When our tormentors had satisfied their thirst for blood, we were divided into groups. I was put with a group that was assigned to handle the corpses. The work was very hard, because we had to drag each corpse, in teams of two, for a distance of approximately three hundred metres. Sometimes we tied ropes around the dead bodies to pull them to their graves.
Suddenly, I saw a live woman in the distance. She was entirely nude; she was young and beautiful, but there was a demented look in her eyes. She was saying something to us, but we could not understand what she was saying and could not help her. She had wrapped herself in a bed sheet under which she was hiding a little child, and she was frantically looking for shelter. Just then one of the Germans saw her, ordered her to get into a ditch and shot her and the child. It was the first shooting I had ever seen.
I looked at the ditches around me. The dimensions of each ditch were 50 by 25 by 10 metres. I stood over one of them, intending to throw in one of the corpses, when suddenly a German came up from behind and wanted to shoot me. I turned around and asked him what I had done, whereupon he told me that I had attempted to climb into the ditch without having been told to do so. I explained that I had only wanted to throw the corpse in.
Next to nearly every one of us there was either a German with a whip or a Ukrainian armed with a gun. As we worked, we would be hit over the head. Some distance away there was an excavator which dug out the ditches.
We had to carry or drag the corpses on the run, since the slightest infraction of the rules meant a severe beating. The corpses had been lying around for quite some time and decomposition had already set in, making the air foul with the stench of decay. Already worms were crawling all over the bodies. It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we tied straps around them in order to drag the bodies away. Thus we worked from dawn to sunset, without food or water, on what some day would be our own graves. During the day it was very hot and we were tortured by thirst.
When we returned to our barracks at night, each of us looked for the men we had met the day before but, alas, we could not find them because they were no longer among the living. Those who worked at assorting the bundles fell victim far more frequently than the others. Because they were starved, they pilfered food from the packages taken from the trains, and when they were caught, they were marched to the nearest open ditch and their miserable existence was cut short by a quick bullet. The entire yard was littered with parcels, valises, clothing and knapsacks which had been discarded by the victims before they met their doom.15
***
Meanwhile, in the part of Poland which had been annexed to Greater Germany, the deportations spread, preceded by scenes of terror. At Lask, on August 24, the Jews were locked into a church. One woman gave birth to a baby. Both she and the newborn child were killed. Three Jews managed to escape. Of the rest, about eight hundred were sent to factories in the Lodz ghetto, more than two and a half thousand to Chelmno, where they were gassed.16
That same day, at Zdunska Wola, 1,100 Jews were driven to the Jewish cemetery. Dora Rosenboim was with her brother. ‘Being ill with a lung inflammation and very weak and not able to run, he fell on the ground and the Germans shot him, and I could not even save him.’ At the cemetery the slaughter began. ‘They tore children from their mothers’ arms and tore them to bits, shot and murdered mercilessly, so that a thousand victims fell in a single day. And those of us who remained alive had to bury the dead Jews.’ Shortly afterwards, her thirteen-year-old son was seized. ‘To this day we do not know what became of him,’ she recalled in 1946, ‘but we understand that we will never see him, our only child, our eyesight itself.’17
In the regions of the General Government where the deportations were to Treblinka, these too were continuing from day to day without interruption. ‘I seem to lose my reason in this atmosphere of doom and idleness,’ the fifty-three-year-old Gertrude Zeisler, a deportee from Vienna, had written from the Kielce ghetto on August 13.18 Eleven days later, on August 24, she was almost certainly among the many thousand Jews deported from Kielce to Treblinka. At Kielce station they were loaded on the trains by Ukrainian and German SS, and by the Polish police. The journey, which normally would take little over three hours, took twenty-four: many fainted from the heat and thirst, and hundreds died of suffocation. Others, in desperation, drank their own urine to try to avoid dehydration. When the train reached Treblinka, Izak Helfing later recalled, ‘nearly a third of us were dead’.
