Everyone knows that the situation is serious, that the existence of the ghetto is in jeopardy. No one can deny that such fears are justified. The argument that not even ‘this resettlement’ can imperil the survival of the ghetto now falls on deaf ears. For nearly every ghetto dweller is affected this time. Everyone is losing a relative, a friend, a room-mate, a colleague.
And yet—Jewish faith in a justice that will ultimately triumph does not permit extreme pessimism. People try to console themselves, deceive themselves in some way. But nearly everyone says to himself, and to others: ‘God only knows who will be better off: the person who stays here or the person who leaves!’22
Among those deported in this June ‘resettlement’ was Mordechai Zurawski. He later recalled how Hans Biebow told them that they would be sent to a labour camp near Leipzig. ‘For you Jews who work diligently’, he added, ‘it will be good.’
Zurawski, who recalled Biebow using these words, also remembered, at the railway station, words written in Polish on the wagons: ‘You are going in the carriages of death.’ But no one believed it. A few hours later, the train reached Kolo, and from there the Jews were taken in trucks to Chelmno, and gassed. Zurawski, sent to the ‘Forest Commando’ to cut wood for the crematorium, recalled how, when the deportees reached Chelmno, they were confronted by signs saying ‘To the bath-house’ and ‘To the physician’. Then, having been given a cake of soap and a towel, and told they were being taken to the shower room, they were put into special vans, and driven off. After three hundred metres, at the entrance to the crematorium, they were dead. ‘But in some cases,’ Zurawski recalled, ‘people still showed signs of life.’ When that happened, the van’s driver, a man named Belaff, ‘would pull out his pistol and shoot these people’. After the bodies had been burned, the bones were ground to a fine powder in a special ‘grinding apparatus’.23
On one occasion, Zurawski witnessed an incident when one of the SS guards ‘threw a living Jewish worker into the furnace’.24
Another survivor, Shimon Srebnik, was given the task of pulling gold teeth from the corpses before they were burned. One day, he later recalled, a boy who was working in the ‘Forest Commando’, taking corpses to the crematorium, saw his sister’s body. He determined to escape, succeeded in slipping off one of the chains wound round his feet, and with the chain still hanging from the other foot, reached the River Ner. There he found a Polish peasant willing to ferry him across the river. But, as Srebnik recalled, the peasant:
…saw the chain on his foot, so left him, went back to the bank, and ran to his house where there was a German. He said, ‘There’s a Jew escaping,’ and the German went out and killed him.
We didn’t know that, but at eight o’clock in the evening the SS Regimental Sergeant-Major came and told us, ‘Everybody out!’ and he told us to take a count—one was missing, and he asked us, ‘Where is one?’ and then he said, ‘Four people out!’ and the four went out and they went to the place where the body had been brought; they brought the body into the hut and then the sergeant-major said, ‘You see, he had escaped—this is his fate.’
And then SS Captain Hans Bothmann arrived at nine o’clock and said, ‘Fifteen people out!’ and fifteen people were taken out. He took out his pistol and killed them. Then he said to us, ‘You know why I did it?’ and we said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Because a man had run away and if any of you try to run away, I will kill you all.’
