The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  Thus, at the very moment of deepest depression, when the hopelessness of revolt had been made clear in all its cruelty, a man who had witnessed the worst torments of his people, and understood that many must go unavenged, settled down amid daily dangers to record what could be recorded; he, an historian in his mid-forties, convinced that the truth must survive, even if those who recorded it would not.9

  Also in hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw was Abrasha Blum, a friend of Ringelblum, one of the organizers of armed resistance in the ghetto, and a member, with Yitzhak Zuckerman, of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations. Blum, in hiding, retained his power to inspire others. But he was betrayed, arrested, and tortured by the Gestapo. Feigele Peltel, who saw him in prison, was the last of his friends to see him alive:

  How horrible he looked! His face was livid and swollen on one side, his head bloody, his hands bruised, his mouth bleeding, he was barely able to walk. I appealed to the police to let him lie down. They permitted him to lie down but went on torturing him with their questions. Abrasha was weak and incoherent.

  After a prolonged investigation, the police sent us out of the room. Abrasha did his best to walk, grimacing with pain. When I asked in a whisper how he was feeling, he was unable to utter a word.10

  On May 10 or May 11, Abrasha Blum was shot.

  ***

  News of the Warsaw ghetto uprising spread throughout German-occupied Europe, thrilling those Jews who heard it. But the pressure against Jews in hiding was relentless. Hundreds were killed in the Parczew forest when, that same Passover, the Germans launched a major military action against the partisans, and the refugees in the family camp which the partisans were protecting.11 Zeew Jungsztajn, one of the refugees in the forest, who had just reached his ninth birthday, later recalled how, after three hours of aerial bombardment, ‘the forest began to burn. The Jews were in the bunkers. The Germans discovered many bunkers. They caught two young boys who betrayed a bunker in which there were many Jews and Russians, who were shot.’12

  The refugees in the Parczew forest were soon to find a new protector who organized them under his command, Yekhiel Grynszpan, whose group grew from eighty fighters in mid-1943 to three hundred a year later. From the outset of Grynszpan’s command, in April 1943, he led a number of successful attacks on German, Ukrainian and Polish police posts in the area, as well as setting fire to the German police headquarters in Parczew itself.13

  At Treblinka, during the very first days of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the small group of Jews employed there to sort the clothes of those who had been gassed, and to carry out menial tasks for the SS, were in the last stage of preparing for a break-out. Their target date was April 1, and three separate ‘combat units’ had been organized under the leadership of Dr Julian Chorazycki, a fifty-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist who had practised before the war in Warsaw.14 In Treblinka, Chorazycki had been put in charge of a small infirmary.

  A former captain in the Polish army, Chorazycki had managed to make contact with a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka who, in return for a substantial sum of money, was willing to buy arms for the rebel group. A few such purchases had already been smuggled in when, on April 19, the deputy commander of Treblinka, Kurt Franz, entered Chorazycki’s medical office, and saw a packet of banknotes peeping out of the doctor’s apron pocket.

  ‘Give me that money,’ screamed Franz. But Chorazycki attacked him with a surgical knife, wounding him in the neck.15 Jumping out of the window, Franz called out that the doctor must be captured alive.

  Chorazycki himself then jumped through the window, walked a few steps, stumbled, and fell. He had taken poison. An eye-witness of what followed, Kalman Feigman, later recalled:

  They lifted Chorazycki up. He still showed some signs of life. All the prisoners were assembled in the camp’s courtyard. They lined us up in rows and ordered us to watch how they wash out the doctor’s stomach. The cruellest of them all, the Ukrainian Rogoza, opened the doctor’s mouth, pulled his tongue with some kind of sharp instrument and poured water in. After this Franz jumped on Chorazycki’s stomach, and with his shoes on started to skip on his stomach. Two Jews were forced to pick the doctor up feet first, and so the water came out. They repeated this a few times. However, Chorazycki did not move. They put him nude on a bench and beat him. The doctor showed no signs of life. He was apparently dead.16

