The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  More than 67,000 Jews were deported from the Lodz ghetto, not to safety, but to Birkenau. There, they faced the two-year-old selection procedure, the majority being sent, all unknowingly, to the gas-chambers, a minority being selected for the barracks. There was a third possibility, selection for medical experiments. Dr Miklos Nyiszli witnessed one such selection from among the Lodz ghetto Jews who reached Birkenau that August:

  When the convoys arrived, Dr Mengele espied, among those lined up for selection, a hunchbacked man about fifty years old. He was not alone; standing beside him was a tall, handsome boy of fifteen or sixteen. The latter, however, had a deformed right foot, which had been corrected by an apparatus made of a metal plate and an orthopaedic, thick-soled shoe. They were father and son.

  Dr Mengele thought he had discovered, in the person of the hunchback father and his lame son, a sovereign example to demonstrate his theory of the Jewish race’s degeneracy. He had them fall out of ranks immediately. Taking his notebook, he inscribed something in it, and entrusted the two wretches to the care of an SS trooper, who took them to number one crematorium.

  Dr Nyiszli’s account continued:

  Father and son—their faces wan from their miserable years in the Lodz ghetto—were filled with forebodings. They looked at me questioningly. I took them across the courtyard, which at this hour of the day was filled with sunlight. On our way to the dissecting room I reassured them with a few well-chosen words. Luckily there were no corpses on the dissecting table; it would have indeed been a horrible sight for them to come upon.

  To spare them I decided not to conduct the examination in the austere dissecting room, which reeked with the odour of formaldehyde, but in the pleasant, well-lighted study hall. From our conversation, I learned that the father had been a respected citizen of Lodz, a wholesaler in cloth. During the years of peace between the wars he had often taken his son with him on his business trips to Vienna, to have him examined and treated by the most famous specialists.

  I first examined the father in detail, omitting nothing. The deviation of his spinal column was the result of retarded rickets. In spite of a most thorough examination, I discovered no symptom of any other illness.

  I tried to console him by saying that he would probably be sent to a work camp.

  Before proceeding to the examination of the boy I conversed with him at some length. He had a pleasant face, and intelligent look, but his morale was badly shaken. Trembling with fear, he related in an expressionless voice the sad, painful, sometimes terrible events which had marked his five years in the ghetto. His mother, a frail and sensitive creature, had not been able long to endure the ordeals which had befallen her. She had become melancholic and depressed. For weeks on end she had eaten almost nothing, so that her son and husband might have a little more food. A true wife and Jewish mother, who had loved her own to the point of madness, she had died a martyr during the first year of her life in the ghetto.

  So it was that they had lived in the ghetto, the father without his wife, the son without his mother.

  Dr Nyiszli strove to overcome his personal emotions, sympathies and powerlessness. ‘By whose will’, he asked himself, ‘had such evil, such a succession of horrors, been made to descend upon our wretched people?’ His account continued:

  By an immense effort of self-control I got hold of myself and examined the boy. On his right foot I noticed a congenital deformity: some of the muscles were lacking.

  The medical term used to describe this deformity is hypomyelia. I could see that extremely expert hands had practised several operations on him, but as a result one foot was shorter than the other. With a bandage and orthopaedic socks, however, he could walk perfectly well. I saw no other deformity to be indicated.

  I asked them if they wanted something to eat. ‘We haven’t had anything to eat for some time,’ they told me.

  I called a man from the Sonderkommando and had some food brought for them: a plate of stewed beef and macaroni, a dish not to be found outside the confines of the Sonderkommando. They began to eat ravenously, unaware that this was their ‘Last Supper’.

  Scarcely half an hour later SS Quartermaster Sergeant Mussfeld appeared with four Sonderkommando men. They took the two prisoners into the furnace room and had them undress. Then the Ober’s revolver cracked twice. Father and son were stretched out on the concrete covered with blood, dead.

