The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  Wallenberg’s first list of ‘protected’ Jews was given to the Hungarian government together with a Swiss list of seven hundred Jews whose emigration for Palestine had been approved by the British government. To guard these Jews against local hostility, a number of ‘protected’ houses were set aside for them.55 The deportations had already stopped. The months of protection, and diplomatic rescue activity, had begun. Within three weeks, at the initiative of the Swiss representative in Budapest, Charles Lutz, a large department store, the Glass House, was declared to be the ‘Swiss Legation Representation of Foreign Interests, Department of Immigration’, and several hundred Budapest Jews were able to register as Swiss-protected persons.56

  Anticipating every advance of the Red Army, the Germans continued to kill or move the surviving Jews of Eastern Europe. On July 12 the remaining eight thousand Jews of the Kovno ghetto were taken by train to Stutthof. But in those last hours, hundreds were killed in Kovno itself. ‘When we left the ghetto,’ Dr Aharon Peretz later recalled, ‘the entire ghetto was in flames. We saw groups of people gathering in the cemetery where they had dug graves and the corpses were put in graves. The entire ghetto was in ruins. There were feathers flying out of pillows, there were pieces of furniture, and there was a desert.’57

  At this moment of slaughter and deportation, a Lithuanian carpenter, Jan Pauvlavicius, who had already taken several Jews into hiding, including a four-year-old boy, built a hiding place next to his cellar for yet more Jews. This cellar he equipped with two bunks on which eight people could lie, and a small opening to the vegetable garden above, to provide the hide-out with air.

  Pauvlavicius was able to carry out his act of rescue even as the Jews were being deported from Kovno. Dr Tania Ipp, one of those whom he saved, later recalled: ‘He was like a father to us—a man only to be admired.’ As well as hiding nine Jews in the hole which he had dug next to his cellar, Pauvlavicius also found refuge elsewhere for two Soviet prisoners-of-war who had escaped from Germany, and for another young Jewish boy.58

  One of those whom Pauvlavicius saved at the moment of the final deportation was a Jewish woman, Miriam Krakinowski, who had managed to break away from the line of deportees in the confusion of the moment. On reaching Pauvlavicius’s house, she had been taken into the cellar, where Pauvlavicius took a broom, swept aside the wood shavings covering a small trap door, and knocked on the floor. ‘I saw a small door being pushed up,’ Miriam Krakinowski later recalled. ‘He told me to go down the steps. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I didn’t say anything. Gradually the room became lighter, and I found myself in a very small, hot room filled with half-naked Jews. I began to cry as they asked questions about the fate of the ghetto.’

  The Jews hidden in Pauvlavicius’s cellar remained there for three weeks, until the day of liberation. ‘After liberation,’ Miriam Krakinowski recalled, ‘Pauvlavicius was killed by Lithuanians who hated him for saving Jews.’59

  One of those deported from Kovno to Stutthof on July 12, Vera Elyashiv, has recalled the long train journey, in sealed wagons. ‘There were some who got hysterical,’ she wrote, ‘and some screamed in a terrifying way. People started to hit the wagon walls with their fists.’ Two men managed to break the small window and jump out. Through the cracks between the boards, Vera Elyashiv wrote, ‘it seemed that one fell under the wheels of the train and a second was hit by a bullet when he got on his feet and started to run.’ The train continued for two days. There was no food or drink, and ‘a terrible stench’. On the third day the train reached Stutthof:

  The door was slid open, and framed in a blinding sky was the fat face of an SS officer. He seemed quite revolted by what he saw. Withdrawing a little, he announced that all the women and children must come out and that the men remain inside, so that they could be counted separately.

