The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  The women from Schindler’s factory at Plaszow, some three hundred, had been evacuated, not to Gross Rosen, but to Auschwitz. Schindler at once sought their release, going personally to Auschwitz and bribing the Nazi officials there to let him take the three hundred women to his Sudetenland factory. There, they were able to rejoin their menfolk. Thus wives, daughters and even mothers were saved.

  ‘Every day from October 18 to May 8 at midnight’, Moshe Bejski later recalled, Schindler helped. ‘I will not leave you until the last SS man has left the camp,’ he told the Jews. ‘If a Jew lost his glasses,’ Bejski added, ‘Schindler went and bought glasses.’ Above the ration of a hundred grammes of bread, a bowl of so-called soup, and two cups of ersatz coffee each day, he provided extra rations. When a young Jewess became pregnant, an ‘offence’ punishable by death, Schindler went into Brno ‘and bought the necessary surgical equipment, and the doctor in the camp made an abortion.’16

  Amid the murder of hundreds of thousands of children, often selected personally for death by Dr Mengele, there was one tiny group, the remnants of the twins who had been sent to Mengele’s special children’s barracks. By October 1944 there were about two hundred surviving children and in half-hell, half-haven, awaiting Mengele’s whim. That month, a high-ranking SS officer, visiting Birkenau, chanced upon the barracks in which these 150 Jews, mostly children, were living, relatively well-fed, so near to the slaughter of so many other thousands of children every week.

  Shocked that any Jewish children at all were still alive, the SS officer ordered the 150 to stand outside their barracks. Ernest Spiegel, the twenty-nine-year-old twin who had been the eldest in the barracks since his arrival from Hungary five months earlier, sensed that something was wrong. ‘He ran to the gate’, several of the twins later recalled, ‘and announced that he had a most urgent message for Dr Mengele’. When Mengele heard what was happening, ‘he immediately ordered that “his” twins be returned to their barracks.’

  From time to time the twins would be taken away for experiments, and some would never return. There were also moments of sadism and sudden death. One of the surviving twins, Moshe Bleyer, later recalled: ‘The SS guard killed my father, and my twin brother Tibi died at my feet.’17

  Despite these horrors, the twins were a small, privileged and protected band among the sea of horror and destruction; Ernest Spiegel himself, their guardian, was the only Jew in Auschwitz who received a ration card entitling him to purchase cigarettes from the non-Jewish prisoners’ store. Spiegel later recalled how:

  The twins were looked after by Mengele. He needed them so he took great care of them. He would receive questions about the twins from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and he would send them the answers. He needed the twins alive, and they would receive white bread. When the rains came, he made sure that they worked in shelter, that is, in the washrooms. Every Saturday afternoon they would receive clean shirts.18

  Mengele protected his twins. But all other children had to die. On October 17 yet another ‘selection’ took place at Birkenau. Among those at the selection was a thirteen-year-old Hungarian girl, Eva Heyman. Eva’s mother, Agnes Zsolt, after speaking to many survivors of that selection, later described it, and the part taken in it by Mengele himself, at one of his ‘last and largest selections’:

  If until then he directed his helpless victims towards the left or the right with a conductor’s elegant movements, now he was not satisfied with the rows of victims lined up in front of their executioners, but he himself searched for them in possible hiding places. And, in fact, a good-hearted female doctor was trying to hide my child, but Mengele found her without effort.

  Eva’s feet were full of sore wounds. ‘Now look at you,’ Mengele shouted, ‘you frog, your feet are foul, reeking with pus! Up with you on to the truck!’ He transported his human material to the crematorium on yellow-coloured trucks. Eyewitnesses told me that he himself had pushed her on to the truck.19

  Eva Heyman was gassed that day or the next. Also murdered at Birkenau on or about October 18 was Gisi Fleischmann, the head of the women’s Zionist movement in pre-war Slovakia, and, until her deportation to Birkenau in July or August 1944, a leader of wartime rescue attempts, especially for children.20

