The wealth collected in ‘Canada’ came from Jews who were alive on arrival at Birkenau, but who were dead by the time their belongings had been sorted. Just before being gassed, further ‘wealth’ was extracted from the women: their hair. On 4 January 1943 the head office of the SS administration wrote to all concentration camp commandants, including Hoess at Auschwitz, requesting them to forward human hair for processing at the firm of Alex Zink, Filzfabrik A.G., at Roth near Nuremberg. For each kilogramme of human hair, camp commandants would receive half a mark.61
From January 7 to January 24, fifteen trains reached Auschwitz, from Belgium, Holland, Berlin, Grodno and the Bialystok region. From them, about four thousand Jews were selected for the barracks, and more than twenty thousand gassed. To enable such numbers to be ‘processed’ rapidly, and even to increase the scale and pace of the killing, four new crematoria were under construction, planned to come into operation in March. On the train from Belgium which arrived on January 18, 387 men and 81 women were sent to the barracks, while the remaining 1,558 deportees, including all the children and old people, were gassed.62
On the train which left Theresienstadt on January 20, 160 young women and 80 young men were taken to the barracks at Birkenau, and the remaining 1,760 Jews loaded into lorries and driven to the gas-chamber. Only 2 of the 160 women and 80 men survived the slave labour of the next six weeks. Taken to marshland four miles from Auschwitz, they were forced to stand knee-deep in the marsh, digging out sand and stones. They were barefoot, and dressed in rags. Many, as the historian of Theresienstadt has recorded, ‘contracted frostbite and their festering fingers fell off’. But, crippled as they were, they had to carry on. SS women beat them with sticks and set Alsatian dogs on them. They had to rise at 3.30 a.m.; for breakfast they were given tea made of herbs; at 5 a.m. they marched to their place of work whence they returned between 6 and 7 p.m. to the strains of the camp band, carrying the bodies of their fellow prisoners murdered at work by the SS men. Their supper consisted of saltless hot water, with pieces of beetroot or bits of nettles swimming in it, and four ounces of bread.63
One of those who recorded some of the events at Birkenau was a member of the Sonderkommando whose twenty-nine-page notebook was found in 1952 buried near one of the crematoria. He recorded how, at the beginning of 1943:
The gas-chamber was crowded with Jews and one Jewish boy remained outside. A certain sergeant came to him and wanted to kill him with a stick. He mangled him in a brutish manner, blood was dripping on all sides, when all of a sudden the maltreated boy, who had been lying motionless, jumped to his feet and began to regard, quietly and silently, his cruel murderer with his childish gaze. The sergeant burst into loud cynical laughter, took out his revolver and shot the boy.
The author of this notebook also recorded how another of the SS men at Birkenau, SS Staff Sergeant Forst, ‘stood at the gate of the undressing room in the case of many transports and felt the sexual organ of each young woman that was passing naked to the gas-chamber. There were also cases when German SS men of all ranks put fingers into the sexual organs of pretty young girls.’
