The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  Because little children at their mothers’ breasts were a great nuisance during the shaving procedure, later the system was modified and babies were taken from their mothers as soon as they got off the train. The children were taken to an enormous ditch; when a large number of them were gathered together they were killed by firearms and thrown into the fire. Here, too, no one bothered to see whether all the children were really dead. Sometimes one could hear infants wailing in the fire.

  When mothers succeeded in keeping their babies with them and this fact interfered with the shaving, a German guard took the baby by its legs and smashed it against the wall of the barracks until only a bloody mass remained in his hands. The unfortunate mother had to take this mass with her to the ‘bath’. Only those who saw these things with their own eyes will believe with what delight the Germans performed these operations; how glad they were when they succeeded in killing a child with only three or four blows; with what satisfaction they pushed the baby’s corpse into the mother’s arms.

  The invalids, cripples and aged who could not move fast were put to death in the same way as the children. The ditch in which the children and infirm were slaughtered and burned was called in German the ‘Lazarett’, ‘infirmary’, and the workers employed in it wore armbands with the Red Cross sign.76

  Five days before Samuel Rajzman had reached Treblinka, another Jew had managed to escape from the camp. His name was Abraham Jacob Krzepicki and he had been at Treblinka for eighteen days, since August 26. A Jew in his early twenties, Krzepicki had fought in the Polish army in 1939. Deported from Warsaw in 1942, on the evening of August 25, he had worked in Treblinka until September 12, when he escaped and returned to Warsaw.

  In Warsaw, Emanuel Ringelblum entrusted one of his colleagues, Rachel Auerbach, with the task of recording Krzepicki’s testimony, the first eye-witness account of Treblinka. Written in Yiddish, the account was later buried with other documents collected by Ringelblum’s ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle. It was found by Polish building workers on 1 December 1950, under what had once been 68 Nowolipki Street.

  In his account of his deportation to Treblinka, Krzepicki wrote of how, during a halt on the journey, with hundreds of Jews suffocating in the heat, a German soldier had told them that ‘in Treblinka’ everybody would be given work ‘at his own occupation’. At this news, some of the deportees applauded. Others tried to work out what kind of work they would be given. As for water, for which the deportees were desperate, at Treblinka, the soldier assured them, ‘everyone would get water’.

  On reaching Treblinka, and being ordered out of the train, women and children were sent to the left, men to the right. Krzepicki’s account continued:

  The women all went into the barracks on the left and, as we later learned, they were told at once to strip naked and were driven out of the barracks through another door. From there, they entered a narrow path lined on either side with barbed wire. This path led through a small grove to the building that housed the gas-chamber. Only a few minutes later we could hear their terrible screams, but we could not see anything, because the trees of the grove blocked our view.

  As we sat there, tired and resigned—some of us lying stretched out on the sand—we could see a heavy machine gun being set up on the roof of the barrack on the left side, with three Ukrainian servicemen stretched out around it. We figured that any minute they would turn the machine gun on us and kill us all. This fear put some new life into me, but then I again felt the terrible thirst which had been torturing me for so many hours. The Ukrainians on the barracks roof had opened an umbrella over their heads to shield them from the sun. My sole thought at the moment was, ‘A cup of water! Just one more cup of water before I die!’

  Some of the people I had known from the factory were sitting near to me. Our book-keeper K., our warehouseman D., and several other young people. ‘It’s no good,’ they said. ‘They’re going to shoot us! Let’s try to get out of here!’ We all thought that there was an open field beyond the fence which surrounded both barracks. We didn’t know then that a second fence lay further on.

  When I had revived a little, I followed some of the others through an open door to the barracks on the right. I planned to break down one of the boards in the wall and to run away. But when we got into the barracks, we were overcome by stark depression. There were many dead bodies lying in the barracks, and we could see that they had all been shot. Through a chink in the barracks’ wall we could see a Ukrainian guard on the other side, holding a gun. There was nothing we could do. I went back outside.

