The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

Near Minsk, the most eastern death camp had continued operation: in the Blagovshchina forest, three miles from the village of Maly Trostenets. On August 4 a train with a thousand Jews left Theresienstadt. Six days later it reached Maly Trostenets, where it stopped in open country. Forty ‘experts’ had already been taken off the train at Minsk. The remaining 960 deportees were ordered out of the train and into vans for the next stage of their journey, and driven off towards the forest. The vans were gas vans; once they reached the forest the doors were unlocked and the bodies of the deportees were thrown into open graves.22 Of a thousand Jews sent from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets in a further deportation on August 25, only twenty-two of the younger men were taken to work at an SS farm. The rest were ordered into the gas vans and killed. Of the twenty-two men sent to the SS farm, two survived the hard labour and sadism of their overseers, and escaped in May 1943 to join the partisans. One was killed in action. One survived the war.23

  At Zdzieciol, west of Minsk, where Jewish Council members had actively encouraged the acquisition of arms, eight hundred Jews managed to escape on August 6, the day of slaughter on which three thousand perished. Of those who were able to break out of the ghetto, about one hundred and fifty were strong enough to form a partisan unit, headed by Hirsh Kaplinsky. The unit went into action almost at once; four months later, Kaplinsky was killed in action.24 At nearby Mir, on August 9, two hundred Jews managed to escape to the forests.25 That same week, six thousand were killed at Nowogrodek.26 These were the survivors of the ‘action’ of December 1941, as well as several thousand Jews who had been brought into the Nowogrodek ghetto from the surrounding villages of Naliboki, Lubcz and Karelicze. One of the survivors of this second Nowogrodek action was Idel Kagan. He has recalled how, on August 7, the workshop in which he was working outside the ghetto was surrounded by Germans with machine guns, while the Jews in the ghetto were taken away, to the ravine at nearby Skridlewe, and machine-gunned. ‘Some people survived, three or four. They came back. Then we heard from them what had happened.’

  The surviving Jews of Nowogrodek also heard that a group of Jewish partisans was in the area, between Nowojelna and Lida. ‘To escape was easy,’ Idel Kagan later recalled. ‘But to escape—where to?’ As Kagan explained, the local farmers ‘used to take away the Jews’ money, and hand over the Jews. They already had their money. So why to feed them for ever and a day? The Germans were winning the war.’

  ‘We had the facilities to escape,’ Kagan reiterated. ‘But the weather was against us. If somebody didn’t give you a hiding place, you’d freeze to death.’ There were hazards, even in hiding. ‘The little peasant boy used to give you away,’ Kagan reflected. ‘The population didn’t want you.’

  Kagan decided, nevertheless, to escape. He waited until the first snows, when the German guards would be preoccupied by the cold, and then escaped with fourteen others. The escapees walked through the snow for two to three hours. But crossing a river, Kagan fell through the ice. Regaining the bank, his body was so covered in ice that he could not keep up. When finally, and alone, he reached an isolated hut in the forest, he discovered that he had just missed the partisans. ‘I felt I would freeze to death. I began to walk back to camp. I didn’t want to freeze to death’.

  Idel Kagan returned to Nowogrodek just in time. ‘My toes were already going black.’ Then, without iodine or bandages, his toes were cut off. His escape had failed, but he was still alive.27

  ***

  The evidence of the fate of individuals is fragmentary, surviving only by chance. At the beginning of the second week of August, at Treblinka railway station, Franciszek Zabecki witnessed an incident otherwise unrecorded. A Polish partisan, Trzcinski, from a nearby village, had reached the station after being forced to flee across the River Bug. He was on his way south, armed, in search of another partisan group, and intended to travel south on the regular train to Sokolow. At an adjoining platform were carriages waiting to be shunted on to the death camp spur. Then, as Zabecki recalled, ‘Trzcinski went up to a wagon, suddenly unfastened his coat, and gave a young Jew a grenade, asking him to throw it among the Germans. The Jew took the grenade, and Trzcinski jumped into the moving passenger train and departed.’