  On October 20 there was another ‘selection’, mainly of Jews from Theresienstadt. The women had to enter a room naked, in single file. An SS doctor standing in the door gripped each woman by her arm and pushed her either into the next room, or to the other side of the room where other naked women, already selected for gassing, sat on a kind of gallery.21 The next train from Theresienstadt, with 1,715 deportees, was made up mostly of women with children, and orphans from the children’s home in Theresienstadt. Only 200 men and 51 women were selected for the barracks. The remaining 1,464 deportees were gassed.22

  The last deportation from Theresienstadt to Birkenau, ‘Transport Ev’, took place on October 28, with 2,038 Jews packed into the cattle trucks.23 That same day, a train from Bolzano in northern Italy reached Birkenau. From it, 105 women and 59 men were sent to the barracks, and 137 men were gassed.24 The train from Theresienstadt, ‘Transport Ev’, reached Birkenau on October 30, after a two-day journey. Only 217 men and 132 women were sent to the barracks. The remaining 1,689 Jews were gassed.25

  There now began the systematic destruction of the evidence. Ten days before the gassings of October 30, two small taxis and a prison car had brought a mass of documents to Crematorium III. These were the files about individual prisoners, death certificates, and charge sheets. All were burned.26 The destruction of evidence went in parallel with the last weeks of human killing.

  The human evidence of Birkenau’s horrendous barracks was also being removed. Throughout October 1944, thousands of Jews were marched away from Birkenau to other camps, and to factories, in central and western Germany. These marches became a new form of torture, in which tens of thousands were to perish.

  For many days, the marchers would be without food. Anyone who fell would be shot. ‘On the road as we were marching,’ the twenty-five-year-old Maria Rebhun later recalled, ‘we heard one, two shots, and a body fell. I remember there was a young girl, a fourteen-year-old, tall, very good-looking, with her mother. They liked the daughter very much. There came the moment the mother couldn’t walk. The girl supported her, tried to make her keep up with us, but to no avail. The Germans finally killed the mother. Two days later they killed the girl because she was so grief-stricken that she couldn’t take it any longer.’27

  One of the camps to which thousands of Jews were sent from Birkenau was Dachau. The seventeen-year-old Mordechai Ansbacher later recalled how, on arrival in Dachau, they were met by a group of SS men singing:

  Jews, go through the Red Sea.

  The waves close in,

  And the world is happy—

  Jews are drowned.

  From Dachau, the Jews evacuated from Birkenau were sent on various work details. While waiting to be allocated work, they received neither food nor water. ‘Most of the people were extremely weak,’ Ansbacher recalled, ‘and found it extremely difficult to hold out.’28

  Another camp to which several thousand Jews were evacuated from Birkenau was Stutthof, near Danzig. ‘We hoped that we were going to Germany for work,’ Gedalia Ben Zvi, who had been born in Bratislava, later recalled, so that ‘again hope flickered in our minds that perhaps the situation would be better.’ But this hope was yet another illusion. ‘As soon as we alighted from the carriages,’ he recalled, ‘then we were received by a shower of blows and this was exactly like Auschwitz.’ The guards were mostly Germans, former criminals. ‘By them we were beaten as soon as we arrived.’

  Gedalia Ben Zvi’s account continued:

  This was a transport of about a thousand or fifteen hundred people and up to the registration, which was three days later, only five hundred people were left. These people were detailed for all kinds of work—very hard work, which can’t even be defined because it defies description.<
br />
  We had to work at the port and we had to unload sacks of stones from the ship and we had to empty those sacks full of stones under a shower of blows, dealt to us by the SS.

  As soon as people would try to run away, they would be shot immediately. The Germans would come over to a man who was not able to lift such a heavy weight and they would say to him: ‘Sit down, rest a little, relax,’ and they would speak kindly to him, and of course, once he sat down he was no longer able to get up, and then of course they would finish him off.

