The posters set a short time limit for acceptance of the German offer: only two or three days. ‘If the Germans are already giving out bread, it must be a sign that they need us. Otherwise why waste the flour?’ people said to each other. For many, Feigele Peltel recalled, ‘the possibility of assuaging their hunger just once, and the Germans’ repeated promises of employment, were enough….’ Fears of deportation were set aside. ‘After the resettlement,’ a friend told Feigele Peltel, ‘we might perhaps survive in another town.’32 Reading the offer of bread and jam, many Warsaw Jews asked, as David Wdowinski recalled: ‘If over there things were not so bad, and here we have to live in hiding and suffer hunger, and since we can be together with our families, why not go?’ And so, Wdowinski added, ‘entire families, bag and baggage gave themselves up. And, indeed, they were not separated. They were gassed all together.’33
Thousands of Jews sought safety by shutting themselves behind locked doors. One such was Baruch Zifferman, who told his story to Feigele Peltel when he met her a few days later:
The Germans had sealed off Nowolipki Street, where he was hiding with his wife and young son in Birnbaum’s house, whose massive iron door was very hard to open.
As the Germans yelled, ‘All Jews downstairs!’ the residents had locked the door and stayed where they were. Then came the familiar loud banging to open the iron door. Crashing blows by iron bars came next, accompanied by barked commands in German to open the door at once. The five Jews within crouched petrified, not stirring, wondering whether the door would hold.
The angry shouting of the Germans and the pounding on the door grew louder. At last, groaning and creaking on its hinges, the door gave way, and several scowling Ukrainians forced their way in, ordering everyone to put up his hands. After being searched and robbed of their valuables, the trembling victims were commanded to line up against the wall. Even with their carbines aimed at him, Zifferman did not dream that the invaders would actually fire; he supposed they were bent merely on intimidation. But the shots broke into his thoughts, and he toppled to the floor.
When he came to, everything was quiet. The Ukrainians had left. His wife, his son, and the Birnbaums lay dead.34
By August 2, the twelfth consecutive day of the deportations from Warsaw, more than seventy-six thousand Jews had been deported.35 ‘We have no information about the fate of those who have been expelled,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on August 2, shortly before he himself was deported. ‘When one falls into the hands of the Nazis one falls into the abyss. The very fact that the deportees make no contact with their families by letters bodes evil.’36 That evil was later described by one of those who survived it, Samuel Rajzman:
Immediately after their arrival, the people had to leave the trains in five minutes and line up on the platform. All those who were driven from the cars were divided into groups—men, children, and women, all separate. They were all forced to strip immediately, and this procedure continued under the lashes of the German guards’ whips. Workers who were employed in this operation immediately picked up all the clothes and carried them away to barracks. Then the people were obliged to walk naked through the street to the gas-chambers.
The Germans had given this street to the gas-chambers a name, Himmelfahrstrasse, ‘the street to heaven’. As Rajzman explained, ‘The whole process of undressing and the walk down to the gas-chambers lasted, for the men eight or ten minutes, and for the women some fifteen minutes. The women took fifteen minutes because they had to have their hair shaved off before they went to the gas-chambers.’37
At Treblinka station, before the trains were uncoupled and sent into the death camp twenty coaches at a time, the Polish railwayman, Franciszek Zabecki, witnessed many scenes of savagery. Four of these concerned Jews who had tried to escape:
I saw a policeman catch two young Jewish boys. He did not shut them in a wagon, since he was afraid to open the door in case others escaped. I was on the platform, letting a military transport go through. I asked him to let them go. The assassin did not even budge. He ordered the bigger boy to sit down on the ground and take the smaller one on his knee, then he shot them both with one bullet.
Turning to me, he said: ‘You’re lucky, that was the last bullet.’ Round the huge stomach of the murderer there was a belt with a clasp, on which I could see the inscription ‘Gott mit uns’, ‘God is with us’.38
The second incident took place after a train, arriving late in the evening, had been kept overnight at Treblinka station. On the following morning a Ukrainian guard:
…promised a Jewess that he would let her and her child go if she put a large bribe in his hand. The Jewess gave the Ukrainian the money and her four-year-old child through the air gap, and afterwards, with the Ukrainian’s help, she also got out of the wagon through the air gap.
