While at Kampinos, Zuckerman had noted the presence, and cruelty, of the Ukrainian guards. There were Ukrainian guards also at another camp near Warsaw, at Lowicz. In Warsaw, it became known early in May that ninety-one Jews had been murdered at Lowicz. The ‘basic cause’, Ringelblum noted, ‘has been the terrible treatment of those in the camp by most of the Ukrainian camp guards’, as well as the ‘starvation’ rations.38 These Ukrainians had been brought by the Germans from south-eastern Poland, where many had lived before the war as a dissatisfied minority. Now they were taking their revenge, on Jews as well as on Poles. ‘The seventeen corpses brought to Warsaw from work camp on May 7th’, Ringelblum noted in his diary, ‘made a dreadful impression: earless, arms and other limbs twisted, the tortures inflicted by the Ukrainian camp guards clearly discernible.’39
In Bedzin and Sosnowiec, each with a pre-war population of twenty-five thousand, Moses Merin was confident that he could govern, and protect, his people. Equally confident, in the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski obtained German permission to open schools for five thousand Jewish children, the teaching to be in Yiddish and Hebrew. But in the Warsaw ghetto, the situation continued to deteriorate, with between five hundred and six hundred Jews dying of hunger every week. ‘Death lies in every street,’ noted Ringelblum on May 11. ‘The children are no longer afraid of death. In one courtyard, the children played a game tickling a corpse.’40
In the Lodz ghetto, the deaths from starvation and the suicides had also mounted. On April 21 a mentally ill woman, the forty-one-year-old Cwajga Blum, who was often seen at the ghetto’s edge, was ordered by a German sentry to dance in front of the barbed wire. She did as ordered. ‘After she had performed a little dance,’ the Ghetto Chronicle recorded, ‘the sentry shot her dead at nearly point-blank range.’41
***
For almost a year, the Jews of France had been spared the cruelties and killings of German-occupied Poland. But as many as forty thousand foreign-born Jews had been interned in metropolitan France, and a further fourteen thousand in French North Africa: in these internment camps ‘several thousand perished’.42 Many Jews in France, especially those who had come from Poland before the war, in search of work, and a life free from anti-Semitism, were drawn into the growing resistance network.
On 10 May 1941, at Suresnes, the Germans executed the twenty-year-old Axon Beckermann, the first Jew to be shot for resistance in France.43 Ten days later, the first measures designed to drive Jews out of French economic life were promulgated: no Jew was to be allowed to engage in the wholesale or retail trade, or to own a restaurant, a hotel or a bank. Restrictions on the number of Jews who could be lawyers, doctors, midwives or architects, however, were not introduced until later in the summer; even radios, forbidden to Polish Jews since the first months of the war, were not forbidden to French Jews until August 1941.
Several hundred Jews in France, with United States or Latin American passports, had managed to leave, legally, for Lisbon, and for the New World. But on 20 May 1941 the Central Office of Emigration in Berlin sent a circular letter to all German consulates, informing them that Goering had banned the emigration of Jews from all occupied territories, including France, in view of the ‘doubtless imminent final solution’.44 This was the first official reference to any such ‘final’ solution, or Endlösung. Within two weeks, on June 2, the threat of arbitrary arrest was embodied in a law authorizing the ‘administrative internment’ of all Jews in France, whether French-born, or foreign-born.45
The Jews of German-occupied Europe followed each phase of the war with close attention. ‘The Jewish populace is in a depression these days,’ noted Ringelblum on May 11, after German forces, having entered Athens, forced the British troops to evacuate Greece altogether, and to prepare for the defence of Palestine against possible German attack. A ghetto humourist coined the epigram: ‘If the Germans win the war, 25 per cent of the Jews will die; if the English win, 75 per cent’—because it would take such a long time for a British victory.46
