The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  Even as more and more Jews were being taken out of Birkenau to the factories and camps of western Germany, all four gas-chambers of Birkenau continued to be operated without respite. On August 30 there was a total of 874 prisoners employed in the Sonderkommando, burning the bodies in the crematoria. A day shift and a night shift ensured that the fires were always blazing. A further four hundred prisoners were employed burning bodies in trenches.59

  However close Germany might be to defeat, the evil ‘selections’ went on. Among the new arrivals at Birkenau in early September were 1,019 Jews sent from Holland who reached Birkenau on September 5, of whom 549 were gassed.60 Dr Gisella Perl, who watched these Dutch deportees arrive, later recalled ‘a group of well-dressed, white-bearded gentlemen go by, fully dressed, with hats and gloves and well-cut overcoats. They carried fine plaid blankets and small overnight cases in their hands, like diplomats going to some important conference.’ These were ‘rich people’, Gisella Perl was later told, ‘who had been able to hide until now, thanks to their money and connections’. Most were gassed. ‘Only a very few came out of the selection alive,’ she recalled, ‘dressed in rags like the rest of us.’ Her account continued:

  A few days later I spoke to one of these newcomers. He worked on the refuse heap near the crematorium. In that short time, the elegant, well-groomed man, who had looked like a diplomat, had become a dirty, lice-infected, human wreck, his spirits broken. He was a Dutchman and he spoke German.

  I saw him go over to one of the camp foremen and whisper to him under his breath, anxiously, hurriedly. The foreman looked at him expectantly, and the new prisoner reached under his rags and brought out a small leather pouch, the kind which usually holds tobacco. He opened it with trembling hands and shook the contents into his palm.

  Like a million little suns the diamonds shone and sparkled in his dirty, broken-nailed hands. Grinning broadly, the foreman nodded and held out three miserable uncooked potatoes, and the elderly man, shaking with impatience, tore them out of his hand and put them to his mouth, chewing, swallowing, as if every bite gave him a new lease of life. The little pouch full of diamonds already rested in the pocket of the foreman and he kept his hand on it, caressing the stones almost tenderly.

  Here, in this Stock Exchange of Hell, the value of a bag of diamonds was three uncooked potatoes. And this value was the real one. Three potatoes had positive value, they prolonged life, gave strength to work and to withstand beatings, and strength meant life, even if for a short time only. The bag of diamonds itself was good for nothing. For a while, a short while, it might delight the eyes of a ruthless murderer, but when the day of reckoning came—it would not save his life.61

  It was not only new arrivals who had to go through the selection procedure. Those who, like Lena Berg, had been in the barracks for many months, were also subjected to repeated selections. ‘One after the other the women would be ordered to strip,’ she later recalled. ‘Sores to the right; abscesses to the right; rashes to the right; flabby breasts to the right. Eye-glasses to the right.’ A chain formed by camp officials holding hands ‘separated the rejected from the more fortunate inmates’. Lena Berg’s account continued:

  Half an hour later those selected to die would be marched slowly to Barrack 25. An hour before, they had all been fighting for a piece of bread, for an assignment to a Kommando, for a thousand and one other trivial things living people are concerned with. Now it was all over. The kapo would be very impatient: why did such carrion move so slowly? And she would urge them on with kicks and abuse.

  Barrack 25 got no food. Prisoners sat there locked up for hours, sometimes for days, without food, without a swallow of water, without toilet facilities, dying before their deaths. For Auschwitz was governed by a strict rule: Berlin always had to confirm the gassing of those selected and, occasionally, confirmation was delayed. Berlin had plenty of other things to attend to.

  From that death barrack came screaming and lamentation, ‘Water, for God’s sake, a little water.’ But no one responded. No one walked over to that barrack, no one ever gave the dying water. Helplessly, hands stretched out between the bars, imploring, but in vain. Barrack 25 was taboo.