  With Chorazycki’s death, Samuel Rajzman later recalled, ‘we had no qualified leader, and none of us wanted to take the moral responsibility for an unsuccessful coup.’17 Two weeks later, on May 3, there was a second blow to the plans for an uprising when one of the underground commanders, Rakowski, was searched, and money found on him. For this crime, he was shot. The money had been intended for the purchase of arms.18

  ***

  All over German-controlled Europe, deportations and attempted escapes continued. From Belgium, on April 19, fourteen hundred Jews had been deported ‘to the East’. One of those deported, Suzanne Kaminsky, was only thirty-nine days old; she had been born on March 11. The oldest of the deportees, Jacob Blom, was ninety years old. Because of previous escapes on trains from Belgium, even the small windows of the cattle trucks were boarded up.

  Escape was uppermost, however, in the minds of many of the deportees. Three Belgians who were then at liberty, a young Jewish doctor, Youra Livschitz, and his two non-Jewish friends, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau, arranged to stop the train at a small station well inside the Belgian border. There, they were able to open three of the wagon doors. Five deportees managed to escape. Before reaching the frontier, a further 231 deportees jumped from the train: twenty-six bodies were later found alongside the railway.19

  In Cracow, on April 29, the Jewish resistance fighters who had been captured during the December uprising, and held in prison, were driven by truck to Plaszow camp. During the short drive, they were able to break out of the truck, but most of them were machine-gunned by the guards. Among the few who escaped being shot was Abraham Leib Leibowicz, founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Cracow. He was recaptured, however, taken to Plaszow, and shot.20

  Also on April 29, the Jewish women fighters held in prison in Cracow were being transferred, on foot, from one prison to another. As they reached the road in front of the second prison, two of them, Gusta Draenger and Gola Mira, attacked the nearest SS men with their hands. The other women at once joined in, among them Rose Jolles and Genia Maltzer. Mira and Jolles were killed by machine gun fire. Maltzer and Draenger escaped. Most of the others were killed.21 Six months later Draenger, who had joined her husband Szymszon, gave herself up to the Gestapo after he had been captured.22

  On April 30, two thousand Jews were deported from Wlodawa to Sobibor. On arrival at the unloading ramp, they attacked the SS guard with bare hands and pieces of wood torn from the wagons. All of them were killed by grenades and machine-gun fire.23

  Preparations for revolt had also been made inside Sobibor, but they too were doomed to failure. Dov Freiberg, who had been taken to Sobibor in its first days, in May 1942, later recalled:

  …there was a captain from Holland, a Jew. He headed an organization, secret organization. It was a period when there were difficulties among the Ukrainians and we thought maybe we could get in touch with them. We heard stories about the partisans from them and some contact was established between this Dutchman and the Ukrainians for a revolt.

  They began plotting an uprising. And then one day in a roll call they took him out, this Dutchman, and began questioning him. ‘Who were the ringleaders?’

  This man withstood tortures and endless blows and he never said a word. The Germans told him that if he does not speak they would give orders that the Dutch block would be ordered to move to Camp III and they will be beheaded in front of his eyes. And he said, ‘Anyway you are doing what you wish, you will not get a word out of me, not a whisper.’ And they gave the orders to this Dutch block to move, all of them, about seventy people, and they were brought to Camp III. On
the next day we learned that the Germans kept their word.

  They beheaded the people. Yes, they cut off their heads.24

  All ghetto and death camp inmates understood, and had to accept, that the price of revolt was torture and mass execution. The Germans were always able to call, as in the Parczew operation, on whatever weapons they judged necessary, including heavy artillery, and air power. Reprisals were continuous: in Riga, at the end of April, during a search for weapons, the Germans found a list of names. It was not at all clear what the list referred to. But three hundred of those on the list were seized, and shot.25

  ***

  At Birkenau, throughout April, medical experiments had continued. Aaron Wald, from Poland, one of the few survivors of the castration experiments, later recalled:

  In April 1943 the SS doctor Schumann arrived in our block, no. 27, in Birkenau, and took all the men between twenty and twenty-four years old to Auschwitz, Block 21. First they shaved us, bathed us, gave us an enema (two litres), and two intramuscular injections.