At Treblinka, the women were the first to be sent to the gas-chambers. Then, as Helfing recalled, ‘a certain Friedman’ cut a Ukrainian in his throat with a razor blade. The guards at once opened fire, and many were killed or wounded. The shooting went on for a long time. By the time it was finished, eighty per cent of the men and boys were dead. Helfing was fortunate to be able to hide among the corpses, and then to slip among the labourers. ‘For an entire day I employed myself by dragging the corpses away from the train cars. When nightfall came, I hid myself straightaway among the dead. Thus did I evade the gas oven for four days on end.’19
***
In the Lodz ghetto, every patch of waste ground had been given over to cultivation of vegetables. Throughout the summer, the hundred thousand inhabitants of the ghetto waited for the moment when the main crop, the cabbages, would be ready to eat. Then, amid a heat wave in August, when the temperature reached 45 degrees centigrade, almost the whole cabbage crop was, as the ghetto chronicle recorded, ‘devoured by an enormous mass of caterpillars’. In this way, the Chronicle added, ‘the work of so many hands, so much energy, and the last ounce of people’s strength were lost with them!’ Those who suffered most were ‘little people without resources’, who had worked alone, or with their families, ‘giving every free minute they had to that tedious back-breaking work’. Now they were helpless for, as the chronicler wrote:
They had thought that by Sisyphean labour they would be able to set a little something aside for the hard winter months to come, they believed in some better tomorrow, assured them by the labour done in the hours free from the demands of the ghetto, and now, suddenly, disillusionment and despair!
But a Jew is a fatalist. He believes that if something happened, it was meant to be.
And, besides, he consoles himself with the knowledge that he has already suffered greater losses and ordeals and somehow survived them too. He must only think of how to protect his remaining vegetables from this plague, since the caterpillars are already moving on to the beets (for lack of anything else to feed on), so those too will soon be under serious attack.
Perhaps a salt, or even a soda solution will be found so that we can somehow go on living and survive this grievous affliction while we wait for a better tomorrow. Such is our mentality!20
Into the Lodz ghetto, at this very moment, were brought the remnants of the Jewish ghettos from a dozen small towns around Lodz, among them those from Lask and Zdunska Wola. ‘Pale shadows trudge through the ghetto,’ the ghetto chronicler noted on August 28, ‘with endemic swellings on their legs and faces, people deformed and disfigured, whose only dream is to endure, survive—to live to see a better tomorrow without new disturbances, even if the price is a small and inadequate ration’.21
***
In the Volhynia, August 1942 saw the massacre of more than sixty thousand Jews. It also saw the escape of tens of thousands to the woods. At Kostopol, on August 24, a Jew, Gedalia Braier, called upon his fellow Jews to run. All seven hundred ran. But less than ten survived the war. At Rokitno, where sixteen hundred Jews were assembled on August 26, surrounded by armed Ukrainians, a Jewish woman called out, ‘Jews! We are done for! Run! Save yourselves!’ and more than seven hundred managed to reach the woods. At Sarny, where fourteen thousand Volhynian Jews were assembled on August 28, two Jews, one a carpenter with his axe, the other, Josef Gendelman, a tinsmith with his tin-cutters, broke through the fence surrounding the ghetto and led a mass escape. Three thousand Jews reached the gap in the fence, and sought to push their
way through it. But the Ukrainians were armed with machine guns, and two and a half thousand Jews were shot down at the fence. Five hundred escaped, but many of these were killed on their way to the woods, and only a hundred survived the war and its two more years of privation, manhunts, and frequent local hostility.
On August 25, when a group of Jews was taken from the town of Zofjowka, under guard, to dig burial pits, one of their number, Moshe-Yossel Schwartz, realising what was intended, urged his fellow Jews to attack their guards. They did so, using their spades to crush the heads of one of the German policemen and two of the Ukrainians. They then fled. But on the way to the woods, Schwartz was shot and killed.
Elsewhere in the Volhynia, individual Jews sought to challenge the German power. In Szumsk, two young women attacked the chief of the police, ‘choking him and biting him until they were shot to death’. In Turzysk, a young man, Berish Segal, stole a gun, hit a German policeman in the face with it, but was shot by other policemen.