  When it was dark the trucks came for them, headlights flashing, engines roaring up, then silenced. When the engines started again, there was the screaming, the last horrible cries of the women taken to the gas-chamber.62

  On September 6, at Birkenau, Salmen Gradowski, a member of the Sonderkommando, who had been in Auschwitz since February 1943, collected together the notes which he had managed to write over the previous nineteen months, describing his deportation and first day at the camp, and buried them. He chose one of the pits of human ashes in which to bury them, explaining in a covering letter: ‘I have buried this under the ashes, deeming it the safest place, where people will certainly dig to find the traces of millions of men who were exterminated.’ Gradowski dedicated his notes to the members of his family ‘burnt alive at Birkenau’, his wife Sonia, his mother Sara, his sisters Estera-Rachel and Liba, his father-in-law Rafael and his brother-in-law Wolf. In his covering letter he wrote:

  Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil. Tens of documents are buried under it, mine and those of other persons, which will throw light on everything that was happening here. Great quantities of teeth are also buried here. It was we, the Kommando workers, who expressly have strewn them all over the terrain, as many as we could, so that the world should find material traces of the millions of murdered people. We ourselves have lost hope of being able to live to see the moment of liberation.63

  37

  * * *

  September 1944:

  the Days of Awe

  By the first week of September 1944, the Slovak uprising was in its most desperate days. For the remnants of the Jewish communities of Slovakia, particularly those which were far from the centre of the revolt, fear of reprisals cast a dark shadow on many towns, among them Topolcany. Hardly had the German forces reimposed their authority in Topolcany than the Einsatzkommando unit of 150 men, commanded by an SS captain, Dr Hauser, entered the town.

  Slovak Fascists who had ‘disappeared’ during the rebellion now re-emerged and reported for duty with the Einsatzkommando: thirty-seven of them were to join in the attempt to achieve what the Einsatzkommando described as the ‘final solution of the Jewish question in Topolcany’. The first effort of the SS was to lull the Jews into a false sense of security. Their spiritual leader, Rabbi Haberfeld, was summoned by Captain Hauser and told that prayers could now be held in the Great Synagogue. Hauser gave the rabbi an assurance that nothing would happen to the Jewish community. Later that same day, Hauser summoned representatives of the community, telling them to go back to work and to normal life.

  Even as these assurances were being given, the Germans arrested one of the leaders of the Jewish community, Karl Pollak, a former deputy mayor of the town, his wife, and one other Jewish family from a nearby village. After being held in the district prison for a few days, they were taken out and killed. On September 6, Moritz Hochberger was killed when he tried to escape the clutches of a number of SS men.

  At noon on September 8 the ‘action’ began. Men of the Einsatzkommando, together with their Slovak auxiliaries, broke into the homes of all Jews and dragged them to the SS headquarters. Few families, at most forty persons, managed to flee their homes and go into hiding. That afternoon the Jews of Topolcany were deported to the concentration camp at Sered.

  Even as the deportation was in progress, Slovak peasants betrayed four Jews who were hiding in a farm outside the town. A detachment of the Einsatzkommando was sent down to the farm, where all four Jews were murdered.

  For the next two days, peasants searched for Jews in hiding, and on September 10, fifty-two Jews who had been caught in hiding places were brought to an open field. There they were ordered to dig a deep pit, before being murdered by the Germans and their Slovak helpers. The corpses were then thrown into the pit. Among the dead were
six children. The smallest was a three-month-old baby from the Linkenberg family.1

  ***

  Rescue and slaughter marched hand in hand during the twilight days of the Reich. On September 3, as the result of a suggestion first put forward by Churchill’s son Randolph, the evacuation began, by air, of 650 German, Austrian and Czech Jews from the partisan-held areas of Yugoslavia, to Allied-occupied Italy.2 Also in Italy, in the German-held port of Fiume, now under German control, the Germans arrested a senior Italian police officer, Giovanni Palatucci, who had helped more than five hundred Jewish refugees who had reached Italy from Croatia, by giving them ‘Aryan’ papers and sending them to safety in southern Italy.3 Palatucci was sent to Dachau, where he died.4

