Enormous numbers of Jews were sent from Greece to Auschwitz – altogether around 55,000. The majority of them were murdered immediately, and the survival rate of the rest within the camp was notoriously low. The Greek Jews found the harshness of the Polish climate hard to take and few of them spoke German, the language in which all commands in the camp were spoken.
What the history of the Greek and Danish Jews demonstrates once again is how the Germans could implement their Final Solution in radically different ways in different countries. And in deciding how much they wanted to find and deport Jews in each individual place – something that, as we have seen, was a crucial element in determining how many Jews subsequently died – the Germans would, of course, have been influenced by a whole range of other factors. Such as how easy it was to deport the Jews in practical terms, the political consequences of deporting them, how ‘racially’ dangerous they considered the particular Jews to be, whether the Jews lived near the front line or not, and so on.
Unlike the Jews of Greece, the Jews of Denmark survived in such large numbers in large part because the Germans chose – for a variety of reasons – not to pursue them all ruthlessly. None of that, it has to be said, takes anything away from the bravery of those who helped the Danish Jews. The heroism of the Danish resisters remains undimmed. But we should also remember the courage of the Greeks who helped the Jews in their country – notwithstanding the fact that so many Greek Jews were subsequently murdered by the Nazis.
Shortly before Danish Jews crossed the sea to safety in Sweden, Jews in the largest Reinhard death camp in Poland were planning their own escape. In the summer of 1943, at Treblinka, the SS were about to face armed resistance from the inmates for the first time. Superficially, in the months leading up to the attempted breakout, all seemed to be running smoothly for the SS. The chaotic rule of Irmfried Eberl had been replaced by a new regime of order and deception – all designed to calm the arriving Jews. ‘They turned the platform, where the people arrived, into a kind of village train station,’ says Kalman Taigman, a member of the Treblinka Sonderkommando. Signs were erected reading ‘first class, second class, third class’ and ‘waiting room’. There was a door with a sign over it saying ‘station manager’.25 Oskar Strawczynski, another Jewish prisoner at Treblinka, also witnessed the transformation of the camp. ‘In a prominent spot,’ he wrote, ‘a fake clock, with a 70-centimeter diameter, is hung. All this decoration understandably served to disorient the new arrivals, to give them the momentary impression that they have simply come to a transit station.’26 Samuel Willenberg, also an inmate of the camp, was appalled at the trickery employed by the SS. As he saw it, the Jews now ‘alighted on to the platform in the usual manner, as if they had arrived in a health resort. And here, on this small plot of land, was taking place the greatest murder that ever took place in Europe, in the entire world.’27 In addition to the transformation of the arrival area, other facilities at the camp were expanded. ‘There were also workshops,’ says Kalman Taigman, ‘there were tailors who would sew new clothing for the SS. There was a metal works and a carpenter shop and an electricians’ shop.’28
But despite this air of seeming permanence, the Jews working inside the death camp knew that the intention of the Germans was – in the words of Oskar Strawczynski – that ‘we will never leave Treblinka alive.’29 Fearing for their future, a group of Sonderkommandos started to plot a way out of the camp. In this enterprise they were helped by the arrogance of the SS and the complacency of their Ukrainian helpers, who were used to seeing Jews terrified and cowed. Moreover, as we have seen, the SS had decided that it was impractical to kill all the Jewish workers in the camp at regular intervals and replace them – not least because training new workers and educating them about the mechanics of the camp was time consuming. Keeping the Sonderkommandos alive for a longer period made the lives of the SS easier, but the risk of an uprising was consequently greater – especially as over time the security tended to become more lax.
Notwithstanding the arrogance of their SS overseers, the difficulties faced by the conspirators within the Sonderkommandos were immense. If the SS had the slightest sense that any resistance was planned, they would torture those they suspected in order to find out the details of the plot. That was the reason that one of the organizers of the planned revolt, Dr Julian Chorążycki, took poison in April 1943 when he was discovered with a large amount of money with which he had hoped to bribe one of the guards. He chose to kill himself rather than risk betraying his comrades.
