Jews stayed in their houses, Cholawski added, ‘still waiting and hoping; maybe the others would return.’ But with every hour, the Red Army was driven further eastward.14
In the early hours of June 27 the Germans entered Bialystok, a city which they had occupied briefly in September 1939, before handing it over to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Since September 1939, as many as ten thousand Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland had found refuge in the city, raising its Jewish population to more than fifty thousand. On the morning of their entry into the city, ‘Red Friday’ in the annals of the Jewish community of Bialystok, a large German motorized unit gathered at one end of the Jewish quarter and began drinking ‘to death’. A few minutes later they besieged the Szulhojf quarter around the Great Synagogue. It was eight in the morning. The slaughter started at once. The Germans, in small units, armed with automatic pistols and hand grenades, started chasing Jews on the narrow, winding streets around the Great Synagogue.
‘Dante-esque scenes’, as the Bialystok historian Szymon Datner later wrote, ‘took place on these streets. Jews were taken out of the houses, put against the walls, and shot. From everywhere, the unfortunate people were driven in the direction of the Great Synagogue, which was burning with a great fire, and from which horrible cries came out.’ At least eight hundred Jews had been locked into the synagogue, before it had been set on fire.
The Germans then forced further victims to push one another into the burning synagogue. Those who resisted, they shot; then they threw the dead bodies inside the burning building. ‘Soon the whole quarter around the synagogue was burning. The soldiers were throwing hand grenades inside the houses, which being mostly wooden, burned easily. A sea of flames which embraced the whole Szulhojf overflowed into the neighbouring streets.’
Until late in the afternoon, Jews were driven into the burning synagogue, shot on the streets and in the houses. The noise of exploding grenades, Datner had written, ‘mingled with the shots from the pistols, and with the drunken cries of the Germans, and the horrible cries of the murdered victims’. Among those who died in the burning synagogue were the well known Dr Kracowski, a pharmacist named Polak, a celebrated chess player, Zabludowski, and a popular comedian, Alter Sztajnberg.
At one moment, when the Germans were not watching, a Pole—his name is not known, he was the porter of the synagogue—opened a small window at the back of the synagogue, and several dozen Jews managed to escape. Among those saved was Pejsach Frajnd. By the end of that day of burning and shooting, two thousand Jews had been murdered.15
The last days of June 1941 also saw the first of the deportations from the Rumanian province of Bessarabia. Jews, uprooted from their towns and villages, were driven hundreds of miles eastwards, some on foot, some by train, in conditions of hardship and violence. On June 27 it was the Jews of Falesti who were the victims. Imprisoned in the Great Synagogue, where the women were assaulted by both German and Rumanian troops, they were then forced to walk eastward.16 In nearby Dombroveni, a Jewish agricultural village whose rabbi and communal leaders had been deported to Siberia in 1940, the remaining Jews were taken to a schoolyard and robbed of all their money and valuables, before being sent on the eastward march.17 Every day, Jews died on the march, or were killed by guards impatient with the slow pace of the sick or elderly.18
No day now passed without Jews being murdered. In Kovno, on Saturday, June 28, Lithuanian police joined with released convicts to hunt through the streets with iron bars, searching for Jews, and beating several hundred to death.19 On June 29, in the Rumanian city of Jassy, Rumanian soldiers and police went on the rampage, watched by German SS men, killing at least two hundred and sixty Jews in their homes.20 At the same time, five thousand Jews were arrested, marched through the streets while being beaten continuously by Rumanian and German police, shot if they fell, and, at the railway station, forced to lie on the ground while all their money, jewellery, rings and documents were taken from them. Eventually they were put into sealed cattle trucks, a hundred people and more in each, in two trains, without food or water. One of the survivors of those on the train that travelled southward later recalled:
The heat and stench inside were fearful. Before our eyes our children fell, our parents and our friends. They might possibly have been saved if only we had had a few drops of water. There were some who drank their own urine or that of their friends. A little water was afterwards poured into the truck through its holes when the death train was halted at different stations. Meantime the heat in the truck became fearful, it was literally an inferno.