  In that camp, there were awful sanitary conditions. People died of dysentery, of typhoid fever, every day, and the mortality rate was staggering. There was a women’s camp near us and there were also the barbed-wire fences charged with electricity. We could get near the women’s camp and we could see that amidst cold and snow, women would be lying in the camp without even a blanket and there was no roof. This way they would freeze.29

  ***

  By the end of October 1944 the Red Army had driven the Germans from eastern Poland and from most of Hungary. In the recently liberated areas, the surviving Jews emerged from their hiding places and returned to their homes. The thirteen-year-old Icchak Soneson had returned with his parents and his younger sister to the village of Ejszyszki. In 1941, Ejszyszki had been the home of two thousand Jews. Only thirty had survived the massacres of the war. ‘We kept together,’ Soneson later recalled, ‘we took a few flats in neighbouring houses. We did our best to rebuild our lives.’ But on October 20 disaster struck. Polish Home Army men, known as ‘White Poles’ attacked the Jewish houses. Soneson’s mother and baby brother were killed, as well as two Soviet soldiers.

  ‘The Jews wanted revenge,’ Soneson recalled. ‘They got hold of arms and attacked the Poles. But the Soviets arrested these Jews, among them my father, who wanted to avenge the death of his wife and child.’ Soneson’s father was imprisoned by the Soviets in Kazakhstan, for five years; the young boy left Ejszyszki for Vilna, where he had been born, and eventually reached Palestine, as did his father. His mother and her son were among several thousand Jews, survivors of the Nazi terror, who were murdered after ‘liberation’.30

  ‘Do not imagine’, another survivor, Joseph Feigenbaum, wrote to a friend in the West from the recently liberated town of Biala Podlaska on October 30, ‘that the handful of Polish Jews who survived the massacres have been spared thanks to their cleverness or material resources. No! Death simply did not like them and left them in this vale of woe, so that they may go on struggling with dark and gloomy life while they are bereft, and broken in body and spirit.’31

  In Warsaw, still held by German forces, a bunker was discovered on October 27, in which seven Jews, among them three Hungarians, were in hiding. The seven Jews, survivors of the Warsaw uprising, were armed, and opened fire. They were all killed.32 Other Jews were only saved when non-Jews, at grave risk, gave them shelter. In November 1944 a Polish doctor, Stanislaw Switala, took into his hospital and sheltered seven of the former leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, among them Tuvia Borzykowski, Itzhak Zuckerman, and his girlfriend, Zivia Lubetkin.33

  At Birkenau, the gas-chambers had ceased their work on October 31, and were slowly being dismantled. Not only the documents, but also the buildings of destruction were to be destroyed. When a train with more than five hundred Jews reached Birkenau on November 3, from the Slovak labour camp at Sered, the Birkenau administration office telephoned to Mauthausen: ‘We have a transport here; could you handle it in your gas-chambers?’ The answer was, ‘That would be a waste of coal burnt in the locomotive. You should be able to handle the load yourself.’34

  But Birkenau no longer had the apparatus for mass murder, and on November 6 the men from Sered were given their tattoo numbers, followed on November 7 by the women and children. The men were then sent to the factory zone at Gleiwitz, the women and children to the barracks. A twelve-year-old girl who survived this Sered transport later recalled that there were about a hundred and fifty children in the transport.35

  On November 25, at Birkenau, the demolition of Crematorium II was begun. ‘It is interesting’, a member of the Sonderkommando wrote, ‘that first of all the ventilating motor and pipes were dismantled and sent to camps—some to Mauthausen, others to Gross Rosen.’ The writer added, in a note dated ‘Today, November 26, 1944’: ‘We are going to the zone, 170 remaining men. We are sure that we are being led to die. They selected thirty persons who will remain in Crematorium V.’36

  On November 26 the last 204 members of the Sonderkommando were murdered. ‘I am going away calmly,’ one of them, Chaim Herman, had written on November 6 to his wife and daughter in France, ‘knowing that you are alive and our enemy is broken.’37

  Throughout December, the remaining crematoria at Birkenau were dismantled, men breaking down the walls and women clearing away the rubble. At the same time, the cremating pits and the pits filled with human ash were covered up and planted with grass. Those Jews still in the barracks were also sent to work on the banks of the Vistula. ‘We would stand for hours on end’, Louise S. from Cluj later recalled, ‘in wooden clogs in the water, at a time when it was already very cold. Most of the women died at this work, which was beyond their powers.’ Back in the barracks at Birkenau ‘we would fall on our beds weary to death, and could only be roused with sticks and clubs in the morning to continue this terrible rigorous work.’38

  In the dwindling areas under German control, the killings continued. During November 1944 several of the Palestinian Jews who had been parachuted behind German lines were executed, Hanna Szenes in Budapest on November 7, Enzo Sereni in Dachau on November 18, and Havivah Reik in Kremnica two days later, together with Raffi Reiss and Zvi Ben Ya’acov.39 A sixth parachutist, Peretz Goldstein, perished in Sachsenhausen, one of the first concentration camps of the Nazi era, and now, north of Berlin, being filled again with Jews evacuated from the regions about to be overrun by the Red Army.

