The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  On March 25 an anonymous letter, written by a German, was forwarded by Hans Frank from Cracow to Berlin, to Hitler’s Chancellery. In the letter, the writer described with disgust the liquidation of an eastern ghetto, and told of how children were thrown to the ground, and then had their heads deliberately trampled on with boots.74 On the same day that this letter was received in Berlin, Der Sturmer announced in triumph that ‘the extermination of the Jews is in progress’.75

  On April 5, the third and last train bringing Jews from Macedonia for ‘resettlement’ reached Treblinka. All were gassed.76 That same day three hundred Jews from the ghettos of Sol and Smorgon were deported to Ponar. They had been told that they were to be ‘resettled’ in the Kovno ghetto. On reaching Ponar, they realized that they had been deceived. That night a fifteen-year-old Vilna schoolboy, Yitshok Rudashevski, noted in his diary the story that reached Vilna within a few hours: ‘Like wild animals before dying, the people began in mortal despair to break the railway cars, they broke the little windows reinforced by strong wire. Hundreds were shot to death while running away. The railway line over a great distance is covered with corpses.’77

  All those Jews from Sol and Smorgon who survived the rail-side massacre of April 5 were shot in the pits at Ponar by the German and Lithuanian SS men. A few hours later, five thousand more Jews reached Ponar, mostly young men from the ghettos of Swieciany and Oszmiana, whom the Gestapo feared might find a way of escaping from the ghettos in order to join the growing number of Jewish and Soviet partisans. These five thousand were sent first to the Vilna ghetto. Then, as with the Jews of Sol and Smorgon, they were sent on as if to the Kovno ghetto, ‘where there was more room’. Just outside Vilna their train came to a halt. They too had been brought to Ponar. Sensing the danger, these young men tried to break out of the freight cars and fought, with revolvers, knives and fists. They were shot down in the cars themselves, and along the railway line. A few dozen managed to escape to Vilna. The rest were killed on the spot.78

  The Polish journalist, W. Sakowicz, noted in his diary:

  Bonfires burn near the station. They were kindled by policemen. Again a train from Vilna. They have arrived. The people were driven out from the carriages, and immediately a small batch was taken to the pit. The ones with poorer clothes on weren’t even undressed. They were driven to the pit, and shooting began immediately.

  Another batch of people were standing nearby and, on seeing what had happened to their nearest, began to yell. Some started running. A little lagging behind the others with her hair dishevelled, a woman is running pressing her child to her breast. The woman is chased after by a policeman, he smashes her head in with the rifle butt, the woman collapses. The policemen seizes the child by its leg, drags it to the pit.79

  Among those participating in this Ponar massacre of April 5 was SS Sergeant Wille. ‘While shooting,’ noted a German Security Police report, Wille ‘was attacked by a Jew’ and wounded ‘by two knife blows in the back and one blow in the head’. He was immediately taken to the military hospital in Vilna. ‘His life is out of danger,’ the report continued, and added: ‘A Lithuanian policeman was fired at while some fifty Jews tried to escape, and he is badly wounded.’80

  In Vilna, the poet Shmerl Kaczerginski was standing not far from the ghetto gate. ‘I saw a young fellow sneaking in,’ he later recalled, ‘bloody, weary, disappearing quickly into a doorway.’ In the security of someone’s home, the young man then ‘pulled off his clothes, washed away the blood, tied up his wounded shoulder’, and whispered to those who had crowded around him: ‘I come from Ponar!’

  Kaczerginski added: ‘We were petrified’. The young man told them: ‘Everyone—everyone was shot!’ The tears rolled down his face. ‘Who?’ he was asked. Did he mean the four thousand who were being sent to Kovno? ‘Yes!’81

  ***

  A month after the Germans had been humiliated by Bulgaria’s refusal to allow Bulgarian Jews to be deported, Hitler personally urged the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to allow the Jews of Hungary to be ‘resettled’. The two men met at Klessheim Castle, near Salzburg, on April 17. Horthy, aware of what was intended, was adamant: ‘The Jews cannot be exterminated or beaten to death,’ he insisted. Hitler then set out his own reasoning, as recorded on the following day by his interpreter:

