Thursday 4 November 1943 was a wild day, with a raging wind tearing the autumn leaves from the trees around Poniatowa Camp, blanketing the roads with a coloured carpet. Rumours of imminent deportation had circulated in the camp for a few days. The bell signalling the start of the workday rang at 5.00am. There was turmoil inside and outside the wooden barracks buildings. A kapo yelled: ‘The Appell [roll call] is at 6, everyone outside.’10 The single people and married couples quickly grabbed small bags, provisions and washing kits and stumbled outside, some dragging along confused and crying children. They marched hurriedly into the main camp, expecting to form up for counting. But today was very different.
‘After a few metres we suddenly notice Ukrainians training their guns on us from both sides of the road,’ said Ludwika Fiszer. ‘We continue in haste and I realize that we are surrounded by SS also pointing their guns at us. Before I could understand what was going on, I heard an SS saying, “Why don’t you run a little?”.’11 The long column of prisoners jogged half a kilometre until the soldiers slowed them down. ‘Once we were allowed to slow the pace we could glimpse at the SS soldiers; they were wearing grey coats with green collars. Some said that these were Wehrmacht soldiers of the regular German Army. We couldn’t imagine the reason for [the] use of so many soldiers and guns.’12 In fact, Fiszer and her fellow prisoners were not observing SS or Wehrmacht, but rather members of Reserve Police Battalion 101. Members of the Ordnungspolizei wore field grey uniforms that had dark green collars, brown cuffs and army rather than SS rank badges.13
Men and women were hastily separated so that they could be processed. The SS and Ukrainian Trawnikis shoved thousands into more wooden barracks, eventually cramming 13,000 people inside. Pandemonium reigned. Fiszer recalled: ‘Mothers lost children, wives lost their husbands. Everybody was searching for someone. Parentless children cried endlessly.’14 Some mothers had left their children back in their accommodation blocks, but these hapless innocents were rounded up by Ukrainians and shoved into the confused and milling throngs inside the huts. Fiszer managed to briefly find her husband in the chaos. He told her that the camp was being liquidated and the men would go probably on foot to some unknown destination, while the women would be sent away by train. Fiszer’s husband completely broke down at this point, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘As my husband was ushered out he promised to search for me in all the camps.’ That was the last she ever saw of him.
Once the men had been taken away, the women were next. SS troops arranged the women into groups of fifty and sent them out of the buildings. This was done in almost complete silence after the hysteria of earlier had subsided. Once the women had left, SS men made a thorough search of the accommodation, tearing apart beds and linen and rifling abandoned suitcases for loot.
Just as Fiszer and her daughter were leaving the barrack, a fusillade of shots rang out close by. Everyone looked around bewildered, but only a few had guessed at what was actually happening.
One group that understood completely what was happening at Poniatowa that day was the small ZOB resistance unit led by Meilech Finekind. Working very quickly, Finekind and his men broke out their few weapons and barricaded the doors and windows to their barrack. They were under no illusions about their chances, but they had decided to fight it out with the Germans and die rather than be passively led to their deaths.
