At this ‘monstrous camp’ more than six hundred thousand Jews were murdered in less than a year.38 No selection was made to keep alive those capable of work: only a few hundred were chosen to be part of a Sonderkommando, or ‘Special Commando’, some employed in taking the bodies of those who had been gassed to the burial pits, others in sorting the clothes of the victims and in preparing those clothes and other belongings for despatch to Germany. Eventually, the members of this Sonderkommando were also murdered. ‘The procedure is pretty barbaric,’ Josef Goebbels noted in his diary on March 27, ‘one not to be described here most definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews.’
‘On the whole,’ Goebbels added, ‘about sixty per cent will have to be liquidated, whereas only forty per cent can be used for forced labour.’ In fact, at Belzec, even the two or three per cent of arrivals who were sent to join the Sonderkommando were then murdered. The measures necessary, Goebbels noted, were being carried out by the former Gauleiter of Vienna, General Odilo Globocnik, who was acting ‘with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention’. A judgement was being visited upon the Jews, Goebbels concluded, that, ‘while barbaric, is fully deserved by them’.39
At Auschwitz, the gas-chambers and crematoria being built at nearby Birkenau were not yet ready. The first deportees, 999 Slovak Jewish women, were therefore kept in barracks after their arrival at Auschwitz on March 26. In the following four weeks, Jews reached the camp every few days, the majority, more than six thousand, being men and women from Slovakia.40 But there were also 1,112 Jews from Paris, most of them Polish-born, who had been seized in Paris in the previous months, held in detention camp at Compiègne, and who reached Auschwitz on March 30.41 Here, they waited with the Slovak Jews, not knowing what was in prospect.
This first deportation from France had left Paris three days earlier, on March 27, as ‘special train 767’. As with all the deportations of the coming two years, a precise timetable had been devised for it:
27 March
Bourget-Drancy dep 17.00
Compiegne arr 18.40
dep 19.40
Laon arr 21.05
dep 21.23
Reims arr 22.25
28 March
dep 9.10
Neuberg (frontier) arr 13.59
30 March
Auschwitz arr 5.33
Of the 1,112 deportees on this train from Paris, one, Georges Rueff, managed to jump from the train and escape. Of the rest, only twenty-one were alive five months later. Among those on the train who were to be gassed during the summer was the forty-four-year-old Israel Chlebowski, who had been born in Przytyk, the village in which the pogrom of 1936 had so shocked Polish Jewry. Others murdered from this train of March 27 were the forty-year-old Ignatz Baum, born in Haifa; Henry Eckstein, born in London in 1915; several Jews born in French North Africa, including Sadia Sarfati from Oran and Maurice Behar from Tunis; a twenty-nine-year-old Jew born in Constantinople, Abram Adjibel, and Moise Schneider, aged forty-one, who had been born in the then Austro-Hungarian frontier town of Auschwitz, to which he was now, unsuspecting, to return.42
***
By the end of March 1942 the gassing of Jews was taking place daily at Chelmno and Belzec. At the same time, gas-chambers were under construction at Birkenau and Sobibor. To gain a first-hand report of the effectiveness of the new system in action, Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller sent Adolf Eichmann to Chelmno. Nineteen years later, in a courtroom in Jerusalem, Eichmann recalled his visit:
There was a room—if I remember correctly—perhaps five times as large as this one. Perhaps it was only four times as big as the one I am sitting in now. And Jews were inside. They were to strip and then a truck arrived where the doors open, and the van pulled up at a hut. The naked Jews were to enter. Then the doors were hermetically sealed and the car started.
Eichmann could not recall how many people were inside the van, explaining to the court:
I couldn’t even look at it. All the time I was trying to avert my sight from what was going on. It was quite enough for me what I saw. The screaming and shrieking—I was too excited to have a look at the van. I told Muller that in my report. He didn’t derive much profit from my report and afterwards I followed the van. Some of them knew the way, of course. And then I saw the most breathtaking sight I have ever seen in my life.
