The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  When the man with the tools was standing near Dr Mengele, Mengele approached another boy. He was a tall boy in the first row. His face was round and he looked quite well. Mengele approached him, grabbed him by the shoulder and led him to the goal post which was on that field. It was a regular football field. There were two goal posts. He led this boy by the shoulder and the man with the plank and the tools and the hammer also followed them. He put the boy near the goal post and gave orders to nail the plank above the boy’s head so that it was like the letter L only in reverse. Then he ordered the first group to pass under the board. The first group of boys started going in single file.

  We had no explanations. We understood that the little ones who did not reach the board, who were not tall enough, would be taken to their death.

  It could have had no other meaning. It was one hundred per cent clear to everyone what the purpose of this game was. We all began stretching. Everyone wanted to get another half inch, another centimetre. I also stretched as much as I could but I despaired. I saw that even taller boys than myself did not attain the necessary height. Their heads did not touch the plank.

  Single file they passed under the plank and whoever was too short would be set aside and taken with the little ones who were doomed to go to their death.

  My brother was standing near me. I was so busy with myself that I didn’t even have time to think about him. He was tall. This was his sixteenth birthday.

  I was standing there quite desperately. I thought this was the end of my life and all of a sudden my brother whispered to me, ‘You want to live. Do something.’ As if I had awoken from a dream, I started looking for a way of rescue. My brain worked quickly. All of a sudden my eyes saw some stones near me. Perhaps this could be my rescue. We were all standing at attention in these lines and I bent down without being noticed, I picked up a few small rocks, I opened my shoe laces and started stuffing my shoes with little stones. I had shoes which were a little too big for me. I stuffed them with stones under my heel and this added about an inch to my height.

  I thought this might be enough. Then I saw that I could not stand at attention with these stones in my shoes and I told my brother that I was going to throw away the stones. But my brother said not to throw them away that he would give me something. He gave me a hat which I tore in two and stuffed into the shoes. This made it a little softer so that I could stand.

  I stood there for about ten minutes with these shoes full of stones and rags and I thought maybe I could make it. Then after about ten minutes all the boys would be passing under the board. Two would make it and two wouldn’t. I stood there and finally my brother kept looking at me and said, ‘No, it’s not enough yet.’ I was afraid that maybe out of excitement it would be difficult and they would notice that I have something in my shoes. My brother asked another boy in the third row to estimate my height. They all looked at me and said that I had no chance of making the proper height.

  I started looking for another device to escape and hide among those tall boys who had already gone under the board and had passed the selection.

  They were in groups of a hundred on the other side of football ground. And the little ones who were too short, they were on the extreme other side. And the little ones always tried to break away.

  I tried to infiltrate into the groups of the big boys. I thought maybe I was safe. But then another boy tried to infiltrate and Dr Mengele noticed that and he started shouting at the guardsmen and Kapos, ‘What are you doing? This is sabotage.’ And he ordered the entire group to be taken and again passed under the board. When I heard this, when we were taken again to the board, I again escaped on the way into my old place, in my old group. It was a narrow passage and I managed to infiltrate this old group.

  I thought that maybe I would live for another half hour with that illusion. Then after fifteen minutes I again fled into the group of the big boys. Nobody noticed this. And this is how the selection was ended. One thousand boys did not make the grade.

  Those who did not make the grade were taken to barracks 25 and 26 and then darkness fell. They were kept locked in these two barracks until about two days after the Day of Atonement.

  They were led to the gas-chambers. They were destroyed in the gas-chambers. Only a thousand boys survived.

  ‘There was an impression’, Joseph Kleinman concluded, ‘as though Dr Mengele wanted to show, “It says in the Jewish prayers for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur that the Jews are like sheep who are led under the rod.” And that he was the man who was leading us under the rod.’15

  The selection of one thousand boys at Birkenau on Yom Kippur was part of the ‘Goebbels calendar’. Dr Aharon Beilin, who was in Birkenau for more than a year, later recalled: ‘A Goebbels calendar, that meant that every Saturday and every Jewish holiday, they would empty the sick infirmary, and the blocks of mussulmen who did not go to work—they were taken away. And we had forgotten, on the eve of the Day of Atonement 1944, that it was a day from the Goebbels calendar. So, that day also, the mussulmen’s block was emptied, and the mussulmen taken to the gas-chamber.’16

  Leon Szalet also recalled that Day of Atonement in Birkenau:

  The moon shone through the window. Its light was dazzling that night and gave the pale, wasted faces of the prisoners a ghostly appearance. It was as if all the life had ebbed out of them. I shuddered with dread, for it suddenly occurred to me that I was the only living man among corpses.