The Jewess walked away from the train, holding her child by the hand; as soon as she walked down the railway embankment the Ukrainian shot her. The mother rolled down into a field, pulling the child after her. The child clutched the mother’s neck. Jews looking out of the wagons called out and yelled, and the child turned back up the embankment again and under the wagons to the other side of the train.
Another Ukrainian killed the child with one blow of a rifle butt on its head.39
A third incident witnessed by Zabecki also took place at Treblinka station:
One mother threw a small child wrapped up in a pillow from the wagon, shouting: ‘Take it, that’s some money to look after it.’ In no time an SS man ran up, unwrapped the pillow, seized the child by its feet and smashed its head against a wheel of the wagon. This took place in full view of the mother, who was howling with pain.40
A fourth incident involved Willi Klinzmann, from Wuppertal, one of the two German railwaymen who supervised the shunting work at the station:
There was an SS man from the camp in Klinzmann’s flat. A frightened, battered Jewess who had managed to get out of a wagon came into the station building. She probably thought she would be safe here. Crossing the threshold of the dark corridor close by the door of the German railwaymen’s quarters, she uttered a loud groan and a sigh.
Willi rushed out into the corridor, and seeing the woman he shouted: ‘Bist du Judin?’, ‘Are you a Jewess?’. The SS man rushed out after Willi. The frightened Jewess exclaimed: ‘Ach, mein Gott!’ ‘Oh, my God!’, escaped to the waiting-room next to the traffic supervisor’s office and fell down exhausted near the wall. Both the Germans grabbed the woman lying there; they wanted her to get up and go out with them. The Jewess lay motionless.
It was already late evening. As I went out to see to a military transport passing through the station, I shone my lamp on the woman lying there; I noticed that she was pregnant, and in the last months of pregnancy at that. The Jewess did not react to the German’s calls, uttering groans as if in labour. Then Klinzmann and the SS man from the camp began to take turns at kicking the Jewess at random, and laughing.
After dispatching the train, I had to go into the office again through the waiting-room, but I could not do it. In the waiting-room a human being, helpless, defenceless—a sick, pregnant woman—had been murdered. The impact from the hobnailed boots was so relentless that one of the Germans, aiming at her head, had hit too high, right into the wall.
I had to go into the office and pass close to the murderers, since the departure of a train to Wolka Okraglik station had to be attended to. My entrance made the criminals stop. In their frenzy they had forgotten where they were, and somebody plucked up courage to break in and stop them in their ‘duty’ of liquidating ‘an enemy of Hitlerism’.
They reached for their pistols. Willi, drunk, mumbled ‘Fahrdienstleiter’, ‘Traffic supervisor’. I closed the door behind me. The butchers renewed the kicking. The Jewess was no longer groaning. She was no longer alive.41
In Warsaw, on August 3, the Ringelblum circle decided that the time had come to begin to bury their archive. The first set of documents was placed in ten tin boxes and
milk cans, and buried by one of the circle, a schoolteacher, Izrael Lichtensztajn. Going to a school building where he had once taught, he buried the boxes deep in the ground. He was helped in his task by two of his former students, Dawid Graber and Nachum Grzybacz.