  Zabecki later learned that the Jew ‘threw the grenade in the death camp at a group of Ukrainians standing beside the Germans on the unloading ramp’. One Ukrainian was seriously wounded. ‘The revenge of the Germans and Ukrainians was terrible,’ Zabecki added. ‘The young men were beaten with sticks until they lost consciousness. All of them died.’28

  Another Polish eye-witness of Jewish resistance in the second week of August was Dr Klukowski of Szczebrzeszyn. On August 8, he noted, two thousand of the Jews of Szczebrzeszyn were ordered to assemble in the market place. It was said that a train was waiting to take them ‘to the Ukraine’. But, Klukowski commented in his diary, ‘Not one Jew appeared of his own free will. They therefore started to seize them….’

  By nightfall, only a few Jews had been rounded up. Most of them ‘hid in such a way that they could not be found’. Klukowski added: ‘Many Poles, particularly youths, are enthusiastically assisting in the searches after the Jews.’29

  Only four hundred Jews were found. Thirteen were shot in the streets. The rest were deported. Two days later Klukowski wrote in his dairy: ‘We now know for certain that the train went towards Belzec. Everyone is convinced that those on it are dead already.’ That same evening, in Szczebrzeszyn, ‘three Jewesses who had come out of hiding were shot.’30

  The deportees of August 8 from Szczebrzeszyn were only sixty kilometres by rail from Belzec, a line that passed through the nearby town of Zwierzyniec. On August 9 it was the Jews of Zwierzyniec who were ordered to assemble. But the Jewish Council, as a local Pole, Stanislaw Bohdanowicz, later recalled, ‘bought itself out with gold’, and only fifty-two Jews were taken, ‘the poorest Jews who had nothing with which to buy themselves out—and newcomers from other towns’.

  The number of trains passing through Zwierzyniec was increasing, Bohdanowicz later recalled:

  These trains looked terrible. The small windows were covered with planks or lots of barbed wire, and in some places planks were missing from the walls, which was proof of desperate struggles taking place inside. Through the cracks in the planks and through the wired-up windows peered scared human faces.

  Sometimes we could tell that a train was approaching, although it was still far off, because of the shooting by the guards; they were standing on the buffers of the wagons and shooting those who tried to escape.

  When such a train stopped at Zwierzyniec station in order to allow another train to pass through, screams, laments and cries could be heard from all the wagons, ‘Water, water!’ The Jews were holding out bottles and money fastened to sticks or parts of broken planks—but no one was allowed to approach the wagons.

  The Germans were shooting without warning all those who begged for water, as well as those who tried to give it to them. Soldiers were marching along the train breaking the bottles with sticks and pocketing the money. Women were throwing rings, ear-rings and jewellery through the windows and cracks, begging for a glass of water for their children who were dying of thirst. But it was forbidden to show even signs of sympathy or pity for the Jews; the punishment was instant death.

  Bohdanowicz also recalled that the inhabitants of Belzec town ‘were complaining about the stench which increased day by day. Everyone understood that in some way the Jews were being killed there. In the end, passengers travelling through Belzec by train also started to complain that the stench of rotting bodies was unbearable and was even penetrating to the interior of the carriages through tightly shut windows.31

  On August 9, fifteen hundred Jews were taken out of the ghetto in the Volhynian town of Krzemieniec, to a camp five miles outside the town. Among those taken away were all the members of the Jewish Council and the Jewish police. According to a Jewish woman who returned to the region after liberation, the ghetto had been besieged immed
iately after these fifteen hundred had been taken out, but a young man in the ghetto opened fire, killing six Germans and Ukrainian policemen, and the ‘liquidation squad’ was withdrawn. On the second day, August 10, ten German and Ukrainian policemen were killed trying to enter the ghetto. On the third day, the Jews set the ghetto on fire: their last act of defiance before their destruction.32

  During August 1942, Jews from more than twenty communities in Eastern Galicia, one of the heartlands of the Jewish diaspora, were deported to Belzec, among them more than forty thousand from Lvov. The round-ups in Lvov, beginning on August 10 and lasting until August 23, turned the city, as one of those present later recalled, ‘into a city of nightmare and blood’. Among those murdered was Jakob Schall, an historian who, like Ringelblum in Warsaw, had collected material on the fate of Lvov Jewry. Schall’s notes, hidden away by him, were all lost at his death.