AUSCHWITZ—BIRKENAU
Another episode was recorded by this unknown author as an example of how the Germans were capable both of ‘torturing people and of mastering their minds’. It took place with the arrival at Birkenau of a group of ‘shrivelled, emaciated’ Jews from another camp:
They undressed in the open and singly went to be shot. They were horribly hungry and they begged to be given a piece of bread at the last moment while they were still alive. Plenty of bread was brought; the eyes of those men, sunken and dimmed due to protracted starvation, now flashed with a wild fire of staggering joy, they snatched big chunks of bread with both hands and voraciously swallowed, at the same time descending the steps straight on to be shot.64
***
On 14 January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca in North Africa to plan the strategy for an Allied invasion of Western Europe. News of the Casablanca Conference gave hope to the surviving Jews. In Kovno, a wife who had sworn not to have children while disaster threatened now became pregnant, confident that Casablanca would be a prelude to victory, and rescue.65
Rescue was more than two years away for the surviving Jews of Kovno; there was little chance of finding safety by escape or hiding. At Pilica, in southern Poland, on January 15, a Polish woman and her one-year-old child were shot for hiding Jews.66
Jewish resistance continued to grow: on January 14, at Lomza, the Chairman of the Jewish Council refused to hand over to the Gestapo forty Jews ‘of his own choosing’. Nor would the Jewish police agree to participate in the selection. The Gestapo themselves thereupon ‘selected’ the Jews, including two Council members.67 That same day, in Warsaw, Menahem Zemba, a distinguished rabbinical scholar, and since 1935 a member of the Warsaw Rabbinical Council, gave rabbinical approval for all efforts of resistance. ‘Of necessity we must resist the enemy on all fronts,’ he said, and he went on to explain that, confronted by a ruthless foe and a programme of ‘total annihilation’, Jewish religious law ‘demands that we fight and resist to the very end with unequalled determination and valour, for the sake of sanctification of the Divine Name.’68
From the deportation trains, Jews now jumped whenever they could, despite the risk of being crushed under the wheels, or shot by the guards. On January 15 a total of seventy-seven Jews managed to jump from a train on its way east from Belgium, and did so before it reached the German frontier. German SS men, and members of the Flemish SS, tracked most of them down.69
On January 15 the Germans decided to empty the camp at Zaslaw in which thousands of Jews from the towns and villages of the River San were being held. All the inmates were sent by train to Belzec, and gassed. The twenty-one-year-old Yaacov Gurfein was in one of the last deportation trains. For two days and three nights the deportees were locked into the train, while it stood stationary. They were given neither food nor water. Then the train set off. ‘When we saw that the train was moving to Belzec,’ Gurfein later recalled, ‘one person jumped out. Then people again had this spark of hope. I don’t think I would have jumped were it not for my mother. She pushed me out.’70 When the last train left Zaslaw for Belzec, only one Jew managed to survive, Jaffa Wallach’s younger brother, Emil Manaster, who succeeded in jumping from the train, and who found refuge, like his sister Jaffa, with the Polish engineer, Jozef Zwonarz.71
In Birkenau, a similar spark of hope survived. Rivka Liebeskind later recalled her first Friday night there, on January 22, crowded with hundreds of other women into one of the huts, or ‘blocks’, tier upon tier. Candles had been acquired and, ‘on the top shelf of our block—we were at the time ten to twelve girls—we lit those candles. We lit the candles and quietly began singing the songs for the Sabbath. We did not know’, she added, ‘what was happening around us, but after a few minutes we heard stifled crying from all the shelves around us. First we were frightened, then moved. Then we saw that they could jump from one shelf to another. There were Jewish women who had already been there for years. They gathered around us and listened to our prayer and singing; soon there were those who came off their own shelves and asked to be allowed to bless the candles.’72
***
On 18 January 1943, after nearly four months without a single deportation, the Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto, intent upon a further deportation to Treblinka. ‘We were in the ghetto and hid in an attic,’ Bluma Shadur later recalled. ‘They went from house to house and killed people, throwing them out of the windows and taking whatever they could.’ Her own young brothers were among those taken, stripped naked, and deported to Treblinka.73
Among those deported on January 18 was Meir Alter, a well-known cantor of pre-war Warsaw. ‘With him’, Stanislaw Adler has recalled, ‘they dragged out his father and his brother Mieczyslaw.’ On the way to the Umschlagplatz, Alter supported his father, who was blind, and moving with difficulty. When asked by the SS escort why the old
man did not walk by himself, Alter explained that his father was blind. The Nazi fired a shot, ‘killing the blind man instantly…’.74
Another of those killed in the streets was the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Yitzhak Gitterman, who had been a ‘moving spirit’ behind self-help in the ghetto, and who was shot while talking to two friends on the stairs outside his apartment.
More than six hundred Jews were killed in the streets during that day of round-ups.75 An eye-witness later recalled:
The action proceeded at a rapid pace. It did not help to show a work card; all had to be taken to the Umschlagplatz. The ‘life certificates’, which had given their holders illusions, were torn up by SS men. There were no longer ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ Jews; all were condemned to death. The Jewish hospital was emptied out. The patients who could still walk were dragged to the Umschlagplatz; those who could not were killed on the spot.
