From his mumblings, we understood that he had stayed buried in the barn, in a hole under the feed trough for the cows. No one knew that he was there and he lived there for over a year. He ate the food that was given to the animals and never stood up. The heat from the burning buildings had forced him out of his hole.
We walked to our base, and tried to help Yankel. He couldn’t hold any food, and the following day he died.
‘We buried him in the woods’, Harold Werner added, ‘and I cried over what had happened to my friend’.42
***
On September 1 the Germans began the final deportations from Tarnow to Birkenau. For two days the Jews resisted with arms. But none of those who took up arms survived. As with the resistance in nearby Sandomierz, the only reports that survive of the resistance of the Jews came from Polish eye-witnesses.43 In Tarnow, according to a Polish underground report, the Germans used grenades to break up the resistance, then loaded the surviving Jews into goods wagons, the insides of which were covered with carbide and lime. According to the Polish report, the wagons were then ‘sealed, inundated with water, and sent off to extermination’.44
It was also on September 1, in Vilna, that the deportations to the Estonian labour camps had begun. Among those who disappeared during the deportations was Hirsh Glik, the twenty-three-year-old author of the song of hope and defiance, ‘Never say that you have reached the very end’. On the first day of the deportations, the Jewish resistance group in Vilna, the United Partisans Organization, issued a proclamation, ‘Jews, prepare for armed resistance!’ Death was certain. ‘Who can still believe that he will survive when the murderers kill systematically? The hand of the hangman will reach out to each of us. Neither hiding nor cowardice will save lives.’45
On September 6, following the deportation of more than seven thousand Vilna Jews to the labour camps in Estonia, Jacob Gens urged the ten thousand Jews who had not been deported to register with the Jewish Council, in order ‘to be able to return to normal life in the ghetto as soon as possible’.46 The partisans now made for the forests. ‘I send you an additional group of fighting Jews,’ Abba Kovner wrote on September 10 to the commander of one of the Soviet partisan units in the region.
Most of the Jews in Vilna were, however, in despair, broken, starving and afraid. ‘I saw desperate people commit suicide,’ Kovner later recalled. Not the ‘battle of an underground’, Kovner added, but the ‘very existence’ of a fighting resistance organization, ‘was the amazing and incredible achievement’.
Those who reached the forests fought as best they could. Vitka Kempner’s exploit at the beginning of July had been a source of pride to the Jewish fighters. ‘Lithuanians did not do it,’ Kovner later recalled, ‘nor Poles, nor Russians. A Jewish woman did it, a woman who, after she did this, had no base to return to. She had to walk three days and nights, with wounded legs and feet. She had to go back to the ghetto.’ Were she to have been captured, Kovner added, the whole ghetto might have been held responsible.47
Two months after she returned to Vilna, Vitka Kemper blew up an electric transformer inside the city, and then made her escape from the scene of her sabotage. On the following day she managed to enter the labour camp at Keilis on the outskirts of Vilna, where she smuggled out several dozen prisoners, leading them from the camp to the forest. Later, with five other Jewish partisans, she entered the town of Olkiniki and set fire to the turpentine factory there.48
On September 14 the Gestapo summoned Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna Jewish Council, to their headquarters. A friend urged him to flee, but he replied that if he were to run away, ‘thousands of Jews will pay for it with their lives’. Gens went to Gestapo headquarters, and did not return. He was shot, it was said, for maintaining contact with the United Partisans Organization, and for financing its activities.49
Nine days later, the Vilna ghetto was ‘liquidated’. The pretext was a further deportation of all Jews to the labour camps in Estonia, but after eight thousand of the ten thousand surviving Jews had been taken to Rossa Square, beaten and robbed, there was a selection. More than sixteen hundred men were sent to the Estonian labour camps, but five thousand women and children were sent to Majdanek, and to its gas-chambers. Several hundred old and sick Jews were sent to Ponar, and shot. By September 25, only two thousand Jews remained in Vilna, in four small labour camps:50 the remnant of fifty-seven thousand inhabitants of that once vibrant secular and spiritual Jewish centre, the Jerusalem of Lithuania.
