On May 10, the first two Jews of Dobele were driven to Yan Rosenthal’s farmhouse ten kilometres away, in the hamlet of Annasnuizha. Both Jews were hidden in a haystack on the farm. A second shelter was already being prepared at a farm belonging to Fritz Rosenthal’s aunt, Wilhelmina Putrinia, and within a short time, several more Jews from Dobele were hidden there as well.37
***
The killing and deportation of Jews had continued to enrich the German Reich. On May 13 Hans Frank sent Himmler a list of the ‘utilization of Jewish concealed and stolen goods’ in the General Government. Up to April 30, Frank reported, 94,000 men’s watches, 33,000 women’s watches, 25,000 fountain pens, and 14,000 propelling pencils had been delivered to Germany. So had 14,000 scissors, most of them sold to the German Equipment Works Limited ‘for technical purposes’. Men’s watches were being distributed to the combat troops, to the submarine service, and to concentration camp guards. The 5,000 watches ‘of most expensive Swiss make’, those in gold or platinum cases, or partly fitted with precious stones, were either to go to the Reichsbank ‘for melting down’, or were to be retained ‘for special use’.38
The Germans were confident that even their enemies would one day share their hatred of the Jews. On May 19 Himmler had written to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, sending him copies of a special edition of the book The Jewish Ritual Murder, about the alleged Jewish use of Christian blood in the baking of Passover bread. Himmler suggested that all those ‘dealing in the Jewish problem’ should see the book, and that extracts from it should be broadcast to Britain and America to increase ‘anti-Jewish feelings’ in those two countries. The book should also be distributed, he wrote, in Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria.39 But still, von Thadden reported on June 3, the Hungarian government was unwilling to adopt anti-Jewish measures.40
***
On May 24 a new SS doctor reached Auschwitz. His name was Josef Mengele, and he had just celebrated his thirty-second birthday. His SS rank was that of Captain. Driven by the desire to advance his medical career by scientific publications, Dr Mengele began to conduct medical experiments on living Jews whom he took from the barracks, and brought to his hospital block. In many instances, amounting over a year and a half to several thousand, Mengele used the pretext of medical treatment to kill prisoners, personally injecting them with phenol, petrol, chloroform or air, or by ordering SS medical orderlies to do so.
From the moment of his arrival at Auschwitz, Mengele joined the other SS officers and SS doctors, among them Dr Clauberg, and later Dr Kremer, in the ‘selection’ of Jews reaching the railway junction from all over Europe, with a movement of the hand or the wave of a stick indicating as ‘unfit for work’, and thus destined for immediate death in the gas-chambers all children, old people, sick, crippled and weak Jews, and all pregnant women.
Between May 1943 and November 1944 Mengele took part in at least seventy-four such selections. He also took an equally decisive part in at least thirty-one selections in the camp infirmary, pointing out for death by shooting, injection or gassing Jews whose strength had been sapped by hunger, forced labour, untreated illness or ill-treatment by the guards.41
Azriel Ne’eman, a Jew who worked in the hospital block as a male nurse, later recalled how one of the men in his ward, a middle-aged Polish Jew with six fingers on each hand, was singled out for special attention by Mengele. Later, when Mengele made his rounds, and found that the man had died, he flew into a rage, his ‘scientific’ interest having been frustrated. Shortly thereafter he held a selection, in which every patient who was too weak to stand to attention at the foot of his bed was sent to the gas-chambers.42
One of the few people to speak to Mengele in Auschwitz about his attitude to the Jews was a Christian woman, Dr Ella Lingens. She had been deported to Auschwitz from Vienna three months before Mengele’s own arrival in the camp, having been denounced for sheltering Jews, and for helping them escape across the Austrian border into Switzerland. She later recalled how, in Auschwitz, ‘I was in a triply privileged position, as a German, as a non-Jew and as a doctor.’ During one of his conversations with her, Mengele ‘said that there were only two gifted nations in the world’—the Germans and the Jews.’ ‘The question is,’ he asked her, ‘which one will dominate?’
