Within a week of the Turobin deportation, trains had begun to reach Sobibor from Theresienstadt, a distance of more than five hundred miles. Of two thousand Jews deported from Theresienstadt to Sobibor on May 17, in two separate trains, there was not a single survivor.27
Dov Freiberg was one of the few surviving witnesses of the fate of these deportees from Czechoslovakia, Austria and Germany. As he later recalled:
They didn’t know exactly what was going to happen to them. Even if they feared, they didn’t believe. But the treatment was that they would leave the carriages in great speed. They would be concentrated in one place. There would be the separation between men and women and children. People would enter a closed yard with barbed-wire entanglements on both sides. In the yard there were also sheds for showers and there was a door in a building in the middle of it and people had the impression that they were entering a bath-shower. There was a man who would come and, as it were, preach to the people concentrated there.
This man, Dov Freiberg later recalled, was known as ‘the Preacher’. His speeches were ‘adapted to each transport’. But their import was the same:
He would say that people were being sent to the Ukraine. They would have to work.
They would have to work hard. Some people asked what was going to happen to women. He would answer and say that women were also supposed to work there. That was more or less the gist of his speech. Then he would say that here you must strip but do it quickly because we have very little time. Try to do it as fast as you possibly can.
People would invariably give credit to his words. They would undress and arrange their belongings and there was a special box office where valuables were surrendered. At that time people would surrender money and gold but sometimes they would also bury part of their belongings, particularly gold and money, hoping to come back to that place one day and retrieve their belongings. Then they would walk a distance of about three hundred metres.
That walk was to the gas-chamber. But almost invariably some Jews would be ordered by the SS and Ukrainian guards to stay behind. ‘Sometimes they would leave people there just to play with,’ Freiberg recalled. ‘They would have all sorts of torture. They would leave some people out of the transport and we could see what was going on. The shrieking was bloodcurdling. And then we would see their belongings soaked with blood.’
Freiberg survived as part of the small group of labourers: sorting through the clothing of the victims, cleaning the residential quarters of the Ukrainians, and, for a short time, ‘shearing women’s hair before they entered the gas-chamber’.28
Another who survived at Sobibor was Itzhak Lichtman. He had been deported from Zolkiewka, near Lublin, to Sobibor on May 22. On reaching the camp, he became one of the five shoemakers, kept alive to make boots and slippers for the SS and their families. Later he recalled how, in a transport from Holland, a hospital nurse, Mrs Hejdi, who had arrived with her husband, was sobbing. ‘Are you crying because your husband left you?’ the SS laughed, knowing that her husband had just been gassed. Whereupon ‘they brought a Czechoslovak middle-aged prisoner and told them, ‘You are husband and wife.’ Then they forced them to sleep together.29
Beginning on May 4, and continuing without pause for eleven days, more than ten thousand Jews were deported from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno, and gassed. These were the Jews who had been brought to Lodz from Western Europe six months earlier. On May 4, one thousand had been deported. All those sent away, the Ghetto Chronicle recorded that same day, ‘had their baggage, knapsacks, and even their hand-held parcels taken away from them’. News of this, the Chronicle added, ‘has cast a chill over the ghetto’.30
On the following day it was noted that at least one Jewish doctor, also a former deportee, was being sent with each transport of a thousand Jews.31 On May 6, with the third deportation, the ghetto learned that as the deportees were about to board the train, ‘the guards ordered them to step back five paces from the train, and then to throw all their baggage to the ground, not only their knapsacks and suitcases, but their hand-held parcels, bags etc. as well’. They were only allowed to keep their bread. The sight of wagons returning to the ghetto, noted the Chronicle, loaded with the bedding and blankets of the deportees, ‘caused a feeling of hopelessness among passers-by’.
The Jews were deported according to their place of origin: Berlin first, then Vienna, then Dusseldorf, followed by more from Berlin, then Hamburg, Vienna, Prague and Cologne. The final transport was from Luxembourg. Those Jews, some 260 in all, who had long before been converted to Christianity, asked to be kept together, and to be ‘resettled’ in a group. Their request was granted.32 Baptism could not protect either those who had converted to Christianity to save their lives, or those whose conversion, often many years before the war, had been an act of faith.