  All at once the oppressive silence was broken by a mournful tune. It was the plaintive tones of the ancient ‘Kol Nidre’ prayer. I raised myself up to see whence it came. There, close to the wall, the moonlight caught the uplifted face of an old man, who, in self-forgetful, pious absorption, was singing softly to himself….

  His prayer brought the ghostly group of seemingly insensible human beings back to life. Little by little, they all roused themselves and all eyes were fixed on the moonlight-flooded face.

  We sat up very quietly, so as not to disturb the old man, and he did not notice that we were listening….

  When at last he was silent, there was exaltation among us, an exaltation which men can experience only when they have fallen as low as we had fallen and then, through the mystic power of a deathless prayer, have awakened once more to the world of the spirit.17

  ‘I remember one day when we were in Auschwitz,’ Sala Kaye has recalled, ‘my mother heard that it was Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement. She took our pieces of bread in the morning and did not let us eat until sunset. I remember that it was a very hot day. At evening one of the Jewish girls, who was an overseer, gave us a candle and before our meal of bread we lit it. I believe that my mother’s faith helped us to survive. And yet my father, who was so religious, did not survive.’ Nor did Sala Kaye’s sister Towa, killed in an air raid in the very first days of the war in 1939, nor her oldest brother, Joseph, in hiding near Radom, denounced to the Germans by Poles ‘one day before the liberation’, and killed.18

  A sixteen-year-old Jewish boy from Transylvania, Nahum Hoch, recalled sixteen years later how, in Birkenau, at the end of that Day of Atonement in 1944 he tried, having fasted all day, to get some extra food. ‘I did not get it,’ he explained, ‘I merely tried,’ and he added:

  The upper part of my body was put in an oven—the type they had there in Auschwitz—and I was beaten on the lower part of my body, with a stick which was very thick, the sticks which they used to carry the lunch pails. At first they gave me ten strokes. I fainted; water was poured on me; then the second group of ten blows was delivered; I fainted again—again they poured water on me, until I received twenty-five blows.

  I could not move any more; they left me right there and, to this day, I can only sit on the left side and cannot sit on the right side because of these blows. The bones were not broken, but I have a piece of flesh completely mutilated—a red wound—to this very day.19

  Among the Jews who were in labour camps in Germany on that Day of Atonement in 1944 was Levi Shalit. At the age o
f twenty-eight, he had survived the Shauliai ghetto and Stutthof. Now, near Dachau, he was forced to work, with thousands of other Jews, building a vast underground refuge for the bombed Messerschmidt aeroplane factory. Later he recalled how:

  Someone takes his stand near a tree, leans as if at the Holy Ark, and in the midst of fear and silence begins: ‘By the Heavenly Court… Kol Nidrei….’

  We gather closer to the cantor, a young Hungarian lad. Lips murmur after him—quiet, quiet, muffled words hardly manage to pass, remain sticking in the throat. Here stands Warsaw’s last rabbi, his face yellow, hairless, wrinkled, his aged body bent; his hands are rocking like reeds in the wind; only the eyes, sparkling stars, look out towards the cold sky above, and his lips, half open, murmur softly.

  What does he say now, how does he pray, this last of the rabbis of Warsaw? Does he lovingly accept the pain and suffering, or does he, through the medium of his prayer, conduct a dispute with the Almighty, asking him the ancient question: is this the reward for faith?

