The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  On December 11, the festival of Chanukkah, when Jews celebrate the miracle of the lights at the time of the Maccabees, the surviving Jews in Monowitz found some candles and lit them in memory of that distant day of salvation. ‘One of us’, Lindenbaum recalled, ‘said that in Palestine it is certain that they are celebrating; they are celebrating because the Germans are beaten.’ Lindenbaum added: ‘as for ourselves, we said a prayer for the dead. We wept. Our death was sure.’49

  In the labour camps and factory zones of Upper Silesia, Jews had always dreaded the day when they would be judged too weak to work, and sent back to Birkenau, not to the barracks from which they had come, but to the gas-chambers. On December 25, at Gleiwitz, more than sixty men were picked out at a roll call as unfit for further work. ‘Our numbers were recorded and we knew what to expect,’ Alfred Oppenheimer later recalled. ‘Had we not known, the commander of the hut told us that—informed us tactfully, and with feeling—that a few days later we would be taken to the chimney.’ But ‘the chimney’, all the chimneys, had ceased working; they had, in fact, already been dismantled. ‘We, as mussulmen, were already marked and chosen to be taken to our death. But there were no more freight trucks to collect the men. No one was taken to Auschwitz.’50

  Among the camps to which Jews had been taken from Birkenau in September and October was Lieberose. There, under German and Ukrainian guards, they worked to build a holiday city for German officers, at nearby Ullersdorf. In December, as the Red Army drew ever nearer, Lieberose was closed down, and more than three and a half thousand Jews were marched out. They were being sent to Sachsenhausen.

  Several hundred Jews were in the camp infirmary at Lieberose. On the eve of the march, they were shot, and the hut set on fire. The march then began. Each night, as darkness fell, the Jews were ordered into a field and told to lie down. At first light they would be marched off again. Some were too weak to rise. As the morning march continued, the marchers would hear the sound of firing.

  Less than a thousand of the marchers survived their ordeal. One of the survivors, Hugo Gryn, who had been sent to Birkenau from Beregszasz during the Hungarian deportations, later recalled how, during a moment of rest, sitting on the slushy roadside with his father, Geza Gryn, a lorry passed them by:

  …by coincidence it had my father’s name still painted on its side and back. He had been a timber merchant and somehow a part of his confiscated transport fleet and we were on the same road.

  It was a pathetic moment and to break the silence I said, ‘Just you wait—one day you’ll have it back again!’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think this was yours anyway!’ And then he explained that whenever he acquired a forest or lorries or suchlike, he rotated the acquisitions: something for my brother, something for me, something for my mother and something for himself. It seemed that everything I thought he owned was already a quarter mine.

  Though it was academic, I was both touched and impressed. Finally, I asked him, ‘Why did you do it that way?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I made up my mind long ago that anything I have to give I want to give with a warm hand—and not wait until I have to give with a cold one.’

  From Sachsenhausen, Hugo Gryn and his father were among thousands of Jews moved south to Mauthausen. And there, a victim of hunger and of typhoid, his father died. He was forty-five years old.51

  In another labour camp that winter, at Neumark, were several thousand women, likewise brought from Birkenau. Hundreds of them, too weak to work, were put into a special tent, and told that they were to be deported to Stutthof. No such deportation was in prospect. All were later shot at Neumark. While being kept in the ‘Stutthofers’ tent’, as it was called, their suffering became unendurable. Reska Weiss, who saw them, later recalled:

  No one was allowed into the Stutthofers’ tent. If anyone was caught visiting a mother or a sister, she was never allowed to leave the tent again. The Stutthofers were seldom given food, and on the rare occasions when it was supplied, it was placed on the ground in the dark in front of the tent. Then the strongest of them fetched it and distributed it.

  Entering the tent from the blinding snow-whiteness, I could hardly distinguish anything in the semi-darkness, least of all the women lying on the ground. The stench was overpowering despite the airy tent. After a while my eyes became accustomed to the light, and I was completely overcome by what I saw.