To calm the fears of those who were ordered to leave their baggage at the station, the Germans announced ‘that they would receive their baggage in the next train’. The trains themselves were ordinary passenger trains, made up of third-class carriages. ‘Each person leaving the ghetto is given a seat,’ the Chronicle recorded on May 6, the train ‘returning the same day, at eight o’clock p.m.’ It had left at seven o’clock in the morning ‘on the dot’.33
The timetable, the third-class carriages, and the promise that the baggage would soon follow, were all deliberate devices of a deceptive normality. All the deportees were taken to Chelmno and gassed. On May 7, the fourth day of the ‘resettlement’ of the once proud, prosperous Western European Jews, the Ghetto Chronicle commented: ‘Ghosts, skeletons with swollen faces and extremities, ragged and impoverished, they now left for a further journey on which they were not even allowed to take a knapsack. They had been stripped of all their European finery, and only the Eternal Jew was left.’34
During the first six days of the deportations, six of the deportees committed suicide, fearing the worst. But the meaning of the deportations was unclear. ‘Tears of joy or of terrible despair,’ the Chronicle noted on May 11, ‘everyone reacts one way or the other upon hearing his name called.’35 The death toll in the ghetto was so high that resettlement offered the illusion of a better chance for life. Every day, as Western European Jews died in the ghetto of starvation, it served as a reminder of the precariousness of life under duress. On May 5, the second day of the deportations, a sixty-three-year-old Jew from Frankfurt had died: Professor Jakob Edmund Speyer, who, as the Ghetto Chronicle recorded, ‘ranked among the greatest inventors in the field of medical chemistry’, one of the discoverers of Eukodal, ‘a preparation that constitutes an improvement over morphine’. He was also a noted researcher into the use of vitamins.36
On May 12 a further nine hundred Western European Jews were deported from Lodz. Another seven Jews had committed suicide, among them the sixty-three-year-old Rosa Kaldo, originally from Hungary, who, the Chronicle reported, ‘threw herself from a fifth-floor window,’ dying immediately.37 The deportations continued on May 13 and again on May 14, when among those deported, and gassed on arrival at Chelmno, was the Viennese pianist, Leopold Birkenfeld, who for the past six months had entranced the ghetto with his music.38 The last of the deportations took place on May 15. ‘On the final day,’ the Chronicle noted, ‘the German guards treated the deportees in relatively mild fashion, allowing them to take their possessions with them.’ Even so, fears for his fate had led to another suicide attempt. ‘The person making the attempt’, recorded the Chronicle, ‘cut the veins in his arms; however this did not help him avoid deportation. After bandages were applied and the bleeding stemmed, he was sent to the train station’. The Chronicle added that, ‘on the whole it must be said that in these tragic moments before another journey into the unknown, the exiles from the West preserved their equanimity to a greater degree than have their brothers here in similar situations. Lamentation, screaming, and wailing at the final assembly points were characteristic features of the previous deportations, whereas during this deportation the Western European
Jews made an outward display of considerably greater self-control. On the other hand, they lost that self-control at the train station and, by causing confusion, drew down repressive measures from the guards.’
As well as Western European Jews in the deportations of May 4 to May 15 were some three hundred Lodz Jews, ‘volunteers’ who hoped for a better life after resettlement, unable to see any way of avoiding starvation if they were to remain in the ghetto. On May 17 alone there were fifty-eight deaths, most of them as a result of hunger and exhaustion, one, the thirty-one-year-old Josek Zajtman, ‘shot to death a few feet from the building where he lived, which is located right by the barbed wire’.39
***
On May 17, the day of the deportation from Pabianice, the Germans separated all children under the age of ten from the parents, then asked for volunteers to ‘accompany’ the children. A leading Zionist in the town, Mordecai Chmura, although his children were not in the transport, being older, left his family and went over to the group of small children ‘in order to be of help to them’. As he was led away with them, ‘this proud Jew’, a witness later recalled, ‘was singing the “Hatikvah”, the anthem of hope’. All were taken to Chelmno, and gassed.40
During May 17 more than two thousand Jews from Pabianice, including the parents of those children who had been sent to Chelmno, reached the Lodz ghetto. There they told the Jews of Lodz the harrowing story of how, that morning, at a football field outside Pabianice, as the selection was made, ‘infants were torn from mothers, children ran crying and screaming around the field looking for parents, while their parents, unable to regard these scenes with composure, beseeched the guards to allow them to take their children from there. In response, they were shoved back, their children were torn from their arms and thrown to the grass like balls, and even thrown over the fence.’
