About this time, the news first came in from the Vilna Ghetto.[*] Messengers were sent to Warsaw to tell what was happening there. We all sat on the floor, facing a young woman of about twenty-two, whose hair was already sprinkled with gray. In the twilight she looked beautiful and impressive, and her eyes were devoid of emotion. She spoke fluently, but sometimes her voice broke down and an oppressive silence fell.
It was a ghastly night. We members of Hashomer Hatzair[*] were hiding together in one apartment. We listened to the noises in the street. German trucks stopped and we heard shouting, firing, heartbreaking weeping. That’s how they emptied street after street. Where did they take them? To a forest in the vicinity, Ponar—apparently a scene of mass murder.[*]
Thousands of Jews have already been taken there. There are witnesses who escaped from the trench and said that they make men, women, and children stand in rows beside the trench and they shoot them. We are living in constant fear. I came here to tell you and warn you. We have reliable information about the liquidation of ghettos throughout eastern Poland, in the Ukraine, and in Lithuania! We’ve decided to defend ourselves. Half of us will stay in the ghetto, and the rest will try to find a way to reach the partisans. Abba Kovner[*] has written a proclamation calling on Jews to fight back, calling for armed resistance against the Nazis: We shall not go like sheep to the slaughter! We’ve decided that when our end comes, we shall not die without defending ourselves. And if we have no more weapons, we’ll spit in their faces; at least we’ll show them our contempt, before we die. But our deeds shall not be forgotten.
We were in shock. It was hard to believe—can they be murdering women and children? Is this what awaits us? They can’t kill innocent people just like that! The world will hear about it and cry out against it!
*
The occupants of the ghetto saw conditions decline steadily, with surprise raids targeting supporters of the underground, those engaged in various illegal activities such as smuggling, and with random terroristic executions, leaving bodies in the streets for all to see. Shortly, the highly orchestrated ‘aktions,’ great deportations to the newly constructed mass murder centers in Poland, would commence.[*]
Summer, 1942: The Great Deportation
In all the streets of the ghetto the Germans have put up large notices, in German. A proclamation on behalf of the German Reich states that all inhabitants of the Jewish quarter in the city of Warsaw are to be transferred eastward, to work camps. The expulsion will be carried out according to plan: six thousand people every day.
Every person is permitted to take five to ten kilograms of belongings and valuables. The responsibility for the execution of the decree is delegated to the Judenrat[*] and the Jewish police, by order of the SS. Exempt will be the people employed by the authorities—the Jewish police, the Judenrat, and hospital employees, as well as all those working in workshops for the Germans.[*]
I stood in the crowd and read the notice again and again. I didn’t get the full meaning. People were arguing as though they had gone crazy, trying to understand how many will be expelled. All the inhabitants of the ghetto are out in the streets, asking each other, trying to grasp the significance of the orders.
People walk around at their wits’ end, as though they had gone mad. They wander about in the streets, searching for a way out. In the meantime, the managers of the workshops, the workshops working for the Germans, are issuing new work cards. These become a matter of life and death. Whoever has protection—acquaintances close to the workshop managers—have a chance to buy such a document for money and jewels.
On that same day, they descended on our street and began to pull people out of their apartments by force. In the evening, I returned to the apartment with my father, and we only found a few of our neighbors. The building looked as though there had been a pogrom. The neighbors told us that they had given the Jewish policemen money and jewels, and in return, they were allowed to stay at home. The others were pushed onto carts and taken to assembly points. During the first days they also took the poor people lying about in the streets and patients in hospitals. Only those in hiding remained in the houses.
The Germans also published a declaration that all those who come on their own to the Umschlagplatz[*] would get three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of jam. Quite a lot of people gave in, as they had no strength left.
Distribution of the Leaflets
At six o’clock in the evening, after working hours, I reported in the attic of one of the youth movement houses, trembling all over with excitement. We gathered there, about ten boys and girls; no one knew why we had been summoned. When our leader Merdek arrived, I calmed down. I loved and admired him.
He brought many printed leaflets, signed by the Jewish Fighters Organization.[*] They warned the Jews to avoid being sent away at all costs—by escaping, by jumping from the railway coaches—for the destination is death, not a camp to live in. ‘The Nazi beasts want to exterminate all European Jews. That is the bitter truth. Do not give in! Fight them in any way you can!’
*
In the aktions of the summer of 1942, Aliza lost many of the teenage friends in her youth movement group.
An intense feeling of being orphaned engulfed me. It was maybe the first time in my life that I mourned deeply, a feeling I shall apparently have to cope with all my life. I was in despair, a state of apathy, feeling helpless. I’ll never see them again, never, ever. By what right am I still here? How am I better than they are?
I have no words to describe all the blockades, the hardships and wandering from place to place, the lack of food, the sanitary conditions, the nights in cellars on the damp floor, the suffering dulling the senses and leading to apathy in the face of the death of others. At that time, we lived like animals, fighting for our lives by means of a primeval urge for survival. This existential urge made us act instinctively. We had shed almost all the veneer of civilization, driven to flee by fear; but defeat in this battle came closer with every passing day…
*
Rumors began to circulate of a camp called Treblinka 100 kilometers northeast of Warsaw.
