The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  ***

  As fragments of information reached the West, the Jews who read them were distraught. ‘Half of the night I spent reading the last report, No. 9, from Poland,’ Ignacy Schwarzbart noted in his diary, in London, on December 1. ‘It is the end of Polish Jewry. The remaining Jews in hiding are hunted like beasts, picked up and killed.’ The Poles denounced the Jews, he added. ‘But there are some Poles who pay with their lives for hiding Jews.’31

  A few Jews continued to believe that safety lay in work and compliance to the bitter end: such was the assurance given, on December 12, by the Chairman of the Jewish Council in Wlodzimierz Wolynski, to the remnant of the ghetto. But the assurance was in vain. By the end of December, all had been ‘resettled’.32

  The conflict between escape and reprisal could not be resolved. Following the escape of several Jews from Kovno early in December, an execution was ordered as a reprisal. On December 16, the day before the execution, the German authorities in the city agreed to a request for 7 litres of schnapps and 140 cigarettes, as a bonus for the seven executioners.33

  Some Jews tried to escape even from Birkenau. On November 13, Fritz Lustig had tried, but been caught. He was shot ten days later.34 On December 21, a Pole, Stanislaw Dorosiewicz, and a Jew, Hersh Kurcwajg, escaped from Auschwitz, after killing an SS guard.35 They were not recaptured.36 In Warsaw, on December 22, the Polish underground reported that the Gestapo had discovered a group of sixty-two Jews in hiding in the cellar of a building on Krolewska Street. All the Jews were killed.37

  Despite the savage penalties, a few Poles continued to hide Jews. Feigele Peltel has recorded how Dankiewicz, a Pole living in Pruszkow, near Warsaw, hid a Jewish woman named Zucker in a large tile stove. The stove was hollow, and could be entered from the top, which ‘masqueraded’ as a metal flue. Despite frequent searches, the hiding place was never discovered.38

  ***

  By the end of 1943, several Jewish resistance groups were active throughout France, among them the Organisation Juif de Combat, founded in 1942, and the Jewish Scout Movement, which had been in existence since 1923. Several thousand other Jews joined the various French underground groups, Communist, Socialist and Gaullist. One French resistance group, the National Liberation Movement, had been founded by a Jew, Maurice Löwenberg, who was killed by the Gestapo, under torture, at the end of July 1944. The leader of the Scouts, Captain Robert Gamzon, was among several Jews who rose to command specifically Jewish resistance units in the Toulouse-Lyons area. The work of these units included preparing hiding places and food for hundreds of Jewish women and children, smuggling Jews across the borders to Switzerland and Spain, and engaging the Germans in combat. A total of 124 members of the scouts resistance group were killed in 1943 and 1944, thirty of them in action, twenty-one shot by the Germans after capture, and seventy-three after being deported to the concentration camps, among them Birkenau, Natzweiler and Mauthausen.39

  In the barracks at the concentration camp of Mauthausen, on the Danube, a British prisoner-of-war, Lieutenant-Commander Pat O’Leary, who had been accused of being a British spy, found himself assigned as the cleaner of Block 5. The Kapo, or overseer, of the block was a German chosen for his brutality: a merchant seaman before the war, he had murdered his mother. He was, O’Leary later recalled, ‘over six feet tall and the epitome of brute force’.

  The only occupants of Block 5 were seven Jews. Fifteen years later, O’Leary told their story to Vincent Brome, who recorded it as follows:

  With no other purpose than brutal destruction the SS had said that all seven must die by Christmas. But the emaciated skeletons were still dragged out every morning to work in the stone quarries. Silent, drooping, they set off, some with tears in their eyes, some talking to themselves, some with the furtive look of hunted animals.

  The Kapo had put it to them bluntly: ‘You must all die by Christmas. You had better choose amongst yourselves who goes first.’

  When no one volunteered for death in the first week, he addressed them again. ‘If you don’t choose, I will.’

  The following day, somewhere out in the stone quarries, while seven skeletons struggled to move stones weighing more than they themselves did, with heavy snow soaking their thin garments and tongues sucking the snow to quench their thirsts, the Kapo suddenly leapt on one man, dragged him down, and as his screams echoed round the quarry, beat out his brains with a pick-axe.

