The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  With each arriving train from Hungary, selections were made, and some men and women from each train were sent to the barracks. But within a few days, twelve thousand Jews were being gassed and cremated every twenty-four hours. Alter Feinsilber, one of the few survivors of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau, noted, of these Hungarian transports:

  If the number of persons to be gassed was not sufficiently large, they would be shot and burned in pits. It was a rule to use the gas-chamber for groups of more than two hundred persons, as it was not worth while to put the gas-chamber in action for a smaller number of persons. It happened that some prisoners offered resistance when about to be shot at the pit or that children would cry and then SS Quartermaster Sergeant Moll would throw them alive into the flames of the pits.

  I was eye-witness of the following incidents: Moll told a naked woman to sit down on the corpses near the pit, and while he himself shot prisoners and threw their bodies into the flaming pit he ordered her to jump about and sing. She did so, in the hope, of course, of thus saving her life, perhaps. When he had shot them all, he also shot this woman and her corpse was cremated.56

  Two of the gas-chambers, numbered II and III, were at the end of the railway spur. But two more, IV and V, were some way across the camp, nearly three thousand yards, at the edge of the Birkenau woods. To these two more distant gas-chambers, the Jews were marched on foot. Those who were sick, as well as old men and women who were too weak to walk, and sometimes children, were taken from the railway ramp to these two distant gas-chambers by truck. Ten months later, Alter Feinsilber recalled how, when those brought by truck reached the gas-chamber: ‘they were dumped into the yard just as is done when refuse is dumped from lorries into pits, expressly prepared for that purpose.’ When it happened, Feinsilber added, ‘that after gassing we found a still moving body among the corpses, we did not want to throw a still living person into the fire and then one of the SS men finished him off with a revolver shot.’57

  HUNGARY

  From the first days of their arrival in Birkenau, Hungarian Jews were among those taken from the barracks for work, not only in the factories of the Auschwitz region, but in many distant factories and projects in the Reich. On May 15, a thousand Jews were sent to a factory at Wustegiersdorf; others were to go to factories at Brünnlitz, Hamburg and Schwarzheide, as well as to a building site of Ullersdorf, south-east of Berlin, which was being prepared as an SS recreation and rest centre.58

  For the new arrivals, the moment of the selection was bewildering and without meaning. Hugo Gryn, a fourteen-year-old boy from Beregszasz, in the Hungarian-annexed eastern region of Czechoslovakia, later recalled his arrival in Birkenau with his father, his mother and his younger brother:

  We were exhausted, thoroughly demoralised and frightened and the train stood for some time. We could only hear the shunting of engines, crunch of people walking outside, and eventually, well into daylight, the door pulled open and people being now herded out, and an amazing scene. It reminded me of what I imagined a lunatic asylum would be like, because in addition to the SS who were moving up and down and pushing people around towards the head of the platform, the other people there wore this striped uniform, with a very curious-shaped hat, and they were just moving up and down taking so-called luggage out of the train. One of them I would say saved my life, because he went around muttering in Yiddish, ‘You’re eighteen, you have a trade,’ which I took to be the mutterings of a lunatic because it was such a curious thing to say—that’s all he kept saying to people—particularly to young people.

  My father was there and took it seriously, and by the time we in fact came to the head of this platform where the selection was taking place I had already been rehearsed, so that when the SS man says: ‘How old are you?’ I said I was nineteen; and ‘Do you have a trade?’ ‘Yes, I’m a carpenter and a joiner.’ My brother who was there was younger, he couldn’t say he was nineteen, and so he was sent with the old people the wrong way and my mother went after him. The SS man quite crudely and violently pulled my mother back. She said, ‘Well, I want to be with my little boy, he’s frightened.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘you will meet him later.’ Well that of course was in fact the last time I saw my brother….59

  Gabi Gryn was eleven years old.

  The deceptions which alone made the murder of so many people possible were continued to the very door of the gas-chamber where, as Yehuda Bakon, a deportee from Hungary, was later told by the Sonderkommando, the word ‘showers’ was written ‘in all languages’. Of the Jews who were about to be gassed, Yehuda Bakon was told:

  They were brought into the chambers for undressing. There were benches, and there were hangers with numbers. Sometimes women would be separated from the men, but when there was no time, they were put into those chambers together, and had to undress all together. The SS men would warn them, ‘Please, remember the number of your hanger for the clothes. Tie both shoes well, and put your clothing in one pile, because they will be handed back to you at the end of the showers.’

  They would ask for water. They were very thirsty after the long journey in those sealed trucks. They were told, ‘Hurry. Coffee is waiting. Coffee is ready in camp. The coffee will be cold.’ And similar things to calm them, to mislead them.60

  During the second half of May, tens of thousands of Jews were deported to Birkenau not only from Hungary, but from Theresienstadt, Italy, Belgium, Holland, France and the former Polish city of Sosnowiec: more than thirty trains in fifteen days.61 Of the 575 Jews brought to Birkenau from Fossoli, in Italy, on May 16, 518 were gassed, among them the seventy-seven-year-old Daria Bauer, who had been born in Florence, the six-year-old Elena Calo, also from Florence, the three-year-old Alina di Consiglio from Rome, and Gigliola Finzi, born at Roccastrada in Italy less than three months before the deportation.62

  There was also one deportation in May which did not go to Birkenau, but to Kovno. Leaving Paris on May 15, the train reached Kovno three days and three nights later. Of the 878 deportees, only 17 survived the war. On May 19, the day after these Paris deportees reached Kovno, the SS ordered the prisoners to undress. A Lithuanian eye-witness, Pavilas Tcherekas, later recalled how, ‘understanding what that meant, the prisoners threw themselves at the SS and disarmed some of them. There was shooting. The prisoners fled, running in all directions, but they were in a concrete enclosure. Bullets poured from the guard towers.’ None escaped.63

  At Munkacs, in Hungarian Ruthenia, and at the Hungarian town of Satoraljaujhely, a number of Jews tried to resist being put on the train to Birkenau, but they were shot down by the SS. The remainder, cowed, entered the wagons.64 During the five-day journey from Munkacs, which began on May 22, many went mad. Some died during the first three days inside the sealed wagons. At one town on the journey, all corpses were removed, and those who had gone mad were shot.65

  On May 25 the German representative in Budapest, SS Brigadier General Edmund Veesenmayer, reported to the German Foreign Ministry that 138,870 Jews had been deported to their ‘destination’ in the past ten days.66

  That same evening, May 25, as the group of Hungarian Jews were being led to one of the two more distant gas-chamber buildings in Birkenau, they sensed that something was wrong, and scattered into the nearby woods. Special searchlights, installed around the gas-chamber, were at once switched on by the SS, who opened fire on those seeking to flee. All were shot. A similar act of revolt, similarly suppressed, took place three days later, on May 28.67

  On the following day, May 29, several thousand Jews who had been deported from the southern Hungarian city of Baja reached the German frontier. Only then, after three and a half days in the wagons, were the doors opened for the first time: fifty-five Jews were found dead, and two hundred had gone mad.68

  One eye-witness of the arrival of Hungarian Jews at Birkenau was a German soldier whose account was eventually passed on to British military Intelligence. He was a member of a German anti-tank artillery unit, transferred from the Russian fr
ont to the west. During the journey, the train on which he and his unit were being transferred had to stop for a few days owing to ‘jammed railways’. At the place where it stopped, it was shunted on to a side track. The side track was at Auschwitz junction, at the entrance to the spur line into Birkenau.

  On the siding, alongside the soldiers’ train, stood a goods train. Its tiny upper windows were covered in barbed wire. The train was guarded by the SS.

  The soldier’s account, as sent to London, read:

  This train was full of Hungarian Jews brought up for extermination. Nobody was allowed near the train, but some of the soldiers managed to get near all the same, and caught glimpses of what was going on.

  The Jews were packed together in the carriages, men, women, children, old people; they were not allowed out and had to obey the calls of nature inside. The carriages were full of excrements, and a putrid fluid was trickling from the carriages.

  The captives cried out for water but it was forbidden to bring them any. Some of the soldiers did it all the same, in spite of the SS guards’ threats. The Jews offered them valuables, rings, watches, etc., in return, but the soldiers refused. One Jew insisted on throwing his watch to a soldier, making the gesture of throat-cutting to indicate that he was going to his death anyhow, and the watch was no more use to him. One SS man accepted valuables from the captives in return for giving them half a loaf of bread.

  This went on for two days when the death train was emptied and the inmates were driven into the camp. Meanwhile the soldiers had found out through interviews with the local locomotive driver who had to shunt the trains, and with SS guards, what was going on in this camp. The engine driver told them to watch out at nightfall; then they would see smoke coming out of twelve chimneys that were visible at some distance, and smell the burned flesh—that was the mass cremation of the people murdered during the afternoon hours in gas-chambers.

  Indeed, when night fell after the emptying of the death train, the chimneys began to smoke and the smell of burned flesh filled the air. Also open fires were seen—the corpses being burned on pyres because the crematorium could not deal with the masses of victims. Another crematorium, bigger than the first, was seen under construction nearby. The soldiers—the whole unit witnessed the events—were aghast. They had heard of these things before but could not believe them. They stayed up all night and discussed what they had seen. Even the most diehard Nazis were silent and pale. No action was possible; the guns had been sent ahead, they had next to no arms, and the place was full of SS.

  The following day, six carriages rolled out of the death camp and were put on the side track for the night. The soldiers crept into the carriages to inspect the contents. It consisted of the clothes of the Jews murdered on the previous day—all with labels of Hungarian firms—anything from shorts to shirts, men’s and women’s underwear, to babies’ swaddling clothes, shoes, suits, dresses, etc., all addressed to Textilverwaltung, Litzmannstadt (the German Textile Administration in Lodz), which was to use them.

  The engine driver said he could hardly hold out any longer at this place, but what could he do? He was scarcely able to eat his meals for disgust. He told the soldiers appalling stories from the camp, especially the treatment of women, which defy description.

  There was also a real romantic drama. One SS man had fallen in love with a Jewish girl and became intimate with her. He protected her and managed for months to get her out of the death batches into some batch which was still to remain alive. But in the end he was found out. The SS man and the girl were killed immediately.69

  Inside Birkenau, two Jews who had witnessed the first ten days of the Hungarian arrivals escaped on May 27. One, Arnost Rosin, was a Czech Jew, the other, Czeslaw Mordowicz, was Polish-born. They managed to reach Slovakia, and their report, combined with that of two earlier escapees who had fled before the Hungarian deportations, reached the West towards the end of June. The two earlier escapees were the young Slovak Jew, Rudolf Vrba, and an older Slovak Jew, Alfred Wetzler. In their report, Vrba set out the fate and the statistics of the deportations into Birkenau since the summer of 1942, when he himself had arrived from Slovakia.70

  Even while Rosin and Mordowicz were struggling to cross the Tatra mountains, trekking southward, but only able to move by night, into Slovakia, Edmund Veesenmayer was again reporting to Berlin on the scale of the deportations from Hungary. On May 25 he gave 138,870 as the number of Jews already deported.71 Six days later, on May 31, the figure had risen to 204,312.72 That same day, from one of the trains reaching the German border, forty-two corpses were removed, one of them a child’s, before the train proceeded to Birkenau.73

  At Birkenau, the torments imposed upon those sent to the barracks reduced many of them to despair. Leon Szalet has recalled how, on one occasion, the prisoners were ordered to drink out of the unflushed toilet bowls. ‘The men could not bring themselves to obey this devilish order,’ he wrote. ‘They only pretended to drink. But the block-führers had reckoned with that; they forced the men’s heads deep into the bowls until their faces were covered with excrement. At this the victims almost went out of their minds—that was why their screams had sounded so demented.’74

  A prisoner in the women’s camp at Birkenau, Halina Birenbaum, has recalled how many women with diarrhea relieved themselves in soup bowls or in the pans provided for ‘coffee’; then they hid the utensils under the mattress to avoid the punishment awaiting them for doing so. The punishment was twenty-five strokes on the bare buttocks, or kneeling all night long on sharp gravel, holding up bricks. These punishments, Halina Birenbaum added, ‘often ended in the death of the “guilty”.’75

  At least twice after the arrival of the Hungarian Jews, blood was taken from Jewish girls in considerable quantities, almost certainly, as one Jewess recalled, ‘for wounded German soldiers’. No medical help or additional food rations were given to those from whom normally excessive quantities were taken, ‘and many of them died soon after’.76

  On June 3, as the Hungarian deportations continued, Rudolf Kastner, summoned by Eichmann, urged Eichmann to allow six or eight hundred Jews from the provinces to travel to Budapest, in order to avert their deportation. ‘Your nerves are too tense, Kastner,’ Eichmann replied. ‘I shall send you to Theresienstadt, or perhaps you prefer Auschwitz.’ Eichmann added: ‘You must understand me. I have to clean up the provincial towns of their Jewish garbage. I must take this Jewish muck out of the provinces. I cannot play the role of the saviour of the Jews.’77

  Eichmann did eventually agree to a Jewish request that 1,686 Hungarian Jews be allowed to leave Hungary for Switzerland.78 But he refused absolutely to increase that number, or to halt the provincial deportations to Birkenau, even though he had sent a Hungarian Zionist, Joel Brand, to negotiate the ‘sale’ of a million Hungarian Jews to the Allies. At the very moment that Brand was explaining Eichmann’s proposals to British, American and Jewish leaders in Istanbul and Aleppo, the Jews who were meant to be the basis of the bargain were being gassed.79

  On June 3, a further train arrived at Birkenau from France. Among those who had been deported on it was the nineteen-year-old Freda Silberberg, who later recalled with some bitterness how, in the village near Lyons where she had been living, ‘it was not the Germans who arrested us, it was the French police.’ Reaching Birkenau, Freda Silberberg watched as a Dutch woman handed her mother a baby for safety. At the selection, her mother was sent to the right with the baby. ‘I wanted to go with her’, Freda later recalled. Then Dr Mengele said, ‘She is going with the baby to a place where there are special creches to look after them.’

  Freda Silberberg was sent with fifty other girls to the left. Reaching the barracks, they asked those whom they found inside what had happened to the people who were sent to the right, their mothers, brothers, sisters. In the barracks was a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl from Belgium, Mala Zimetbaum. It was she who tried to comfort the new arrivals. ‘They had to go into another camp,’ she told them. But afte
r a while, as Freda Silberberg later recalled, ‘you realised something was wrong, you saw convoys arrive and then nobody came into the barracks at all.’

  The impact of Mala Zimetbaum on the new arrivals was considerable. ‘She was the one who tried to make it easier for us when we arrived,’ Freda Silberberg later recalled. But even Mala Zimetbaum could not hide forever the truth that Freda’s mother, and the baby she had taken for safety, were dead.80

  ***

  On 6 June 1944 the Allied forces landed in Normandy. The long-awaited second front was in being. In the east, the Red Army was poised to renew its offensive. That same day, on the Greek island of Corfu, the Germans rounded up 1,795 Jews. All were deported to Birkenau, where 1,500 were gassed on arrival.81 Also on June 6, 260 Jews living on the island of Crete, who had been seized on May 20, were taken, together with four hundred Greek hostages and three hundred Italian soldiers, Germany’s former allies, a hundred miles out to sea, beyond the island of Santorini, where the boat was scuttled. All were drowned.82

  On the Greek island of Zante, not far from Corfu, the Mayor, Lukos Karrer and the leading churchman, Archbishop Crysostomos, not only alerted the Jews to the danger, but sent 195 of them to remote villages in the hills. Unfortunately, 62 Jews, all of them elderly, who could not make the sudden journey into the rough terrain, were seized by the Gestapo in Zante and taken to the port. ‘If the deportation order is carried out,’ Crysostomos declared, ‘I will join the Jews and share their fate.’ But when the boat arrived from Corfu to collect them, it was already so packed with Jews that it did not stop.83