  Where the Jews were left to themselves, as for instance in Poland, the most terrible misery and decay prevailed. They are just pure parasites. In Poland this state of affairs had been fundamentally cleared up. If the Jews there did not want to work, they were shot. If they could not work, they had to succumb. They had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli, with which a healthy body may become infected. This was not cruel, if one remembered that even innocent creatures of nature, such as hares and deer, have to be killed, so that no harm is caused by them. Why should the beasts who wanted to bring us Bolshevism be spared more? Nations which did not rid themselves of Jews, perished. One of the most famous examples of this was the downfall of a people who were once so proud—the Persians, who now lead a pitiful existence as Armenians.82

  Horthy refused to accept Hitler’s arguments, or his pressure, and returned to Budapest; for the time being, the Jews of Hungary remained in Hungary.

  28

  * * *

  Warsaw, April 1943:

  hopeless days of revolt

  On the night of 18 April 1943 the Jews of Warsaw learned that plans were about to be put into effect for the final destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. ‘Even though we were prepared,’ Zivia Lubetkin later recalled, ‘and had even prayed for this hour, we turned pale. A tremor of joy mixed with a shudder of fear passed through all of us. But we suppressed our emotions and reached for our guns.’1

  The Germans had chosen yet another date in the ‘Goebbels calendar’, Passover 1943, for the destruction of what was left of the Warsaw ghetto. Driven out of the ghetto in ignominy in January, they were determined not to fail in April. The Jews were equally determined not to be destroyed without a struggle. ‘He who has arms will fight,’ the commander of the Jewish resistance groups, Mordechai Anielewicz, told his colleagues on the eve of the German attack, ‘he who has no arms—women and children—will go down into the bunkers.’ In the first ‘chaos’ of the fighting, he added, those in the bunkers should seek to cross into Aryan Warsaw. ‘Go to the woods,’ he advised. ‘Some of them will be saved.’2

  The Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto on the morning of April 19. Man for man and gun for gun, their forces were formidable: 2,100 German soldiers, including SS troops, against 1,200 Jewish fighters; 13 heavy machine guns, against which the Jews had no equivalent armament; 69 hand-held machine guns, against which the Jews had none; a total of 135 submachine guns, against which the Jews had 2; several howitzers and other artillery pieces, of which the Jews had none; a total of 1,358 rifles, as against only 17 rifles among the Jews. The Jews had acquired some pistols, about five hundred. But pistols were of little or no use in street fighting. The main Jewish weapons were several thousand grenades and incendiary bottles.3

  As the German forces entered the ghetto, the Jews opened fire. Zivia Lubetkin was with her group of fighters, looking out of an attic window at that precise moment, as thousands of German soldiers surrounded the ghetto with machine guns. Then, as she later recalled:

  …all of a sudden they started entering the ghetto, thousands armed as if they were going to the front against Russia. And we, some twenty men and women, young. And what was our arms? The arms we had—we had a revolver, a grenade and a whole group had two guns, and some bombs, home-made, prepared in a very primitive way. We had to light it by matches and Molotov bottles. It was strange to see those twenty men and women, Jewish men and women, standing up against the armed great enemy glad and merry, because we knew that their end will come. We knew that they will conquer us first, but to know that for our lives they would pay a high price….

  When the Germans came up to our posts and marched by and we threw those hand grenades and bombs
, and saw German blood pouring over the streets of Warsaw, after we saw so much Jewish blood running in the streets of Warsaw before that, there was rejoicing. The tomorrow did not worry us. The rejoicing amongst Jewish fighters was great and, see the wonder and the miracle, those German heroes retreated, afraid and terrorized from the Jewish bombs and hand grenades, home-made.

