The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  I was ordered to carry the old woman on my back, while at my side strode two companions. One pushed me along with his rifle butt and shouted that I was going too slowly and idly; while the other kept on hitting me for being in such a hurry.

  Beaten and bleeding, I dragged my way to the town hall square. Not a single Jew of all those I saw there was uninjured. They were wounded and bruised, and blood was running on all sides. From the square they were led off in separate groups. To begin with they were loaded on huge lorries which afterwards returned empty. Then the Germans and Ukrainians began to hurry up very much indeed and ordered them all to line up in three rows, each three men deep.

  These rows began to drag along, covering a length of three kilometres and containing many thousand Jews. We were driven to the road behind the town, towards the new Jewish cemetery at Batory. When we approached we understood the full horror of the situation. The sound of shots reached us from the cemetery.

  We were driven into the cemetery with cruel, brutal beatings. I saw that the Germans were driving the people standing on the one side towards the graves, while those standing on the other were being permitted merely to stand and watch. Then came an order, ‘Hand over all valuables!’ I used the tumult and hubbub, and crossed over to the side of the watchers.

  The German stormtroops together with the Ukrainian police took up their stations beside the machine guns. Fifteen of the stormtroops shot, and fifteen others loaded the guns. The Jews leapt naked into the graves. The bullets hit them while jumping.

  Three graves had been dug there. The work of excavation had lasted for about a fortnight. It had been done by young Ukrainians who were members of the Petlura organisation. The Germans then explained to the Jewish Council that the Ukrainians were preparing stations for anti-aircraft against Bolshevik air attack. Nobody even imagined that six thousand Jews would meet with their deaths at this place.

  The graves were deep, the naked people fell one on the other, whether dead or alive. The heap of bodies grew higher and higher. I stood and gazed. Early in the morning the murderers had stationed a group of Jews to watch the scene. This was far worse than death, and many people of our group, who could bear it no longer, burst out with shouts, ‘Take us and murder us as well!’ And the murderers satisfied them, and began dragging people from our ranks off to the graves as well.

  My turn came. The only thing I had in mind was to reach the grave as soon as possible so that an end might be made of it all. ‘Take off your clothes!’ I was ordered, and quickly stood naked. Three of us approached the grave. There were shots. Two of us fell. Suddenly something strange happened. There came an order, ‘Cease fire!’ The stormtroopers standing ready stopped their shooting. I stood astonished and confused. One of the murderers approached me and said, ‘Jew, you are lucky. You are not going to die. Dress again, quickly.’

  The graves were filled to overflowing. All round lay the dead, strangled, trodden underfoot, wounded. Those of us who remained alive felt ourselves to be infinitely unfortunate. There were about one thousand seven hundred of us left in the cemetery grounds. We were afraid to move from the spot. One of those in command of the action announced that ‘the action was completed’, and that the survivors might return to their homes.77

  More than two years had passed since the German invasion of Poland in 1939. In the East, more than a hundred days had passed since the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The victorious German war machine destroyed whatever it wished to destroy: Polish intellectuals, Soviet prisoners-of-war, Yugoslav partisans, French resistance fighters, each felt the full force of superior power. The Jews, scattered among many nations, few of them sympathetic, were singled out for murder and abuse. Reprisals, and the threat of reprisals, inhibited Jew and non-Jew alike, even the bravest. In Warsaw, on October 15, the Germans imposed ‘punishment by death’ on all Jews who left the ghetto without permission, and on any person ‘who deliberately offers a hiding place to such Jews’.78 These were not idle threats: later that same month, as a punitive measure and as a warning, German policemen drowned thirty Jewish children in the water-filled clay pits near Okopowa Street.79

  14

  * * *

  ‘Write and record!’

