The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  The evening before, one Jewess was returning from the lavatory and was on her way upstairs to the sleeping quarters. A German woman thought she held a stone in her hand, but that, of course, was only her hysterical imagination. At the gate below, a sentry was standing guard. As everybody knew, he was that woman’s lover. Leaning out from the window, she cried for help, saying she had been hit by the Jewess.

  All guards on duty immediately ran upstairs and together with the depraved German women prisoners they began to hit the Jewish women indiscriminately. They threw some women down the winding stairs, so that they fell in a heap, one upon the other. Some were thrown out of the window and fell to their deaths. The guards also drove the Jewish women from the barracks into the yard. The German woman, who had instigated the butchering, stayed behind in the bedroom with her lover. This may have been what she originally intended.

  The ‘rebellion’ was meanwhile mastered with bludgeons, gun butts and shots. Even an axe had been used as a weapon by one of the female capos. In their mortal fear a few Jewish women tried to creep under the wire fence in order to escape the butchering. They got stuck and were soon killed. Even when all the women lay on the ground, the fiends, drunk with blood, kept hitting the helpless victims again and again. They wanted, above all, to kill everybody, so as to destroy all witnesses of their atrocities.

  At five that morning, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, was told that there had been a ‘rebellion’ at Budy, but that it had been ‘successfully overcome’. He at once drove to Budy, Pery Broad recalled, ‘and inspected the traces of the bloody orgy. A few wounded women, who had hidden among the corpses, then rose and thought that they were saved.’ But as soon as Hoess left Budy, ‘the wounded women were shot.’28

  ***

  As the killing of Jews continued, so too did the acts of resistance, bravery or defiance. In Lukow, near Lublin, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, David Liberman, had collected money from the Jews assembled in the main square on October 1, believing that he could use the money to ransom the Jews. On learning that the deportation was to continue, he shouted at the German supervisor of this action, ‘Here is your payment for our trip, you bloody tyrant,’ and, tearing the money into small shreds, slapped the German in the face. Ukrainian guards murdered him on the spot.29 The assembled Jews, four thousand altogether, two thousand of whom were Slovak Jews deported to Lukow five months earlier, were sent to Treblinka, as planned, and gassed.30

  The deceptions were continuous. An eye-witness has recorded how, at Treblinka, after the arrival of a train from Vienna, Sigmund Freud’s sister approached SS Second Lieutenant Kurt Hubert Franz, who that day was supervising the arrival of the victims, ‘and asked to be given lighter work on account of her poor health’. Franz ‘assured her that her arrival in Treblinka was a mistake, in view of her poor health, and that as soon as she had had her bath, she would be put on the first available train back to Vienna.’31

  Which of Freud’s sisters this was, is not known; two of his five sisters were murdered at Treblinka, the eighty-two-year-old Marie and the eighty-year-old Pauline. Two other of his sisters also perished, the eighty-four-year-old Rosa in Auschwitz, and the eighty-one-year-old Adolfine in Theresienstadt.32

  Under heavy armed guard, amid scenes of savage violence intermingled with cunning deceptions, the deportations to Belzec had also continued throughout the autumn: more than one hundred and fifty-five thousand in August, at least ninety-six thousand in September, and a further fifty-eight thousand in October. The October deportees included a thousand Jews deported from Sambor, two thousand from Drohobycz and three thousand from Skalat.33 At the station platform at Belzec the deportees were met by a poster which proclaimed: ‘First a wash and breakfast—then to work’. All were gassed.34

  In Drohobycz, those who were sick, or who actively resisted the round-up, were shot on the spot.35 Among those killed on the streets in Drohobycz was the novelist and short story writer, Bruno Schulz. In his writings, he had transformed Drohobycz into a fantastic world of the imagination. His last novel, The Messiah, he left for safekeeping, while still in manuscript, to a friend. But the friend also perished in the holocaust, and of the novel, nothing survives.36

  In the Eastern Territories, the mass executions in pits continued. In August they had accounted for more than one hundred thousand deaths, in September for more than thirty-two thousand, in October for more than eighty thousand. One of these Eastern executions took place in Dubno on October 5, where more than three thousand Jews were killed. It was witnessed by the German engineer, Hermann Graebe, who had earlier seen the killings in Rowne. As he later recalled:

  On 5th October 1942, when I visited the building office at Dubno, my foreman told me that in the vicinity of the site Jews from Dubno had been shot in three large pits, each about thirty metres long and three metres deep. About fifteen hundred persons had been killed daily. All were to be liquidated. As the shooting had taken place in his presence he was still very upset.

