The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  I still bear the scars on my legs when I failed to outrun the dogs we encountered. I carry other types of scars, too.

  We thought we were the only Jews left in the world. We would survive, but I believed that we would be the sole survivors. We never met another Jew in our wanderings through the forests. I once asked my sister, perhaps out of despair, what would be our fate at the war’s end. She replied: ‘There is a place called Palestine. There, Jews are living and building a home, a state. When this is over we’ll be going home to Palestine.’45

  At Treblinka, following a visit by Himmler, orders were given for the digging up and burning of the hundreds of thousands of corpses that had been dumped in vast pits behind the gas-chambers. Yankel Wiernik was among those prisoners who had to perform the task. ‘Wherever a grave was opened,’ he recalled two years later, ‘a terrible stench polluted the air, as the bodies were in an advanced stage of putrefaction. It turned out that women burned easier than men. Accordingly, corpses of women were used for kindling fires.’ Wiernik added: ‘The sight was terrifying, the worst that human eyes have ever beheld. When corpses of pregnant women were cremated, the abdomen would burst open, and the burning of the fetus inside the mother’s body would become visible.’46

  Himmler also visited Sobibor at this time. According to an eye-witness, three hundred young Jewish women, the prettiest that could be found, had been selected on that occasion in Majdanek, and brought specially to Sobibor, where Himmler had watched them, naked, being gassed. Several survivors also recalled how SS Staff Sergeant Hubert Gomerski and another SS man used to amuse themselves by swinging Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their deaths. He who threw a Jewish child farthest won. Eye-witnesses also described how Gomerski would walk past the lines of Jews as they left the cattle trucks and kill those who appeared too weak to be able to walk to the gas-chambers by smashing their skulls with a heavy iron watering can.47

  On March 2, in one of the almost daily deportations to Birkenau, the deportees, who came from Paris, included the thirty-five-year-old Yetta Flater, who had been born in New York, the fifty-six-year-old Helene Rosenberg, born in London, and Mazel Menace-Misrahi, born in Jerusalem seventy-two years before. On this same train were Jews who had been born in Kiev, Odessa, Vitebsk, Minsk and Moscow. More than three hundred of the deportees of March 2 were over seventy years old.

  Of the thousand deportees of March 2, only a hundred men and nineteen women were selected for work.48 Two of them, Joseph Dorebus and Jankiel Handelsman, were to be among the leaders of the revolt in Birkenau a year and a half later. Another of the deportees, Chaim Herman, who was later sent to work in the Sonderkommando, pulling the bodies out of the gas chamber and taking them to the crematorium, buried underground some letters in Flemish and Yiddish describing his experiences. But he did not survive.49

  A further deportation train from Paris, on March 4, was sent, not to Birkenau, but to the Polish town of Chelm, east of Lublin, from where it is possible that the majority of the deportees were sent to Sobibor, and gassed. A minority, it is known, were sent to Majdanek, of whom several were to survive the war.50 Among those who did not survive the deportation of March 4 was the Munich-born painter, Hermann Lismann. After studying painting in Lausanne, Rome and Paris before the First World War, Lismann had seen active service in the German army. When Hitler came to power in 1933 he had fled to France. There, in 1939, he was interned, escaped, was caught, and deported.51

  In the Eastern Territories and in the Ukraine, the slaughter continued, as hitherto, without deportations. On March 5 more than a thousand Jews were murdered outside the Khmielnik ghetto. The Chairman of the Jewish Council, Shmuel Zalcman, who had maintained contact with the Jewish underground, and advised them on how to organize resistance in the ghetto, was betrayed, arrested, and dragged through the town tied behind a horse-drawn cart, until he died.52 At Swieciany, on the night of March 6, twenty youngsters armed only with two revolvers and a single rifle, managed to escape from the ghetto to the forest. They were the lucky ones.53

  Also lucky were forty-eight thousand Jews of Bulgaria: those living within the pre-war borders of the state. At first, it seemed that they too would be deported, as had those from the Bulgarian-occupied zones of Thrace and Macedonia. Following German insistence, the Bulgarian government had indeed ordered the deportation of all Jews from Bulgaria proper, some of whom had already been interned. But the deportation order led to such an outcry from the Bulgarian people, including many intellectuals and church leaders, that the government rescinded the order, and Jews already taken into custody were released.54