The women were ushered in groups of fifty into a hut where they were compelled under threat of immediate execution to hand over all of their valuables. After this, the SS ordered them to strip naked. Led outside, the batches of crying, shivering and terrified women and children were taken to the ditches that they had themselves dug. Waiting for them were members of Reserve Police Battalion 101, pistols in hand. The women could see that the pit was full of the naked, bleeding corpses of those who had already been shot. Realizing that she was about to die, Fiszer quickly lay down in the pit with her little girl, to spare the child the appalling sights that surrounded them: ‘My little girl asked me to cover her eyes because she was afraid. I hugged her head and covered her eyes as she asked me to. With my right hand I held her tight. That is how we lay with our heads bent down.’15
Within seconds of lying down, the Ordnungspolizei opened fire. Several reserve policemen stood on the edge of the pit, each carefully shooting a set number of people in the head with their pistols. ‘The shots were aimed at us,’ said Fiszer. ‘I felt heat in my left arm. A bullet had passed through it penetrating my 10-year old daughter’s skull … she never even shivered … I feel pain in my head but I have no recollection if I passed out or not. I hear my neighbour’s dying groan.’16
Over 18,000 Jews died at Poniatowa on 4 November 1943, part of the wider 43,000 Jews that the Germans executed as part of Aktion Erntefest. But not every one of them died in the murder pits that they had been forced to dig. A small number tried to resist, initially taking the SS by surprise. Firing broke out from one wooden barrack at Poniatowa Camp, the Germans scattering in shock at the pistol shots aimed at them. But the small ZOB unit was trapped. Some who had managed to escape from the round-up before the firing started had set fire to some of the factory warehouses, causing extensive damage. But the rest, under the command of Meilech Finekind, did what they could to hold the Germans’ attention, sheltering behind the thin wooden walls of their barrack. The SS quickly reorganized themselves and launched a devastating barrage of automatic and rifle fire at the hut, which was soon riddled with bullet holes. As sporadic firing continued from the Jewish fighters inside, the Germans decided to finish the matter. SS men crept close enough to set the building on fire. Any Jews who tried to flee the heat and flames were immediately gunned down, while the rest all burned to death inside the hut. The fire that the ZOB started spread to the huge pile of clothes and belongings that the Germans had taken from their victims, and by the time darkness fell a massive conflagration lit up the night sky over the place of execution – it was a scene from The Inferno.
Ludwiga Fiszer was one of a handful of Jews to survive the mass executions, buried under the murdered corpses of her fellow workers. Her daughter and husband both perished. Wounded and naked, the heartbroken and confused Fiszer waited until night had fallen to crawl out of the execution pit and escape to the woods, where she managed to find several other women survivors. They eventually found help from some local Poles.
The next day, the SS decided to cremate the bodies of the dead, to try and preserve the secret of their crimes at Poniatowa from the advancing Red Army. Two hundred male Jews who had been spared execution were now ordered to empty the pits and cremate the bodies on giant pyres, the technique already well perfected after the clearing up of the site of the Babi Yar Massacre. The Jews flatly refused to help the Germans. Commandant Hering reacted to this act of resistance by having the entire workforce shot. Eventually, a Sonderkommando of Jewish prisoners was brought to Poniatowa from Majdenek to cleanse the site of the massacre. But enough men and women had managed to survive to ensure that what had happened at Poniatowa would never be forgotten. They were eventually able to bear witness.
As for the perpetrators of this appalling war crime, their fates were mixed. SS-Hauptsturmführer Gottlieb Hering joined most members of Aktion Reinhard in Italy, where they were sent by Himmler to fight partisans. He survived the war but died under mysterious circumstances in the waiting room of St Catherine’s Hospital, Stetten im Remstal, on 9 October 1945, aged 58. SS-Oberscharführer Gley later served with the SS in Prague and was captured by the US Army in Pilsen on 10 May 1945. Released in December 1947, Gley died in October 1985. SS-Oberscharführer Erich Muhlsfeldt, the young psychopath who was brought in as an expert to oversee the massacre at Poniatowa, transferred back to Auschwitz. He was arrested at the war’s end and handed over to the Poles. Placed on trial in Krakow before the Supreme National Tribunal in 1947, Muhlsfeldt was found guilty and sentenced to death. He was hanged on 28 January 1948. Reserve Police Battalion 101 was responsible for a total of 83,000 Jewish deaths during the
war, an astounding figure considering that the unit never numbered more than 500 men. Its commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was captured by the British and sent to Neuengamme Internment Camp. Trapp was extradited to Poland alongside three other Reserve Police Battalion 101 officers, tried and sentenced to death. Trapp and one other officer were hanged on 18 November 1948. In 1964, several other members of the unit were arrested in West Germany and placed on trial for mass murder. Five men received prison sentences ranging from five to eight years, six were found guilty but received no sentence and no one else out of the many hundreds who served in the unit were ever prosecuted. Considering the gravity and breadth of the unit’s crimes, it was an appalling failure on the part of post-war justice.