  Late in the afternoon Dr Mengele arrived, ‘already’, as Dr Nyiszli noted, ‘having sent at least ten thousand men to their death’, and ordered the bodies of the father and son boiled in water, so that the flesh could be taken from the bones. The boiling finished, ‘the lab assistant very completely gathered up the bones of the skeletons and placed them on the same work table, where, the evening before, I had examined the still living men.’ The skeletons were then sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.40

  In the SS doctors at Birkenau, with their pre-war medical training and qualifications, the transformation from good to evil was complete. The healer had become killer. The trained, professional saver of life, dedicated to healing, had become the self-taught, enthusiastic taker of life, dedicated to killing.

  ***

  For twenty-three consecutive days, the Jews from the Lodz ghetto were brought to Birkenau. On the third day, the head of the Sonderkommando brought in to Quartermaster Sergeant Mussfeld a woman and two children, ‘drenched to the skin and shivering with cold’. As Dr Nyiszli recalled:

  They had escaped when the last convoy had been sent to its death. Guessing what was in store for them, they had hidden behind the piles of wood that were used for heating and that, for lack of a better place, were stored in the courtyard. Their convoy had disappeared, swallowed by the earth before their very eyes. And no one had ever returned. Numb with fear and cold, they had waited there for some miraculous turn of fate to deliver them. But nothing had happened.

  For three days they had hidden in the rain and cold, with nothing to eat, their rags scant protection against the elements, till finally the Sonderkommando chief had found them, almost unconscious, while making his rounds. Unable to help them in any way, he had taken them to the quartermaster sergeant.

  The woman, who was about thirty but who looked closer to fifty, had gathered her waning forces and thrown herself at Mussfeld’s feet, begging him to spare her life and those of her ten- and twelve-year-old children. She had worked for five years in a clothing factory in the ghetto, she said, making uniforms for the German army. She was still willing to work, to do anything, if only they would let her live.

  All this was quite useless. Here there was no salvation. They had to die.41

  By the end of August, sixty-seven thousand Jews had been deported from the Lodz ghetto to Birkenau. Among them, Chaim Rumkowski, ‘King of the Jews’ of the Lodz ghetto, their protector and their mentor, was deported with his family, and perished in the gas-chamber together with more than sixty thousand other Jews from the ghetto over which he had exercised so much control, and, as he believed, protection.42

  None of the ghettos and camps in which at least some Jews had been kept alive for their labour, whether in Riga, Vilna, Siauliai or Lodz, was able to avert the final deportation, on the eve of their potential liberation. On August 6 the Jews in Kaiserwald camp were taken to the Riga docks, and loaded into boats. For two days the boats sailed along the Baltic coast. ‘There were no sanitary provisions,’ Maja Zarch, a survivor of the Dvinsk ghetto, later recalled, ‘and we were forbidden to go on deck.’ After two days the boats reached Danzig, and the Jews were taken to Stutthof. Other Jews arrived at the same time from the Estonian camps. All were shocked by what they saw: ‘Living corpses wandering aimlessly around, their eyes staring into nothingness, souls existing from hour to hour, with only the past as a crutch to lean on.’ Such was Maja Zarch’s description. ‘For a bit of amusement,’ she later recalled, ‘the Germans would put a woman in a crouching position on a narrow bench and make her stay like that until she would faint, or drop de
ad.’43

  While more and more Jews, and particularly Jewesses, were being brought to Stutthof from the camps in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, far to the south Jews were still reaching Birkenau. On August 16 a train from Athens arrived at Auschwitz with the 1,651 Jews from Rhodes and the 94 Jews from Kos who had been nearly a month on their deportation journey.44 Through the tiny window at the top of one of the wagons, the twenty-two-year-old Violette Fintz from Rhodes ‘saw some people without hair and walking like lunatics. I said to my mother, “I think we’ve come to a lunatic asylum.”’

  A voice was heard, through the carriage wall, calling out in Italian: ‘The children to the old.’ It meant nothing to those inside. Later they realized that it was a prisoner trying to save the young mothers, because if a mother was holding a child at the ‘selection’, she was automatically sent to the gas-chambers.

  EVACUATIONS FROM EAST TO WEST

  THE AUSCHWITZ REGION EVACUATIONS

  A few moments after this mysterious message, the door of the carriage opened. ‘They started with the dogs and the Germans and “Raus!”’ Violette Fintz recalled.