The journey of the living together with the dead lasted for four days; and then the train halted at Tromat so that the corpses should be removed.
On the way to Kalarash the train stopped at Mirteshet, near a pool of filthy water. The reckless victims or madmen, whichever we ought to call them, broke down the doors of the trucks and made for the pool. They paid no attention to the warnings of the trainmaster that they would be killed and refused to move away from the turbid water. Dozens of them were shot by the guards as they stood in the pool and drank the filthy mess.21
By the time the train had reached Mirteshet, more than six hundred Jews had perished. At Mirteshet, a further 327 had died, or were shot. At the next halt, Sabaoani, 172 bodies were taken out of the train, and at Roman, a further 53. While at Roman, the surviving Jews were taken out of the train, made to strip naked in order to enter a disinfectant bath in a sanitary train, and then forced to spend the night naked on the ground. Fortunately, a local Christian woman, Viorica Agarici, head of the region’s Red Cross, insisted that measures be taken to lessen the torment of the journey, and some Jews were allowed out of the train altogether: but even of these, 143 died in the coming month.22 At the next stop, Inotesti, forty bodies were taken out, and at Kalarash, the train’s destination, a further twenty-five. The journey from Jassy had lasted eight days.
Sixty-nine of the Jews who reached Kalarash were so weak that they did not survive more than a few days in the Kalarash camp. From a second train sent from Jassy on the same day, but in a different direction, 1,194 died: bringing the number of those killed, according to the officially certified Rumanian police reports, to more than two and a half thousand.23
***
On 30 June 1941, eight days after their invasion of the Soviet Union, German forces entered the city of Lvov. In 1939 there had been 109,500 Jews in Lvov, a third of the city’s population. After Warsaw and Lodz, it was the third largest Jewish community in inter-war Poland. The first Jews are believed to have reached Lvov in the Byzantine era. In 1340 there was an influx of Jewish refugees from Germany and Bohemia. A ‘Holy Congregation outside the walls’ was founded in 1352. Under Austrian rule from 1772 to 1914, Polish from 1919 to 1939, Lvov Jewry had made its contribution to every facet of Jewish and Polish life. With the German occupation of western Poland in September 1939, a further fifty thousand Jews had reached Lvov as refugees. Under Soviet rule, they sheltered under the protection of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the Red Army. Both were now swept away.
From the first hours of the German occupation, mobs of Ukrainian hoodlums, incited by German proclamations and pamphlets, combed the streets and houses, murdering Jews wherever they found them, or taking them off to the city’s prisons, where thousands were tortured and shot. In an attempt to halt the slaughter, Yechezkel Lewin, editor-in-chief of the Jewish weekly newspaper Opinja, and rabbi of the Reform Synagogue in Lvov, went, in his rabbinical robes, to see the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Metropolitan Sheptitsky, in his palace. ‘You told me once, “I am a friend of Israel,”’ Lewin declared. ‘You have always emphasized your friendship to us, and we ask you now, at this time of terrible danger, to give proof of your friendship and to use your influence over the wild crowds rioting against us.’
Responding to Lewin’s appeal, Sheptitsky issued a proclamation against the killings. But the mobs were on the rampage, the howls of the killers mingled
with the screams of the victims, and the slaughter in the streets continued. Sheptitsky urged Lewin to remain in the palace until the violence had subsided. But Lewin told him: ‘My mission is completed. I have come to make a request for the community, and shall return to the congregation, where my place is.’
Lewin walked back towards his home. On the way, several of his Christian friends urged him to go back to the Metropolitan’s palace, but he refused to do so. At the threshold of his house he was seized by Ukrainian militiamen, and dragged to prison. There, still in his rabbinical robes, he was pushed and beaten with the rifle butts of German soldiers, before being shot down in the prison courtyard.
