The Holocaust

by Martin Gilbert

  We tried to move our limbs and began climbing the mountain slope with great difficulty. Genia was the one who hadn’t lost courage yet. Half-way up she told us to wait, she wanted to go down again and see if there were any survivors. But after some time she came back alone. We felt very sick because we had swallowed a lot of sea water; in spite of this Genia kept driving us forward. At last we came to the top of the cliff which had been entirely deserted by the Germans. It was twenty-five degrees below zero. We were covered with a layer of ice and unable to go any further. Genia told us over and over again, ‘We’ve got to go on!’ Then, after an hour’s staggering about in the snow, we suddenly saw smoke.

  The three women found refuge with a farmer called Voss. Later, when Voss tried to turn them over to the Germans, they were saved by two other villagers, Albert Harder and his wife, who fed and clothed them, and pretended that they were three Polish girls. One day a German officer asked Frau Harder for permission to take them out. It would have roused too many suspicions to refuse. Celina, now known as Cecilia, later recalled her evening with the officer:

  He led me to the spot along the seashore where I had endured the worst night of my life and said: ‘In this place our people murdered ten thousand Jews. It is terrible that Germans were capable of such a thing. I can only tell you that if the Russians march in, which is only a question of days or weeks now, they will do the same to us as we have done to the Jews. A German will dangle from every tree. The forest will be full of German corpses!’

  I felt faint and lost consciousness. When I had recovered we walked back to the Harders’ in silence. On the way back the officer also told me that two hundred Jews had survived the night massacre, but had been handed over to the Gestapo by the population of the surrounding villages among whom they had sought asylum. They had all been killed.

  He continued to pay court to me, assured me that I looked like his sister, and made a few attempts to go out with me. The night before the entry of the Russians, I remember him coming to Frau Harder with a suitcase at 11 p.m. in a state of great excitement. He had to speak to me at all costs—it could not wait till next morning. When I stood before him in my nightdress and dressing gown he opened the case and produced a mass of tinned preserves he had procured for family Harder from the officers’ mess.

  The German officer tried to persuade Celina to leave with him, ‘for woe betide you if the barbaric Russians get hold of you here’, but she persuaded him that she had to stay. Celina, for her part, urged the German to desert, and to throw away his uniform. ‘I cannot do that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to play out this bad game to the bitter end.’

  The German left. The Russians arrived. Celina and her two friends were saved. But none of the Russians, even a Yiddish-speaking Red Army officer, a Jew, could believe that they were Jews. ‘The Jews have all perished over there,’ they said, pointing to the sea. Only the emergence from hiding of ten other survivors of the massacre gave credence to the story of their survival. Of nine thousand and more marchers brought to the sea at Palmnicken, only thirteen had survived.41

  ***

  Freedom brought many hazards; among those who had set out from Auschwitz immediately after the liberation of the camp on January 27 was Ernest Spiegel, together with thirty-three of the surviving boy twins. Spiegel had been making plans to leave Auschwitz with another prisoner when the children had come to him and said: ‘Uncle, you promised to take us home.’ On the first stage of their journey, a Russian soldier driving a truck saw the children, and agreed to drive them to Cracow. During the journey, the truck was hit by another vehicle, and one of the twins was killed.

  For seven weeks Spiegel led the twins southwards towards his home town, Munkacs. During the journey, Soviet officers asked him to take care of a further 120 survivors who had been found wandering in the Tatra mountains.42

  For the liberated Jews, the dangers were far from over. On February 2 a woman from Russian-liberated Rokitno, in the Volhynia, wrote to her relatives in Palestine of the family’s sufferings in the war. ‘And now’, she added, ‘my Yechielke went off to take part in a committee meeting and fell victim to the Ukrainian nationalists.’43

