Sophie Lucas could write no more. Her husband Isaac took up the pen. ‘Perhaps there will still be a chance of going to our relations in Denmark,’ he wrote. ‘Write to them, and we shall try the same. We are thinking of you. With the help of God we shall manage.’44
Neither Sophie nor Isaac Lucas was to survive the war. Their place of death, place of execution, some time in 1942 or 1943, was to be recorded only as ‘unknown’ and ‘the East’.45
8
* * *
‘Blood of innocents’
The mass killings of September and October 1939 in German-occupied Poland left five thousand Jewish dead. As German rule was consolidated throughout the General Government, these killings continued, but on a smaller scale, in the form of almost daily punitive actions against Jew and non-Jew alike for every attempt at protest. These reprisal actions were arbitrary and relentless. Among six men and three boys seized at the village of Zielonka, near Warsaw, on 11 November, taken to the nearby woods and shot, were two Jews, Aron Kaufman, the village butcher, and Edward Szweryn, proprietor of the village café.1 That same day, in Zdunska Wola, after the killing of a policeman, Jews and Poles were taken as hostages, and several were shot.2
On 12 November 1939 another stage in Heydrich’s September directive was put into effect, less than two months after the Berlin meeting. This was the order for the removal of all Jews, as well as some Poles, from the newly constituted Warthegau province, formerly part of western Poland, and now incorporated into Greater Germany. The areas ‘south of Warsaw and Lublin’ were designated as ‘the quarters for those removed’.3 But even in the areas in which Jews could live, restrictions were soon imposed. From mid-November Jews were forbidden to work in any government offices, to buy or sell to ‘Aryans’, to travel by train, to bake bread, to go to an ‘Aryan’ doctor or to have an ‘Aryan’ patient. In the first days of the German occupation of Warsaw, Dr Adam Zamenhof, the fifty-two-year-old manager of the Jewish hospital on Czyste Street, was arrested ‘and never seen again’.4 Zamenhof, the son of the inventor of Esperanto, was himself the inventor of a device for checking blind spots in the field of vision.
Wherever Jews were allowed to live, their homes were liable to search and looting. David Wdowinski, the chief of the psychiatric department of the Czyste Street hospital, has recalled how, outside an apartment block in Warsaw, in the first weeks of the occupation, a truck arrived with three German officers and two civilians, who then entered one of the apartments:
There they demanded money, jewels, goods and food. They shut the women up in one room and the men in another. They stole everything they could lay their hands on and ordered the men to load it on to the trucks, to the accompaniment of kicks and beatings. The women were searched individually for anything that they might have hidden. But they were still unsatisfied with their loot. At the point of guns they forced the women and young girls to undress and they performed gynaecological examinations on each one of them. And even this was not enough. They forced the women and girls to get up on the tables and jump to the floor with legs straddled. ‘Maybe something will fall out. One never knows how deep the Jewish swindlers can hide their jewels.’5
Such raids happened every day. Often, a German would arrive in a truck, enter an apartment, demand certain items of furniture, and then force the Jewish owner to carry the furniture down to the truck, ‘under pain of beatings with whips and sticks’.
