Four days later, the 3,860 ‘Czech family camp’ inmates were told that they were to be resettled at a nearby labour camp, Heydebreck. No such ‘resettlement’ was in fact planned. All 3,860 were to be sent to the gas-chambers only a few hundred yards away from their ‘haven’.
On March 6 a Slovak Jewess, Katherina Singer, who worked as a secretary to the senior SS guard in the women’s camp at Birkenau, overheard by chance an SS remark about ‘special treatment’ for the family camp inmates. Aware that in the SS language ‘special treatment’ meant gassing, she at once passed on the news to two young Jewish prisoners who were at that moment, as maintenance men, repairing cauldrons in the kitchen of the women’s camp. These two, under the pretext of ‘urgent repairs’ needed elsewhere, managed to pass the news that same day to Freddy Hirsch, one of the leaders of the family camp, while urging Hirsch to act.
Hirsch was convinced that there was nothing whatsoever to be done to save the family camp. That night he took poison. It was not strong enough to kill him, however, and on the following day, March 7, while still in a state of unconsciousness, he was taken by truck, together with the 3,860 other survivors of the family camp, to the gas-chamber.27
Themselves deceived, these victims of a wider deception were driven into the undressing room of the gas-chamber. Realizing suddenly that they really were about to be gassed, they tried to resist, attacking the guards with their bare hands. The SS were quick to answer back, first with rifle butts and then, when the resistance spread, with flame-throwers. Filip Muller, a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau, and one of the few men to survive it, was then on duty in the undressing room. He later recalled how these Czech family camp victims, ‘heads smashed and bleeding from their wounds’, were driven across the threshold of the gas-chamber. As the gas pellets were released, they began to sing the Czech national anthem, ‘Kde domov muj’, ‘Where Is My Home’, and the Hebrew song ‘Hatikvah’, ‘Hope’.28
Of this whole Jewish group of 3,860 men, women and children, only thirty-seven were spared, among them eleven pairs of twins, who were kept alive so that medical experiments could be performed on them by Dr Mengele.29
The destruction of the Czech family camp at Birkenau on March 7 was paralleled that same day, in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, by the betrayal of thirty-eight Jews in hiding in a bunker. Among those caught when the bunker was raided was Emanuel Ringelblum.30
Ringelblum was taken, with the others who had been caught, to the Pawiak prison, together with his wife Yehudit, and their thirteen-year-old son Uri. Another Jewish prisoner in Pawiak, Julian Hirszhaut, was involved in an attempt to move Ringelblum out of the condemned cells, to those with prisoners who had every expectation of being sent to work for the Germans as shoemakers and tailors. Four years later Hirszhaut recalled how he managed, four days after Ringelblum’s arrest, to enter the prison cell in which the historian was being held:
The cell was jammed with people, apparently these were the Jews whom the Germans had seized with Ringelblum in his bunker. Ringelblum himself was sitting on a straw mattress close to the wall, on which hundreds of names had been scratched out by nails. These were the names of the persons who had made their final journey through this cell.
On his lap Ringelblum was holding a handsome boy. This was his son Uri. When I approached Ringelblum, I told him, without losing any time, whose messenger I was. I remember how astonished Ringelblum was to learn that there were still Jews in the Pawiak.
Then I told him that we were making attempts to take him in with us.
‘And what will happen to him?’ he asked, pointing his finger at his son. ‘And what will happen to my wife who is in the women’s section?’
What could I answer him? We all knew well that even if we succeeded in taking Ringelblum out of there and bringing him to us as a shoemaker or tailor, his family would still be doomed. My silence conveyed the truth to him, and he added right away: ‘Then I prefer to go the way of Kiddush Ha-Shem (“Hallowing His Name”) together with them.’
Later he told me how he had been tortured by the Gestapo. The bandits wanted to extort from him the addresses of the persons with whom he was in contact on the ‘Aryan’ side. They enquired about his recent activities. Ringelblum remained silent and did not reveal anything, therefore, they had beaten him murderously for three days. He showed me black and blue spots all over his body, the results of the savage beatings.
