The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  Among those held prisoner in Mauthausen was the British naval officer, Lieutenant-Commander Pat O’Leary, GC, DSO. O’Leary’s biographer, Vincent Brome, has recorded how O’Leary witnessed what happened when a prisoner who had managed to escape was recaptured. An SS guard, O’Leary recalled, ‘launched a tremendous blow to the man’s jaw. The prisoner’s hand went up to ward off a second blow and the guard kicked him savagely in the stomach. As the man doubled up, another sledgehammer blow hit his jaw. He fell down. “Up! Up!” The SS man kicked him to attention again. Then alternately he slogged his jaw and kicked his stomach, eight, nine, ten, eleven times, until one tremendous kick in the pit of the stomach brought blood gushing from the man’s mouth; he screamed and fell down. The guard continued kicking him in the face, head, groin and legs. The twitching form at last lay quite inert and the pavement was quickly thick with blood.’66

  Hundreds of prisoners had been murdered each month in Mauthausen by similar savagery. By April 1945, there was no means of washing in the camp. ‘At the time we were swarming with lice and filth,’ the fifteen-year-old Yehuda Bakon later recalled. ‘I remember that we would sometimes pull out some two hundred lice on each one of us. When I would sit down and try to rise I would go dizzy and see nothing for a couple of minutes. That is how weak we were.’ During an Allied air raid, a bomb hit the prisoners’ camp, ‘and I saw, on the following morning,’ Bakon recalled, ‘people eating human flesh.’ Some of the camp inmates were eating the flesh of those killed in the air raid.67

  On May 1, as the American army approached Mauthausen, the last death marches of the war began, from Mauthausen itself, and from the nearby camps of Gusen and St Valentin, to Gunskirchen and Ebensee. Hundreds of marchers fell to the ground as they marched, dying in the mud from sheer exhaustion.68

  Among those who reached Gunskirchen alive was the Hungarian writer and journalist, Geza Havas. But on May 5, only a few hours before the Americans arrived, he died.69

  At Ebensee, as the American armies approached, all thirty thousand prisoners were ordered into a tunnel packed with explosives. As the historian of Mauthausen, Evelyn le Chěne, has written: ‘The prisoners, to a man, blankly refused. The SS guards were paralysed with indecision. The hordes of humans swayed and murmured. For the first time since their arrest, the prisoners who were not already dying saw the possibility that they might just survive the war. Understandably, they neither wished to be blown up in the tunnel, nor mown down by SS machine guns for refusing. But they knew that in these last days, many of the SS had left and been replaced by Ethnic Germans.’ A quick consultation with some of the officers under his command made it clear to the commandant ‘that they too were reluctant either to force the men into the tunnel, or to shoot them down. With the war all but over, they were thinking of the future, and the punishment they would receive for the slaughter of so many human beings was something they still wished—even with their already stained hands—to avoid. And so the prisoners won the day.’70

  Among those who had survived the last days at Ebensee was Meir Pesker, a Polish Jew from Bielsk Podlaski who had been deported to Majdanek, then to Plaszow, then to Mauthausen. ‘We saw that the Americans were coming,’ he wrote, ‘and so did the Germans.’ His account continued:

  Suddenly a German Kapo appeared, a bloated primeval beast whose cruelty included the bare-handed murder of dozens of Jews. Suddenly he had become weak and emotional and he began to plead with us not to turn him in for he had ‘done many favours for the Jews to whom that madman Hitler had sought to do evil’. As he finished his pleading three boys overpowered and killed him, there in the same camp where he had been sole ruler.

  We killed every one of the German oppressors who fell into our hands, before the arrival of the Americans in the enclosure of the camp. This was our revenge for our loved ones whose blood had been spilled at the hands of these heathen German beasts.

