In the Lodz ghetto, news of the Normandy landings, heard on illegally owned radios, circulated throughout the ghetto. Hitherto, war news had been spread cautiously and slowly, in order to protect the owners of the radios. Such was the joy on this occasion, however, as Lucjan Dobroszycki, a survivor of the ghetto, has written, ‘that for a moment people seemed to forget themselves’, behaving as if Lodz would be liberated ‘in a very short while’.84 The German authorities realized that the news of the landing could only have reached the ghetto by illegal radios. Searches were mounted, and six Jews arrested.
One of the Jews who could not be found was Chaim Widawski, a young man who, the Chronicle noted on June 8, was well known in the ghetto and ‘widely popular’. It was feared, the Chronicle added, ‘that he will commit suicide rather than turn himself in to the German authorities’.85
On June 9, Chaim Widawski’s body was found in the street. He had taken poison.86
One young boy in the Lodz ghetto, reflecting on the D-Day landings, wrote in his diary: ‘It is true. The fact has been accomplished. But shall we survive? Is it possible to come out of such unimaginable depths, of such unfathomable abysses?’87
‘Could we be granted victory this year, 1944?’ asked Anne Frank, in hiding in Holland. ‘We don’t know yet, but hope is revived within me; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’88
35
* * *
‘May one cry now?’
With every day of the Allied struggle on the Normandy beaches and across the fields of northern France, Jews were being gassed in Birkenau, or hunted down and shot throughout German-occupied Europe. On D-Day itself, Hanna Szenes, one of the Palestinian Jews parachuted behind German lines by the British to make contact with the Hungarian and Slovak resistance, was caught on the Hungarian border. ‘Even if they catch me,’ Hanna Szenes told Reuven Dafni, a fellow parachutist, on the eve of her mission, ‘that will become known to the people in the concentration camps. They will know that someone was coming to try to help them.’1
On 10 June 1944, in the tiny French village of Oradour, on the River Glane, the SS massacred 642 villagers. Among the dead were several Jews who had found refuge in the village, and of whose presence the Germans were completely unaware. Like the other villagers, they were locked in the village church, and then killed, as a reprisal for the killing of an SS man by French partisans in a distant village, but one with the same name.
Of the Jews murdered at Oradour, the forty-five-year-old Maria Goldman had been born in Warsaw, and the eight-year-old Serge Bergman in Strasbourg.2 Both were refugees. Elsewhere in France, Jews were shot for active participation in the partisan struggle: several, on June 12, near Lyons.3 In Greece, in the wheat fields of Thessaly, where partisans were trying to deprive the Germans of the harvest, Leon Sakkis was among several Jewish resistance fighters in action against German military units. On the night of June 14 he was killed by machine-gun fire as he tried to help a wounded colleague.4
On June 16, in France, the historian Marc Bloch, leader of the Franc Tireur resistance group, was executed.5 But it was still upon Hungarian Jewry that the worst terror fell. On June 17 Veesenmayer telegraphed to Berlin that 340,142 Hungarian Jews had now been deported.6 A few were relatively fortunate to be selected for the barracks, or even moved out altogether to factories and camps in Germany. On June 19 some five hundred Jews, and on June 22 a further thousand, were sent from Birkenau to Dachau, to work in factories in the Munich area.7 Since 1933 Dachau had been a camp for political prisoners; now it became a centre for Jewish deportees from the east being sent to labour camps in the Munich region.
Ten days later, the first Jews, 2,500 women, were deported from Birkenau to Stutthof concentration camp. From Stutthof they were sent to several hundred factories in the Baltic region.8 But most Jews brought to Birkenau continued to be gassed. To ‘greet’ these deportees, yet another element of deception had been devised. Among those who witnessed it day after day was the Frenchwoman, Claude Vaillant Couturier. Less than two years later, she recalled how, from her block directly facing the special rail spur that came right into Birkenau, ‘practically right up to the gas-chamber’:
…we saw the unsealing of the coaches and the soldiers ordering men, women and children out of them. We then witnessed heart-rending scenes, old couples forced to part from each other, mothers made to abandon their young daughters, since the latter were sent to the camp whereas mothers and children were sent to the gas-chambers.
