Swi¸eciany: “In truth,” Kalmanovitch wrote in November 1942, “we are in any case not innocent…. We have bought our lives and our future with the death of tens of thousands. If we have decided that we must continue with this life despite everything, then we must go on to the end. May the merciful Lord forgive us…. That is the situation and it is not in our hands to change it. Of course delicate souls cannot bear such acts, but the protest of the soul has no more than psychological value, and there is no moral value to it. Everybody is guilty or, more correctly, all are innocent and holy, and most of all those who take real action, who must overcome their spirit, who must overcome the torture of the soul, who free others of this task, and save their souls from pain.”165
A few weeks later a briefly oblivious community celebrated a significant achievement: “100,000 books in the ghetto.” Kruk was in charge: “In November the ghetto library went beyond the figure of a hundred thousand books distributed to readers. Because of this, the library is organizing a big cultural morning event, which will take place in the Ghetto Theater on Sunday, the 13th of this month [December], at noon. On the program: Opening by G. Yashunski, welcome from the ghetto chief [Gens], writers, scientific circles, teachers and the Youth Club. Dr. Ts. Feldstein will speak on “The Book and Martyrdom,” then a lecture by H. Kruk “100,000 Books in the Ghetto.” The second part will be a concert of words and music. The finale: distribution of gift books to the first reader in the ghetto and the youngest reader of the library.”166
VII
During the last months of 1942 a small minority of European Jews understood their common fate; the vast majority remained tossed to and fro among momentary insight, disbelief, despair, and, as we saw, ever new hope.
Hidden in her Amsterdam attic, Anne Frank seemed to know what was happening to the Jews of the outside world. “Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves,” she noted on October 9, 1942. “The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they are sending all the Jews.” After adding some horrible details about Westerbork, apparently based on rumors that had reached Miep Gies, Anne went on. “If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places to which the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.”167
A few weeks later Anne described the arrests in Amsterdam as reported to the inhabitants of the attic by a new tenant, Mr. Dussel, and again she seemed to reach the same conclusion: “Countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate. Night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there…. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children and babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death.”168
During those very same days Rudashevski was recording events and incidents of everyday life in the ghetto. In Vilna, as we saw, the end of 1942 was a relatively quiet period. On October 7, 1942, Rudashevski’s voice was almost that of a happy and carefree youngster. “The club work has begun. We have groups for literature and natural science. After leaving class at 7:30, I go immediately to the club. It is gay there, we have a good time and return home evenings in a large crowd. The days are short, it is dark in the street when our bunch leaves the club. [Jewish] policemen shout at us but we do not listen to them.”169
Did Anne, in her faraway hiding place, understand the situation more thoroughly than Rudashevski in his decimated Vilna ghetto? It is doubtful. At times both recorded the most ominous information, then appeared to forget about it while turning their minds to the more immediate issues of their teenage lives.
Etty Hillesum, as an employee of the Jewish Council, had already stayed briefly in Westerbork. On her return to Amsterdam in December 1942, she tried to describe the camp and the ultimate fate of the deportees in a letter to two Dutch friends: “Finding something to say about Westerbork is difficult…it is a camp for a people in transit…to be deported a few days later to their unknown destiny…deep within Europe, from where only a few indistinct sounds have come back to the rest of us. But the quota must be filled; so must the train, which comes to fetch its load with mathematical regularity.”170
How could Etty have known the exact meaning of the deportations when Gonda Redlich in Theresienstadt, so intent on saving children and youngsters from the transports to the East, and so often alluding to the fact that the deportees were being carried to their death, was making plans for the postwar years? In one and the same diary entry, on June 14–15, 1942, for example, Redlich recorded both his fears about the transports and his plans for the future: “I fear that the transports will not stay in one place in the East. What will happen when we go to our land after the war? What will our position be toward the others? I already feel that for me Aliyah [emigration to the land of Israel] will be an escape, an escape from people here in Europe, an escape because of life here in the Goluth [exile], an escape when you compare the old life to the new.”171
The total confusion about what was happening to the deportees, from whom nothing was heard directly once they had boarded the transports, reappears in Paris at the end of 1942. Although on August 18 Biélinky had emphasized that “one never had news from the deportees,”172 on December 2 he reported: “It is said that the Jews deported from France, Belgium, etc. have been found—about 35,000 of them—in a town in Russia, where they have been well received by the population.”173 December 17 Biélinky recorded his last diary entry. He was arrested on the night of February 10, 1943, by the French police and deported from Drancy to Sobibor on March 23.174
On December 9, 1942, Lambert was ordered by the Commissariat Général to dismiss all foreign Jews still working for the UGIF (approximately one-quarter of the staff) and told that—at that price—the French employees would be spared from deportation. Did he believe it? Even when he heard the Allied governments’ declaration about the extermination of the Jews of Europe later the same month, he wrote that he still believed in his “star.”175
Thus in almost all the diaries written by Jews in Western Europe, in Germany, and even in Theresienstadt, the entries during the second half of 1942 indicate both sporadic intimations about Nazi intention to exterminate all of them and, often simultaneously, contrary information and personal plans for the postwar period. Lambert, like Redlich, dreamed of the future: He hoped to own “a house on a hill” in his old age, although he immediately added that he knew this to be impossible.176
As for Klemperer, after noting on October 23, 1942, how the German military situation was worsening, he added: “But all conversations among Jews again and again lead to the same reflection: ‘If they have the time, they will kill us first.’ One said to Frau Ziegler yesterday: He felt like a calf at the slaughterhouse, looking on, as the other calves are slaughtered, and waiting for his turn. The man is right.”177 And yet, a day later, as though what he had just written was meaningless, Klemperer mused about his future projects “after Hitler’s fall:” “With what shall I start? I very certainly do not have so much more time [Klemperer had a heart condition]. The 18ème [a book project on eighteenth-century literature] has slipped into the background for me. Tackle a supplement of my Modern Prose? Continue with the Curriculum?”178 and the like.