  Another historian to perish that August was Falik Hafner, who had been in charge of food distribution for the Jews of Lvov, and had used his position to organize secret assistance for writers and scholars in need.33 Also killed in Lvov, on August 18, was Filip Eisenberg, a leading bacteriologist, who between the wars had been Director of the Hygiene Institute at Cracow: he was sixty-six years old.34

  On August 14, the fourth day of the Lvov deportations, two rabbis employed in the religious department of the Jewish Council, David Kahane and Rabbi Chameides, formerly of Katowice, had visited the head of the Ukrainian Uniate Church in Galicia, the Metropolitan Andreas Sheptitsky. Aged seventy-seven, Sheptitsky was in poor health, and partly paralysed.

  The two rabbis asked Sheptitsky if he would find a hiding place for several Jewish children. Sheptitsky agreed, and asked both his brother and his sister to help. His brother, Father Superior Clement Sheptitsky, was the spiritual head of the Uniate monasteries. His sister, Sister Josepha, was the Mother Superior of the Uniate nunneries. Both agreed to help, and 150 Jews, mostly small boys and girls, were found sanctuary. None was betrayed to the Germans. Sheptitsky himself hid fifteen Jews, including Rabbi Kahane, in his own residence in Lvov, a building frequently visited by German officials.35

  During August 1942, 76,000 Jews were deported from Lvov, and from the other towns of Eastern Galicia. All were sent to Belzec. From Western Galicia, that same August, Jews from thirty communities were deported to Belzec, including 16,000 from the region of Nowy Sacz and 12,500 from Przemysl. In all, during that single month, from Eastern and Western Galicia, and from the Lublin region, more than 145,000 Jews were gassed at Belzec.36

  Among those driven from their homes in the Eastern Galician town of Czortkow in the early hours of August 27 was Zonka Pollak. She later recalled that night, when several thousand Jews were assembled on the square near the Bristol Hotel, ‘watching the scenes of children being shot to death in their mothers’ hands and thrown from the balconies’.

  Lined in formations of six, the Jews were then marched to the prison yard, where they were locked in until the following day. Zonka Pollak added:

  Our faces reflect silent despair. People ask each other about the circumstances of their arrest, and we are wondering what’s going to happen next. Groups are formed, friends look for each other; there are many wounded people with bloody injuries from having been beaten, children without parents, separated families.

  It begins to dawn, and with the appearance of the sun, the heat grows. There is no water, and we quench our thirst with rain water in the nearby barrels. Hours are passing with the heat becoming unbearable. We are like animals destined for slaughter and kept in a a cage; but for those animals they spare neither water nor food. Everybody is hungry and forgets even the feeling of shame, making his ordure in public.

  It was not until the early afternoon that the prison gates were unlocked and the Jews marched out. Zonka Pollak continued:

  We are sure we will be taken to the forest, where we can expect to be shot, but we are directed to the railway station. It seems to me that I never walked carefree and without fear through these streets. The feeling of thirst grows more intense. My lips are dry and the tongue sticks to the palate. It is a terrible feeling. People get rid of their belongings to ease their way.

  At the railway station, we are split up in groups of 120 and more, and packaged off into freight cars. The doors of the cars are shut. It is dark and tense, impossible to stretch out your arms, absolutely no air to breathe. Everybody strangles and chokes and you feel as if a rope were tied around your neck and such a terrible heat, as if fire had been set under the car.

  About ten people from our group are placed near the door; whoever has hairpins, nails, fasteners, starts to bore between the boards to get a little bit of air. People behind us are in much worse plight. They take off their clothes and look as if obsessed by bestiality and madness. They are choking and driven unto the utmost despair.

  I cannot recall for how long we are waiting or after how many hours the train starts. But when, after a long waiting, the train is in motion, a sigh of relief emanates from the mouths of those who are still alive. They hope that now more air will find its way into the carriage, or it will start raining and a few drops will penetrate through the clefts. But none of these miracles happen.