All the children under ten, as well as all adults judged by the Gestapo as ‘unfit for work’, were then ‘loaded into peasant wagons and taken away on a different direction, to parts’, the Lodz Chronicle reported, ‘that remain unknown.’ A day later, the Chronicle noted, it was ‘terrible to see these desperate, lamenting women and men, wringing their hands from which those nearest and dearest to them had been rudely torn’.41
On May 18, a further 1,420 Jews arrived in the Lodz ghetto from Brzeziny. Like the Jews from Pabianice, they reported how, that same morning, all children under the age of ten, ‘even babies at the breast’, were, ‘to the despair of their parents—taken from there and sent off to parts unknown’, together with many adults, ‘the weak, the sick, the elderly’, seventeen hundred people in all. Among the Jews who reached Lodz from Brzeziny was Michal Urbach, a doctor from Lodz who had gone to Brzeziny a few months earlier as a pharmacist; his only child, a boy of five, had been among the children taken away.42 All the children of Brzeziny, like those of Pabianice, had been sent to Chelmno, and gassed.43
Inside the Lodz ghetto, the news of the deportations from Pabianice and Brzeziny had a devastating effect. ‘The greatest optimists have lost hope,’ Bernard Ostrowski, one of the ghetto chroniclers, recorded, and he went on to explain: ‘Until now, people had thought that work would maintain the ghetto and the majority of its people without any break-up of families. Now it is clear that even this was an illusion. There were plenty of orders (for new work) in Pabianice and Brzeziny, but that did not protect the Jews against wholesale deportation. Fear for our ghetto’s fate is keeping everyone up at night. Our last hope is our Chairman; people believe that he will succeed, if not totally, then at least in part, in averting the calamities that now loom ahead.’44
Chaim Rumkowski was convinced that he could keep the Lodz ghetto in productive work and thus preserve life, and that he could find work for all the surviving 100,000 inhabitants. Ironically, part of that work derived from the belongings of the Jews gassed at Chelmno, and sent to the Lodz ghetto for sorting. On May 20 the Chronicle noted the arrival in the ghetto of ‘three hundred train cars of underclothes for cleaning’, as well as orders placed in the woodwork factory, for a million pairs of clogs, requiring the work of eight hundred people in three shifts. The straw-shoe workshop was now making army boots, and the metal workshop ‘is supposed to have work enough for two years’.45 On June 1 the Chronicle recorded ‘sewing machines by the hundreds’ reaching Lodz, as well as the arrival on May 29 of four five-ton trucks bringing ‘enormous quantities of civilian footwear’. The trucks had come ‘from the direction of Brzeziny’. From each pair of shoes, the tops, or the entire heels, ‘had been torn off’.46
Thousands of Jews from Lodz were working in labour camps throughout the region, and taken from their labour camps to factories and other forced labour sites in Germany. Among these slave labourers was Leo Laufer, one of the survivors of Ruchocki Mlyn, who had been sent to a labour camp at Schwenningen. Later he recalled how, at Schwenningen:
A fellow went out from his barrack and he went to the toilet which was a separate barrack away from the camp. Evidently he couldn’t make it, and one of the guards saw him doing it against the barrack on the side. I’m sure he must have been sick, or had diarrhoea or whatever happened. The next morning they caught him; the next morning again we had to stay outside, and they actually opened a grave, and put him in alive, all the way to about his shoulder, and all of us looked at him when they put him in, then we left for work, and we were gone at least ten hours. When we came back, the man was barely living, and he had to die, slowly, in his own grave.
