I saw these things with my own eyes, and curse the day on which I was forced to witness such bestial atrocities. For many days this picture would not leave me, the face of the bound youth, contorted with terror from the tortures, the eyes protruding from sockets as if they were two superfluous items detached from the face. It is hard to forget.
Meir Peker also recalled the next stage of his deportation:
At midday a train arrived and a German with a stick separated the prisoners, some to the left, some to the right. I was parted from my wife and child. A Russian guard, one of the POWs, a Gentile as good as any Gentile, was pleased to announce to us that those on the right were to be taken to a labour camp, and those on the left to Treblinka. He already knew our fate. I never saw my family again.83
The deportations continued through the winter, to Treblinka and also to Belzec. On November 2, in Zloczow, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Dr Meiblum, refused to sign a document stating, in order to justify the deportation, that the ghetto had to be closed because of a typhus epidemic. He was shot.84 Among the 2,500 deportees from Zloczow was the Yiddish poet S. J. Imber, nephew of the author of the ‘Hatikvah’. Imber’s wife and friends sought to guard his last manuscripts. But later they too were killed, and Imber’s writings were lost with them.85
On November 3 the Jews of Zaklikow were deported to Belzec. Dana Szapira, then eight years old, later recalled how, at the time of the deportation, ‘there was a Jewish woman dentist. Her leg was broken. A German came, not a bad sort, and took her out on a stretcher.’ The ‘good’ German then went off to see what could be done to help the woman. While he was gone, a German soldier, known as ‘Moustache’, came up. ‘“What are you doing here?” he said, and shot at her, not to kill her, but to see her writhe. Slowly, here and there, here and there, she was killed.’
Dana Szapira and her mother were hidden by a Polish farmer. They survived, living inside a cubby hole in his cowshed. One day the farmer heard a knock on the door: it was a Jew, holding in his arms his teenage son. ‘I have been hiding in the woods for months,’ the Jew told the farmer. ‘My son has gangrene. Please get a doctor.’
The farmer went to the Gestapo and told them about the two Jews. ‘He got two kilogrammes of sugar for reporting them,’ Dana Szapira recalled. ‘They were taken away and shot.’86
Here, the same man had both saved and betrayed: a bizarre example of the disjointing of moral values, in the unending atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Not only did individuals succumb, but throughout Europe the hitherto apparently natural conventions of human trust were undermined.
In a study of Polish—Jewish relations in the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of how in Lukow the Jews hid in the surrounding woods for some time after the ‘resettlement action’. It was ‘a frequent occurrence’, Ringelblum wrote, ‘for Polish children playing there to discover groups of these Jews in hiding: they had been taught to hate Jews, so they told the municipal authorities, who in turn handed the Jews over to the Germans to be killed.’87
Confirmation of the flight of numerous Lukow Jews to the surrounding forests, as well as the part played by the local population in tracking down the Jews and denouncing them, is to be found in the diary of a local Polish teacher from Lukow, S. Zeminski, who wrote in his diary on 8 November 1942:
On 5 November, I passed through the village of Siedliska. I went into the cooperative store. The peasants were buying scythes. The woman shopkeeper said, ‘They’ll be useful for you in the round-up today.’ I asked, ‘What round-up?’ ‘Of the Jews.’ I asked, ‘How much are they paying for every Jew caught?’ An embarrassed silence fell. So I went on, ‘They paid thirty pieces of silver for Christ, so you should also ask for the same amount.’
Nobody answered. What the answer was I heard a little later. Going through the forest, I heard volleys of machine-gun fire. It was the round-up of the Jews hiding there. Perhaps it is blasphemous to say that I clearly ought to be glad that I got out of the forest alive.
In Burzec, one go-ahead watchman proposed: ‘If the village gives me a thousand zloty, I’ll hand over these Jews.’ Three days later I heard that six Jews in the Burzec forest had dug themselves an underground hide-out. They were denounced by a forester of the estate.88
Rescue and denunciation; the historian is overwhelmed by the conflicting currents of human nature.