All these people were unaware of the fate awaiting them. They were merely upset at being separated but they did not know that they were going to their death. To render their welcome more pleasant at this time—June, July 1944—an orchestra composed of internees—all young and pretty girls, dressed in little white blouses and navy blue skirts—played, during the selection on the arrival of the trains, gay tunes such as ‘The Merry Widow’, the ‘Barcarolle’ from The Tales of Hoffmann, etc. They were then informed that this was a labour camp, and since they were not brought into the camp they only saw the small platform surrounded by flowering plants. Naturally, they could not realise what was in store for them.
Those selected to be gassed, Claude Vaillant Couturier added, ‘i.e., the old people, mothers and children’, were ‘escorted’ to a red-brick building. They were not tattooed. ‘They were not even counted.’9 They were all gassed.
The only children who were not gassed at Birkenau were twins. For more than a year, Mengele, who personally made so many of the selections at Birkenau, had sought to become an expert on the medical and genetic problems of twins. He therefore continued to take out all twins, both children and adults, to a special barracks, and for medical experiments.
Few aspects of the history of the Holocaust are as horrific as these experiments. More than fifteen hundred Jewish twins were experimented on by Mengele in the eighteen months after his arrival at Birkenau in May 1943. Less than two hundred survived.10 One of those survivors, Vera Kriegel, recalled, forty years later, the moment when she and her twin sister Olga reached Birkenau. Speaking to a shocked gathering in Jerusalem she described first her arrival at the spot where Mengele practised his selection process, sending people with a flick of his finger either in one direction, to instant death in the crematorium, or in the other, to the labour camp. ‘Children were having their heads beaten in like poultry by SS men with their gun butts,’ she recalled, ‘and some were being thrown into a smoking pit. I was confused: I thought that this was some sort of animal kingdom or perhaps I was already in Hell.’
Vera Kriegel and her sister Olga were five years old at that moment of horror. Their father was among those sent to his death. The twins, and their mother, survived. They did so because, as Vera Kriegel explained to the court, Mengele ‘wanted to know why our eyes were brown while our mother’s were blue’.
Vera and Olga Kriegel were forced to live in a straw-covered cage for ten days, while Mengele performed his experiments. ‘They injected our eyes with liquid that burnt,’ she said. ‘But we tried to remain strong, because we knew that in Auschwitz the weak went “up the chimney”.’
Vera Kriegel also recalled in 1985 how, forty years earlier, she had entered an Auschwitz laboratory to find herself confronted by a collection of human eyes being used in experiments of which she, her twin sister Olga, and their mother were a part. She recalled: ‘I was terrified.’11
Among the Jews who died as a result of Mengele’s experiments were two Hungarian twins on whom Mengele had performed head operations, a thirty-year-old Jewish woman from Szombathely whose twin sister was also killed by Mengele or on his orders to allow for a comparative autopsy, and a one-year-old triplet from Munkacs on whom Mengele was said to have conducted a ‘postmortem’ under anaesthesis while the child was still alive.12
Although hundreds of young children died during these experiments, many in an agony of torment, others survived. To be selected for the ‘twin’ experiments in Birkenau was, by a grotesque irony, the o
nly way in which a child under ten could avoid being sent to the gas-chambers on arrival. Two twins who survived were Ernest Spiegel, who was already twenty-nine years old when he was deported to Birkenau from Munkacs, and his twin sister Magda. Both survived the war, although Magda’s own child perished. As the eldest twin in the male twins’ barracks, Ernest Spiegel was given the duty of supervising and caring for about forty boys, aged from six to eighteen, and of washing and feeding the younger ones. Without any books, paper or writing material, Spiegel also strove to teach them the rudiments of history, geography and mathematics.