By the summer of 1943 the Sonderkommandos at Treblinka were becoming increasingly alarmed. They were concerned that soon the camp would be closed and, as part of that process, they would inevitably be killed. Finally, on 2 August, they decided to act. ‘We were sick of our miserable existence,’ wrote Yankel Wiernik, an inmate at Treblinka, ‘and all that mattered was to take revenge on our tormentors and to escape … The long processions, those ghastly caravans of death, were still before our eyes, crying out for vengeance. We knew what lay hidden beneath the surface of this soil. We were the only ones left alive to tell the story. Silently, we took our leave of the ashes of our fellow Jews and vowed that, out of their blood, an avenger would arise.’30
The conspirators managed to steal weapons from the armoury in the camp, and on the afternoon of 2 August they attacked the SS and the other guards. At the same time other prisoners doused wooden buildings with petrol and set them on fire. Several hundred prisoners now rushed for the barbed wire. ‘Some of us were mowed down by the machine guns,’ says Samuel Willenberg, who escaped from Treblinka that day. ‘And I ran over those corpses.’ The perimeter fence at Treblinka was not electrified, and using blankets to cover the wire, Samuel and the rest of the prisoners rushed towards the nearby forest, all the time under fire from the guards. Samuel remembers that as he ran he ‘screamed like a madman: “The hell has been burnt!” ’31
Around 300 prisoners managed to escape, but – as we shall see – getting past the wire fence was just the first of many dangerous challenges that prisoners who broke out from a death camp had to face.
Surprisingly, the SS did not learn lessons from the uprising at Treblinka, and a similar breakout occurred at Sobibór less than three months later. Just as at Treblinka, the Sonderkommandos at the death camp of Sobibór understood that once their usefulness to the Germans ceased, they would be killed. Their own existence depended on the murder factory continuing to function. This tragic dichotomy – their lives were prolonged by the deaths of others – was not lost on them. ‘For some time again there had been a lull in transports,’ wrote Toivi Blatt, a member of the Sobibór Sonderkommando. ‘Food was scarce, and we were hungry, because we previously supplemented our diet with the food we found in the luggage of new arrivals. Suddenly the Nazis ordered us to prepare for a transport that would arrive the next day. Somewhere on the distant rails of Poland, a doomed train was rolling toward Sobibor. Karolek [another Sonderkommando] turned toward me and said, “Tomorrow there will be plenty of food.” I thought: Are we still humans?’32
Between March and July 1943, the deportation of nearly 35,000 Dutch Jews to Sobibór brought considerable wealth to the camp. These Jews, direct from the Netherlands, carried food and jewels with them. It was unusual for large transports from western Europe to arrive at a Reinhard death camp. The decision to deport Dutch Jews to Sobibór was probably taken because thousands of Jews had just been sent to Auschwitz from Greece, and Sobibór had spare killing capacity. But whatever the precise motive for it, this decision was one of the reasons why the overall death toll of Jews from the Netherlands was so high. Unlike at Auschwitz, where a proportion of new arrivals were selected on the ramp to work as forced labour, at Sobibór more than 99 per cent of the people on each transport were dead within a few hours of arrival. Out of the 35,000 Dutch Jews who were sent to Sobibór, fewer than two dozen survived. So while it is understandable that historians focus on the domestic factors within the Netherlands that might hav
e contributed to the large proportion of Dutch Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust – such as the cooperative attitude of the Dutch civil service – it is important to remember that this German decision to send the Dutch Jews to Sobibór also had some, albeit limited, impact.33
When the Dutch Jews entered the camp, many believed the Nazi lie that they had arrived at a hygiene stop. ‘This trap was so perfect,’ says Toivi Blatt, one of the Sonderkommando who dealt with the Dutch transports, ‘that I’m sure that when they were in the gas chambers and gas came out instead of water, probably they were thinking that this was some kind of malfunction … When the job was finished, when they were already taken out of the gas chambers to be burnt, I remember thinking to myself that it was a beautiful night [with] the stars really quiet … Three thousand people died [in that one transport]. Nothing happened. The stars are in the same place.’34
At Sobibór, it took the arrival of a group of Soviet prisoners of war in September 1943 – all of them sent to the camp because they were also Jews – to act as the catalyst for a mass escape. About eighty of the POWs were selected to work as builders within the camp and they soon realized the special nature of Sobibór. As one of them, Arkadiy Vajspapir, says, ‘we knew that the Germans would not leave anyone alive, especially in that camp.’35 Under the leadership of a Red Army officer called Alexander Pechersky, they conceived a daring plan. The idea was to ask individual members of the SS to come to the cobblers’ workshop and the tailors’ shop in the camp for fittings. The prisoners believed – and it turned out they were correct – that the Germans, all asked to come at set intervals, would arrive exactly on time. Once they sat down, waiting for the fitting, they would be killed by a prisoner who had hidden in the back of the hut.