On May 11 Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew to England where he insisted that peace was possible between Britain and Germany. His mission was quickly denounced by Hitler as the act of a lunatic. But in Warsaw, the thirty-five-year-old Alexander Donat later recalled, ‘people went wild’ as the news of Hess’s mission broke on May 13. ‘The war would now soon be over. Our suffering had not been in vain after all, and liberation was just around the corner.’ Said one wisecrack: ‘Mit Hess iz geshen a ness,’ ‘Hess has wrought a miracle.’47
Hess was denounced by Hitler, and Britain remained at war with Germany. The United States and the Soviet Union were still neutral; Yugoslavia and Greece were now defeated. Britain was alone. But there were rumours of Russia’s imminent entry into the war. When Stalin replaced Molotov as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissioners, becoming Soviet Premier, Warsaw Jews celebrated with ‘Stalin Premier’ bread.48
For twenty months, Poland up to the River Bug had been under German occupation. For twenty months, the Jews in occupied Poland had been cut off from the outside world, from world Jewry, and from the rights and protections afforded civilians in wartime. Jewish prisoners-of-war continued, after twenty months, to be deprived of the protection laid down for all prisoners-of-war by the Geneva conventions. On May 15 the Jewish prisoner-of-war camp at Biala Podlaska, near the Soviet border, was closed down, and the surviving prisoners taken by sealed train to Konskowola, further west. When the train was unloaded, it was discovered that four of the prisoners-of-war had managed to break their way out of the wagons during the journey. As a reprisal, twelve others were murdered on the spot.49
***
For several months, German reconnaissance aircraft had been flying over the border regions of western Russia, but the two million and more Jews on Soviet territory felt safe from danger. Despite the deportation of several thousand Jews to labour camps in April and May 1940, on Stalin’s orders, for the mass of Soviet Jews there was no immediate threat to their existence. On June 21 Zalman Grinberg, a leading Jewish doctor in Kovno, noted in his diary: ‘The peaceful life is running its usual course.’50 That Saturday night, in the Soviet border town of Siemiatycze, there was a ball: attended, as had become usual for some days, by the German border patrol from the other side, and by many Jews. At four o’clock on the Sunday morning, the ball was still in progress. ‘Suddenly,’ the historian of Siemiatycze has recorded, ‘bombs began to fall. The electricity in the hall was cut off. Panic-stricken and stumbling over each other in the darkness, everyone ran home.’51 Unknown to the Jews of Siemiatycze, of Nazi-occupied Europe, or of the Soviet Union, the mass murder of Jews was about to begin: the killing, not of thousands, but of millions.
12
* * *
‘It cannot happen!’
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union launched on 22 June 1941, marked a tragic turning-point in German policy towards the Jews. In the twenty-one months before Barbarossa, as many as thirty thousand Jews had perished. Of these, ten thousand had been murdered in individual killings, in street massacres, in punitive reprisals, in outbreaks of savagery in the ghettos, and in the labour camps. Twenty thousand had died of starvation in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. But in no Jewish community had more than two or three per cent been murdered, while in Western Europe, the Jews had been virtually unmolested.
From the first hours of Barbarossa, however, throughout what had once been eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as in the Ukraine, White Russia and the western regions of the Russian Republic, a new policy was carried out, the systematic destruction of entire Jewish communities. These were the regions in which the Jew had been most isolated and cursed for more than two centuries, the regions where Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Ethnic German and Jew had been most marked in their distinctive ways of life, in which language differences had been a barrier, social divisions a source of isolation, and religious contrasts a cause of hatred. The German invaders knew this well a
nd exploited it to the full. In advance of the invasion of Russia, the SS leaders had prepared special killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, which set about finding and organizing local collaborators, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, in murder gangs, and were confident that the anti-Jewish hatreds which existed in the East could be turned easily to mass murder. In this they were right.
