The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  In Nazi-occupied Europe, the deportations continued. On October 24 the Jews of Lichtenstein were deported. Eight months earlier there had been a complaint from Eichmann’s office in Berlin that a number of Jews in Lichtenstein were still being allowed to visit a public café, to eat there, ‘and to have a cup of coffee’.52 On October 25, in the eastern Polish town of Oszmiana, the Germans demanded four hundred Jews. In order to save the remaining six hundred, Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna ghetto, agreed that all old people should be given up. Many were hiding in the thousands of ‘malines’, or secret hiding places, in basements, attics and cupboards.

  Reporting on this decision two days later, Gens told his fellow Council members in the Vilna ghetto:

  Today I will say that it is my duty to soil my hands, because terrible times have come over the Jewish people. If five million people have already gone it is our duty to save the strong and the young, not in years only, but in spirit, and not to indulge in sentimentality. When the rabbi in Oszmiana was told that the number of persons required was not complete and that five elderly Jews were hiding in a ‘maline’, he said that the ‘maline’ should be opened. That is a man with a young and unshaken spirit.

  I don’t know whether everybody will understand this and defend it, and whether they will defend it after we have left the ghetto, but the attitude of our police is this—rescue what you can, do not consider your own good name or what you must live through.

  All these things that I have told you do not sound sweetly to our souls nor yet for our lives. These are things one should not have to know. I have told you a shocking secret which must remain locked in our hearts.

  Gens had only ‘regret’, he said, that there were no Jewish police present when the ‘action’ was carried out in the nearby villages of Kiemieliszki and Bystrzyca. ‘Last week’, he explained, ‘all the Jews were shot there, without any distinction.’53

  Jacob Gens believed that by helping to supervise the actions, he and the Jewish police could save a percentage of those who would otherwise be killed. But not all his Council members shared his confidence or moral convictions. Early in the following month, Zelig Kalmanovitch noted in his diary: ‘We have bought our lives and our future with the death of tens of thousands.’54

  On October 26 the first deportations from Theresienstadt to Birkenau took place: 1,866 Jews were deported. On arrival, 350 men under fifty were selected for the barracks, while all the other deportees, the old men, all the women, and all the children, were gassed. Of the 350 men ‘selected’ for forced labour, only 28 survived the war.55 In the next two years, twenty-five trains were to leave Theresienstadt for Birkenau, with a total of more than forty-four thousand deportees, of whom less than four thousand were to survive.56

  From Opoczno, on October 27, three thousand Jews were sent to Treblinka.57 During the deportation, a few managed to escape to the nearby forests, where they established a partisan group, the ‘Lions’. Led by Julian Ajzenman, this group succeeded in damaging German rail communication in the Opoczno region, but not enough to halt the pace of the deportations.58 During October alone, eighty-two thousand Jews were deported to Treblinka and gassed, among them the twenty thousand Jews from Piotrkow deported between October 14 and October 21.59 A further seventeen thousand Jews were deported to Sobibor, among them eight thousand from Wlodawa and the surrounding towns and villages. Aizik Rottenberg, a bricklayer from Wlodawa, who survived, later asked:

  You may also wonder why eight thousand people did not fight the Nazis. But a hundred men armed with machine guns are more powerful than an unarmed crowd. The young ones would have tried to escape, but refused to abandon their parents; they knew it would mean the death of the older people, and how was it possible to leave behind the helpless little brothers and sisters without support?60

  That same October, sixty-four thousand Jews were deported to Belzec, among them, on October 28, two thousand children and six thousand adults from Cracow. Among the adults was Gizela Gutman, a leading pediatrician.61 On October 28 a ‘top secret’ SS directive ordered all children’s stockings and children’s mittens from the death camp stores to be sent to SS families.62

  ***

  On October 28, a former Jewish soldier in the Polish army, Mieczyslaw Gruber, who was being held with several hundred other Jewish prisoners-of-war in the Lipowa Street prison camp in Lublin, escaped together with seventeen other Jews held captive there. Under the code name ‘Mietek’, Gruber and his fellow escapees established a small partisan group in the woods north-west of Lublin, taking under their protection Jews who had escaped five months earlier from the village of Markuszow, on the eve of their deportation to Treblinka.63