***
The reality of extermination was so terrible that the civilised mind of man rebelled against it. ‘Persistent rumours circulate’, wrote Jakub Poznanski, in the Lodz ghetto, on 27 September 1943, ‘about the liquidation of the ghettos in various Polish cities. In my opinion, people are exaggerating, as usual. Even if certain excesses have taken place in some cities, that still does not incline one to believe that Jews are being mass-murdered. At least I consider that out of the question.’51
Poznanski’s doubts were a sign of the isolation of one ghetto from another. So little was known by the Jews in any one locality of the fate of the Jews elsewhere. In the labour camp at Nowogrodek, the two hundred and fifty survivors of the once flourishing Jewish population of five thousand had no idea of the events that had so recently taken place in Vilna, or in Bialystok. All they knew was that their destruction could be ordered at any moment; that urgent efforts were needed if they were to avoid being slaughtered.
With enormous difficulty, a tunnel was dug under the wire of the camp, out towards the surrounding woods. Some of the prisoners saw no point in making the escape bid, arguing, as Idel Kagan later recalled, ‘If we are going to die why run for it?’ But by September 22 the tunnel was ready, and the escape began.
‘When I came out of the tunnel’, Idel Kagan later recalled, ‘there was a tremendous machine-gun fire. The guards did not know what was happening. Because we had light in the tunnel, people lost their sense of direction when they came out into the dark. Some ran back towards the camp by mistake.’
Of the two hundred who escaped, eighty were killed or captured. The others reached the woods, and survived as best they could, searching for food, and for partisans. Idel Kagan had no weapon, only a pistol cover. But with this, he was able to give sufficient impression of being armed, so as to demand food from a farmer. Finally, after hiding by day and walking by night for ten days, he reached the partisan group led by Tobias Belsky.
Belsky’s three hundred partisans were not only an armed unit. They had also been, since their first days in the forest, the protectors of more than a thousand women, children and old people, who had managed to escape from the surrounding ghettos, or whom Belsky and his three brothers had succeeded in rescuing. In an area without any large forests, the Belsky brothers had still managed to fend off repeated German searching. One of the four brothers, Zusl, followed Soviet instructions and took a group of eighty fighters into the woods as an unencumbered unit, devoted solely to anti-German attacks. Tobias Belsky and his fighters remained with the ‘family camp’, as did his other brothers Asael and Achik. With them was Idel Kagan, who recalled how the brothers opened a bakery, a sausage workshop, a shoe repair workshop and, eventually, a munitions workshop, all of which were much used by the Soviet partisans in the neighbourhood. Tobias Belsky’s fighters would also go out from time to time on an anti-German expedition, to cut telegraph wires. Later in the war, Asael Belsky was killed in action near Königsberg. His girlfriend, Haya Dzienciolski, whose escape from Nowogrodek in July 1941 had led to the establishment of the family camp, survived. One of her first acts, with the Belsky brothers, had been to try to rescue their parents from the village of Stankewicz. But the Germans had already taken them to their deaths.52
With the destruction of each ghetto, the Germans continued to gather the clothing and belongings of the dead. On September 6 the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle noted a further ‘twelve freight cars’ of used shoes reaching the ghetto. ‘The old-shoe workshop’, it added, ‘will b
e busy for many months just sorting this vast quantity.’ Leather shoes had to be sorted from other shoes. Men’s, women’s and children’s shoes had to be separated. Right shoes had to be sorted from left shoes, ‘whole shoes from half shoes’, black shoes from brown shoes, and finally, ‘and this is the hardest job of all’, the matching pairs ‘have to be ferreted out’.53
The penalty for any theft from this mass of shoe leather brought into the ghetto was execution. In each of the ghetto factories a notice stated: ‘Every act of theft will be punishable by death’.54 Icek Bekerman, a thirty-four-year-old shoeworker, had already been hanged in the Lodz ghetto in September 13, for taking a few scraps of leather in order to make himself a pair of shoe laces.55 The ghetto carpentry shop had been ordered to build the gallows, and the entire personnel of the leather and saddlery workshop, and the shoe workshop, were ordered to be present at the execution, together with representatives of each of the other workshops in the ghetto.56
Bekerman’s wife and two children were not allowed to the place of execution to witness the death sentence. Instead, forced to remain at home, their cries could be heard by all those on the way to the execution. Those cries, recalled the twelve-year-old Ben Edelbaum, ‘were the most terrifying lamentations I had ever heard’.57
31
* * *
‘A page of glory… never to be written’
Almost everywhere within their control, the Germans sought to destroy the remnants of long-since decimated Jewish communities. On 18 September 1943, two thousand Minsk Jews were deported to Sobibor, where all but a dozen, chosen for the labour camp, were gassed.1 On September 20, at Szebnie camp in southern Poland, the thousand Jewish inmates were driven in trucks to a field outside the camp. The road to the field was cordoned off by German and Ukrainian police. An eye-witness, who escaped and reached England at the beginning of 1945, recalled how:
Half-naked and without shoes, Jewish men, women and children were pushed along by Ukrainian guards with rifles to the place of execution near the woods. As soon as one party arrived, it was mowed down by SS men with tommy-guns. Thus party after party was slaughtered. First one heard a burst of shot, then later single shots killing those who had not fallen in the first instance.