In the first hours, many Jews in Western Europe, in Greater Germany, even in German-occupied Poland, saw the German invasion of the Soviet Union as a hopeful sign. ‘The Jews somehow believed that the Russians would advance,’ Zivia Lubetkin later recalled, ‘beat the Germans, and perhaps this would mean the end of the war.’1 At four o’clock on the afternoon of June 22, as a German announcer broadcast the news of the invasion of Russia over the loudspeakers in Grzybowski Place, another Warsaw resident noticed that the Jews in the square ‘were trying unsuccessfully to hide their smiles’.2 ‘With Russia on our side,’ Alexander Donat recalled, ‘victory was certain and the end for Hitler was near.’3
The German forces advanced rapidly, however, and it soon became clear that the sudden upsurge of hope had been premature. ‘What good will it do to me when I am dead,’ one Warsaw ghetto-dweller said to another, ‘if they come to my grave and say, “Mazel Tov, congratulations, you won the war”?’4 But still some optimism survived. ‘Don’t worry,’ a Red Army officer told the Jews of Nieswiez as his men withdrew eastwards, ‘we’ll be back.’5
In Kovno, the twenty-five-year-old Leon Bauminger, a refugee from Cracow, had a chance to hide as a non-Jew. But when he saw the Jews of Kovno being driven to a special ghetto area in the Slobodka suburb, house of a famous Talmudic academy, he decided to join them. ‘What will be with all the Jews will be with me,’ he told himself. It was rumoured that the Germans would send all the Jews to Madagascar. Bauminger later recalled: ‘I said to myself: I will be the Robinson Crusoe on Madagascar.’6
Yet the slaughter in the East began from the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Helped by Lithuanian, Latvian and Ukrainian policemen and auxiliaries, the Einsatzgruppen moved rapidly forward behind the advancing German forces. An eye-witness later recalled how, at the frontier village of Virbalis, Jews ‘were placed alive in anti-tank trenches about two kilometres long and killed by machine guns. Lime was thereupon sprayed upon them and a second row of Jews was made to lie down. They were similarly shot.’ Six more times, a new line of Jews were driven into the trench. ‘Only the children were not shot. They were caught by the legs, their heads hit against stones and they were thereupon buried alive.’7
Even before the German killing squads reached a region, the local population often attacked the Jews who had lived in their midst for centuries. These attacks were not pogroms to beat and wound, to loot and burn, but attacks to kill: to destroy a whole community at one swift blow. The records of these attacks are scant. Few Jews survived to recount what happened. In hundreds of smaller villages, no Jew was left alive.
THE GERMAN INVASION OF RUSSIA
Wherever possible, Jews tried to resist the killers. But the forces against them were overwhelming. Sometimes the Jews succeeded, if only briefly, in halting the tide of killing. At Lubieszow, Jews armed themselves with axes, hammers, iron bars and pitchforks, to await the arrival of local Ukrainians intent upon murder as soon as the Red Army withdrew, and before the Germans had arrived. The Ukrainians came, and were beaten off. But then, retreating to the nearby village of Lubiaz, they fell immediately upon the few isolated Jewish families living there. When, the following morning, the Jews of Lubieszow’s self-defence group reached Lubiaz, ‘they found the bodies of twenty children, women and men without heads, bellies ripped open, legs and arms hacked off.’
Ten days later, on July 2, a German cavalry patrol entered Lubieszow. As its first task, it hunted down and destroyed the local Jews who had dared to resist their attackers.8
There were many examples of bravery, amid the slaughter. When German forces entered Luck on June 25 they found Dr Benjamin From in the hospital operating room, performing an operation on a Christian woman. The doctor was immediately ordered to stop the operation. He refused, was dragged out of the hospital, taken to his home, and killed with his entire family. He was forty-seven years old.9
In Kovno, on June 26, hundreds of Jews were seized in their homes, taken to one of the fortifications which surrounded the city, the Ninth Fort, and murdered. A Kovno Jewess whose father was among those seized that day, later wrote: ‘We never saw him again, I suppose that his end was the same as the end of so many hundreds of thousands of European Jewry.’10
It was not always obvious, in those first days of the German occupation, what the future of the Jews would be. In the former Latvian city of Dvinsk, more than sixteen thousand Jews had been trapped by the rapid German advance. Hardly had German forces occupied the city, than all Jewish males between the ages of sixteen and sixty were ordered to report to the market place. The Jews were then divided into groups, each with a German or a Latvian overseer, and taken to different parts of the city to clear rubble. Jews who tried to hide from these labour tasks were rounded up by zealous Latvians, members of a pre-war Fascist organization.