David Wdowinski has recalled how a Jewish refugee family, who had fled to Warsaw from Polish Silesia, was ‘visited’ one November evening in 1939 by three German officers:
They demanded money and jewellery and threatened the woman at the point of a gun that she give them everything. She gave them all she had. Suddenly one of the officers noticed a small medallion hanging around the neck of the little boy. This child had been ill from birth. He had petit-mal, a form of epilepsy, which forced on as many as forty and sixty seizures a day, lasting one or two seconds. The child was mentally retarded. He could express himself only in inarticulate sounds. The only thing which gave this child any comfort was this very medallion. In the presence of the officers the child was taken with a seizure and the mother pleaded that the medallion be left for her child. One of the officers watching the child said: ‘I see that the child is ill. I am a doctor, but a Jew-kid is not a human being,’ and he tore the medallion off the neck of the little boy.6
Not only pillaging, accompanied by physical and mental violence, but also executions, continued almost daily. On November 16, among seven Poles executed in Warsaw was one Jew, Leib Michel Hochman, killed, according to the official German notification, ‘for refusal to perform a job’ and ‘for flight’.7 Three days later, among fifteen Poles executed in Warsaw, the German notification of the execution included, curtly, ‘Knecht, Majer, Jew, born Zelechow, 1890, resident Warsaw, 29 Franciszkanska Street’.8
In the exultation of their military victory, the Nazi conquerors acted without restraint. Hundreds of synagogues were destroyed during the first months of the occupation. ‘The synagogue on Kosciuszko Alley went up in flames yesterday morning,’ the official German newspaper in Lodz reported on November 16, adding that ‘the first and third fire brigades prevented the flames from spreading to adjoining buildings’.9 The destruction of the books in the Talmudic Academy in Lublin gave so much pleasure to the conquerors that it was recalled with glee more than a year later. ‘For us’, a German eye-witness later reported, ‘it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy, which was known as the greatest in Poland’, and he went on to describe how:
We threw the huge Talmudic library out of the building and carried the books to the market place, where we set fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with their cries. We summoned the military band, and with joyful shouts the soldiers drowned out the sounds of the Jewish cries.10
Throughout November 1939, the Germans continued to demand Jewish labour and to receive a daily quota of work brigades. One task assigned to Jews was the clearing of rubble in towns which had been the scene of fighting or bombardment. Conditions were deliberately made severe. ‘Truly we are cattle in the eyes of the Nazis,’ Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary on November 18. ‘When they supervise Jewish workers they hold a whip in their hands. All are beaten unmercifully.’ The details of Nazi cruelty, Kaplan added, ‘are enough to drive you crazy. Sometimes we are ashamed to look at one another. And worse than this, we have begun to look upon ourselves as “inferior beings”, lacking God’s image.’
Poland had been conquered. Britain and France, at war with Germany, had as yet taken no offensive action. The United States remained staunchly neutral. And yet, Kaplan wrote, the defeat of the Nazis ‘will surely come. We have only one doubt, whether we shall live to see that day. And I say: Yes, we will live; we will reach that day! No power endures for ever.’11
***
On 13 November 1939, a twenty-year-old former convict, Pinkus Zylberryng, a Jew, had shot and killed a Polish policeman at 9 Nalewki Street, in the centre of Warsaw’s Jewish district. Although Zylberryng was identified, the Germans arrested all fifty-three male inhabitants of no. 9. On November 22, all fifty-three were executed.12 But before announcing the execution, the Germans demanded 300,000 zlotys from the Jewish Council. ‘The levy was to be a ransom for the lives of the men under arrest,’ a member of the Council, Ludwik Landau, noted, ‘but when the representatives of the Council arrived, the money was taken from them, but they were told that the prisoners had already been shot.’13
Among those shot in this reprisal action was one of Warsaw’s leading gynaecologists, the forty-five-year-old Samuel Zamkowy.14 ‘This was the first mass arrest and murder,’ David Wdowinski later recalled, ‘and it threw the Jewish population into panic.’15
On November 28 Hans Frank formally ordered the setting up of Jewish Councils in every Jewish community in the General Government. The Councils were to have twenty-four members i
n communities of over ten thousand Jews, and twelve members in smaller communities. It was the German intention, as Heydrich had laid down in September, to issue all orders to the Jews through these Councils. It would then be the responsibility of Council members to ensure that these orders were obeyed. But the Germans retained the power of arbitrary action, in matters large and small. Walking through a Warsaw street in December 1939, David Wdowinski ‘saw a German officer take a fur coat off the back of a Jewish woman and give it to his female companion’.16 In Lodz, Mary Berg noted in her diary how their German neighbours, railway workers, were constantly calling on them. ‘Every time they come, they ask for something, but their requests are really orders. Last week, for instance, they asked for pillows, pretending they had nothing to sleep on.’17 Against such pilferings there was no redress.