  I screamed in horror and shut my eyes to the sight. My knees trembled, my head began to swim, and I grasped the central tent-prop for support. It was hard to believe the women on the ground were still human beings. Their rigid bodies were skeletons, their eyes were glazed from long starvation….

  For two months the Stutthofers had lain on the ground, stark naked. The meagre bundles of straw on which they lay were putrid from their urine and excreta. Their frozen limbs were fetid and covered with wounds and bites to the points of bleeding, and countless lice nested in the pus. Their hair was very short indeed, but the armies of lice found a home in it. No stretch of the imagination, no power of the written word, can convey the horror of that tent. And yet… they were alive… they were hungry and they tore at their skeletal bodies with emaciated hands covered in pus and dirt. They were beyond help. The SS guards denied them the mercy of shooting them all at once. Only three or four were called out daily to be shot.

  For days I couldn’t swallow even a crumb of bread. The horror I lived through watching this agony will remain with me to the end of my days. Later I saw thousands of my fellow prisoners die from rifle shots, but even that could not compare with the terrible and unspeakable ordeal of the Stutthofers.52

  East of Warsaw, Soviet troops had reached Treblinka, and began at once to examine what was left of the former death camp. One of those brought to the site was Dr Adolf Berman, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. ‘I saw a sight which I shall never forget,’ he later recalled, ‘a tremendous area of many kilometres, and all over this area there were scattered skulls, bones—tens of thousands; and piles of shoes—among them tens of thousands of little shoes.’

  Berman picked up a pair of children’s shoes. ‘I brought it as a very precious thing,’ he told a court in Jerusalem sixteen years later, ‘because I knew that over a million of such little shoes, scattered over all the fields of death, could easily be found.’53

  40

  * * *

  The death marches

  At Birkenau, the gassing had ended at the end of October 1944. For two months, tens of thousands of Jews had remained in the barracks. Hunger and exposure took their toll. On 6 January 1945 Anne Frank’s mother Edith died in the camp. Anne Frank, deported from Birkenau to Belsen the previous October with her elder sister, Margot, died there of typhus at about this same time, a few days after Margot, falling from the bunk above, had, in her weakened state, died from shock on hitting the barracks floor.1

  In Budapest, as Soviet forces drew closer to the city, the deportations to the Austrian border came to an end. But in the city, the Nyilas continued to rob and torment Jews, and to threaten them with death. On January 6, as a result of negotiations between Raoul Wallenberg and the Hungarian authorities, it was agreed that five thousand Jews could be transferred to the ‘international ghetto’ under Swedish protective documents. A further five thousand Jews were moved under Swiss, Portuguese and Vatican protection.

  For eleven days, the 120,000 Jews of Budapest waited for the arrival of the Red Army. On January 11 a gang of about eight men wearing German and Nyilas uniforms entered one of the protected houses: twenty-six women, fifteen men and a child were killed.2 That same day a number of other Jewish protected buildings were attacked, and many Jews, taken to the bank of the Danube, were tied together in threes. The middle one was then shot, and the three thrown into the Danube, so that the weight of the dead man would pull down the other two.3

  Also on January 11, the Nyilas surrounded the Jewish hospital, seizing ninety-two patients, doctors and nurses, torturing them, and then shooting them. Only a single nurse was able to escape. On J
anuary 14, in the Jewish Orthodox hospital, one hundred and fifty Jews were killed, followed by the massacre of ninety Jews from an Orthodox almshouse, taken to the hospital and killed there.4

  On January 17 Soviet forces entered the Hungarian capital: 120,000 Jews were safe from any further Nyilas attacks. Only Raoul Wallenberg, one of their protectors, came to grief. Summoned to Soviet military headquarters, he was seized, and disappeared.5

  Soviet forces had also reached Warsaw on January 17. ‘We have no need to go back down into the bunker,’ Chaim Goldstein recalled. ‘Our cries of “We are free” have reached the ears of our comrades, who now came out into the street one by one. We fall into each other’s arms and kiss one another.’6

  Goldstein rejoiced at the moment of liberation. But for the rest of his life he was to be haunted by the bitter personal reality of the war years: his mother, aged seventy-seven, killed during a transport to Treblinka, his brother shot while trying to help her, his sisters both dead, although ‘time and place of death remain unknown’.7