In the middle of our conversation he suddenly asked: ‘Is death so hard to bear?’ And then, a little later, he went on with a voice broken from despair: ‘What is this little boy guilty of?’—and he again pointed his finger at his son—‘It breaks my heart to think of him.’
I stood helpless before Ringelblum, I did not know what to answer, and a wave of sorrow swept over my heart.31
Ringelblum was executed a few days later, as were his wife and their son. Thus perished the historian of the Warsaw ghetto; the humane chronicler of events too terrible to chronicle; the eyewitness, in words and documents, of the destruction of Polish Jewry.
To the last, Ringelblum had continued to work as an historian. At the time of his capture he was forty-three years old. Twelve years earlier, he had published his first book, a history of the Jews of Warsaw from the earliest times to their expulsion in 1527. His last two books, written while in hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, were a history of Trawniki camp, and a history of Polish-Jewish relations during the Second World War. When published after the war, this second book filled 248 printed pages. In it Ringelblum wrote of the individual Poles who had helped him, among them Teodor Pajewski, a railway worker who had helped to get him out of Trawniki, and Mieczyslaw Wolski, the gardener in whose hide-out he had lived in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, and who was shot by the Germans after the hide-out had been discovered. After describing the dangers involved in helping Jews, Ringelblum wrote, of the Poles who accepted these dangers:
Idealists from among both the educated and the working classes, who saved Jews at the risk of their lives and with boundless self-sacrifice—there are thousands such in Warsaw and the whole country. The names of these people, on whom the Poland to come will bestow insignia for their human acts, will forever remain engraved in our memories, the names of heroes who saved thousands of human beings from destruction in the fight against the greatest enemy of the human race.32
Parts of Ringelblum’s book dealt with those Poles who had betrayed Jews, and reflected on the fact that only a small percentage of Jews were given sanctuary by non-Jews in Poland compared with those who were given sanctuary by non-Jews in countries such as France or Holland. Ringelblum ascribed this difference to many generations of anti-Jewish feeling. As a result of this, he wrote, the Warsaw ghetto deportations of July 1942 had met with ‘blank indifference’ on the Aryan side of the city.33 There were even Poles who remarked, as the ghetto went up in flames: ‘The bugs are burning’.34 In the whole of Poland, including Warsaw, noted Ringelblum in the early months of 1944, ‘there are probably no more than thirty thousand Jews hiding’, and he added,
Among the Polish families hiding Jews there are doubtless some anti-Semites. It is, however, the anti-Semites as a whole, infected with racialism and Nazism, who created conditions so unfavourable that it has been possible to save only a small percentage of the Polish Jews from the Teuton butchers. Polish Fascism and its ally, anti-Semitism, have conquered the majority of the Polish people. It is they whom we blame for the fact that Poland has not taken an equal place alongside Western European countries in rescuing Jews.
The blind folly of Poland’s anti-Semites, who have learnt nothing, has been responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have been saved despite the Germans. The guilt is theirs for not having saved tens of thousands of Jewish children who could have been taken in by Polish families or institutions. The fault is entirely theirs that Poland has given asylum at the most to one per cent of the Jewish victims of Hitler’s persecutions.35
Such was Ringelblum’s bitter conclusio
n.