  Soldiers’ hands and rifle butts got the reluctant, frightened and by now weakened women and children out of the wagons. I, as with most of the others, could hardly stand and hardly knew what was happening when suddenly the doors of the wagons were closed. I could hear father crying out my name, his cry almost drowned by the noise of the engine and the other cries. I must have tried to run, because I fell and when I got up I could see the back of the fast-disappearing train. This was the last I saw of my father.60

  On July 12 Shalom Cholawski entered his home town, Lachowice, now liberated by the Red Army. Before the war Lachowice had been the home of about three thousand Jews. ‘The streets were empty,’ he later recalled, ‘houses were entirely empty. The wind was blowing, but we were breathing the spirit of death….’61 On the following day, July 13, the first Soviet soldiers entered Vilna, among them many Jewish partisans who had joined in the final three-day battle for the city. One of those partisans, Abba Kovner, later recalled how he reached the quarter that had been the ghetto: ‘I saw a desert of ruined walls.’ The streets were empty. Then he saw a woman turn the corner of the deserted street, holding a girl in her arms:

  In the first moment she stopped and shouted and screamed and wanted to hide. Some of us wore German uniforms; booty, captured uniforms which we had been wearing when we were partisans. Perhaps she thought that the Germans had returned. The German army perhaps had returned. But once she recognized us, she ran towards us and in an hysterical voice she started relating her story.

  The girl whom she had been holding looked about three years old. Perhaps she may have been older, four and a half years, maybe. They had been hiding in a little cave in the wall more than eleven months. I don’t know how they survived in this dark hole. She broke down. She cried bitterly and in that moment the girl who was in her arms who looked as though she had been dumb opened her mouth and said: ‘Mommy, mother, may one cry now, mother?’

  And I was told that for these eleven months, the mother, day in and day out, told the girl that one shouldn’t and must not cry lest someone hear this outside and they be discovered. Now when the girl heard the mother crying, she asked her that question. I can speak of other scenes which I saw, but this matter of the girl, perhaps this speaks more eloquently than many other events.62

  On July 13, at a pit near Bialystok, a group of Jews were at work, as part of the ‘Blobel Commando’ set up in Bialystok a year earlier, digging up and burning the bodies of those massacred in the autumn of 1941. Suddenly, German soldiers armed with automatic weapons surrounded them in a semi-circle. ‘I was in the first row,’ Abraham Karasick later recalled. ‘I saw that near me they were coming.’

  One of the Jews pulled out a small pistol, and fired a single shot. ‘We heard a cry, “Comrades—run!”’

  Karasick ran, jumped into the pit, fell, jumped again, and crossed a fence. The Germans opened fire. Karasick was wounded, but ran on. One friend was with him. They decided to go towards the Russian front. On the first night they saw a light, and crawled towards it. It was the place from which they had started. ‘The bonfire was still burning.’ All day they hid. The next night they crawled eastward. For nine days they continued crawling. Finally, they crossed the front line. ‘My friend was killed, and I was taken to hospital.’ Who had killed his friend, Karasick did not know: ‘It was at night, the last night.’ Karasick survived.63

  With Bialystok under imminent attack, and even Warsaw vulnerable to a Red Army assault, the Germans decided to empty the Pawiak prison. On July 14, forty-two Jews employed in the prison workshops were murdered.64

  On July 15, as the Red Army approached one of the few surviving ghettos, that of Siauliai, in Lithuania, four thousand local Jews, and a further three thousand from the nearby labour camps at Panevezys and Joniskis, were assembled in Siauliai and taken by train to Stutthof, and other camps in East Prussia. A hundred Jews who remained in Siauliai were killed on the spot. Twelve days later, the city was liberated.65

  Such was the pattern of those July days in 1944: the Red Army approaching, the evacuation of the last thousands, the murder of the remnants. Those evacuated still had another ten months of war and terror in fro
nt of them. The handful who were able to hide, avoiding both evacuation and execution, welcomed their liberators and became survivors.

  36

  * * *

  July–September 1944:

  the last deportations

  Liberation and enslavement were taking place in the same days: on 18 July 1944 it was the turn of the 4,500 Jews of Rhodes and Kos to be caught up in the maelstrom. These new victims were descendants of Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. Their language was Ladino, a form of medieval Spanish, spoken by the descendants of Jews who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. For the Jews of Rhodes, Ladino was the language in which their Jewish communal heritage was most diligently preserved. Together with Hebrew, the language of their Bible and their liturgy, it had given them 450 years of cohesion.