Graber was nineteen years old. ‘The men who buried the archives’, he wrote, ‘know that they may not survive to see the moment when the treasure is dug up and the whole truth proclaimed.’ ‘Yesterday we sat up till late at night,’ Grzybacz, who was eighteen, wrote. ‘Now I am in the midst of writing, while in the streets the terrible shooting continues.’ Grzybacz added: ‘One thing I am proud of, namely, that in these disastrous and horrible days I had been chosen to help bury the treasure, in order that you may know of the tortures and murders of the Nazi tyrants.’42
Lichtensztajn, Graber and Grzybacz were not to survive the war: but their boxes and milk cans did. In them was preserved a formidable record of the destruction of Jewish Warsaw, and of Polish Jewry.43
23
* * *
Autumn 1942:
‘at a faster pace’
As the deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka continued, gathering in intensity during August, the pace of deportation and murder was accelerated throughout German-occupied Europe. On 23 July 1942, SS Colonel Viktor Brack, the euthanasia expert on Hitler’s staff, informed Himmler that General Globocnik ‘believes that we must carry out the entire operation against the Jews at a faster pace, for the difficulties that might turn up can freeze the entire operation, and then we will be stuck midway through’. Brack advised that all able-bodied Jews should be castrated, and the rest exterminated.1
The need for speed had become a driving force behind the daily measures. On July 24 the Under-Secretary of State at the German Foreign Ministry, Martin Luther, warned Ribbentrop of the Italian government’s continued resistance to any deportation plans from the Italian-occupied zone of Croatia. The Italian Chief of Staff in Mostar, Luther reported, ‘has declared that he cannot give his approval to the resettlement of the Jews, all inhabitants of Mostar having received assurance of equal treatment.’2
No such problems existed in either the General Government, or the Occupied Eastern Territories. On July 27, on the eve of the deportations from Przemysl to Belzec, a German proclamation warned that any Pole or Ukrainian ‘who tries to hide a Jew, or to assist him in hiding, will be shot dead’.3
A part of this ‘action’ in Przemysl was seen by Josef Buzhminski, from his hiding place near the ghetto fence, bordering ‘Aryan’ Przemysl. It was from this hiding place that Buzhminski saw an SS man by the name of Kidash catch a Jewish woman who was holding a baby in her arms. The baby was about eighteen months old. ‘She held the baby in her arms,’ Buzhminski recalled, ‘and began asking for mercy, that she be shot first, leaving the baby alive. From behind the fence there were Poles who raised their hands ready to catch the baby.’ The woman was about to hand the baby over to the Poles, when Kidash ‘took the baby from her arms and shot her twice’ and then ‘took the baby into his hands and tore him as one would tear a rag’.4
‘The Occupied Eastern Territories are to become free of Jews,’ Himmler wrote to one of his senior SS officials on July 28. ‘The execution of this very grave order has been placed on my shoulders by the Führer. No one can deny me the responsibility anyway.’5 In the Minsk region, General Commissar Kube reported to Gauleiter Lohse on July-31, ‘Jewry has been completely eliminated without any danger to manpower requirements.’ In the predominantly Polish area of Lida, ‘sixteen thousand Jews were liquidated, in Slonim, eight thousand, etc.’. In the previous ten weeks, Kube reported, fifty-five thousand Jews had been ‘liquidated’.6
To achieve the Nazi goal, mass executions, like the deportations, had to be carried out every day. On July 28, an Einsatzkommando unit in White Russia recorded a ‘major action’ in the Minsk ghetto, ‘six thousand Jews are brought to pits’; and on July 29, ‘three thousand Jews are brought to pits’. The following days, the report noted, ‘were filled with cleaning weapons…’.7 Among those who were shot in this action in Minsk were patients in the surgical ward of the Jewish hospital.8 But there had been no quiet submission to the Nazi will. When the Jewish Council Chairman, now Moshe Yaffe, was ordered to address the Jews in Jubilee Square, in order to calm them down, he agreed to speak, then shouted to those assembled to run for their lives.9
Several examples also survive of non-Jews protecting Jews: in the Volhynian town of Hoszcza a Ukrainian farmer, Fiodor Kalenczuk, hid a Jewish grain merchant, Pessah Kranzberg, his wife, their ten-year-old daughter and their daughter’s young friend, for seventeen months, refusing to deny them refuge even when his wife protested that their presence, in the stable, was endangering a Christian household.10 In the last week of September, five hundred Jews were murdered in the town. The Kranzbergs survived. Their rescue, in the circumstances of the East, had been a rare act of courage. Less rare, if no less courageous, at the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France, where several dozen Jews had found refuge, when the police came in August to make a census of all Jews, the villagers hid them for three nights in a row, and the police could not find them.11
On July 28 it was the turn of the Jews of Tarnow to be ordered out of their houses. All had to remove their shoes, and, barefoot, were driven with rifle butts and whips into the market square. There, everyone was ordered to kneel down, after which, as one eyewitness recalled, ‘Gestapo men walked among the kneeling people and took away the children….’
