The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  The lorry stopped, the tarpaulin was raised and they began to dump down the human mass in the way in which gravel is unloaded on to the road. Those that had lain at the edge, fell upon the hard ground, breaking their heads upon […] so that they weakened completely and had no strength left to move. The remaining [women] fell upon them, pressing them down with their weight. One heard […] groans.

  Those that were dumped down later, began to extricate themselves from the pile of bodies, stood […] on their feet and tried to walk […] the ground, they trembled and jerked horribly with cold, they slowly dragged themselves to the bunker, which was called Auskleidungsraum, ‘undressing room’ and to which steps led down, like to a cellar.

  The remainder [of the women] were taken down by men from the Kommando who swiftly ran upstairs, raised the fainted victims, left without help, extricated them carefully, crushed and barely breathing, from the heap [of bodies] and led them quickly downstairs. They were a long time in the camp and knew that the bunker (the gas-chamber) was the last step [leading] to death.

  But still they were very grateful, with their eyes begging for mercy and with [the movements] of their trembling heads they expressed their thanks, at the same time giving signs with their hands that they were unable to speak. They found solace in seeing tears of compassion and [an expression] of depression […] in the faces of those who were leading them downstairs. They were shaking with cold and […].

  The women, taken downstairs, were permitted to sit down, the rest of them were led into this [con]fined, cold room, they jerked horribly and trembled with cold, [so] a coke stove was brought. Only some of them drew near enough to be able to feel the warmth emanating from the small stove. The rest sat, plunged in pain and sadness. It was cold but they were so resigned and embittered with their lives that they thought with abhorrence of physical sensations of any kind…. They were sitting far in the background and were silent.

  Lewental then set down the story of a girl from the ghetto of Bedzin, who had been brought to Birkenau ‘towards the end of the summer’, and who now talked as she lay ‘helpless’:

  She was left the only one of a numerous family. All the time she had been working hard, was undernourished, suffered the cold. Still, she was in good health and was well. She thought she would survive. Eight days ago no Jewish child was allowed to go to work. The order came. ‘Juden, antreten!’ ‘Jews, leave the ranks!’ Then the blocks were filled with Jewish girls. During the selection nobody paid attention whether they looked well or not, whether they were sick or well.

  They were lined outside the block and later they were led to Block 25, there they were ordered to strip naked; [allegedly] they were to be examined as to their health. When they had stripped, all were driven to three blocks; one thousand persons in a block and there they were shut for three days and three nights, without getting a drop of water or a crumb of bread, even.

  So they had lived for three awful days and it was only the third night that bread was brought; one loaf of bread weighing, 1,40 kilogramme for sixteen persons, afterwards […]

  ‘If they had shot us then, gassed us, it would have been better. Many [women] lost consciousness and others were only semi-conscious. They lay crowded on bunks, motionless, helpless. Death would not have impressed us at all then.

  ‘The fourth day we were led from the block, the weakest were led to the Krankenstube (infirmary), and the rest were again given the normal camp ration of food and were left […] were taken […] to [life].

  ‘On the eighth day, that is five days later, we were again ordered to strip naked, Blocksperre (permission for prisoners to leave the blocks) was ordained. Our clothes were at once loaded and we, after many hours of waiting in the frost, were loaded into lorries and here we were dumped down on the ground. Such is the sad end of our last mistaken illusions. We have been, evidently, cursed even in our mothers’ wombs, since such a sad end fell to our lot.’

  The girl from Bedzin had finished her story. As Lewental noted:

  She could no more pronounce the last words because her voice became stifled with flowing [tears] […] from […] some women still tried to wrench themselves away, they looked at our faces, seeking compassion in them.

  One of us, standing aside and looking at the immensity of unhappiness of those defenceless, tormented souls, could not master his feelings and wept.

  One young girl then cried, ‘Look, what I have lived yet to see before my death: a look of compassion and tears shed because of our dreadful fate. Here, in the murderers’ camp, where they torture and beat and where they torment, where one sees murders and falling victims, here where men have lost the consciousness of the greatest disasters, here, where a brother or sister falls down in your sight, you cannot even vouchsafe them a [farewell] sigh, a man is still found who took to heart our horrible disaster and who expressed his sympathy with tears. Ah, this is wonderful, not natural. The tears and sighs of a living [man] will accompany us to our death, there is still somebody who will weep for us. And I thought we shall pass away like deserted orphans. The young man has given me some solace. Amidst only bandits and murderers I have seen, before my death, a man who still feels.’

