The SS men ordered the orchestra in the yard to await further orders. The orchestra—six musicians—was usually stationed in the area between the gas-chambers and the mass graves. They played all the time—day after day—using instruments taken from the dead.
I was working nearby on construction work, and saw everything that happened. The SS ordered the orchestra to play ‘Es geht alles voruber, es geht alles vorbei’ and ‘Drei Lilien’ on flutes, fiddles and harmonicas. This lasted for some time. Then they put the leader of the Judenrat against a wall and started to beat him about the head and face with whips. Those who tortured him were Irrmann—a fat Gestapo man—Schwartz, Schmidt and some of the Ukrainian guards.
Their victim was ordered to dance and jump around to the music while being beaten. After some hours he was given a quarter of a loaf of bread and made to eat it—while still being beaten.
He stood there, covered in blood, indifferent, very calm. I did not hear him even groan once. His torment lasted for seven hours. The SS men stood there and laughed, ‘Das ist eine hohere Person, Prasident des Judenrates!’ They shouted loudly and wickedly.
It was six o’clock in the evening when Gestapo man Schmidt pushed him towards a grave, shot him in the head and kicked the body on to the pile of gassed victims.14
On a subsequent train reaching Belzec, the SS had to leave a hundred people out of the gas-chamber, having calculated that even the able-bodied Jews of the Sonderkommando would not be able to handle such large numbers. The hundred not gassed were all young boys. Rudolf Reder later recalled:
All day long they were employed dragging corpses to the mass graves and were constantly beaten with whips. They were not given a drop of water to drink—and worked naked in the snow and mud. In the evening, Schmidt took them to the mass graves and shot them with his Browning automatic. As he was short of ammunition, he used his pistol butt to batter some of them to death. I didn’t hear a sound from any of them. I only saw them jostling with each other to be the next in line in that death queue—the defenceless remnants of life and youth!15
***
In Cracow, a Jewish couple who had not yet been deported, Moses and Helen Hiller, decided that whereas, as a young couple, they might possibly survive deportation to what they believed would be a labour camp, their two-year-old son Shachne would surely perish. They had already made contact with two Catholics, Josef Jachowicz and his wife, in nearby Dabrowa, and on November 15 Helen Hiller managed to leave the ghetto with her son, and to reach the Jachowicz home.
Helen Hiller gave her son to the Catholic couple. She also gave them two envelopes. One contained all the Hillers’ precious valuables; the other, letters and a will. One of the letters entrusted Mr and Mrs Jachowicz with Shachne, and asked them to ‘return him to his people’ in the event of his parents’ death. A second letter was addressed to Shachne himself, telling him how much his parents loved him, and that it was this love which had prompted them to leave him alone with strangers, ‘good and noble people’.
This second letter told Shachne of his Jewishness and expressed the hope that he would grow up to be a man ‘proud of his Jewish heritage’.
A third letter contained a will written by Helen Hiller’s mother, addressed to her sister-in-law in the United States, in which she asked her sister-in-law to take the child to her home in Washington should none of the family in Poland survive, and to reward Josef Jachowicz and his wife—the ‘good people’, as she described them.
As Helen Hiller handed the three letters to Mrs Jachowicz, she pleaded: ‘If I or my husband do not return when this madness is over, please post this letter to America to our relatives. They will surely respond and take the child. Regardless of the fate of my husband or myself, I want my son brought up as a Jew.’
Mrs Jachowicz promised that she would fulfil the requests. The two women embraced, and Helen Hiller returned to Cracow. She was never to see her son again.16
***
The deportations within German-occupied Poland were almost over: 600,000 Polish Jews had been gassed in Belzec, 360,000 in Chelmno, 250,000 in Sobibor. Treblinka, where 840,000 were gassed, still awaited the German decision about the surviving 50,000 Jews of Warsaw.