  No more than two hundred Jews had survived in Warsaw, the remnant of more than half a million. Most of the survivors had been in hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw since the destruction of the ghetto more than a year and a half before. Among the survivors was an eight-year-old girl, Ania Goldman, my cousin.8

  ‘I was like a walker between two walls,’ Tuvia Borzykowski later recalled. ‘One was the recollection of the past years, the life in the ghetto, the stacks of dead bodies, the destruction of my people, the other was the hope for the future, in a world free of the Nazi scourge.’9 Feigele Peltel walked, on that day of Warsaw’s liberation, through the rubble of the ghetto. ‘Here a protruding length of pipe,’ she recalled, ‘there a bent iron rail, there a charred sapling—these are what is left of our devastated world.’ There remained only the search for her father’s grave in the Gesia cemetery:

  Wherever I turned, there was nothing but overturned tombstones, desecrated graves and scattered skulls—skulls, their dark sockets burning deep into me, their shattered jaws demanding, ‘Why? Why has this befallen us?’

  Although I knew that these atrocities were the handiwork of the so-called ‘dentists’—Polish ghouls who searched the mouths of the Jewish corpses to extract their gold-capped teeth, I nevertheless felt strangely guilty and ashamed. Yes, Jews were persecuted even in their graves.

  Deliberately, in order not to trample the skulls and not to slip into an open grave, we made our way through this place of rest to the spot where my father’s bones had lain. Though the location was well known to me, I could not find his grave. The spot was desolate, destroyed, the soil pitted and strewn with broken skulls and markers.

  We stood there forlorn. Around our feet lay skull after skull. Was not one of them my own father? How would I ever recognize it?

  Nothing. Nothing was left me of my past, of my life in the ghetto—not even the grave of my father.10

  Zivia Lubetkin was hiding in the town of Grodzisk, outside Warsaw, when Soviet tanks entered on January 17. ‘The people rejoiced and embraced their liberators,’ she recalled. ‘We stood by crushed and dejected, lone remnants of our people.’11

  Those Jews who returned to what had once been the Warsaw ghetto saw at first glance the meaning of the Holocaust. Whereas the Poles had already begun the slow and painful process of rebuilding their shattered city, and re-establishing their interrupted lives and careers, the Jews could not do so. Firstly, there were far too few survivors. Secondly, the former Jewish buildings had been levelled to the ground. Polish Warsaw was able to return to life as the capital of modern Poland. Jewish Warsaw was destroyed forever, and with it the ‘Jewish Nation in Poland’ which had been so vibrant a feature of the pre-war Polish state.

  The same was true of every city or town in what had once been German-occupied Poland. The Poles and the Jews both mourned their dead: but only the Poles had the numbers and the resources left to repopulate their cities. Unlike the Jews, many non-Jews had never even had to leave their homes. Whereas every non-Jewish family had suffered death and privation, few had been destroyed in their entirety. For the Jews, the vast majority of their families had been destroyed root and branch, so that for most families not a single individual remained alive, to return to claim a stake in the new world.

  ***

  In the expectation of the imminent arrival of Soviet forces, the evacuations from areas still under German control were accelerated. So too were the killings. On January 15, in a labour camp at Brodnica, a branch of Stutthof, all Jewish women too sick or too weak to be moved were shot. A few, however, outwitting their guards, managed to escape.12 In nearby Torun, a memorial tablet marks the common grave of 152 Jewish women, murdered by the SS in January 1945.13

  On January 17, at Chelmno, the SS prepared to murder the surviving members of the special Commando which, for the previous two and a half months, had been forced to dismantle the crematoria. A hundred Jews had been put to this work. By mid-January only forty-one were still alive. There had been no work that final day, Mordechai Zurawski later recalled, ‘and we were placed in a row; each man had a bottle on his head and they amused themselves shooting at the bottles. When the bottle was hit, the man survived, but if the bullet landed below the mark he had had it.’