  At first, I resisted, I wanted to run away. Professor Schumann said: ‘We need it for an experiment.’ After the operation I was in terrible pain for forty-eight hours. Ninety per cent of the patients died. After eight days, I had to go back to work.26

  On April 28 an SS telegram instructed the camp commandant at Auschwitz to place 120 women on the list of ‘prisoners for various experimental purposes’.27

  The young girls on whom the experiments were carried out quickly became old and decrepit in appearance, probably because of the damage done to their sex glands by the experiments. The victims’ wounds healed badly, causing all of them prolonged suffering. Many of them died.

  The medical experiments at Auschwitz were veiled in secrecy. Block 10 and its residents were isolated from the rest of the camp. The windows were shuttered, so that the women could see only through cracks in the shutters what was going on directly opposite their own block. There they saw the ‘Death Square’, the execution ground for Block 11, where the murder of Polish and other prisoners was constantly taking place. The daily sight of these executions only intensified the women’s fears. When they heard that Professor Clauberg was coming on one of his regular visits, they would hide in corners and become hysterical, crying out: ‘The obese butcher is coming! The revolting rooster is here!’

  The first experiments, intended to provide evidence about the effects and consequences of sterilization, were carried out on a number of young Jewish girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. All were from Greece. First, they were sterilized by X-rays. Then their ovaries were removed. Or, three months after the sterilization, parts of their reproductive organs would be removed and sent to the Research Institute in Breslau. Such experiments were performed two to three times a week. Each experiment would ‘use up’ about thirty women. Hundreds of women, having been mutilated by these experiments, were then sent to Birkenau and to its gas-chambers.28

  By the summer of 1943, the four new gas-chambers at Birkenau, as well as those at Majdanek and Sobibor, were in daily operation. In Sobibor, Eliezer Karstatt was a witness to the arrival of a transport of Jews from somewhere in the Lublin region:

  They were human skeletons really. On that day there was some kind of a malfunction apparently in the gas-chamber and they spent the night with us outside in the open courtyard. These people didn’t care about anything. They were beaten, they just sighed. They could not even speak.

  We were ordered to give them some food and we did. The last ounce of energy they spent in trying to get up. They were piled on top of each other and they stepped on each other in order to get that crumb of bread which we could give them. On the next morning they were taken to the gas-chambers and in the courtyard where they had been during the night were several hundred dead.

  The SS ordered a group of twenty Jews, among them Eliezer Karstatt, to undress the corpses of the Jews in the courtyard, and to carry them to small wagons about 150 yards away:

  It is difficult to describe what a feeling it was to be naked and carry these dead bodies on our shoulders. The Germans egged us on and beat us to run faster. We had to drag them along. Grab them by their feet and drag them along and it was a hot day.

  I left a body for a moment and wanted to rest and this man whom I thought to be dead sighed and he sat up straight and he said, ‘Is it far?’ It was a very weak voice and must have been a supreme effort and I could not carry him any more. I raised him up and I put his hand around my shoulder. I was very weak myself and couldn’t go very far but at a certain moment I felt whip lashes on my back and an SS man beat me and I let go of the body and I again dragged the man to the wagons.29

  Enemies of the Jews were everywhere. On May 6 the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was then in Europe, protested to the Bulgarian Foreign Minister about allowing Jewish children to leave Bulgaria for Palestine. They should be sent, he suggested, to Poland, ‘under strong and energetic guard’.30 In Tunisia, the German occupation on May 7 led to widespread plunder of Jewish homes, and confiscations of Jewish property, in Djerba, Sfax, Sousse and Tunis. These Jews were oriental Sephardi Jews who had been living under Arab and Muslim rule for many centuries, until the French conquest of 1881. From the moment of the German occupation in November 1942 their lives had been at risk, and in May 1943 more than four thousand were sent as forced labourers to construction sites near the front line. A considerable number were killed during Allied air bombardments of the airfields on which they were forced to work. Others died as a result of malnutrition and ill-treatment.31