  Huddling to the cantor stands Alter der Klinger, the Kovno cab driver. His broad shoulders lean against a young tree and his mouth emits staccato sounds as if they were hummed out of his inside. No, he does not beg; he does not pray; he demands! He demands his rights, he calls for justice. Why were his children burnt by the Nazis, why was his wife reduced to ashes? He hums mutely, without words. He does not know the words, is not capable of saying the prayers by heart. Does the Lord require words? He requires the heart. Where, then, is His hearty, divine mercy? Since Alter, the cab driver, can’t find this mercy, he hums in revolt against the Almighty.

  Here stands Consul Naftel, his face drawn and worn. With his bowed head his figure reminds one of a bent thorn. Why does he cling so closely to the cantor? Why doesn’t he want to miss a single word? Has he become so pious?

  But, what difference does it make why Naftel called out to God near the crematorium of Dachau—he took poison on the day after Yom Kippur.20

  The Day of Atonement passed, and the gassing at Birkenau continued. Of 2,499 Jews sent from Theresienstadt to Birkenau on September 28, more than a thousand were gassed.21 Of a further 1,500 Jews sent from Theresienstadt on September 29, 750 were gassed.22 Of 1,500 sent to Birkenau on October 1, more than a thousand were gassed.23 From the transport sent from Theresienstadt on October 4, all women with children were sent to the gas-chambers.24 From a further transport which left Theresienstadt two days later, on October 6, all those who were sick, all women with children, and everyone over forty-five, was gassed.25

  One of those who reached Birkenau from Theresienstadt in the first week of October was Alfred Oppenheimer, a forty-three-year-old Jew who had lived in Luxembourg since 1926. Of the 723 Jews in Luxembourg who had not fled in 1940, only 35 survived. Oppenheimer was one of them. His wife had died in Theresienstadt. At the ‘selection’ at Birkenau, a Jew who was with Oppenheimer on the journey, a former Czechoslovak ski champion, gave his current profession, lawyer. He was sent to join those about to be gassed. Oppenheimer, warned a few moments earlier by a veteran prisoner to whom he had given his watch, said he was ‘a fine mechanic’ by profession. He also, as advised, reduced his age, from forty-three to thirty-eight. He was sent to the barracks, and he survived, being sent shortly afterwards to one of the factories at Gleiwitz.26

  In liberated Kiev, on September 29, Jews gathered to mark the third anniversary at Babi Yar. Among those who wished to commemorate their murdered relatives was Sara Tartakovskaya, whose father, mother and sisters had been among the murdered. ‘We came to the place of execution, to Babi Yar’, she later recalled, ‘and descended there, to the bottom. We were gathering the burnt bones of arms, legs. I drew out from the slope, by its hair, which was not burnt, a girl’s head with the remains of a scarf stuck to it. The head had two plaits, pins, and a hole in the temple. I was standing weeping: she could be my sister.’27

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  * * *

  Revolt at Birkenau

  At Birkenau the Jews of the Sonderkommando were preparing to revolt. It was an enterprise of supreme hazard, and of supreme courage. Those men who dragged to the crematorium the bodies of their fellow Jews who had been gassed and were then forced to scatter their ashes on the barracks paths, and in the nearby ponds, were themselves murdered in strict rotation. ‘I have wanted to live through it’, one of them, a Greek Jew working at Crematorium II, wrote shortly before the revolt, ‘to take a revenge for the death of my father, my mother, my beloved sister Nella.’1 More than three hundred Greek Jews were among the Sonderkommando preparing for revolt, among them Errera de Larissa, a former lieutenant in the Greek army.2

  In the nearby Union explosives factory, a group of Jewish girls had collected small amounts of explosives and smuggled them to the plotters. Among the girls were Giza Weissblum and Raizl Kibel, both of whom survived the war. The preparations, Raizl Kibel later recalled, ‘were in connection with rumours that at the last moment, as the front approaches the camp, the SS may want to annihilate everybody by blowing up the camp’.3

  Three girls in the Union factory, Ella Garnter, and two girls known only by their first names, Toszka and Regina, managed to smuggle explosives into Birkenau.4 They handed them to a girl who was working inside Birkenau, Roza Robota, who passed them on to Wrobel, a member of the Sonderkommando. Two other Jewish prisoners were also privy to the plot, Israel Gutman and Jehuda Laufer.