The children were taken to a shed at the edge of the square, and shot. ‘Indescribable lamentations, sobbing and weeping filled the market,’ the eye-witness recalled. ‘One could go mad,’ and he added:
In the corner of the square a thin, white-haired man was kneeling, and at his side his daughter, a slim brunette. A fat Gestapo man stopped near them, drew his revolver and killed the Jew. His daughter then leaped to her feet and cried to the Gestapo man in German: ‘You scoundrel! What did my father do to you that you shot him?’
The Gestapo man flew at her, hit her and threatened to kill her, too. The girl looked at him with a penetrating gaze. When he turned away, avoiding her eyes, she insulted him again, called him a mean coward who shot defenceless people, and shouted that he dared not look into her eyes.
‘Look straight into my eyes, you coward,’ she cried, ‘and shoot! These eyes will pursue you and haunt you all your life!’
The Gestapo man winced, turned away from the girl, as if to muster his courage, and after a moment aimed his revolver at her and shot her.12
A few Jews, the eye-witness among them, were taken off as forced labourers. The Jews of Tarnow were then deported: to Belzec, and to their death.13
Several hundred Tarnow Jews were given refuge by non-Jews. Among those who were saved in this way from deportation were the wife and daughter of Maximilian Rosenbusz, the head of the local Hebrew school in Tarnow, who had been taken to Auschwitz in June 1940 at the time of the camp’s construction, and who had perished there. The man who gave shelter to the two women was Wladyslaw Horbacki, a former regional school inspector of the Polish Ministry of Education. Both women survived the war.14
All those who tried to escape from these deportations were hunted down, as were those who tried to run away from labour gangs taken outside the ghetto for work. On July 28 two Jews were hanged in the Lodz ghetto for having escaped from a work gang. One, the fifty-one-year-old Szymon Makowski, had been among the earlier deportees from Pabianice to Lodz. The other was Josek Grynbaum, a boy of sixteen. After Grynbaum’s execution, a British certificate for Palestine was found in his clothing.15
Suicide also continued to be a means of escape from the whim and tyranny of deportation. On July 31, the nineteen-year-old Bluma Rozenfeld jumped to her death from the fifth floor of a building in the Lodz ghetto.16 Two days later, Lota Hirszberg, a woman of fifty-six, and one of the surviving deportees from Berlin to Lodz, killed herself by an overdose of sleeping powders.17
***
On August 4, the first 998 Jews from Belgium were sent to Auschwitz, among them 394 women and 80 children under the age of sixteen. Less than a hundred of these deportees survived the war, and only two of the children. By the end of August, six trains had left for Auschwitz, with 5,669 deportees, of whom only 321 survived the war. Among the Belgian Jews murdered in this one month, 896 were children.18 From Luxembourg, 723 Jews were deported; only 35 survived the war.19
On August 4, in the Polish city of Radom, ten thousand Jews were ordered to assemble on Graniczna Street. The SS began shooting. ‘The defenceless Jews ran madly amidst flying bullets,’ the historian of the destruction of Radom Jewry has written. ‘The terror deprived men of their reason.’ As in Warsaw, only a valid work permit enabled a man and his family to escape deportation. As the ‘selection’ proceeded, the shooting continued, until nightfall. ‘On the pavement along the streets lay dead and wounded Jews. The reflectors threw a bright light on the bloodstained corpses.’ That night, ten thousand Radom Jews were deported to Treblinka, and gassed.20
That same day, thirteen thousand Jews were rounded up in Warsaw, ‘among them’, noted Chaim Kaplan, ‘five thousand who came to the transfer of their own free will’, and he added: ‘They had had their fill of the ghetto life, which is a life of hunger and fear of death. They escaped from the trap. Would that I could allow myself to do as they did!’21
The Holocaust Page 45