Hundreds of Dvinsk Jews were taken to work, going off ‘without suspicion or hesitation’, Maja Zarch, whose father was among those taken, later recalled. Her recollection continued:
The first day the men were in good spirits although the thought had crossed the minds of some of them that it was strange that only Jews had been singled out for the task. Even more strange was the fact that after work the men were not allowed to return to their homes. This created suspicion and they were given various reasons why this was so. Some said that it was to save time and would eliminate the difficulties in rounding up the men each morning for work. On several occasions my mother, like all the other wives and mothers, went to investigate the whereabouts of my father. Mother would return from seeing Father with bits of bread, soap or whatever the men had salvaged from their cleaning operations.
As the days passed it became known that some of the wives could not find their husbands with the working commandos. Rumours started to circulate that these men had been shot. As the town was beginning to be restored to order fewer and fewer men were to be found in town. Many conflicting reports were heard. Some doubted the stories regarding the shooting and dismissed them as impossible. Why should they be shot? What crimes had they committed? They were probably being sent away to do other work out of town. But rumours of the shootings continued.
One day my mother returned from town in a very agitated state. She could not find my father. The men she had found would not tell what had happened to the others. Rumours of shooting persisted. Someone who lived not far from the prison had heard shooting right through the night. She went to the prison and found my father in a most terrible state. His eyes were swollen and tears were running down his face. He told her of the horrifying night they had spent. Uncle Isaac, together with a lot of men, were called out, made to dig their own graves and then shot. He was sure that the same fate would befall him and the rest of the men. Mother returned with this terrible news. My aunt, who had not accompanied her this time, fainted. We were all crying, mourning my uncle’s death.
The next day, when she went to see my father in prison again, no one was there—the prison was empty. The men were gone. All enquiries were futile. In a state of confusion, she was returning home and on her way she encountered someone who told her that they had seen lorry-loads of men being transported from the prison the previous night. They had been taken in the direction of the outskirts of the town. She went there hoping to find Father but instead she came across the most horrifying sight: horse-drawn carts full of men’s clothing were passing her. The ghastly truth dawned on her—he was no more.
She staggered into the house—there was no need to ask her what had happened. They are all gone, she whispered, murdered, in cold blood!11
The ferocity of hatred was not directed only against Jews. Russi
an prisoners-of-war were also murdered in cold blood by the occupying forces. These Russians were likewise unarmed, defeated, and at the mercy of the conqueror. But the Germans showed them no mercy: by the end of the war, two and a half million Russian prisoners-of-war had been murdered.12
Towards the Soviet soldiers as prisoners, as towards the Jews as a people, the Nazis inculcated a sense of loathing, wishing for their total removal, and rejoicing at their destruction. Throughout the newly conquered areas, revolting tortures were perpetrated upon Russian prisoners-of-war, towards whom the Germans did not recognize the pre-war Geneva Conventions which served to protect hundreds of thousands of British and French prisoners-of-war. As in the creation of a spurious racial concept of ‘the Jew’, the Germans had stimulated a similar hatred of the Russian prisoner-of-war, portraying him as a ‘degenerate Slav’, a coward for whom the honour and dignity of the ‘Aryan’ soldier were of no relevance, and of no avail.13
A young Jew, Shalom Cholawski, has recalled how, on June 27, the day on which the Germans entered Nieswiez:
Groups of Russian prisoners-of-war were brought into the synagogue courtyard. They lay hungry and exhausted. The Germans moved among them, kicking them with their heavy shoes.
One of the soldiers began beating a prisoner. He raised the man to his feet and cursed him with every punch. The prisoner, a short fellow with dull Mongolian features, did not know why the German had singled him out or what he was raving about. He stood there, not resisting the blows. Suddenly, he lifted his hand and, with a terrific sweep, slapped his attacker powerfully and squarely on the cheek. Blood trickled slowly down the German’s face. For a moment they stared at each other. One man seething with anger, the other calm. Several Germans brusquely shoved the man to a place behind the fence. A volley of shots echoed in the air. I witnessed the scene from my window.
The Holocaust Page 17