The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  On April 6, the day after this deportation from Italy, forty-three Jewish children and ten nurses were arrested at a small centre for children in Izieu, in the French province of Ain. All were sent first to Lyons, then to Drancy, then to Birkenau. Their fate is recalled today in a memorial opposite the village post office.20 Among the children deported from Izieu was the eleven-year-old Liliane Berenstein, who before leaving wrote a letter to God. The letter read:

  God? How good You are, how kind, and if one had to count the number of goodnesses and kindnesses You have done us he would never finish. God? It is You Who command. It is You Who are justice, it is You Who reward the good and punish the evil. God? It is thanks to You that I had a beautiful life before, that I was spoiled, that I had lovely things that others do not have. God? After that, I ask You one thing only: MAKE MY PARENTS COME BACK. MY POOR PARENTS, PROTECT THEM (even more than You protect me) so THAT I SEE THEM AGAIN AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MAKE THEM COME BACK AGAIN. Ah! I could say that I had such a good mother and such a good father! I have such faith in You that I thank You in advance.21

  Two of the children from Izieu, and the man in charge of the centre, Miron Zlatin, were deported to Reval, in Estonia, and shot.22 On the same day, in a raid on ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, three thousand Germans were deployed from four in the morning to nine in the evening in a search for Jews in hiding. In all, seventy ‘non-Aryan’ men and thirty-one ‘non-Aryan’ women were seized: all were executed five days later.23

  There were other Polish Jews who believed they were on their way to safety; those who, with South American passports, often acquired at enormous cost, were being held in a camp at Vittel, in France. Negotiations to transfer them out of Europe altogether were making slow progress. But there was a precedent; on February 4 the 365 Spanish-protected Jews of Salonica had been sent, finally, from Bergen-Belsen camp to the safety of neutral Spain.24

  Some of the Vittel Jews were fortunate, but not all. On April 8, the first night of Passover, a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau noted: ‘a transport from Vittel in France arrived.’ On it were ‘worthy Jewish notables’, among them Mosze Friedman, one of Polish Jewry’s leading scholars, and in the immediate pre-war years, Rabbi of Bayonne. ‘He undressed together with the others,’ the eye-witness wrote. Then ‘a certain SS Lieutenant came’. The Jews were about to be driven from the undressing room to the gas-chamber. Rabbi Friedman took hold of the SS man’s lapels and said to him, in German:

  You common, cruel murderers of mankind, do not think you will succeed in extinguishing our nation. The Jewish nation will live forever and will not disappear from the world’s arena. And you, villainous murderers, will pay very dearly, for every innocent Jew you will pay with ten Germans, you will disappear not only as a power but even as a separate nation. The day of reckoning is approaching, the blood shed will cry for retribution. Our blood will not have peace until the flaming wrath of destruction does overflow upon your nation and does annihilate your beastly blood.

  The eye-witness noted that the Rabbi spoke ‘in a strong lion’s voice and with great energy’. He then put on his hat and cried out, ‘with immense fervour’, ‘Shema Israel!’—‘Hear! O Israel’. All those present then cried out with him, ‘Hear! O Israel’—that prayer of all Jews in their moment of distress.

  The young men of the Sonderkommando, so inured to suffering, so cauterized by the daily sight of death, were themselves overcome by this ‘rapture of profound faith’. It was, added the eye-witness, ‘an extraordinarily sublime moment, not to be equalled in the lives of men, and it confirmed the eternal spiritual power of Jewry.’25

  Neither the squalor of death nor the debilitating force of fear could crush the spirit of hope. On April 11 Anne Frank, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl who, as a pre-war refugee from Germany, was now in hiding in Holland, noted in her diary:

  Who has inflicted this upon us? Who has made us Jews different to all other people? Who has allowed us to suffer so terribly up till now? It is God that has made us as we are, but it will be God, too, who will raise us up again. If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example. Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter, we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.26

  Literally in the depths of the pit, Jews still struggled to remain Jews, and to retain human dignity. At the Ponar execution site outside Vilna, Szloma Gol was among seventy Jews, and ten Russian prisoners-of-war suspected of being Jewish, who, as members of a ‘Blobel Commando’, had to dig up and then burn the bodies of those who had been murdered in 1941, 1942 and 1943. Each night the eighty prisoners were forced to sleep in a deep pit to which the only access was by a ladder drawn up each evening. Each morning, chained at the ankles and waist, they were put to work to dig up and burn tens of thousands of corpses. These eighty prisoners were supervised by thirty Lithuanian and German guards and fifty SS men. Their guards were armed with pistols, daggers and automatic guns: one armed guard for each chained prisoner.