Several thousand Jews were murdered in these prison killings, among them Lewin’s brother, Rabbi Aaron Lewin, a former deputy in the Polish parliament, and head of the rabbinical court of the city of Rzeszow.24 A sixteen-year-old eye-witness of the slaughter in Lvov, Leon Weliczker, later recalled how, after he and his father had been arrested, they were taken to the yard of a police station, where more than five thousand Jews were assembled:
Thousands of men were lying here in rows. They lay on their bellies, their faces buried in the sand. Around the perimeter of the field searchlights and machine guns had been set up. Among them I caught sight of German officers standing about. We were ordered to lie flat like the others. We were pushed and shoved brutally, this way and that. My father was separated from me, and I heard him calling out in despair: ‘Let me stay with my son! I want to die with my son!’ Nobody took any notice of him.
Now that we were all lying still, there was a hush that lasted for a moment or two. Then the ‘game’ started. We could hear the sound of a man, clearly one of us, stumbling awkwardly around, chased and beaten by another as he went. At last the pursued collapsed out of sheer exhaustion. He was told to rise. Blows were rained down upon him until he dragged himself to his feet again and tried to run forward. He fell to the ground again and hadn’t the strength to get up. When the pursuers were at last satisfied that the incessant blows had rendered him unable to stir, let alone run, they called a halt and left him there. Now it was the turn of a second victim. He received the same treatment.
Now a third was hauled out. The Germans, in pursuit of their sport, tramped up and down over our backs as we lay there. No one dared to raise his head. The dread of being picked out for the next turn almost drove me crazy. Every few minutes I touched my neighbour to see if he was still there or if he had gone to face this merciless ordeal. Where could my father be? Was he already among those now lying stunned, with the ordeal behind them? And what of my brother Aaron? Had not he, too, been recruited for work?
Thoughts raced in disorder and confusion through my mind. I was so exhausted that I fell asleep. Not even the agonizing screams, the sound of savage blows, or the continual trampling on our bodies could prevent me any longer from sinking into oblivion. I dreamed of home—the whole family was there, sitting happily together. I dreamed that my brother has been sent home.
The welcome state of unconsciousness passed all too quickly. I came to, and was startled by a painful stab of dazzling light. Powerful searchlights were focused on us. We sat up, one beside the other, so close that we could not stir. Directly in front of me sat two men with shattered skulls. Through the mess of bone and hair I could see the very brains. We whispered to them. We nudged them. But they did not stir. They just sat there, propped up, bulging eyes staring ahead. They were quite dead.
‘The sun rose slowly’, Weliczker’s account continued: ‘The day promised to be heavy and oppressive. Thirst was already making itself felt among us. Ten at a time we were allowed to go to the toilets. The greater number, however, were so apathetic, still so full of numbing dread, that they declined to budge. An almost stupefying stench arose from the many battered bodies of the dead.’
Two days later, Weliczker was taken with 150 other Jews to unload artillery guns. By the end of the day, more than sixty of the Jews had been crushed to death under the wheels of the guns.25
***
While these Eastern slaughters continued day after day and town after town, elsewhere in German-occupied Europe the earlier patterns of destruction were being repeated. On June 30, the day of the German occupation of Lvov, three hundred more young men were rounded up in Amsterdam and deported to the stone quarries of Mauthausen. ‘They followed the same thorny path,’ one Dutch witness of their deportation later recalled. ‘Nobody survived….’26
In the East, throughout July, the first victims were carefully chosen so that the communities immediately lost their natural leadership. In Minsk, within hours of the German occupation, forty thousand men and boys between the ages of fifteen and forty-five were assembled for ‘registration’, under penalty of death: Jews, captured Soviet soldiers, and non-Jewish civilians. Taken to a field outside the city, each group was put into a separate section. For four days all were kept in the field, surrounded by machine guns and floodlights. Then, on the fifth day, all Jewish members of the intelligentsia—doctors, lawyers, writers—were ordered to step forward. Some two thousand did so, not knowing for what purpose they would be needed, perhaps as administrators, as functionaries, or in their professional capacities. Many non-professionals were among those who stepped forward, believing that this group was to be given some privileged work or position, and wanting to be a part of it. All two thousand were then marched off to a nearby wood, and machine-gunned.27
On the following day, in Bialystok, three hundred of the Jewish leaders and professional men were arrested, driven to a field outside the town, and murdered there. Among those murdered was Pejsach Frajnd, who had escaped the burning synagogue on June 27.28
News of the killings in Minsk and Bialystok was sent to the chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Muller, in Berlin. Muller asked Adolf Eichmann to see him, Eichmann being the SS officer in charge of the department IV-D-4, responsible for deportations and emigration. Twenty years later, in a court in Jerusalem, on trial for his life, Eichmann recalled that Muller had said to him: ‘In Minsk they’re shooting Jews. I want you to report how it’s going.’ Eichmann went at once, first to Bialystok and then to Minsk. At his trial he recalled how, reaching the execution site in Minsk,
There were the piles of dead people. They were shooting into the pit—it was rather a large one, so I was told, perhaps four to five times the size of this room, perhaps even six or seven times. I didn’t think much about it because I could hardly express any thoughts about it—I only saw it and that was quite enough—they were shooting into the pit and I saw a woman, her arms seemed to be at the back; and then my knees went weak and I went away.