  News had begun to reach the West that the Jews deported ‘to the East’ were being murdered by gas. Most of this news reached neutral Switzerland from Germany, and was passed on at once to London, Washington and Jerusalem. These reports soon found an echo in the speeches and declarations of Allied statesmen. On October 29 a protest meeting was held in London, under the chairmanship of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Winston Churchill wrote to the Archbishop, for those at the meeting: ‘The systematic cruelties to which the Jewish people—men, women, and children—have been exposed under the Nazi regime are amongst the most terrible events of history, and place an indelible stain upon all who perpetrate and instigate them. Free men and women denounce these vile crimes, and when this world struggle ends with the enthronement of human rights, racial persecution will be ended.’64

  Inside Warsaw, the Jewish Fighting Organization had continued to prepare itself for action. On October 29 Eliyahu Rozanski, a member of the Organization, killed Jakub Lejkin, Szerynski’s replacement as commander of the Jewish police in the ghetto. Rozanski’s accomplices were Mordechai Grobas and a seventeen-year-old girl, Margalit Landau. Their act was met, Ringelblum later noted, with the ‘heartfelt acclamation of the Jewish population’.65

  Thereafter, thirteen Jewish policemen, those who had been particularly active in the August and September deportations, were killed. Also killed, on November 29, was the head of the economic section of the Jewish Council, a hated, active collaborator.66 ‘We wanted everyone to know’, Zivia Lubetkin later wrote, ‘that from now on there would be reprisals for every criminal act committed against Jews.’67

  In the Bialystok ghetto, the Jews received two messengers from the Warsaw ghetto, Tamar Sznajderman and Lonka Koziebrodzka. ‘They had faces radiant with cheerfulness,’ Bronia Klibanski later recalled. ‘They brought us new hope, news and regards from the other part of the movement which, for some time, had been without contact with us.’

  Bronia Klibanski added that the two girls from Warsaw ‘inspired all of us with plenty of courage and hope. We began to believe that Vilna’s ghetto, too, would be there to stay’.

  The leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Bialystok was Mordecai Tenenbaum. He would meet his fellow conspirators, Bronia Klibanski later recalled, to the whistled tune of the Hebrew song, ‘There in the Plain of Jezreel’.68

  In Bialystok, too, resistance was developing. The historian Reuben Ainsztein has pointed out, also, that in that city the number of Germans and Austrians who helped Jews was unique in the history of the Jewish resistance movement in Poland. One of these was Schade, a German Social Democrat, and the manager of a textile mill.

  Through a group of Jewish girls, led by Maryla Rozycka, Schade maintained contact with the Jewish resistance organization inside the ghetto and with the Jewish partisans in the forests, supplying them with arms, clothes and valuable information. After the liquidation of the ghetto he hid twelve Jews in his factory. All twelve survived until the arrival of the Red Army.

  Another German who helped Jews was a man by the name of Beneschek, a Sudeten German and a Communist. Beneschek was in Bialystok hiding from the Gestapo under a false identity. As manager of another textile mill situated on the border of the ghetto, he employed both Jews and Poles, and was instrumental in making it possible for Jews to smuggle ar
ms into the ghetto. Beneschek also provided the Jews with false documents and money, and introduced another Sudeten German, Kudlatschek, to the Jewish resistance organization.

  It was Kudlatschek who was in charge of the motor pool of all the textile mills in the city. A number of Jews left Bialystok in Kudlatschek’s own car, travelling in it to partisan territory, and transporting arms back to the Jewish resistance organization in the ghetto from Grodno and other distant, and for Jews inaccessible, towns.

  The Jews of the Bialystok ghetto were also helped by a number of German soldiers stationed in the city, from whom they obtained a few weapons, and several wireless sets. Arms also reached the ghetto from Walter, a Viennese, and Rischel, a German, who worked as storekeepers in the ‘Beutenlager’, or ‘Booty Stores’, in Kolejowa Street; until their posting to a front-line unit, they enabled the Jews working for them in the Stores to take arms back into the ghetto.