Typical of the work which the Jewish Councils were forced to do, and part of the Nazi plan to isolate and impoverish the Jewish communities of Poland, on the morning of November 29 the German Civil Commissar in Piotrkow, Hans Drexel, presented the Council with a decree, signed by Hans Frank, for the delivery of 350,000 zlotys ‘to my office by 11 a.m. today’. If this request were not complied with, Drexel added, ‘punitive measures will be taken as ordered by the Governor-General’.
This enormous sum had somehow to be paid. While the Jews searched for the money, the Germans held three hostages. As the search for the money continued, the hostages were so savagely beaten that one of them, Leib Dessau, died.
As soon as the sum of money was collected, it was taken in a sack to the German Commissar. Later the Germans demanded more money, as well as 12,000 eggs, 500 sacks of flour, 300 kilogrammes of butter and 100 sacks of sugar. The payment of these sums and commodities bankrupted Piotrkow’s Jews, as it was intended to do. All over Poland, the wealth accumulated by generations of hard work and enterprise was seized by the conqueror, leaving the Jews with none of the basic strengths that money can so often provide.18
On the German-Soviet demarcation line, the border had now been effectively sealed, halting further escapes eastward. The expulsion of Jews across the border was also ending. One last deportation was announced on December 1, in the city of Hrubieszow. There, all men between the ages of fifty and sixty, together with men from the nearby city of Chelm, were ordered to assemble in the central square on the following day. The Jews were told that they would be going out to work. Many women and children tried to join their menfolk, not wishing to be separated from them, but were ordered to return home. Craftsmen, shoemakers and carpenters were ordered to lead the march.
‘We started marching,’ recalled Hirsch Pachter. ‘One girl succeeded in following the marchers, shouting “Father” all the way. At the first village, they took this girl away. We do not know what happened to her, but we heard a shot.’
The marchers were divided into about ten groups of two hundred men each. At the end of the first day’s march, on the evening of December 2, twenty Jews were taken out of Hirsch Pachter’s group: two rabbis, two synagogue beadles, ‘and other people with long beards’. They were never seen again. From the other groups, a further two hundred men were taken away.
Early on December 3 the march resumed. At the first village, three bearded Jews were led away: Shmuel Topocostok, Benjamin Rosenberg and a man by the name of Loewenberg. As Loewenberg was led away, Pachter later recalled, ‘his son jumped up and said, “Leave my father alone, I will take his place. Take me,” and they said, “You come along too,” and they took both of them and the other two.’ Pachter added: ‘They were all shot in the back of their heads and the bullets came out of their foreheads.’
The third day of the march, December 4, saw further shootings, the Germans competing as to the number of Jews they could kill in a specific time. ‘They would lay a hand on a man. He would lie down—whoever did not want to lie down would be hit on the head with a rifle butt and the blood ran. But most people were so tired that they could not resist. We were only shadows after all this marching. The slaughter on that day was horrible.’
Of the eighteen hundred Jews who had set off from Hrubieszow, more than fourteen hundred were murdered on that day. The surviving marchers had been given nothing to eat but a small bread roll each. Seeing a fifteen-year-old boy without any food at all, a fellow marcher threw him a piece of his own roll. When the boy bent down to pick it up, he was shot, by the commander of the march himself. ‘He shot him,’ Pachter recalled, ‘but he did not kill him, and he ordered another man to finish the job. The other one apologized in a way—as if to say that the boy had jumped out of the line, and if he had not done that he would not have been shot.’
Two hundred marchers reached the Soviet border on the morning of December 9, starving and in pain from their torn and bleeding feet. ‘The sun was rising,’ Pachter recalled. ‘We were told to sing. Whoever would not sit down and sing would be shot. We started singing Jewish melodies.’ All day the marchers sat, and sang. That night they were taken to a bridge across the River Bug, which marked the border, and ordered to march across it, hands held high, shouting, ‘Long live Stalin’.19
In Warsaw, the reprisal actions continued. On December 8, six Jews and twenty-five Poles were shot for ‘complicity in acts of sabotage’.20 ‘There is no strength left to cry,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary: ‘steady and continued weeping leads finally to silence. At first there is screaming; then wailing; and at last a bottomless sigh that does not leave even an echo.’21
On December 11, all Jews living within the borders of the General Government were officially made liable to two years’ forced labour, with a possible extension ‘if its educational purpose is not considered fulfilled’.22 Further tasks were now devised for the Jews deported to labour sites: clearing swamps, paving roads, and building fortifications. Two days later, a secret instruction from SS headquarters in Poznan stated that any Jews still living in the western regions of Poland annexed to Germany ‘in disregard of the removal order’, even if they had gone to another province of the annexed areas, ‘are to be shot under martial law’. This ruling, the order added, ‘is to be passed on orally to the leaders of the Jewish communities, insofar as they still exist’.23
The Jews expelled from western Poland went mostly to Warsaw and Lodz, whose combined Jewish populations rose to well over one million. The indignities continued. In his diary on December 16, Chaim Kaplan gave two examples which had just reached him from Lodz. The first concerned some Jewish girls, seized for forced labour:
These girls were compelled to clean a latrine—to remove the excrement and clean it. But they received no utensils. To their question: ‘With what?’ the Nazis replied: ‘With your blouses.’ The girls removed their blouses and cleaned the excrement with them. When the job was done they received their reward: the Nazis wrapped their faces in the blouses, filthy with the remains of excrement, and laughed uproariously. And all this because ‘Jewish England’ is fighting against the Fuhrer with the help of the Juden.
The second incident recorded by Kaplan was of a rabbi in Lodz who was forced to spit on a Scroll of the Law:
In fear of his life, he complied and desecrated that which is holy to him and to his people. After a short while he had no more saliva, his mouth was dry. To the Nazi’s question, why did he stop spitting, the rabbi replied that his mouth was dry. Then the son of the ‘superior race’ began to spit into the rabbi’s open mouth, and the rabbi continued to spit on the Torah.24
Mary Berg also recorded in her diary various Nazi ‘entertainments’ in Lodz, when five or ten Jewish couples would be brought to a room, ordered to strip, and then made to dance together naked to the accompaniment of a gramophone record. Two of her schoolmates had experienced this in their own home, when, as Mary Berg noted:
Several Nazis entered their apartment and, after a thorough search of all the rooms, forced the two girls into the parlour, where there was a piano. When their parents tried to accompany them, the Nazis struck them over the head with clubs. Then the Nazis lo
cked the parlour door and ordered the girls to strip. They ordered the older one to play a Viennese waltz and the younger one to dance. But the sounds of the piano merged with the cries of the parents in the adjoining room. When the younger girl fainted in the midst of the dancing, the other sister began to cry for help at the window. This was too much for the Nazis, and they left. My schoolmates showed me the black and blue marks left on their bodies after their struggles with their tormentors.25
To those in authority, such obscenities and torments were a gratifying game. But they did not provide the answer to the future of Polish Jewry. ‘The Jews represent for us’, Hans Frank noted in his diary on December 19, ‘extraordinarily malignant gluttons. We have now approximately 2,500,000 of them in the General Government and counting half-Jews, perhaps 3,500,000.’ Frank could see no solution. ‘We cannot shoot 2,500,000 Jews,’ he wrote, ‘neither can we poison them. We shall have to take steps, however, designed to extirpate them in some way—and this will be done.’26
On December 27, as a reprisal for the death of two German policemen, shot in a tavern at Wawer, outside Warsaw, the Germans hanged 114 residents of the suburb. Almost all those executed were Poles: but eight at least were Jews.27 ‘The screams of those suffocated and killed do not reach us,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary two days later, ‘only the voice of the Nazi is heard in the newspapers. He publishes lies upon lies, spreads falsehoods upon falsehoods every day, casts filthy epithets upon Jew and Pole alike.’28 The conqueror, Kaplan added a few days later, ‘preys upon and devours guiltless people, free of crime, and dips himself in the blood of innocents, even in the blood of children who have never known sin.’29
The Holocaust Page 11