Lucille and her younger sister were now alone in the ghetto—two orphans who had to cope as best they could.
We didn’t feel anything. We didn’t say a prayer, we didn’t cry—we were numb, there was no feeling left. We went back to that room, to that furnished room with the other occupants, and my sister essentially just stopped talking—she didn’t talk any more. She was very bright, she was tall and was very pretty, but there was nothing left to say. She was totally deserted, and my mother made me promise that I would take care of her—and I couldn’t do anything. I tried, and I couldn’t.
Two months later the Germans entered the ghetto themselves to conduct selections, searching for those who were not fit for work—the elderly, the sick, and the young. Lucille describes how Rumkowski, the leader of the ghetto, asked mothers in the ghetto to cooperate and give up their children to the Germans.
“Hand over your children so the rest of us may live,” [he said]. I was seventeen when I heard that speech. I could not comprehend how somebody could ask parents for their children. I still cannot comprehend that. People were crying out, “How can you ask this? How can we do this?” But he said, “If we don’t, it’ll be worse.”
Lucille did all she could to try and ensure her younger sister was spared—she put make-up on her, and encouraged her to appear fit and healthy. Lucille did have some hope—she thought her sister might be safe because she was twelve years old and the cut-off age for selection was eleven. But when the Germans arrived they still carried her away: “They took my sister—they were not supposed to. I tried to get up on the truck with her. The end of a gun hit my arms and I couldn’t get on the truck, and those people disappeared.” Even as she watched in despair as her young sister was taken away, Lucille had no idea that she was being transported directly to be murdered. “It never dawned on us to reason what they would do with a young person, or a very old person, who would not be able to work. We were never rational enough to figure that one out. We just assumed they would be alive.”
Utterly alone and emotionally devastated, Lucille still forced herself to go looking for work in the ghetto. Significantly, when she eventually found her first job it was through one of the few “connections” she had—a fellow German Jew from Hamburg. He had convinced Rumkowski that the ghetto needed “improvements,” like parks and open spaces, and Lucille worked with him on the plans. After a few months Rumkowski closed the department, but Lucille had made useful contacts. A new acquaintance from Vienna worked in one of the administrative departments in the same building, and through her she managed to get another job—filling out applications to be sent to the Germans for coal rations for the following winter. Life in the ghetto so far had taught Lucille a hard lesson: “You really couldn’t trust anybody, because if I would tell a co-worker something she would use it for her advantage. You had to be very careful. There was a lot of back-stabbing, and you can understand why—it was a matter of life and death.”
One day, Rumkowski arrived at the office to select workers for a new factory within the ghetto. Lucille was “terrified” of meeting him—because this sixty-six year old, who looked like everyone’s grandfather, had a bad reputation. “I had heard rumors. I knew he had a vile temper. If he got angry he would take his cane and hit you. He was an absolute dictator within limits, which came from the German side. I think most people were afraid of him.” Lucille hid in the hallway and tried to escape notice, but her name was on a list and eventually she was called in to see Rumkowski. “He sat on a chair. He had white hair and darkened glasses. He held his cane in his right hand and for a moment he appeared to me like the king on a throne. He asked me where I was from, what languages I spoke, what my father did, where my family was, if I had any family left. I answered the questions and his last words were, ‘Oh, you’ll hear from me.’ I didn’t pay much attention to it.”
After Rumkowski’s visit, Lucille’s boss moved her to the statistical department: “I don’t know why they transferred me. It could have been to hide me away because it was a very quiet, secret office.” But then came a phone call from Rumkowski’s secretary—he wanted Lucille. When she reported to the main administrative building she found a number of other women of her own age already there. Rumkowski gave them all jobs working in a kitchen he was starting for “deserving workers.” Some of the young women would be waitresses in the dining room and some, like Lucille, would work in the adjacent office. “He said he would take me and I would figure out, if we had fifty kilo of red beets, how many portions it would make.” As a reward for working in the new kitchen Lucille would get an extra meal each day. “It was very meaningful,” she says. “As you would say today, it was a very big deal.” When she left to go to work in the kitchen her boss gave her one final word of warning about Rumkowski: “I think he used the word ‘pig’ in Polish.” Her boss was right. In almost every ghetto that the Nazis established the Jewish leader behaved responsibly—but not in Łódź. Rumkowski was known to put people on the deportation list because he himself wanted to be rid of them, and he committed still more personal offences, as Lucille was about to discover.
Lucille started work in the kitchen, and quickly realized that this was one of Rumkowski’s pet projects. Almost every evening he would pay a visit—something she came to dread.
You could hear him arrive with a horse-drawn carriage. He would go into the kitchen and look at the waitress, and if an apron wasn’t tied correctly he would hit her with a cane. He looked at the food but he would not eat it—this was below his dignity. And then he would come into the office and you could hear his uneven steps, a sort of slight limp, in the hallway. And I was alone in the office and he would pull up a chair and we had a couple of conversations. He talked and I would listen, and he molested me. He took my hand and placed it on his penis and he said, “Make it work” ... I kept moving away and he kept moving close, and it was a frightening relationship—to me it was shocking. He wanted me to move into a private apartment to which only he would have access, and I started to cry—I didn’t want to move. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to do that ... But sex in the ghetto was a very valuable commodity—it was traded like you would trade anything else.