Even close to the killing sites, Jews at times did not know what happened to the deportees, nor did they believe the information that reached them. Jews in Warsaw and in London knew the details about Chelmno, while the inhabitants of Lodz dismissed them. Thus a little-known Lodz ghetto diarist, Menachem Oppenheim, a native of the city and apparently an Orthodox Jew, recorded his reaction after the great deportations of September 1942. Oppenheim, like everybody else, was wondering about the use of small children, the elderly, and hospital patients in labor camps in places unknown, and yet he recorded—probably on October 16, 1942: “Peop
le say that they were taken to Chelmno near Kolo and there is a gasworks where they are gassed. But I believe that something else happened with the Jews of Warsaw and Kielce Cracow. For when I remember my beloved wife child mother sister brother brothers-in-law with their children I hope that they are alive and that soon I’ll rejoice with them…. If not then why am I tormenting myself.”179
By mid-August 1942, on the other hand, Abraham Lewin was no longer fooled about what was happening to the deportees from Warsaw: “When people get out of the train, they are beaten viciously. Then they are driven into huge barracks. For five minutes heart-rending screams are heard, then silence. The bodies that are taken out are swollen horribly…. Young men from among the prisoners are the gravediggers, the next day they too are killed.”180 On August 28, the information was brought by a Jew who escaped from Treblinka and returned to the ghetto: “His words confirm once again and leave no room for doubt that all deportees, both those who have been seized and those who reported voluntarily, are taken to be killed and no one is saved,” Lewin wrote. “In the last weeks at least 300,000 Jews have been exterminated, from Warsaw and other towns…. God! Now it is certain that all those deported from Warsaw have been killed.”181 Very soon Lewin’s turn would come.
In Western Europe the situation of the Flinkers was not an unusual one in the summer of 1942. At the beginning of the deportations from Holland, Eliezer Flinker, a Polish-born Orthodox Jew and a successful businessman residing in The Hague with his wife and seven children (six girls and a boy), paid what it took and the family crossed the border to Belgium. In Brussels further payments to the right intermediaries ensured an Aryan residence permit. The son, Moshe, whom we already encountered as a high school student in Holland, was sixteen years old when the Flinkers settled in the Belgian capital.
Moshe’s diary, started on November 24, 1942, not only provides insight into the daily life of a Jewish family hiding in the open, so to speak, in a Western European city, but also gives us a glimpse of the inner turmoil of a profoundly religious Jewish boy in the face of the extraordinary persecution befalling his people. “Our sufferings have by far exceeded our wrongdoings,” Moshe wrote on November 26, 1942. “What other purpose could the Lord have in allowing such things to befall us? I feel certain that further troubles will not bring any Jew back to the paths of righteousness; on the contrary, I think that upon experiencing such great anguish they will think that there is no God at all…and indeed what can God intend by all these calamities that are happening to us in this terrible period? It seems to me that the time has come for our redemption, or rather, that we are more or less worthy of being redeemed.”182 On December 3, however, he was uncertain. “Today is the eve of Hanukkah, but I have the feeling that this Hanukkah will pass, as have so many others, without a miracle or anything resembling one.”183
More often than not the Flinkers quarreled: The mother wanted the father to find some work; she wanted them to move on to Switzerland, despite the fact than an acquaintance who had attempted to cross the Swiss border had been betrayed by the guides and had barely escaped with his life.184 The father was wary: Both looking for work and attempting the journey and passage to Switzerland were too dangerous; better to stay where they were and remain as unobtrusive as possible. Yet, when it was not school time [during which children out on the street would have looked suspicious], Moshe could venture out of the house, even go to see a film, although cinemas were forbidden to Jews.