  She turned to the wall, propped her head against it and sobbed quietly, pathetically. She was deeply moved. Many girls stood and sat around, their heads bowed, and preserved a stubborn silence, looked with deep revulsion at this base world and particularly at us.

  One of them spoke, ‘I am still so young, I have really not experienced anything in my life, why should death of this kind fall to my lot? Why?’ She spoke very slowly in a faltering voice. She sighed heavily and proceeded, ‘And one should like so much to live a little bit longer.’

  Having finished, she fell into a state of melancholy reverie and fixed her gaze on some distant point; fear of death emanated from her wildly shining eyes. Her companion regarded her with a sarcastic smile, she said, ‘This happy hour of which I dreamed so much has come at last. When the heart is full of pain and suffering, when it is oppressed by the criminal world, full of baseness and low corruption, [full of] limitless evil, then life becomes so troublesome, so hard and unbearable that one looks to death for rescue, for release. The nightmare, oppressing me, will vanish forever. My tormented thoughts will experience eternal rest. How dear, how sweet is the death of which one dreamed in the course of so many wakeful nights.’

  She spoke with fervour, with pathos and with dignity. ‘I am only sorry to sit here so naked, but to render death more sweet one must pass through that indignity, too.’ A young emaciated girl lay aloof and was moaning softly, ‘I am… dy… ing, I… am… dy… ing’ [;] a film was covering her eyes which turned this way and that […], they begged to live […].

  A mother was sitting with her daughter, they both spoke in Polish. She sat helplessly, spoke so softly that she could hardly be heard. She was clasping the head of her daughter with her hands and hugging her tightly. [She spoke] ‘In an hour we both shall die. What tragedy. My dearest, my last hope will die with you.’ She sat […] immersed in thought, with wide open, dimmed eyes […] threw […] around her so […].

  After some minutes she came to and continued to speak, ‘On account of you my pain is so great that I am dying when I think of it.’ She let down her stiff arms and her daughter’s head sank down upon her mother’s knees.

  A shiver passed through the body of the young girl, she called desperately, ‘Mamma!’ And she spoke no more, those were her last words.

  The order was then given, as Lewental noted, to conduct the women ‘into the road leading to the crematorium’.3

  ***

  In the Lodz ghetto, where eighty thousand Jews were still living in the hope that their productive work would ensure their survival, deaths from hunger were increasing. ‘People are faced with the catastrophe of inevitable starvation,’ the Ghetto Chronicle noted on 20 January 1944.4 On the following day, Professor Wilhelm Caspari, one of the deportees from Berlin to Lodz, died in the ghetto, at the age of s
eventy-two. A specialist in cancer research, Caspari had been a professor in Frankfurt until 1933. He had also been a German delegate at the 1930 International Congress of Physicians in Madrid.5

  A month later, the Ghetto Chronicle recorded the death of Adam Goetz, an engineer from Hamburg, and one of the pioneers of the rigid dirigible airship. In the ghetto, at the age of sixty-eight, Goetz had founded a research group to promote the cultivation of medicinal herbs.6

  The workers in the Lodz ghetto continued to survive because, unknown to them, other ghettos were being destroyed. On February 9 the ghetto received machines from what the Chronicle called ‘an evacuated buckle factory’ at Poniatowa. With the arrival of these machines, yet another factory was to be established, thus ensuring further productive work for the ghetto.7 Unknown to those who worked the new machines, they had been sent to the Lodz ghetto, together with hundreds of sewing machines from Poniatowa, only because the Jews held in Poniatowa, most of them deportees from Warsaw, had been murdered the previous November.8