  That evening the remaining six crowded round Pat. News of a possible Allied invasion had swept across Europe and the mysterious drumming of intelligence had carried the message into the heart of Mauthausen. Was it possible that the invasion would begin soon, and once begun would break through swiftly? Was there, possibly, the hope that… or if not…? Could they at least believe that the bombing raids might scare the SS or the Kapo into relaxing their sentence? Had they any hope if they hung on, tried to evade the death by pick-axe? Was there any point in struggling?

  Pat spoke very carefully. Many things were possible. Hope sprang indestructibly for those about to die, and he did not wish to destroy a hope which might miraculously realize itself. They seemed to feel better after he had spoken.

  In the second week there were still no volunteers for death. The ragged file of scarcely human men, who seemed tall because they were paper-thin, whose eyes were large in sunken faces, whose voices were sometimes whispers from weakness, staggered out into the ice-cold dawn, but no one volunteered to die.

  Two amongst them were father and son, a boy of nineteen, frequently in tears, and the father aged forty-five, who looked seventy. He was a Jewish tailor who had deliberately withdrawn from political life of any kind to remain completely innocent, but he was a Jew and that was enough. The son had hardly begun adult life and if he possessed any coherent views of the world, they were scarcely worth exterminating.

  They stayed together as much as possible, sleeping next to one another, and sometimes, far into the night, Pat heard the old Jew’s slow, melancholy voice trying to soothe his son’s fears. Or they talked to Pat and occasionally the great owl-like eyes enlarged in the thin faces, stared at Pat as though he had it in his power to save them, and would not save them. Always Pat encouraged them, helped them in their illnesses, tried to add scraps to their food; but what they needed even more than food was some re-affirmation of their right to live, and several times the old man turned away, tears in his eyes, and shambled back to his stinking bunk, while Pat cursed his powerlessness.

  At the end of November the Kapo spoke to them again. ‘You’re not dying quick enough. It’s easy to do it. You can walk out in front of the wire and get machine-gunned. Or—you can run into the wire. You frizzle quick then. But get a move on—time’s getting short.’

  No one died the next day; but on the following night when they returned from the quarry one of their number was again missing, and crowding round Pat, five Jews in terrible fear spoke of the cries they had heard. On the hundred steps which led down into the quarry, the berserk Kapo had torn another emaciated body to pieces with his pick-axe. There followed the same questions about the British, the Allies, the hope of an armistice before the year was out; but the Jewish tailor and his son were fatalistic now and the father said to Pat: ‘We may walk into the wire tomorrow.’ It was clean and simple. The flash which shrivelled life was better than a long death by mutilation and starvation.

  Three days later there were still five Jews, each no longer interested in the fate of the others, and all fighting desperately with the cunning of despair to remain alive.

  By the beginning of December the snow was very deep, the winds icy, and the five Jews could not sleep very much because of the cold. One day in the second week in December another man did not return from the quarry. And on the 15th, Pat heard the Jewish tailor say to his son, ‘There’s no hope. We had better die.’ The boy burst into tears. The tailor said again to Pat the next day. ‘We shall walk into the wire’. But they did not. December 18 came and still the four Jews remained in a state
resembling life. Still Pat tried to help them. Encouragement seemed the last indignity when hope had so long died, but Pat talked to them and sometimes they seemed stronger afterwards.

  Sometimes, too, he looked down at his own fast-wasting body and knew that he could not continue losing weight himself at such a rate without collapse. Originally he had weighed 160 lb. Now he was 90 lb and still losing weight. His face had yellowed, his absurd cotton clothes hung on bones, a sense of deep lethargy very easily overtook him, and hunger pains sometimes brought him awake in the night as though a knife had entered his bowels. He drank more and more water. Everyone drank and drank.

  Still he wondered why he remained alive, why they had not shot him, why the fate reserved for the Jews was not his also. If espionage against the religion of Nazism was a crime too simple to redeem by sudden death, this expiation, this long-drawn-out death by hardship and starvation was the kind of penance paid only for the most mortal sin; but why should he still be allowed hope while the Jews had none?