The Jews who reached the Volhynian woods and formed small partisan bands did so six months before the arrival of Soviet partisans from White Russia. When the Soviet partisans came, Jews helped them, and were protected by them. But in the interval, the death toll was high. Of a group of a hundred Jewish partisans and escaped Soviet prisoners-of-war near Radziwillow, only one, the platoon commander, Yechiel Prochownik, survived. Another of the Jewish partisan leaders, Moshe Gildenmann, began his anti-German activities with ten men and a single knife. A year later, in the marshes north of Zhitomir, Gildenmann’s group was to guide to safety a Russian division surrounded by the Germans.22
The deportations from France had continued throughout August. Individual Catholics protested. At the same time, on August 28, the Germans ordered all Catholic priests who sheltered Jews to be arrested.23 One priest, a Jesuit, had hidden eighty Jewish children destined for deportation. He too was arrested.24
On August 26 more than four hundred children under the age of twelve had been deported from Paris to Auschwitz and gassed.25 On August 28 the deportees included 280 children of sixteen and younger, among them Michel Rozes, who was only one and a half years old, deported with his mother and his five-year-old sister Sarah.
The journey from Paris to Auschwitz took three days. Albert Hollender, one of only eight survivors of the convoy, later recalled:
Piled up in freight cars, unable to bend or to budge, sticking one to the other, breathless, crushed by one’s neighbour’s every move, this was already hell. During the day, a torrid heat, with a pestilential smell. After several days and several nights, the doors were opened. We arrived worn out, dehydrated, with many ill. A newborn baby, snatched from its mother’s arms, was thrown against a column. The mother, crazed from pain, began to scream. The SS man struck her violently with the butt end of his weapon over the head. Her eyes haggard, with fearful screams, her beautiful hair became tinted with her own blood. She was struck down by a bullet in her head.26
On the day of the arrival of this train at Auschwitz, a new German surgeon, Dr Johann Kremer, who had reached the camp on the previous evening, and was to live in the SS Officers’ Home near Auschwitz station, noted in his dairy: ‘Tropical climate with 28 degrees centigrade in the shade, dust and innumerable flies! Excellent food in the Home. This evening, for instance, we had sour duck livers for 0.40 mark, with stuffed tomatoes, tomato salad etc.’ The water, Kremer added, was infected, ‘so we drink seltzer water which is served free’.27
Two days later Kremer noted: ‘Was present for the first time at a special action at 3 a.m. By comparison, Dante’s inferno seems almost a comedy. Auschwitz is justly called an extermination camp!’28
The Jews whom Kremer saw being gassed on September 2 were from France, including seventy boys and seventy-eight girls under fifteen. Many of the children had been deported without their parents, among them Helene Goldenberg, aged nine, and her sister Lotty, aged five; also Henri Garnek, aged eleven, and his brother Jean, aged three.29
Asked after the war about what he had seen on September 2, Kremer told his questioners:
These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. The cottages were called ‘bunkers’ in the SS men’s slang. All SS physicians on duty in the camp took turns to participate in the gassing, which were called Sonderaction, ‘special action’. My part as physician at the gassing consisted in remaining in readiness near the bunker.
I was brought there by car. I sat in front with the driver, and an SS hospital orderly sat in the back of the car with oxygen apparatus to revive SS men employed in the gassing, in case any of them should succumb to the poisonous fumes.
When the transport with people who were destined to be gassed arrived at the railway ramp, the SS officers selected, from among the new arrivals, persons fit to work, while the rest—old people, all children, women with children in their arms and other persons not deemed fit to work—were loaded on to lorries and driven to the gas-chambers.
I used to follow behind the transport till we reached the bunker. There people were first driven into the barrack huts where the victims undressed and then went naked to the gas-chambers. Very often no incidents occurred, as the SS men kept people quiet, maintaining that they were to bathe and be deloused.
After driving all of them into the gas-chamber, the door was closed and an SS man in a gas-mask threw contents of a Cyclon tin through an opening in the side wall. The shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they were fighting for their lives.