  In Budapest, the Fascist Nyilas continued their random slaughter. On November 6 they entered and pillaged a building in which many Jews had found shelter, killing nineteen Jews.40 On November 15, as the marches from Budapest to the frontier continued, yet more Jews were taken from their homes in Budapest. ‘My mother was put on the march,’ Aviva Fleischmann later recalled. ‘She could not walk. She had unhealthy feet. She dragged along for five days. She could not carry on. So they shot her dead.’41

  On November 15, as the deportations from Budapest continued, the Hungarian authorities agreed to the establishment of an ‘international ghetto’ in the city, consisting of the seventy-two buildings assigned to house Jews under Swiss protection.42 A week later, on November 22, those engaged in trying to protect as many Jews as possible in Budapest met in the Swedish Legation. Raoul Wallenberg was their host. Also present was Miklos Krausz, a Jew who represented the Swiss Legation, and the representatives, also Jewish, of the Portuguese and Spanish Legations, Dr Koerner and Dr Farkas.43 Arie Breslauer, who was also present, recalled that Koerner and Farkas were rescuing Jews who had been converted to Catholicism.44

  The meeting heard that nearly eight thousand Jews had already crossed into Germany, with two thousand more about to cross; that thirteen thousand Jews were marching, and would reach the frontier in the next three days, and that ten thousand Jews had ‘disappeared’ on the march.45

  It was agreed to try to help those whose ‘immunity letters’ had been taken away from them at the brick factory, on the eve of the march. Breslauer was given the official stamp of the Swiss Consulate, a typewriter, and blank protective letters, and on November 23, with an assistant, Ladislaus Kluger, and a driver, drove through the night to the former Austrian border. For four days, Breslauer and Kluger gave out as many protective documents as they could, about three hundred in all. On their return to Budapest on November 28 they prepared a report of what they had seen: hundreds of Jews, locked in a barn, with no medical care and no food. ‘Those who had money could get a cup of water.’ Many were dying. ‘I saw p
eople who could still scream.’ In the barn, twenty Jews died ‘that night alone’.

  Hungarian gendarmes had driven Breslauer from the barn. On the return journey to Budapest he saw a group of several hundred people: ‘Most of them were old, or pregnant women who were just not fit for work.’ He tried to get permission for them to return with him to Budapest, but this was refused. Nor was he allowed to speak to them. In Budapest, he enquired about them, hoping still to be able to help them. ‘I later learned from an authoritative source that these people were taken to the Danube, were shot and killed, and thrown into the Danube river.’46

  In Budapest, where 120,000 Jews still lived, the Nyilas gangs ruled the streets. On December 28 they entered the Jewish hospital and took away twenty-eight patients. Two days later, all twenty-eight were murdered.47 On the afternoon of December 31, a gang of forty to fifty Nyilas broke into the largest of the houses under Swiss protection, the ‘Glass House’ department store, blasting open the locked doors with grenades and opening fire with machine guns. Three Jews were killed, including the wife of Rabbi Lajos Scheiber. But when the Nyilas tried to attack the eight hundred Jews in hiding in the building, a Hungarian military unit intervened, and the Jews were saved. Only the building’s patron, Otto Komoly, lured away for ‘negotiations’, was never seen again.48

  At Monowitz, where twelve thousand Jews from Birkenau had been employed as slave labourers in the synthetic oil and rubber factory, two thousand had survived. ‘That was a lot of survivors,’ Shalom Lindenbaum later recalled. In this respect, Lindenbaum added, ‘it was a “good” camp,’ but he noted that during the several Allied bombing raids on the factory, ‘we were apathetic because we did not believe that we would survive.’