  It was about eleven in the morning. Amid the bedlam of noise and orders, the sun was shining. As Violette Fintz came down, she and one of her sisters were ordered to the left. Her mother, who tried to go with them, was seized by the hair by an SS man ‘with a huge dog’, and dragged to the right. She stood in the middle of the road calling, ‘My daughters.’ ‘I had the courage’, Violette Fintz later recalled, ‘to say, “Goodbye, Mother.” I never saw her again.’ She had lost sight of her father in the chaos and confusion, nor was she ever to see him again.

  Speaking only Ladino and Italian, and some Turkish, the Jews of Rhodes and Kos were bewildered by the babble of German, Polish, Yiddish and Hungarian all around them. Those who had not been sent to the right, and, within a few hours, to their deaths, were taken to an underground gallery and ordered to undress. ‘They started to shave our hair, under our arms, our pubic hair. That was done by men who were laughing, mocking, shouting, “Raus! Raus!” It was so difficult for us to understand the orders, to understand what they wanted.’ After being shaved, the women from Rhodes were sent to the showers, and then, coming out of the other side of the building they found ‘SS men holding bellows and shouting at us to bend over and pushed the nose of the bellows into our anuses and vaginas’. This, Violette Fintz added, ‘was their way of disinfecting us’.45

  Among those who had survived the journey from Rhodes was the Czech-born Sidney Fahn. Later he was to recall how, on the platform at Birkenau, he saw the last of his wife Regina and their tiny son Shani. ‘It happened so quickly,’ John Bierman has written, ‘that Sidney scarcely realized what had occurred. One moment they were side by side; the next they were forking off in different directions, he and Rudolf to the right, Regina and the baby to the left. He called out to her, and she turned eyes wide with uncomprehending fear on him before being swallowed up in the crowd of prisoners, kapos and SS guards.’

  Like many of the prisoners in the barracks at Birkenau, it was to be several days before Sidney Fahn could really comprehend that he would never see his wife and child again; that they had already, in the jargon of the barracks, ‘gone up the chimney’. Many years later Sidney Fahn recalled how, on his second day at Birkenau, ‘I happened to see a girl named Olga whom I had known in Bratislava and I gave her my wife and child’s photographs and documents and asked her to look out for them. But she just shook her head and said, “They won’t need these any more.” She had been there two years and knew all there was to know about Auschwitz, but still I didn’t realize what she meant. Then I was put into a barrack hut just one hundred metres from the crematorium in Block 4 and I could see the smoke rising all day and all night, and still I couldn’t believe it. Finally, after two more days, I believed it.’46

  Of the 1,673 Jews from Rhodes who reached Birkenau on August 16, only 151 survived the war. Of the 94 from Kos, 12 were to survive.47

  ***

  The Red Army was now reaching town after town in which tens of thousands of Jews had lived before the war. But with the exception of a few dozen Jews who had managed in each town to survive in hiding, mostly in Christian homes, the Jews were dead, and with them the Jewish life of many centuries. In liberated Lvov, one of the survivors wrote on August 24, with her husband Mulik, to a friend in Palestine:

  We were rescued thanks to our neighbour, a nun of noble birth, who at the last moment prevented us from going to the ghetto and persuaded us to hide. She had had a presentiment of the imminent disaster, but we did not believe her.

  It is impossible to describe that period of our life while we remained in concealment under the permanent threat of search. We were living in the vicinity of Zloczow while all the other members of the family were in Lvov (with the exception of Jozio who was in Brzuchowice). We have lost all hope of seeing Jozio again. Max is no longer among the living and the same is true of Nathan, his wife and his sister-in-law. The same happened to Polek.

  The heart has turned into stone, the pain takes our very breath away; we cannot even weep any longer.

  We dreamt of dying a natural death. By day and by night we kept with us a dose of poison, and great was our grief when that poison was poured out. We were afraid that we might fall into the hands of the Gestapo, where we would be unable to put an end to slow death under cruel torture.

  What can you know, who are living over there, of the horrors of such a protracted, excruciating death!

  We lived a life of that kind for over two long years, and the mark of Cain is engraved on our foreheads. You would not recognize us, so greatly have our faces changed. Mulik is beginning to regain his balance gradually, since he has succeeded in getting work. Instead of living the life of a criminal he is once more starting to live the life of a man who enjoys equal rights.