  For many centuries, Rhodes and the islands around it had been a part of the Ottoman Empire, until conquered by Italy in 1912. Since 1936, under the Italian racial laws, Jews had been forbidden to be teachers, to employ non-Jewish servants, or to marry non-Jews. No Jew had been allowed to have a radio. But no Jews were killed, and none deported.

  Following the fall of Mussolini in 1943, Rhodes and Kos had been occupied by German troops, as were each of the twelve Dodecanese Islands of which they formed a part. The Jewish quarter of Rhodes was near the port. On 2 February 1944, during an Allied air raid on German shipping in the port, bombs had fallen on the Jewish quarter, leaving eight Jews dead. In a second air raid, on April 8, the eve of Passover, in a second Allied air raid, twenty-six Jews were killed, among them the sweetmaker, Morenu Mayo.1 These were the first victims of the war among two Jewish communities which had been unmolested for more than four and a half years of war: in 1944 there were 1,712 Jews in Rhodes, and 107 on Kos.

  On 18 July 1944 all Jewish men in Rhodes, and in the nearby villages of Trianda, Cremasti and Villabova, to which many had fled to escape further air attacks, were ordered to assemble at the Aviation Palace in Rhodes, formerly the Italian air force headquarters, on the following morning. It was believed that this was a call for labourers to build fortifications on the island.2 Once at the Palace, the Jews were made to give up their ties and their shoe laces. Two men were then sent back to the Jewish quarter to gather the women and children, the old and the sick. The women were told to bring all their jewels, money and rings, as they would need them ‘once they were interned’. No one had any idea what this internment would involve.

  The assembled Jews were kept in the Aviation Palace throughout the night of July 19. On the following morning a German officer came with a number of sacks to collect all valuables. One of those present, the twenty-two-year-old Violette Fintz, later recalled him as ‘the one with the white shirt: we never knew his name. He had an interpreter who spoke Ladino.’ The jewellery alone, she added, ‘filled four sacks’.3

  Among those who had been rounded up with the Jews of Rhodes, and was present during this looting session, was one non-Ladino-speaking Jewish family, the Fahns, from Czechoslovakia. In May 1940 they had escaped by boat from Europe; two brothers, Rudolf and Sidney, and Sidney’s wife Regina. Travelling with many other refugees down the Danube, they had, after a veritable odyssey, become separated from the others, and eventually reached Rhodes. Once in Rhodes, there was no reason why the Fahns should have expected danger.

  During the search for valuables, Sidney Fahn witnessed how, as he later recalled, ‘despite the occasional meek protest, the looting proceeded in a quiet and orderly fashion until one teenage girl refused to part with a gold chain and with a Star of David pendant. Without a word, the SS major stepped forward, ripped the chain from around her neck, felled her with a blow and kicked her as she lay on the ground at his feet.’4

  During the Jews’ second day at the Aviation Palace, Bay Selahettin, the Turkish Consul General on Rhodes, came with documents for thirty-nine of the Jews, who had been born in Turkey. These thirty-nine were at once released, as were thirteen similarly Turkish-born Jews on Kos, protected by the representative of a neutral state.5

  That night the mayor of Rhodes, Antonio Macchi, with a group of Italian volunteers searched the Jewish community to find the names of yet more Turkish-born Jews: among them Violette Fintz’s mother Rachel. At least three hundred more of the internees were on the list, but the exercise was in vain: that day the Turkish Consul had a heart attack, and no further rescue documents could be drawn up.

  On the second and third day of the internment, food was sent in to the Aviation Palace by local Italians. The Jews waited, ‘hoping against hope’, Violette Fintz has recalled, ‘that a ship would come and take us off the island’.

  On July 21 the air raid sirens sounded, and the people of Rhodes were ordered to stay indoors. Then the interned Jews were taken to the port. ‘Everyone went with their bundles,’ Violette Fintz later recalled, ‘the aged and disabled who were not able to carry their possessions and were lashed by the Germans, cripples with their sticks, the children crying.’ Three small petrol tankers were at the quayside. More than 550 Jews were put into each, like sardines, without food—no food at all.’