  On February 17, the Jewish Sabbath, Szymon Datner, head of the Jewish regional committee which had been set up in Bialystok after the liberation, was summoned to the nearby village of Sokoly. There he found seven murdered Jews. The story he learned was as follows: earlier that day, all twenty survivors of the Jews of Sokoly had assembled in a room when a Pole had entered, and opened fire. Among the dead was a prominent local engineer, David Zholti, two brothers, Yankele Litwak, aged fifteen, and Shaikele, aged twelve, two other members of the Litwak family, Chaim and Shammai, a young woman, the twenty-year-old Batya Weinstein, and a man, David Kostshevski. Also murdered in that burst of fire was another woman, the twenty-two-year-old Shaine Olshak, and Tokele, the four-year-old orphan daughter of her sister.44

  Not only the enmity of the local population, but the weakness brought about by such long privation, often gave the first days of freedom a bitter twist. Esther Epsztejn, from Lodz, whose parents and two brothers had both been murdered during the war, recalled how, in February 1945, after she and a large number of women had been liberated by the Red Army while being evacuated from Stutthof, ‘Russian doctors did everything they could for us, but the mortality rate did not diminish. Eighty-five people died in five days, after we were liberated.’45

  ‘For the time being I go on living,’ a survivor wrote, from Kovno, on February 18. ‘How hard it is to walk about on earth that is so saturated with Jewish blood.’46

  41

  * * *

  The ‘tainted luck’ of survival

  By the end of February 1945, the factories to which the Jews from Birkenau had been evacuated in November and December 1944 were themselves within a few days of being overrun by the Red Army. On February 23 the Jews in Schwarzheide, on the Dresden to Berlin autobahn, were evacuated. The three hundred weakest were sent in open goods wagons to Belsen. There, all but one of them perished.1

  A month earlier, from a camp at Neusalz, on the Oder, a thousand Jewish women, many of them survivors of Auschwitz, had been marched westward and south, away from the advancing Soviet forces. As with so many of the death marches, they passed through many German towns and villages: on February 28 they were at Bautzen. One of those on the march, Gisela Teumann, later recalled how, ‘We passed through some German town. We asked for food. At first they thought that we were German refugees. The SS man who accompanied us shouted: “Don’t give them anything to eat, it’s Jews they are.” And so I got no food. German children began to throw stones at us.’2

  Of the thousand women who set off from Neusalz, only two hundred reached Flossenburg alive, forty-two days after they had been sent on their tragic way. From there, they too were sent on by train to Belsen.

  Belsen and Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck, and their many sub-camps, were now the destination of hundreds of evacuation trains and marches. Jews who had already survived the ‘selections’ in Birkenau, and work as slave labourers in factories, had now to survive the death marches. Throughout February and March columns of men, and crowded cattle trucks, converged on the long-existing concentration camps, now given a new task. These camps had been transformed into holding camps for the remnant of a destroyed people, men and women whose labour was still of some last-minute utility for a dying Reich, or whose emaciated bodies were to be left to languish in agony in one final camp.

  It was in Dachau that Violette Fintz, the Jewess from Rhodes, found her brother Leon. ‘I took him in my arms,’ she later recalled. “‘You must have the courage to go on,” I said. He said, “No.” He showed me where hot soup had been spilled down his leg. It had gone gangrenous.’ Violette Fintz was transferred to Belsen. Her brother remained in Dachau, and there, shortly after her own evacuation, he died.

  Violette Fintz was moved to Belsen. Forty years later she recalled how, among the masses o
f earlier evacuees, she found her sister Miriam. ‘She put her arms around me, saying, “Never will I be separated from you again.”’ Violette Fintz’s account continued:

  Belsen was in the beginning bearable and we had bunks to sleep on and a small ration of soup and bread. But as the camp got fuller, our group and many others were given a barracks to hold about seven hundred lying on the floor without blankets and without food or anything.

  It was a pitiful scene as the camp was attacked by lice and most of the people had typhus and cholera.

  Many girls died and we were all thinking that these were our last days. My sister Miriam had a very high temperature and she told me that if she did not get a little water she would die there and then.