Ella Lingens later recalled an example of Mengele’s ‘ruthlessness’. After all efforts to contain spotted fever had failed, he ordered an entire block cleared by sending all its six or seven hundred inmates to the gas-chambers. Then he had the barracks disinfected and populated by the thoroughly deloused prisoners of another block. This process, delousing and gassing, was repeated many times, until the spotted fever was brought under control.43
The ‘elimination of Jews’, SS Lieutenant-General Krüger noted on May 31, at a meeting of General Government ministers in Cracow, was ‘the most difficult and unpleasant task for the police’. Yet it ‘had to be done’, Kruger added, ‘on the Führer’s orders, because it is necessary from the standpoint of European interests.’44 The reports of German administrators made clear what the methods of ‘elimination’ were. The prison administrator in Minsk reported on May 31 that ‘516 German and Russian Jews’ had been ‘finished off’ in Minsk in the previous two weeks, but not before all of them had ‘had their gold bridgework, crowns and fillings pulled or broken out’. This always took place, the administrator added, ‘one to two hours before the respective action’.45
Poles also recorded the fate of Jews. On June 3, during a deportation from Michalowice, three Jews had hidden in a barn, opening fire as the Germans approached. Tadeusz Seweryn, a Pole, later recalled how one of the Jews was killed, one escaped, and the third fought to the end, being burnt to death when the barn was set on fire. Enraged at the resistance, the Germans then killed two Polish farmers, Stefan Kaczmarski and Stanislaw Stojka, for hiding the three Jews.46 In ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, Feigele Peltel, in hiding, learned of the murder of an entire Polish family who had sheltered Jews: the family had been burnt alive in their house ‘as a sort of object lesson’.47
For the Jews still alive in certain ghettos, among them the ghettos of Lodz, Vilna, Bialystok and Czestochowa, the future was a terrifying uncertainty. To the heads of these ghettos, the only hope of survival seemed to be if the ghetto could continued to serve as a productive one. ‘The ghetto’s food supply depends entirely on productivity here,’ noted the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle on May 21. ‘If the orders from the German authorities are not filled, on time and in the desired quantity, the ghetto faces enormous danger.’48 In Vilna, the head of the Jewish Council, Jacob Gens, argued on June 6 that if the Jews continued to show that they were ‘very useful and irreplaceable’ as workers, especially for the German army, they would ‘enhance the justification for our existence’.49
At Auschwitz, Dr Clauberg reported on June 7 a sterilization rate of a thousand women a day.50 Many of these women were Jewesses from Greece. On June 8 a Greek Jewish doctor, Albert Menasche, reached Birkenau from Salonica in a transport of 880 Greek Jews. He was the only one of a family of more than thirty to survive, first as a member of the camp orchestra, then as a doctor. His daughter Lillian, aged eleven, had also been sent to play in the orchestra, as a drummer, but was later gassed.51 These ‘musicians of Auschwitz’, as they have been called, had to amuse the Germans by playing when new arrivals reached the camp, and at special concerts for the SS.52
A week after Dr Menasche’s arrival in Birkenau, the camp was visited by SS Major-General Richard Glueks, head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, who noted that the ‘special buildings’ were not well located, and ordered them to be relocated. They should be sited, he wrote, where it would not be possible for ‘all kinds of people’ to ‘gaze’ at them.53 One result of this complaint was the planting of a ‘green belt’ of fast-growing trees around the two crematoria nearest the camp entrance.
On the day of Glueks’s report, June 15, a new labour camp was opened in the Auschwitz region, at the coal mines of Jaworzno.54 On the following day, Himmler
’s permission was given for eight Jews in Birkenau, condemned to death for resistance activities, to be sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, for experiments into jaundice.55 Five days later, on Himmler’s instructions, in what he called the interest of ‘medical science’, seventy-three Jews and thirty Jewesses were sent, alive, from Birkenau to the concentration camp of Natzweiler, in Alsace. On reaching Natzweiler, their ‘vital statistics’ were taken. They were then killed, and their skeletons sent as ‘exhibits’ to the Anatomical Museum in Strasbourg.56 Within a year and a half, Himmler ordered the skeleton collection to be destroyed because of the ‘deterioration of the military situation’.57 Allied forces were then approaching Strasbourg.
Since early 1943, the advance of the Red Army on the eastern front had led to the decision to dig up the corpses of hundreds of thousands of murdered Jews, and to burn them. A former Einsatzkommando chief, SS Colonel Paul Blobel, was appointed to supervise this task. The units operating under Blobel’s command were known as the ‘Blobel Commando’ or ‘Special Commando 1005’.
