Holocaust

by Gerald Green

  I squeezed the trigger as I had been taught in that brief session at SS school. The explosion was surprisingly soft, almost like a child’s popgun. The side of her head came apart at such close range. Bone, blood and bits of brain spattered my boots. My stomach began to churn, and it was an effort to prevent my lunch from bursting through my throat.

  “That’s how, sir,” Foltz said. “You get used to it, after the first few times. They don’t seem to mind. Never seen people like them.”

  He had to be right. I told myself that we are almost in league with the Jews, to effect their destruction. How else explain the ease with which we are eliminating them?

  “I’ll handle the others, sir,” Foltz said. I heard him as if he were talking through a long-distance phone. I jammed my Luger back into its sheath. I did not look again at the young woman I had just killed. If the men beneath me could kill thousands, hundreds of thousands, I had the duty to kill at least one. In a sense Blobel was right—although I detest the man—in forcing me to act.

  Applauding, grinning, Blobel was winking at his sycophants as I approached his party. “Nice work, Dorf,” he said. “Von Reichenau says two bullets is enough for a Jew. You did it with one.”

  Conversation was blotted out for a moment by a burst from the guns. More Jews were dying. And I am now convinced, a believer in the correctness of it. They have no other purpose except to die.

  Rudi Weiss’ Story

  The wall was slowly strangling life in the ghetto. Its excuse had been that it was built for health purposes, to contain the spread of typhus. Actually, it was a vast prison, where Jews were expected to die by attrition, until the final solution went into effect.

  But still Jews would sneak into the “Aryan” side. Many were women seeking food for their children. One such was a nurse named Sarah Olenick, who worked for my father in the children’s ward at the hospital. Sarah had been caught and jailed.

  Angered, my father called on the ghetto police chief, a Jew named Karp, who had converted to Catholicism, and had thus gained some favor with the SS.

  “I want Sarah Olenick released,” my father said.

  “She’s a smuggler.”

  “You know better, Karp. She went outside the wall to get bread for her children.”

  “She knew the rules. No smuggling.”

  “Please release her. She’s needed at the hospital.”

  “A bit of class snobbery, doctor? Would you be as eager to have her freed if she were a beggar, or a laborer’s wife?”

  “I would.”

  “Then you can appeal for all eight of them.”

  “Eight?”

  He led my father to a window in his office and pointed to the prison courtyard below. There were eight women of varying ages there, among them Sarah Olenick.

  “What do you think I am?” Karp whined. “A monster? I get orders, I obey them, or they’ll hang me. That beggar girl—Rivka—she’s sixteen.”

  “What was her crime?”

  “The same. Smuggling. She went outside the wall and got milk for her bastard kid.”

  My father lowered his head and tried to pray. Useless. He felt bound, constricted, imprisoned himself. “Karp, you are a Jew. Appeal to your masters—”

  “I was a Jew. That’s how I’ve saved my neck.”

  “But you know the SS. Use your influence. You can’t let them—”

  Karp began to rage. “Who the hell are you to talk? You and your brother Moses, so high and mighty on that council? What do you do but take orders from the Germans? Nod your heads and do what they say? Lists of names, work details, offenders. Hollering against smugglers as much as the Nazis do. Don’t lecture me. You want to be a hero and complain to the SS? Try it.”

  My father looked once more into the courtyard, tried to catch a glimpse of Sarah—she was a tall, dignified woman of great patience and kindness—then walked away.

  The eight women accused of “smuggling” were shot dead a few days later. The Jewish police refused to perform the execution, so some Poles from outside were ordered to do it.

  A crowd gathered outside the prison to pray, to protest.

  It did little good—either the prayers or the protest.

  My mother, in her old coat, once fashionable and very much in the Berlin mode, stood by my father and held his hand. He had told her she need not come, but she insisted. “I am one of them,” my mother said.

