In Kovno, Rabbi Shapiro did inform the inhabitants that workers had to go to work and he allowed those in poor health to eat, according to Tory’s diary entry of September 20. “Despite the ban on praying in public,” Tory further recorded, “many minyanim [prayer quorums of ten Jewish men] assembled in the ghetto. The wording of ‘Hazkarat neshamot ’ [remembrance of souls] had been printed on a typewriter by the council because of the shortage of prayer books…for the Holy Days.” The next day Tory recorded that many workers fasted at their workplaces. Two [German] officials were inspecting the ghetto on that day: “They went in the direction of the hospital where a prayer meeting was taking place. The praying Jews were warned only at the last moment, but succeeded in dispersing before the Germans came.”196
None of this secretiveness was necessary in Vilna. Apart from smaller services, an official prayer service was organized in the hall of the ghetto theater, with a cantor and a choir. Gens attended, and so did all the Jewish officials of the ghetto. “After Kol Nidre,” Kruk noted, “[Tsemakh] Feldstein announces that Mr. Gens will speak. Gens says: let us begin with a kaddish [prayer for the dead] for those who are gone. We have gone through a hard year; let us pray to God that next year will be easier. We must be hard, disciplined, and industrious. At the beginning of Gens’s speech, a great lament broke out. It was the wind of Ponar, of death of the children, women, and men who were torn away. Even Gens was strongly moved.”197
There was of course no place for young Rudashevski at the main prayer meeting. “It is Yom Kippur eve,” he noted on the twentieth. “A sad mood suffuses the ghetto. People have had such a sad Holy Day feeling. I am as far from religion now as before the ghetto. Nevertheless, this holiday, drenched in blood and sorrow, which is solemnized in the ghetto, now penetrates my heart…. People sit at home and weep. They remind themselves of the past…. The hearts which have turned to stone in the grip of the ghetto woes and did not have time to weep their fill have now on this evening of lamentation poured out all their bitterness.”198
In Kovno and Vilna the memory of the massacres of the previous year rekindled the sorrow in the September days of 1942. In Lodz, as in Warsaw, the inhabitants were barely reaching the end of a period of unequaled extermination and, of course, the chroniclers abstained from any comment. Yom Kippur was a workday like any other. Yet it was not an entirely ordinary day: “Great appreciation and gratitude were felt for the especially good and substantial midday meal—a potato and pea dish cooked with bones—that was served to mark the holiday. The midday meal was the sole evidence of the holiday, which is normally celebrated so solemnly. Only a few private stores were closed.”199
Such lack of loftier feelings angered Rosenfeld, although he could not have forgotten the events of the past weeks and, more generally, the utter misery of the ghetto population. Yet, on September 23, he did not restrain his feelings: “In shirts, gloves—in the ghetto workshops, hundreds of Eastern Jews were shopping on YK [Yom Kippur], no Western Jew was to be seen. Hardening of the human spirit, deafness to the heart, alienation. Basest mentality doesn’t matter. What kind of human beings are these? Terrible, downcast, melancholy, sobering.”200
IX
While, during the second half of 1942, the hunting down of Jews and their wholesale murder had spread to every country and territory in Germany’s direct grip, for some segments of European Jewry the attitudes of a few governments, either allied with the Reich or neutral, were becoming a matter of life and death.
Crossing the Spanish border was relatively easy following the defeat of France, as we saw, provided the (mainly Jewish) refugees had visas for a further destination. Once the deportations from France started, escape via Spain became a chance of survival. By then, however, Spanish border guards were sending the fleeing Jews back to France. A few months later, after the Allied landing in North Africa and the occupation of the whole of France by the Germans, refugees—Jewish and others—also tried to cross into Spain in order to join the Allied forces in North Africa. The Spaniards soon found themselves caught between the contrary pressures of Germany and of the Anglo-Saxon powers. It took a direct threat from Churchill, in April 1943, to convince Franco that, at that stage of the war, Spain’s frontiers could not be fully closed.201
No such problems arose between Germany and Switzerland. Authority over the foreigners living in Switzerland and over immigration was in the hands of the Federal Department of Justice and Police (headed since 1940 by Federal Councillor Eduard von Steiger) and, more specifically, in the hands of Heinrich Rothmund’s Police Division. During 1942 Swiss border police and customs officials were steadily reinforced by army units whose main task became to hunt down Jewish refugees. On the other side of the border, well remunerated but often unreliable guides (including at times outright criminals who defrauded their hapless charges and in some cases even murdered them for their money and valuables) tried to slip through the blockade.
On July 16, 1942 (the day the mass roundups started in Paris), the Intelligence and Security Division of the Swiss army warned Rothmund’s deputy, Robert Jezler. “We have noticed that for some time now the number of Jewish, Dutch and Belgian civilian refugees, as well as that of Polish refugees living in these countries, had been increasing in an alarming manner. All of them leave their own country for the same reason: to avoid the work camps to which they are sent by the occupying power…. Urgent measures would seem to be needed to prevent whole groups of refugees from entering our country, as has been the case recently…. In our opinion certain elements should be turned back; the relevant organizations would then no doubt hear about the measures taken, and this would put an end to their activities.”202 Identifying these “certain elements” did not demand much imagination.
The Police Division faced a decision whose full consequences it knew: “We have not been able recently to decide about sending these people back,” Jezler wrote on July 30. “Reports confirming each other and entirely reliable about the way the deportations are taking place and about the situation in the Jewish areas in the East are so horrible that one has to understand the desperate attempts of the refugees to escape such a fate; one cannot anymore take the responsibility of sending them back.”203
Rothmund thought otherwise. A decree of October 17, 1939, ordered the sending back of refugees who entered Switzerland illegally. Until the summer of 1942 it had not been strictly applied by all cantonal authorities (which often sent the refugees to internment camps); from then on it was to be enforced. On August 4, Steiger signed the directive. In a circular sent on August 13 to all relevant civilian and military authorities, the police division, after indicating that the number of refugees, “mainly Jews of various nationalities,” arriving at the border had grown to an average of twenty-one persons a day over the previous two weeks, explained that both for security and economic reasons, these refugees had to be sent back. Political refugees were not to be sent back but “persons who have fled purely on racial grounds, for example Jews, cannot be considered political refugees” (emphasis in original).204 At the first attempt to cross the border the refugee was to be sent back; if a further attempt took place, the refugee was to be delivered to the army or the relevant authorities on the other side despite all the risks involved.”205
From the minutes of a police directors’ conference that took place on August 28, 1942, it becomes amply clear that everyone knew that excluding Jews from the status of political refugees was “a farce” in Rothmund’s own words. Even Steiger admitted as much: “Political Refugees. Theory is no good,” the federal councillor declared. “Jews are also in a way political refugees.”206 Notwithstanding some exceptions, Swiss policy of sending Jews back remained unchanged until late 1943 and, more selectively, even beyond that date.
Throughout the first years of the war Sweden had been no less restrictive than Switzerland. Yet, as information about the exterminations accumulated in Stockholm (as it did in Bern), and once the deportations reached Scandinavia, the attitude of the Swe
dish Foreign Ministry, and particularly of the undersecretary in charge of immigration, Gösta Engzell, changed. When, in November 1942, the deportations from Norway started, the Swedes reacted: Jews from Norway—and not only those who were Norwegian citizens—who managed to flee to Sweden were given asylum. From then on Swedish help to Jews was extended not only to the whole of Scandinavia but also in other rescue operations on the Continent.207 Whether Sweden’s about-face was induced by humanitarian feelings or by a more prosaic assessment of the course of the war is a moot question. Both incentives were probably at work in Engzell’s mind and in those of his colleagues from the Foreign Ministry.208
Himmler’s attempt, during his visit to Helsinki in July 1942, to persuade the Finns to deliver the foreign Jews living in the country (about 150 to 200 people at that time) to Germany offers a telling example of the relentlessness of the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign.209 No colonization in the East was at stake, or any economic benefit for the Volksgemeinschaft, or any other political or economic advantage so often adduced to explain the Nazi anti-Jewish drive—nothing except mere ideological fury.
Although we do not know Prime Minister Johan Rangell’s answer to Himmler’s request, we know of the Reichsführer’s demand as such.210 The Finnish secret police started drawing lists of foreign Jews who could be deported (thirty-five persons according to some estimates) and delivered to the Germans in Estonia.211 The rumor spread; protests erupted in the government and in public opinion. Finally the number of deportees was reduced to eight. On November 6, 1942, they were deported to Tallinn: One survived the war.212
The Jewish communities of Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria represented a prize of quite different magnitude. No sooner had the Germans launched their major extermination campaign in the General Government and in Western Europe than pressure to deliver the Jews of southeastern Europe started. On September 24, 1942, Luther noted that Ribbentrop had asked him “to accelerate as much as possible the evacuation of Jews from the most diverse European countries, “as it is proven that everywhere the Jews incite against us and have to be considered responsible for sabotage acts and assassination attempts.”213
The Germans did score an initial success in Romania when Antonescu authorized the deportation of Romanian Jews living in Germany or in German-occupied countries.214 In principle Bucharest had promised that the deportation of the approximately three hundred thousand Jews still living in Romania as such would follow. At the end of July 1942 Eichmann had no doubts whatsoever: “From September 10, 1942, the Jews of Romania could foreseeably be transferred to the Lublin district in ongoing transports; there, those able to work will be allocated for labor while the remaining part will be subjected to special treatment.”215 What followed came as a complete surprise: The Romanians changed their mind.
The reasons for the turnabout in Bucharest have been attributed to the whole array of reasons: repeated interventions by Jewish personalities, by the papal nuncio, Monsignor Andrea Cassulo, and the Swiss minister, René de Weck; the bribing of officials and of Ion Antonescu’s family by wealthy Romanian Jews and, also, Antonescu’s resentment of German interference in an essentially internal matter.216 By October it became clear that the Romanians were stalling. On October 11 Antonescu ordered the postponement of the deportations until the spring, and on November 11 Mihai Antonescu told Himmler’s delegate in Bucharest, Gustav Richter, to his face that the Germans were behaving barbarically toward the Jews.217
Although by the end of 1942, the Romanian Jewish policy had obviously shifted and although there were even rumors that Bucharest would allow Jews from Transnistria to leave for Palestine (for adequate per capita remuneration)—a move the Germans tried to stop by all means—Luther, increasingly spurned by Ribbentrop and in dire need of proving commitment for all to see, hurled another desperate exhortation at Ambassador Manfred von Killinger on January 23, 1943. The ambassador was ordered to inform the Romanians that the Italians would be brought to heel regarding the deportations from Western Europe. All European states were being made aware of the principles announced by the Führer in his latest speech [presumably the speech of November 8, 1942, in which Hitler again dwelled on his prophecy and its ongoing vindication]. “Please inform Romanian government,” Luther went on “that Jews are elements of disintegration, that they perpetrate sabotage and help enemy intelligence activities. The German government has many proofs of the above. The evacuation of the Jews from Europe is therefore a compelling necessity for the security of the continent. The positive attitude adopted until now by the Romanian government regarding the Jewish question justified our hope that it would continue to offer its exemplary support to the common cause.”218
Luther’s rhetoric did not help. And at the end of January, Himmler ordered Richter back to Berlin.219 In the meantime, it should be kept in mind, the Romanian forces near Stalingrad had been destroyed, the German Sixth Army was on the brink of surrender, and in North Africa, the Allies were gaining control of much of the area stretching from the Atlantic to the Egyptian border.
In Hungary events would ultimately take a different course, but, in early 1943, the situation still looked similar to that in Romania. A year before, in March 1942, as we saw, the ultraconservative and pro-German prime minister Laszlo Bardossy had been dismissed by Horthy and replaced by the more moderate Miklós Kallay. During the first six months of Kallay’s premiership, however—that is, during the phase of German military successes—no change occurred in Hungarian policies. In the spring of 1942, in response to German pressure, one-third of the Hungarian armed forces, the Second Hungarian Army, was sent to the Eastern front and positioned along the Don River. At the same time Horthy and Kallay allowed widespread volunteering of German Hungarians (mostly belonging to the pro-Nazi Volksbund) for the SS, although the volunteers had to give up their Hungarian citizenship. A new law ordered the nationalization of land belonging to Jews. The treatment of Jews conscripted into labor battalions on the Eastern Front was so harsh that thousands died.
More ominously, radical anti-Jewish initiatives were planned at the same time by the Hungarian military, apparently with the knowledge and even support of Kallay’s staff: The deportation of Hungarian Jews, first of one hundred thousand of them, was discussed with the Germans. It remains unclear to this day whether Horthy or even Kallay himself knew of these contacts. As historian Yehuda Bauer has pointed out, the entire episode remains something of a mystery.220
In the fall of 1942 the change in policy started, obviously as a result of the shift in the global strategic balance. In October, when the Germans demanded that the Jews of Hungary be compelled to wear the yellow star as a first step toward their deportation, Kallay refused. At the same time efforts were undertaken by the defense minister to alleviate the fate of the Jewish conscripts in the labor battalion.221 The change found its expression on October 5, when Luther met the Hungarian ambassador in Berlin, Döme Sztójay, and demanded that the deportation of Hungary’s eight hundred thousand Jews should start. The ambassador mentioned rumors about the fate of deported Jews: Prime Minister Kallay did not want to reproach himself later with having delivered Hungarian Jews to misery or possibly even worse. Luther replied that the Jews were employed in road building and that later they would be settled in a reservation.222 The Hungarians were not convinced. The German demand was rejected. In April 1943, as we shall see, Hitler would personally intervene with Horthy, to no immediate avail. In January 1943 the Second Hungarian Army had been completely destroyed near Voronezh.
In Bulgaria, Jewish policy also moved from cooperation with Germany to an increasingly independent stance. In June 1942 the Bulgarian parliament had authorized the government “to implement a solution of the Jewish problem:” A notorious anti-Semite, Alexander Beleff, was appointed commissar for Jewish affairs in the Ministry of the Interior. The first victims of King Boris’s policies of collaboration were the Jews of Thracia (a former Greek province) and Macedonia (a formerly Yugoslav province), areas Bulgaria had receive
d as a reward for joining the German campaign against its two neighbors, in April 1941. These eleven thousand foreign Jews (from Sofia’s standpoint), were rounded up by the Bulgarian police, delivered to the Germans, and shipped to their death in Treblinka, in March and April 1943. The deportation of native Bulgarian Jews would, as we shall see, become a different matter altogether.
Italy was certainly not setting the right example for these countries of Southeastern Europe. Of course Mussolini was not fooled by Himmler’s account about the fate of the Jews during the Reichsführer’s visit to the Duce on October 11, 1942. The SS chief admitted that in the eastern territories the Germans had to shoot a “not unmeaningful number” of Jews, including women and youngsters as even these were messengers of the partisans; according to Himmler, Mussolini’s response was that “this represented the only possible solution.” Otherwise Himmler spoke of labor camps, of road work, of Theresienstadt—and of the many Jews shot by the Russians whenever the Germans tried to chase them to the Soviet side through gaps in the front lines.223 The Italians had their own sources of information.
As indicated by historian Jonathan Steinberg, the head of the occupied territories division at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs recorded at the end of November 1942: “The Germans continue imperturbably to massacre Jews.” He further mentioned foreign radio reports according to which six to seven thousand Warsaw Jews were deported each day and exterminated. The Germans, according to him, had already murdered one million Jews. King Vittorio Emmanuele III, it seems, knew as well. Thus with the implicit support of the highest levels of the state, wherever it could, in Croatia, in Greece, and in France, Italy was protecting the Jews. The Germans, as Goebbels’s diaries show, were fuming but there was little they could do.224
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