One of Biskowitz’s first tasks was to drag enormous branches of greenery from the nearby woods, to cover the barbed-wire fence on the path between the railway ramp and Camp 2, the undressing courtyard. He later recalled how those who were too sick or old to walk the length of the path were taken to the so-called Lazarett, or hospital, on a small rail spur used to carry coal. Men ‘who could not run fast enough’, and small children, would be thrown into the wagons and sent to the ‘hospital’. There, they would be shot.
Eighty Jews were forced to work in Camp 3, burning the bodies which had been gassed. They had also to sort out the clothing of those who had been killed. Damaged clothing, and all personal documents, were burned. One day a young man who had known Biskowitz in Hrubieszow brought him some photographs. While burning the personal belongings of those who had been gassed, he had recognized the photographs of Biskowitz’s family. ‘He brought those pictures out of the fire,’ Biskowitz recalled. His family had been killed. It was June 3.
Two months later, Biskowitz’s father was taken ill. ‘I tried to take him to work,’ he recalled. ‘I dragged him to work every morning. While he was down with typhoid, I worked at the casino of the Ukrainians. I would put him in the corner and work for two, but one day I could not drag him any longer. I tried, then all of a sudden, two SS men—Wagner and Frenschel—took him out of the barrack and he was taken to the “Lazarett”, beaten all the way. He was shot in my presence. I wanted to run after him, but I was held back by the other workers.’15
***
In Warsaw, no Jews were shot on June 3 in the prison on Gesia Street, among them ten Jewish policemen. Mary Berg noted in her diary that Polish police were ordered to do the shooting, but refused. Both they, and Jewish policemen, were forced to watch the execution. ‘One of the eye-witnesses told me that several Polish policemen wept,’ Mary Berg noted. One of the Jewish Council members forced to be present had fainted. The Jewish policemen forced to watch ‘were completely shattered’. The victims included several women, two of them pregnant. All had gone to their deaths ‘in complete calm’. Some had even refused to be blindfolded.16
Ringelblum and his friends, known as the ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle, worked continuously to record the fate of the Jews of Warsaw. ‘Each Saturday’, Ringelblum noted on June 6, ‘we come together, a group of Jewish community activists, to discuss the writing of our diaries and journals. We want our suffering to remain on record for future generations and for the whole world.’17
Among those who were recording the events in the Warsaw ghetto was Abraham Levin, an historian whose books included a study of the ‘Cantonists’, the Jewish boys who, in the nineteenth century, had been forcibly conscripted in the Tsarist army for twenty-five years’ military service. Levin gave his diary to Ringelblum’s ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle. ‘On every Sabbath’, Levin noted on June 6, ‘we gather together, a group of Jewish public workers, in connection with our diaries and records. Our purpose is that our sufferings, “the pains before the coming of the Messiah”, should be noted down for remembrance by future generations, for remembrance by the whole world.’ Levin added: ‘Sabbath by Sabbath we meet and discuss what we have to do in this connection, and in the course of this we cannot refrain from telling one another what the old-new Amalekites are doing to us Jews. The stories throw me into utter depression, my head begins to ache as if a heavy leaden weight were pressing on it. The same thing happened today. They told and they told, and I felt cold and impotent—and they went on telling.’
In his diary for June 6, Levin noted down several of these most recent stories. In Wlodawa, the rabbi of Radzyn had been killed. A young man, wanting to save him, told the Germans that he was the rabbi. But the Germans saw through the deception, found the rabbi, ‘and killed both him and the young man’.18
On the following day, June 7, Levin recorded: ‘Tonight once again a Jewish man and a woman fell into the hands of German murderers in uniform,’ and he went on to explain:
At about one o’clock at night a Jew, thirty-five years of age, and two German officers, got out of a car at the corner of Karmelicka and Nowolipie Streets. They let him go a few paces then fired at him. The Jew was still alive, so they shot at him again until he died. They then rang at the gate of 22 Nowolipie Street and ordered the house porter to take the dead man inside. Early in the morning they removed the body. Who the Jew was, is not known. According to one source he was Rosen, of 24 Elektoralna Street.