26
* * *
‘To save at least someone’
From Belgium, France and Holland, and from several Polish towns, the deportations to Birkenau continued throughout November and December 1942. A Jew from Ciechanow, Noah Zabludowicz, later described the round-up in his town on November 5: ‘As we were standing in lines on the day of the deportation,’ he recalled, ‘there was this woman who was holding a baby of a few months old in her arms. The baby began crying and whimpering. One of the SS men said: “Give me that child, will you?” Of course, she resisted. But he said this rather courteously, so she eventually, tremblingly, she gave him the baby. He took the infant and threw it—with its head to the road. And, of course, the child died.’ As for the mother, Zabludowicz added, ‘She could not even cry.’1
On the evening of Friday, November 6, in preparation for the deportation from Drancy, one thousand Jews were locked into twenty cattle trucks on the railway siding. Among the deportees was the twenty-one-year-old Leo Bretholz, an Austrian Jew who had fled from Vienna to Luxembourg in 1938, then fled to Belgium, then, in May 1940, to France. In October 1942 he had managed to find safety by crossing into neutral Switzerland. But his safety was short-lived. Arrested on Swiss soil by the Swiss police, he was sent back to France, as were nearly ten thousand Jews who crossed to Switzerland in search of safety in September 1942, when the Swiss Police Instruction of September 25 had denied entry to refugees ‘on the grounds of race alone’, claiming that they could not be considered ‘political’ refugees.2
On being sent back across the border, Bretholz was interned by the French police in Rivesaltes, then sent to Drancy. In Drancy, he later recalled:
There was hardly enough space to sit or squat. The train stood all night on the railway siding in the station of Drancy—Le Bourget. In the middle of the car there was one bucket to be used by the occupants for their sanitary needs.
After a few hours, the bucket was full, and human waste overflowed. Thereafter, the people relieved themselves directly on the floor. The process of dehumanization had started in earnest. The putrid stench was unbearable, but it concerned us less than the thoughts of what was so ominously lying ahead of us.
At 8.55 in the morning of November 7, according to its precise schedule, the train moved eastward. Leo Bretholz had already discussed during the night, with two friends, the possibility of escape. Now, as the train began its eastward journey, they were determined at least to try. His account of the journey continued:
The moans of the elderly, the screams of the children, the ‘Sha! Sha!’ ‘Hush! Hush!’ plea of a mother to her infant, were being drowned by the clatter of the death train as it moved through the French countryside of contrasting bucolic beauty and serenity.
My thoughts flashed back to my childhood. Then, the sound of a train had that soothing, even romantic, quality—and it made me dream of faraway places I would have liked to visit. At this time, however, it was striking a note of fateful doom and finality. The gamut of emotions accompanying the rattle of the train ranged from hysterical cries of despair by many, to absolute silence of fatalistic resignation by others.
The scenes were unbearable to the witness, who had all intentions to keep a clear mind and a cool grasp of the situation. We needed to keep our senses intact, as our decision was made to escape before the train would reach the devil’s enclave, Nazi Germany itself.
Two parallel iron bars in the rectangular opening in the corner of the cattle car represented the only obvious obstacle to our escape. We had to go to work immediately. The mood of the occupants provided the impetus, and set the stage. Many among th
em shouted words of encouragement. Our decision would give them some measure of hope, if only symbolically.
We took off our sweaters, soaked them in human waste, wrung them out, thereby giving the fabric greater tensile strength. We then wrapped them around the iron bars, tourniquet-style. Working feverishly, we applied that twisting method until the bars showed some inward bending. Relaxing the tourniquet, we tried with our hands to bend the bars in the other—outward—direction. The bars began to give.
We repeated that process for several hours, until the bars were loose enough in the frame, we were able to bend them at will. Having achieved this, we put the bars back into their normal position. All we had to do now was to wait for darkness to provide the cover for our escape. It was now early afternoon, and our attempt was only a matter of a few hours away.