On 14 October 1943 they put their plan into action. At half past three in the afternoon, Arkadiy Vajspapir, together with a comrade called Yehuda Lerner, hid behind a curtain at the back of the cobblers’ hut. ‘The German came in for a shoe fitting,’ says Arkadiy. ‘He sat down just in front of me. So I stepped out and hit him. I didn’t know that you should do it with the flat side of the axe. I hit him with the blade. We took him away and put a cloth over him. And then another German came in. So he came up to the corpse and kicked him with his leg and said, “What is this? What does this disorder mean?” And then when he understood [what was happening] I also hit him with the axe. So then we took the pistols and ran away. Afterwards I was shivering. I couldn’t calm down for a long time. I was sick. I was splashed with blood.’36
While Arkadiy Vajspapir and Yehuda Lerner killed two Germans in the cobblers’ workshop, their colleagues attacked three more members of the SS in the tailors’ shop. By late afternoon the majority of the SS men in the camp had been killed, but the SS commander, Karl Frenzel, was still alive. ‘I found Sasha [Alexander Pechersky, the leader of the uprising] and told him we had killed two Germans,’ says Arkadiy. ‘And he said that we should kill Frenzel. We should go to his room … and I said that I couldn’t. My hands were shaking. I was shivering all over my body, I said I couldn’t do it … he understood, and he didn’t … push me. So I didn’t kill anyone else.’37
Just before six o’clock in the evening the prisoners moved towards the main gate. They now came under fire not just from the guard towers, but from Frenzel who turned a machine gun on them. Many of the prisoners ran straight for the wire, but when Toivi Blatt reached the fence it collapsed on him: ‘My first thought was, “This is the end!” People were stepping over me, and the barbed wire points went into my coat. But finally I had a stroke of genius. I left the leather coat in the barbed wire and just slid out. I started to run. I fell down about two or three times; each time I thought I was hit, but I got up, nothing happened to me, and finally [I reached] the forest.’38
Just as at Treblinka, the majority of prisoners who escaped from Sobibór did not survive the war. Out of the 300 who crossed the wire of the camp, perhaps sixty made it through to the end of the conflict. They had to survive less than two years in the country in which many of them had been born – they spoke the language, they knew the landscape. Yet so many perished. The reasons why this happened are complex, but the experience of Toivi Blatt encapsulated many of the difficulties the escapees faced. He was well aware, for instance, that he had not reached ‘safety’ when he got to the forest, for ‘it wasn’t safe at all.’39 Not only did he run the risk of the pursuing Germans catching up with him, and local farmers capturing him for a reward, but he was worried that he might encounter groups of armed ‘bandits’ – Poles who had sought refuge in the forest and now lived by robbing others.