‘They brought a Jewish woman to Nowolipie and shot her,’ Levin continued. ‘It is believed that they had brought her from the Aryan side.’19
The Germans were still determined not to let a single Jew escape the widening deportations.
On 27 May 1942, SS General Reinhard Heydrich was fatally wounded in Prague by two Czech patriots parachuted into German-occupied Czechoslovakia from Britain. As Deputy Protector for Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich’s name had become a byword for repression. At the Wannsee Conference four months earlier, he had presided over the bureaucratic confirmation of the ‘final solution’.
Following the attack on Heydrich, and even before his death eight days later, SS General Odilo Globocnik began preparations for what was called ‘Operation Reinhard’, the deportation of Jews to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor to their immediate deaths. Two weeks later, a thousand Jews were deported from Prague to death in the East. At the same time, in a reprisal action on Czech soil, 199 Czech men and boys were murdered in the mining village of Lidice. The village was then burned to the ground.20
On the day of the Lidice massacre, thirty Jews were driven from Theresienstadt to the smouldering ruins of the small mining community. There, at pistol point, they were forced to bury the 199 victims. For thirty-six hours they worked without a break at their grim task.21
As Operation Reinhard gathered momentum, the deportation of Jews was accelerated from the Reich itself. The background of Heydrich’s assassination was not yet clear, wrote Josef Goebbels at the end of May, but ‘in any event we are holding the Jews to account. I am ordering the arrest of 500 Berlin Jews which I had been planning, and I am informing the Jewish community leaders that for every Jewish assassination and for every attempt at revolt on the part of Jews, 100 or 150 Jews in our hands will be shot.’ In the wake of the Heydrich assassination, several hundred Jews had already been shot in Sachsenhausen. ‘The more of this filth that is eliminated,’ Goebbels added, ‘the better for the security of the Reich.’22
On June 6, Eichmann sent a telegram from Berlin to Gestapo officials in Coblenz, concerning the composition of a transport to Lublin. Among the 450 Jews in the Coblenz region to be deported, the inmates of a mental home in one small town were to be included. Later, in its constant efforts to maintain secrecy, Eichmann’s office reiterated its instruction that even the words ‘deportation to the East’ should not be used, but, instead, ‘people who emigrated elsewhere’.23
The fate of these deportees was the same for each deportation. Of the thousand Jews sent from Prague on June 10, as part of Operation Reinhard, the only survivor was a man who jumped from the train during the journey.24 There were no survivors at all of the thousand deportees from Theresienstadt on June 12.25 Nor was there a single survivor of a further thousand sent from Theresienstadt on June 13 ‘to an unknown destination in the East’. As no deportee returned, the historian of Theresienstadt has written, ‘it must be assumed that all prisoners perished in death camps.’26
The only indication of the fate of the deportees from the first of the Operation Reinhard deportations, that of June 10, was in a letter smuggled from the Lublin district in September 1942, from one of the deportees to his son. According to this letter the transport had been taken to a camp at Ujazdow in the Lublin district, from where the prisoners continued their journey in sordid cattle trucks to a camp which the writer described as a ‘selection camp on the River Bug’. There they were robbed of all their belongings, and those unfit for work were killed.
The letter gave no details
as to how the murders had been carried out. The prisoners—Czech, Dutch, Polish, Austrian and German Jews—slept in barns on the bare floor without blankets. They had to walk many miles to their place of work, where men and women alike were forced to dig trenches in marshland. So debilitated did they become that they could scarcely hold their spades. They worked and slept in wet clothing. The camp doctor, himself a prisoner, had no medical supplies for those who fell ill. The camp commander recognized only typhus as a disease exempting from work. All typhus patients were taken to a special typhus camp, where they were left to die.