  On the afternoon of July 23 the three boats set off across the eastern Aegean, within sight of the Turkish coast. On the first night a Jew died. On the following morning the boat stopped at a deserted little island, and two men were allowed off with the dead man to bury him. After a second night at sea the boats arrived at the island of Kos, where ninety-four Jews were brought on board.

  The boats reached the Greek island of Leros. There, the captain, an Austrian, refused to continue the journey unless food was brought on board. Only after bread and water were produced did he agree to continue the voyage. For ten days, the boats continued on their way, without any further stops. Forty years later Violette Fintz recalled ‘the very cold, very rough seas, all the water on top of us; we were soaking wet. Everyone was seasick.’6 During the journey across the Aegean, five Jews died.7

  On reaching Piraeus, the boats were met by SS officers who ordered the Jews to disembark, beating the men with sticks, and pulling the women by the hair. The women who struggled against the order were pulled by the breasts; the men were struck in the face, ‘so hard they knocked out their teeth’. Others had their noses broken or their faces cut.

  The Jews of Rhodes and Kos were ordered up into trucks. ‘The moment you jumped in,’ Violette Fintz recalled, ‘you received a blow on the head.’ Fourteen Jews were left at the quayside, the sick and the elderly. ‘We never knew what happened to those people. We never, never found out.’

  The trucks were driven to Athens, to the detention camp at Haidar. There the Jews were ordered to come down from the trucks, ‘with whips and schnell and schnell and raus, as if the world was at an end. That was their principle, “Quick, quick, quick.”’ Once the Jews were off the trucks, the Germans demanded any hidden gold: ‘If anyone is hiding any gold, they must give it, or they will be killed.’ Thus was taken away the last remnants of such wealth as the Jews of Rhodes and Kos had acquired, most of them by a lifetime of hard toil.

  For four days the Jews were held at Haidar, again without water, with no beds or bedding, ‘sleeping on top of one another’. On the fourth day they were brought some soup. ‘A man was dying of thirst,’ Violette Fintz later recalled. His name was Michel Menache. ‘They gave him urine to drink, to quench his thirst. He died that afternoon. He was a merchant, a good man.’

  None of the assembled Jews knew what was in store for them. On August 3, after four days at Haidar, and two weeks after they had been taken off their beautiful island, they were lined up in rows of four, and driven with whips to Athens station. ‘We entered the trucks. We found a little heap of bread in one corner and a little heap of onions, a barrel of water, and a barrel for sanitary purposes.’

  Eighty Jews were pushed into each of the trucks, and the train set off northwards, travelling at night, and stationary during the day. Every two or three days ‘they would open the doors and tak
e out the dead people. Sometimes they would fill the barrel with water—not always.’

  After more than a week the train reached Hungary. ‘We saw when we arrived in Budapest white bread and butter sent by the community. But they would not let it in.’ Next to Violette Fintz was a year-old baby, so thirsty ‘that he was jumping on his mother’s face to lick off her sweat’.

  For fourteen days the train continued on its way. ‘My father said prayers and sang. We thought they were taking us on a holiday. We didn’t know what was happening in Europe.’8 During that two-week journey, a further seventeen Jews perished.9

  As the train continued northwards, Sidney Fahn, the Jew who had escaped with his family from Bratislava in 1940, realised that the train would shortly pass close to the town of Ruzomberok in the Tatra mountains, where his parents were still living. When the train stopped at Sered, Fahn saw through a crack in the carriage wall a man whom he had known before the war, and was able to call down to ask the man to telephone his father, to say that the train was heading his way. Receiving the message, Arnold Fahn, his father, went at once to the goods yard at Zilina where he learned that the train carrying his two sons, Sidney and Rudolf, his daughter-in-law Regina, and his nine-month-old grandson, Shani, whom he had never seen, would be passing through Zilina in a few hours.