  It occurs to me that we are making our way towards Tarnopol. I notice that in our carriage there is more and more free space. People die and we are seated on their dead bodies. The remaining are raving and wild, mad from suffering, quarrel between themselves about water; mothers hand their children urine to still their thirst.

  At night we are arriving at a station, where the train stops for some time. We can hear a conversation in Russian. We wonder what they will do to us next. A short ray of hope comes to our hearts; maybe we shall stay here to work. We hear many sounds, like that of a detachment of carriages, opening of doors, orders to undress, lamentations; we do not know from where, and whether there are more trains. Our train is driven back, and in our car there are still about twenty people alive. I remember, my mother with a very poor voice asking us to ease our suffering and to break open a small window, which if discovered, would not make any difference for us, being anyway condemned to death.

  All of a sudden it becomes light in our car and from this moment I can hardly remember, how my mother insisted that I should jump out. I do not hesitate at all, because the motion of the train does not frighten me when I look on the dead bodies around me.

  And then, I recall two countrymen leaning over me and insisting that I should run away, but all I wanted was to drink, drink, drink.

  I throw myself in a nearby pond, and I can hardly quench my thirst which burns my stomach. I am pouring handfuls of water, with those hands which had lifted, a short while ago, dead bodies in the carriage.

  Within a short distance from me, I notice a body of a woman from our car. She certainly has been shot to death by the Germans, who were on guard on the roof of the train.

  Zonka Pollak survived, but those deported with her either died on the train during the journey to Belzec, or were murdered at Belzec within hours of their arrival.37

  Among the deportees that August from Lvov to Belzec was Rudolf Reder, a soap manufacturer, and one of only two Jews to survive Belzec. His train was among the first to reach the death camp from Lvov, on August 11. As he later wrote:

  About mid-day the train entered Belzec, a small station surrounded by small houses inhabited by the SS men. Here, the train was shunted off the main track on to a siding which ran for about another kilometre straight to the gates of the death camp. Ukrainian railwaymen also lived near the station and there was a post office nearby as well.

  At Belzec station an old German with a thick, black moustache climbed into the locomotive cab. I don’t know his name, but I would recognise him again, he looked like a hangman; he took over command of the train and drove it into the camp. The journey to the camp took two minutes. For months I always saw the same bandit.

  The siding ran through fields, on both sides there was completely op
en country; not one building. The German who drove the train into the camp climbed out of the locomotive, he was ‘helping us’ by beating and shouting, throwing people out of the train. He personally entered each wagon and made sure that no one remained behind. He knew about everything. When the train was empty and had been checked, he signalled with a small flag and took the train out of the camp.

  The whole area of Belzec was occupied by the SS—no one was allowed to approach; any individuals who stumbled accidentally into the area were immediately shot. The train entered a yard which measured about one kilometre by one kilometre and was surrounded by barbed wire and fencing about two metres high, which was not electrified. Entry to the yard was through a wooden gate covered with barbed wire. Next to the gate there was a guard house with a telephone and standing in front of the guard house were several SS men with dogs. When the train had entered the yard the SS men closed the gate and went into the guard house.

  At that moment, dozens of SS men opened the doors of the wagons shouting ‘Los!’ They pushed people out with their whips and rifles. The doors of the wagons were about one metre above the ground. The people, hurried along with blows from whips, were forced to jump down, old and young alike, it made no difference. They broke arms and legs, but they had to obey the orders of the SS men. Children were injured, everyone was falling down, dirty, hungry, frightened.

  Beside the SS men stood the so-called ‘Zugsführers’—these were the guards in charge of the permanent Jewish death kommando in the camp, they were dressed in civilian clothes, without any insignia.

  Reder’s recollections continued:

  The old, the sick and the babies, all those who could not walk, were placed on stretchers and taken to the edge of the huge mass graves. There, the SS man Irrman shot them and then pushed them into the graves with his rifle. Irrman was the camp expert at ‘finishing off’ old people and small children; a tall, dark, handsome Gestapo man, with a very normal-looking face, he lived like the other SS men in Belzec—not far from the railway station in a cottage, completely alone—and, like the others, without his family and without women.