On the subject of the camp guards, the letter says: ‘They shout but they do not beat.’ The letter ended with a desperate appeal for food, clothing or money. Food, clothing and money were sent as asked. But there was no reply. Nor did any one of the Theresienstadt deportees on that transport of June 10 return after the war. The road from Ujazdow led only to Belzec.27
In German-occupied Poland, the Jewish Councils continued to try to give a lead: on June 8 the head of the Council at Pilica, Fogel, warned the community ‘that every able Jew must flee to the forests’. Several hundred succeeded. Fogel later visited those in the forests, and helped to supply them with weapons.28
In Riga, the Einsatzkommando decided to use gas-vans to facilitate its killings. Two such vans, which could kill fifteen to twenty-five Jews at a time, had already been used in Belgrade. On June 9, after one of the vans had been returned to Berlin after completion of a ‘special assignment’ in Belgrade, it was sent on to Riga. Six days later, the Riga authorities requested a second van.29 At his testimony before the Nuremberg Tribunal, General Ohlendorf told the court that the Einsatzkommando units had not liked to use the vans, because the burial of those gassed in them was ‘unpleasant’.30 The vans were, however, effective. On July 5 an official in Eichmann’s department noted that, since December 1941, ninety-seven thousand people had been ‘processed’ in three vans, without any ‘defect’ being discovered in the vans; that the defects found at Chelmno were ‘a solitary case’.31
In Warsaw, the diarists of the ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle continued to record the news which reached them. ‘During the deportation from Pabianice,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on June 9, ‘there was one mother who fought like a lioness and refused to turn her baby over to the murderers. They immediately grabbed the baby and hurled it out of the window.’32 That month in Sosnowiec, Frieda Mazia later recalled, the Germans entered the Jewish hospitals, ‘took women after childbirth, people after operations; they took all the babies from the children’s ward and threw them from the second floor into large trucks in the street.’ All those in the hospitals were supposed to be going ‘to new settlements’.33 They were sent, in fact, to Auschwitz, and gassed.34
Five young Sosnowiec Jews decided to try to steal weapons from an apartment lived in by a German officer. One of these Jews, Harry Blumenfrucht, was caught. He tried to shoot the German who seized him. This German was known throughout the district as ‘Dog with Dog’, because he was always with his dog. The dog sunk his teeth into Blumenfrucht’s hand, making it impossible for him to shoot.
Under torture, Blumenfrucht refused to betray his four colleagues. As Frieda Mazia recalled:
They put chips of wood under his fingernails and put fire to them. They put him on an iron net and held him there for forty-eight hours, without a stop. And when he screamed, all he said was, ‘I will not speak. I am dead, in any case.’
They brought his mother and she prayed and begged with him, ‘Harry, to shorten your torture—you will not come out alive—but just to shorten your torture, admit something.’ Harry said nothing. He told his mother, ‘I am doomed. I will not speak.’ The Germans kept him, I believe, two weeks. And they admired the boy.
Usually people were hanged in public and Jews were ordered to come and watch. Harry they hanged before dawn, during curfew hours, because they were afraid. They saw there was something unusual in the man.35
The German reaction to all such defiance was savage. Writing from Lodz on June 9, the German criminal police reported to their superiors in Poznan: ‘Thus far ninety-five Jews have been hung publicly here.’ These hangings, they explained, ‘have caused the Jew to understand the severe order here, and from now on he will obey all orders completely and peacefully’.
The Jews who had been hanged in the Lodz ghetto had been chosen at random, and killed in order to discourage others from resisting deportation by hiding or flight. On July 13, further such public executions were reported by the same police unit: nine Jews hanged in Warta, two in the county of Lask, and two more in the Lodz ghetto.36
Equally savage pressure against any hint of defiance was seen in the Janowska camp at Lvov, where Josef Buzhminski later recalled how his brother Isidore was killed ‘by hanging by his feet and beating till he died’.37 But even where successful physical resistance was impossible, acts of moral and spiritual resistance took place, to the fury of the murderers. At Dabrowa Tarnowska, in June, the Germans dragged Rabbi Isaac and his followers out of their underground hide-out, and drove them to the local Jewish cemetery. The Jews had waited in their prayer shawls for their inevitable discovery. They also had a bottle of vodka, which they managed to bring with them to the cemetery. There, facing their would-be murderers, they drank lekhayim, ‘to life’, held hands, began to dance, and were shot down as they danced. An eye-witness later recalled how the Germans ‘were so enraged by the scene, which they had failed to prevent, that they slit their bellies and trampled on them until the bowels came out.’38
At Khmelnik, in the Ukraine, June 12 saw the third ‘action’ against the Jews. This time it was babies, children and old people who were ordered to assemble. Children were taken from their mothers. Mothers who begged to go with their babies were not allowed to do so. ‘The children were taken to the forest,’ the eighteen-year-old Maria Rubinstein later recalled. ‘Nobody knew what really was there. There were rumours that the wives of the Ukrainian policemen were putting poison on their lips with their fingers.’