Now it was in the forests and labour camps that the killings began. Throughout the winter, Polish peasants took part in raids organized by the Germans to track down Jews in hiding. ‘The peasants,’ noted Zygmunt Klukowski in his diary on November 26, ‘for fear of repressive measures, catch Jews in the villages and bring them into the town, or sometimes simply kill them on the spot.’ Klukowski added: ‘Generally, a strange brutalization has taken place regarding the Jews. People have fallen into a kind of psychosis: following the German example, they often do not see in the Jew a human being but instead consider him as a kind of obnoxious animal that must be annihilated with every possible means, like rabid dogs, rats, etc.’17
At Karczew, outside Warsaw, four hundred Jewish forced labourers were killed on December 1.18 On December 3, three young girls who had escaped from a labour camp in Poznan were brought to the Lodz ghetto and shot. The oldest of the girls, Sure Jamniak, had been born in Lodz twenty-eight years earlier. Matla Rozensztajn had been born in Radom: she was shot twelve days before her twenty-first birthday. Gitla Hadasa Aronowicz was only seventeen.19
The news of the labour camp executions, reaching Warsaw, stimulated the plans for resistance. ‘The community wants the enemy to pay dearly,’ Ringelblum noted on December 5. ‘They will attack them with knives, sticks, carbolic acid; they will not allow themselves to be seized in the streets, because now they know that labour camp these days mean death.’20
In the labour camp at Kruszyna, near Radom, the Jews were told of ‘evacuation plans’. Suspecting the worst, they decided to resist with knives and fists. On December 17, when they were ordered to assemble, they attacked the guards. In the fight that ensued, six prisoners were killed, but four escaped. The Germans summoned reinforcements: four machine guns and twenty-five armed Ukrainians. The Jews were then, on the following day, forced into trucks. But still they resisted deportation, and more than a hundred were shot refusing to board the trucks.21
Three weeks later it was the turn of the four hundred Jews imprisoned in the Kopernik camp in Minsk Mazowiecki to be destroyed. But as the SS and police unit approached, they barricaded themselves into the building and resisted with whatever implements they could lay their hands on: sticks, stones and bricks. After three Germans had been wounded in the first clash, the Germans gave up the idea of forcing the Jews out of the building. Instead, they opened fire on it with machine guns, and then set it on fire. All four hundred Jews died in the flames.
According to the testimony of the Polish doctor, Stanislaw Eugeniusz Wisniewski, a resident of Minsk Mazowiecki, this rebellion was headed by a tailor named Greenberg, whose entire family had been killed during the liquidation of the ghetto.22
To cut off whatever chance of haven might exist for any Jews who did escape from labour camps, the Germans published reiterated warnings to Poles not to help Jews. In Debica, on November 19, a public announcement had stated that, as from December 1, any Pole ‘helping to lodge, feed or hide a Jew will be punished by death’.23 On December 6, at Stary Ciepielow, the SS locked twenty-three Poles—men, women and children into a barn and then burned them alive on suspicion of harbouring Jews.24
That same day, in the Parczew forest, the Germans launched a four-day manhunt against more than a thousand Jews in hiding. ‘We fled round and round in terror,’ Arieh Koren later recalled, as Germans with machine guns, four small cannon and armoured vehicles penetrated the forest. ‘We thought we had run twenty kilometres, but actually we circled an area of half a kilometre.’25
In the nearby village of Bialka, Jews found refuge with the villagers. But on the second day of the hunt, December 7, the Germans entered the village and shot ninety-six men for helping Jews.26 The hunt intensified. As it did so, the unarmed Jews lost control, running, Arieh Koren wrote, ‘lik
e a herd of rabbits from a hunter straight into the hands of the Germans. They died easily, and lost one another. Afterwards, children without parents, husbands without wives, and vice versa, wandered about the forest.’27
On December 24, in a second manhunt in the Parczew forest, several hundred more Jews were slaughtered. The survivors, unarmed, freezing, and without food, were fortunate: that winter they found a protector, the twenty-four-year-old Yekhiel Grynszpan. Their saviour was from a family of local horse-traders. He entered the Parczew forest at the end of 1942, built up a partisan unit of thirty or forty Jews, foraged for food, acquired arms from the peasants whom his family had known before the war, and when German raiders entered the forest, he fought them off.28