  Jews were also active in their own defence: in Budapest, on September 7, the Hungarian authorities allowed Otto Komoly, a Jew who had been decorated for heroism in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, to rent a number of buildings in the capital for the protection of Jewish children, under the aegis of the International Red Cross. Helped by two Polish Jews, Dr Osterweil and Sholem Offenbach, both of them refugees in Hungary, Komoly gave protection to five thousand children in more than thirty-five protected buildings. Like Palatucci in Fiume, however, Komoly did not escape the penalty for courage. Within four months of his scheme being put into effect, he was seized and murdered by Hungarian Fascists.5

  Also in September 1944, shortly before the Red Army entered Przemysl, Yosef Buzhminsky saw, in a courtyard, ‘a little girl about six years old playing there. Gestapo and SS men arrived, surrounded the courtyard. It was a Polish family consisting of eight people. They began whipping the girl, and then they executed all of them right there in the courtyard.’ The Polish family had hidden the Jewish girl. It was for that ‘crime’ that they, and the girl, were shot.6

  On September 9, a group of thirty-nine Dutchmen, one American and seven Englishmen, all of them active in the anti-Nazi underground, were brought to Mauthausen. After spending the night inside the bunker they were driven, barefoot and in their underclothes, to the quarry, ‘where’ as the historian of Mauthausen has written, ‘the 186 steps were lined on both sides by SS and Kapos swinging their cudgels and anticipating a spectacle.’ The forty-seven prisoners were ‘loaded with stone slabs of up to sixty pounds in weight, and then forced to run up the steps. The run was repeated again and again, and the blows fell faster and faster as the exhausted prisoners stumbled on the uneven steps.’ One of the prisoners was a British Jew, Marcus Bloom, who had operated a clandestine radio in Nazi-occupied Europe. He, the historian noted, ‘was the first to fall’.

  Bloom was shot in the head at point-blank range.7

  On September 17, as the Red Army drove through eastern Hungary, the Germans began to evacuate the labour camp at Bor, where thousands of Jews had worked, and many died, in the copper mines.

  When the ‘death march’ from Bor reached Cervenka, the marchers were driven into the kiln of a brick works. There, six hundred were shot. That same day, about sixty more were shot on the march itself.8 At Gyor, on November 4, hundreds of the exhausted survivors were either beaten to death or shot, their bodies being thrown into a mass grave which they themselves had been forced to dig. Among those whose bodies were found in this grave when it was uncovered in 1946 was Miklos Radnoti, a thirty-five-year-old poet, whose poems during the war years had graphically portrayed the impending disaster in Hungary.9

  More than five thousand Jews had set off on this march to Belgrade, then to Austria, and finally to the concentration camps of Flossenburg and Buchenwald. Only nine survived the war.10

  ***

  September 18 marked the eve of the Jewish New Year 5705. Three days earlier, at Birkenau, fourteen hundred Jewish boys in their early teens had been taken to the special Children’s Block. They were kept there for three days, until the Jewish New Year. One of those who witnessed the ‘action’ that day was the fourteen-year-old Josef Zalman Kleinman. The SS ‘began loading them into trucks’, he later recalled, ‘and the screams were terrible: “Hear! O Israel!” “Mother”, “Father”—this took several hours. I had never heard anything like it. In Auschwitz usually, during summer, the people were taken to the gas-chambers by the hundreds of thousands, those people did not know where they were being led. But we, who had already become veterans of the camp—we knew….’11

  There were other ‘veterans’ in Birkenau who had no chance of survival. These were the ‘mussulmen’, Jews in the last stage of starvation. Dr Aharon Beilin, who had been sent to Birkenau from Bialystok in the autumn of 1943, has recalled their symptoms, and their fate:

  They began speaking about food. Usually this was a taboo. Two things were taboo—crematoria and food. Food—that was a reflex, a conditioned reflex; because whenever people spoke about food the secretion of digestive acids would increase, and people tried not to speak about food. As soon as a person lost that self-control and began remembering the good food which he used to have at home in the good old times, such a talk was called a ‘mussulman conversation’.

  That was the first stage, and we knew that within a day or two, he would enter the second stage. There was not such a rigorous division, but he would stop taking an interest in his surroundings and would also cease reacting to orders, and his motions would become very slow, his face frozen like a mask. He would no longer have control over his bowels. He would relieve himself where he was. He was not even turning over when he lay down.

