by Yitzhak Arad
They all disembarked from the freight cars in perfect order and serenity. Attractive, well-dressed women, children as pretty as dolls, gentlemen tidying up their lapels. . . . Miete found three German-speaking Greeks and appointed them translators; they moved about with armbands embellished with the Greek colors. Not a single one of the new arrivals had grasped where he was and what his fate was to be. The truth only penetrated when they were being led naked, supposedly to the baths, and suddenly the first blows began to fall. . . .20
Wiernik describes the Yugoslav and Greek Jews at the gas chambers:
Transports from Bulgaria began to arrive. . . . They were eliminated like the others. The Bulgarian Jews were tall, strong and manly. When we looked at a man like that, we didn’t want to believe that only twenty minutes later he would end his life in the gas chamber. These fine-looking Jews would hardly let the hangmen kill them so easily.
A small quantity of gas was introduced into the chambers, and the asphyxiation process went on all night. They suffered for a long time until they breathed their last. They also suffered terribly before entering the chambers. The hangmen were jealous of the victims’ fine appearance and maltreated them that much more. . . .21
France
The deportation of Jews from France to the death camps in occupied Poland began on March 27, 1942, and continued sporadically until the summer of 1944, close to the liberation of France. The deportations were carried out in full cooperation with the French Vichy government, which divided the Jews into two categories: (1) native French Jews and those who had been naturalized for a long time; (2) refugees, stateless Jews, or those unprotected by a foreign power. The Vichy government protected the first category, and few of them were deported, but they cooperated and handed over for deportation the Jews belonging to the second category.
Over 75,000 Jews from France were deported to the death camps. The deportations were carried out in freight cars, and most of the transports departed from the Drancy internment camp, near Paris. There were about eighty transports, with about 1,000 people each. The lists of these transports, which include the names, places, and dates of birth of the deportees, were preserved. The destination of most of the transports was Auschwitz, but four transports in March 1943 were sent to the Lublin district. Transports nos. 50 and 51, with 2,001 people, almost all of them males from the Gurs internment camp, left on March 4 and 6, 1943. They reached Majdanek, where part of the people were left for work; the others were sent to Sobibor and murdered there. Transport no. 52, with Jews from Marseille, left Drancy on March 23 for Sobibor. Transport no. 53 departed on March 25 1943.22
Josef Dunitz, who was in transport no. 53, testified:
I remember that we left Drancy on March 25,1943. We traveled four days and arrived at Sobibor on March 29/30, 1943. We passed through Majdanek and the same day came to Sobibor. Before we left Drancy, the Germans told us that we were going to Poland for work. They said that we should take part in the war effort and not walk around the cities of France. We were just being tricked. The transports that left Drancy were quite big, 1,000 people in each, fifty people in a freight car. . . . We were a group of friends from Drancy, and, in spite of the fact that we did not know what awaited us there, we wanted to escape. We wanted to jump from the train when the other people in the car were sleeping, otherwise they would try to prevent the escape, as they were afraid of collective punishment. We made a hole in the floor. We started to jump, without knowing that in the last car were Gestapo with machine guns. When the Germans understood that people were escaping, they started to shoot. Some were killed. I do not know how many of those who jumped succeeded in escaping. We reached Sobibor. . . .
After we left the train, some SS men ordered that thirty people be selected for work. We did not know what was better, to be among the thirty people taken for work or among those who were going in the other direction. Where were they going? I saw that one of my friends from Drancy was among the thirty people taken to work. I joined this group. The Germans counted and found that we were thirty-one people. “Let there be thirty-one,” he said. In this way I remained in the group. . . .23
Josef Dunitz and one other man, Antonius Bardach, both of them from transport no. 53, were the only survivors from the Jews deported from France to Sobibor.