The van was making for an open pit. The doors were flung open and corpses were cast out as if they were some animals—some beasts. They were hurled into the ditch. I also saw how the teeth were being extracted. And then I disappeared; I entered my car and I didn’t want to look at this heinous act of turpitude. Then I took the car; for hours I was sitting at the side of the driver without exchanging a word with him. Then I knew I was washed up. It was quite enough for me. I only know that I remember a doctor in a white apron—there was a doctor in white uniform. He was looking at them. I couldn’t say anything more. I had to leave because it was too much, as much as I could stand.
According to Eichmann, he had told Muller that the scene at Chelmno was ‘horrible, it’s an indescribable inferno’.43
At Belzec, the man in charge of the killings was Christian Wirth, who was also given the task of choosing someone to organize a third death camp, at Sobibor. Wirth chose Franz Stangl, who went to prepare the site at Sobibor, helped by Michel Hermann, formerly the head male nurse at the largest of the German euthanasia centres, Schloss Hartheim. Stangl later recalled his first visit to Belzec, by car from Sobibor. ‘The smell,’ he said, ‘oh God, the smell. It was everywhere.’ Stangl’s account continued:
Wirth wasn’t in his office; they said he was up in the camp. I asked whether I should go up there and they said, ‘I wouldn’t if I were you—he’s mad with fury. It isn’t healthy to be near him.’ I asked what was the matter. The man I was talking to said that one of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them—oh God, it was awful. A bit later Wirth came down. And that’s when he told me….
I said to Wirth that I couldn’t do it, I simply wasn’t up to such an assignment. There wasn’t any argument or discussion. Wirth just said my reply would be reported to HQ and I was to go back to Sobibor. In fact I went to Lublin, tried again to see Globocnik, again in vain; he wouldn’t see me. When I got back to Sobibor, Michel and I talked and talked about it. We agreed that what they were doing was a crime. We considered deserting—we discussed it for a long time. But how? Where could we go? What about our families?
Stangl continued with the construction of the gas-chambers and crematoria at Sobibor. One afternoon, before the gas-chambers were finished, Wirth arrived unexpectedly. Stangl was at once summoned to the still unfinished gas-chamber. ‘When I got there,’ he later recalled, ‘Wirth stood in front of the building wiping the sweat off his cap and fuming. Michel told me later that he’d suddenly appeared, looked around the gas-chambers on which they were still working and said, “Right, we’ll try it out right now with those twenty-five work-Jews: get them up here.” They marched our twenty-five Jews up there and just pushed them in, and gassed them. Michel said Wirth behaved like a lunatic, hit out at his own staff with his whip to drive them on. And then he was livid because the doors hadn’t worked properly.’
Wirth ordered the gas-chamber doors to be changed, and left.44
***
At camp Jungfernhof in Riga, Gerda Rose-Wasserman was present on March 26 at a further selection of German Jews for work at the alleged ‘fish factory’ in Duenamuende. That day the Germans asked for fifteen hundred ‘workers’. Many refused to be separated from their parents; others were tempted by the promise of easy indoor work and the likelihood of better food at such a location. ‘But when some of the young people’, Gerda Rose-Wasserman later recalled, ‘wanted to go along with their parents,’ SS Sergeant Seck, the commandan
t of Jungfernhof, refused to give them permission to do so. Gerda Rose-Wasserman went down on her knees, begging to be allowed to go along with her mother and little brother. ‘Seck just smiled at her,’ Gertrude Schneider, the historian of the Riga ghetto, later wrote, ‘said something about how pretty she was, and refused her pleas. To many of the inmates, his behaviour seemed ominous, but for those already loaded upon the trucks, such second thoughts came much too late.’
As a result of the pressure of those who hoped for better conditions away from Riga, four hundred more Jews than the SS had asked for left the city that Sunday, March 26. They were taken, not to a distant labour camp, but to the nearby Bikernieker forest. On the following day several trucks entered the Riga ghetto, and were unloaded. ‘Their cargo was an assortment of personal effects of the people who had been resettled. There were clothes that had been taken off hurriedly by their owners—still turned inside out—stockings attached to girdles and shoes encrusted with mud. The trucks also yielded nursing bottles, children’s toys, eye-glasses, bags filled with food, and satchels containing photographs and documents.’