  In the early morning of December 23 he began to clean the bunks of Block 5. Suddenly he saw the Jewish tailor leading his son gently by the hand towards the door. The boy sobbed and there were tears in the old man’s eyes. Outside, with clumsy, fumbling steps, the old man began running, his arm around the boy. They could not run properly. They had not the strength. But they stumbled hopelessly towards the margin, and the shots which Pat expected did not come.

  They did not run straight and clean into the electrified wire. They blundered into it, and Pat felt the great blue flash as if it had seared his own body. And there on the ground were the two twitching bodies, entwined with one another, and presently still.

  It was very silent and empty in the block that evening. The two remaining Jews were cowering animals. One shivered continuously. Tomorrow was the 24th and one must die. Neither spoke, and when Pat went to them and used whatever words he could find to hold their broken minds together, they stared back mutely.

  The dawn was cold, grey, and misty. They could hardly walk as they left for the stone quarry, but one distorted drive remained: nothing mattered but the will to survive for another single day. The man who came back was a ghost, with fixed eyes and twitching lips, who tried to talk to Pat but could not articulate clearly. The last glimmering of the human spirit had almost gone. An animal looked out from the prison of shrivelled flesh and made meaningless whimpers.

  On Christmas morning the Kapo almost carried him from the block. That night, as the sound of a Christmas carol came across from one of the blocks, Block 5 was empty.40

  ***

  At the Ninth Fort in Kovno, Christmas 1943 saw the end of their tether for the sixty-four men and women who had been formed into a unit of the ‘Blobel Commando’, to dig up and then to burn the corpses of more than seventy thousand Lithuanian, German and Czech Jews, murdered in the Ninth Fort in the autumn and winter of 1941. By December 1943 they had dug up and burned more than twelve thousand bodies, seven thousand of them Jews from Kovno. Examination of the bodies showed that many of the victims had been buried alive.

  The members of ‘Blobel Commando’ in the Ninth Fort included twelve members of the Jewish Fighting Organization from the Kovno ghetto, several Russian—Jewish prisoners-of-war, among them a major in the Red Army, Mikhail Nemyonov, a few Jewish women, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, three non-Jews, and one of Lithuania’s best known rabbis, Gabriel Shusterman.

  An escape committee was formed, and security maintained by another of the Russian—Jewish prisoners-of-war, ‘Mishka the Tramp’, a former Soviet naval officer. A locksmith among the prisoners, Pinchas Krakinovsky, made keys to open the cells, and then, on the eve of the escape, drilled 314 holes, with primitive tools, in a long-forgotten iron door leading out of the fort near the cells.

  On December 24 the escape plans were ready. That evening, as the guards celebrated Christmas Eve, all sixty-four prisoners made their way out of their cells, through the door, up a rope ladder, over the fortress wall, and, rolling like logs in prostrate bundles, across the deep snow of the surrounding fields. But despite the festive carousing of the guards, the escape was noticed, and thirty-two escapees were quickly rounded up. Another five were shot, trying to resist capture. Eight more were caught on their way to the ghetto. Nineteen reached the ghetto undetected. One of the nineteen, Rabbi Shusterman, died soon afterwards of frostbite, suffered during the escape.

  The escape of members of ‘Blobel Commando’ from the Ninth Fort provided witnesses of the fate of tens of thousands of Jews. ‘You are more important than I,’ the head of the Jewish police in Kovno, Moshe Levin, told them. ‘You must remain alive to tell the world what you saw with your own eyes in the Ninth Fort.’ To ensure that the escapees did remain alive, Levin hid them in a secure bunker, equipped with lighting, heating and water.

  While in hiding, the escapees were given weapon training by another Russian-Jewish prisoner-of-war, Captain Israel Veselnitsky, himself from an Orthodox Jewish farming family from the Ukraine. They were then smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto, to join the partisans in the Rudniki forest, ninety miles to the east. Six of them later fell in battle. One of the escapees, Major Nemyonov, committed suicide. He was too old, he said, to run, and ‘happy to die by my own hand as a free man’.41

  Also on December 24, the Jews in ‘Blobel Commando’ at Borki were ready to try to escape, although there were more German guards than prisoners. In frozen ground, without proper tools, they had dug a tunnel from under the barracks to the field beyond the camp fence. It took six weeks to dig. At dawn on December 14 all was ready.