Another Jewish group had begun to operate in White Russia, led by Tobias Belsky. By the end of 1942 it numbered 150 men, with eighteen rifles, two machine guns and one automatic rifle between them. Belsky encouraged Jews still trapped in the ghettos to escape and to join him. Among those who did so was Chaim Joffe, who came with a group of eleven young Jews from Nowogrodek. The Belsky group attacked German vehicles, and took revenge against the families of German policemen. In an ambush at the end of the year, nineteen members of the group, fifteen men and four women, were killed, including Belsky’s wife and his nephew, Gershon, one of the machine-gunners. The second machine-gunner, Wolkin, was captured and tortured until he died. Belsky’s brother Asael, who was also captured, managed to escape.29
On December 4, in Warsaw, a group of non-Jewish Poles set up a Council for Assistance to the Jews. The originators of this Council were two women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz.30 They knew full well that any Pole who helped a Jew, and was caught, could expect no mercy. On December 10, a few miles west of the Parczew forest, at Wola Przybyslawska, seven Poles were shot for concealing Jews.31 It was not only the Poles who helped Jews. On December 13 Goebbels wrote bitterly in his diary:
The Italians are extremely lax in the treatment of the Jews. They protect the Italian Jews both in Tunis and in occupied France and will not permit their being drafted for work or compelled to wear the Star of David. This shows once again that Fascism does not really dare to get down to fundamentals but is very superficial regarding problems of vital importance. The Jewish question is causing us a lot of trouble. Everywhere, even among our allies, the Jews have friends to help them.32
In Cracow, the Jewish Fighting Organization, although much weakened by earlier arrests and executions, decided to act. On December 22 its members, led by Adolf Liebeskind, attacked a café frequented by the SS and the Gestapo. Yitzhak Zuckerman, who had come from Warsaw that day, took part in a second attack, in order, he later recalled, ‘to save what could be saved, at least honour’.33
Wounded in the leg, Zuckerman succeeded in returning to Warsaw. The Germans moved rapidly against the other members of the group, tracking them down to their hiding place. Judah Tenenbaum, snatching a pistol from a German, killed one German before he was shot by bursts of machine-gun fire. Liebeskind was also killed. His sister-in-law, Miriam, managed to reach Radom, where she hoped to organize a ghetto uprising. But she was captured there, tortured, and shot.34 ‘We are fighting’, Liebeskind had remarked bitterly a few weeks before his death, ‘for three lines in the history books.’35
Decimated, Liebeskind’s group nevertheless survived his death. Some of them managed to escape altogether from ‘Aryan’ Cracow, intending, as Liebeskind’s wife Rivka later recalled, ‘to set up hide-outs, to work in forests, and to enable Jews to hide—because they still hoped that the war would end’. Their aim, she added, ‘was to save at least someone to relate our story’.36
***
By December 1942, Volhynia was almost totally cleared of Jews. But in the town of Luck, a labour camp had been established for some five hundred young Jews allocated tasks by the German civilian administration in the town. On December 11, a Christian woman informed the head of the Jewish workers, a man by the name of Sawicki, that she had heard from the son of the Ukrainian mayor that the camp was about to be liquidated. Sawicki immediately organized plans for revolt. The centre of these preparations was the carpentry shop where two carpenters, Guz and Shulman, and a tinsmith, Moshe, equipped with a single pistol, put together a small pile of knives, acid, iron bars and bricks which they removed from the walls of their building.
On the morning of Saturday, December 12, the Germans approached the camp. Another carpenter, Bronstein, opened fire with the pistol. Others scattered acid, burning the face of the German commander. The Germans withdrew from the camp and began to shoot.
Later that day, the Germans entered the camp once more, and the Jews gave battle. By evening the revolt was over. Some of the defenders had been killed and some were shot afterwards.37
Because of the growing Jewish resistance, many different deceptions were devised. On 15 December 1942 the Jews of Holland learned that eighty-three letters and eighteen postcards had been received from the deportees at Birkenau, and another thirty-seven from those deported to Theresienstadt and Monowitz. According to the information bulletin of the Jewish Council, in Birkenau work was said to be rather hard but supplies and living conditions not unsatisfactory. In Monowitz, the postcards reported, ‘The food is good, with hot lunches, cheese and jam sandwiches in the evenings…. We have central heating and sleep under two blankets. There are magnificent shower arrangements with hot and cold water.’