  As I later learned, the corpses were those of a transport of Jews from Kielce who had arrived in Treblinka that morning. Among them were a mother and her son. When it came time to separate them—women to the left and men to the right—the son wanted to say a last goodbye to his mother. When they tried to drive him away, he took out a pocket-knife and stuck it into the Ukrainian. As a punishment, they spent all that day shooting all the Jews from Kielce who were at the camp.

  Krzepicki was chosen, with sixty other men, to throw bodies into a ditch. These were the bodies of Jews from earlier transports, most of whom had died on the journey. Krzepicki noted:

  Countless dead bodies lay there, piled upon each other. I think that perhaps ten thousand bodies were there. A terrible stench hovered in the air. Most of the bodies had horribly bloated bellies; they were covered with brown and black spots, swollen, and the surfaces of their skin already crawling with worms.

  The lips of most of the dead were strangely twisted and the tips of their tongues could be seen protruding between the swollen lips. The mouths resembled those of dead fish. I later learned that most of these people had died of suffocation in the boxcar. Their mouths had remained open as if they were still struggling for a little air. Many of the dead still had their eyes open.

  We, the new arrivals, were terror-stricken. We looked at each other to confirm that what we were seeing was real. But we were afraid to look around too much, because the guards could start shooting any minute.

  Each day amid the murder of thousands of Jews, it was the killing of individuals that horrified Krzepicki most. As an SS man was talking to him, he caught sight of another prisoner:

  He was standing in the ditch, receiving the bodies which others had been dragging over. It seemed to the German that he was not working fast enough.

  ‘Halt! Turn around!’ the SS man ordered the young man. He took his rifle from his shoulder and before the young man could have figured out what was expected from him, he lay dead among the bodies in the ditch. They dragged him farther along and soon additional corpses were piled on top of him.

  The German returned the rifle to his shoulder and resumed our conversation, as if nothing had happened.

  Later, Krzepicki was put to work cleaning out the railway wagons before they were sent away empty:

  A Ukrainian and an SS man stationed themselves at either side of the exit gate and shone flashlights under the wheels to see whether anyone was hiding beneath the cars. A few cars pulled out in good order. But when he got to the third or fourth car, the German shouted, ‘Halt!’ He had discovered two boys lying hunched up between the wheels.

  One of them got a bullet even before he could crawl out from under the car. The other was able to jump out and started running quick as lightning, trying to lose himself in the crowd of Jews. But the SS man stopped him right away. The young man immediately took his papers out of his pocket and tried to prove that he was a worker. He shouted and pleaded, but this did not impress the German. He started hitting him over the head as hard as he could with his rubber truncheon, until the boy collapsed. Then the Ukrainian came up, turned his rifle upside down and with great force, as if chopping wood, hit his victim over the head with the rifle butt. Finally, they put a bullet in him. Then, at last, they left him alone. The train rolled out.

  On his second day at Treblinka, Krzepicki had been taken to an incoming train. ‘I was stunned by what I saw there. The train contained
only corpses. They had suffocated on the journey from lack of air: six thousand Jews, from the town of Miedrzyrzec, some seventy-five miles from Treblinka. As the Jewish prisoners worked, they discovered a few of the Miedrzyrzec deportees who had ‘merely fainted, and were now regaining consciousness’. Among the living, Krzepicki found ‘a little child, about a year or a year and a half old. The child had regained consciousness and was crying at the top of its voice. I put it down, too, apart from the others, next to the pile of rags. By the next morning the child was dead and it was thrown into the ditch.’

  Krzepicki also recalled the last act of defiance of those who were driven to their deaths. ‘All over Treblinka’, he wrote, ‘one would find scattered bits and pieces of money notes including dollar bills and other foreign currencies. These bills had been torn up and thrown away by Jews who finally understood what kind of place this was. This was their final protest and act of revenge before disappearing forever in the “bath house”.’77

  Eight days after Krzepicki had managed to escape from Treblinka, an underground newspaper in Warsaw published his story. The article ended:

  Today every Jew should know the fate of those resettled. The same fate awaits the remaining few left in Warsaw. The conclusion then is: Don’t let yourself be caught! Hide, don’t let yourself be taken away. Run away, don’t be fooled by registrations, selections, numbers and roll calls! Jews, help one another! Take care of the children! Help the illegals!