  The Germans continued to round up the remaining Jews from the smallest hamlets. Even in the remote French countryside, Jews were not safe, either from round-ups or from reprisals. On January 10, two German Jewish refugees, Professor Victor Basch and his wife, who had spent two years in the safety of the village of Saint-Claire-à-Caluire, in the Lyons region, were executed as a reprisal for the death of a French collaborator, killed by French partisans. On the corpse of Professor Basch the Germans placed a placard: ‘Terror against terror. The Jew pays with his life for the death of a National’.9

  On January 15, among the Jews deported from Belgium to Birkenau were the Polish-born Meir Tabakman and his wife Raizl. Tabakman had been deported some months earlier, but had jumped off the train. Later he had been caught. Now, branded as a ‘flitzer’, one who had tried to flee, he was locked into a special goods wagon with many other former escapees. At Birkenau, his wife later recalled, ‘not one of them entered the camp’. All went straight to the gas-chamber.10

  In the woods near Buczacz, more than three hundred Jews had been in hiding for more than nine months. On January 18 the whole area was surrounded by German tanks, and in a systematic military sweep and search all were found and killed.11 In Warsaw, hundreds of Jews in hiding were suddenly at risk when one of the surviving liaison men of the Jewish Fighting Organization was caught and tortured. Under torture, he broke; many of those in hiding were then rounded up and killed.12 Among those whose hiding place was not betrayed, was Emanuel Ringelblum. He was on a list of nineteen former Jewish underground leaders whom the Polish Government in London agreed to rescue, through the Home Army underground. By the time the list could be acted upon, however, only three of the nineteen were still alive. Ringelblum, who was one of the three, declined to leave, as did his two colleagues, ‘because’, they informed the Polish underground, ‘we must fulfil our duty to society’.13

  Ringelblum remained in hiding, but the German pressures to force Poles to betray and abandon Jews were relentless. On January 29, in Cracow, a special court sentenced five Poles to death for helping Jews. One, Kazimierz Jozefek, was hanged in a public square.14 Four weeks later, on the night of February 23, in the remote Polish village of Zawadka, the Germans arrested a former primary school headmaster, Aleksander Sosnowski, and his seventeen-year-old daughter, together with two Jewish women whose father and daughter he had hidden and sheltered in an attic for a year and a half. All four were killed.15

  In Lublin, a ten-year-old girl had managed to hide in a barn during the last of the deportations. Her hiding place was a hole under a beam, where she could only stay lying down. Eventually, her whole body was covered in sores. Only with difficulty could she crawl to a corner of the barn where there was some bags of grain.

  The girl’s name was Irena Szyldkraut. In 1938, at the age of six, she had starred in the Polish film His Great Love. Known as ‘the Polish Shirley Temple’, she gained fame on the screen. Her father, a pharmacist in Warsaw, served in the Polish army in 1939, and was among the hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers who surrendered to the Russians. He spent the rest of the war years, first in Siberia, then with the Polish forces in Italy.

  After many months hiding in the barn, Irena Szyldkraut was discovered by a Christian overseer who came to look for the bag of grain. Seeing ‘a human foot’ peeping out from under the beam, he discovered the girl, and brought her food and drink. Later she was discovered by the Gestapo. Then, as a post-war inquiry into her fate revealed:

  All German authorities, being very much astonished that the child could live in such conditions, considered her as a curiosity and, exceptionally, promised her to protect her life, and even guaranteed her life. The young Szyldkraut Irena was entrusted a special protection.

  The child had been under a careful special medical treatment and after a long time the girl again looked as a girl. One day she was very happy and overjoyed, receiving from the Germans a pair of new shoes and a dress. But alas, her happiness lasted not very long.

  Some days later Szyldkraut Irena has been called to appear in her new dress and shoes before the German officials. The child became trembling and tremulous. It occurs to her mind: ‘for what destination?’

  But the guardian appeases her, saying, ‘You have to receive today a new overcoat.’ The child, quite calm, followed her guardian. They went downstairs and the poor child, pale as a corpse, had been pushed in—in a cell of death.