  What Goering had called the ‘final solution’ in May 1941 was under active discussion five months later in Berlin, Cracow and Prague. ‘As far as Jews are concerned,’ Hans Frank told the ministers of the General Government in Cracow on 9 October 1941, ‘I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done away with one way or another.’1 On the following day, at a meeting in Prague at which Adolf Eichmann was present, the notes of the discussion recorded that ‘the Führer wants the Jews to leave the centre of Germany and this matter has to be dealt with immediately’. It was the transport problem, the meeting was told, that ‘constitutes a difficulty’.2

  That difficulty was being overcome. On October 16 the first of twenty trains left Germany ‘for the East’. By November 4 they had all completed their journey, taking 19,837 Jews to the Lodz ghetto. One of these trains, with 512 Jews, came from Luxembourg. Five trains, with 5,000 Jews in all, came from Vienna, a similar number from Prague, and 4,187, in four trains, from Berlin. Other trains came from Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Dusseldorf.3

  As in 1933 and again in 1938, many German Jews responded to the renewal of persecution by committing suicide. Hildegarde Henschel, who was among the deportees from Germany to Lodz in October 1941, later recalled not only the suicides, as many as 1,200, but also the efforts of the German authorities, often successful, to revive those who had attempted suicide. It was these Jews, she noted, whom the Germans deported first.4

  The arrival of the ‘Western European’ Jews in the Lodz ghetto made a considerable impression: six months later, one of the ghetto chroniclers recalled how, as the deportees arrived:

  We were struck by their elegant sports clothes, their exquisite footwear, their furs, the many variously coloured capes the women wore. They often gave the impression of being people on some sort of vacation or, rather, engaged in winter sports, for the majority of them wore ski clothes. You couldn’t tell there was a war on from the way those people looked; and the fact that, during the bitter cold spells, they strolled about in front of the gates to their ‘transports’, and about the ‘city’ as well, demonstrated most eloquently that their layers of fat afforded them excellent protection from the cold.

  Their attitude toward the extremely unsanitary conditions in which they were quartered was one of unusual disgust, though perhaps that was not without justification; they shouted, they were indignant, and beyond the reach of any argument.

  The ‘Western European’ Jews protested to the ghetto dwellers that, ‘somewhere along the line, they had been led astray’. They had been told they were going ‘to some industrial centre, where each of them would find suitable employment’. Some of them even asked if they could not ‘reside in a hotel of some sort’. Losing their bearings, they began to feel ‘small and hopeless’.

  The Ghetto Chronicle also recalled the arrival of the deportees from Hamburg. They had reached the Lodz ghetto on a Thursday evening, and were housed in a former cinema. On the Friday morning, Rumkowski called on them. ‘They were spread out on the floor,’ the Chronicle noted, ‘sleeping on their bundles, the old people and the women sitting in chairs lining the walls.’ That evening they arranged a Friday evening service, to welcome the Sabbath:

  Dressed in their best clothes, with many candles lit, they said their first prayer to God with uncanny calm and in a mood of exaltation. Those who had left Judaism a long time before, even those whose fathers had broken any connection with their forefathers, stood there that day, festively attired, in a sort of grave and exalted mood, seeking consolation and salvation in prayer.

  When their prayers were concluded, they went out into the lobby, the same words on all their lips: ‘Now we see that we are all equal, all sons of the same people, all brothers.’ This was either mere flattery or, perhaps, a genu
ine compliment to the old population—or perhaps a premonition of the not-too-distant future.

  The chronicler added, in the retrospect of six months:

  Events outpaced time, people changed visibly, at first outwardly, then physically, and finally, if they had not vanished altogether, they moved through the ghetto like ghosts. The turnips and beets they had at first disdained, they now bought at high prices, and the soups they had scorned became the height of their dreams. Once it had been others, but then it was they who prowled the ‘city’ with a cup or a canteen on a chain to beg a little soup.5

  DEPORTATIONS FROM GERMANY

  Among the Viennese deported to Lodz that October was Stephan Deutsch, the ‘dean of Viennese journalists’, who was to die in the ghetto six months later,6 and Leopold Birkenfeld, a brilliant pianist, who from the moment of his arrival entertained the ghetto-dwellers to his music. Birkenfeld’s performances, noted the Ghetto Chronicle for November 1941, ‘deserve special mention’; each of his concerts ‘is truly a feast for the ghetto’s music lovers’. In all, more than thirty musicians, actors, singers and painters had arrived from Vienna, and were to contribute to the ghetto’s cultural activities.7 At a concert on December 3, Birkenfeld ‘literally enchanted the audience’, as the Ghetto Chronicle recorded, with his ‘absolutely marvellous piano performance’ of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, Liszt’s Rhapsody No. 2, and works by Mendelssohn.8