Most of the other members were pessimistic. They ceased to believe that it was possible to survive and began to prepare mentally for death. Black jokes hung in the air. A few called for vengeance and resistance immediately, but the older members persuaded the others to wait and consolidate the fighting organization that was being set up. This was veiled in great secrecy.
Again we distributed leaflets; the name TREBLINKA spread quickly.
*
July 16, 2013/Treblinka Memorial
We are in Warsaw now, my study group of 26 teachers of the Holocaust and our scholar-leaders Elaine and Stephen, and our wonderful guides.
We are booked into the top digs in the town. In fact, our hotel, the Bristol, is right next door to the Presidential Palace. This hotel was of course occupied by the Germans during the war, indeed mentioned in Leon Uris’s classic Mila 18. We go out occasionally at night, to purge some of the madness that, if you are not careful, on a study tour like this can begin to accumulate like a toxin in the soul. Light, refreshing conversation. Good Polish beer. And yes, laughter with fellow travelers, taking in the sights and sounds of a lively and resurgent Warsaw. There are many important places to visit, but little of the prewar Warsaw remains. We tour Jewish Warsaw and finally the remnants of the ghetto wall, and also the Umschlagplatz, the assembly point where upwards of 10,000 a day were forced to wait in the sun; it is here where the mass deportations to Treblinka took place.
And today we are bussed to Treblinka, about 50 miles northeast. The primary roads turn onto secondary roads. Towns become villages, villages become hamlets as we make the final approach on tertiary roads that are dirt. But now, there are railroad tracks that we cross, and then follow.
Treblinka I was a forced labor camp. Soon enough, orders came down to construct Treblinka II, a full-blown killing center authorized, like Sobibor and Belzec, within the parame
ters of Aktion Reinhard. The signage in English refers to it as the ‘Extermination Camp,’ like human beings were pests or vermin. Of course, to the perpetrators they were, and though they communicated with carefully camouflaged euphemisms (‘special treatment,’ ‘final solution’), it still feels like we are using the language of the murderers. Most of the Warsaw Ghetto occupants were murdered here, including, again, relatives of survivors I am close to.
When we arrive here, we go to a tiny museum where our guide Waclaw gives us the layout of the camp, overlooking a huge scale model, complete with the SS guard vegetable garden in the front. The trains would roll in like clockwork, at mostly ‘regular’ times, normal working hours; eight to one, break for lunch, then another transport to be processed. The morning group often waited overnight, and given the heavy rail traffic prioritized for the German Army, it sometimes took days to travel the relatively short distance to Treblinka.
The deception reaches its height at Treblinka. There is a false station front complete with a large clock and a suspended station sign—TREBLINKA—in capital letters. The barbed wire double fence is cloaked in trees, some branches even woven into the fence itself. New arrivals in transports of up to seven thousand, though sometimes just twenty railcars at a time, are uncoupled and shifted forward for ‘processing.’ The victims are sometimes greeted with a short speech by the camp commander, and then are directed to step down and disembark, to hand over all valuables, as they are at a ‘transit center.’
They undress in segregated areas, and are then forced to run naked down the ‘tube’—a camouflaged fenced-in path that led to the gas chambers. They are beaten by SS men and specially trained Ukrainian guards. The clothes are searched by the members of the sondercommando[*] and sorted, to be shipped back for reuse in the war economy of the Reich.
We move on to the site of the gas chambers. Even the ‘bath house’ has a Star of David, a Hebrew inscription that reads, ‘This is the gate through which the righteous pass.’ Once inside, the doors are sealed, and a captured Soviet T-34 tank engine is started, pumping choking carbon monoxide into the chamber.
After a quarter-hour, the people would be dead. Bodies would then be pulled out and cavities searched for gold or other valuables. The disposal of the corpses evolved, almost as a science, at some of these centers. Buried at first, near the end of the camp’s existence Himmler ordered that bodies be exhumed and cremated, to destroy the evidence of their crimes. Iron railroad rails would be set up and huge pyres would be created. Ashes were scattered, mixed in with the sandy earth, and plowed over. Treblinka was so far off the beaten path and so well hidden that for years the general public, outside of the locals, had no knowledge of it. It was pretty much gone by the time Soviet troops overran the area in late July 1944.
Between July 1942 and November 1943, probably near 900,000 people were murdered here. But a little-known part of the story focuses on the uprising that led to the camp’s demise, documented in narrative style in Jean-François Steiner’s 1966 book Treblinka. Under the noses of the SS and Ukrainians, a secret revolt manifested among the slave laborers. On August 2, 1943, six hundred attacked the guards, burned parts of the camp, and about half of them managed to escape into the forest. Most did not survive, but a few dozen did.
So we are at the scene of the crime, educators from across the USA, sharing this special bond, only 70 years later. Jagged upright memorial stones, 1,700 of them, emerge out of the landscape—one for each shtetl, town, and city purged of its Jewish population in Poland during the Holocaust.
Talli says, in between the tears that trickle down her face, ‘I feel such a presence here.’ I feel it with her.