Among the children taken away was Maria Rubinstein’s youngest sister Dina. She was not yet two years old. Following the murder of her mother six months earlier, Dina had been hidden with a peasant woman in a village some way from Khmelnik. But two days before this third ‘action’ she had been brought back to the ghetto because the Christian woman who was hiding her had ‘had some family troubles with her husband’.
Dina was taken away, and, with hundreds of other babies and young children, was murdered in the nearby forest.39
On June 10 the Jews of Biala Podlaska had been deported to Sobibor. A week later, Ringelblum spoke in Warsaw to the head of the Jewish Social Relief Organization in Biala Podlaska, who asked in anger, ‘How much longer will we go “as sheep to the slaughter”? Why do we keep quiet? Why is there no call to escape to the forests. No call to resist?’ Ringelblum noted:
This question torments all of us, but there is no answer to it because everyone knows that resistance, and particularly if even one single German is killed, its outcome may lead to a slaughter of a whole community, or even of many communities.
The first who are sent to slaughter are the old, the sick, the children, those who are not able to resist. The strong ones, the workers, are left meanwhile to be, because they are needed for the time being.
The evacuations are carried out in such a way that it is not always and not to everyone clear that a massacre is taking place. So strong is the instinct of life of workers, of the fortunate owners of work permits, that it overcomes the will to fight, the urge to defend the whole community, with no thought of consequences. And we are left to be led as sheep to a slaughterhouse. This is partly due to the complete spiritual breakdown and disintegration, caused by unheard-of terror which has been inflicted upon the Jews for three years and which comes to its climax in times of such evacuations.
The effect of all this taken together is that when a moment for some resistance arrives, we are completely powerless
and the enemy does to us whatever he pleases.
Ringelblum was critical of particular communities which had not done enough, he thought, to challenge their tormentors. ‘One gendarme is sufficient to butcher a whole town,’ he wrote bitterly, adding, of earlier reports of resistance which had been spread in Warsaw:
Of no use will be the lies that are being fabricated about Nowogrodek or the recent ones about Kowel; in no place did Jews resist the slaughter. They went passively to death and they did it, so that the remnants of the people would be left to live, because every Jew knew that lifting a hand against a German would endanger his brothers from a different town or maybe from a different country. That is the reason why three hundred prisoners of war let the Germans kill them on the way from Lublin to Biala; and these soldiers were known to have distinguished themselves in the fight for Poland’s freedom.
Not to act, not to lift a hand against Germans, has since then become the quiet, passive heroism of the common Jew. This was perhaps the mute life instinct of the masses, which dictated to everybody, as if agreed upon, to behave thus and not otherwise. And it seems to me that no incitement, no persuasion, will be of any use here; it is impossible to fight a mass-instinct—you must submit to it.40
There were in fact many acts of resistance, even in Warsaw. But the subsequent reprisals were, as Ringelblum had written, a fierce deterrent. In Warsaw that June, the conflict between the will to resist and the horror of reprisals was seen when two Jewish porters, suspected of smuggling, were taken to be shot. A friend of theirs, a tailor named Izraelit, who had come by chance to spend the night with them, was taken with them to the execution site. These three ‘candidates for death’, Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on July 6, ‘were virile men with strength in their loins, and they did not want to die in spite of the Nazis’. Kaplan’s account continued:
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