  The dishonourable traitors and helpers—the Jewish police—should be boycotted! Don’t believe them, beware of them. Stand up against them!

  We are all soldiers on a terrible front!

  We must survive so that we can demand a reckoning for the tortured brothers and sisters, children and parents who were killed by the murderer’s hand on the battlefield for freedom and humanity!78

  The following night, September 12, was the eve of the Day of Atonement. During the day, a further 2,196 Warsaw Jews, most of them women and children, were rounded up, sent to Treblinka, and gassed, bringing the total number of deportees in the previous seven weeks to 253,741. There were now, in the Warsaw ghetto, no more than fifty-five thousand Jews, most of them ‘exempt workers’, some, ‘wildcats’ in hiding. A further eight thousand Jews had managed to cross illegally from the ghetto to ‘Aryan’ Warsaw.79

  In each deportation, whether to Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor or Chelmno, Jews tried to jump from the trains. But armed guards shot most of them down. When yet more Jews from Jaworow were deported to Belzec at the beginning of September, ‘Youthful Jadzia Beer got her skirt caught in the car window. She dangled in mid-air until a Nazi guard “helped” her with a bullet through the heart.’80

  No corner of Nazi-controlled Europe, or of occupied Russia, was too distant for the murderers of Jews to reach it. On September 7, as the German army reached the Caucasus in their drive towards the Caspian Sea, the Jews of remote and isolated Kislovodsk were told that, ‘for the purpose of colonizing sparsely populated districts of the Ukraine’, all those with ‘no permanent abode’ were to present themselves at the railway station in two days’ time, at six in the morning. Every Jew was to bring luggage ‘not exceeding twenty kilogrammes in weight’ and food ‘for a minimum of two days’. Further food would be provided by the German authorities ‘at the railway stations’. Also ‘subject to transfer’ were Jews who had been baptised.81

  Two thousand Jews assembled at Kislovodsk railway station in the early hours of September 9. They boarded the train, and set off. Not to the distant Ukraine, however, but to the nearby spa of Mineralnye Vody, where they were taken out of the train, marched two and a half kilometres to an anti-tank ditch, and shot. Also brought to this spot, and killed, were Jews from the nearby towns of Essentuki and Piatigorsk.82

  ***

  In the German-occupied Volhynia, the Jews of Krzemieniec awaited the moment when the SS would seek to destroy their ghetto, where an underground youth organisation had been able to procure arms and even German documents. These young men believed that by taking up arms outside the ghetto at the decisive moment, they would be able to prevent the SS entering the ghetto. They were mistaken: on September 9 the ghetto was unexpectedly surrounded by gendarmes and police, forestalling the youngsters’ plan to draw them into battle outside the ghetto walls.

  A stubborn struggle began within the ghetto itself. On the first day of battle six German soldiers and policemen were killed, and ten on the second day. Still surrounded on the third day, the fighters set fire to the ghetto, which burnt for a full week, during which time the battle continued until the last defender was killed.83

  On September 19, the three thousand Jews of the Volhynian town of Tuczyn were ordered into a ghetto, in which there were only sixty buildings. Three days later, Jews from several nearby villages, and young men who worked on peasants’ farms outside the ghetto, reported that Russian prisoners-of-war were digging pits in the nearby woods. That night, German and Ukrainian police surrounded the ghetto, and on the following morning the head of the Rowne Gestapo appeared and ordered the Chairman of the Jewish Council, now Getzel Schwartzman, and two of his assistants, Meir Himmelfarb and Tuwia Czuwak, to assemble all the Jews at the ghetto gate, ostensibly to select young workers for work elsewhere. Schwartzman, Himmelfarb and Czuwak at once gathered the Jews in the synagogue and urged them to set fire to the ghetto, rather than accept slaughter, unchallenged. Another Council member, Aharon Markish, distributed petrol and axes.