  Explosives were passed out of the Union factory hidden in a false bottom of a food tray. Israel Gutman has recalled how, on one such occasion:

  When I was standing near my friend he told me that there was a search going on. He told me that he had not time to put the explosives in the saucers and that the explosives were on his body in a cigarette package. I knew quite well that not only we would be killed as retaliation, but all the underground of Auschwitz was jeopardized.

  When they carried out the search they felt that I was trembling and they then searched me very thoroughly. When they didn’t find anything then they didn’t really look at my friend. Somehow or other they skipped him. Since I was a little excited they thought that I was the one who had explosives and not him.5

  Inside the Sonderkommando, Salmen Lewental coordinated the plans for revolt. His record, written at the time in a small notebook and then buried in a jar under the earth, is the principal source for the events of 7 October 1944.

  The Birkenau camp records show that four days earlier, on October 3, the number of Jews in the Sonderkommando at Crematorium II was 169, divided into a day shift and a night shift. At Crematorium III there were also 169 Sonderkommando on October 3, likewise divided, and at Crematorium IV a total of 154, also in two shifts. With the gassing at Birkenau coming to an end, the Sonderkommando were alert to any indication that their days too might be numbered, they who in their gruesome task were given the privilege of ample food and blankets, and such ‘comforts’ as they might need in their barracks.

  On the morning of Saturday, October 7, the senior Sonderkommando man at Crematorium IV was ordered to draw up lists for ‘evacuation’ of three hundred men at noon that same day. Fearing that this was a prelude to destruction, he refused to do so. The SS ordered a roll-call for noon. The purpose of the roll-call, the Jews were told, was that they were to be sent away by train to work in another camp. As the SS Staff Sergeant called out their numbers, however, only a few men answered.

  After repeated calls and threats, Chaim Neuhof, a Jew from Sosnowice who had worked in the Sonderkommando since 1942, stepped forward. He approached the SS Staff Sergeant, talked to him, and gesticulated. When the SS man reached for his gun, Neuhof, loudly yelling the password, ‘Hurrah’, struck the SS man on the head with his hammer. The SS man fell to the ground. The other prisoners then echoed Neuhof’s ‘Hurrah’ and threw stones at the SS.6

  Reporting these events at Crematorium IV, Salmen Lewental noted, of his fellow Sonderkommando:

  …they showed an immense courage refusing to budge [from the spot]. They set up a loud
shout, hurled themselves upon the guards with hammers and axes, wounded some of them, the rest they beat with what they could get at, they pelted them with stones without further ado. It is easy to imagine what was the upshot of this. Few moments had passed when a whole detachment of SS men drove in, armed with machine guns and grenades. There were so many of them that each had two machine guns for one prisoner. Even such an army was mobilized against them.

  Some of the Sonderkommando at Crematorium IV attacked the SS so viciously with axes, picks and crowbars that several SS men fell wounded and bleeding to the ground. Other SS men sought cover behind the barbed-wire fence, shooting at the prisoners with their pistols.

  Some of the prisoners then managed to run into their empty barracks, where there were hundreds of straw mattresses on the wooden bunks. They set the mattresses on fire. The fire spread at once to the wooden roof of Crematorium IV.

  ‘Our men,’ Lewental noted, ‘seeing they were brought to destruction, wanted to set fire to Cre[matorium] IV at the last moment and perish in battle, fall on the spot under the hail of bullets. And in this way, the whole crematorium went up in flames.’

  The arrival of SS reinforcements on motorcycles, from the SS barracks inside Birkenau, brought the revolt at Crematorium IV to an end. All those who had acquired implements, and all who had set fire to the crematorium roof, were machine-gunned.

  The blazing roof of Crematorium IV was seen by the Sonderkommando of Crematorium II. They took the flames as a sign that the revolt, for which they too had been preparing, had begun. Before they could act as planned, however, their well-prepared scheme was foiled by an accident of fate. At that very moment, a group of Soviet prisoners-of-war who were working in Crematorium II saw armed SS men coming towards the crematorium. The Russians, Lewental noted, thought that the SS were coming ‘just to take them away’. It was ‘impossible’, he added, ‘to restrain them in this last moment’.