  It was only by a stroke of luck—even if tainted luck—that I had survived.71

  Among those at Ebensee on May 5, as the Germans prepared to flee, was Dr Miklos Nyiszli, the eye-witness of Dr Mengele’s brutality at Birkenau. Like all his fellow prisoners at Ebensee, he too had survived the death marches, including one from central Germany to Mauthausen on which three thousand had set off, and one thousand been killed on the march. ‘On May 5th,’ he later recalled, ‘a white flag flew from the Ebensee watch-tower. It was finished. They had laid down their arms. The sun was shining brightly when, at nine o’clock, an American light tank, with three soldiers on board, arrived and took possession of the camp. We were free.’72

  Once more the moment of freedom was one of deep shock for the liberators. When American troops reached Mauthausen, they found nearly ten thousand bodies in a huge communal grave. Of the 110,000 survivors, 28,000 were Jews. Among the survivors was Sidney Fahn, the last of the five Czech Jews whose odyssey, beginning in Bratislava, had taken them to the Aegean island of Rhodes and the ‘selection’ on the ramp at Birkenau. At liberation, Sidney Fahn weighed eighty pounds.

  Confronted by so many starving skeletons, well-meaning American soldiers brought chocolate, jam and other rich foods which the camp survivors ate, but which many could not digest, and died. Fortunately for Sidney Fahn, he was too weak to stagger from the hospital bed in order to claim his share of these enticing foods, ‘and so again’, he later recalled, ‘I survived: again my fate intervened.’73

  Here, repeated in every liberated camp, was yet another insane version of reality for thousands of Jews: food, which had for so long been the life-giving substance, longed for with such desperation, was yet again the final blow. These emaciated men and women, here, as in other camps, were no longer used to such food, nor could their digestive systems cope with it. It was too rich, too fatty, too filling, and it killed, in the first hectic day of liberation, as surely as the bullets and the rifle butts of the day before.

  More than three thousand of the 110,000 survivors at Mauthausen and its sub-camps died after liberation.74 Among the dead was Andor Endre Gelleri, the thirty-eight-year-old Hungarian novelist. He died of typhus, two days after liberation.75 When Geza Gryn died four days after liberation, his son Hugo was too weak even to follow his father’s corpse.76

  The last of the death marches and death trains were still under German control, in the dwindling areas not yet captured by the Allies. In Theresienstadt, on May 4, the International Red Cross took over the camp, and on the following day, the last of the SS men fled. Only in the Sudeten mountains were the last of the death trains and death marches still within the dwindling orbit of the disintegrating Reich. One such death march had left Schwarzheide on April 18, then continued in two open railway wagons towards Theresienstadt. On May 6 the wagons had reached Leitmeritz, only three miles from Theresienstadt. There, with its SS escort still in command, it came to a halt.

  ‘Starving in open vans,’ Alfred Kantor, a deportee on one of the two railway trucks, noted on May 6, and he added, ‘Second van reports: sixteen more deaths and ten dying of cold and hunger.’ No engine was available for the train. But the guard was ‘still at his post’. When German railwaymen asked the SS chief if they could feed the prisoners with hot soup, the SS chief ‘gives in to their request to help’. That night, the SS man ‘yells “Everybody out!” Many dead bodies are brought down by the living, to the side of the track.’77

  On May 8 the German armies surrendered to the Allies. ‘Our guards leave us to our fate and flee,’ Alfred Kantor noted at eleven o’clock that evening. ‘We can’t believe it’s over! 175 out of 1,000 are alive. Red Cross truck appears—but can’t take 175 men. We spend the night on the road—but in a dream. It’s over.’78

  EPILOGUE

  * * *

  ‘I will tell the world’

  The war was over; the systematic murder of six million Jews was also at an end. But its reverberations continue to this day. Too many scars had been inflicted, too much blood had been spilled, for 8 May 1945 to mark the end of the story, or the end
of tragedy for the two hundred thousand survivors of the ghettos, camps and death marches.1 On May 10, in Flensburg naval hospital, SS General Richard Glueks, head of the concentration camp directorate, was found dead. It was not clear whether Glueks had committed suicide, or had been killed by ‘Jewish avengers’ who had already begun to track down and to kill a number of those who had carried out the policy of mass murder.2

