The Holocaust (106 page)

Also on July 24, Soviet forces entered Majdanek. War correspondents from all the Allied armies gazed in horror at gas-chambers, crematoria, and the charred remains of human beings. Photographs of these remains were published throughout the Allied world. Hitler, watching with growing disdain the collapse of his armies, was roused to an outburst of rage, fuming, as SS Brigadier Walther Hewel reported, against ‘the slovenly and cowardly rabble in the Security Services who did not erase the traces’ in time.
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The Western Allies were now pressing towards Paris. But among the last trains to leave France before the railway junctions were bombed beyond repair, was one, on July 31, with more than three hundred children and young people under eighteen, among the thirteen hundred deportees. Among the deportees was a baby only fifteen days old, deported in the wooden box that had served as his cradle.
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Also on July 31, from the labour camp at Blizyn, near Radom, three thousand Jews were deported to Birkenau, as the Red Army drew ever westward. Many of the deportees were Jews who had been brought to Blizyn after the crushing of the revolt in Bialystok a year earlier. Among the deportees was the twenty-two-year-old Bertha Sokolskaya. As a teenager in inter-war Poland, Bertha had studied at the State Commercial Lyceum in Bialystok. Of her best friends at the Lyceum, Lucy Albeck was later killed in her apartment by the Nazis, and Inna Galay died at Majdanek. Two of Bertha’s cousins, Lena Fisher and Fannie Parasol, had left Poland for Palestine shortly before the outbreak of war. In 1939 her brother Menahem, who was living in Vilna, moved to Minsk. ‘That is all I know about him,’ she later recalled. ‘Nor do I know about the fate of my sister Eva who left Bialystok in 1939.’ In June 1941, with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, thousands of Jews had sought to escape eastward, among them Bertha and another of her brothers, Ovsey. During their flight, Ovsey was killed by a bomb fragment.

Of those deported to Birkenau, from Blizyn on July 31, more than five hundred were taken straight from the railway siding to the gas-chamber. Bertha was sent to the women’s section of the camp, for slave labour. On reaching the women’s camp she was tattooed on her forearm, her Auschwitz number: A. 15772.

Still able to work, Bertha survived. From the women’s camp at Birkenau she was sent to the labour camp at the nearby industrial town of Hindenburg. She was working at Hindenburg on her twenty-third birthday, a slave of the Reich.
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One large ghetto was still populated and working: the Lodz ghetto, where sixty-eight thousand Jews were still confined, following the
June deportations. ‘All thoughts, considerations, hopes and fears,’ the Ghetto Chronicle noted on July 22, ‘ultimately culminate in one main question: “Will we be left in peace?”’ The workshops were ‘functioning normally’. Rumkowski had urged the ghetto workers ‘not to allow discipline to slacken under any circumstances, in order to avert danger for the ghetto’.
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As news of the Russian advance reached the ghetto, there was growing optimism. On July 22 the Red Army occupied Chelm, east of Lublin. ‘The mood in the ghetto is rosy’, the chronicler Oskar Rosenfeld noted. ‘Everyone is hopeful of a speedy end to the war.’
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There was further cause for hope on July 25, when thirty-one postcards reached the ghetto, apparently from Leipzig, all postmarked ‘July 19,1944’. These were the first messages from a total of 6,496 deportees. They were either the result of coercion, or they were forgeries: for all the deportees had been sent, not to Leipzig but to Chelmno, where they had been gassed. The arrival of the postcards, however, gave the ghetto cause for optimism. As the Chronicle recorded:

Each dweller of the Lodz ghetto surveyed the future with a mixture of hope and foreboding. On July 31 the boy who had commented in his diary on the hopes aroused by the Normandy landings noted: ‘Although I write with a broken and hesitant Hebrew, I cannot but write Hebrew, for Hebrew is the language of the future, because I shall use Hebrew as a Jew standing proudly upright in the land of Israel.’
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Three days later, on August 3, the young diarist wrote again, in Yiddish: ‘Oh God in heaven, why dids’t Thou create Germans to destroy humanity? I don’t even know if I shall be allowed to be together with my sister. I cannot write more. I am resigned terribly and black spirited.’
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The days of security in the Lodz ghetto were over. Deportations were to begin again, in order, so the Jews were told, to move both men and machines to safer places, inside Germany, far from the front. The new deportations were to begin on August 6, in three days’ time.
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On July 27, the German army retreated from Lvov. Only a tiny remnant of this once flourishing Jewish community of one hundred thousand Jews had survived, among them ten of the Jews who had been hidden by Leopold Socha in the sewers underneath the city. This small group had heard the firing of the guns in the streets above. Suddenly they heard Socha shouting down to them, ‘Get ready, you are free.’ ‘The manhole cover was opened, and one by one we climbed out,’ Halina Wind later recalled, ‘some reluctantly, since they were still afraid.’ The manhole cover was in the courtyard of the house, inside which Socha’s wife Magdalene had prepared a table with cake and vodka. Some months later, Leopold Socha was accidentally killed, run over by a truck in the streets of Lvov. ‘As he lay on the pavement,’ Halina Wind recalled, ‘with the blood dripping into the sewers, the Poles crossed themselves and said that it was God’s punishment for hiding Jews.’
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In ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, on 1 August 1944, sixteen months after the ghetto uprising, Polish resistance forces challenged the German occupation, taking up arms with equal proportions of hopelessness and courage. The Warsaw uprising began as Soviet forces approached the eastern bank of the Vistula. Its aim was both to accelerate the withdrawal of the Germans from Warsaw, and to establish Polish control in the city before the Soviets arrived. Three separate Jewish groups, about a thousand Jews altogether, took part in the fighting. The first group consisted of the surviving inmates of the Gesiowka labour camp, those former Birkenau and Majdanek inmates who had been sent to clear the ruins of the ghetto. The second group was made up of the surviving members of
the Jewish Fighting Organization, those who had found hiding places in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw and who now formed a platoon of twenty-two Jews, commanded by Yitzhak Zuckerman. The third group was a Jewish ‘battle unit’, commanded by Shmuel Kenigswein, who, before the war, had been a boxer in Maccabi Warsaw. In 1939 Kenigswein had been a sergeant in the Polish army. His unit was made up of more than forty former concentration camp inmates, and fought until it was virtually destroyed.