Most of the victims walked to death calm and resigned. The children were mostly unaware of what was to happen to them and waved their hands in goodbye. One beautiful girl begged the Ukrainian policeman to let her escape. He let her go but the next one shot her dead.
Clothing was removed from the bodies which were left unburied until the next day when Jews brought from another camp were ordered to pile them and set fire to them. When they had done so, they themselves were shot and thrown on to the pyres.
These bodies burned for forty eight hours. Later the bones were collected and thrown into the River Jasiolka.2
The destruction of the evidence of mass murder now followed in the wake of the murders themselves, or at the sites of earlier killings. To Ponar, the death pits near Vilna, was brought a group of seventy Jews, nine Russian prisoners-of-war, and a young Polish peasant who had given refuge to a Jewish child. All eighty had been held in prison in Vilna. For four months, from September 1943, they worked at Ponar, as another ‘Special Commando 1005’, under the direct orders of Blobel, building massive log pyres, digging up corpses, placing the corpses on the pyres, igniting them, and scattering the ashes. Each pyre could hold 3,500 bodies, and burnt for up to ten days.
The first grave opened by the ‘Blobel Commando’ at Ponar contained the corpses of eight thousand Jews, five hundred Soviet prisoners-of-war and several hundred Catholic priests and seminarists. Most of the corpses were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs. The second grave contained the corpses of 9,500 Jewish children, women and men. In the third grave the prisoners counted 10,400 corpses. Hardly any of the children’s remains showed marks of bullets, but their tongues were protruding. In the fourth pit the prisoners found twenty-four thousand corpses, among them many Soviet prisoners-of-war, a number of Poles, Catholic priests and nuns, and one German soldier. In the fifth grave they found 3,500 women, children and men, all naked, and all shot in the back of the head. In the sixth grave they counted five thousand naked corpses. In the seventh grave they found several hundred political prisoners, and in the eighth and ninth graves they found five thousand naked corpses of Jews from the rural ghettos in the Vilna region; these were the Jewish deportees who had earlier received assurances that they were being taken to the Kovno ghetto, and had found themselves, on 5 April 1943, at Ponar.3
Since August 18, a third ‘Blobel Commando’ had been at work at Babi Yar, in the suburbs of Kiev. Blobel himself had visited the site to see the work being done. After the earth on top of the grave had been removed, he later recalled, ‘the bodies were covered with inflammable material and ignited. It took about two days until the grave burnt to the bottom.’ Blobel added: ‘I myself observed that the fire had glowed down to the bottom. After that the grave was filled in and the traces practically obliterated.’4
More than four hundred Jews and Soviet prisoners-of-war were working at this gruesome task, knowing that when their work was finished they would be killed. They worked with shackles around their ankles, guarded by sixty SS men armed with submachine guns, and accompanied by Alsatian dogs trained to kill. Within a month, seventy of the prisoners had been killed in random executions, staged each night by the guards for their amusement.