  A small amount of vengeance there undoubtedly was, but vengeance was the path of a minority. ‘Sometimes’, Israel Gutman, a survivor of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Gunskirchen has written, the ‘desire and expectation of revenge’ were the ‘hope’ that kept camp inmates alive ‘during the final and most arduous stages of camp life’, but, once the war was over, ‘we find only a few cases of revenge, or organized vengeful activity on the part of the survivors.’3 As Dr Zalman Grinberg, a survivor of the Kovno ghetto and the death marches, told those survivors who were still living in huts in Dachau on May 27, nearly a month after liberation, but a day nevertheless on which thirty-five Jews had died as a result of continuing illness and weakness:

  Hitler has lost every battle on every front except the battle against defenceless and unarmed men, women and children. He won the war against the Jews of Europe. He carried out this war with the help of the German nation.

  However, we do not want revenge. If we took this vengeance it would mean we would fall to the depths of ethics and morals the German nation has been in these past ten years.

  We are not able to slaughter women and children! We are not able to burn millions of people! We are not able to starve hundreds of thousands!4

  On May 20, Henry Slamovich, one of the Jews from Plaszow who had been saved by Oscar Schindler, returned with about twenty-five other young Jews, all of them survivors, to his home town of Dzialoszyce. ‘We thought to ourselves,’ he later recalled, ‘we had survived. We are alive, we are going to enjoy freedom.’ Even though his own home was now lived in by non-Jews, Slamovich was determined somehow to rebuild his life in his own town. But within a week, four of the twenty-five Jews who had returned were murdered by Polish anti-Semites. The rest of the young Jews realized they would have to leave. ‘It was sad, very sad,’ Slamovich recalled, thirty-five years later, in his home in San Francisco.5

  In the aftermath of the war, there were many such personal tragedies. Returning to her home in Lodz, the former physician-in-chief of the ghetto hospital, Dr Maria Ginsberg-Rabinowicz, committed suicide on learning that her daughter had not survived.6 Seeking to return to their village of Choroszcza, near Bialystok, on May 22, two brothers, Icchok and Mejer Sznajder, were in a train which was stopped by Polish thugs. Mejer was beaten, taken away, and never seen again. He and Icchok had survived the Bialystok ghetto and Birkenau. ‘Icchok suffers depression as a result of his brother’s death,’ Dr Szymon Datner noted seventeen months later, ‘his brother with whom he had lived through such terrible times.’7

  Liberation and safety had proved inconstant partners. At Neustadt-Glowen, where Russian troops had taken over from the Americans within a few days of liberation, the Jewish women understood just how much Russian blood had been shed in nearly four years of fighting. ‘They had paid dearly for their victory,’ Lena Berg recalled, ‘and they celebrated with all the forthrightness and lack of restraint characteristic of Slavs.’ Those whom the Russians had liberated were recovering their health, their hair, even their looks. Lena Berg’s account continued:

  The camp teemed with amorous couples, but the majority of the liberated women, despite their sympathy for their liberators and admiration for the Red Army’s heroism, were reluctant to express their gratitude with their bodies. The Russians were unable to understand that and the situation led to sharp, and occasionally tragic, conflicts. ‘Aren’t you our girls?’ the Russians would say, surprised by the reluctance. ‘We shed our blood for you. We liberated you, and you refuse us a mere trifle?’

  Intoxicated by victory and often literally drunk, they felt they were entitled to anything and everything. Several times they took women by brute force, and I shall never forget the heart-rending screams and tears of a fifteen-year-old girl raped by a Soviet private in the barracks in front of hundreds of women. ‘No! No! I don’t want to!’ the girl raved. We heard those words for a long time afterwards.8

  Many survivors were to be haunted by memories of these immediate post-war months. Returning to Poland after their liberation in Theresienstadt, fifteen-year-old Ben Helfgott and his twelve-year-old cousin Gershon were still emaciated, as they worked their way northward. Ben Helfgott later recalled how, while passing through Czechoslovakia, they had been showered ‘with food, warmth and sympathy’. This gave them a sense of well-being, as they reached Czestochowa, their first stop in Poland. The two boys waited at the railway station for the train to their home town of Piotrkow. In Ben Helfgott’s words:

  Hundreds of people were milling around talking and gesticulating excitedly when suddenly two Polish officers accosted us. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ Somewhat taken aback and surprised, we replied, ‘Can’t you see? We are survivors from the concentration camps and we are returning to our home town.’ To our amazement, they asked for some proof which we immediately produced in the form of an Identity Card which had been issued to us in Theresienstadt, the place of our liberation.

  They were still not satisfied and ordered us to come with them to the police station for a routine check. It seemed rather strange to us, but we had nothing to fear. Fortified by our experience in Czechoslovakia and believing in a better world now that the monster that tried to destroy the people of Europe was vanquished, we walked along with the two officers chatting animatedly about the great future that was in store for the people of Poland.

  The streets were deserted and darkness prevailed as there was still a curfew after midnight and street lighting was not yet restored. My cousin and I were tiring as we carried our cases which contained clothing we had received from the Red Cross.

  Casually, I asked, ‘Where is the police station? It seems so far.’ The reply was devastating and shattering: ‘Shut your f… mouth you f… Jew’!!!!!

  I was stunned, hardly believing what I had just heard. How could I have been so naive; so gullible? The Nazi cancer was removed but its tentacles were widespread and deeply rooted. How had I lulled myself into a false sense of security?

  I believed what I wanted to believe. I had experienced and witnessed so much cruelty and bestiality yet I refused to accept that man is wicked. I was grown up in so many ways, yet I was still a child dreaming of a beautiful world. I was suddenly brought back to reality and began to fear the worst. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, no one to turn to for help.

  At last we stopped at a house where one of the officers knocked at the gate which was opened by a young Polish woman. We entered a room which was dimly lit by a paraffin lamp, and we were ordered to open our suitcases. They took most of the clothing and announced that they would now take us to the police station. It seemed inconceivable to me that this was their real intention, but we had no choice and we had to follow events as they unfolded.

  As we walked in the dark and deserted streets, I tried desperately to renew conversation so as to restore the personal and human touch, but it was to no avail. I endeavoured to conceal and ignore my true feelings and innermost thoughts, pretending to believe that they were acting in the name of the law, but they became strangely uncommunicative.

  After what seemed an eternity, we arrived at a place that looked fearfully foreboding. The buildings were derelict and abandoned; there was no sign of human habitation; all one could hear was the howling of the wind, the barking of the dogs and the mating calls of the cats.

  The two officers menacingly extracted the pistols from their holsters, and ordered us to walk to the nearest wall.

  Both my cousin and I felt rooted to the ground unable to move.

  When, at last, I recovered my composure, I emitted a torrent of desperate appeals and entreaties. I ple
aded with them, ‘Haven’t we suffered enough? Haven’t the Nazis caused enough destruction and devastation to all of us? Our common enemy is destroyed and the future is ours. We have survived against all odds and why are you intent on promoting the heinous crimes that the Nazis have unleashed. Don’t we speak the same language as you? Didn’t we imbibe the same culture as you?’

  I went on in the same vein speaking agitatedly for some time. Eventually, one of the officers succumbed to my pleas and said, ‘Let’s leave them. They are after all still boys.’ As they put away their pistols, they made a remark which still rings loud in my ears. ‘You can consider yourselves very lucky. We have killed many of your kind. You are the first ones we have left alive.’ With this comment they disappeared into the dark of the night.9

  Not every journey homeward was so brutal. In July 1945 David Shmueli, a Rumanian-born Jew who had served in the British army during the war, learned that his father, Yehiel Shmueli, was in Dachau, among the survivors. David’s sister Rachel later recorded:

  My brother immediately ran to his commander and received permission to go to Dachau. There he entered the office and found the list containing my father’s name. He entered the shack and immediately noticed Father standing at the sink and washing dishes.