  In the Lodz ghetto, as elsewhere, resistance and protests continued to be severely punished. The forty-four-year-old Dr Ulrich Schulz, a lawyer, was one of the deportees from Prague to Lodz. During the journey he had, the Chronicle recorded, ‘flown into a rage and slandered the police officials who were on the train as escorts’. Imprisoned on arrival in Lodz, Schulz was held in prison for three months and then shot by German policemen.9

  Non-Jews were also punished for seeking to help Jews: in Berlin, on October 23, a German Catholic priest, Bernhard Lichtenberg, who had been a military chaplain in the First World War, was arrested for his protests against the deportations to the East. Since the Kristallnacht in November 1938, Lichtenberg had closed each evening’s service with a prayer ‘for the Jews, and the poor prisoners in the concentration camps’. Sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, he was sent to Dachau, but died ‘on the way’.10

  ***

  On October 24, in Vilna, after a distribution of about six thousand work passes, the Germans seized four thousand Jews without passes and took them to Ponar. In vain had the recently appointed head of the Jewish Council, Jacob Gens, appealed to the Germans for further passes.11 Thousands of Jews hid in cellars, or in attics, but groups of Lithuanians went from house to house in search of them, often returning several times to the same house.12 ‘We feel like beasts surrounded by hunters,’ noted one fifteen-year-old boy, who survived these October raids.13

  In many of the cellars, Jews resisted the Lithuanian ‘hunters’, and refused to leave. They were shot dead on the spot.14 In two days, more than 3,700 Jews were taken to Ponar and murdered, or killed in the cellars. Of those killed, according to the precise German statistics, 885 were children.15

  To the distress of the Einsatzgruppen, the local population in White Russia, one commander reported, had ‘not proposed to take part in any pogroms’, a fact which made ‘vigorous’ action by the Germans themselves all the more imperative. It was experienced repeatedly, according to one Einsatzgruppen report, that ‘Jewish women showed an especially obstinate behaviour’. For this reason, the report continued, ‘28 Jewesses had to be shot in Krugloje and 337 at Mogilev’. In Tatarsk, the Jews had left the ghetto to which they had been deported and had returned to their homes ‘attempting’, the report noted, ‘to expel the Russians who had been quartered there in the meantime’. As a result of this ‘act of defiance’, all male Jews, as well as three Jewesses, were shot. In nearby Starodub, ‘the Jews offered some resistance against the establishment of a ghetto, so all 272 Jews and Jewesses had to be shot’. In Mogilev also, the Einsatzgruppen reported, ‘the Jews attempted to sabotage their removal to the ghetto. 113 Jews were liquidated.’ This was in addition to four Jews ‘shot on account of their refusal to work’, and two more shot because they had allegedly ill-treated wounded German soldiers, and ‘because they did not wear the prescribed markings’.

  In Bobruisk, according to this same Einsatzgruppen report, which was sent to Berlin on October 25, those executed included ‘rebellious Jews and persons who had shielded Red Army soldiers or who had acted as spies for the partisans.’ Some fifty-two Jews who had fled from Gorodok to Vitebsk, and ‘had made the population restive by spreading rumours’. They were given what the report of October 25 described as ‘special treatment’.16

  On October 16 Rumanian and German forces had occupied Odessa, after a two-month siege. Six days later, at 5.35 in the afternoon, an explosion blew up the Rumanian command headquarters in the city. Seventeen Rumanian and four German officers were killed, including General Glogojeanu, head of the Rumanian Occupation Command. ‘I have taken steps’, telegraphed Glogojeanu’s deputy, General Trestioreanu, three hours later, ‘to hang Jews and Communists in Odessa squares.’17 By noon on the following day, October 23, as the reprisals gathered momentum, five thousand civilians had been seized and shot, most of them Jews, of whom at least eighty thousand had been unable to flee before the city was surrounded in August.