These shouts were heard for a very short while. I should say for some minutes, but I am unable to give the exact length of time.30
Non-Jewish eye-witnesses, like the three Germans, Herman Graebe, Kurt Gerstein and Dr Kremer, or the two Poles, Dr Klukowski and railwayman Zabecki, saw and recorded every facet of the Jewish fate. So terrible were the scenes at Treblinka station, Zabecki noted, that from September 1942 no more passenger trains stopped there, as hitherto: only military trains, and deportation trains being divided up and shunted into the death camp.
Beyond the railway lines, Zabecki recalled, and parallel to them, ran a concrete road, beyond which was an excavation overgrown with bushes. Fugitives, seeing this thicket, often hid there before fleeing further away. But, ‘more often than not’, they died there from wounds received as they had jumped from the train: injuries from falling, or shots from the guards. The SS men knew about this, Zabecki wrote, and scoured the thicket with a dog.
As Zabecki’s own allotment was not far away from the thicket, ‘I saw quite a few tragedies.’ One of them took place on September 1, as a train of deportees stood in the station, waiting to be shunted forward. Several had managed to break out of the trains and, being shot at all the while, had made for the thicket:
One of the SS men who had arrived at the station that day—he was Kurt Franz, deputy commandant of the camp—came out with his dog along the road. The dog, scenting something, pulled the SS man after it into the thicket. A Jewess was lying there with a baby; probably she was already dead. The baby, a few months old, was crying, and nestling against its mother’s bosom.
The dog, let off the lead, tracked them down, but at a certain distance it crouched on the ground. It looked as if it was getting ready to jump, to bite them and tear them to pieces. However, after a time it began to cringe and whimper dolefully, and approached the people lying on the ground; crouching, it licked the baby on its hands, face and head.
The SS man came up to the scene with his gun in his hand. He sensed the dog’s weakness. The dog began to wag its tail, turning its head towards the boots of the SS man. The German swore violently and flogged the dog with his stick. The dog looked up and fled. Several times the German kicked the dead woman, and then began to kick the baby and trample on its head. Later, he walked through the bushes, whistling for his dog.
The dog did not seem to hear, although it was not far away; it ran through the bushes whimpering softl
y; it appeared to be looking for the people. After a time the SS man came out on to the road, and the dog ran up to its ‘master’. The German then began to beat it mercilessly with a whip. The dog howled, barked, even jumped up to the German’s chest as if it were rabid, but the blows with the whip got the better of it. On the ‘master’s’ command it lay down.
The German went a few paces away, and ordered the dog to stand. The dog obeyed the order perfectly. It carefully licked the boots, undoubtedly spattered with the baby’s blood, under its muzzle. Satisfied, the SS man began to shoot and set the dog on other Jews who were still escaping from the wagons standing in the station.31
That same day, in Wlodzimierz Wolynski, the Germans ordered the Jewish Council to provide seven thousand Jews. A member of the Council, Jacob Kogen, realizing that these Jews would be taken outside the town and shot, committed suicide, together with his wife and thirteen-year-old son. He did not want to be the one ‘to decide who was to be taken away’.32
The Germans searched for their victims unaided. In all, in four days, 13,500 Jews were found, and killed. Five hundred managed to escape. After the first day of the ‘action’ the Treasurer of the Jewish Council, David Halpern, came out of the cellar in which he had been hiding in order to make enquiries about offering the Germans a ransom for the surviving Jews. He was caught, and killed on the spot.33
In the Lodz ghetto, on September 1, the Gestapo went to the hospitals. ‘Such despair was never seen in the ghetto,’ wrote the photographer Mendel Grossman, ‘even during the deportations.’34 ‘The Germans threw the patients from the staircases,’ recalled Dr L. Szykier, director of the health section of the ghetto, ‘tore them from operating tables.’35 In one of the hospitals, Ben Edelbaum’s sister Esther had just given birth to a baby girl. On September 1 the baby was seven days old, with ‘a headful of jet black hair’. As no one at home could agree on a name, it was agreed to wait until mother and baby returned. That morning Ben Edelbaum and his parents learned that the hospital had been cordoned off. They hurried to it:
The Holocaust Page 49