Holland
The mass deportation of the Jews from Holland to Auschwitz and Sobibor began in July 1942. The Jews marked for deportation were concentrated mainly in the Westerbork camp with some of them in the Vught camp. The deportations were carried out by the German authorities in Holland and with the full collaboration of the Dutch “Green Police.” About 105,000 Jews from Holland were deported in ninety-eight passenger trains between July 15, 1942, and September 3, 1944. Sixty-four transports, with about 60,000 Jews, were sent to Auschwitz. Nineteen transports, with at least 34,313 Jews, were sent to Sobibor. There is a possibility that some transports marked for Auschwitz eventually reached Sobibor. The other transports were sent to Theresienstadt and Bergen-Belsen.24
The deportation from Westerbork to Sobibor was carried out between March 5 and July 23, 1943. Selma Wijnberg wrote in her testimony:
In 1942 I was arrested with my family and interned in Westerbork. We were 8,000 prisoners, and the German officers in charge announced that we were going to work in Poland or the Ukraine, and we were to take with us shoes, clothes, and food. Letters were arriving from Wlodawa confirming that life was pleasant in Poland. Later I knew it was a lie, as the prisoners were forced to sign printed postcards. The name Sobibor was never mentioned. I did not want to go to Poland, and I ran away from Westerbork. I hid for a long time among Dutch families, but a Volksdeutsche denounced me. I spent two months in an Amsterdam prison. . . . In March 1943 we were on our way to Poland. Many of us hoped to meet our families there, again. Sick Jews were treated during the journey; German nurses distributed medicines to patients. We reached Sobibor on April 9. . . . A German chose twenty-eight women to work in camp no. 2.25
Ilana Safran testified:
At Vught there were many Jewish families and many children Later we were transferred to Westerbork, the place where the Dutch Jews were concentrated, and we remained there for one week. In April 1943 we left for Poland. The journey to Poland was dreadful; the prisoners from Western countries believed that we were going to labor camps. . . . When we reached Sobibor, a selection took place—young girls were placed on one side, the others, including children, went to the gas chambers. We were given postcards. “Write to your families that you have arrived safely.” I wrote a card to some Dutch friends; it reached its destination and I found it after the war.26
According to information gathered by the Red Cross, from all the transports from Holland that arrived in Sobibor, only nineteen persons survived.27
Dov Freiberg described the arrival of a hospital, complete with doctors and patients:
I remember the arrival of a hospital from Holland. The patients were carried on stretchers, and the whole hospital team accompanied them. A table was put on the square, and a doctor, perhaps the director of the hospital, was sitting there. Doctors and nurses went around, checked the patients, gave injections, served water and pills. The director was busy writing and giving some notes to the nurses. There was an impression that the whole area had turned into a hospital. After a few hours there were no more patients or hospital personnel.28
Leon Feldhendler, a prisoner in Sobibor, wrote about the treatment of the transports from Western Europe:
These transports were treated entirely differently. They arrived in passenger trains. The Bahnhof kommando [platform workers] helped them carry their baggage to a special barrack near the station. The deception was carried on to such an extent that they were given tickets in order to reclaim their baggage. On the square was a special table with writing instruments to write letters. They were ordered by the SS men to write that they were in Wlodawa and to ask the recipients to send them letters to Wlodawa. Sometimes answers to these letters were inde
ed sent. These letters had a double purpose: to make the recipients believe that the deportation did not mean liquidation and to reveal the addresses of the families of the deported.29
The Jews who were brought to the Operation Reinhard camps from Western, Central, and Southern Europe had never heard of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, and knew nothing of their destination or the fate awaiting them there. They believed what they were told—that they were being sent to labor camps in Eastern Europe, or that they would be employed on agricultural farms. Even after they had arrived in these camps, until they were actually in the gas chambers, they did not realize what was being done to them. Approximately 135,000 Jews from European countries other than Poland and the Soviet Union were murdered in Operation Reinhard death camps.