  I took a tin and went out of the block to try and find some water. A woman pointed out to me that a block further away where there were children there was water.

  It is impossible for me to express the scene that was before me: piles of bodies already decomposing, in fact about a mile of bodies. Shivering at what I had seen, I still managed to go and find some water which I hid inside my dress so no one could see. This relieved my sister a bit.

  Many people talk about Auschwitz, it was a horrible camp; but Belsen, no words can describe it. There was no need to work as we were just put there with no food, no water, no anything, eaten by the lice.

  From my experience and my suffering Belsen was the worst. I came to the point where everyone was saying, ‘Violette is dying.’3

  On March 3 a train of evacuees from Gross Rosen reached Ebensee, a sub-camp of Mauthausen. These 2,059 Jews had mostly been sent to Gross Rosen from Birkenau, or from the labour camps in central Poland. On the train journey to Ebensee, 49 had died. On the first day in Ebensee, 182 died during the disinfection procedure. They had become too weak to withstand any further effort.4

  There was also a continual danger in the intensified Allied bombing raids. On March 20 many Jewish women in a camp at Tiefstack, near Hamburg, were killed when the camp was hit in an air raid, and burnt to the ground.5 The accidents of bombing affected both the eastern and western fronts: on March 26 a Russian bomb hit the Jewish hospital in Stutthof. ‘My sister was one of the victims of that bomb,’ a Kovno Jewess wrote. ‘All in all twenty-eight people were killed and thirty-five were wounded.’ The Jewess added: ‘It was fated that I should know where she was buried.’6

  With liberation apparently so near, the Jews were still not safe. In Stutthof, as this same Jewess wrote two months later, ‘If I had not seen with my own eyes how people were flung alive into the crematorium I would never have believed that any man could do anything like this to any other man. But that is the truth.’7

  Stutthof, and Danzig, remained in German hands. But one by one the many branch camps around Stutthof were liberated by the Red Army. At one of these, Pruszcz, nine hundred prisoners had died, most of them Jewish women deported there in the summer and autumn of 1944 from Auschwitz and the Baltic States. Only two hundred women remained alive on March 21, when the Germans fled and Russian troops entered the camp. One of the Jewish women, Sonia Reznik Rosenfeld, later recalled:

  As the horrible scene in the barracks met the eyes of the officer he stood transfixed and speechless. Then our ‘redeemer’, standing at a distance lest he be infected by our lice, asked us who we were. We told him we were Jews. To this he answered, ‘You are free! Go where your hearts desire. Our Red Army has freed you from murderous hands.’

  Everyone lay motionless, no one could utter a word. It is impossible to be freed when one already has one leg underground. As I could speak Russian better than anyone there, I told the officer that we were half-dead people, and I asked him where we would go, and how we would get there as none of us had a home any more for Hitler’s hordes had shot everyone’s family.

  The officer sighed, and with eyes full of pity he said, ‘Don’t be disheartened, unhappy women, as long as your pulses throb within you, you will yet be people like everyone else. Remain in your places and we will take you to our military hospital. There you will convalesce and each one of you will be able to go on your way.’8

  For many of those on the death marches, the distance they were from the Red Army could be calculated only by the sound of distant artillery fire, as their German guards drove them further and further away from the front line. When the Red Army drew too near, the marchers would be put in trains. Aliza Besser, one of the two hundred survivors of the thousand Jewish women who had marched on foot from the camp at Neusalz to Flossenberg, was among those who were sent on the next stage of their horrendous journey, by sealed cattle truck, they knew not where. On March 21, after three days and nights in the train, she noted:

  It’s almost a week already that we are in the trucks. No water. They die of thirst. Lips are parched. Every other day they give a few cups of water, occasionally they bring a bucket of water which is intended for seventy people. There’s nothing with which to take the water. There are only a few cups in every truck, and everyone wants to drink. Commotion breaks out, and the German guards pour away the water in front of us all. Water that no one drank….9