  In the early hours of September 24, at 3.30 in the morning, German and Ukrainian policemen began shooting into the ghetto. Those Jews who possessed pistols shot back and, at the same time, set the ghetto on fire. As the German shooting intensified, some Jews threw themselves into the flames, or drowned themselves in wells. Others, armed with axes, ran towards the barbed-wire fences and escaped. Out of three thousand Jews in the ghetto, two thousand made their way to the forest. But in a three-day manhunt, German and Ukrainian police, helped by local Ukrainian peasants, rounded up a thousand of those who had escaped, brought them to the Jewish cemetery, and shot them. Getzel Schwarztman, unable to break out of the German cordon, surrendered, asking to die in the Jewish cemetery. His request was granted; he was shot by the graves of his ancestors.84

  On the fourth day after the escape from Tuczyn, three hundred woman and children came back to the ghetto. Lack of food and the cold nights had been too much for them to bear. To tempt them back, the Germans had promised to let them live. On their return all were shot. The remaining seven hundred escapees fended as best they could. But only fifteen survived the war. Six days later, on September 29, eight hundred and fifty Jews were killed during a similar break-out attempt at Serniki. Only one hundred and fifty reached the forest. Of these, only ten survived the war.85

  The problem of survival in the woods was compounded by the frequent hostility of other partisan groups, and of bands of escaped Soviet prisoners-of-war. Shmuel Krakowski, the historian of the forest fugitives, has described how these hostile bands ‘quickly learned to rob the unarmed Jews of their meagre possessions’. The Jews prepared bunkers for themselves in the forest, but the assaults on them became more and more frequent. In addition to these assaults, acts of fraud often took place. The Russians, wrote Krakowski, ‘saw that what the Jews most wanted were arms, and promised to supply them. Deceptively, they took money from the Jews, and then disappeared.’ There was also ‘a plague of rape’: armed groups of former Soviet soldiers, escaped prisoners-of-war, ‘attacked Jewish bunkers in order to take defenceless Jewish women’. Zipora Koren, who survived in the Parczew forests near Lublin, ‘tells of how Russian partisans bound an old woman, tied her to a tree, and tortured her, because she refused to reveal the hiding place of her daughter whom they schemed to rape’.

  This was not an isolated incident. When a Jewish woman, Sarah, from the town of Parczew, resisted an attempt by a Soviet partisan, Alyosha Vasilevich, to rape her, Vasilevich killed her. Her murder was avenged by a Jewish partisan, who kill
ed Vasilevich. Such incidents, coming as they did on top of frequent German searches through the forest, gave added danger to those who sought to survive in hiding and had no other place of refuge.86

  A new Jewish Year, 5,703, had come into being. A new Day of Atonement had passed. The slaughter was unabated. At Stolpce, on September 23, the ghetto was surrounded by German soldiers. Pits had been prepared outside a nearby village. Hundreds of Jews hid in cellars. The Germans entered the ghetto, shooting and searching. Eliezer Melamed later recalled how he and his girl friend found a room in which to hide behind some sacks of flour. A mother and her three children followed them into the house. The mother hid in one corner of the room, the three children in another.

  The Germans entered the room and discovered the children. One of the children, a young boy, began to scream, ‘Mama! Mama!’ as the Germans dragged the children away. But another of them, aged four, shouted to his brother in Yiddish, ‘Zog nit “Mameh”. Men vet ir oich zunemen.’ ‘Don’t say “Mama”, they’ll take her too.’

  The boy stopped screaming. The mother remained silent. Her children were dragged away. The mother was saved. ‘I will always hear that,’ Melamed recalled, ‘especially at night: “Zog nit Mameh.” “Don’t say Mama.” And I will always remember the sight of the mother as she watched her children being dragged away by the Germans. She was hitting her head against the wall, as if to punish herself for remaining silent, for wanting to live.’87

  25

  * * *

  September–November 1942:

  the spread of resistance

  By the end of September 1942 German troops stood victorious throughout Europe. The Soviet Union was still struggling to restrain the onward thrust of the German armies. Stalingrad was threatened, and with it Russia’s river lifeline, the Volga. In the Caucasus, German troops stood poised to strike at the oil wells of Baku, on the shores of the Caspian. Britain, still battling in North Africa, was as yet without the means to launch a major invasion of Europe. Germany was supreme. And with her supremacy came the thirst for Jewish blood; for the completion of the ‘final solution’.