The women from the ghetto were ordered to sort out the clothes. The best items were to be sent to Germany, the rest to be distributed among the inmates of the ghetto. Gertrude Schneider later recalled how, as the women worked at the sorting, ‘They recognized many of the clothes, some by the names that had been sewn into them, some by the identity cards still in the pockets, and there were of course, dresses, coats and suits which they had seen on their friends and neighbours when they had left the ghetto only a few days before.’ Her account continued:
Soon everyone in the ghetto knew about the cargo that the trucks had brought and about the conditions of the clothes. It did not take any great imagination to understand what had happened to their owners. No longer did anyone scoff at the tales of the Latvian Jews nor think that this could happen only to Ostjuden and never to the Jews from Germany. In many houses, in the ghetto, Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, was recited. The German ghetto was plunged into despair.45
Among those murdered at the Bikernieker forest that day was Chief Rabbi Joseph Carlebach.46
Throughout Eastern Europe, rumours abounded as to some sinister fate for the growing number of Jews being deported ‘to the East’. But the exact nature of that fate was still unknown. Also unknown was the reason: the ‘final solution’, worked out administratively at Wannsee, remained a tight secret. Even so, evidence that the killings were not to be limited to a single region, or to chance, began to be clear to the Jews in Warsaw towards the end of March 1942, with a second messenger with evil tidings. The first had been Heniek Grabowski, who had brought with him in November 1941 an account of the mass killings in Vilna that autumn. The second was Yakov Grojanowski, who now gave his eye-witness account of the disposal of the murdered Jews and Gypsies at Chelmno.
One of those who had heard both messengers tell their stories was Yitzhak Zuckerman. He and his friends had been trying for some months to organize at least the nucleus of an underground organization. ‘We, after we heard the story about Vilna on the one hand and the story about Chelmno on the other, we believed that this was the system and this was the plan.’ Until then, he recalled, ‘we could not believe that a nation in the twentieth century can pronounce a sentence of death on a whole nation, and we used to ask ourselves: “They degrade us, they suppress us, do they plan to exterminate us all?” We did not believe that.’47
A small band of young men and women now came to understand that the killings were part of a wider, sinister plan. As Yitzhak Zuckerman recalled, ‘In the East it burned and in the West it burned. Chelmno is in the Warthegau area and we were right in between, in the middle.’ Of course, he added, ‘the fire would reach us. We, the Jews of Warsaw, knew we were no better. We would not be spared.’
Looking back upon those years, Zuckerman later recalled the isolation of the Jews of Warsaw. ‘We thought the entire world was being defeated,’ he said. ‘The undergrounds all over the world had not yet started operating.’48
In spite of what they felt to be their total isolation, a small group of Warsaw Jews decided to organize for resistance. ‘There can be no doubt’, one of their underground newspapers wrote on March 28, ‘that Hitler, sensing that the downfall of his regime is approaching, intends to drown the Jews in a sea of blood.’ The cultural and educational work that had continued in the ghetto would have to give way to preparation ‘for such difficult days’. Despite the destruction, ‘mobilization of the vital forces of the Jews’ would have to begin. ‘From generation to generation,’ the article added, ‘we are troubled by the burden of passivity and lack of faith in our own strength; but our history also contains glorious and shining pages of heroism and struggle. We are obliged to join these eras of heroism….’49
The young Jews were able to build upon certain existing preparations. Three months earlier, Emanuel Ringelblum was invited, during a break in a lecture that he was giving on the history of the Jewish labour movement, by two of the organizers of resistance, Mordecai Anielewicz and Yosef Kaplan, to a room in which they showed him ‘two revolvers’. These revolvers, they explained, ‘were to be employed to train youth in the use of arms’.50
As these preparations continued, so did the deportations, gassings and random killings, without respite. On April 1 a further thousand Jews were deported from Theresienstadt to the ghetto at Piaski. Only four were to survive the war.51 On April 2 a further 965 Slovak Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and held in the barracks at Birkenau; by the end of the month, eight more transports brought the number of Slovak Jews deported to Birkenau to eight thousand in a single month.52
April 2 was Passover, festival of the liberation of the Jews from their bondage in Egypt. In different towns it was remembered in different ways. The historian of the Jewish community in Jaworow, in Eastern Galicia, has recorded:
During the Passover holidays of 1942, there came to Jaworow a high-ranking Nazi, a fellow by the name of Steuer. His ferocious deeds will never be erased from the memory of Jaworow Jews, and those of Grodek, Krakowice and Janow. Each time this Hitler satrap visited a town or village, he left a trail of tears, torture and sorrow. His appetite for loot was insatiable, and the Jewish Council had no choice but to supply him with whatever they could….