  Another German, Otto Busse, who was in charge of a painting shop attached to the SS units in Bialystok, helped the Jews employed in his shop to smuggle pistols and several rifles into the ghetto. Two other Germans in Bialystok were sentenced to death for helping Jews.69

  Some Jews were helped, others were betrayed. Near Cracow, at the end of October, six members of the Jewish Fighting Organization who set off for the forests near Rzeszow, armed with pistols and a knife, were betrayed by local peasants. They survived the first German manhunt, but later, in a second, unexpected clash, five of the six were killed.70 Inside Cracow, in November and early December, the Jewish Fighting Organization sabotaged railway lines, raided a German clothing store, and killed, in separate attacks, a German soldier, a German policeman, an SS man, a German air force pilot, two Gestapo detectives and a senior clerk of the German administration.71

  By the end of 1942 the once vibrant pre-war Jewish community of Yugoslavia had been destroyed: at four camps, Loborgrad, Jasenovac, Stara Gradiska and Djakovo, more than 30,000 men, women and children had been starved, tortured and shot.72 More than 4,500 Jews, escaping from their homes, joined the Yugoslav partisans. Of those Jews who fought with the partisans, 1,318 were killed in battle.73

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  At Birkenau, the corpses of more than one hundred thousand Jews gassed during the autumn of 1942 had been dumped into deep pits behind the farmhouse which had been converted into Birkenau’s gas-chamber. As more and more Jewish ‘transports’ reached the camp, the two hundred men of the Sonderkommando, who had since April been forced to drag the bodies from the pits to the crematoria ovens, were joined by two hundred more Jews and ordered, as their most urgent task, to dig up and burn the remaining corpses.

  Enormous pyres were built out of stacks of wood. The wood was then drenched in petrol, the corpses dug up, placed on the pyres, and burned. To dig up and then to destroy so many corpses, the Sonderkommando worked by day and by night, pulling the corpses from the pits, laying them on the pyres, and, when the fire died down, covering the ash with earth.

  During November, as this task drew to an end, the Sonderkommando realized that they too would be murdered, to ensure that no witnesses survived of what they had done. A plan was made to escape, but was discovered at the beginning of December. The escape bid was foiled. As a punishment, almost all members of the Sonderkommando who were still at work were taken from Birkenau to the gas-chamber at Auschwitz Main Camp, where they were killed.

  A few days later, three hundred Jews were selected from the trains reaching Birkenau from ghettos in Poland, to form a new Sonderkommando. Their task was to take the corpses of those who had just been gassed, including often their own families, and to drag them to new pits where the fires were never allowed to die down. After six or seven weeks, five members of this new Sonderkommando managed to break out beyond the camp perimeter. All five were caught and shot. Their bodies were then exhibited in the camp as a deterrent to any further escape bid.74

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  During October, rumours of impending deportations spread through the Bialystok region. Ephraim Barasz, head of the Jewish Council in Bialystok itself, believed that the city could be spared if its factories worked to fulfil the German needs. ‘It is imperative’, he had told his fellow Council members and the heads of the various ghetto workshops, on October 11, ‘that we find means to postpone the danger, or at least reduce its scope.’75

  Barasz was not the only person in the Bialystok region who did not believe that they would be deported. The region had been annexed to Germany in June 1941, and was entirely separate, administratively, from the Eastern Territories. ‘People came from Slonim,’ a girl from Siemiatycze, Helen Bronsztejn, later recalled. ‘They were running away from the horrors over there. We didn’t believe it. “People, why don’t you listen,” one man cried out. “My wife was killed. My son was killed.” People said: “This is the Third Reich. They won’t do it to us.”’76

  On 2 November 1942, however, on the twenty-second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in support of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, the deportations finally came to the Bialystok region, though not to the city. Once more, the pattern of terror, courage, deportations, revolt and destruction was repeated.