One large-scale Blobel ‘action’ began on June 15, at the Janowska death pits in Lvov, when hundreds of Jewish forced labourers in Janowska were taken to the nearby mass murder site and forced to dig up the putrefying corpses. They were ordered to extract gold teeth and pull gold rings off the fingers of the dead. ‘Every day’, recalled Leon Weliczker, a survivor of the first of the Blobel ‘actions’, ‘we collected about eight kilogrammes of gold.’
The corpses had then to be burned. Leon Weliczker recalled how, as the disinterred corpses were put on the pyre:
The fire crackles and sizzles. Some of the bodies in the fire have their hands extended. It looks as if they are pleading to be taken out. Many bodies are lying around with open mouths. Could they be trying to say: ‘We are your own mothers, fathers, who raised you and took care of you. Now you are burning us.’ If they could have spoken, maybe they would have said this, but they are forbidden to talk too—they are guarded. Maybe they would forgive us. They know that we are being forced to do this by the same murderers that killed them. We are under their whips and machine guns. They would forgive us, they who are our fathers and mothers, who if they knew it would help their children. But what should we do?58
This question of what to do was asked by all surviving Jews: but none could know for certain the answer, or by what path life might be preserved. In mid-June the head of the Jewish Council of Sosnowiec, Moshe Merin, who for more than two years had sought the safety of his ghetto in compliance with German orders for labour gangs and deportees, was invited to a meeting with the head of the local SS, together with four other Council members. Neither Merin nor his companions was seen again. Those Jews who had believed in Merin, especially the ‘simple folk’, were in a panic, hoping that he might still find some way to lead them. His opponents were relieved that he, the ‘despotic tyrant’, had gone. It was later reported that Merin and the other four had been deported to Birkenau and gassed: the fate, six weeks later, of almost all the other Jews of Sosnowiec.59
Resistance, given so dramatic a manifestation in the Warsaw ghetto, continued elsewhere. Its most frequent manifestation was escape. But the Germans were persistent in their search for escapees. In Lodz, the thirty-one-year-old Abram Tandowski, who had earlier escaped from the ghetto, was executed on June 12, together with two other Jews, the twenty-three-year-old Hersch Fejgelis and the twenty-nine-year-old Mordecai Standarowicz, both of whom had escaped from a labour camp. The heads of the Jewish police in the Lodz ghetto were made to watch the execution.60
In Minsk, a well known local doctor, Niuta Jurezkaya, had escaped from the ghetto to the forests. But she too was caught, brought back to Minsk, and tortured. ‘Who was with you?’ she was asked. ‘All of my people were with me,’ she replied; and was then shot.
Niuta Jurezkaya was shot on June 16. That same day, in Berlin, two hundred patients in the Jewish hospital were deported to Theresienstadt, many of them on stretchers.61 The same was the fate a week later of the residents of the Jewish old people’s home in Moravska Ostrava.62 For the old and the sick, revolt was impossible. For those who did revolt, the German power was impregnable. On June 19, Hillel Katz, held by the Gestapo in Paris, wrote to his baby girl of seven months, his ‘dear little Annette’, whom he had not seen since she was twelve days old:
Your desire to appear in our lives was fierce. Nothing counted with you, neither the dangers of wartime, nor our desire that you wait until after the war. Obviously, you could not share our earthly point of view, you who were still in eternity.
It was with love, joy and courage that we submitted to your imperious will. Your birth gave us such life as we have now.63
Hillel Katz was shot by the Gestapo: he helped to provide the Soviet Union with information about the German war effort. His daughter Annette survived. She is my cousin. Her grandfather, my great uncle, had been murdered in Czestochowa in the early months of the war.64 Almost all her other cousins, my cousins also, were later deported from Czestochowa to Treblinka: something I did not know either on my own first visit to Treblinka in 1959, or on my second visit in 1981.