Steuer made surprise visits to the Council and lashed out at those present. Unexpectedly he forced his way into Jewish homes, swept the dishes from the table to the floor, smashed the furniture and obscenely humiliated the women. He flogged Ida Lipshitz. He grabbed Polka Cipper who was married to the Jew, Dolek Guttman, ordered her to undress, ground her bare toes with his boots, and whipped her unmercifully. He delighted in striking blows at women with bare fists until their blood flowed, and chasing them nude into the cold outdoors.53
The Jews of Jaworow were unaware of the deportations to Belzec: deportations of which they, too, would be the victims within a few months. But Jews escaping from Lublin did bring to Warsaw accounts of the killings in their city, and of the deportations from Lublin to Belzec between March 15 and March 26, when ten thousand Jews had been seized, deported and gassed. ‘We tremble at the mention of Lublin,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on April 7. ‘Our blood turns to ice when we listen to tales told by refugees from the city. Even before they arrived in the Warsaw ghetto, the rumours reaching us were so frightful that we thought they came from totally unreliable sources.’
The refugees had not mentioned Belzec. ‘When the great hunt began,’ Kaplan noted, ‘thousands of Jews were rounded up and led—where? Nobody knows.’ Kaplan added: ‘That is the Nazis’ way. Forty thousand homeless and panic-stricken Jews were taken by the Nazi overlords and led to some unknown place to be massacred. According to one rumour they were taken to Rawa-Ruska and were electrocuted there.’
The trains from Lublin had indeed set off in the direction of Rawa-Ruska. But ten miles before that town their journey had ended, at Belzec. The shocking details brought by the r
efugees related, not to the fate of the deportees, but to the savagery of the Germans in Lublin itself, as the deportations began. As Kaplan recorded:
As Jews tried to escape, the Nazis hunted them down. Heeding the advice of the prophet, ‘Wait a little until the danger is past’, some Jews tried to conceal themselves in obscure holes and corners. Perhaps God would have mercy and spare them? Perhaps the Keeper of Israel would take pity? But the killers discovered the hiding places and swiftly put to death anyone they found. Some of the Jews suffocated in these airless holes even before the Nazis discovered them, for the doors could not be opened from within and there was no one to open them from without because everyone above ground had been arrested.54
What was unknown in Warsaw was known at Szczebrzeszyn, one of the towns nearest to Belzec. On April 8 the Polish doctor, Zygmunt Klukowski, noted in his diary ‘a great depression among the Jews’, and he went on to explain: ‘We know now for certain that one train every day from the direction of Lublin, and one from the direction of Lvov, of twenty-odd wagons, each are going to Belzec. Here, they are taking the Jews out of the trains, pushing them behind barbed-wire fences and killing them either by electrocution or poisoning with gas, and after that they burn the remains.’
Klukowski added:
On the way to Belzec people can see horrifying scenes—especially the railwaymen—because the Jews know very well why they are being taken there, and on the journey they are given neither food nor water. On the station in Szczebrzeszyn the railwaymen could see with their own eyes, and hear with their own ears Jews offering 150 zlotys for a kilo of bread (i.e. about a month’s wages), and a Jewess took off a gold ring from her finger and offered it in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. The inhabitants of Lublin told me of some incredible scenes which are happening there among the Jews, shooting the sick on the spot, and outside the town—shooting the healthy ones and transporting thousands of others to Belzec.55
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