  There is no greater sensation in town than the appearance of a Jew in the streets. Only three per cent of the Jewish population have survived.

  The terrible events as well as the two long years of starvation have exhausted our strength. We have no clothing and no footwear. We had to sell part of our property in order to buy food. All the rest was pillaged by the murderers during the pogrom, when we fled from our home.

  Yet I do hope that we shall succeed in rebuilding our lives in view of Mulik’s diligence and talents, if we are treated in accordance with our natural gifts and not thrashed all the time with whips because we are Jews.48

  Where they could, Jews fought in the battles for liberation. On August 25, large numbers of Jewish members of the French resistance, mostly Polish-born Jews, took part in the battle for the liberation of Lyons. Other Jewish units, led by Robert Gamzon, successfully blew up a German military train at Mazamet, and participated in the liberation of Castres.49 In Slovakia, a special unit of Jews from the labour camp at Novaki fought in one of the main battles of the uprising, from August 31 to September 3, and later in the battle for Banska Bystrica.

  More than fifteen hundred Jews joined the sixteen thousand Slovak soldiers and partisans who took part in the revolt. Of the 2,100 partisans who were killed in action, 269 were Jews.50 One partisan battalion commander, Edita Katz, a Jewess, covered the retreat of her men with a machine gun, until her ammunition ran out. She then used hand grenades to hold off the Germans and the Hlinka Guard, until hit and killed.51

  Within four weeks of the outbreak of the Slovak revolt, the Jewish units, and the Slovak fighters, were joined by Jewish parachutists sent from Palestine, among them a woman parachutist, Havivah Reik, who was captured during the battle at Kremnica at the end of October, and imprisoned.52

  Among the Jews who were in Slovakia during the uprising, and survived, were two of the escapees from Birkenau, Rudolf Vrba and Czeslaw Mordowicz. During the uprising Mordowicz was captured and, together with several thousand surviving Slovak Jews, deported to Birkenau. The Auschwitz number tattooed on his forearm, if discovered by the camp authorities, would have mean
t the torture and execution always meted out to an escapee. But on reaching the tattoo barrack, Mordowicz had a magnificent multiscaled fish tattooed over and around the original number, and then a new number tattooed elsewhere.53

  The Germans reacted savagely to the Slovak uprising. Tibor Cifea, a Jewish partisan, was shot, and left hanging for three days as a warning.54 Pavel Ekstein was executed less than two months before his eighteenth birthday. In all, 722 Jews were ‘specially handled’ on the spot, mostly shot, or hanged. A Swiss Red Cross official, Georges Dunand, who was in Bratislava, tried as best he could to ameliorate the Jewish suffering. But Eichmann sent an emissary to Bratislava to ensure that the deportations were carried out, and a total of 8,975 Slovak Jews were deported to Birkenau.55

  Trekking southward from Slovakia, one of the parachutists from Palestine, the twenty-four-year-old Abba Berdichev, hoped to bring some succour to the Jews of Rumania, his birthplace. ‘I hope’, he had written before leaving Palestine, ‘that this time luck will be with me, because the desire and determination to fulfil my duty as a Jew is still strong.’ Berdichev was captured while still in Slovakia, charged with spying and sabotage, and shot.56

  At Birkenau, two separate policies were in effect. Simultaneously with the arrival of Jews from the Lodz ghetto, Rhodes, Kos, and from Slovakia, most of whom were gassed, other trains continued to take Jews from the barracks at Birkenau to the factories and labour camps of Germany. On August 29, while seventy-two sick Jewish adults and youths and several pregnant women from a labour camp at Leipzig, were brought to Birkenau and gassed, 807 Jews were sent from Birkenau to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, for work in a dozen nearby factories. On August 30, a further five hundred Hungarian Jews were sent by train from Birkenau to Buchenwald, to be sent on to a Junkers aircraft factory at Markkleeberg.57 Others Jews were kept in Buchenwald, from where, as one young Jew from the Lodz ghetto, Michael Etkind, later recalled, ‘no one escaped. No one was missing—except the dead.’58