Srebnik also recalled another SS man, Master-Sergeant Piller, who, on Saturdays, would take four men out of the forced labour squads, and say to them: ‘You see this finger? If I move it this way you will stand up and if it moves that way you will lie down.’ It was ‘up and down and up and down until we were completely out of breath’. Finally, Piller ‘would whip out his pistol and shoot all those who remained lying down’.25
The renewed killings at Chelmno, like those in 1942, brought profit to the Reich. A note of September 9, two months after the renewed Lodz deportations, recorded 775 wrist watches and 550 pocket watches sent to the ghetto administration in Lodz.26
***
On June 23 the Red Army opened its Great Offensive on the White Russian and Baltic fronts. As Soviet troops pressed forward in the region of the Pripet marshes, Jewish partisans played their part behind German lines, disrupting the arrival of reinforcements, and seizing vital bridges. As Red Army tanks reached the partisan bases, Jewish partisans met victorious Red Army soldiers. But, ‘the tremendous wave of joy that flooded the heart’, Shalom Cholawski recalled, ‘could not remove the feeling of deep sadness; if only they had come two years earlier! Now that the day of liberation was here, there was no one left to free.’27
***
On June 24, a Pole, Edward Galinski, known as ‘Edek’, and the Jewish girl from Belgium, Mala Zimetbaum, escaped from Birkenau.28 Earlier locked into the ‘death hut’, Block 25, where those who were to be gassed from the barracks were kept, often for many days, naked and without food, the nineteen-year-old Mala Zimetbaum had escaped through an air vent with several others. Returning to her barracks, she had been given administrative work as a messenger. Fluent in French, German and Polish, she soon became the chief interpreter at Birkenau. Whenever she could, she would leave names off the selection lists, an act of considerable courage. While serving as an interpreter, Mala had fallen in love with Galinski, and together, she and her ‘Edek’ planned their escape.29
Edward Galinski had managed to steal an SS uniform for himself, and the uniform of a woman member of the SS, a camp guard, for Mala Zimetbaum. With the uniforms were the necessary SS identity documents. Together, he and Mala walked out of the main gate, and travelled by train to Cracow. ‘To all of us,’ Lena Berg later recalled, ‘this was an impossible dream come true and the prisoners’ pinched, starved faces lit up with smiles. Mala’s fate became our main concern. They had escaped, we told ourselves; they were free and happy.’30
It was rumoured among the prisoners that Mala had stolen a number of documents giving details about the gassing, and, as Raja Kagan later recalled, ‘that her intention was to make the documents public all over the world’.
For two weeks, Mala and Edek remained at liberty. But, according to one account, on reaching the frontier into Slovakia they were caught by customs officers, so Raja Kagan learned, ‘in a very silly way’. When they asked the officers the way, the officers became suspicious ‘that a couple in SS uniforms would come to ask for the road’.31
According to another account, the couple had been caught in Cracow, when Edek had called at some office for papers. ‘Mala was waiting for him outside on the stairs,’ Lena Berg was told, ‘and when she saw the Germans leading him out, she went with him.’32 According to a third account, it was in the village of Kozy, not far from Auschwitz, that Mala, alone briefly in a café, had been joined by a Gestapo officer. ‘He stared at her. Did he find her beautiful, or odd, or both?’ Mala, worried, had tried to leave. The officer had seized her. Edek, returning at that moment, could have left unnoticed in his SS uniform. Instead, ‘despite her desperate glance’, he joined Mala, and let himself be arrested with her.33
Mala and Edek were brought back to Auschwitz, where both of them were tortured. Raja Kagan was able to pass the hut in which Mala was held. ‘I asked her, “How are you keeping, Mala?” She answered peacefully and heroically, “Es geht mir immer gut”, “I am always calm”….’34
Several thousand Jewish women were witnesses of Mala Zimetbaum’s fate. This is Lena Berg’s account:
We were standing roll-call when Mala was brought back to camp. She was to be publicly hanged as a warning to the other prisoners that no one could escape from Auschwitz, that the only way out was via the crematorium chimney.
Mala stood in front of the SS men’s barracks, pale and calm, and the hearts of the thousands of women who watched her pounded with hers. She had disappointed them when her audacious dream of happiness and freedom had collapsed, but she was not going to disappoint them now.
No one knew how Mala got the razor blade; it was said that some charitable soul had slipped it to her earlier, when she was being questioned. Now she suddenly produced it and, before everyone, quickly slashed both wrists, severing the veins. An SS man ran up to seize the razor blade and she punched him in the face, screaming, ‘Get away from me, you dirty dog!’
The Oberkapo strode up to her and said, ‘You stupid Jewish whore, you thought you’d outsmart us, did you, that you could escape? You swine, is that how you show gratitude for our kindness?’
Mala had fallen to her knees, blood spurting from her wounds. Suddenly, she staggered to her feet and cried out in a terrible, loud voice, ‘I know I’m dying, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are dying, too, and your gangster Reich with you. Your hours are numbered and pretty soon you’ll be paying for your crimes!’
The SS men knocked her down and shot her. Then they dumped her in a hand cart and several women were ordered to pull the cart around the camp so everyone could see it. Thousands of women stood there in the setting sun saying farewell to Mala. Later it was said that she was still alive when they threw her into the crematorium furnace.