  And thus he entered the ‘mussulmanship’. It was a skeleton with bloated legs. And these people, because they wanted to drag them from the blocks to the roll call, they were placed forcibly next to the wall with their hands above their heads, their face to the wall for support, and it was a skeleton with grey face that would lean against the wall, swaying back and forth. They had no sense of balance. That was the typical mussulman, who would be taken afterwards by the ‘skeleton’ Kommando with the real bodies.12

  On September 19, in the Baltic, Soviet troops approached Klooga camp, where more than three thousand Jews, Russians and Estonians were being used as forced labourers. The SS acted once more to prevent their victims, the witnesses of their crimes, from being rescued. Almost all the Klooga inmates were killed, among them fifteen hundred Jews who had been brought to the camp in 1943 from the Vilna ghetto, eight hundred Soviet prisoners-of-war, and seven hundred Estonian political prisoners. Only eighty-five survived. At nearby Lagedi camp, 426 Jews, among them many children and babies, were murdered only a few hours before the first Red Army soldiers entered the camp.13

  At Birkenau, following the gassing of four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944, there was a substantial reduction in the number of trains reaching the camp, so much so that during September the SS decided to reduce the number of Sonderkommando prisoners. On September 24, two hundred men of the Sonderkommando were forced into freight cars at the ramp in Birkenau under the pretence of being sent to work at some distant camp. They were in fact taken to Auschwitz Main Camp, where they were gassed. That night their bodies were brought back to Birkenau, and burned.

  The Sonderkommando was now reduced to 661 men. A hundred were housed in each of the attics of Crematoria II and III. The remaining 461, who worked in Crematoria IV and V, and at the cremation pits, slept in the large unused ‘dressing room’ of crematorium IV.14 In the nightmare world that Nazism had created, one of the cruellest tasks of all was that imposed upon the Jews of the Sonderkommando.

  The days between the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement mark the ‘Days of Awe’ in the Jewish calendar. Some Jewish sentiment maintains that only the virtuous die on the Day of Atonement. At Birkenau, many were to die that day, between the opening hours of the fast on the evening of September 26, and its ending twenty-four hours later.

  Even before the fast began, there was a ‘selection’ of a thousand young boys, who had been told that, in preparation for the Day of Atonement, extra bread would be distributed: a third of a loaf instead of
a fifth of a loaf, and also cheese. ‘There had never been anything like it at Auschwitz,’ Josef Kleinman later recalled. ‘We were very happy that we could eat and then fast properly on the next day.’ Then, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the boys were ordered back into Birkenau. Kleinman has recalled the sequel:

  The preparations were very intensive. The chief clerk and other clerks were there. All the block seniors, they all gathered and arranged us in groups of a hundred. Somebody spread a rumour that we were to be taken to collect the potato harvest in the area so we were arranged in these groups of a hundred. There were two thousand of us altogether.

  All of a sudden a tremble passed through the parade ground like an electric current. The angel of death appeared. Dr Mengele appeared on his bicycle. Somebody approached him, took his bicycle and leaned the bicycle near the barrack. I was in a group right near the road and I saw that. He put his hands behind his back, his lips as usual were tightly closed, he went to the centre of the parade ground, lifted his head so that he could survey the whole scene and then his eyes landed on a little boy about fifteen years old. Perhaps only fourteen years old or something like that. He was not far from me in the first row. He was a boy from the Lodz ghetto. I remember his face very well. He was blond, very thin and very sunburnt. His face had freckles. He was standing in the first line when Mengele approached him and asked him, ‘How old are you?’ The boy shook and said, ‘I am eighteen years old.’

  I saw immediately that Dr Mengele was very furious and started shouting, ‘I’ll show you. Bring me a hammer and nails and a little plank.’ So somebody ran immediately and we were standing and looking at him completely silent. A deathly silence prevailed on the parade ground. He was standing in the middle and everyone was watching him. In the meantime, the man with the hammer and the nails arrived.