  From Siemiatycze, 3,200 Jews were deported; Helen Bronsztejn was one of the very few who found shelter in a Polish home. Resistance, too, was widespread. In Lomza, a member of the Jewish Council, Dr Joseph Hepner, committed suicide ‘rather than cooperate with the Nazis’.77 In Marcinkance, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Aron Kobrowski, called out to the Jews who had been brought to the railway station: ‘Fellow Jews, everybody run for his life. Everything is lost!’ As the Jews ran towards the ghetto fence, attacking the guards with their bare fists, 105 were shot. Kobrowski, who had hid in a cellar, was discovered, and, with his brother and two other Jews, began shooting with revolvers at the Germans. The Germans replied with hand grenades, ending the revolt. Only a fragment of the Jews succeeded in reaching the forests, where they joined the growing number of partisans.78

  From almost a hundred towns, villages and hamlets in the Bialystok region, mass escapes took place. Almost all six hundred Jews of Lapy fled. Of four hundred Jews at Suprasl, only 170 could be rounded up; of Zambrow’s four thousand Jews, almost half escaped; of nearly six hundred Jews in Drohiczyn, almost half escaped. But the recapture rate was high. Of seven hundred who escaped from Ciechanowiec, only sixty succeeded in avoiding recapture.79

  Many of the Jews who fled found shelter with Poles. Some were betrayed by Poles. A few survived. ‘My parents suffered death for having kept Jews,’ recalled Henryk Woloszynowicz of Waniewo; ‘my father was murdered on the spot, my mother was taken and murdered at Tykocin.’80

  As the trains took the Jews of the Bialystok region to Treblinka, some managed to jump from the wagons, and to survive: eleven of the deportees from Siemiatycze survived in this way. But J. Kohut, a teacher, remained with his students, singing with them as the train proceeded the Jewish national anthem, ‘Hatikvah’, ‘Hope’. All but 152 of the 3,200 deportees from Siemiatycze were gassed. The 152 became slave labourers in Treblinka. One of the few survivors of the 152 later recalled how, on one occasion, they were driven naked out into the snow, where many were shot. One of the Siemiatycze Jews to die in Treblinka, Samuel Priss, was killed with a pick-axe in front of his father. Another Siemiatycze Jew, Kalman Kravitz, saw his two younger brothers ‘savagely beaten to death with an iron bar’.81

  Samuel Rajzman, from Warsaw, was in Treblinka when the Jews from the Bialystok region were brought there. ‘The most heartrending scenes took place that winter’, he later recalled, ‘when women were compelled to strip their children at temperatures of twenty to thirty degrees below zero in the yard or in open barracks whose walls were of thin plywood. The unfortunate creatures had nervous shocks, cried and laughed alternately, then wept desperately while standing on line in the cold, their babies pressed close to their breasts. The hangman lashed their naked bodies to force them into silence.’82

  So massive had been the round-
ups on November 2 in the Bialystok region, involving as they did more than one hundred thousand Jews, that thousands were kept for several weeks in special camps elsewhere in the region, before being taken to Treblinka. In one such camp, just outside Bialystok, guarded by Ukrainians, a few Jews were able to escape when their guards, overcome by a bout of particularly heavy drinking, passed out. Two of those who escaped eventually came back: one caught, and one of his own accord. Their fate was horrible, as a young married man, Meir Peker, later recalled:

  I had contemplated escape, but because of my small child, could not see us succeeding, and so we remained. There were a few other families in the same position. It was my misfortune to have to stay and see what befell those who were captured by the murderous Germans.

  A girl who had fallen behind the escapees was caught, and in the course of the terrible tortures which followed, admitted that she had broken through a board in the toilet against the fence and escaped. They tore out her hair and poked out her eyes with their fingers, and when she had lost consciousness, they killed her.

  There was also a young man who had returned of his own accord. It seems that he was frightened of going into the forest and believed that they would pardon him and allow him to go back to work in his trade.

  He was, undoubtedly, afraid of the Gentiles in the area, as they had handed over the roving Jews to the Germans. With his capture, the beastly and vicious tortures began. The German in charge of the Ukrainian guards broke the boy’s hands, first one, then the other, joint by joint. This done, two Ukrainians stretched him out on a chair, still half-conscious, and broke his back: they then laid out his lifeless body, like an empty sack, and emptied their rifles into it.