On December 13 Moshe saw Jud Süss. “What I saw there,” he recorded on the following day, “made my blood boil. I was red in the face when I came out. I realized the wicked objectives of these evil people—how they want to inject the poison of anti-Semitism in the blood of the gentiles. While I was watching the film I suddenly remembered what the evil one [Hitler] had said in one of his speeches: Whichever side wins the war, anti-Semitism will spread and spread until the Jews are no more” [Moshe was probably paraphrasing Hitler’s speech of April 1942]. “In that film I saw the means he is using to achieve his aim…. The way in which jealousy, hatred and loathing are aroused is simply indescribable…. The Jews are being made so hateful to the world that nothing that anyone can do will be able to undo his work.”185
The smallest incident triggered the worst fears. “Last night my parents and I were sitting around the table,” Moshe noted on January 7, 1943. “It was almost midnight. Suddenly we heard the bell: we all shuddered. We thought that the moment had come for us to be deported…. My mother had already put her shoes on to go to the door, but my father said to wait until they ring once more. But the bell did not ring again. Thank heaven it passed quietly. Only the fear remained, and all day long my parents have been very nervous. They can’t stand the slightest noise, and the smallest thing bothers them.”186
Deportation from Brussels, as halting as it was, continued nonetheless. On January 21, 1943, Moshe was sent to the [former] synagogue beadle to buy some clothing and bread coupons. The beadle was gone; his door had been sealed with a swastika sign: “When I stood in the street, I saw that the shutters were closed. I thought: This man [the beadle] took so much trouble in hiding from the Germans, and now, despite all his labor, he is taken away—he, his wife, and his two children. The younger child was a four-year-old girl.”187
At the end of that fearsome day, Moshe wanted to pray: “I do not know in whose name to pray. Our forefathers are too far from us. Our people? It looks as though they have no merit at all, otherwise so many troubles could not have befallen them. Maybe the prayer that will be most effective will be about the magnitude of our pain. As great as our sins have been, our troubles have already surpassed them. A little more and we shall perish.”188
VIII
It was in this atmosphere of total uncertainty that, on September 20 and 21, 1942, the Jews of Europe had tried—as much as each community could or each individual wished—to observe Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There were places where the “Kol Nidre” service, on the eve of Yom Kippur, could not take place at all. In Paris, for example, the Germans had imposed a curfew from three p.m. on that day (a Sunday) in response to renewed attacks on members of the Wehrmacht. But according to Bielinky, there were many people in the synagogues on the twenty-first.189 Sebastian’s diary entry of September 22 was laconic: “Yesterday was Yom Kippur. A day of fasting—and of trying to believe and hope.”190 The key word was “trying,” trying against all odds, in spite of the events of the past months, and in the face of “God’s silence.”
Klemperer’s entry on the twenty-first was, formally speaking, that of a converted Jew. Much had changed, however, in terms of self-perception, for this “Protestant” who, as we saw, had explicitly declared at the outset of the war that he did not want to have anything to do with the Jewish community. “Today is Yom Kippur,” he noted, “and this very day the last 26 ‘old people’ are sitting in the Community house, from where they will be transported early tomorrow.” The Klemperers went on “farewell visits” to the friends slated for deportation. Victor mentioned, among others, the reaction of the Neumanns, “who were defiantly merry: ‘Yes and no.’ On the one hand the corpses themselves were there. On the other hand they were really going into a beyond, from which, as yet there had been no reliable news. Because what had been reported was no more than supposition. He gave me a prayer book with Hebrew and German text. I: ‘How was it possible to forgive one’s enemies on the Day of Atonement?’ He: ‘The Jewish religion does not require it. The relevant prayer says Atonement for all Israelites and for the stranger in our midst, that is only for the peaceful guest among us. Judaism nowhere requires love of one’s enemy.’ I: ‘Love of one’s enemy is moral softening of the brain.’”…At the end of his visits, Klemperer summed up his impression: “The mood of all Jewry here is without exception the same: The terrible end is imminent. They will perish, but perhaps, probably, they will have time to annihilate us first.”191
In Theresienstadt, on the eve of Yom Kippur, Redlich recorded an extraordi
nary scene: “The attics. A blind woman has been registered for a transport. She has been sitting without help for many hours. They are bringing her to the attic. A small child, ten years old, helps her. A spectacle not to be believed.”…On the Day of Atonement, the usual was recorded: “A transport from Berlin arrived. They traveled all day Yom Kippur. Nevertheless, some women fasted all day.”192
In Warsaw the Aktion went on until September 21. That day the last transport left for Treblinka with 2,196 Jews.193 A member of Globocnik’s staff must have scrutinized the Jewish calendar: The day the deportations began, July 22, was the eve of the Ninth of Av, the commemoration of the destruction of the Temple, and the last day of the Aktion was Yom Kippur.
Not much, of course, was recorded by the Warsaw diarists about Yom Kippur as such, but the coincidence was not missed by some. “The SS men—as is their wont—had prepared a surprise for the Jews on the Day of Atonement,” Peretz Opoczynski, whose fragmentary diaries were found in the Oneg Shabbat archives, noted on September 21…. “In honor of the Day of Atonement the factories were not working, to make believe that the Jewish religion was tolerated. In return, however, new sorrow was being added to the Jewish cup of woe. The SS men are alleged to have finally left Warsaw yesterday. The fact that today’s action has been carried out by the ‘shop-commissars,’ Jewish policemen and ‘shop guards’ [Werkschutz], and not by the German soldiers, seems to fully confirm the rumor. The Day of Atonement has brought us plenty of fear and shattered nerves.”194 And yet, on September 21, Lewin noted: “In our courtyard Jews are praying, pouring out their cares to the Creator.”195
Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination Page 57