  All sixty prisoners entered the tunnel led by the escape organizer, Oscar Berger. One of the escapees, Josef Reznik, later recalled how a fellow escapee was so large that he had to be pushed through the opening at the end of the tunnel. As he was being pushed out into the field Reznik recalled, ‘There was noise, and this alerted the Germans. It was impossible to wait for everyone.’

  Of the sixty prisoners who tried to escape, only three survived the war. It is not known how many died in the camp, in the tunnel, at the tunnel exit, or on the way to the nearby woods. Several of those who escaped joined the Soviet partisans across the River Bug, and fought eventually in the ranks of the Red Army. One of them, Singer, fell in a partisan battle. Another, Aharonowicz, was wounded in battle in the Carpathians. A third, Josef Sterdyner, testified at the trial of the Borki guards in West Germany in 1962. A further survivor of the revolt at Borki, Josef Reznik, was a witness at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Reznik testified that after his escape he had been helped in hiding by a Polish priest.42

  33

  * * *

  ‘One should like so much to live a little bit longer’

  The opening months of 1944 saw no pause in the search for victims, or in the cruelties of the slaughter. At Birkenau, at Christmas 1943, Madame Vaillant Couturier, a non-Jew, had been opposite the notorious Block 25, the ‘Waiting Block’, when she had seen Jewish women brought naked from the barracks. These were women who had been judged too sick or too frail to work, or even chosen at random. From Block 25, after being kept for up to a week without food or water, they were all sent, invariably from that hut, to the gas-chamber. Of the fate of the women who had been brought to Block 25 that particular Christmas, Madame Vaillant Couturier recalled how uncovered trucks were driven up to the block, and then:

  …on them the naked women were piled, as many as the trucks could hold. Each time a truck started, the famous Hessler ran after the truck and with his bludgeon repeatedly struck the naked women going to their death.

  They knew they were going to the gas-chamber and tried to escape. They were massacred. They attempted to jump from the truck and we, from our own block, watched the trucks pass by and heard the grievous wailing of all those women who knew they were going to be gassed.1

  Perhaps it was these same women whom Rudolf Vrba saw being put on open lorries to be taken to one of the gas-chambers. ‘They were all prisoners a
lready,’ he later recalled, ‘and they knew that they were going to the gas-chamber, and they were quiet. And somehow people were accustomed to live with the moment, with the knowledge that death will come.’ But when the lorry motors started, the noise ‘created a panic’. A terrible noise arose, Vrba recalled, ‘the death cry of thousands of young women’, who were already ‘reduced to skeletons’. Many tried to jump out of the lorries, knowing ‘that they can’t succeed’. But still they tried.

  As the women tried in vain to break out, a rabbi’s son, Moshe Sonnenshein, called out, in Vrba’s presence, ‘God—show them your power—this is against You.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ Vrba added. Then Sonnenshein cried out, ‘There is no God.’2

  Among the most remarkable documents to have survived the war is the manuscript written in Birkenau by one of the members of the Sonderkommando, Salmen Lewental. This particular manuscript was discovered in 1962 in a jar buried in the ground near Crematorium III, where Lewental worked. The gaps in it are words destroyed by dampness which seeped into the jar. Lewental, who did not survive his gruesome work, recalled in his note book what may have been the same episode witnessed in its opening stages by Madame Vaillant Couturier and Rudolf Vrba.

  Lewental’s account is headed ‘3,000 naked people’. It reads:

  This was at the beginning of 1944. A cold, dry lashing wind was blowing. The soil was quite frozen. The first lorry, loaded brimful with naked women and girls, drove in front of Crematorium III. They were not standing close to one another, as usual, no; they did not stand on their feet at all, they were exhausted, they lay inertly one upon another in a state of utter exhaustion. They were sighing and groaning.