Lucille was most definitely not a willing participant in this “trade,” but she was certain that, if she did not let Rumkowski abuse her, her “life was at stake.” “If I would have run away he would have had me deported—I mean that was very clear.”
“Rumkowski did take advantage of young women,” confirms Jacob Zylberstein, who witnessed how the leader of the ghetto behaved when he saw another young woman whom he fancied. “We were all in the dining room and he just comes in, took a hand around her and just walks out with her. I saw that. Not anybody told me, but I saw that.” Zylberstein also believes that a woman’s life might very well have been “in danger” if she did not consent to Rumkowski’s wishes. “Personally I didn’t like the man,” he adds. “I didn’t like what he represents.”
After some weeks the kitchen closed and Lucille was sent to a leather factory within the ghetto to sew belts for the German army. She never saw Rumkowski again. All that was left was the damage he had done, “I felt disgusted and I felt angry and I felt abused.” In 1944, both Lucille and Rumkowski were among the Jews from Łódź who were transported to Auschwitz when the ghetto was finally closed. Rumkowski and his family died in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Lucille, as a young woman, was selected not for immediate death but for work, and was saved by the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945.
It was nearly three years after she had first been deported from Germany that Lucille Eichengreen eventually arrived at Auschwitz. But the first Jews from outside Poland were sent there as early as the spring of 1942, and the story of how they came to be on trains to the camp is one of the most shocking and surprising in the history of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” They came from Slovakia, a country whose northern border was less than eighty kilometers from Auschwitz.
Slovakia had a troubled his
tory; as an independent state it was just three years old, created in March 1939 after the Nazis had annexed the adjoining Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia. Prior to 1939 Slovakia had been part of Czechoslovakia, and before 1918 it had been incorporated into Hungary. The president of Slovakia was Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, leader of the fiercely nationalistic Slovak People’s Party of Hlinka. Tiso allied Slovakia with the Nazis, and a Treaty of Protection allowed Germany to control Slovak foreign policy. The Slovakian government enthusiastically adopted anti-Semitic measures against the 90,000 Slovak Jews—in rapid succession regulations were introduced to seize Jewish businesses, encourage Jewish emigration, exclude Jews from public life, and to make them wear a yellow star. The effect of these measures on the Slovakian Jewish community was swift and brutal.
Eva Votavová,31 was at that time a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl.
I realized I was an outcast. I was not a “decent person” anymore. I was kicked out of secondary school. Jews were forbidden to possess certain things—we were not allowed to possess properties. Before that happened I’d lived in a village where we had all grown up together and been equal.
A striking feature of the persecution of the Slovakian Jews was the speed with which friend became foe. There was no gradual transformation—it was as if a switch had suddenly been turned on. “The young German boys [ethnic Germans living in Slovakia] were starting to act like Nazis,” says Otto Pressburger,32 a Slovakian Jew who was fifteen years old in 1939.
Before that they were our friends. There used to be no difference between us—Jewish and Christian youth. As children we always used to play together. Then the signs were put up: “No Jews and dogs allowed.” We could not walk on the pavement. It was horrible. I was not allowed to go to a school or cinema or watch a soccer game—I had to sit at home with my parents; before, I used to be out with my friends.
It was obvious to Otto Pressburger that the primary motivation for this change in attitude towards the Jews was greed.
There were posters on the walls, taken from German newspapers, showing a Jew with a big nose and a bag full of money over his shoulder. Then there was a Hlinka guard kicking him in his buttocks and making his money fall out. The city was full of posters like this.
The Slovakian Hlinka guards were the shock troops in the anti-Jewish actions, acting against the Jews like Nazi storm troopers, and like their Nazi counterparts they dripped anti-Semitism from every pore. “Slovaks were happy to take the [Jewish] stores and become rich,” says Michal Kabáč,33 one of the Hlinka guards.
They [the Jews] used to have stores and do the monkey business. They never worked but only wanted to have an easy life. It was in their blood. It was a kind of politics all around the world that the Jews were not willing to work. Even Hitler was afraid of them becoming the royalty of Europe, so he killed them. It was all politics.
It is a striking feature of the inherent illogicality of anti-Semitic prejudice that Michal Kabáč, like Hans Friedrich in Chapter 1, sees no contradiction in simultaneously blaming the Jews for being both lazy and industrious—jealous that they built up powerful and successful businesses while claiming that they never worked. In so far as there is any logic to Friedrich’s and Kabáč’s position, it is that they maintain the Jews did not do “real” work like farming but chose to be dealers or shopkeepers—areas of activity, of course, that the Jews had concentrated on precisely because for centuries they had been banned in many European countries from owning land.