The cries of the victims were drowned by rifle and machine-gun fire. The road to the Umschlagplatz was strewn with bodies of the dead and the dying. Those still alive would lift their eyes to the passing Jews, hoping for help, but no one paid any attention.76
Within several hours the Germans succeeded in rounding up five thousand Jews. Their success sprang from the element of surprise. Thousands of Jews had no time to seek shelter, others were caught on their way to work.
Among the five thousand Jews deported to Treblinka on January 18 were 150 doctors, including Izrael Milejkowski, who had led the team of researchers studying starvation disease. During the train journey he committed suicide. News of Dr Milejkowski’s suicide was brought to Warsaw by his nephew, who managed to jump from the train and to make his way back into the ghetto.77 Another doctor who committed suicide on the journey was Zofia Binsztejn-Syrkin, chairman of the board of health of the Warsaw Jewish Council, and a former director of TOZ, the pre-war Organization for the Protection of the Health of the Jews of Poland.78
The Germans expected no resistance, but preparations to resist had been made in the ghetto throughout the autumn and winter. Tuvia Borzykowski’s group hid three pistols and three grenades. Those who had no weapons, he recalled, ‘armed themselves with lengths of iron pipe, sticks, bottles, whatever could serve to attack the enemy’.
A large number of Jews were being deported along the street as Tuvia Borzykowski watched. Suddenly, a small group of them, led by Mordechai Anielewicz, began to throw grenades at the German guards and at the special SS task force. Several of the Germans fell. Others ran away.79 All but two of the group of fighters were killed, among them the seventeen-year-old Margalit Landau, who had helped carry out the death sentence on Jacob Lejkin two and a half weeks earlier.80
Nine Jewish fighters were killed. But the armed clash had taken place. Jews had raised the standard of revolt. Then, as Tuvia Borzykowski recalled:
The fighters set up a barricade in a little house on Niska Street and held it against the German reinforcements which soon arrived. The Germans found it impossible to enter the house, so they set it afire. The fighters inside continued firing until the last bullet.
I should like to mention here one of the fighters, Eliyahu Rozanski (Elik). When he was mortally wounded, he asked one of the comrades to take his rifle so that it should not fall into German hands. Of the entire unit only Mordechai Anielewicz survived; in the final stage of the battle he fought with a rifle which he forced out of the hands of a German.
Though the unit was destroyed, the battle on Niska Street encouraged us. For the first time since the occupation we saw Germans clinging to walls, crawling on the ground, running for cover, hesitating before making a step in the fear of being hit by a Jewish bullet. The cries of the wounded caused us joy, and increased our thirst for battle.81
On January 19 the Germans entered the ghetto once more. One of those in hiding that day was David Wdowinski. ‘Again we went into our shelters,’ he wrote. ‘Again the familiar voices, the heavy treads, the alarming hammering.’ The Germans were clearly nearby:
A child began to cry. Fright, alarm—we’ll be betrayed. The mother closed her hand tightly over the child’s mouth and nose. The crying stopped. The child was quiet, very quiet. The German went away. The quiet child was a little bluish in the face and from his mouth issued a small stream of bloody foam. It was never to cry again. So went a Jewish child into the other world.82
On January 21 the Germans began firing into windows, and hurling grenades. ‘All through the day’, Borzykowski recalled, ‘the ghetto resounded to the explosions in which hundreds of Jews perished.’ But the resistance continued, forty Jews going from house to house and rooftop to rooftop, not all of them armed, but taking arms from the Germans, and keeping up firing. Then, to the amazement of the fighters, the Germans withdrew from the ghetto. ‘At the time’, Borzykowski later wrote, ‘we had only ten pistols.’ Had the Germans known this, they would probably have continued the raids, and Jewish resistance ‘would have been nipped in the bud as a minor, insignificant episode’.83 ‘We obtained faith’, Yitzhak Zuckerman later recalled, ‘that we can fight; we know how to fight.’84
Among the Jewish fighters killed was Tamara Sznajderman, one of the Jewish Fighting Organization couriers who had been on missions to Bialystok and elsewhere. She was the girlfriend of Mordecai Tenenbaum, leader of the growing resistance group in Bialystok.85
