Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (103 page)
The deportations from the Lodz ghetto began on June 23, and continued until July 14. All were sent to Chelmno, and to their
deaths.
19
To deceive the deportees up to the last moment, Gunter Fuchs assured the first of them while they were at the railway station on June 23, waiting to board the train, ‘that they would be working in the Reich and that decent food would be provided’. It was only the shortage of passenger carriages, he explained, that made it necessary to load them ‘initially’ on to goods wagons. But they would be transferred to passenger carriages en route: ‘No one had anything to fear.’ News of these assurances, the Ghetto Chronicle noted, ‘spread through the ghetto like wildfire and had a somewhat calming effect’. In addition, it was noted that ‘the travellers’ of June 23 did not have to carry any of their luggage to the station; ‘everything was brought to the station in wagons. Everyone collected his hand luggage at the station, while larger pieces were stowed in separate freight cars. Everything was properly numbered. People were treated correctly.’
20
The train set off into the unknown. On the following day the ghetto was ‘agitated’, as the Chronicle noted, because the wagons were already back at the ghetto station. People recalled the ‘frequent shuttle’ of wagons during the ‘great resettlement’ of September 1942, and the ‘alarming rumours’ at that time. As a result, ‘a wave of terror is spreading through the ghetto.’
A note was said to have been found in one of the goods wagons, indicating that the train had only gone as far as Kutno, thirty-three miles north of Lodz, when the ‘travellers’ had been transferred to passenger carriages. The Ghetto Chronicle commented: ‘The information has not been confirmed. No one has actually seen this note: so no conclusions can be drawn about the quick return of the carriages. Perhaps further transportation is being staged in Kutno.’
21
On the following day, June 25, it was announced that twenty-five transports would have to leave the ghetto. The Chronicler Oskar Rosenfeld noted that day: ‘Reality has completely stemmed the tide of rumours. Ghetto dwellers are now being shipped out of the ghetto to perform manual labour,’ but he added:
Everyone knows that the situation is serious, that the existence of the ghetto is in jeopardy. No one can deny that such fears are justified. The argument that not even ‘this resettlement’ can imperil the survival of the ghetto now falls on deaf
ears. For nearly every ghetto dweller is affected this time. Everyone is losing a relative, a friend, a room-mate, a colleague.
And yet—
Jewish faith in a justice that will ultimately triumph does not permit extreme pessimism
. People try to console themselves, deceive themselves in some way. But nearly everyone says to himself, and to others: ‘God only knows who will be better off: the person who stays here or the person who leaves!’
22
Among those deported in this June ‘resettlement’ was Mordechai Zurawski. He later recalled how Hans Biebow told them that they would be sent to a labour camp near Leipzig. ‘For you Jews who work diligently’, he added, ‘it will be good.’
Zurawski, who recalled Biebow using these words, also remembered, at the railway station, words written in Polish on the wagons: ‘You are going in the carriages of death.’ But no one believed it. A few hours later, the train reached Kolo, and from there the Jews were taken in trucks to Chelmno, and gassed. Zurawski, sent to the ‘Forest Commando’ to cut wood for the crematorium, recalled how, when the deportees reached Chelmno, they were confronted by signs saying ‘To the bath-house’ and ‘To the physician’. Then, having been given a cake of soap and a towel, and told they were being taken to the shower room, they were put into special vans, and driven off. After three hundred metres, at the entrance to the crematorium, they were dead. ‘But in some cases,’ Zurawski recalled, ‘people still showed signs of life.’ When that happened, the van’s driver, a man named Belaff, ‘would pull out his pistol and shoot these people’. After the bodies had been burned, the bones were ground to a fine powder in a special ‘grinding apparatus’.
23
On one occasion, Zurawski witnessed an incident when one of the SS guards ‘threw a living Jewish worker into the furnace’.
24
Another survivor, Shimon Srebnik, was given the task of pulling gold teeth from the corpses before they were burned. One day, he later recalled, a boy who was working in the ‘Forest Commando’, taking corpses to the crematorium, saw his sister’s body. He determined to escape, succeeded in slipping off one of the chains wound round his feet, and with the chain still hanging from the other foot, reached the River Ner. There he found a Polish peasant
willing to ferry him across the river. But, as Srebnik recalled, the peasant:
…saw the chain on his foot, so left him, went back to the bank, and ran to his house where there was a German. He said, ‘There’s a Jew escaping,’ and the German went out and killed him.