  Two and a half years later Szloma Gol recalled how, between the end of September 1943, when their work began, and April 1944:

  We dug up altogether 68,000 corpses. I know this because two of the Jews in the pit with us were ordered by the Germans to keep count of the bodies: that was their sole job. The bodies were mixed, Jews, Polish priests, Russian prisoners-of-war.

  Amongst those that I dug up I found my own brother. I found his identification papers on him. He had been dead two years when I dug him up: because I know that he was in a batch of 10,000 Jews from the Vilna ghetto who were shot in September 1941.

  The Jews worked in chains. Anyone removing the chains, they were warned, would be hanged. As they worked, the guards beat and stabbed them. ‘I was once knocked senseless on to the pile of bodies,’ Szloma Gol recalled, ‘and could not get up, but my companions took me off the pile. Then I went sick.’ Prisoners were allowed to go sick for two days, staying in the pit while the others worked. On the third day, if they were still too sick to work, they would be shot. Szloma Gol managed to return to work.

  As the digging up and burning of the bodies proceeded, eleven of the eighty Jews were shot by the guards: sadistic acts which gratified the killers, and were intended to terrorize and cow the prisoners. But inside the pit, a desperate plan of escape was being put into effect: the digging of a tunnel from the bottom of the pit to a point beyond the camp wire, at the edge of the Ponar woods.

  While the tunnel was still being dug, a Czech SS man alerted the Jews to their imminent execution: ‘They are going to shoot you soon’, he told them, ‘and they are going to shoot me too, and put us all on the pile. Get out if you can, but not while I’m on guard.’27

  One of the sixty-nine surviving prisoners, Isaac Dogim, took the lead in helping to organize the escape. Dogim had been placing the corpses in layers on the pyre one day, when he recognized his wife, his three sisters and his three nieces. All the bodies were decomposed; he recognized his wife by the medallion which he had given her on their wedding day. Another prisoner, Yudi Farber, who had been a civil engineer before the war, joined in the preparations for escape.28

  On April 15 the prisoners in the pit at Ponar made their bid for freedom. Forty of them managed to get through the tunnel, but a guard, alerted by the sound of footsteps on the pine branches, opened fire. In the ensuing chase, twenty-five Jews were shot, but fifteen managed to reach the woods; later, most of them joined the partisans in the distant Rudniki forest. Five days after the escape, the remaining twenty-nine prisoners were shot.29

  ***

  Destruction and liberation travelled along parallel paths during the spring of 1944. Among the few Jews in hiding in Lubartow was Raya Weberman, who was a week short of her twenty-first birthday. Toge
ther with her father and her uncle, she had been in hiding since the final ‘action’ in Lubartow in November 1942. The three of them had hidden at first in a hole under the kitchen floor of a Polish farmer, Adam Butrin. Then, as the German searches began, they hid in a pit which Butrin dug under the floor of his stables.

  After a further search, Raya and her father had to live for three weeks lying down in a field, and then in the nearby forest, drinking stagnant water. ‘The water was green, bitter and full of insects,’ she later recalled. Returning to the hole under the stable, Raya, her father and her uncle survived. ‘For two years we wore the same clothes,’ she recalled. ‘I read bits of newspaper, dozens of times each.’ When liberation came in late July, ‘Butrin joyously told us the good news. Afterwards he returned and announced sadly: “The Russians hate Jews too.”’30

  ***

  In Hungary, the Germans were moving all Jews out of their homes and into specially designated ‘ghetto’ areas in each town. These ‘ghettos’ were often an abandoned barracks, a deserted brickworks, or a timber yard. The first deportation from Hungary to Birkenau took place on April 29, from the town of Kistarcsa. Only ‘able-bodied’ Jews between the ages of sixteen and fifty were deported.31

  The Jewish leaders in Budapest were told that the Kistarcsa deportees had been sent to a labour camp at ‘Waldsee’. But when one of those leaders, Rudolf Kastner, questioned Eichmann’s deputy, SS Lieutenant-Colonel Hermann Krumey, about why not a single letter or postcard had been received from the deportees, the conversation was inconclusive, and disturbing:

  Krumey: Haven’t they written?