  The Gestapo chief of Tunis was Walter Rauff, who had supervised the construction and use of gas-vans in the Eastern Territories from October 1941 to July 1942. In Tunis, Rauff ‘harassed, persecuted and killed Jews, winning rewards from Berlin, and condemnation to death in absentia after the German evacuation’.32

  ***

  In German-occupied White Russia, the five hundred surviving Jews of the five thousand Jews of Nowogrodek remained alive in the ghetto labour camp, at the whim of their overseers. ‘They didn’t care if you didn’t work,’ Idel Kagan later recalled. ‘If you didn’t work, you will starve, and that’s that.’ But on May 7 there was a roll call. Kagan, having lost his toes after his unsuccessful escape bid four months earlier, watched the roll-call from his bed. ‘Suddenly I saw German and White Russian police. My mother came to the window. “Don’t fear. It’s nothing.” I couldn’t bear the shouting of the people. I covered my ears with the pillow.’

  During this unexpected ‘action’, half of the five hundred surviving Jews of Nowogrodek were killed, among them Idel Kagan’s mother Dvora, and his sixteen-year-old sister Nehama. He and his father survived. ‘You will remain until the end of the war,’ the Germans told them. ‘The Reich needs you.’

  The Nowogrodek survivors formed an escape committee, and began to try to work out some means of escape from their labour camp.33 In Eastern Galicia, likewise, the surviving Jews in the ghettos and labour camps were, despite hunger and isolation, still searching for means of survival. In Rohatyn, Jewish ghetto police in secret session decided on May 15 to acquire weapons and to despatch armed groups to the forest. The decision was acted upon. But the Germans, learning of it, executed many of the policemen. Three weeks later, all one thousand surviving Jews in Rohatyn were killed.34

  At nearby Brody, once the Austro-Hungarian frontier town for Jews fleeing from Tsarist Russia, German and Ukrainian units, having killed thirty Jewish partisans in the nearby woods, and paraded six more captives through the streets of the town, entered the ghetto in the early hours of May 21. Almost all the two and a half thousand surviving Jews of Brody were driven to a waiting train. But in their attempts to resist deportation, the Jews killed four Ukrainians and several Germans. Even on the train, many tried to break out. The walls of several of the cattle trucks were broken, and several hundred escaped. But many more died under the wheels, or were machine-gunned by the Ukrainian guards travelling on top of the wagon
s.35

  To the anger of the Germans, some of the Jews of Brody had acquired arms from Italian troops stationed in the town. So also had Jews in Lvov. Nor had they hesitated to use them. Reporting on these efforts by Lvov Jews to avoid deportation, SS General Katzmann told his superiors five weeks later:

  The Jews tried every means to evade evacuation. They not only attempted to escape from the ghetto, but hid in every imaginable corner, in pipes, in chimneys, in sewers, and canals. They built tunnels under the hallways, underground; they widened cellars and turned them into passageways; they dug trenches underground, and cunningly created hiding places in lofts, woodsheds, attics, and inside furniture, etc.

  Special bunkers and dug-outs had been built, Katzmann wrote. ‘We were compelled therefore to act brutally from the beginning in order to avoid sustaining greater casualties among our men. We had to blast and burn many houses.’36

  In Riga, several dozen Jews had continued to find shelter in the cave which had been dug by Yanis Lipke underneath his henhouse. Lipke himself continued to smuggle bread and potatoes into the ghetto on his daily journey to collect Jewish workers for work in the German air force storehouse. Lipke also cast about for men to help him save the ‘doomed’ Jews of the nearby village of Dobele, asking three Lithuanian friends of his, Yanis Undulis and the brothers Fritz and Yan Rosenthal, to help him.