We didn’t know that, but at eight o’clock in the evening the SS Regimental Sergeant-Major came and told us, ‘Everybody out!’ and he told us to take a count—one was missing, and he asked us, ‘Where is one?’ and then he said, ‘Four people out!’ and the four went out and they went to the place where the body had been brought; they brought the body into the hut and then the sergeant-major said, ‘You see, he had escaped—this is his fate.’
And then SS Captain Hans Bothmann arrived at nine o’clock and said, ‘Fifteen people out!’ and fifteen people were taken out. He took out his pistol and killed them. Then he said to us, ‘You know why I did it?’ and we said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Because a man had run away and if any of you try to run away, I will kill you all.’
Srebnik also recalled another SS man, Master-Sergeant Piller, who, on Saturdays, would take four men out of the forced labour squads, and say to them: ‘You see this finger? If I move it this way you will stand up and if it moves that way you will lie down.’ It was ‘up and down and up and down until we were completely out of breath’. Finally, Piller ‘would whip out his pistol and shoot all those who remained lying down’.
25
The renewed killings at Chelmno, like those in 1942, brought profit to the Reich. A note of September 9, two months after the renewed Lodz deportations, recorded 775 wrist watches and 550 pocket watches sent to the ghetto administration in Lodz.
26
***
On June 23 the Red Army opened its Great Offensive on the White Russian and Baltic fronts. As Soviet troops pressed forward in the region of the Pripet marshes, Jewish partisans played their part behind German lines, disrupting the arrival of reinforcements, and seizing vital bridges. As Red Army tanks reached the partisan bases, Jewish partisans met victorious Red Army soldiers. But, ‘the
tremendous wave of joy that flooded the heart’, Shalom Cholawski recalled, ‘could not remove the feeling of deep sadness; if only they had come two years earlier! Now that the day of liberation was here, there was no one left to free.’
27
***
On June 24, a Pole, Edward Galinski, known as ‘Edek’, and the Jewish girl from Belgium, Mala Zimetbaum, escaped from Birkenau.
28
Earlier locked into the ‘death hut’, Block 25, where those who were to be gassed from the barracks were kept, often for many days, naked and without food, the nineteen-year-old Mala Zimetbaum had escaped through an air vent with several others. Returning to her barracks, she had been given administrative work as a messenger. Fluent in French, German and Polish, she soon became the chief interpreter at Birkenau. Whenever she could, she would leave names off the selection lists, an act of considerable courage. While serving as an interpreter, Mala had fallen in love with Galinski, and together, she and her ‘Edek’ planned their escape.
29
Edward Galinski had managed to steal an SS uniform for himself, and the uniform of a woman member of the SS, a camp guard, for Mala Zimetbaum. With the uniforms were the necessary SS identity documents. Together, he and Mala walked out of the main gate, and travelled by train to Cracow. ‘To all of us,’ Lena Berg later recalled, ‘this was an impossible dream come true and the prisoners’ pinched, starved faces lit up with smiles. Mala’s fate became our main concern. They had escaped, we told ourselves; they were free and happy.’
30
It was rumoured among the prisoners that Mala had stolen a number of documents giving details about the gassing, and, as Raja Kagan later recalled, ‘that her intention was to make the documents public all over the world’.
For two weeks, Mala and Edek remained at liberty. But, according to one account, on reaching the frontier into Slovakia they were caught by customs officers, so Raja Kagan learned, ‘in a very silly way’. When they asked the officers the way, the officers became suspicious ‘that a couple in SS uniforms would come to ask for the road’.
31
According to another account, the couple had been caught in
Cracow, when Edek had called at some office for papers. ‘Mala was waiting for him outside on the stairs,’ Lena Berg was told, ‘and when she saw the Germans leading him out, she went with him.’
32
According to a third account, it was in the village of Kozy, not far from Auschwitz, that Mala, alone briefly in a café, had been joined by a Gestapo officer. ‘He stared at her. Did he find her beautiful, or odd, or both?’ Mala, worried, had tried to leave. The officer had seized her. Edek, returning at that moment, could have left unnoticed in his SS uniform. Instead, ‘despite her desperate glance’, he joined Mala, and let himself be arrested with her.