‘Mala’s death shocked the camp to the core,’ Lena Berg recalled. ‘She had been our golden dream, a single ray of light in our dark lives.’35
The fate of Edward Galinski has also been recorded by several survivors. The twenty-six-year-old Fania Fenelon, who had been deported from Paris to Birkenau in January 1944, and was one of the few ‘fortunate’ ones chosen for the Birkenau orchestra, later recalled:
On the other side, in the men’s camp, a gallows had been put up. Like us, the men prisoners were there, motionless, silent. Edek Galinski appeared, hands tied behind his back, unrecognizable. He who had been so handsome seemed no longer to have any face at all: it was a swollen bloody mass.
We saw him climb on to a bench. A snatch of the verdict in German, then in Polish, reached us; but before it was concluded I saw Edek move: he himself put his head in the noose and pushed back the bench. Jup, a camp Kapo, intervened, took his head out, made him get back on the bench. The speech was resumed, but Edek didn’t wait for it to end to shout: ‘Poland isn’t yet—’
We would never know the end. With a kick, Jup, his friend, tipped over the bench. An order rang out in Polish and thousands of hands were lifted to raise their caps. In final homage, the inmates of the men’s camp bared their heads before Edek, who had been their hope.36
On June 27, in the Lyons region of France, the Germans executed the Jewish resistance leader, David Donoff, known as ‘Dodo’. He was twenty-four years old. Four months earlier, they had shot the twenty-year-old Moise Fingercwajg, another of the leaders of the Jewish resistance groups which were an integral but prominent part of the French underground struggle. Donoff and Fingercwajg were two of more than eleven hundred Jews executed in France for their resistance activities.37
Each day saw a new development in the Jewish tragedy; on June 28 the advancing Red Army approached Maly Trostenets camp near Minsk. Russian aircraft attacked the camp itself. That day, the camp guards, Latvian, Ukrainian, White Russian, Hungarian and Rumanian SS auxiliaries, were replaced by a special SS detachment, all German, under German SS officers. This detachment locked all the surviving prisoners, Russian civilians, Jews from the Minsk ghetto, and Viennese Jews who had been brought from Theresienstadt, into the barracks, and then set the barracks on fire.
All those who were able to flee from the blazing buildings were shot. About twenty Theresienstadt Jews managed to escape the blaze and the bullets, and to hide in the forest until the arrival of the Red Army six days later. Taken to Moscow by their liberators, they were kept for two years in a Siberian camp on the Chinese border, before being released, in 1946.38
On June 30, the 1,795 Jews deported from Corfu reached Birkenau. An eye-witness of their fate was a Hungarian Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, who was then employed in Birkenau as doctor to the Sonderkommando. After the war he recalled how, on the morning of July 1, he was making his ‘morning rounds’:
All four crematoria were working at full blast. Last night they had burned the Greek Jews from the Mediterranean island of Corfu, one of the oldest communities of Europe. The victims were kept for twenty-seven days without food or water, first in launches, then in sealed boxcars.
When they arrived at Auschwitz’s unloading platform, the doors were unlocked, but no one got out and lined up for selection. Half of them were already dead, and the other half in a coma. The entire convoy, without exception, was sent to number two crematorium.
Work was accelerated during the night, so that by morning all that remained of the convoy was a pile of dirty, dishevelled clothes in the crematorium compound. I gazed sadly at the hill of rags, which, little by little, grew wet and soggy beneath a fine autumn rain.