  ‘Such’, commented the inquiry, ‘was the German’s life-guarantee.’16

  ***

  On February 3, yet another train left Drancy for Birkenau, the sixty-seventh in less than eighteen months. Among those on it was the thirty-nine-year-old Rabbi of Mulhouse, René Hirschler, who, as chaplain to all foreign-born Jews interned in France, had carried out considerable relief work on their behalf, as well as for hundreds of Jews in hiding.17

  Of the 1,214 Drancy deportees that day, 985 were gassed on arrival at Birkenau, among them 14 people who were over eighty years old, and 184 children under eighteen. Neither Hirschler, nor his wife Simone who was deported with him, survived. Another of those who perished was the thirty-three-year-old Betty Zilberstein, who had been born in London. Before the war she had left England for France, to marry a Frenchman. They had three children. At the time of Betty Zilberstein’s arrest, her husband was with the resistance. Her children, too, had a chance of hiding, and two of them were saved. But because her youngest son, Harvey, who was not yet five years old, had a bad earache, she decided not to send him away from her, but to take him with her into the unknown. After the war, her husband was told that the young boy’s cries of pain from his earache were such that he was shot by one of the guards during the journey. Nor did Betty Zilberstein survive.18

  On February 8, five days after this deportation from Drancy, a thousand Jews were deported from Holland to Birkenau. Among them were 268 of the camp’s hospital patients, including children with scarlet fever and diphtheria. ‘Of all these diabolical transports,’ one eye-witness, Philip Mechanicus, later recalled, ‘perhaps this was the most fiendish.’ Many of the sick were brought to the train on stretchers. ‘All the while,’ Mechanicus recalled, ‘wet snow was falling out of a dark sky, covering everything with slush.’19

  This Westerbork train reached Birkenau two days later: 142 men and 73 women were taken to the barracks, the remaining eight hundred deportees, including all the children, were gassed.20

  At Birkenau, the SS had learned of a second escape plan by members of the Sonderkommando. As a protection against such escapes, they decided to reduce the growing number of Sonderkommando members, and on February 24, two hundred of the eight hundred prisoners in the Sonderkommando were transported to Majdanek. There they were shot, their shooting reported by nineteen Soviet prisoners-of-war who were brought from Majdanek to Birkenau a year later.21

  ‘The Jews are a race which must be wiped out,’ Hans Frank told a meeting of Nazi Party speakers in Cracow on March 4. ‘Whenever we catch o
ne—he will be exterminated.’22 That same day, in Warsaw, four Jewish women, caught in the city, were shot in the ruins of the ghetto, together with eighty non-Jews. The bodies of those who had been shot, some of whom had not been killed outright, were thrown into the basement of a ruined house. The basement was then doused with an inflammable liquid and set on fire. ‘For four to six hours,’ the historian of this episode had written, ‘there could be heard the screams of the wounded as they burned alive.’23

  The names of the four Jewish women killed in Warsaw on March 4 are unknown, like most of the millions who perished. Some of the victims, their names and careers, are a part of Jewish history. On March 5, at Drancy, while awaiting deportation, the sixty-year-old Max Jacob died of bronchial pneumonia. A poet of the Cubist and Surrealist movements, he had been baptised in the Catholic Church in his late thirties. Picasso had been his godfather. Despite his devout Catholicism of more than thirty years, Max Jacob was still forced to wear the yellow star, and sent to Drancy for deportation.24

  Also at Drancy, and there on the day of Max Jacob’s death, was another poet, David Vogel, who had been born in Tsarist Russia fifty-two years before. For one year, in 1929, he had lived in Palestine, before settling finally in France. On March 7 he too was deported to Birkenau in a transport with 1,501 other Jews, of whom only twenty survived the war. Vogel perished.25 So too, among the children from that same transport, did Henriette Hess, aged eleven, and her brother Roger, aged nine, who had been deported without their parents.26

  At Birkenau, one group of deportees had not only been kept alive, but whole families had been kept together in a special family camp. These were some 3,860 Czech Jews, survivors of the 5,000 Jews who had been brought to Birkenau from Theresienstadt six months earlier. At the beginning of March they were visited by a German Red Cross delegation, which was not allowed to see the rest of Birkenau. Then, on March 3, the inmates of the family camp were told to write postcards to their relatives who were still in Czechoslovakia, saying that they were alive, well, and working. They were also made to date the postcards March 25, 26, or 27, and to ask their relatives to send them food parcels.