Throughout their work, the SS would address the Jews working in the pits at Babi Yar as Leichen, ‘corpses’. But, as the historian Reuben Ainsztein has written, ‘in those half-naked men who reeked of putrefying flesh, whose bodies were eaten by scabies and covered with a layer of mud and soot, and of whose physical strength so little remained, there survived a spirit that defied everything that the Nazis’ New Order had done or could do to them. In the men whom the SS men saw only as walking corpses, there matured a determination that at least one of them must survive to tell the world about what they had seen in Babi Yar.’
Plans were made to break out. Among those who coordinated these plans was a Jewish soldier of the Red Army, Vladimir Davydov. Independent of these plans, a non-Jewish Red Army man, Fyodor Zavertanny, managed one day to loosen his shackles, and to escape. In retaliation, the Germans shot twelve of the prisoners. They also shot the SS man in charge of the guards who had been watching Zavertanny’s group.
The scale of the reprisal seemed to rule out individual escapes, and make a mass break-out the only possible course. The method was to search for any keys that remained among the thousands of rotting corpses and decaying garments, in the hope that one of these keys might fit the padlock of the bunker in which the prisoners were locked at night.
Miraculously, on September 20, one of the prisoners, Jacob Kapler, discovered a key that fitted the padlock. Nine days later, on the third anniversary of the first mass slaughter at Babi Yar, the escape plans were put into effect. In all, 325 Jews and Soviet prisoners-of-war made the break-out. A total of 311 were shot down as they ran; 14 reached hiding places, 5 of whom hid for twenty days in the chimney of a disused factory. Two were hidden by the Ukrainian sisters Natalya and Antonina Petrenko, underneath their henhouse.
Five weeks after the escape, on November 6, the fourteen survivors welcomed the victorious Red Armyinto Kiev, and then joined its ranks. Four of them, Filip Vilkis, Leonid Kharash, I. Brodskiy and Leonid Kadomskiy, all Jews, were later killed in action against the Germans. Two of them, David Budnik and Vladimir Davydov, also Jews, gave evidence about the mass murders of Babi Yar in 1946, when they were both witnesses at the Nuremberg Tribunal.5
The fourteen survivors of the Babi Yar revolt had found temporary safety in flight; ten of them were to survive the war. There was also a miraculous escape, at the end of September 1943, for more than seven thousand Danish Jews. During the previous three years, following the occupation of Denmark in the spring of 1940, the Germans had embarked on a policy of cooperation an
d negotiation with the Danish authorities. As a result, the Jews had been left unmolested. But growing Danish resistance to the German occupation had slowly undermined any chance of continued cooperation, and on 28 August 1943 the Germans had declared martial law.
The SS hoped to use the opportunity of martial law to deport all of Denmark’s Jews and half-Jews. Forewarned of the planned deportation, however, Danes and Jews plotted to ensure that, on the eve of the deportation, Danish sea captains and fishermen ferried 5,919 Jews, 1,301 part-Jews—designated Jews by the Nazis—and 686 Christians married to Jews, to neutral Sweden.
On 1 October 1943, the second day of the Jewish New Year, the Germans found only 500 Jews still in Denmark. All were sent to Theresienstadt; 423 survived the war.6 The Danish Jews who had been ferried to Sweden also survived, unmolested, as did a further 3,000 Jewish refugees who had reached Sweden before the outbreak of war, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The escape of more than seven thousand Danish Jews at the end of September 1943 was a setback for German plans. But those plans had continued without respite throughout September. From Holland, Belgium and France more than five thousand Jews had been deported to Birkenau and gassed during that same September. Even those sent to the barracks at Birkenau were in daily danger: on October 3 an SS doctor, as part of a regular inspection, selected 139 Jews from the barracks whom he judged too sick to work: they were taken away and gassed.7
At Poznan, on October 4, Heinrich Himmler addressed his senior SS officers. At one point in his remarks he said that he wished to speak ‘quite frankly’ on ‘a very grave matter’. ‘Among ourselves,’ he added, ‘it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly’. Himmler went on to explain:
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