Laufer also recalled several attempts to escape from Schwenningen, all of them unsuccessful: ‘they hanged people who escaped.’47
***
In and around Berlin, on May 18, 27 Jews were shot for having organized a display of anti-Nazi posters, and for various acts of defiance, among them the setting fire to several exhibits at an anti-Soviet exhibition in the German capital. Led by Herbert Baum, a Communist, the group included twelve young women, among them Baum’s sister Marianne, aged thirty, the sisters Alice and Hella Hirsch, aged nineteen and twenty-two respectively, and Edith Fraenkel, aged twenty-one. A memorial in the Berlin Jewish cemetery of Weissensee records their fate.48
Also in May 1942, a group of Communist Jews living in Paris, some of them Polish- and German-born, took part in the first French acts of collective armed resistance against the Germans. These Jews were members of Jewish units in the French Communist underground.49
In a further selection of children, on May 22, in the town of Ozorkow, the Secretary to the Jewish Council, Mania Rzepkowicz, rejected an offer by the German ghetto-leader that her child should be excluded from the ‘resettlement’, and, together with her child, voluntarily joined a group of some three hundred children being deported, she knew not where. They too were sent to Chelmno, and gassed.50
May 22 was the first day of Shavuot, the festival of Pentecost. In Mielec, the Gestapo organized a fictitious fight between Jews in the ghetto and themselves, pretending that the Jews were partisans, taking them to the forest, breaking their heads and arms, and then killing them. ‘I was present when they were buried,’ Eda Lichtmann later recalled, ‘and saw their mutilated bodies.’
Eda Lichtmann was also a witness to another Nazi ‘sport’, when some twenty orthodox Jews were taken from their homes, dressed in their prayer shawls, with prayer books in hand, and ordered ‘to chant religious hymns, to pray, to raise their hands in supplication to God—and then the officers went up to them and poured kerosene and petrol under those Jews and set fire to all the Jews, while they were in their prayer shawls, holding their prayer books in supplication to God. I saw it with my own eyes.’51
Also on this festival at Zdunska Wola, the Gestapo ordered the Jewish Council to ‘provide’ ten Jews. The Council members resisted, knowing that the last time ten men had been demanded, they had been hanged. The Gestapo then told the Council that if the men were not produced, a thousand Jews would be shot. ‘Having no choice,’ Dora Rosenboim later recalled, ‘and fearing that the Gestapo would carry out their terri
ble plan of shooting a thousand Jews, the Jewish Council, with bitter and broken hearts, had to give them another ten Jews for the gallows and the Jewish policemen had to hang them with their own hands in the presence of all twelve hundred Jews, men, women, old people and children.’ Among those hanged was Binyamin Pavel Radii and his son-in-law, Shlomo Zhelochovski. As Zhelochovski was brought to the gallows, ‘he cried out, with his head uplifted and his arms to heaven, “Jehovah is God”.’52
Courage in the face of death, and courageous actions, were a source of inspiration for those Jews who heard them, an illustration of Kiddush Ha-Shem, sanctification of the name of God, through martyrdom. One example of such innocent, and indeed unwitting martyrdom, was recorded in Ringelblum’s collection of materials from all over Poland. It concerned a Jew, by the name of Ankerman, in the town of Wlodawa, and Ringelblum himself drew attention to it. On May 23, two thousand Jews were assembled in Wlodawa for deportation. The Gestapo then asked: ‘Where is the rabbi?’ Ankerman, thinking that the Gestapo wished to save the rabbi from deportation, pointed him out, in order to save him. The Gestapo at once shot Ankerman. The rabbi was then deported with the rest to Sobibor, where all were gassed.53
From Warsaw, no Jews had yet been deported. But each day, Jews were beaten or murdered. ‘The Gestapo men in the Pawia Street prison’, Ringelblum noted on May 23, ‘have to have their daily victims. Just the way a pious Jew feels bad if he misses prayers one day, the Gestapo men have to pick up a few Jews every day and break a few arms and legs.’54
During May, 3,636 Warsaw Jews died of starvation.55 ‘Sometimes’, Ringelblum noted on May 25, ‘one comes across former students from the Institute of Judaic Studies, who ask for help in Hebrew.’ Some of the beggars were well dressed. On one street, Ringelblum wrote, ‘stands a beggar whose clothes are impeccable; he has a pretty child with him who is clean and spotless; he begs, not with outstretched hand, but with his eyes alone.’56
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