Mengele allowed Spiegel to take school books from among the mass of belongings taken from the Jewish children who had been gassed, and with these books Spiegel taught them what he could. He was also in charge of the filing cards in the twins’ barracks. A fellow survivor later recalled how:
One day two little boys arrived with a Hungarian Jewish family transport. They were dressed exactly alike and thus it was assumed that they were twins. When they were brought into this barracks and he made out the file cards, Ernest discovered that the brothers had different birth dates. He realized they were doomed if it were discovered they were not twins, so he immediately went to the Jewish doctor in charge of the barracks—with whom he had become very friendly—and together they decided to keep the little boys as twins. They had to make it very clear to the children that they had the same birthday from now on, and thus the lives of these two little boys were saved.13
These two boys survived not only Mengele’s experiments on them, but also the war.
Not only Jews, but also Gypsies, were the victims of Mengele’s perversion of medical sciences. Another survivor, Vera Alexander, recalled in the same courtroom how two Gypsy twins, one a hunchback, had been sewn together and their veins connected by Mengele who concentrated on blood transfusions in many experiments. ‘Their wounds were infected,’ she said, ‘and they were screaming in pain. Their parents managed to get hold of some morphine and used it to kill them in order to end their suffering.’
Jews and Gypsies had both been chosen by Mengele for the ultimate senseless and barbaric suffering. As well as twins, he also selected Jews with physical deformities, hunchbacks and dwarfs in particular, in order to experiment on them as well. Among the Jews who reached Birkenau from Hungary in the summer of 1944 were seven dwarfs and three children of normal height, all members of the Ovitch family, who had been famous in the pre-war European music halls. Forty years later the eldest of the dwarfs, Elizabeth Moshkovitz, who was nineteen years old in 1944, explained how, when the family reached the selection at the railway ramp, Mengele did not believe that the ‘little people’ were Jewish. On discovering that they were, he became ‘very excited’ and was overheard to say: ‘I now have work for the next twenty years.’
Later, as Elizabeth Moshkovitz recalled, Mengele personally rescued the dwarfs from inside a gas-chamber in order to keep them for his experiments. These included injecting into the womb, and the pulling out of their healthy teeth, to compare them with those of normal humans. The three members of the Ovitch family who were of normal height were allowed to live to serve their little brothers and sisters. All of them survived.
On one occasion, Mengele exhibited the entire Ovitch family naked at the SS hospital, in front of an audience of SS officers and camp guards, many of whom had been brought by bus and car from distant camps. The dwarfs were displayed on a pedestal, along with a detailed family tree drawn by Mengele.
Various experiments were carried out on the dwarfs’ bodies, Elizabeth Moshkovitz added. The girls were forced to strip naked, and then to perform circus-type acts. Some were sexually abused.14
***
Among those murdered at Birkenau in June 1944 was the former Elder of the Theresienstadt ghetto, Jacob Edelstein. SS Lieutenant Franz Hoessler was present during Edelstein’s last moments. An eye-witness, Yossl Rosensaft, recalled a year later:
Jacob was in the same barracks as I was—number 13—on that Monday morning. It was about nine a.m. and he was saying his morning prayers, wrapped in his prayer shawl. Suddenly the door burst open and Hoessler strutted in, accompanied by three SS men. He called out Jacob’s name. Jacob did not move. Hoessler screamed: ‘I am waiting for you, hurry up.’
Jacob turned round very slowly, faced Hoessler and said quietly: ‘Of the last moments on this earth, allotted to me by the Almighty, I am the master, not you.’ Whereupon he turned back to face the wall and finished his prayers. He then folded his prayer shawl unhurriedly, handed it to one of the inmates and said to Hoessler: ‘I am now ready.’
Hoessler stood there all the while without uttering a word, and marched out when Edelstein was ready. Edelstein followed him and the three SS men made up the rear. We have never seen Jacob Edelstein again.15
On June 16 the Jews of the Lodz ghetto were confronted by a proclamation appealing for ‘voluntary registration for labour outside the ghetto’. According to the proclamation, parents whose children were ‘old enough to work’ could register their children for such labour. Those who volunteered could ‘collect their rations immediately, without waiting their turn’.16
The destination of the volunteers was unknown in the ghetto. The Chronicle recorded that they had been told by the Gestapo Commissioner, Gunter Fuchs, that their task would be ‘the clearing away of debris in cities that have been bombed’. This assurance, the Chronicle added, ‘somewhat alleviates the terror occasioned by every previous resettlement’.