33
Mala and Edek were brought back to Auschwitz, where both of them were tortured. Raja Kagan was able to pass the hut in which Mala was held. ‘I asked her, “How are you keeping, Mala?” She answered peacefully and heroically, “Es geht mir immer gut”, “I am always calm”….’
34
Several thousand Jewish women were witnesses of Mala Zimetbaum’s fate. This is Lena Berg’s account:
We were standing roll-call when Mala was brought back to camp. She was to be publicly hanged as a warning to the other prisoners that no one could escape from Auschwitz, that the only way out was via the crematorium chimney.
Mala stood in front of the SS men’s barracks, pale and calm, and the hearts of the thousands of women who watched her pounded with hers. She had disappointed them when her audacious dream of happiness and freedom had collapsed, but she was not going to disappoint them now.
No one knew how Mala got the razor blade; it was said that some charitable soul had slipped it to her earlier, when she was being questioned. Now she suddenly produced it and, before everyone, quickly slashed both wrists, severing the veins. An SS man ran up to seize the razor blade and she punched him in the face, screaming, ‘Get away from me, you dirty dog!’
The Oberkapo strode up to her and said, ‘You stupid Jewish whore, you thought you’d outsmart us, did you, that you could escape? You swine, is that how you show gratitude for our kindness?’
Mala had fallen to her knees, blood spurting from her wounds. Suddenly, she staggered to her feet and cried out in a terrible, loud voice, ‘I know I’m dying, but it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that you are dying, too, and your gangster Reich with you. Your hours are numbered and pretty soon you’ll be paying for your crimes!’
The SS men knocked her down and shot her. Then they dumped her in a hand cart and several women were ordered to pull the cart around the camp so everyone could see it. Thousands of women stood there in the setting sun saying farewell to Mala. Later it was said that she was still alive when they threw her into the crematorium furnace.
‘Mala’s death shocked the camp to the core,’ Lena Berg recalled. ‘She had been our golden dream, a single ray of light in our dark lives.’
35
The fate of Edward Galinski has also been recorded by several survivors. The twenty-six-year-old Fania Fenelon, who had been deported from Paris to Birkenau in January 1944, and was one of the few ‘fortunate’ ones chosen for the Birkenau orchestra, later recalled:
On the other side, in the men’s camp, a gallows had been put up. Like us, the men prisoners were there, motionless, silent. Edek Galinski appeared, hands tied behind his back, unrecognizable. He who had been so handsome seemed no longer to have any face at all: it was a swollen bloody mass.
We saw him climb on to a bench. A snatch of the verdict in German, then in Polish, reached us; but before it was concluded I saw Edek move: he himself put his head in the noose and pushed back the bench. Jup, a camp Kapo, intervened, took his head out, made him get back on the bench. The speech was resumed, but Edek didn’t wait for it to end to shout: ‘Poland isn’t yet—’
We would never know the end. With a kick, Jup, his friend, tipped over the bench. An order rang out in Polish and thousands of hands were lifted to raise their caps. In final homage, the inmates of the men’s camp bared their heads before Edek, who had been their hope.
36
On June 27, in the Lyons region of France, the Germans executed the Jewish resistance leader, David Donoff, known as ‘Dodo’. He
was twenty-four years old. Four months earlier, they had shot the twenty-year-old Moise Fingercwajg, another of the leaders of the Jewish resistance groups which were an integral but prominent part of the French underground struggle. Donoff and Fingercwajg were two of more than eleven hundred Jews executed in France for their resistance activities.
37
Each day saw a new development in the Jewish tragedy; on June 28 the advancing Red Army approached Maly Trostenets camp near Minsk. Russian aircraft attacked the camp itself. That day, the camp guards, Latvian, Ukrainian, White Russian, Hungarian and Rumanian SS auxiliaries, were replaced by a special SS detachment, all German, under German SS officers. This detachment locked all the surviving prisoners, Russian civilians, Jews from the Minsk ghetto, and Viennese Jews who had been brought from Theresienstadt, into the barracks, and then set the barracks on fire.