In Lvov, on June 21, the Germans hunted down and killed the remnant of the ghetto population. In search of a hiding place, and survival, 500 Jews entered the city’s sewers; 350 were caught and killed. The remaining 150 hid in the sewers. After a week of starvation and stench, 130 had committed suicide.65
For escape and hiding to be effective, the help of non-Jews was almost always essential. In Lvov, it was a professional thief, Leopold Socha, and one of his pre-war companions in crime, Stefan Wrobleski, who made it possible for some Jews to survive the final round-up of June 21. One who was saved, seventeen-year-old Halina Wind, later recalled how, as the Gestapo surrounded the ghetto on June 1:
We did not know what to do. We went down with a group into the basement through a pipe, steps, water, a tunnel, other pipes. Finally we were crawling in the sewers of Lvov. We heard a rush of water. Suddenly we were standing on a narrow ledge against a wall. In front of us flew the Peltew river. Along this ledge very slowly and carefully people were moving. Sometimes there was a splash, when someone slipped and fell in or couldn’t stand the stress any more and deliberately jumped in.
At that moment, Halina Wind saw Leopold Socha, who, as a thief, had long been familiar with the sewers as a hiding place for his stolen goods. Socha took twenty-one of the Jews whom he found in the sewer to one of his subterranean hiding places, telling them to ‘stay put’ and promising to bring them food on the following day.
Halina Wind later recalled that among those hidden in the sewers by Socha was one whole family, Jerzy Chigier, his wife Peppa, their seven-year-old daughter Christine, and their four-year-old son Pawel. ‘We were brought food every day,’ she added, ‘always by different manholes so as not to arouse suspicion.’
One of those whom Socha sheltered was a pregnant woman, Weinbergowa. Shortly after giving birth, her child died. Weinbergowa survived.
Halina Wind also recalled how several of the group decided to leave that particular hiding place for some other refuge elsewhere in the sewers. ‘None ever returned. Three of them left one morning and we found their bodies the same evening.’
Each week Leopold Socha would take the dirty clothes of those in hiding and return them washed. He also brought them a Jewish prayer book which he had found in the now deserted ghetto. At Passover, knowing that Jews could not eat leavened bread, he brought a large load of potatoes which he pushed down through several manholes. ‘We were careful of the potatoes,’ Halina Wind later recalled, ‘always eating the rotten ones first, until we realized that the rats were having a feast on the fresh ones.’ On the day that the Red Army forced the German surrender at Stalingrad, Socha and Wrobleski brought those in hiding vodka to celebrate. Ten of the twenty-one Jews survived in that sewer hide-out, until liberation nearly a year later.66
Having completed the ‘action’ in Lvov, the
SS turned to nearby Czortkow, where 534 Jews were living in the former Jewish religious school, and sent each day to work for the Germans. A normal day’s work lasted twelve to fourteen hours. Their food consisted of a hundred grams of bread each day, a little black coffee, and, as Gerta Hollaender later recalled, ‘a little sparse water, which was supposed to be soup’.
At five o’clock in the morning of June 23, the Jews woke up to find the school surrounded by Ukrainian policemen. The camp commandant, Thomanek, then appeared. ‘Like a beast sneaking to its prey,’ Gerta Hollaender wrote in her diary:
…he approached the people who were doomed to death. His head was bent a little forward, the plump face red like a cray-fish and in his sparkling eyes lust for murder. He stopped a few paces in front of his victims and stood, his legs spread wide and both hands resting on his sides, examining the miserable creatures for a few minutes without uttering a word, while they all stared at him in silence, dumbfounded with horror, as if they were hypnotized.
Then suddenly he screamed with his grating voice: ‘Lie down! Whoever raises his head will be shot!’ Obediently and without resistance almost five hundred people fell down and prostrated themselves in the dust. It was a pitiful sight, yet could they have done otherwise? Would resistance against this gang of murderers, armed from head to foot, be of any use?
Thomanek ordered some of the Jews to get up and wait at the side. During the selection, Gerta Hollaender saw the man next to her, the camp barber, who had not been selected, raise his head and call out to Thomanek: ‘Mr Camp Manager, surely you know me, let me live.’ Then, she recorded in her diary:
Thomanek lifted his automatic rifle, leveled it and aimed in my direction. It seemed that he was aiming at me. For a fleeting instant it occurred to me that it would be better to be shot here, so that an end might come to the agonies, and I asked myself whether the bullet would cause pain, and at once the shot was fired.
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