20
The Extermination of Gypsies
The Gypsies originated in northern India and are part of the Indo-Germanic Aryan race. The Gypsies left India over 1,000 years ago and came to Europe through Asia Minor to the Balkan peninsula. They reached Central Europe in the fifteenth century. They did not constitute a homogeneous people, but split into tribes, each with its own king, dialect, and beliefs. Eventually, they adopted Christianity. During the generations of wandering over Europe as nomadic tribes, they endured prejudice, expulsions from one country to another, and persecutions. Anti-Gypsy laws and restrictions were imposed on them in many countries, particularly in Germany and Austria.
For Nazi Germany the Gypsies became a racist dilemma. The Gypsies were Aryans, but in the Nazi mind there were contradictions between what they regarded as the superiority of the Aryan race and their image of the Gypsies. Their treatment of the Gypsies was an indication of the lack of sincerity with which the Nazis regarded their racial theories. Nazi racial “specialists” and “scientists” had to find a way to prove that Gypsies were not Aryans and thus lay the ideological basis for their persecution. It was not an easy task, as they had to deny ethnographic and anthropologic facts. But Professor Hans Gunther, a leading Nazi racial scientist, found a definition that could solve the Nazis’ racial dilemma. He wrote:
The Gypsies have indeed retained some elements from their Nordic home, but they are descended from the lowest classes of the population in that region. In the course of their migration, they absorbed the blood of the surrounding peoples and thus became an Oriental, West-Asiatic racial mixture with an addition of Indian, mid-Asiatic, and European strains. Their nomadic mode of living is a result of this mixture. The Gypsies will generally affect Europe as aliens.1
Notwithstanding this definition, the Nazis did not feel confident that ideologically they could base the persecution of the Gypsies on racist theories alone. Using the prevailing negative stereotype of the Gypsies among large segments of the population, they preferred to justify the persecutions of the Gypsies by defining them as “asocial elements.” The Gypsies were regarded as aliens in Nazi German society; they endangered the purity of Aryan blood and the public health. Many restrictions, which included special identity cards, were imposed on them even before the outbreak of World War II. After the beginning of the war, their situation in Germany worsened. At a conference held in Berlin on January 30, 1940, a decision was taken to expel 30,000 Gypsies from Germany to the territories of occupied Poland. Due to the general situation in occupied Poland at that time, and because of transportation difficulties, this plan was postponed, but not canceled; 5,000 Gypsies were sent along with 20,000 Jews from Germany to the Lodz ghetto—which was in that part of Poland annexed to Germany—in November 1941. Most of them died from typhus within a few months; those who survived were sent to the Chelmno extermination camp, together with the Jews from this ghetto, in March/April 1942. Smaller transports of Gypsies were sent to other Jewish ghettos and suffered the same fate as the Jews. The reports of the SS Einsatzgruppen which operated in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union mention the murder of thousands of Gypsies along with the massive extermination of the Jews in these areas.2
The deportations and executions of the Gypsies came under Himmler’s authority. On December 16, 1942, Himmler issued an order to send all Gypsies to the concentration camps, with a few exceptions. Exempted from deportation were those Gypsy tribes within the Third Reich who had succeeded in maintaining both Aryan purity and a lifestyle and standards of behavior that could, according to Nazi judgment, justify their being spared the fate of expulsion and later extermination. Among those who evaded the deportation from Germany were the Sinte and Lalleri Gypsy tribes. Such an exemption was never given to any segment of the Jewish population, neither in Germany nor in any other part of occupied Europe.3
The deported Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a special Gypsy camp was erected. Over 20,000 Gypsies from Germany and some other parts of Europe were sent to this camp, and most of them were gassed there.4
The data collected about Gypsies sent to Jewish ghettos in the General Government is very limited. Gypsies lived in only a few places (ghettos) from which the inhabitants were expelled to the death camps of Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka. But hundreds of Gypsies, some of them from Germany, were expelled to the Warsaw ghetto in April-June 1942. Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish council there, mentioned them in his diary. He wrote that at the end of April 1942, a few dozen Gypsies were brought to the ghetto and put in the prison. After being deloused, they were set free in the ghetto. Other groups of Gypsies arrived in the ghetto, went through the prison, and were set free in June 1942. In the entry for June 16 1942, Czerniakow mentions 190 Gypsies who were released from prison.5 The Gypsies in the Warsaw ghetto had to wear armbands with the letter Z for Zigeuner (“Gypsy” in German).
Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote in his diary on June 17, 1942, that 240 Gypsy families were brought to the ghetto and located in Pokorna Street. As a possible reason why the Germans sent them to the ghetto, Ringelblum assumed that “they wish to toss into the ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened and which anyway has to be destroyed.”6 The final fate of the Gypsies in the Warsaw ghetto was the same fate that befell the Jews—they were sent to Treblinka and murdered there.
Several groups of Gypsies were brought to Treblinka for extermination without passing through a ghetto. The first group, some seventy people from the Warsaw area, arrived and was exterminated in the summer of 1942. Later, in February 1943, several hundred more Gypsies arrived.7 These Gypsies were brought to the camp in their wagons; they usually entered through the main gate and were taken to the gas chambers via Seidel Street to the extermination area. On a few occasions the Gypsies arrived in one or two special railroad cars.8 Small groups of Gypsies, a family or a few individuals, who were brought to Treblinka were shot at the Lazarett rather than being taken to the gas chambers.9 The Gypsies’ clothing and meager belongings were not brought to Sorting Square for shipment; rather, they were destroyed or thrown outside the camp and burned there.
Wiernik describes the arrival of the largest of the Gypsy groups brought to Treblinka, apparently in the spring of 1943:
One day, while I was working near the gate, I noticed the Germans and Ukrainians making special preparations. The Stabsscharführer, a short, squat man of about fifty, with a face of a murderer, left the camp several times in a car. Meanwhile the gate opened, and about 1,000 Gypsies were brought in (this was the third transport of Gypsies). About 200 of them were men, and the rest women and children. All their belongings were piled up with them on the wagons—filthy rags, torn bedding, and other beggar’s belongings. They arrived with nearly no security escort; they were brought in by two Ukrainians in German uniform who themselves did not know the entire truth. The latter asked to take care of the formalities and get a receipt for delivering the transport. They weren’t even allowed into the camp. Their request was honored with a sarcastic smile. As this procedure was being carried out, they learned from the Ukrainians in the camp that they had brought victims to an extermination camp. They paled, didn’t believe w
hat they had been told, and made an attempt to enter the camp. Then the Stabsscharführer came out and gave them a sealed envelope. They left. All the Gypsies were taken to the gas chambers and then burned.10
The Gypsies did not realize what was happening until they were actually inside the closed gas chambers. Only then did they try to break out. Shimon Goldberg, who worked near the gas chambers, wrote:
While I was there, they killed about 2,000 Gypsies. The Gypsies went wild, screamed awfully and wanted to break down the chambers. They climbed up the walls toward the apertures at the top and even tried to break the barred window. The Germans climbed onto the roof, fired inside, sealed off the apertures and asphyxiated everyone.11
The number of Gypsy victims at Treblinka can be estimated at over 2,000. There is almost no evidence about Gypsies brought for extermination in Sobibor and Belzec. A Jewish survivor from Sobibor, Dov Freiberg, mentioned in his testimony that “he remembers a transport with Gypsies that arrived in Sobibor” but he gave no details or approximate numbers.12 In all the documents relating to Belzec, there is no mention of Gypsies having been brought there. But a Polish woman, Maria Damiel, who lived in the township of Belzec, testified: “In the year 1942, when I was going on the Rava-Russkaya-Belzec highway, I saw Germans who were bringing two trucks full of Gypsies. The Gypsies implored on their knees to be released.”13 However, from this testimony it is unclear whether these two trucks with the Gypsies were taken to the death camp and exterminated there. In any case, there were no survivors among the Gypsies brought to any of the Operation Reinhard death camps.