  Kastner: Where should they have written from?

  Krumey: From Waldsee.

  Kastner: Where is Waldsee?

  Krumey: Well, I can’t say anything about it. It’s not far from here. West of Hungary. And I took only professional workers.

  Kastner: Professional workers? These deportees were bourgeois!

  Krumey: Well—they’ll learn a profession in the Reich….32

  On April 30 a second deportation, of two thousand ‘able-bodied’ Jews, left the Hungarian town of Topolya, also for Birkenau.33

  To lull those who had stayed behind into a sense of false security, the SS arranged for some of those who had been deported to send postcards. The eighteen-year-old Moshe Sandberg later recalled how his father was one of a number of those who had sent such postcards to their home town, Kecskemet:

  The contents were brief and all said the same thing: they were well, were working, and lacked for nothing. The cards came from the mysterious place Waldsee.

  It is impossible to describe the effect these cards had on the Jews. One heard the exclamations, ‘See! They’re at work! Nothing has happened to them, and now nothing will happen to them for the war will soon be over! The Russians are closing in from the East, and the Americans and British are only waiting for the right moment to invade Europe and reoccupy it! The important thing is not to become nervous, but to suffer patiently, for we will outlast them!’

  The postcards acted as a sleeping drug, coming just at the right time to tranquillize us, to dispel the accumulated misgivings of the past weeks and to remove any thought of revolt or escape.34

  Even in the undressing rooms at Birkenau, some Jews were given postcards to write. Each had to contain the same brief message: ‘Es geht mir gut’, ‘I am well’.35

  Also sent to Birkenau at the end of April were a further 238 Polish Jews being held at Vittel, in France: among them the poet Yitzhak Katznelson and his eighteen-year-old son. Katznelson’s wife and two youngest sons, Bension and Benjamin, had been murdered at Treblinka more than a year and a half before.36 While at Vittel, shortly before his own deportation, Katznelson had written, in his poem, the ‘Song of the Murdered Jewish People’:

  I had a dream,

  A dream so terrible:

  My people were no more,

  No more!

  I wake up with a cry.

  What I dreamed was true:

  It had happened indeed,

  It had happened to me.37

  Katznelson, who before the war had translated Heine’s lyrics into Hebrew, had been best known in Poland for his light verses, songs and poems for children: songs reflecting youthful pleasures and the joys of life.38

  On the night of April 30, Katznelson and his surviving son were gassed.

  As the killings continued on Polish soil, Polish Jews were fighting with Polish units in the Allied armies in Italy. At Monte Cassino, many Jewish soldiers were among the Polish and Allied dead. Among the Jews who fought with the Polish army in Italy was Dr Adam Graber, a surgeon of the Jewish hospital in Warsaw between the wars. In 1932, and again in 1935, Graber had been a representative of the Polish Maccabi at their World Games, held in Palestine. In 1939, as head of a field hospital with the Polish forces, Dr Graber had been captured by the Russians, who later allowed tens of thousands of captured Poles, among them many Jews, to join the Polish forces who fought in North Africa and Italy. On May 11, Dr Graber was among those who fell at Monte Cassino.39 That same day, in Warsaw, forty-three women were taken from the Pawiak prison, and shot. Fifteen of these women were Jewish: one of them was shot with her four-year-old child.40

  On May 18 it was the turn of a Jewish partisan leader in the Parczew region, Aleksander Skotnicki, to fall in action when his unit ran into a tank force of the heavily armoured SS Viking Division.41

  In preparation for the imminent arrival of several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, some of whom would be chosen for forced labour, the German industrial plants in the Auschwitz region began to expand. At Gleiwitz there were to be four such plants: one, for the production and packing of black smoke for smoke screens, was opened on May 3. The others were for repairing railway carriages and oil wagons, for making railway bogies and gun carriages, and for repairing and remodelling military motor vehicles.42

  The factories in the Auschwitz region had expanded during the first five months of 1944, using both prisoners-of-war and Jews. Among the prisoners-of-war were Polish, Yugoslav, Soviet, French and British soldiers.