Chapter 9
‘Bearers of Secrets’
‘We reached the stage where we could eat and drink among the corpses, totally indifferent, utterly detached from our emotions.’
Shaul Chazan
Auschwitz Sonderkommando
The name ‘Auschwitz’ now represents the ultimate in German wartime cruelty towards the peoples that Hitler subjugated and terrorized. Confusingly, there were three Auschwitz camps operating at the same time. The original Auschwitz was a converted Polish Army barracks. It housed Polish political prisoners, Soviet PoWs and other enemies of the state, including Jews, and contained a single gas chamber. But Auschwitz I soon became very overcrowded, so Himmler authorized the construction of a vast new camp nearby that consisted of rows of wooden barracks, gas chambers and crematoria, designated Auschwitz II, and known by the SS as Birkenau. A railway line led into the vast enclosure through a large red brick gatehouse, through extensive perimeter fences that were carefully guarded by SS positioned in towers and patrolling the wire. Row upon row of wooden barrack huts stretched in all directions, the camp divided into sub-camps that were fenced off from each other. On the western extremity of the camp were four large crematoria buildings, their tall red brick chimneys poking over the tops of trees and hedges planted to shield the buildings from the rest of the camp.
The third camp to carry the infamous name was Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz. This was another huge hutted enclosure to provide living quarters for the tens of thousands of slave labourers who worked in the equally vast I.G. Farben factory nearby.
Inside Auschwitz-Birkenau laboured the Sonderkommandos, groups of prisoners organized into day and night shifts under strict SS supervision. Their task was the disposal of the corpses of the gassing victims. The men who worked on the Sonderkommandos had been given no choice; they had simply been selected by the SS from the transport trains that arrived regularly at the camp bringing fresh victims for the Nazis. The system of selection was virtually the same as that conducted at the Aktion Reinhard camps at Sobibor and Treblinka II.
The SS labelled the Sonderkommando staff ‘Hilflinge’, or ‘Helpers’, or more formally ‘Arbeitsjuden’, meaning ‘Jews for Work’. They had another name for them that summed up what these men were forced to do for the SS: Geheimstrager – ‘Bearers of Secrets’. Because of the nature of their tasks, and what they knew of the German extermination programme, the Sonderkommandos were kept in strict isolation from the rest of the camp population. By the summer of 1944, over 600 men were employed working at Crematoria II, III, IV and V at Birkenau. Their grisly duties included shaving the hair off bodies, removing gold teeth, sorting personal possessions, burning the bodies in the crematoria ovens and disposing of the bones and ashes. Most were Jews, but a few Soviet prisoners of war were also employed on the Sonderkommandos.
The SS deliberately kept the men who were selected to work as Sonderkommandos healthy and strong. They had to be in order to perform their vital tasks, which included constant heavy manual labour. They lived in separate barracks from the rest of the slave labour at Birkenau, wore civilian clothes rather than the striped concentration camp uniforms and could supplement their diet with food taken from those who were dispatched to the gas chambers. ‘Relatively speaking we lacked nothing, we had access to reasonable food, clothing and accommodations,’1 said Greek Jew Yosef Sachar, who was aged 20. Yaakov Silberberg, a Polish Jew, arrived at Auschwitz at the end of 1942. On his first day working on a Sonderkommando he met Kapo Shlomo Kirschenbaum. Silberberg told Kirschenbaum that he couldn’t survive and was contemplating suicide. Large numbers committed suicide when they realized what they would have to do, while others adjusted to the grisly work in the hope of surviving and bearing witness. Silberberg recounted: ‘Kirschenbaum told me that he too felt the same way when he was sent to the Sonderkommando, but was able to adapt. He said that I too would be able to adapt. He gave me two stiff drinks. I fell asleep, and after waking the next day I felt differently about it, and did not kill myself.’2
Sakar, who had arrived at Auschwitz in April 1944, worked in Crematoria II, in the room where arrivals were ordered to strip. He was asked why he didn’t tell the people that they were going to be killed, and replied: ‘What would have been the point? They were totally defenceless. What was the point of frightening them for no good reason?’3
Many of the other prisoners in Auschwitz considered the Sonderkommandos to be beyond the pale, to be, in effect, collaborators with the Germans in the destruction of the Jews. But in reality, those men who were assigned to these work units had no choice in the matter. If they refused, they would have been executed, and the determination to survive, even for one more day, meant that most of these men submitted to SS demands. Unfortunately, the Germans had no intention of allowing the Sonderkommandos to bear witness to their crimes – entire Sonderkommando units were liquidated every few months and replaced with fresh workers for this express reason. Working for the Sonderkommandos did not ensure survival in Auschwitz – it merely deferred execution by a few weeks or months. This fact meant that the Sonderkommando leaders called for an uprising to be mounted as soon as possible.