Twelve Germans were killed in the fighting. They died, Yitzhak Katznelson recalled a year later, ‘in utter bewilderment’, and he added:
SS agents who stood some distance away and many gendarmes who fled in confusion cried out: ‘The Jews are shooting!’ I, myself, heard these astonished cries from the lips of a vile loathsome German as he ran down the stairs of the house which he had entered for the deliberate purpose of killing us. ‘The Jews are shooting!’ he cried out in utter bewilderment. Something unheard of! Jews firing! ‘They have guns!’86
The Germans, Feigele Peltel later wrote, ‘had received their first blow at the hands of the contemptible Juden’.87
27
* * *
‘Help me get more trains’
On the eastern front, the German armies were in disarray: cheated of their objective—the city of Stalingrad—surrounded by the Red Army, and driven back over hundreds of miles. No military setback, however, could halt the deportation of Jews. Indeed, it seemed only to make the deportations more urgent. On 20 January 1943 Himmler sent the Reich Minister of Transport a special letter about ‘the removal of Jews’ from the General Government, the Eastern Territories, and ‘the West’. For this, he wrote, ‘I need your help and support. If I am to wind things up quickly, I must have more trains for transports.’
‘I know very well’, Himmler added, ‘how taxing the situation is for the railways and what demands are constantly made of you. Just the same, I must make this request of you: help me get more trains.’1 That same day, the deportations from Theresienstadt to Birkenau were renewed, with two thousand deportees sent ‘to the East’. Of the two thousand, only 160 young men and 80 women were ‘selected’ for the barracks, and the rest were gassed.2
All the deportees from Theresienstadt to Birkenau were Jews who had already been uprooted from their homes in 1941, when they had been deported to Theresienstadt from Austria and Czechoslovakia. The new deportation seemed nothing more than another stage on their road; one more move at the whim of the conqueror.
In a train which left Holland on the day after Himmler wrote his letter on the need for ‘more trains’, the deportees were mental defectives from the Jewish mental hospital at Apeldoorn.
One historian of the destruction of Dutch Jewry, Dr Jacob Presser, has recorded, of the deportees:
They were escorted into the lorries with pushes and blows, men, women and children, most of them inadequately clad for the cold winter night. As one eye-witness put it: ‘I saw them place a row of patients, many of them older women, on mattresses at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human bodies on
top of them. So crammed were these lorries that the Germans had a hard job to put up the tailboards.’
More than one document mentions pitiable screams. From the very start, the patients were thrown together indiscriminately, children with dangerous lunatics, imbeciles with those who were not fit to be moved.
The lorries hurtled to the station. The matter-of-fact, unadorned report of the station-master at Apeldoorn, who stood by the train throughout, gives us a few more particulars. At first everything went smoothly. The earliest arrivals, mainly young men, went quietly into the front freight wagons, forty in each. When the station-master opened the ventilators, the Germans quickly closed them again.
At first, men and women were put into separate wagons, but later they were all mixed together. Although it was a very mild night, it was ‘not nearly mild enough for old people in nightdresses to travel in open lorries’. As the night wore on, the more seriously ill were brought into the station. Some wore strait-jackets, ‘staggered into the carriages and then leant helplessly against the wall’.
The report goes on to say: ‘Of course, a person in a strait-jacket cannot protect himself if he slips between the platform and the train. I remember the case of a girl of twenty to twenty-five, whose arms were pinioned in this way, but who was otherwise stark naked. When I remarked on this to the guards, they told me that this patient had refused to put on clothes, so what could they do but take her along as she was. Blinded by the light that was flashed in her face, the girl ran, fell on her face and could not, of course, use her arms to break the fall. She crashed down with a thud, but luckily escaped without serious injury. In no time she was up again and unconcernedly entered the wagon.’
The Holocaust Page 59