fell on our tortured bodies and aching hearts.

  I was jolted from my thoughts by the command: ‘Attention!’ A group of sergeants and Ukrainian guards, headed by Franz with his dog Barry stood before us. Franz announced that he was about to give a command. At a signal from him, they began to torture us anew, blows falling thick and fast. Our faces and bodies were cruelly torn, but we all had to keep standing erect, because if one so much as stooped over but a little, he would be shot because he would be considered unfit for work.