Due to the vast size of the Auschwitz complex of camps and factories, a resistance organization had soon flourished. It included not only Jews, but also Poles, political prisoners and Soviet PoWs. The organization was called the ‘Auschwitz Struggle Group’. The Jewish section of the organization had been established in 1942 by arrivals from Ciechanow and Mlawa, led by Motek Bielowicz.4
The Jewish section agitated for a camp-wide revolt against the SS. The wider resistance organization ‘demanded restraint and warned that an uprising under the prevailing conditions would induce the Germans to liquidate immediately all prisoners in both parts of Auschwitz’.5 But the leaders of the Auschwitz Struggle Group acknowledged that for the Sonderkommandos working in the gas chambers and crematoria, time was a luxury that they did not have. Sooner rather than later, the SS would liquidate them and bring in fresh prisoners. ‘We did not believe we would survive,’ said Sonderkommando Shlomo Dragon. ‘Towards the end it was clear that shipments [of Jews] were becoming smaller since there were no Jews left to kill. I was sure that the entire Jewish nation would be eradicated.’6
Such sentiments expressed by the Sonderkommandos did not sway the Auschwitz Struggle Group. ‘We could not take part because what was for them the only hope of being saved was liable to be for the others an act of suicide,’7 said Bruno Braun, one of the Struggle Group leaders. Austrian Ernst Burger, a member of the Auschwitz Underground, was sent to talk to the Sonderkommando leadership. He tried to appease them, but the Sonderkommandos continued to demand action, while the Struggle Group called for restraint and patience.8
Elsewhere at Auschwitz, the Germans faced a rebellion from a completely unexpected group of prisoners. As well as imprisoning tens of thousands of Jews for use as slave labour, Auschwitz also received other ‘undesirables’ that the Nazis had deemed racially inferior. The next biggest group after the Jews was Romani and Sinti peoples, collectively termed ‘gypsies’. Commandant SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss had established a ‘Gypsy Camp’ that consisted of thirty-two residential and six sanitation blocks containing, between February and July 1944, a total
of 20,967 people. Earlier in 1944, Höss had ordered the acceleration of work underway in one section of Birkenau, primarily the construction of ramps and rails for a three-line branch of the Auschwitz-Katowice railway line leading to Crematoria I and II. It was intended that Hungarian Jews would be processed through these new rail lines to the gas chambers. SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Möll, German overseer of all the Birkenau crematoria, had to ensure, over a period of just one week, that all repairs were made to the crematoria buildings, all building work was completed and undressing rooms erected near Bunker II and behind Crematoria V. Two large pits were also excavated.
Space also had to be made in Birkenau for those Hungarian Jews that were selected to join Sonderkommandos and slave labour details.
On 15 May 1944, Höss decided to kill everyone in the Gypsy Family Camp to free up space in Camp B-II-e. But for once, the German plan did not proceed smoothly. Incredibly, an SS man objected to the treatment the gypsies were to face and tried to help them. Thirty-year-old SS-Unterscharführer Georg Bonigut was the ‘Reporting Officer’ for the Gypsy Family Camp. He was an ethnic German of Yugoslavian origin. The position of gypsies was complex within the Nazi racial hierarchy. They were not Jews, and many were German citizens deported to Auschwitz. Many of the older men were First World War veterans who had fought in the German Army.
Holocaust Heroes Page 15