  The campaign which now ensued against the Jews of Odessa was reported by the Germans who witnessed it. That same morning, October 23, nineteen thousand Jews were assembled into a square near the port, which was surrounded by a wooden fence; they were sprayed with gasoline and burnt alive. In the afternoon, the gendarmerie and the police rounded up over twenty thousand persons in the streets—again, most of them Jews—and squeezed them into the municipal gaol. The next day, October 24, they removed sixteen thousand Jews from the gaol and led them out of the city in long columns, in the direction of Dalnik, a nearby village.

  When the first Jews reached Dalnik they were bound to one another’s arms in groups of between forty and fifty, thrown into an anti-tank ditch and shot dead. When this method proved too slow, they were pressed into four large warehouses which had holes in the walls. Machine-gun nozzles were pushed into the holes, and in this manner mass murder was committed in one warehouse after another.

  The soldiers who carried out the murders were under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel N. Deleanu and Lieutenant-Colonel C. D. Nicolescu. German soldiers also took part in the shooting. For fear that someone might escape nevertheless, three warehouses, which were filled mainly with women and children, were set on fire. Those who were not killed by the flames sought to escape through the holes in the roof, or through the windows; these were met with hand grenades or machine-gun fire. Many women went mad and threw their children out of the windows. The fourth warehouse, which was filled with men, was shelled the next afternoon, October 25, at 5.35, exactly three days after the bombing of command headquarters.

  Following the massacres of October 23, 24 and 25, a further ten thousand Jews were deported from Odessa to three concentration camps established near Golta: Bogdanovka, Domanovka and Acmecetca. There, they were murdered two months later, together with tens of thousands of other Jews who had been brought to these camps from northern Transnistria and Bessarabia.18

  ***

  Throughout the autumn of 1941, methods of mass murder were being devised which were intended to be more efficient, and more secret, than the shooting hitherto employed in the East. On October 25, as news of the previous day’s slaughter in the streets of Vilna reached Berlin, Alfred Wetzel, an official in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, noted that Dr Viktor Brack, a member of Hitler’s Chancellery and an expert on euthanasia, had already ‘coordinated the supply of instruments and apparatus for killing people through poison gas’. This was to be the new method. Wetzel noted that Brack ‘is ready to collaborate in the installation of the necessary buildings and ga
s plants’. He was willing to send his own chemist, Kallmeyer, to Riga.

  Wetzel added that Eichmann ‘is in agreement with this procedure’. Eichmann had already informed the ministry, Wetzel noted, ‘that the camps are intended for Riga and Minsk, where even Jews from the Old Reich may be sent’. To judge from the ‘actual situation’, Wetzel added, ‘one need have no scruple in using Brack’s method to liquidate Jews who are unsuitable for work’. In this way, it would be possible to avoid ‘incidents’ such as occurred ‘during the shootings at Vilna—and these shootings were public, according to the report that I have before me’. Such public shootings ‘will no longer be possible or tolerated’.19

  In the western Polish town of Kalisz, the Jewish community was informed by the Germans on October 26 that, in order ‘to reduce the danger of epidemics to a minimum’, patients in the Jewish old people’s home were to be transferred to convalescent homes in another town at ten in the morning on the following day. The patients were to be ‘washed and dressed in fresh underwear’. Nothing else need be done for them, ‘even bedding was unnecessary as everything had now been prepared’.

  Jewish mechanics, returning to their homes in the ghetto later that day from their work at Gestapo headquarters, reported that ‘a large number of strange Gestapo men had arrived with a mysterious large black lorry that was closed on every side and had no ventilation holes at all’.

  Many inside the ghetto linked these facts with the order to evacuate the old people’s home. As one of those persons later recalled: ‘There were still many optimists, hoping for the best, but the majority were ill at ease and apprehensive.’