  Moennikes and I went straight to the pits. Nobody prevented us. I heard a quick succession of shots from behind one of the mounds of earth. The people who had got off the lorries—men, women and children of all ages—had to undress upon the order of an SS man, who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put their clothes on separate piles of shoes, top clothing and underclothing. I saw a heap of shoes that must have contained eight hundred to one thousand pairs, great piles of clothes and undergarments.

  Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood in family groups, kissed each other, said their farewells, and waited for a sign from another SS man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in his hand. During the fifteen minutes that I stood near the pit, I did not hear anyone complain or beg for mercy.

  I watched a family of about eight, a man and a woman, both about fifty, with their children, aged about one, eight and ten, and two grown-up daughters of about twenty to twenty-four. An old woman with snow-white hair was holding the one-year-old child in her arms, singing something to it and tickling it. The child was crowing with delight. The man and wife were looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was holding the hand of a boy of about ten, speaking to him softly. The boy was fighting back his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked the boy’s head and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the SS man at the pit shouted something to his comrade, who separated off about twenty persons and ordered them to go behind the mound of earth. Among them was the family that I have mentioned. I still clearly remember a dark-haired, slim girl who pointed to herself as she passed close to me and said, ‘Twenty-three.’

  I walked to the other side of the mound and found myself standing before an enormous grave. The people lay so closely packed, one on top of the other, that only their heads were visible. Nearly all had blood running over their shoulders from their heads. Some of them were still moving. Some lifted an arm and turned a head to show that they were still alive.

  The pit was already two-thirds full. I estimated that it already contained about one thousand people. I looked round for the man who had shot them. He was an SS man, who was sitting on the edge of the narrow end of the pit, his legs dangling into it. He had a submachine gun across his knees and was smoking a cigarette. The people, completely naked, went down some steps which had been cut in the clay wall of the pit and climbed over the heads of those already lying there, to the place indicated by the SS man. They laid down in front of the dead or injured people. Some of them caressed those who were still alive and spoke to them softly.

  Then I heard a series of shots. I looked into the pit and saw that the bodies were twitching or that the heads lay motionless on top of the bodies which lay before them. Blood was pouring from their necks. I was surprised that I was not ordered away, but saw that there were also two or three uniformed policemen standing nearby.

  The next batch was already approaching. They climbed into the pit, lined up against the previous victims and were shot. When I walk
ed back round the mound I noticed another lorry-load of people which had just arrived. This time it included sick and infirm people. A very thin old woman, with terribly thin legs, was undressed by others who were already naked, while two people supported her. The woman appeared to be paralysed. The naked people carried the woman around the mound. I left with Moennikes and drove back to Dubno in the car.37

  Two weeks after Hermann Graebe witnessed this slaughter in Dubno, Dr Kremer was present at another ‘special action’ in Auschwitz. ‘Terrible scenes’, he noted in his diary on October 18, ‘when three women begged to have their lives spared.’38 The women were Jewesses from Holland, three of 1,710 deportees, of whom 116 were sent to the barracks, and 1,594 were gassed. ‘They were young and healthy women,’ Kremer later recalled, ‘but their begging was to no avail. The SS men taking the action shot them on the spot.’39

  On October 17 more than ten thousand Jews being held in the concentration camp at Buchenwald, and several thousand in Sachsenhausen, were deported to Auschwitz. Among them was Fritz Beda, the Viennese satirist, who had been held in Buchenwald since October 1938, and who, under another name, had submitted the prize-winning song to a competition he had organized himself. The song ended:

  Whatever our fate,

  We still say ‘yes’ to life.40

  On October 21 it was the turn of the remaining Jews of Szczebrzeszyn to be rounded up. Dr Zygmunt Klukowski, a member of the Polish ‘Home Army’ underground movement, witnessed the scene as SS men, German policemen and Polish gendarmes ‘wandered about the city, chasing after the Jews and following after their tracks’. Klukowski’s account continued:

  They drove them out of various hideouts, broke down gates and doors, broke shutters, and threw hand grenades into a few cellars and apartments. They were shooting with pistols, submachine guns and machine guns that were positioned in various places. They beat them, kicked them and were generally cruel in an inhuman way.

  At three o’clock, they took nine hundred Jews—men, women and children—out of the town, forcing them to run by hitting them with sticks and rifle butts, and shooting the whole time. Only members of the Jewish Council and the Jewish police rode in wagons.

  The action did not stop with their departure. They continued to look for those still hiding. They announced that death awaits anyone hiding Jews or their belongings. Those who discover Jewish hide-outs were promised a prize. The Jews who were caught were shot on the spot without mercy. The Poles had to bury the dead. How many—it is hard to say. Their number is estimated at four to five hundred. I will try to get the exact number from the municipality. From the numbers mentioned, it is possible to estimate that about two thousand are still hiding. Those who were captured were brought to the station.

  Where the Jews were taken, Klukowski added, ‘I do not know.’41

  It was in fact Belzec, where all were gassed. With them were sent the Jews of Zwierzyniec, deported on foot to Szczebrzeszyn on the afternoon of October 21. Another Pole, Stanislaw Bohdanowicz, who witnessed this deportation, later recalled:

  The police were armed with rifles and pistols and each one had in his left hand a walking stick. Their facial expression showed boredom and indifference. Some of them took the Jews to the town square, the others got into the car and drove off.

  The shooting in Zwierzyniec didn’t stop.

  All the Jews, women and children, were first gathered in the town square and then taken along the road in the direction of Szczebrzeszyn. They walked fast. The older and weaker ones couldn’t keep up. These were shot at once in the back of the head with a rifle or pistol.

  Only now did I understand the meaning of those walking sticks. If one of the Jews swayed, the Germans hooked the sticks around their thin necks, pulled them out of the line and shot them. The road to Szczebrzeszyn was covered with bodies.

  At one point, Bohdanowicz recalled, a Jewish butcher threw himself at a German ‘in an attempt to snatch his rifle. He would have succeeded, but at the same moment another German shot him dead with his pistol.’42

  For two more days, in Szczebrzeszyn, the searches continued for every Jew in hiding. Those found, Dr Klukowski noted on October 22, ‘were shot on the spot, or brought to the cemetery and killed here’.43 To Klukowski’s amazement, many fellow Poles ‘helped enthusiastically’ in dragging Jews from their hiding places. One Pole, a gatekeeper, ‘cracked the skulls of Jews who had been taken out of their hide-outs without the use of a gun or a pistol’.44

  Luba Krugman, a Jewess in hiding in nearby Chorbrzany, watched while the Jews of the region were driven through her village. ‘Hundreds marched slowly,’ she later recalled, ‘in broken rows, supporting the old and sick.’ Her account continued:

  An infant’s shrill cry pierced the air. The mother, sensing danger, covered the child with her shawl, desperately trying to quiet him. Instantly, an impatient German grabbed the unruly bundle and dumped it in the nearest ditch. Then he forced the sobbing mother into a row of marchers, and when she protested, he struck her with his rifle butt and threw her unconscious body into another ditch.

  Excited voices in the crowd were silenced by Germans shouting: ‘Vorwaerts, vorwaerts, los, los!’, ‘Forward, forward, move, move!’