By evening, the din which had emanated from the ghost-like forms in the car throughout the day had somewhat died down. We were now six or seven hours into our journey to oblivion, and many had dozed off, collapsed from exhauston or fainted. An old lady on crutches—one of her legs had been amputated below the knee—pointed a crutch toward us, faintly uttering the French words: ‘Courrez, courrez et que Dieu vous garde!’ ‘Run and may God watch over you!’ This woman’s gesture of encouragement keeps flashing back to me through the veil of time. I shall never forget her words, or her face.
With nightfall, the train was scarcely two hours away from the German border. ‘It was a dreary, raw and cold November evening,’ Bretholz recalled. ‘My body was shivering, my mouth was dry, my cheeks felt feverish.’ He was also afraid. His account continued:
We chose the moment of escape very carefully. It had to come at a time when the train would slow down for a curve. It also had to be timed correctly to avoid the floodlights which the guards were aiming over the entire length of the concave curvature of the train during the period of reduced speed.
At the propitious moment we bent the bars into the spread-apart position. I lifted myself, rump first, out of the opening, holding on to the ledge above it on the outside. The rest of my body followed. My right leg, testingly, reached around the corner for the coupling which joined our car with the next. I found it and was safely standing on it holding on to one of the rungs of the iron steps leading to the roof of the car.
My friend followed, using the same method. The train, at that point, was going full speed as the two of us were standing on the couplings between cars. Something had held up our friend who was part of the escape plan, for it took him some time to lift himself on to the opening. As he appeared to have reached the outside, the train went into a slight curve, slowing down as we had expected.
At this split second, we had to take our chances and leap before the beams of the floodlights would fall upon us. We jumped. We tumbled into a ravine and held our breath for what seemed like an eternity. Our friend never joined us. He must have been frightened or he had been caught in the glare of the lights and discovered.
The train continued on its way to Birkenau. On arrival, 145 men and 82 women were selected for the barracks and forced labour. The remaining 771 were gassed. Of those who had been selected to ‘live’, only four survived the war.3
On November 9 it was the turn of Greek-born Jews, arrested in Paris four days earlier, to be deported to Birkenau. Among them were several hundred Sephardi Jews from Salonica, and their children, most of them born in France. One of these children, Salvator Cabili, was eight months old.4 A further 113 Greek-born Jews were among the 745 deportees on November 11, together with 35 patients from the Rothschild Old Age Home in Paris. Six of these patients were over eighty years old.5
On arrival at Birkenau, at night, the women, the children, the old and the sick, were lined up to be marched to the gas-chamber. The young Slovak Jew, Rudolf Vrba, who had already been in the barracks at Birkenau for several months, later recalled the arrival of this latest transport from France:
For the SS this was an easy load. These people knew nothing of ghettos or pogroms. They had never had their senses toughened by real persecution. They were docile to the point of apathy, in fact, and they did precisely what they were told without a murmur of protest, an utterly amenable mass of human putty in the hands of experienced artists.
Yet these were the people who nearly made the SS panic.
It happened at midnight in the cold winter of 1942. Men, women and children were queuing obediently for selection when something went wrong.
Every night a truck, carrying a harvest of dead from Auschwitz to Birkenau, passed at right angles to the head of the ramp. Normally nobody saw what it held and it was gone before anyone could even think about it; but that night it was overloaded. That night it was swaying and heaving with the weight of dead flesh and, as it crawled over the railway lines, it began to bounce and buck on its tired, tortured springs.
The neatly packed bodies began to shift. A hundred, two hundred scrawny arms and legs flopped over the side, waving wildly, limply in a terrible, mocking farewell; and simultaneously from those three thousand men, women and children, rose a thin, hopeless wail that swept from one end of the orderly queue to the other, an almost inhuman cry of despair that neither threats, nor blows, nor bullets could silence.
With one, last desperate lurch, the lorry cleared the tracks, disappearing out of the arclights, into the darkness; and then there was silence, absolute and all-embracing. For three seconds, four at the most, those French people had glimpsed the true horror of Auschwitz; but now it was gone and they could not believe what their eyes had told them. Already their minds, untrained to mass murder, had rejected the existence of that lorry; and with that they marched quietly towards the gas-chambers which claimed them half an hour later.