  And after an hour we saw the officer hastening his soldiers to retreat, to collect their dead and their wounded. But they did not move, they did not collect their dead and their wounded. We took their arms later. And thus on the first day, we the few with our poor arms drove the Germans away from the ghetto.4

  The first day’s fighting was over. According to the German Commander, SS General Jurgen Stroop, the German losses had been six SS men and six Ukrainian auxiliaries.5

  It was clear from Stroop’s account that in every instance that day, it was the Jewish fighters who had opened fire, catching the Germans by surprise. It was also apparent that the Germans had met not only with the organized resistance of several hundred Jewish fighters, but with the resistance of tens of thousands of Jews in hiding in the cellars, bunkers and sewers of the ghetto.6 That same first day of revolt, the Polish underground organization, the Home Army, presented the Jewish insurgents with twenty-two rifles.7

  The first evening of the ghetto uprising was also the Seder night, the first night of Passover, the Jewish ‘festival of liberty’. During the evening, one of the fighters, Tuvia Borzykowski, went in search of flashlights at 4 Kacza Street:

  Wandering about there, I unexpectedly came upon Rabbi Maisel. When I entered the room, I suddenly realized that this was the night of the first Seder.

  The room looked as if it had been hit by a hurricane. Bedding was everywhere, chairs lay overturned, the floor was strewn with household objects, the window panes were all gone. It had all happened during the day, before the inhabitants of the room returned from the bunker.

  Amidst this destruction, the table in the centre of the room looked incongruous with glasses filled with wine, with the family seated around, the rabbi reading the Haggadah. His reading was punctuated by explosions and the rattling of machine guns; the faces of the family around the table were lit by the red light from the burning buildings, nearby.

  ‘I could not stay long,’ Borzykowski added. ‘As I was leaving, the Rabbi cordially bade me farewell and wished me success. He was old and broken, he told me, but we, the young people, must not give up, and God would help us.’8

  In Vilna, the poet Shmerl Kaczerginski was among a group of Jews listening, on the morning of April 19, to a clandestine radio. ‘Hello, hello!’ they heard over the air waves. ‘The survivors in the Warsaw ghetto have begun an armed resistance against the murderers of the Jewish people. The ghetto is aflame!’

  ‘We knew of no other particulars yet,’ Kaczerginski later recalled, but ‘we suddenly saw clearly the flames of the Warsaw ghetto and Jews fighting with arms for their dignity and self-respect.’9

  Leon Najberg, who was to survive the war, noted how, on April 20, ‘things look more and more serious’. The Warsaw ghetto was being bombarded ‘by mortars and machine guns of different calibre. Hopeless plight.’ At noon the German industrialist, Walter Toebbens, ordered all those employed in his factories to assemble at the Umschlagplatz on the following morning. Their destination, Toebbens told them, truthfully, was to factories set up in two labour camps at the villages of Trawniki and Poniatow, near Lublin. But no one believed him. Najberg himself commented:

  So this is a new trick of murderers! They want to get us into a new mechanized factory of slaughter! The Treblinkas are too popular—they invented Trawniki and Poniatow. The news had spread over the whole factory. People have decided not to go to the Umschlagplatz. Everybody prefers to shut himself alive in tomb-shelters rather than to yield himself alive to the murderers.

  During April 20 the Germans broke into the Czyste hospital on Gesia Street where, as Najberg noted, ‘They shot all the sick lying in beds.’ Among those killed was Michal Gluski, the editor, before the war, of the monthly Foreign Languages Echo. ‘That talented man’, Najberg wrote, ‘found his tragic death on a hospital bed.’10 Alexander Donat later recalled: ‘German soldiers went through the wards shooting and killing all whom they found. Then they set the building on fire. Those patients and staff who had managed to reach the cellars, died in the fire.’11

  The Germans moved through the ghetto, shelling the buildings from which shots were fired at them, and burning down the apartment blocks, building by building. Several hundred Jews were forced by the smoke and flames to jump from the blazing buildings, and to their deaths. Leon Najberg wrote in his diary:

  Our brave defenders are holding out at their posts. Germans—in spite of everything—have to fight for access to each house. Gates of houses are barricaded, each house in Ghetto is a defensive fortress, each flat is a citadel—Jewish defenders are showering missiles from flats’ windows and throwing shells at bandits.

  The defenders are passing over from one street to another through garrets and recapturing places which are threatened by German bandits. The murderers have introduced flame-throwers into action. Houses in the ghetto are set on fire.