On August 5 Polish forces liberated the Gesiowka camp, freeing 348 Jews, of whom 24 were women. These Jews included Greek, Belgian, French, Rumanian and Hungarian, as well as Polish Jews. One of the prisoners at Gesiowka, Hans Robert Martin Korn, was one of the eight Jews deported earlier from Finland to Auschwitz. German born, he had been a volunteer in the ‘Winter War’ between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939. He did not survive the events of 1944.
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All of the Jews released from the Gesiowka camp joined the Warsaw uprising. Those who were technicians, like Korn, formed a special platoon for the repair of captured German tanks. The first to fall in battle was David Edelman, a deportee from France to Auschwitz.

One of the earliest actions in which the Jews from the Gesiowka camp were involved was recorded by a Pole, Second-Lieutenant Tadeusz Zuchowicz, who had taken part in the liberation of the camp. Three German ‘Panther’ tanks had approached his unit. One of them was hit by mortar fire and its crew killed. The other two tanks then retreated up the street, firing their machine guns. The third tank was immobile and abandoned. Then, as Zuchowicz recalled:

Many Jews who had survived the Warsaw ghetto revolt of April 1943 as fighters now fell in the Warsaw uprising of August 1944, either as part of the Jewish units, or in the various units of the Polish resistance forces. One of the three leaders at the political headquarters of the Polish resistance forces was a Jewess, Helena Kozlowska. One Polish unit was commanded by a Jew, Lieutenant Jan Szelubski. Another had a Jewish second-in-command, Lieutenant Rozlubirski; these two men were both awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s highest military decoration, for their part in the uprising.
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Another Jew, Major Nastek, fell in defence of the Old City as a member of the Supreme Command of the uprising.
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Tragically, for the Jews who emerged from their hiding places to join the uprising and to fight for Polish independence, many anti-Semitic acts took place in those brief days of Warsaw’s struggle. Some Jews were killed by Poles, including two Jews who were still in concentration camp clothes. A Jewish fighter, Chaim Goldstein, later recalled standing with the Lieutenant of his unit, a non-Jew, at the entrance to a large courtyard, when he heard shooting, ‘and suddenly I saw a man on the ground in the last convulsions of death’. He then saw a second man ‘calmly putting his gun back in his holster. He marched up to us with a confident step, like a hunter who has just killed a rabbit. On reaching us, he saluted the Lieutenant and said to him with a smile: “To hell with him, he was a Jew!” Then off he went.’
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In the centre of Warsaw, a Jewish doctor, Roman Bornstein, an officer in the Polish army, was in charge of the health services in the area won by the rebels. He has described the murder of thirty Jews in hiding in a house on Twarda Street. He also told of a Jewish engineer, who had visited the hospital to see his wounded brother, a Jew and soldier in the Home Army. On leaving hospital, this engineer was murdered by Poles.
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Feigele Peltel has recorded how another Jewish engineer named Golde, ‘a splendid and jovial fellow’, seeking refuge with Poles in their bunker after his own hide-out had been bombarded, was forced after several days of anti-Semitic insults to leave during a heavy German bombardment. He was killed by shrapnel.
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Three other Jews, arrested by Polish partisans on suspicion of being German spies, were told that ‘there would be no place for Jews in liberated Poland.’ Two of them managed to escape, ‘under a hail of bullets’. The third, Yeshieh Solomon, was murdered on the spot.
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Most Poles accepted Jewish help in the uprising, and Poles and Jews fought side by side as the German trap closed in upon them. But the murder, by Poles, of more than a hundred Jews during those same heroic weeks, gave a bitter twist to the Jewish fate.

As the Warsaw uprising was crushed, some Jews were also killed in Warsaw by those former Russian soldiers who were fighting in the German ranks as part of the anti-Soviet Kaminski Brigade. One such unfortunate was the forty-seven-year-old gynaecologist, Henryk Forbert. Co-opted on to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in 1940, Forbert had worked that winter in the Jewish deportee camps in ‘Lublinland’. Following the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto revolt, he had been in hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw.
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Other Jewish doctors who fought and died included Dr Fajgenblat, an opthalmologist, who had hidden in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw since the ghetto uprising; he was forty-four when he died of wounds received in action; and Dr Szymon Fajgenblat, one of the few surviving doctors who had worked in the ghetto on the study of starvation diseases.
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The forty-four-year-old Warsaw neurologist, Maurycy Wolf, who had devoted much of his time and work before the war to the underprivileged, was killed on October 7, on one of the last days of the uprising.
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Of the thousand Jews who fought in the Warsaw uprising, at least five hundred were killed. The survivors, among them Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin, either escaped to the countryside, or hid once more in bunkers in the cellars of ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. At the outset of the revolt, on August 1, ‘everybody’, as Tuvia Borzykowski recalled, ‘still thought that liberation was a matter of days or even hours’. In addition, for Jews like himself, the argument was strong that they should stay in hiding, so as to remain after the war
as ‘living’ witnesses to the holocaust. But the desire to participate in battle against the Nazis overwhelmed all other arguments.
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