  On the night of January 17 the SS entered the barracks at Chelmno and one of them, waving his flashlight, demanded, ‘Five men follow me!’ Five people were taken out, Zurawski later recalled, ‘and we heard five shots’. Then someone else came in and shouted, ‘Five more—out!’ More shots; then a third group of five was taken out. Further shots, then a fourth group was called, among them Zurawski. ‘The SS man came in,’ he recalled. ‘I hid behind the door—I had a knife in my hand; I jumped on the SS man and stabbed him. I broke his flashlight and stabbed right and left, and I escaped.’

  Running from the camp, Zurawski was shot in the foot. But he managed to reach the safety of the dense woods.14

  A second Jew of the forty-one had also survived. Unknown to Zurawski, in the first group that had been taken out to be shot, one had been gravely wounded, but had not died. This was Shimon Srebnik, who later recalled being ordered out of the barracks:

  I was the youngest. I also ran. I didn’t even put on my trousers. I just had my pants and singlet. And there was another boy from Czechoslovakia. He was a doctor. He got some sort of a shock. He began singing and dancing. And Lentz, our transport man, asked where to put us. And Bothmann said, ‘A bit further from here,’ and he told us that we should lie down. We lay down, the first five, and when we were thus lying, I heard some sort of a noise, and then I was hit.

  The bullet had entered through the nape of Srebnik’s neck, and came out through his mouth. At the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the court was shown the scar. His account of the shooting continued:

  After a few minutes, I regained my consciousness, and when he passed by, I stopped breathing, so that he should think that I am dead. I was just lying there.

  And then there was another group of five. They shot them, and then the third group of five, in turn, and they were also shot. There was one soldier who was just guarding the groups of dead people and finishing off those who still showed signs of life.

  I was lying down and he would pass by, and when he heard some signs of life—there were all sorts of movements—so he would finish them off with a second shot.

  Then I ran away. I ran away when his gaze was not fixed on me, and I was hiding in the hut of a Gentile up to the liberation.

  When the Russians came, I was looking through a hole in a stable. I thought it was a dream. I didn’t know what was going on. Somebody came in, opened the door, and said to me, ‘You can now go out. The Russians have already arrived.’

  A Russian physician gave Srebnik only twelve to twenty-four hours to survive: it was thought that the bullet had broken his spine.15

  ***

  On January 17, as Soviet forces entered Budapest and Warsaw, Auschwitz lay finally exposed to i
mminent assault. A count was made of the number of Jews and other prisoners. At Birkenau, there remained 15,058, mostly Jews; at Auschwitz, 16,226, mostly Poles brought there after the Warsaw uprising the previous August; at Monowitz, 10,233, Jews, Poles, and forced labourers of a dozen nationalities, including British prisoners-of-war; and in the factories of the Auschwitz region, another 16,000 Jews and non-Jews.16 On January 18 the order was given: immediate evacuation, on foot, often to a nearby railway junction from which they could be taken to a hundred different camps and sub-camps in western Germany, but sometimes by foot for hundreds of miles.

  Learning of the order to evacuate, many Jews believed that it was a trap, a subterfuge for their mass-murder. Inside Auschwitz, a group of inmates decided therefore to resist: to die fighting rather than to be marched away to their deaths. But, as Israel Gutman later recalled, the camp underground told them that it really was ‘evacuation and not execution’, and through evacuation, there was a chance of survival.17

  Thousands who were too weak to march away were shot in the camps themselves on the eve of evacuation. On the marches, tens of thousands were shot and killed wherever they chanced to stumble and fall: ‘Anybody who was weak,’ Gutman recalled, ‘anybody who had to sit down for a few minutes, was shot at.’18

  On the marches in the region of Blechhammer, fifteen hundred Jews were shot.19 ‘We heard shooting all the time,’ Alfred Oppenheimer recalled, of his own march to Blechhammer from Gleiwitz. ‘We were not allowed to turn our heads, but we knew what the shooting meant. All those lagging behind were shot dead.’ On reaching Blechhammer the marchers were taken to a hut to sleep. Suddenly Oppenheimer was awoken by the sound of voices: