The Jewish refugees in Warsaw lived in conditions of growing hardship. ‘Some move in with a relative, a friend, or a distant acquaintance,’ Kaplan noted on December 30. ‘The poor ones fill the synagogues, which have become refugee centres. One cannot describe the crowded conditions, the congestion and filth in these centres.’ Sometimes, Kaplan noted, ‘you see a provincial Polish Jew, who truly presents an exotic appearance in a European city. Even his brethren, fellow Jews of Warsaw, are not accustomed to him, and in Gentile eyes he is the object of ridicule and mockery.’ Some of the newly arrived refugees, Kaplan added, ‘go out with their yellow patches in the shape of a Star of David. In such cases they are rebuked and forced to change them for the blue and white patch—symbol of the Jewishness of the Jews of Warsaw.’30
By the end of 1939, only a few Jews were able to find a means of escape from Greater Germany. A few still managed, however, to make their way southward, to Yugoslavia or Rumania, usually along the Danube, hoping to be able to proceed across the Black Sea by ship to Palestine. But it was not only the Germans who sought to close these escape routes. On December 30 a river boat, Uranus, reached the Iron Gates. On board were 1,210 Jews who had left Vienna and Prague in November, as an ‘illegal’ transport bound for Palestine, organized by a young Viennese Jew, Ehud Uberall.31 At the Iron Gates, the Danube began to freeze over. The refugees were taken for shelter to the nearest Yugoslav port, Kladovo, to await the warmer weather, when they could continue their journey down the lower Danube. As a result of repeated British diplomatic protests, however, urging the Yugoslav government not to allow boats to proceed, lest they made for Palestine, the refugees were interned in Yugoslavia, for nine months, first at Kladovo and then at Sabac.32 There, early in 1940, 207 teenagers received Palestine certificates, and were allowed to proceed to Palestine by train. The remaining 1,003 were massacred at Sabac in October 1941, within six months of the German conquest of Yugoslavia.33
In spite of the Palestine White Paper of 17 May 1939, restricting the number of Jews to be allowed into Palestine to twenty thousand a year, the British authorities in Palestine had allowed more Jews into Palestine during 1939 than in the previous two years: 27,561 immigrants for 1939 alone. This brought the total Jewish immigration to Palestine since 1936 to more than eighty thousand. But now the gates both of emigration and of immigration were being closed.
CENTRAL POLAND
In Warsaw, a book had been published in Yiddish that year, describing some of the worst moments in Jewish history: the Crusader massacre of Jews in the twelfth century, the Chmielnicki killings in the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, and the Ukrainian pogroms of 1918 and 1919. ‘But it did not occur to us’, Yitzhak Zuckerman, then a young Zionist in Warsaw, later wrote, ‘that the poison cup was not yet empty, and that we would have to drain it to its last dregs.’34
9
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1940: ‘a wave of evil’
Starvation had begun to haunt the Jews of Warsaw; during the first week of January 1940 Emanuel Ringelblum noted ‘fifty to seventy deaths daily’, as against normal pre-war mortality of ten. The random killings also continued. ‘Tonight,’ Ringelblum wrote on January 1, ‘Dr Cooperman was shot for being out after eight o’clock. He had a pass.’ In Praga, a suburb of Warsaw across the Vistula, ‘A Jewish worker who belonged to the labour battalion was killed.’1 On January 2, a General Government ordinance forbade the posting of obituary notices.2 On January 5, Jews were forbidden both to be in the streets between nine at night and five in the morning, and to do any trading outside the predominantly Jewish section of Warsaw.3
As the deportations from western Poland continued, the pressures inside Warsaw increased. Elderly refugees died from the exhaustion of their journeys. Fuel was so hard to obtain that on January 6 Ringelblum noted that books from the library of the Socialist-Zionist movement Hashomer Hatzair ‘are being used by the refugees to stoke ovens at 6 Leszno Street’.4 ‘The Jews joke that they no longer have to travel to Carlsbad,’ Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary that same day, ‘for the Spa has come to them. Their weight has dropped, and their drawn, thin faces show poverty and privation.’5
Another hazard was the activity of those whom Mary Berg, who had returned to Warsaw from Lodz, described as Polish ‘hoodlums’: young men ‘who beat and rob every Jewish passer-by’, and who led the Nazis to the apartments of well-to-do Jews, and participated in the looting. Some Poles ‘not blessed with Nordic features’ had also been beaten up by these same roving gangs. For many days, Mary Berg noted, ‘a middle-aged Polish woman, wrapped in a long black shawl and holding a stick in her hand, has been the terror of Marszalkowska Street. She has not let a single Jew by without beating him, and she specializes in women and children.’ The Germans, Mary Berg added, ‘look on and laugh’.6
Away from the sight of passers-by, Jewish or non-Jewish, a death march similar in its cruelties to the death march from Hrubieszow at the beginning of December was taking place in the Lublin region. On January 14 a group of former soldiers in the Polish army, 880 Jews in all, were taken from the prisoner-of-war camp in Lublin and told that they were to be marched to the Soviet border where, as Jews born east of the new Nazi-Soviet demarcation line, they would be transferred to Soviet authority.
The 880 prisoners were escorted on the march by SS men armed with rifles and machine guns. Just before the town of Lubartow, the SS men opened fire, and more than a hundred of the prisoners-of-war were killed. ‘The invalids were the first to be shot at,’ one of the prisoners-of-war, Avraham Buchman, later recalled, ‘because they were too weak to walk. There was one man who was shot in the lung.’7
The prisoners-of-war thought seriously of rebelling; there were only thirteen guards, albeit armed. But, as Ringelblum later learned, the guards told them that if any tried to escape ‘that would be a great catastrophe for all the Jews of Poland’. Some twenty prisoners-of-war did manage to escape. But the retaliation was immediate: three men were killed ‘with one bullet’, while the cruellest of the guards ‘wantonly killed people walking along the road’.8
That night the prisoners-of-war were locked in an abandoned stable, and in the local synagogue. On the following day, between Lubartow and Parczew, a second massacre took place: only 400 of the 880 reached the outskirts of Parczew alive. There, Arieh Helfgot, one of the survivors, later recalled, ‘a delegation of Jews came out to meet us in order to conduct negotiations with our murderers. We were astonished at their courage, as they could quite easily have died together with us.’
These local Jews gave the SS men money, in return for permission to provide the prisoners-of-war with food. That night the prisoners-of-war were again locked in the local synagogue. But during the night, with the help of the same local Jews who had come so bravely to intercede for them, forty of the prisoners managed to escape. The local Jews then found them civilian clothes, and hiding places.
On the following morning the remaining 360 prisoners-of-war were again marched off, and once more subjected to bursts of machine-gun fire; less than two hundred survived, to be imprisoned in another prisoner-of-war camp, at Biala Podlaska. The transfer to Soviet territory never took place. At Biala Podlaska, refused medical attention, most of the survivors of the march died of typhus.9
There were other Jewish prisoners-of-war murdered that winter, among them 320 who had been captured by the Germans in central Poland, but who had also been born east of the new demarcation line. They were sent in sealed, unheated cattle trucks towards the border town of Wlodawa. They too were told that they would be sent across the border. During the train journey, with frequent halts at sidings, more than two hundred died of starvation, or froze to death. In the forest between Wlodawa and the village of Sobibor, the train was stopped and the survivors were ordered to remove the corpses. After they had done this, the men were led into the forest, where the SS guards opened fire with automatic weapons. The prisoners-of-war tried to run away, but only a few succeeded; 120 were killed. Some days later, in
return for payment, the Wlodawa Jewish Council obtained the permission of the Germans to remove the wounded and to bury the dead in the Jewish cemetery of Wlodawa.10
News of the Parczew and Wlodawa killings did not reach Warsaw for several months. There, it was the publication on January 13 of the forced labour decree of December 11 that had created a sudden panic. ‘This decree’, Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary, ‘will uproot all of Polish Jewry and bring utter destruction upon it.’11 Two days later Kaplan wrote again:
The forced labour decree gnaws away at our people. Because of the extent of the catastrophe, the Jews do not believe that it will come to pass. Even though they know the nature of the conqueror very, very well, and his tyrannical attitude toward them has already been felt on their backs; even though they know he has no pity or human feeling in relation to the Jews—in spite of all this, their attitude toward the terrible decree he has published is one of frivolity. I do not join them in this. Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands will become slave labourers—that is, if the tyrant’s defeat does not intervene.12
Not the tyrant’s defeat, however, but his capacity for killing, dominated the talk and experience of Warsaw Jewry. Early in January, the Germans had arrested Andrzej Kott, the leader of a secret youth association, the Polish People’s Independent Action, dedicated to action against the occupying power. Kott was of Jewish origin: his family had converted to Catholicism some time in the past. Using his Jewish origin as their reason, the Gestapo arrested 255 Jews at random, including many professional people: industrialists, engineers, furriers, businessmen, lawyers, hatters, doctors and teachers, tailors, tie-makers, book-keepers, chemists and musicians. Beginning on January 18, and continuing for seven days, all those arrested were taken in groups to the Palmiry woods, outside Warsaw, and shot. Among those murdered were the dental surgeon Franz Sturm, the lawyer Ludwik Dyzenhaus, and the photographer Pinkus Topaz.13
‘Every house is filled with sadness and a spirit of depression,’ Kaplan noted in his diary on January 24, before news of the executions had become known. ‘The Kott affair brought misfortune to a number of families among the intelligentsia, whose husbands or sons were arrested for no legal reason. And those who had not yet been arrested live in mortal fear. Every echo of footsteps on the stairs in the dark of night drives mute panic into their hearts.’14
That same week, the Germans ordered all synagogues and houses of prayer in Warsaw to close.
Following the publication of the forced labour decree, thousands of Jews were taken from the main Polish cities. Plans were also made to deport Jews from Slovakia for forced labour. On January 30, in Berlin, Heydrich announced the setting up of a special government bureau, IV-D-4, for handling all deportation details, including the continuing removal of Jews from the annexed regions of western Poland.
Labour camps were set up near the Soviet frontier, in the expectation, as Zygmunt Klukowski, a Polish doctor in the Lublin region, noted in his diary, ‘that there will be some heavy fighting in our area’. Klukowski listed several towns and villages near which ‘very solid trenches were being built’, among them Frampol, Zamosc and Belzec, all in the border zone.15
Jews were sent to work at each of these labour sites. But ‘from the outset’, Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on February 4, ‘the People of Hope did not believe that the decree of forced labour would be put into effect. As is the way with Jews, they didn’t understand the decree in its simple sense’, trying to find in it instead ‘some hint for an enormous financial contribution’.16 But Kaplan himself was fully aware of what the decree meant. He wrote, the next day, of a Jew who had been ‘caught for forced labour’ in Warsaw:
The work consisted of transferring cakes of ice from one place to another. The terrible cold pierces the flesh. Who could endure the icy chill? But there was no choice. It was the Nazis’ order and, as such, could not be avoided. The Jew did his job with gloves, but the Nazi overseer forced him to do the work barehanded. The Jew was forced to fulfil the wishes of the oppressor, and with terrible suffering he moved the ice cakes barehanded, in below-zero cold. The Jew fell under the agony of this torture. His palms were so frozen that they are beyond help and his hands will have to be amputated.17
Each day, new rules made the life of Warsaw Jewry more difficult. On February 7 Ringelblum noted that ‘Jews may not visit the public libraries which were built through Jewish philanthropy’, and the Jews could only travel by train on presentation of a ‘delousing certificate’, each certificate being valid for only ten days.18 Four days later he recorded incidents where Jews who had been taken off to work in a garage ‘are ordered to beat one another with their galoshes’. A Jew who had been seized while at prayer wearing his phylacteries ‘was forced to work all day in them’. Workers were divided into groups and made to fight each other: ‘I have seen people badly injured in these games.’ On another occasion, a rabbi ‘was ordered to shit in his pants’.19
The cruelties and indignities recorded by Ringelblum and Kaplan in Warsaw were repeated in every Polish city under Nazi rule. In Piotrkow, on February 18, two German sergeants seized two Jewish girls, the eighteen-year-old Miss Nachmanowicz and the seventeen-year-old Miss Satanowska, forced them at gunpoint to the Jewish cemetery, and raped them. The Nuremberg Laws against ‘race defilement’ had proved no protection.20
On February 19 a report from Warsaw, sent through Copenhagen, was published in England, in the Manchester Guardian. ‘The humiliations and tortures inflicted upon the Jewish workmen,’ the report declared, ‘who are compelled by their Nazi overseers to dance and sing and undress during their work, and are even forced to belabour each other with blows, show no signs of abating.’21
In his diary, Ringelblum recorded mounting indignities. On February 21 he recorded how Germans, whom he called ‘the Others’ or ‘the lords and masters’, threw a woman out of a moving tram. Large numbers of Jewish women had been seized from various cafés, and taken away, ‘no one knows where to; it is said that about a hundred came back a few days later, some of them infected’. He had heard about a ten-year-old boy, beaten on the head, who ‘went mad’, and of a place where ‘during the work registration those Jews who said they were sickly were killed’.22
On March 6, Ringelblum recorded how, at a house in the Jewish district, ‘three lords and masters ravished some women; screams resounded through the house’. The Gestapo, Ringelblum added, ‘were concerned over the racial degradation’ involved, ‘but are afraid to report it’.23
Every morning, several hundred Jews, collected by the Jewish Council, were assembled for forced labour: in early March their task was the clearing of snow from the centre of Warsaw. ‘You can recognize them,’ Chaim Kaplan noted, ‘not only by the “Jewish insignia” on their sleeves, but by their gestures, by the sorrow implanted in their faces. They receive no pay for this,’ Kaplan added, ‘not even food. The Gentiles too are required to work, but they are paid.’24
The Lublin region deportations had been abandoned: but six weeks later, on 22 April 1940, SS General Odilo Globocnik, the most senior SS officer in the Lublin district, proposed a substantial extension of the labour-camp system throughout the Lublin region to make use of a much larger number of Jews, isolating men from women. These camps were set up at once: in July 1940 there were more than thirty, employing ten thousand Jews; the number of forced labourers doubled by the end of the year.25 From Piotrkow, Jews were taken to two nearby swamps, where they were forced to dig canals and ditches. Some of those who were taken off for this work were only twelve years old. Many were forced to work naked and barefoot, standing in the water up to their waists. Many died of pneumonia or tuberculosis.26
The purpose of these labour camps was actual physical work, albeit in cruel conditions. But from the first days of the German conquest of Poland, two other types of camp had been created, both near the Free City of Danzig, annexed to the Reich on the outbreak of war. The first was in the woods near the village of Piasnica, twenty-five miles north-wes
t of Danzig, to which mental defectives had been sent since October 1939. ‘It is said’, Ringelblum had noted on 7 February 1940, ‘that many hundreds of madmen had been killed,’ although he did not know where.27 The second camp was in the village of Stutthof, twenty miles east of Danzig. Several hundred Danzig Jews had been deported to Stutthof in the third week of September, among them the writer and journalist Jacob Lange, and the cantor of the Danzig synagogue, Leopold Shufftan. Within a few weeks, most of them had died.28 A Polish Socialist leader, who was imprisoned at Stutthof for fifteen months, later described a ‘mass slaughter’ of Jews at Stutthof during the Passover of 1940. This festival of Jewish liberation from bondage began, in 1940, on the evening of April 23:
All the Jews were assembled in the courtyard; they were ordered to run, to drop down and to stand up again. Anybody who was slow in obeying the order was beaten to death by the overseer with the butt of his rifle.
Afterwards Jews were ordered to jump right into the cesspit of the latrines, which were being built; this was full of urine. The taller Jews got out again since the level reached their chin, but the shorter ones went down. The young ones tried to help the old folk, and as a punishment the overseers ordered the latter to beat the young. When they refused to obey they were cruelly beaten themselves. Two or three died on the spot and the survivors were ordered to bury them.
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