For the Nazis, Auschwitz was now suddenly a tempting place to send the Slovakian Jews. Himmler realized that no more Soviet POWs would be sent to Auschwitz—the stalemate between the Germans and the Soviets close to Moscow made it obvious that the War in the East would not be over as swiftly as had been anticipated. Captured Red Army soldiers were now thought to be too valuable a source of forced labor to be squandered in a camp like Auschwitz, and Goering would soon formally confirm that all available Soviet POWs must work in armaments factories. As a result, Birkenau could no longer be used for the purpose originally contemplated. And who could fill the gap left by the Soviet POWs? Himmler, ever adept at swift policy shifts, had the answer immediately—the Jews.
And the Jews were exactly the people the Slovak authorities now wanted to deport. As far back as the autumn of 1941, the Nazis had asked the Slovaks to provide forced laborers to work in the Reich. Now, in February 1942, the Slovaks offered up 20,000 Jews—including their families. Tiso and the rest of the Slovak government had no more desire to retain women and children after their breadwinners were gone than did the Nazis on the Eastern Front. It was much easier for the Slovak authorities if everyone went. But what was easier for the Slovaks was not easier for the Nazis. Lacking the necessary extermination capacity, they had no desire at this time to accept Jews who could not work.
To resolve the deportation issue, a meeting was held in February 1942 in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, between the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Vojtech Tuka, the chief of his office, Dr. Izidor Koso, and Eichmann’s agent in Slovakia, SS Major Dieter Wisliceny. Both Wisliceny and Tuka gave evidence after the war about the content of the discussions, and by comparing their testimonies it is possible to reach a judgment about what was said.34
The Slovakians put forward the view that to separate the breadwinner from the rest of the family was “unchristian,” because, after the resettling of the Jewish workers in the Reich, the families would have “no one to look after them.” Wisliceny’s recollection of the meeting is that, rather than “Christian concerns,” the Slovaks were primarily worried about the “financial considerations” that would result from the Nazis receiving the workforce while the families were left behind with no means of support. Finally, the Slovaks suggested that they might in some way compensate the Germans for the “expenses” incurred if the families were taken along with the breadwinners.
The matter was resolved in Berlin. The Slovak government agreed to pay the Germans 500 Reichsmarks for every Jew deported, on condition that they never came back to Slovakia and that no claim was made by the Germans on the property or other assets the Jews had left behind. The Slovaks—whose head of state was a Catholic priest—therefore paid the Germans to take their Jews away.
The forcible deportation of Slovak Jews began in March 1942. For most, the journey began with imprisonment in a holding camp in Slovakia. Silvia Veselá35 was one of those held in a temporary camp in the town of Poprad that spring.
Some of those Slovak soldiers behaved in a really silly way. For example, they deliberately crapped on the floor and we had to clean the dirt manually. They called us “Jewish whores” and they kicked us. They behaved really badly. They also told us, “We will teach you Jews how to work.” But all of us were poor women that were used to work.... It’s a really humiliating feeling when your personality is being taken away. I don’t know whether you can understand it. You suddenly mean nothing. We were treated like animals.
There were rich pickings for the Hlinka guards who worked in the holding camps. “When Jews were coming to the camps,” says Michal Kabáč, “we used to take their belongings and clothes. The deputy commander always called us to go and choose the clothes we wanted. Everybody took what he or she could. I took a pair of shoes. I wrapped it up with string and took it home. The guards were doing fine.”
It also was not just the Slovakians who robbed the Jews before they left, says Silvia Veselá,One day a heavy SS officer came and started to shout at us. We had no idea why he was shouting. Then we saw big baskets—three big baskets—into which we had to give our gold, silver, money, and all our valuables. We were told we were going to work and didn’t need these valuables. I was very poor. I had just one watch that was given to me by my aunt, and so I gave them it.
The holding camp was a place not just of theft but of casual brutality. “Our guards used to beat them [the Jews],” says Michal Kabáč. “There was a special kind of unit who used to punish the guilty ones. They used to take them to a speci
al room and punish them by beating them on their feet with a wooden stick.” It was, of course, the Hlinka guards themselves who arbitrarily decided who was “guilty” and who was not.
The stay in the holding camp could vary from a few days to a few weeks, but eventually the Slovakian Jews were taken to a nearby railway station to be transported out of the country. Silvia Veselá36 vividly remembers the walk to the station and her last memories of Slovakia.
They spat at us and shouted, “Jewish whores, it serves you right! You’ll finally work!” They also threw stones at us. They used every possibility to humiliate us. There were also some people who just stood still and just witnessed the humiliation. Some of those people cried. However the majority, older and younger generation, humiliated us. I wouldn’t wish this kind of experience on anyone. It is a horrible feeling.
The Slovakian Jews were escorted to the railway station by the Hlinka guards. “I was ordered to load the Jewish women on the train and watch them,” says Michal Kabáč. “I was telling myself: ‘You did not want to work, you Jewish swine!’” Within months, members of the Hlinka guards like Kabáč realized that the Slovakian Jews were being sent to their deaths—news that did not fill them with compassion:I was feeling sorry for them, but on the other hand I was not sorry for them considering they were stealing from the Slovaks. We were not very sorry. We thought it was good that they were taken away. That way they could not cheat us any more. They were not going to get rich at the expense of the working class any more.
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