  In the power station and coal mine at Neu Dachs, known also by its Polish name, Jaworzno, more than sixteen hundred prisoners were employed by May 1944.43 At the synthetic petrol plant at Blechhammer, opened on April 1, four thousand prisoners were employed, among them almost two hundred women who were in the SS and prisoners’ kitchens and laundry.44 At Bobrek, from April 22, the two hundred and fifty prisoners in the Siemens Schuckert works had included fifty children: all were employed making electrical apparatus for aircraft and submarines.45

  A further labour camp at Myslowice provided thirteen hundred slave labourers for the Furstengrube coal mines, working the old mine, and constructing a new one.46 Another thousand prisoners were employed at the Laurahutte steel works, making anti-aircraft guns.47 At the Gunthergrube coal mines there were six hundred prisoners, most of them Jews brought from Birkenau, working the old mine and constructing a new one.48 In May 1944, on the eve of the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to Birkenau, a new labour camp was opened at Sosnowiec, the second there, for nine hundred prisoners needed to work the gun-barrel foundry and shell production of the Ost-Maschinenbau Gesellschaft works.49

  Between Birkenau and Auschwitz Main Camp, fuses for grenades were manufactured at the Union factory.50 At Monowitz, the synthetic oil and rubber factory was already absorbing tens of thousands of Jewish workers, as well as some British prisoners-of-war, all non-Jews.51 Hungarian Jews were also to be sent from Birkenau to the labour camp on the site of the Warsaw ghetto, to continue to clear the rubble, and to search for valuables.52

  ***

  On May 15 the trains from Hungary began crossing Slovakia and southern Poland, on their way to Birkenau. Mel Mermelstein, who was among the earliest of the deportees from Hungary, later recalled the change in mood as the train crossed from Slovakia into Poland, and stopped at a town somewhere inside the German-occupied area:

  Tall buildings
were in sight and the air was thick. I managed to get to the little barbed-wired window. Another train just like ours was in sight.

  I began to shout across, ‘Who are you…? Where are you coming from…?’

  ‘We are Dutch Jews… We are headed for Germany… to a labour camp…’

  The SS ran over to put a stop to our communication. From across I could hear a woman scream to the guard, ‘You killed my child… my baby’s dead… you killed it, you Nazi swine… I’ll kill you!’

  He turned his head toward the noise, removed his automatic weapon and delivered a burst of fire into the boxcar. I heard another SS shout back derisively, ‘With what will you kill me, you bitch?’

  ‘With my bare hands.’

  Another burst, but this time in the air as he moved away to the other end of the transport.

  On May 16 the tattoo numbers at Birkenau were given a new series, beginning with the letter A. The seventeen-year-old Mermelstein, arriving on May 21, was given the tattoo number A.4685. But only those chosen for work were given numbers.53 A specially built railway spur now brought the trains to the very gates of two of the gas-chambers, only a few yards’ walk away. ‘When we arrived in Birkenau,’ one eye-witness wrote four months later, ‘such a smell of burning flesh wafted towards us that in the groups arriving at night, who not only smelt the stench but saw the flames rising from the crematoria, many committed suicide at once.’54

  A Jewess from Hungary, Judith Sternberg, later recalled the moment of arrival at Birkenau:

  Corpses were strewn all over the road; bodies were hanging from the barbed-wire fence; the sound of shots rang in the air continuously. Blazing flames shot into the sky; a giant smoke cloud ascended above them. Starving, emaciated human skeletons stumbled toward us, uttering incoherent sounds. They fell down right in front of our eyes, and lay there gasping out their last breath.55