Alan knows. A widower, he has become close to many on this trip—it is the presence of absence. ‘Treblinka manifests the presence of absence, and the absence of presence.’
We gather at the site of the gas chambers. Mindy is reading her poem. Talli is crying. Beryl shares a special story. Back on the bus, Elaine cups my face with her hands when I ask her if there is anything I can do for her; her eyes are overflowing with an anguish she must feel every time she comes here, but also a special kind of love for us as teachers, as witnesses. Her parents were survivors, and as an educator she’s led hundreds of teachers on this journey, but today is just as hard as the rest, maybe more so as time slips by. After the prayer for the dead, I go to the perimeter by myself, to wander along the vanished fence line. It’s not a huge place. It only had one purpose.
We are here for a couple of hours, and our group is alone, or so it appears. The wind sings and the pines sway with the presence of the dead.
I try to capture my thoughts and write in my journal on the bus ride back from Treblinka to Warsaw. My handwriting is nearly illegible due to the poor bumpy roads, underscoring the remoteness of this place where nine-tenths of a million people were murdered, burned, and plowed under the earth.
*
The Cauldron
Aliza Melamed Vitis–Shomron
The ‘kociol’ (‘cauldron’) began on the 6th of September, 1942. In the evening policemen went from house to house, from workshop to workshop, and ordered all the Jews to report the next morning at ten next to the workshops where they were registered. By then all must be in this small area enclosed on all sides by ropes, secured by the Germans.
What’s happening? Family members are debating: Should we go, or hide in the hiding place we’ve prepared? If we don’t go and they find us, the order is to kill anyone on the spot. And if we do go, maybe there will be some kind of selection and some of the residents of the ghetto will survive…
Father and Mother decided to go. My parents were promised a worker’s permit by the large shop of the German industrialist Töbens.
We walk with our usual backpacks to Lesno Street and join the line of thousands of fortunate people belonging to those workshops. The weather is hotter than usual, stifling summer heat, and we are wearing everything we were able to put on. Of course, one dress on top of another and a winter coat as well, for who knows where they’ll take us from here. Each one of us is afraid, but also believes that he’ll get through this selection.
I look at my mother, a young, beautiful woman, but her hair has gone white and her face is haggard. I have scissors in my backpack and I suggest that I’ll cut her hair short, to make her look younger. Father, a young man, very thin, his face is pale and drawn. He feels the responsibility, he is anxious about his family; my dear father, unable to help his children, me and my sister, aged nine, but looking much younger. Her hair is fair—she doesn’t look Jewish. She is clutching her mother, she cannot exist without her. She believes in Mother and Mother’s ability to save her.
I feel terribly hot and thirsty. We are approaching the line forming in front of the German manager. Next to him stands the Jewish manager of the plant, and he whispers to the German, telling him to whom to give the worker’s permit. Father and Mother receive the worker’s permit; my sister and I, of course, do not. The endless procession is approaching its destination, on order by the Germans. We are already in Mila Street. Now we are pushed from the lines of the Töbens factory people, pushed into the crowd; we hold onto each other with all our strength.
God! We mustn’t get lost among the thousands of people, sweating like us, totally exhausted by the tension, the heat, and the thirst. The silent question is reflected in their eyes: What do they mean to do with us here, in this cage? In this human ‘cauldron?’ Why did they concentrate tens of thousands of people here?
The commotion in the street increased. The Töbens workshop people were called to stand in lines, to go through the selection process, and then return home. The heat got worse. I threw my winter coat on a pile of things lying in a corner. I went with my family.
And now we are at the large wooden gate, built across the street. I go with my father as though in a dream. He is holding the worker’s permit in front of him. Two rows of Germans stand in front of us. Suddenly I hear a voice, asking in German:
<
br /> ‘Deine Tochter? Ist sie auch eine Arbeiterin?’ ‘Your daughter? Also a worker?’ ‘Yes,’ Father answers. A hand motions us to turn back and the same hand takes the worker’s permit from my father. Mother feels instinctively that something is happening to us and drops out of the line. Meanwhile the crazy procession moves on. I step aside, right up to the fence, and peep in to see what is happening on the other side—two rows of Germans, motioning to the people to go right or left. I see a mother with a little girl. They separate the girl from the mother. The mother, to the right—the child, to the left. The girl holds her hands out to her mother, crying bitterly and calling her desperately. The mother stops, tries to free herself from the German policemen holding her, wants to run to the other side, to the weeping child. Blows rain on her from all sides and in the end they drag her to the right. Now there goes a father with a baby in his arms. The German grabs the child from the father’s arms and throws it with all his strength on the ground. They beat the father with a rubber truncheon, until he loses his balance. The corpse of the baby is disposed of quickly.
Now I understood that they were taking all the children to be killed. What a miraculous instinct warned my mother so that she did not follow us, but moved back.
The evening fell. The gate of the selection was closed. They said that most of the people with worker’s permits had already passed through. Yet tens of thousands still remained in the ‘cauldron.’ Mother went up to me: ‘Liza, you are young… fourteen… my darling, take the remaining worker’s permit and try to get through tomorrow. Maybe people will help you and you’ll survive.’
A Train Near Magdeburg Page 10