  In the northern part of Bulgaria, farmers had threatened to lie down on the railway tracks to prevent passage of the deportation trains. It was also said that the King himself had intervened. Despite the fact that he was German, of the family of Coburg, he was known to be opposed to the anti-Semitic measures then in force in Bulgaria, helpless though he considered himself to be in the face of the German might. The release of the Jews, which took place on March 10, came to be known in Bulgaria as a ‘miracle of the Jewish people’.55

  The Bulgarian experience highlights the possibility that was open to certain states in Europe to refuse to allow their Jewish citizens to be deported. There were several other occasions on which this refusal was exercised. By March 1943, Finland, Italy and Hungary had each likewise chosen to refuse, and had refused successfully, the German government’s demands to deport Jews to Germany. Slovakia and Vichy France, however, had complied with the German demands, and had done so with alacrity, as had Vidkun Quisling’s government in Norway. Those countries whose governments agreed to deport Jews also put their local police forces at the disposal of the Germans in the work of rounding up Jews.

  ***

  On the eastern front, the Red Army was about to attack the Germans at Sokolovo. Among the Soviet forces was a thousand-strong battalion of Czechoslovak troops, soldiers who had fled from Czechoslovakia to Poland in March 1939, and from Poland to Russia in September 1939: part of the survivors of five and a half thousand Czech Jews who had sought refuge on Soviet soil, and been deported by the Soviet authorities to labour camps, where three thousand of them had perished.

  Of the thousand men in the Czech battalion at Sokolovo, six hundred were Jews. The battle began on March 8 and lasted for three days. By the end of it, 140 of the Jews had been killed and 160 severely wounded. Among the Jews in the battalion was an eighteen-year-old girl, Malvine Friedmann, one of eighteen Jewish nurses who served at Sokolovo. During the battle, she saved more than seven severely wounded men by carrying them out of the danger zone.56

  The battle of Sokolovo ended on March 13. On the following morning, in Cracow, in German-occupied Poland, two thousand Jews were rounded up for deportation. Even before the trains could leave for Birkenau, several hundred small children were shot in the entrance to one of the houses, and several hundred old people were killed in the street. Also killed were those who were sick.57 When the Gestapo entered the hospital, an officer ordered Dr Zygmunt Fischer to abandon his patients. He refused to do so, and was shot, together with his wife and child.58 The patients were then killed in the wards.

  One eye-witness of the events of March 14 in Cracow was Maria Hochberg-Marianska, a Jewish woman living on the ‘Aryan’ side who had given home and shelter to Jewish children. Three years later she described the fate of the Jewish children in the ghetto orphanage:

  At midday cars drove up before the institution. The Gestapo men flung themselves upon the children. Little ones, three years of age, were flung into baskets and placed on platforms or hoisted on to carts. The older children were driven off to the Plac Zgody, flanked by armed soldiers. There, they joined the grown-ups. The baskets with the little ones were emptied behind the city like so much rubbish. They were thrown into a ditch, most of them alive. Some were killed by a blow with a rifle butt before burial.59

  Among those deported from Cracow were Moses and Helen Hiller, whose two-ye
ar-old son had been given refuge by Josef Jachowicz and his wife in nearby Dabrowa. Neither parent survived. When Shachne cried out for his father and mother, as he often did, Jachowicz and his wife feared that neighbours would betray them to the Gestapo. Mrs Jachowicz became very attached to the little boy, loved his bright inquiring eyes, took great pride in her ‘son’, and took him regularly to church. Soon, he knew by heart all the Sunday hymns.

  A devout Catholic, Mrs Jachowicz decided to have Shachne Hiller baptised, and went to see a young parish priest, Karol Wojtyla, who had a reputation for wisdom and trustworthiness. Revealing the secret of the boy’s identity, Mrs Jachowicz told the priest of her wish that Shachne should become a ‘true Christian’ and devout Catholic like herself.