34
* * *
From the occupation of Hungary to the Normandy landings
On 10 March 1944 Adolf Eichmann and his principal subordinates met at Mauthausen concentration camp in order to work out a deportation programme for the 750,000 Jews of Hungary.1 Eight days later, on March 18, Hitler again summoned the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to Klessheim Castle, near Salzburg. Horthy agreed to deliver 100,000 ‘Jewish workers’ for the German war effort, but he was still reluctant to agree to a general deportation. At 9.30 that evening his train left Salzburg for Budapest. Forty-five minutes later, German troops began to move into Hungary.2
Early on the evening of the following day, March 19, the Germans took their first independent action in Hungary against Hungarian Jewry, arresting two hundred Jewish doctors and lawyers, their names chosen at random from the Budapest telephone book. All were deported to Mauthausen.3 The Gestapo then moved into hundreds of Hungarian towns and villages; prepared a list of all Jewish wealth in each town; took the leaders of the local community into custody; and then threatened to shoot the leaders if the money and valuables were not forthcoming. The technique was devastatingly successful. First, it drained the communities of their money, so that they could not even buy railway tickets, or pay bribes. Second, after the Gestapo released the community leaders on payment of the ransom, it made their threats seem plausible and finite: they had done what they had promised. Provided the Jews conformed, they would keep their promises in future. As Hugo Gryn, a survivor of the subsequent deportations from Hungary has recalled, ‘When, in the weeks after the ransomings, the Gestapo said, “All Jews are to leave their homes, and assemble in brick factories and timber yards and no harm will come to you,” it could be believed. Then all they had to say was, “And now you will be sent by train to help with the harvest”….’4
Each German demand was accompanied by threats. But when the demand was met, the threats were withdrawn. Thus on March 21 the Germans made their first demand of the Jewish community in Budapest: 600 blankets, 300 mattresses, and 30 Jewish printers to print propaganda leaflets. The Jewish leaders asked for time. One of the Germans present then took out his revolver and said that if the request was not fulfilled in an hour and a half, the leaders would be shot. ‘The Jews had to learn’, one historian has written, ‘that nothing was impossible.’5 Nine days after the German occupation of Hungary, one of the leaders of Hungarian Jewry, Fulop Freudiger, who had already persuaded the Gestapo to release his brother from detention, wrote to the leader of the Orthodox Jewish Community in the Hungarian city of Nagyvarad: ‘I do not believe that we shall suffer the same fate that befell Polish Jews. We shall have to give up our wealth, we must be prepared for many struggles and deprivations, but I am not worried for our lives.’6
Eichmann himself, speaking to a delegation from the Jewish Council at the end of the month, created a basis for the forthcoming deceptions. ‘After the war,’ he told them, ‘the Jews would be free to do whatever they wanted.’ Everything ‘taking place on the Jewish question’, Eichmann added, ‘was in fact only for the wartime period’; with the end of the war, ‘the Germans would again become good-natured and permit everything, as in the past.’
Eichmann added that he was ‘no friend of force’, and he ‘hoped that things would go well without it’. Violence and executions had occurred ‘only where the Jews had taken up opposition’, as with the Jewish soldiers serving in partisan bands in Ruthenia and Yugoslavia, he explained. ‘As in Greece,’ Eichmann added, ‘he would mow them down mercilessly, because there was war on.’ But he would be equally severe, he promised, against any Hungarian citizen who harmed a Jew because he saw the yellow star. ‘He would not tolerate the harming of Jews for wearing the yellow star,’ Eichmann assured the Jewish leaders, and he asked them to report any incident of attacks on Jews to him ‘and he would deal with the attackers’.7 While the Jews of Hungary were being caught for the first time in the Nazi net, those few who remained alive in German-occupied Poland, after four and a half years of war, still struggled to resist. At Koldyczewo camp, in White Russia, a mass revolt of the labourers took place on the night of March 22, led by a Jew, Shlomo Kushnir. Ten Nazi guards were killed, and hundreds of labourers reached the forests, and the partisans. Kushnir, and twenty-five others, were caught: Kushnir committed suicide before he could be tortured and shot.8 On the following day, in the Bialystok region, a Soviet partisan group, led by a Jew, Sergeant Andrei Tsymbal, with a large number of Jewish fighters under him, destroyed a German military train carrying armoured cars to the eastern front.9
In Western Europe, as resistance activity grew, so too did reprisals against civilians unconnected with any underground action. On March 24, in Rome, the Germans drove 335 civilians into the Ardeatine caves, and then shot them: 253 were Catholics, and 70 were Jews.10 The cave itself, in the vicinity of Rome’s ancient catacombs, is now an Italian national monument. On March 26, at Limoges, three Jews were shot for being actively involved in resistance work, among them the sixty-five-year-old Victor Rubinstein, who had been born in New York.11 On March 27, the eighteen-year-old Abraham Geleman, born in Lodz, was killed by the Germans in the Dordogne: he too had been active in the resistance.12 In Belgium, three members of the Belgian resistance, ‘Dolly’, ‘Sabor’ and ‘Nic’, were arrested, sent to concentration camps, and were killed. Their real names were Jacques Gunzig, Isi Springer and Nic Spitz.13
***
The Red Army continued its westward advance, approaching to within three hundred miles of Riga, Kovno and Vilna. The Germans now accelerated their moves against the remnants in the ghetto and labour camps. In Zezmariai camp, near Kovno, all children were seized on March 27. ‘Our eleven-year-old Hannah’le went too,’ her seventeen-year-old sister Lea Svirsky, later recalled. ‘My mother tried to hide her, not give her up, so they set a big dog on my mother, which attacked and began biting her. She fainted. When she woke up, Hannah’le was no more.’14
In Kovno, on March 27, all remaining children up to the age of thirteen were seized by the SS, thrown into trucks, and driven off to their deaths. Thirty-seven Jewish policemen, among them the commander of the Jewish police and his two deputies, refused to take part in this round-up of children. They were shot on the spot.15
The ‘children’s action’ in Kovno took two days to complete. Several thousand children were rounded up, driven off in trucks, and shot. Only a tiny fragment survived, among them the five-year-old Zahar Kaplanas. This young boy was saved by a non-Jew, a Lithuanian, who smuggled him out of the ghetto in a sack. Later Kaplanas’s parents were both killed in the ghetto. Zahar survived the war.16
In a desperate act, as the search intensified, some parents poisoned their children, and then committed suicide. Dr Aharon Peretz, who witnessed the events of March 27, later recalled:
I saw shattering scenes. It was near the hospital. I saw automobiles which from time to time would approach mothers with children, or children who were on their own. In the back of them, two Germans with rifles would be going as if they were escorting criminals. They would toss the children into the automobile.
I saw mothers screaming. A mother whose three children had been taken away—she went up to this automobile and shouted at the German, ‘Give me the children,’ and he said, ‘How many?’ and the German said, ‘You may have one.’ And he went up into that automobile, and all three children looked at her and stretched out their hands. Of course, all of them wanted to go with the mother, and the mother didn’t know which child to select, and she went down alone, and she left the car.
And a second mother just hung on to the car and didn’t want to let go. And a dog bit her; they set a dog against her.
Another mother with two children, a girl and a boy—I saw that from my window—went and pleaded, and begged that the Germans should return one child, so he took the girl by her shoulders and threw the girl down to her.
‘Such scenes’, Dr Peretz recalled, ‘repeated themselves all da
y.’17
In the Lodz ghetto, a similar ‘children’s action’ had been witnessed by a fifteen-year-old boy. Among those in the ghetto was a mother, Rachel, and her little boy Hershl, who was so physically handicapped from birth that he had to be carried everywhere in a small handcart. Suddenly, the order went up in the street, ‘All out.’ Then, as the young boy, Ben Edelbaum, later recalled:
The silence was suddenly broken by screams from apartment 11. It was Hershl crying and saying, ‘No, Mama! No! Mama, no!’ We heard a thud, and Hershl cried no more.
We ran in and saw Rachel standing over Hershl with a lead pipe in her hand. Hershl was lying on the bed in a pool of blood. His head was split wide open. Before we could reach Rachel, she ran to the window and threw herself out, shouting, ‘They won’t get him now!’
Rachel fell to the sidewalk below and died instantly.
‘May God forgive her for what she has done,’ a woman said.
‘Forgive her?’ another asked. ‘Why, it was His will, or else this would not have been allowed to happen.’18
***
On April 5, 835 Jews were deported from northern Italy to Birkenau. On arrival, 559 were gassed. The deportees included Jews who had found refuge in Italy for more than four years: Jews from all over Europe and North Africa, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews. Some were from old Sephardi families expelled from Spain in 1492, like the Alkalai family from Sarajevo. The seventy-one-year-old Sara Klein had been born in Istanbul, the seventy-six-year-old Genia Levi in Moscow, the five-year-old Rosetta Scaramella in Venice, the three-year-old Roberto Zarfatti in Rome.19
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