Yet the SS realised well what could happen if mass hysteria of this nature had time to catch hold of their victims, if the lorry broke down, for instance. Every night after that, a secret signal was given when it was approaching and all arclights were switched off until it was safely out of sight.6
One more camp with selection and gas-chambers was about to begin operation: Majdanek, on the eastern outskirts of Lublin. As at Birkenau, a percentage of the able-bodied deportees were sent to the barracks, to toil, torture and tyranny. The young, the elderly and the sick were gassed. On November 9, four thousand Lublin Jews, who had already been deported, first in March to a camp at Majdan Tatarski, and then, in September, to another camp at Piaski, were brought to Majdanek.7 Yet another name had entered the vocabulary of evil.
As at Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec, and as in Birkenau, the scenes at Majdanek had few, if any, parallels in the catalogue of human crime. ‘It was a Sunday,’ Janina Latowicz later recalled. ‘A lorry was brought into the camp. A woman guard and a young SS man went into the children’s hut and began dragging them out. They had whips. The children were whipped towards the lorry. They were thrown into the air. Many were flung against the lorry and the side of the huts, their heads were smashed open. They were piled into the lorry like filth.’ The mothers screamed. Callously, the woman guard asked the mothers why they were making such a fuss. ‘The children are going to the rose garden,’ she said.8 The rose garden was the gas-chamber, five minutes’ drive away.
In Oslo, on November 11, while the deportation of several hundred Jews was being prepared, the Norwegian Protestant bishops issued a public protest: ‘God does not differentiate between peoples,’ they declared, and went on to oppose all laws ‘in conflict with the Christian faith’. That month, 531 Norwegian Jews, men, women and children, were deported to Birkenau.9
More Norwegian Jews were saved than were deported. Among those who were saved was Henriette Samuel, the wife of the already deported Chief Rabbi. Her children were saved with her. A twenty-five-year-old Norwegian girl, Inge Sletten, a member of the Norwegian resistance, not only warned Henriette Samuel of the impending deportation, but then took her and her children for safety to the home of a Christian friend, brought them food and clothing, and, a week later,
arranged for them to be smuggled across the border into neutral Sweden, together with forty other Jews.10 In all, 930 Norwegian Jews were saved in this way.11
***
One form of resistance which had begun in Nazi-occupied Poland concerned the protection of those in hiding. In the woods around the town of Siemiatycze in the Bialystok region, Jews who had managed to escape the November deportation to Treblinka organized a small group, five in number, found other fugitives to join them, and tried to protect those Jews who were in hiding. Under the leadership of Hershl Shabbes, and in its early days with a single rifle, the Siemiatycze group, as it became known, threatened to shoot any Poles who betrayed Jews to the Gestapo.
This was no idle threat. In December 1942 a Polish peasant captured three Jews, among them Motl Bluestein, tied them up, and handed them over to the Gestapo in Drohiczyn, where they were tortured and shot. As a warning to others, the Siemiatycze group murdered not only the peasant, but his family.12
In mid-November the remaining Jews of Zwierzyniec were deported to Belzec. They were forced to take off all their clothes before boarding the train, in order to make escapes more difficult. ‘But they tried just the same,’ Stanislaw Bohdanowicz later recalled. ‘Along the railway line, everywhere one could see the naked corpses of shot people.’ Once, at Zwierzyniec railway station, Bohdanowicz saw ‘a young, nude Jewess who had only been wounded. The railway police caught her, and took her to the Jewish cemetery, where she was shot.’13
Inside Belzec, there was no escape: on November 15 Rudolf Reder was a witness to the arrival of a train from the city of Zamosc:
It was cold. The ground was covered with snow and mud. In such conditions and in the middle of a snow storm, a big transport arrived from Zamosc. The whole Judenrat was on the train. When they had all undressed and stood naked, as usual, the men were pushed towards the gas-chambers and the women to the barrack-hut to have their heads shaved. But the leader of the Judenrat was ordered to stay behind in the yard. The Ukrainian guards took the transport away and the complete Belzec SS detachment surrounded the Jewish leader. I don’t know his name. I saw a middle-aged man, pale as death, but completely calm.
The Holocaust Page 56