  Wojtyla listened intently to the woman’s story. When she had finished, he asked: ‘And what was the parents’ wish, when they entrusted their only child to you and to your husband?’ Mrs Jachowicz then told him that Helen Hiller’s last request had been that the child should be told of his Jewish origins, and ‘returned to his people’ if his parents died. Hearing this, Wojtyla replied that he would not perform the baptismal ceremony. It would be unfair, he explained, to baptise Shachne while there was still hope that, once the war was over, his relatives might take him.

  Shachne Hiller not only survived the war, but was eventually united with his relatives in the United States. Karol Wojtyla was later to become Pope, as John Paul II.60

  Several thousand able-bodied Cracow Jews, Moses and Helen Hiller among them, were sent to a slave labour camp in the suburb of Plaszow. The conditions of work at Plaszow were later described by one of the Jews there, Moshe Bejski. There was a case, he later recalled, where a man who was whipped, and cried, had to go to the commandant’s office ‘and inform him that he thanked him for his punishment, and when he turned around he was shot in the back.’ On another occasion, all fifteen thousand prisoners were called to witness a double hanging, of a boy named Halbenstock and an engineer, Krauwiert:

  The boy Halbenstock was hanged and something happened. The rope snapped. The boy was put up again on a high chair under the rope; he started begging for his life; he was ordered to be hanged again, and he did go up to the gallows once again and was hanged. And then he was shot at.

  The engineer was on the second chair and here the perfidy reached even further—the SS men came with their machine guns and ordered the man to gaze upon the hanging as it was being carried out, and the engineer, Krauwiert, cut his veins with a razor and thus he was hanged. Bleeding.61

  The majority of the Cracow deportees had been sent to Birkenau, and gassed. Such was the scale of murder there that four new gas-chambers had been under construction for some months, to enable the Jews to be gassed and cremated in the quickest possible time. Built to the most modern design, each of the new brick buildings had a vast underground undressing room adjacent to the underground gas-chamber, with the crematorium ovens above reached by special electrically controlled lifts.

  The gas-chamber and crematorium in Auschwitz Main Camp, or Auschwitz I, was known henceforth as Crematorium I. The four new gas-chambers and crematoria at Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, became known as Crematorium II, Crematorium HI, Crematorium IV and Crematorium V. Crematorium IV was the first to be ready: it began operation on March 22. Crematorium II began operation nine days later, on March 31; Crematorium V four days after that, on April 4; and Crematorium III on June 25.62

  On March 15, in the Theresienstadt ghetto, a fifty-two-year-old woman died of hunger. She was one of the many thousand Theresienstadt Jews to die in the ghetto, before deportation to Birkenau. Her name was Trude Neumann. From 1918 until 1942 she had been a mental patient in an institution near Vienna. In 1942 she had been sent to Theresienstadt together with all Jewish mental patients in the Vienna area.

  Trude Neumann was the daughter of Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement. Her son Stephan, born in the year in which she had been taken ill, had been educated at a British public school, and was, in 1943, an officer in the British army.63

  On the day of the death of Herzl’s daughter in Theresienstadt, the deportations began of the Jews of Salonica: an ancient Sephardi community. Ten thousand had been deported by the end of March, a further twenty-five thousand in April, and another ten thousand in May. They had no idea of their destination, having been told that it was a ‘resettlement’ area in Poland.

  Each deportee from Salonica was allowed to take a food parcel for the journey, and up to fifteen kilogrammes of clothing for the ‘resettlement’ area. It was in fact Birkenau.

  For many generations the Jews of Salonica had serviced the port as stevedores and dockworkers: the smooth working of the port depended upon them. But the Nazi design would allow no exceptions, no logic, no special pleading. Jews from the villages around Salonica were also deported, except from Aicatherine, where the local Director of police gave the Jews three hours to flee after receipt of the deportation order. Thirty-three Jews fled, and were hidden by Greek villagers. Three, who were unable to leave, were shot.64

  ***

  Each act of escape or resistance still led to immediate and massive reprisals. On March 16, in Lvov, a Jew, Engineer Kotnowski, killed an SS policeman who was noted for his cruelty. The next day, as a reprisal, the Germans burst into the ghetto and hanged eleven Jewish policemen from the balconies in the main street of the ghetto. That same day more than a thousand Jews were taken out of the working groups and shot, while in Janowska camp, nearly two hundred Jews were killed: a reprisal ratio of almost twelve hundred to one.65