  Aaron Feldman, the boy who specialized in smuggling, climbed the prison wall and shouted down to the crowd as the women were led in one by one, blindfolded, and shot dead.

  They killed Rivka the beggar first. Then Sarah was shot. Then the other six women. Their crime had been to look for food for hungry children.

  “Oh, Josef,” my mother wept. “Could we not have saved them?”

  “Hopeless,” he said.

  My Uncle Moses, that mildest of men, was not crying, but cursing. “I want revenge. I want to see some of them dead and covered with blood.”

  Again my father tried to persuade my mother to leave, but she insisted on remaining until the last volley of shots.

  A rabbi began to lead the Hebrew prayer for the dead, and my parents, who barely knew the words, tried to pray along with them. My Uncle Moses was silent, so angry he could not speak.

  When the prayers had ended, the crowd, many of them weeping, some relatives of the victims clinging to the prison gate and banging at it, began to dissolve.

  Eva Lubin, my informant of this period in my parents’ lives, recalls that she and Zalman, approached Moses Weiss. Anelevitz was standing nearby. His face, as usual, was meditative, as if forever focused on some goal, some future action.

  “Can you come with us?” Zalman asked.

  “Of course,” Moses said.

  Some people were still praying at the gate. Their voices, wrenched with sorrow, hung in the cold November air.

  “I’m embarrassed that I can’t pray any more,” Moses said.

  Zalman shrugged. “Prayers are no help, Weiss.”

  They led him to the basement of a house on Leszno Street.

  In a dark room, hidden behind a false wall, were a table, books, piles of paper and a printing press.

  It was a small, hand-run affair, but it was working. The printer was my father’s old friend Max Lowy, his patient from Berlin. He and Moses greeted each other.

  “So,” Moses said. “Here is where it comes from.”

  “You object to our newspaper?” Zalman asked.

  “Not at all. I wish it were longer. More news, more protests. I read every word.”

  Anelevitz said, “We’re running short of ink. You have access to the pharmacy.”

  “You can’t run a printing press with iodine.”

  “No,” Lowy said. “But we can make our own ink. Lampblack, charcoal, linseed oil. I’ll give you a list.”

  Lowy ran off a sheet, studied it with a critic’s eye, crumpled it and threw it away. “I’m still a craftsman, even in a basement.”

  In the corner of the room, a shortwave radio crackled. So here, Moses realized, was where the overseas news came from. He understood that every single activity in the room was punishable by death, that any person caught here would be tortured to disclose the whole underground operation.

  “A resistance paper?” asked Moses. “Up to now, you’ve been pretty passive, I’d say.”

  “No more,” Anelevitz said. “We are going to arouse the people. After today, there is no way passive resistance can work. They must be made aware of what awaits them.”

  Moses hesitated. “If … if I bring you stuff to make ink, I’ll be involved.”

  “Better to be involved with us than the council,” Eva said.

  “The council members are alive. Lawbreakers get shot.”

  “You’ll die anyway,” Anelevitz said. “And better to die fighting, with a protest,” Zalman said.

  Moses looked at little Lowy, busily inking his ancient machine, and at the plain, earnest faces of the people in th
e cramped room.

  My uncle was beginning to have doubts. What kind of army were they? How could they possibly resist? Maybe he and my father had been too impulsive, throwing their lot in with these visionaries, brave and admirable as they were.

  “Listen, Zalman,” Uncle Moses said. “You’re a working man, a labor leader. Don’t the Nazis know what good workmen we are? How we keep factories going? What good is it to them if they have a bunch of dead Jews on their hands?”

  Zalman rubbed his chin. “Weiss, they’ll close down every factory in Poland, let the Poles and Russians run them, before they’ll let a Jew live.”

  Moses tried to pursue the argument. What chance did they stand against the Waffen SS, the German army? My uncle agreed that they should think of fighting back. But how? What sense did it make? Jews spent most of their time arguing with each other—Orthodox against nonbelievers, Zionists against non-Zionists, Communists against Socialists. Name an internal dispute, and you’d find it.

  Anelevitz nodded at the door. “He can go. We don’t need him. Just be quiet about what you’ve seen, Weiss.”

  But Moses lingered. He was fascinated with Lowy. The little man was all business. He might have been running a giant automatic press for Ullstein. On his head was a paper printer’s cap. A smear of black decorated his nose.

  “Hah,” Lowy said in Yiddish. “The master craftsman at work. They’d throw me out of the union in Berlin if they saw the junk I put out here.” He winked at Zalman. “Not the copy, mind you, but the quality of the printing.”

  Moses appealed to Zalman and the others. “Don’t misunderstand me, I’m on your side. But logic says we are not all necessarily marked for … for …”

  “Logic proves nothing, Weiss,” Lowy said.

  Moses needed but a moment more to decide. He extended his hand to Anelevitz. “I am with you,” he said.

  The young man smiled. Zalman and Eva embraced Moses.

  “We could use the doc also,” Lowy said. “It would help having a man at the hospital, a man people respect.”

  “I will talk to my brother.”

  Lowy pulled another sheet from the flat press, waved it a second to dry it, then gave it to Moses. “Not bad. Wouldn’t win any typography prizes, but it’ll do. Read it.”

  Moses took the sheet and began to read.

  “To the Jews of Warsaw,” the proclamation said. “Let us have an end to apathy. No more submission to the enemy. Apathy can cause our moral collapse and root out our hearts, our hatred for the invader. It can destroy within us the will to fight, it can undermine our resolution. Because our position is so bitterly desperate, our will to give up our lives for a purpose more sublime than our daily existence must be reinforced. Our young people must walk with head erect.”

  So Moses was committed. He not only joined the resistance that day, he volunteered to tack up the first call for resistance, at key points in the ghetto. He and Eva and a few others went out and, making sure no police were in sight, attached the underground leaflets to doors, walls and telephone poles.

  Eva remembers Moses nailing the proclamation to the door of an abandoned shop, and then pretending to be a mere passer-by, just as my mother and father turned the corner. My father halted to read the words of protest, having no idea Moses had just posted them.

  “‘A purpose more sublime than our daily existence must be reinforced,’” my father read aloud. “Noble words.”

  My mother read it also. “Whoever wrote those words and put them up,” she said, “are braver people than we are, Josef. And perhaps better.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Moses said. “Maybe just young and foolhardy.”

  Papa laughed. “Makes me think of Rudi. It’s the kind of thing he’d be doing if he were here.”

  “Yes, you are right,” Mama said. “If he were here, he’d be in the thick of it. You know, Josef, I have the feeling Rudi is safe. That he got away.”

  He kissed her cheek. “So do I. And Karl. And Inga. And all of us will be together soon.”

  Erik Dorf’s Diary

  Berlin

  November 1941

  This morning, November 16, Heydrich and I screened the photographs and the movies from the Ukraine.

  To my surprise, he did not share my indignation at the visual records that people had made without authorization from our office. But he did agree that we had to exercise control over such undertakings, and that all films and photographs must be filed in his headquarters.

  “Any reason, sir?” I asked.

  “To show the world we did not flinch.”

  He sat in the darkened screening room, immobile, reflective, smoking, his musician’s fingers stroking his long nose now and then.

  We watched, as in flickering black and white the Jews were marched to the collection point at the edge of the pit, made to undress, prodded into the ditch, turned to face the guns. And then fell under the smashing impact of the bullets. I confess that watching it on film was easier than seeing it with my own eyes.

  “They die rather peacefully,” Heydrich said. “And the lack of resistance is remarkable. You know, Dorf, we’ll fulfill the Führer’s goal with a lot less difficulty than I imagined.”

  I told him how Blobel complained that millions of Jews were fleeing east, ahead of our victorious armies.

  He yawned. “Oh, we’ll get them all eventually. Russia will collapse and they’ll be ours.”

  I then made some useful suggestions about careful supervision of all documentation of the Einsatzgruppen—films, photos, records, papers. A special unit would have to be set up to keep lists. He agreed. Already I’d collected some information, which I read off to him.

  “The various commanders try to do the actual shooting anywhere from ninety to a hundred and twenty miles from the towns from which the Jews came. On these trips, either on foot, or by truck, Jews sometimes escape, I’m sorry to report. We’ve had our best results in Lithuania, where trained volunteers from the local populace have helped immeasurably.”

  “Good for the Lithuanians.”

  Colonel Jager, head of one of our commandos, calls Kovno a “shooting paradise.”

  Such phrases should be kept out of the records, but it seems to be the case. Kovno is Jew-free. And some random statistics, which I’ll organize for Heydrich, into table form later: 30,000 Jews have been shot in Lvov, 5,000 in Tarnopol, 4,000 in Brzezany. Lithuania remains a prime area, however. It’s estimated that about 300,000 Jews have been eliminated in the Vilna and Kaunas areas.

  As I read off these statistics, I watched Heydrich for any reaction. There was none on his handsome face. The job is getting done. He is carrying out the Führer’s wishes. A plague, a curse is being erased from Europe. Moreover, we now perceive our operation as no more bloody, or unusual, or remarkable, than a saturation bombing from the air, or the encirclement and annihilation of a Soviet division, or the administration of an occupied area. The foremost thing is getting the job done.

  In truth, the statistics, as astonishing as they are in terms of numbers—I confess that envisioning the mass shooting of 300,000 Jews takes a bit of stretching of one’s mind—makes it easier to accept. It proves we are a functioning, efficient organization in which orders are given, and orders are obeyed. One has to conceive of these operations not in terms of a single girl raising her arm, or a child asking about her homework, but in terms of the essential evil, the persistent perniciousness of Jews.

  We kept watching the pictures on the screen. The photos were being flashed now. Naked women covering their breasts and private parts, and running, in that awkward, stumbling way women have, toward the ditch. Old, white-bodied Jews with bearded faces. They kept their skullcaps on even while facing the guns. Young men, wide-eyed, terrified. In terms of our mission, whatever the reasons (and there are many) we are the perfect agents for these acts, and we have found our perfect victims. It is like an Olympian marriage, something conceived of by mythological gods.

  “I think the pictorial aspec
t of our work should not be scanted,” Heydrich said. “Dorf, see to it that it’s done under our sanction, and that all films are developed and screened and stored here.”

  I hesitated. “Of course I’ll look after it. But …”

  “Doubts?”

  “None, sir.”

  Heydrich seemed rather remote from the grisly photographs on the screen. He smoked, we chatted, he asked a pointed question now and then. Only once did he surprise me, when he stressed that I “read between the lines” in the Führer’s work, look up old memoranda, as if to reinforce in himself (and in me) the absolute rightness of what we are doing.

  The last photo flickered on the screen. Three naked Jewish boys, in their teens, children with those strange curling earlocks and shaven heads. Their hands were raised, their eyes were round with terror. In seconds they would be dead. Statistics.

  The lights went on. He turned to me, and then he reaffirmed (if so potent a man has to reaffirm his deepest beliefs) the need for purging Europe of Jews. He told me of a record some early party member had kept of a conversation with Hitler back in 1922.

  Hitler had boasted that once he came to power, he would hang every Jew in Munich, then in every other city, “until the bodies stank.” He would systematically keep hanging Jews until Germany was rid of its last Jew. “It’s in the record, Dorf,” the chief said. “We are doing precisely what he has always wanted.”

  I asked again why we were so careful to keep the work secret. Heydrich dismissed my query. What with England isolated, with our war against the Russians going so well, Churchill might very well sue for peace. Why complicate matters by letting the world know of the Jewish question?

  That seems logical enough to me.

  Rudi Weiss’ Story

  Kiev fell in a few days.