Glancing upward, I noticed that the four lightning rods, placed at the corners of the crematorium chimneys, were twisted and bent, the result of the previous night’s high temperatures.39
In Vilna, on July 2 and 3, as the city awaited the arrival of the Red Army, there were two thousand Jews working in the Kailis factory, emaciated, but heartened by their imminent liberation. But more than eighteen hundred of them were seized and taken to Ponar, where they were shot. Less than two hundred workers managed to hide, and to remain in hiding until the Red Army entered the city on July 13. In the battle for Vilna, which had lasted five days, eight thousand German soldiers were killed.40
From Birkenau, more and more Jews were now being sent to factories inside the Reich. On July 1, one thousand Jewish men were sent to the synthetic oil works at Schwarzheide, on the Berlin-Dresden autobahn.41 Among those deported was a young Czech Jew, Alfred Kantor. ‘You dirty rats!’ the camp commandant at Schwarzheide addressed the new arrivals. ‘I’ll show you what a concentration camp really is! So you think you’ve been places?’42 Alfred Kantor noted, of one SS man at Schwarzheide: ‘Jumping on a man’s intestines makes him feel merry.’43
On July 4, one thousand Jewish women were sent from Birkenau to Hamburg, where they had to demolish houses bombed in Allied air raids.44 That same day, 250 prisoners from Alderney camp on the Channel Islands were put on board ship to be sent back to the mainland. The ship was attacked by British warships, and sank. All the prisoners were drowned. Most of them were French Jews.45
The Theresienstadt deportations to Birkenau had ceased on May 18, and were not to begin again until September 28.46 But two small deportations in July, and one in September, ostensibly of Jews in Theresienstadt who were to be exchanged for Germans in Palestine or Switzerland, had no survivors.47 One of those deported from Theresienstadt in July 1944 was Dr Erich Salomon, a pioneer photographer, whose photographs of pre-war statesmen had become a feature of international conferences. Salomon, who fought in the German army in the First World War, had been taken prisoner on the Marne, and spent three and a half years in captivity. In 1933, with the rise of Hitler, he fled to Holland, and it was from Holland, in 1942, that he had been sent to Theresienstadt, then, in 1944, to an unknown destination, possibly Belsen. Whatever the destination, he did not survive it.48
***
In March 1944 the surviving Jews of Cracow had been seized and deported to a camp at Plaszow. Here, while working as slave labourers, and subjected to the sadistic whims of the camp commandant, Amnon Goeth, thousands had been murdered. Near Plaszow was a factory which manufactured kitchen utensils, run by a German Catholic, Oscar Schindler, a man who, like all the factory managers in the neighbourhood, was allowed to employ Jewish workers.
Schindler, whose relations with the Gestapo were outwardly cordial, had always done his utmost to protect the Jews who worked in his factory. When the Gestapo tried to transfer some of his workers to Plaszow, Schindler, by bribery and persuasion, was able to keep them. By the summer of 1944, more than five hundred Jews were under Schindler’s protection.49
In Warsaw, the search continued for Jews in hiding. On July 10, thirty men and
several women ‘of Jewish origin’ were shot in the Pawiak prison.50
***
In France, a German-born Jewess, Marianne Cohn, had been active in helping Jews to escape through France to Switzerland. Caught by the Germans while accompanying a convoy of Jewish children to Switzerland, she refused to be freed as an ‘Aryan’ according to her forged documents, and insisted upon remaining with the children. She was executed in the early hours of July 8, together with five non-Jewish resistance fighters, at Ville-La-Grande, between Paris and Lyons.51 That week, the deportees from Hungary were being taken from the suburbs of Budapest. But the news smuggled out by the escapees Vrba and Wetzler in April, Mordowicz and Rosin in May, telegraphed from Switzerland to London and Washington on June 24, led to demands from the King of Sweden, the Pope, and the Geneva-based International Red Cross, as well as from Britain and the United States, to the Hungarian Regent, urging him to halt the deportations. On July 7, Horthy agreed to do so. On July 8, the deportations stopped.52
By this time, a total of 437,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported.53 More than 170,000 remained in Budapest, from where Eichmann had intended to begin the deportations in the second week of July.
On July 9 a Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, reached Budapest from Sweden with a list of 630 Hungarian Jews for whom Swedish visas were available. No longer in danger of deportation to Auschwitz, these Jews were desperate nevertheless for whatever protection they could receive.
Raoul Wallenberg, the man who now sought to protect the Jews of Budapest from further disasters, was the great-great-grandson of Michael Benedics, one of the first Jews to settle in Sweden, at the end of the eighteenth century, and a convert to Lutheranism. Wallenberg’s father had died of cancer three months before his son’s birth in August 1912. In his youth, Wallenberg had studied in the United States. In 1936 he spent six months studying management at the Midland Bank at Haifa: it was there that he had met many refugees from Hitler. In 1944 four American institutions, the American-based World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the State Department, and President Roosevelt’s recently established War Refugee Board, had persuaded the Swedish Foreign Ministry to send Wallenberg to Budapest, with instructions to do whatever he could to help save the surviving Jews of Hungary.54
The Holocaust Page 79