  Jews who had managed to hide were continually being betrayed. In the village of Topczewo, the thirty-year-old Dr Julian Charin, a Jew from nearby Lapy, had his hiding place betrayed. His Christian rescuers could save him no more. A graduate from Padua University just before the war, he had later worked at the Bialystok Jewish hospital. He was shot on March 18: one of tens of thousands of Jews betrayed for money, fear or sheer hatred.66 That same day, in Auschwitz Main Camp, the Jewish underground fighter Lonka Kozibrodska, who had been captured in June 1942 while on a mission to Bialystok, and sent to Auschwitz as an ‘Aryan’ Pole, died of typhus.67 She was twenty-six years old. Her ‘Aryan’ disguise had not failed her: her fate was that of millions of Poles, who, like the Jews, were marked out for labour camp, prison, ill-treatment, execution and death.

  March 20 was the eve of the festival of Purim, day of rejoicing at the downfall of Haman the Jew-hater. That day, in Czestochowa, more than a hundred Jewish doctors and their families were taken to the cemetery and shot. Among those killed was the forty-four-year-old neurologist, Dr Bernard Epstein, whose postgraduate work had been done in Vienna and Paris. He was murdered with his wife and two sons.68

  Another of those shot down in the cemetery at Czestochowa was a woman gynaecologist and obstetrician, Dr Kruza Gruenwald: she was fifty-six years old.69 Another of the murdered doctors, Irena Horowicz, a former general practitioner in Lodz, was thirty years old. She was murdered with her three-year-old child.70

  Lawyers and engineers were also murdered in the Czestochowa cemetery that day: that same Czestochowa which is revered by Polish Catholics for the shrine of the Madonna there. On the following day, March 21, the actual day of the Purim festival, there was another ‘Purim massacre’ in nearby Piotrkow. That day, Jews living legally in the ghetto were told that there was to be an exchange with German citizens living in the settlement of Sarona, in Palestine. Ten people were needed for this exchange, the Germans declared. All must possess university degrees: that was the only condition for emigration.

  The Jews chosen for Palestine were driven out of Piotrkow in Gestapo cars, and then driven round the city a few times, before being taken, as darkness fell, to the Jewish cemetery. A deep pit had been dug. The Gestapo lined up the ‘chosen’, made derisive speeches amid much drinking and laughter, and then ordered the Jews to undress.

  Among the Jews shot that night at the Piotrkow cemetery was Dr Maurycy Brams, a paedia
trician and popular figure among the poor Jews of pre-war Piotrkow, shot that day with his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter, Hannah—‘Ania’. The teenage girl had managed to run away from the cemetery at the last moment, but the Gestapo chased her among the tombstones until they caught her. Also shot that night was a young lawyer, Simon Stein, killed with his mother, and the psychiatrist Dr Leon Glatter.

  Part of the Nazi ‘Purim game’ was to ‘revenge’ the ten sons of the Jew-hater Haman. These ten had been hanged in the biblical story. But only eight Jews had been brought from Piotrkow that night, so the Jewish watchman of the cemetery and his wife were included, at the last moment, in the execution.71

  In Radom, all Jewish doctors were taken that Purim to nearby Szydlowiec, ostensibly to ‘go to Palestine’. On arriving in Szydlowiec they found graves, newly dug, awaiting them. Among those killed were the neurologist Dr Wladyslaw Cung and the gynaecologist Dr Anatol Fryd.72

  Tens of thousands of Jews were still in hiding throughout the General Government, the Eastern Territories and the Ukraine. But German searches for them were continuous. On March 22 Dr Klukowski noted in his diary, in Szczebrzeszyn, where he had earlier witnessed the harrowing scenes of deportation:

  Yesterday they brought me a dangerously wounded peasant from Gruszka Zaporska. He had concealed six Jews from Radecznica in his cow barn. When the police appeared, he began to run and was shot at. He died last night. The gendarmes did not permit the family to carry away his body and ordered the Municipal Administration to bury him as a bandit. The Jews were shot by the Polish police of Radecznica and, shortly after the event, the gendarmes appeared in Gruszka and shot the peasant’s wife and two children: a six-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy.73