  Three days later, the train reached Belsen. Of the thousand Jewish women who had set off two months earlier, less than two hundred reached Belsen alive.10

  ***

  On March 30, at Ravensbruck, a number of women who were being led to their execution struggled with the SS guards. Nine managed to escape; but they were soon recaptured, and then executed.11

  The Allied forces now stood on German soil both in the west and in the east, advancing steadily on both fronts. In southern Germany, French forces were on the edge of the Black Forest. In the forest, being marched towards Dachau, a group of eighty-three Jews agreed upon a plan to run away. Their password would be the Jewish greeting over a glass of wine, ‘Lehayim!’, ‘To life!’ Many of these Jews were survivors of a sequence of deportations and evacuations, from the Vilna ghetto to the Estonian labour camps, from the Estonian labour camps, by sea, to Stutthof, and from Stutthof to a camp in south-western Germany. One of them, Meir Dvorjetzky, later recalled, of the march towards Dachau:

  …we were walking along and we saw that orders were being given that people should get off the street, get into the forest, and we saw a big lake in front of us. It was near Baden-Baden. We understood that here we were being led to be drowned in the lake. We walked in single file and we decided—we shouted ‘Lehayim’ and all the Jews scattered in all directions, and in the evening we found ourselves in the forest—eighty-three people we were; others may have been scattered elsewhere in the other forests; others were lying dead, hit by German bullets.

  We went on, we lived in the forest, we had no arms—it was a German forest—it was near Baden-Baden, a forest in Germany; the date was the end of March 1945—perhaps the middle of March; we had lost track of dates and days and hours—and we were there during the night. We would attack the foresters. They were even afraid of us—of the ‘mussulman’, of the prisoners; they would turn over bread to us—they had no choice. Then we would go elsewhere to avoid being caught and then one night we heard shots and we knew that we were in between the two fronts.

  We didn’t know who was fighting whom. In the morning the fighting died down; it was the end of that battle. One boy climbed up a tree and saw tanks—tri-coloured tanks—we understood that this was the French army. We shouted, ‘Liberté, Fraternité, Egalité,’ and we were put into the tanks and we went in those tanks into the German town of Solgau and there, we, the eighty-three Jews, entered with the French army into the town….12

  Liberation did not always bring allies or safety: on 2 April 1945, on the liberated soil of Poland, Leon Feldhendler, one of the leaders of the Sobibor death camp revolt in 1943, was murdered by Poles.13

  ***

  From the first days of April 1945 it became clear that the Russian and Western Allies would continue to advance until they met somewhere in the middle of Germany. But Hitler still hoped that the German army would be
able to hold out in one of the mountainous areas that remained under his control, either the Sudeten mountains or the Austrian Alps, and from there to continue the war.

  A new policy now drove the SS to prolong the agony of the death marches: the desire to preserve for as long as possible a mass of slave labour for all the needs which confronted the disintegrating German army: repairing roads and railway tracks, building up railway embankments, repairing bridges, excavating underground bunkers from which the battle could still be directed, preparing tank traps to check the Allied advance, and helping with the massive work involved in preparing mountain fortresses deep underground.

  Sixty per cent of those on the death marches were non-Jews; for the Jews, there remained the all-pervading Nazi obsession that Jews were not human beings, that they must be made to suffer. ‘This hatred of the Jews’, Hugo Gryn, a survivor of the death marches, has commented, ‘was the one fixed function of the Nazi ideology: all else could change, but the Jew must continue to suffer, and to die’. The death marches and death trains continued, despite the increasing chaos on the roads and railways following the collapse of both the western and eastern fronts.

  At the beginning of April, as Soviet forces approached Vienna, a group of thirteen hundred Jews, who had been set to work repairing Vienna’s badly bombed main railway station, were evacuated westward. Many of them were survivors of Theresienstadt, and of Birkenau. No food was issued on the march: the Jews ate whatever food they could find in the fields. Those who fell behind were shot. Only seven hundred reached Gusen camp, their destination, alive.14