The Germans had asked for more than three thousand Jews a week, for three weeks. The first, it was said, were to go to Munich ‘to clear away debris’. The proclamation calling for volunteers was signed by the Eldest of the Ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski. Two earlier registrations in the previous month had indeed been for labour. This one, however, was for Chelmno.
During June 16 the head of the German administration in Lodz, Hans Biebow, went to see Rumkowski. Biebow was seen entering Rumkowski’s office ‘in a highly excited state’. Once there, he had struck Rumkowski a savage blow to the face. The reason for this attack was, and remains, unknown. In the ghetto, it was believed that Rumkowski had insisted that he was ‘unable to comply’ with the new, large-scale demands for manpower.17
On June 22 the search for deportees intensified. That day, Oskar Rosenfeld recorded the arrival of the German police at an apartment in which they believed they could find all eleven members of a family named Szmulewicz. ‘They knock at the door,’ Rosenfeld wrote, ‘shove it open, and question the occupant’:
‘Does the Szmulewicz family live here?’
‘They used to. Now I do. Dawid Botwin. I took over their apartment.’
‘What about Mordko Szmulewicz?’
‘Dead.’
‘Szaja?’
‘Dead.’
‘Lajzer and Sure Szmulewicz?’
‘Resettled.’
‘Jankel?’
‘Jumped out the window. Dead.’
‘Chawe Szmulewicz?’
‘Resettled.’
‘Mojsze Szmulewicz, the fifteen-year-old?’
‘Shot to death near the barbed wire.’
‘The two brothers, Boruch and Hersz?’
‘Tried to escape to Warsaw. Didn’t make it.’
‘Boruch’s son Josef?’
‘No idea. Never came to the ghetto in the first place.’
‘The two officers look around the apartment. A miserable scene. No trace of the Szmulewicz family. Eleven people snuffed out. Nothing to be done now.’ The police had come ‘too late’. Rosenfeld commented: ‘Death has thumbed its nose at the authorities. Even the quickest hand is powerless against death.’18
The deportations from the Lodz ghetto began on June 23, and continued until July 14. All were sent to Chelmno, and to their deaths.19 To deceive the deportees up to the last moment, Gunter Fuchs assured the first of them while they were at the railway station on June 23, waiting to board the train, ‘that they would be working in the Reich and that dec
ent food would be provided’. It was only the shortage of passenger carriages, he explained, that made it necessary to load them ‘initially’ on to goods wagons. But they would be transferred to passenger carriages en route: ‘No one had anything to fear.’ News of these assurances, the Ghetto Chronicle noted, ‘spread through the ghetto like wildfire and had a somewhat calming effect’. In addition, it was noted that ‘the travellers’ of June 23 did not have to carry any of their luggage to the station; ‘everything was brought to the station in wagons. Everyone collected his hand luggage at the station, while larger pieces were stowed in separate freight cars. Everything was properly numbered. People were treated correctly.’20
The train set off into the unknown. On the following day the ghetto was ‘agitated’, as the Chronicle noted, because the wagons were already back at the ghetto station. People recalled the ‘frequent shuttle’ of wagons during the ‘great resettlement’ of September 1942, and the ‘alarming rumours’ at that time. As a result, ‘a wave of terror is spreading through the ghetto.’
A note was said to have been found in one of the goods wagons, indicating that the train had only gone as far as Kutno, thirty-three miles north of Lodz, when the ‘travellers’ had been transferred to passenger carriages. The Ghetto Chronicle commented: ‘The information has not been confirmed. No one has actually seen this note: so no conclusions can be drawn about the quick return of the carriages. Perhaps further transportation is being staged in Kutno.’21
On the following day, June 25, it was announced that twenty-five transports would have to leave the ghetto. The Chronicler Oskar Rosenfeld noted that day: ‘Reality has completely stemmed the tide of rumours. Ghetto dwellers are now being shipped out of the ghetto to perform manual labour,’ but he added:
The Holocaust Page 78