  ‘From tomorrow’, Najberg ended his notes for April 20, ‘we will have to lock ourselves up in terrible shelters until the end of the war—perhaps for ever.’12

  Despite being outnumbered and outarmed, the Jewish fighters continued to engage the German forces. On April 23 Mordecai Anielewicz wrote to Yitzhak Zuckerman, who was seeking help for the uprising on the ‘Aryan’ side: ‘You should know that the pistol is of no use. We hardly made use of it. What we need is grenades, rifles, machine guns and explosives.’ Anielewicz wrote also of the ‘victory’ that only a single man from his fighting units was missing. His letter ended: ‘Keep well. Perhaps we’ll still see each other. What’s most important; the dream of my life has become a reality. I lived to see Jewish defence in the ghetto in all its greatness and splendour.’13

  On April 25 Leon Najberg witnessed the death of several Jews during the fires started by the Germans in the buildings around where he was hiding. In one cellar nearby lay a German Jew, Hoch, of whom Najberg wrote:

  He had hidden in a hide-out on the fourth floor. He had started to be asphyxiated under the influence of the smell of burning carbon monoxide. When the first tongues of flame had reached Hoch’s hide-out, the staircase was already destroyed. He had jumped from the fourth floor. He had his arms broken, his spine shattered, and coagulated blood on his face. Yesterday he was still conscious and crawled up to the cellar on his own. Today he is lying and dying.

  In the courtyard of the next building, Najberg saw the bodies of two children and a woman. ‘They have burned hair,’ he wrote, ‘mangled faces and rifle-shot wounds. What yesterday was alive is a heap of flesh and bones.’14

  On April 26 the German commander, SS Brigadier General Stroop, reported that the continuing resistance in the bunkers and underground shelters had been ‘broken, either by returning fire or by blowing up the bunkers’.15 As the buildings of the ghetto were set on fire, and thousands of unarmed Jews were rounded up and marched to the Umschlagplatz, the battle in the bunkers continued; even the roofs and upper floors of unburned houses gave shelter to Jews with guns. On April 27 Alexander Donat was among those being marched to the Umschlagplatz. As he later recalled:

  When we passed Niska Street, the fighting was still going on; from roofs, from the windows of burning buildings, from doorways. Suddenly Lena clutched my hand and squeezed it with all her might. A blood-curdling scream rang out from an upper-storey window filled with flames where a woman appeared holding a child by the hand, and toppled down to the street. That was our last sight of the Warsaw ghetto.16

  From a building on the ‘Aryan’ side of the ghetto wall, Feigele Peltel, in hiding, watched as the ghetto was set on fire. Later she recalled what she had seen as a Pole pointed out to her one of the burning buildings:

  On the
balcony of the second floor a woman stood wringing her hands. She disappeared into the building but returned a moment later, carrying a child and dragging a featherbed, which she flung to the pavement to break her fall. Clutching her child, she started to climb over the railing. A spray of bullets caught her midway—the child dropped to the street—the woman’s body dangled lifeless from the railing.

  By now the flames had enveloped the upper floor, their rise matched by the increased frequency and intensity of the explosions. Jews were jumping out of windows, some of them caught by bullets in mid-air, others shot on the ground. Two Jews opened fire from the third floor, then retreated. A knot of people stood crowded in a third-storey window, lowering a rope to the ground. One man, then another, climbed out of the window and slid down the rope. The Germans opened fire, and both fell to the pavement. The cough of the machine gun mixed with the screams of agony.

  As the room in which Feigele Peltel was hiding filled with ‘the acrid smoke and stench of the burning ghetto’, she returned again and again to the window, watching through the night as the flames spread from building to building. Her account continued:

  Dawn came quiet and ghastly to the ghetto, revealing the burnt shells of the buildings, the charred, blood-stained bodies of the victims. Suddenly one of those bodies began to move, slowly, painfully crawling on its belly until it disappeared into the smoking ruins. Others began to show signs of life. The enemy was on the alert, a spray of machine-gun fire—and all was lifeless again.17