From Minsk, Eichmann travelled by train to Lvov, the capital of Eastern Galicia during the reign of the Emperor Franz Josef, at the turn of the century:
I came to Lvov and saw for the first time a charming picture—the railway station which was built in honour of the sixtieth year of the reign of Franz Josef; and since I always find pleasure in that period, maybe because I heard so many nice things about it in my parents’ home—the relatives of my stepmother were of a certain social standing. It was painted yellow and I remember it, I remember that the date was inscribed on the wall. This for the first time drove away these terrible thoughts which had never left me since Minsk, this was the first time I could forget.
I came to the state police, and even had an order—or maybe I did not have an order—I went there out of curiosity and visited the commander, because I was passing that way; and said: ‘Yes, this is terrible, the things which are going on. We educate the young people to grow up as sadists.’
This, Eichmann insisted, was ‘exactly’ what he said to Muller, and, at a later time, ‘to everyone I met’, including his deputy, SS Major Rolf Gunther, and his colleague in the Race and Resettlement Main Office of the SS, Lieutenant-Colonel Friedrich Suhr. Eichmann added:
I told everyone who came my way—I said: ‘How can you shoot a woman and children, how is this possible? It cannot be done—these
people can go mad or become sadists, and they are our own people.’ He said: ‘This is true, and this is how it is done here. The shootings are carried out here, too—do you wish to see for yourself?’ I said: ‘No, I do not want to see.’ And he said: ‘We shall see whether you wish to or not, because it is on our way.’ There was a trench, but the trench was already filled in; and there was a kind of spring of blood gushing from the earth—and this, too, I had never seen before. As far as I was concerned, I’d had enough, and went back to Berlin and told Gruppenführer Muller.
Eichmann was then asked, in court, if he had ever seen a ‘written order’ for such killings, for the ‘physical extermination’ of the Jews. He replied:
I never saw a written order. All I know is that Heydrich told me, ‘the Fuhrer ordered the physical extermination of the Jews.’ He said this quite early and with certainty, the way I repeat it at this moment. And these were the first results. These were small things that I have just related.
I asked the Gruppenführer: ‘Please do not send me there, send someone else, someone stronger than I am. You see I was never sent to the front, I was never a soldier; there are other men who can look upon such actions. I cannot. At night I cannot sleep, I dream. I cannot do it, Gruppenführer.’
His request, Eichmann added, ‘was not granted’.29 He continued to be sent to the mass murder sites, and the mass murder continued with unabated fury.
In Kovno, since the first days of the German occupation at the end of June, hundreds of Jews had continued to be taken to the Jewish cemetery and shot. Other Jews were seized in the streets, were dragged to a garage, where hoses ‘were put into their mouths and opened’, with the horrendous result that ‘the Jews would burst’.30 On July 4 Lithuanian militiamen, on German instructions, murdered 416 Jewish men and 47 Jewish women in Kovno’s Seventh Fort; two days later, again on German instructions, a further 2,514 Jews were murdered in the fort, the figures precisely recorded by the commander of SS Einsatzkommando 3 in his report submitted to Berlin at the end of the year.31
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