  Minutes later, the laments of an elderly Jew, beaten by a husky SS man, brought the marchers to a second halt. The old man, apparently stricken by a heart attack, was unable to move; but the German continued to strike him. Trying to put an end to the senseless beating, the victim’s son sent a powerful blow to the German’s red face. Another SS man shot the young Jew in the back. He fell to the ground, covering the body of his dying father.45

  Later, Luba Krugman was to learn that among the Jews deported from Zwierzyniec to Szczebrzeszyn on October 21 had been her parents, Anna and Tewja Krugman. ‘They refused to obey the order of a German who marched them to the collection centre,’ she later wrote. ‘They were buried in a mass grave in Zwierzyniec.’46

  ***

  In the East, when Jews who had escaped the ghetto slaughter sought safety in the forests, guarded by their own feeble forces, the Germans mounted a series of military operations. On October 21 the Commanding Officer of one Police Company reported that his men had killed, in the Kobryn area, two peasant families ‘who maintained contacts’ with the partisans, eight ‘accomplices of partisans’, one ‘bandit’ and five Jews, while a neighbouring Police Company had seized a Jewish family camp in the forests along the Brest Litovsk—Kobryn highway ‘and shot 461 Jews’.47

  Among the largest of the Jewish communities destroyed in October 1942 was the community of Piotrkow, where fifteen thousand Jews had lived on the eve of war. Of these, two thousand had managed to escape eastwards to the Soviet Union in the first weeks of war. Those who remained inside the cramped confines of their ghetto were forced to take in a further eight thousand Jews from the neighbouring towns and villages. At two in the morning of October 14 the Piotrkow ‘action’ began. It was to last for eight days. About a thousand Jews, including many who were too sick to leave their hospital beds, were shot. Also shot in his bed was the baker Yehuda Leib Russak, who refused to abandon his paralysed wife. She too was shot.

  More than twenty thousand Jews were deported from Piotrkow. All were sent to Treblinka, and gassed. The convert Dr Shanster, the Turkish subject Jacob Witorz and his family, and the Egyptian subject, Kem, and his family, those Jews who had originally been allowed to stay out of the ghetto, were deported with the rest. So too, in the last train, was Rabbi Lau, who, on the eve of his departure, gave a sermon on the theme of Kiddush Ha-Shem, the sanctification of God’s name through martyrdom. A witness of the sermon later related that Rabbi Lau spoke ‘with as much pathos and enthusiasm as he used to do in the good old days, from the pulpit of the synagogue’. Lau told the Jews around him: ‘Better a living death than a dead life. Everyone who is killed as a Jew is a saint.’

  Although Lau had earlier received an offer to escape back to his home town in Slovakia, he had declined, callin
g now upon the Jews of Piotrkow ‘to fulfil the will of God with joy’. He was then deported to his death.

  The Piotrkow deportation ended on October 21. More than twenty thousand Jews had been deported and killed. Less than two thousand succeeded in hiding. In the weeks ahead, these ‘illegals’ were to face the daily risk of discovery.48

  ***

  On October 23, as part of the process of Allied counterattack, General Mark Clark met in Morocco with the leaders of the Algerian resistance, to plan for ‘Operation Torch’, the Allied landings in North Africa. Among those whom he met was a Jew, Jose Aboulker, one of the leaders of Algerian resistance. As a result of this meeting, the United States provided Aboulker and his colleagues with 800 sten guns, 800 grenades, 400 revolvers and 50 portable radios. These arms were landed on November 5, enabling the resistance groups to paralyse the main strategic points in Algiers, and to prevent any effective Vichy response to the American landings three days later.49 With these landings, the 117,000 Jews of Algeria were freed from the danger of deportation to metropolitan France, to Drancy, and beyond. But at the same moment, with the German occupation of Tripoli, 2,600 Jews were seized and taken to forced labour at Giado. For fourteen months they worked, in severe conditions, building military roads. During those months, 562 died of starvation and of typhus.50 In Tunis, on December 9, German soldiers rounded up 128 Jews and marched them to a labour camp. One young Jew, who was sick, fell down with exhaustion on the march. A German soldier shot him dead.51