In the information bulletin of December 16 it was admitted that only two postcards had come from Theresienstadt. But on that same day a further twenty-nine letters and twenty-four postcards arrived, describing Theresienstadt as ‘a friendly town with broad streets and lovely gardens, and single-storey houses. The women and children seem to be very well looked after.’ The letters also suggested that it was possible to get help with rough work, ‘and that those who wished could take a nap in the afternoon….’38
Also on December 16, a Jewess with the first name Laja, who was in a train of deportees being taken from Plonsk to Auschwitz, managed to throw a postcard out of the train as it passed through the Warsaw suburb of Praga. The postcard was addressed to a friend of hers who lived in the Warsaw ghetto. ‘Being at Praga station’, she wrote, ‘I am writing a couple of words to you. We are going nobody knows where. Be well! Laja.’39
On the following day, December 17, this same deportation train was passing through Czestochowa. There, another Jewess, her first name was Gitla, also managed to throw out a postcard, likewise addressed to a friend of hers in the Warsaw ghetto. ‘We are going to work,’ she wrote. ‘Be of good heart. I don’t give you our new address, because up to now I don’t know what it will be.’40
The Jews deported from Plonsk on December 16 were taken to Birkenau, where, on December 17, 523 men and 247 women were sent to the barracks, and all the other deportees, including all children, and all mothers with children, were gassed.41
In the many slave labour camps through German-occupied Poland, selections and deportations were frequent. In one such camp, Zaslaw, as many as twenty-five thousand Jews were being held behind barbed wire; they came from the beautiful mountain towns of Sanok and Lesko, near Poland’s southern frontier, and from more than a hundred surrounding villages. One Jewish couple, Jaffa and Norris Wallach, managed to escape from Zaslaw on December 17, leaving behind, as they later recalled, ‘our parents and the major part of our families’.
Jaffa Wallach and her husband Norris found refuge in the house of a Polish mechanical engineer, Jozef Zwonarz, who lived in Lesko. ‘He was the only link we had with the external world,’ Norris Wallach later wrote. ‘His wife and their five children knew nothing about our hiding in that house.’
Zwonarz also hid Jaffa Wallach’s brother Pinkas and her sister Anna. He had already, in September, taken their four-year-old daughter Rena out of Lesko, on the eve of the deportation to Zaslaw, and found the child a home with a Polish ‘uncle’, Jan Kakol, who lived in the forest. ‘It is important to emphasise’, Norris Wallach la
ter wrote, ‘that Zwonarz, and the Kakols as well, endangered their lives for pure human motives without any financial gain nor expectations.’
Those whom Zwonarz saved were to honour his memory for the rest of their lives; and to remember, too, how he would use his knowledge as a mechanical engineer, while ‘repairing’ German vehicles, to sabotage these vehicles, especially, Norris Wallach later recalled, before those vehicles set out ‘for hunting Jews’.42
***
Since October 21, in Piotrkow, the Germans had carried out a series of systematic searches for the two thousand Jews who had escaped deportation. Group by group, those who were found in cellars and hiding places were brought to the synagogue, held under armed guard, and sent to nearby Tomaszow Mazowiecki, where they were deported to Treblinka together with the Jews of Tomaszow. On November 19, a further hundred Jews, most of them old people, were found in Piotrkow and brought to the synagogue. These were also led away, but not to Tomaszow. They were taken instead to the Rakow forest, just outside Piotrkow, and shot.
On November 25 the remaining ‘illegals’ in hiding in Piotrkow had been offered the chance of staying in the ghetto legally, provided they came out of their hiding places. Many did so. They too were taken to the synagogue. The building was then surrounded by Ukrainians, who shot into the building at random.
The Jews being held in the synagogue had no food, no water and no light. They had to relieve themselves where they could on the synagogue floor. From time to time, men with skills, such as carpenters or watchmakers, would be called for, and allowed to return ‘legally’ to the ghetto.
The Holocaust Page 57