Toivi desperately wanted to stay with Sasha, the Red Army officer who had led the revolt, as he felt much safer under his protection. But the day after the breakout Sasha announced that he and eight other members of his unit were going off on their own. ‘Sasha said, “Now we must find out where we are, so a group of us will go to check the area and maybe buy food,” ’ remembers Toivi, ‘and he ordered us to give him some money … he just promised that he will be back, and he left and he never came back.’40 Toivi was devastated. After the war he confronted Sasha about what had happened. Toivi told him that while he would always be a hero ‘not only in my eyes, but the eyes of other survivors’ he had ‘done something which I think you shouldn’t have’, because ‘you took nine people with nine guns and left us with practically nothing. So he told me – “Listen, I was a soldier, my first obligation was to go back to the army.” He explained this with some kind of a little bit of shame. But nevertheless he said, “I was a soldier and a soldier is supposed to go back.” ’
Sasha led his armed group east and they managed to make contact with Soviet partisans. ‘Only those who flocked together could survive,’ says Arkadiy Vajspapir, one of Sasha’s unit. ‘The only thing that helped us to survive – that we kept together all nine of us. We had many brave and courageous people, but they were not respected as much as Sasha.’41
But in saving his comrades Sasha had left the rest of this group of forty or so escapees in disarray. Small factions formed and argued with others. Without leadership some of the stronger wanted to discard the weaker. Eventually, Toivi and two others detached themselves from the main group and made for his hometown of Izbica. With winter approaching, they were desperate to find shelter. When they eventually reached Izbica, Toivi approached one villager, who he knew had venerated his father, and begged her to hide them. She refused, fearing German retribution. She said that her husband had been taken to Auschwitz and she wanted to save her son. ‘By the terror etched in her face,’ wrote Toivi, ‘I could clearly see we represented a deadly plague, the Black Death of the twentieth century.’42
They moved on and met a farmer who was prepared, in return for the gold and jewels the escapees had carried with them from the camp, to hide them in a pit at the back of his barn. But the farmer was interested only in what he could take from them, and after several months – once he had ‘borrowed’ many of their clothes – he attempted to kill them with the help of some friends. Toivi escaped only because after they had fired a shot that grazed his jaw he pretended he was dead. Having fled from the farm, Toivi hid in a ruined brickworks in Izbica and relied on acquaintances to bring him food. But he was almost as much at risk here as he had been in the hands of the murderous farmer. Armed groups from the forest sometimes came and searched the area – some of them were partisans and some were simply bandits. Toivi was afraid of both. Many of the partisans were anti-Semitic – one group, even though it included one of Toivi’s childhood acquaintances, refused to let him join simply because he was a Jew.
Starving, Toivi approached his former teacher and begged her for help. She replied that she was frightened, because the Germans had recently captured a Jew and then tortured him to make him reveal the names of the people who had assisted him. Toivi turned away, but the woman was overcome by pity and gave him a loaf of bread. Eventually, outside Izbica, Toivi met a farmer who had known him since childho
od. The farmer agreed that Toivi could stay with him – as long as he pretended to be a non-Jewish Pole and looked after the cows.
Toivi was protected by the farmer until the Red Army liberated Poland. ‘I should have jumped for joy,’ wrote Toivi of his reaction to surviving the war. ‘So why did I feel such sadness, such tremendous sorrow, such emptiness in my soul? What my survival instincts had suppressed now hit me with full force. My loved ones were gone, my world was gone. I felt empty, sad and alone.’43
Looking back, Toivi believes that there are ‘three basic ingredients’ of anti-Semitism, and that they were all present in Poland during the war: ‘Religious prejudice which was very strong in Poland; economic and social difficulties – the country had some problems – and of course it was very easy to point at [that is, blame] the Jew. And the third one is simple jealousy, mostly Jews made a living for themselves.’44 But Toivi also accepts, despite the widespread anti-Semitism, that it was only because of the kindness of a number of Catholic Poles that he was able to survive at all.
Toivi Blatt’s story illustrates many of the difficulties that Polish Jews faced even if they managed to escape from German hands. The destruction of Jewish communities meant that they had no safe place to hide – no fellow Jews on whom they could rely. Moreover, a German decree of 15 October 1941 stated that not only would the Germans execute Jews who were found outside a camp or ghetto without permission, but that any Poles who had assisted them would also be killed. So giving a Jew a crust of bread meant death if you were caught. Jews were also at risk of blackmail from non-Jewish Poles, and Jews would often have to pay large amounts of money for a place of refuge. As a result, Jews without financial resources were intensely vulnerable. Female Jews who sought somewhere to hide were particularly at risk of sexual exploitation. There were also strong incentives for Poles to denounce Jews. In some areas of the General Government, for example, any Pole that betrayed a Jew could expect to receive as much as a third of that Jew’s property as a reward.45
The Holocaust: A New History Page 45