The Holocaust (107 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
***
While Jews joined the Polish uprising in Warsaw, elsewhere Jews in the labour camps were faced by the determination of the Germans either to evacuate them to Germany, or to kill them before the arrival of the Red Army.
At Strassenhof camp, near Riga, three thousand Jews were awaiting liberation. ‘It was clear to everyone’, the nineteen-year-old Ruth Chajet later recalled, ‘that we were in a lion’s mouth. Yet a spark of hope burned in everyone’s heart that the Red Army might still succeed in taking Riga quickly and liberating us.’ Then, on August 3, during roll call, the prisoners were surrounded by guards, and 2,400 Jews, all the youth under eighteen and all men and women over thirty, were marched away. They were never seen again. Later, the 600 survivors, most of them young women like Ruth Chajet, learned that those taken away ‘had been gassed in a small, primitive crematorium set up on the River Dvina’. The event became known as ‘the action of the thirty-year-olds’. Three days later, the survivors were evacuated by sea to Stutthof.
37
The advance of the Western Allies towards Holland was likewise no deterrent to the continuing searches and deportations. In Amsterdam, on August 4, the Germans, ever vigilant in searching for hidden Jews, found several in hiding, among them Anne Frank. A month later, she and her family were deported to Birkenau.
38
It was in the Lodz ghetto that the largest number of Jews still lived, 68,000 in all, of whom 67,000 were now to be deported. On August 7 both Chaim Rumkowski, the ghetto Elder, and Hans Biebow, the German administrator of the ghetto, urged them to accept resettlement. Its aim, Biebow told them, was to save lives, not to destroy them.
39
More than 67,000 Jews were deported from the Lodz ghetto, not to safety, but to Birkenau. There, they faced the two-year-old selection procedure, the majority being sent, all unknowingly, to the gas-chambers, a minority being selected for the barracks. There was a third possibility, selection for medical experiments. Dr Miklos Nyiszli witnessed one such selection from among the Lodz ghetto Jews who reached Birkenau that August:
When the convoys arrived, Dr Mengele espied, among those lined up for selection, a hunchbacked man about fifty years old. He was not alone; standing beside him was a tall, handsome boy of fifteen or sixteen. The latter, however, had a deformed right foot, which had been corrected by an apparatus made of a metal plate and an orthopaedic, thick-soled shoe. They were father and son.
Dr Mengele thought he had discovered, in the person of the hunchback father and his lame son, a sovereign example to demonstrate his theory of the Jewish race’s degeneracy. He had them fall out of ranks immediately. Taking his notebook, he inscribed something in it, and entrusted the two wretches to the care of an SS trooper, who took them to number one crematorium.
Dr Nyiszli’s account continued:
Father and son—their faces wan from their miserable years in the Lodz ghetto—were filled with forebodings. They looked at me questioningly. I took them across the courtyard, which at this hour of the day was filled with sunlight. On our way to the dissecting room I reassured them with a few well-chosen words. Luckily there were no corpses on the dissecting table; it would have indeed been a horrible sight for them to come upon.
To spare them I decided not to conduct the examination in the austere dissecting room, which reeked with the odour of formaldehyde, but in the pleasant, well-lighted study hall. From our conversation, I learned that the father had been a respected citizen of Lodz, a wholesaler in cloth. During the years of peace between the wars he had often taken his son with him on his business trips to Vienna, to have him examined and treated by the most famous specialists.
I first examined the father in detail, omitting nothing. The deviation of his spinal column was the result of retarded rickets. In spite of a most thorough examination, I discovered no symptom of any other illness.
I tried to console him by saying that he would probably be sent to a work camp.
Before proceeding to the examination of the boy I conversed with him at some length. He had a pleasant face, and intelligent
look, but his morale was badly shaken. Trembling with fear, he related in an expressionless voice the sad, painful, sometimes terrible events which had marked his five years in the ghetto. His mother, a frail and sensitive creature, had not been able long to endure the ordeals which had befallen her. She had become melancholic and depressed. For weeks on end she had eaten almost nothing, so that her son and husband might have a little more food. A true wife and Jewish mother, who had loved her own to the point of madness, she had died a martyr during the first year of her life in the ghetto.
So it was that they had lived in the ghetto, the father without his wife, the son without his mother.
Dr Nyiszli strove to overcome his personal emotions, sympathies and powerlessness. ‘By whose will’, he asked himself, ‘had such evil, such a succession of horrors, been made to descend upon our wretched people?’ His account continued:
By an immense effort of self-control I got hold of myself and examined the boy. On his right foot I noticed a congenital deformity: some of the muscles were lacking.
The medical term used to describe this deformity is hypomyelia. I could see that extremely expert hands had practised several operations on him, but as a result one foot was shorter than the other. With a bandage and orthopaedic socks, however, he could walk perfectly well. I saw no other deformity to be indicated.
I asked them if they wanted something to eat. ‘We haven’t had anything to eat for some time,’ they told me.
I called a man from the Sonderkommando and had some food brought for them: a plate of stewed beef and macaroni, a dish not to be found outside the confines of the Sonderkommando. They began to eat ravenously, unaware that this was their ‘Last Supper’.
Scarcely half an hour later SS Quartermaster Sergeant Mussfeld appeared with four Sonderkommando men. They took the two prisoners into the furnace room and had them undress. Then the Ober’s revolver cracked twice. Father and son were stretched out on the concrete covered with blood, dead.
Late in the afternoon Dr Mengele arrived, ‘already’, as Dr Nyiszli noted, ‘having sent at least ten thousand men to their death’, and
ordered the bodies of the father and son boiled in water, so that the flesh could be taken from the bones. The boiling finished, ‘the lab assistant very completely gathered up the bones of the skeletons and placed them on the same work table, where, the evening before, I had examined the still living men.’ The skeletons were then sent to the Anthropological Museum in Berlin.
40
In the SS doctors at Birkenau, with their pre-war medical training and qualifications, the transformation from good to evil was complete. The healer had become killer. The trained, professional saver of life, dedicated to healing, had become the self-taught, enthusiastic taker of life, dedicated to killing.
***
For twenty-three consecutive days, the Jews from the Lodz ghetto were brought to Birkenau. On the third day, the head of the Sonderkommando brought in to Quartermaster Sergeant Mussfeld a woman and two children, ‘drenched to the skin and shivering with cold’. As Dr Nyiszli recalled:
They had escaped when the last convoy had been sent to its death. Guessing what was in store for them, they had hidden behind the piles of wood that were used for heating and that, for lack of a better place, were stored in the courtyard. Their convoy had disappeared, swallowed by the earth before their very eyes. And no one had ever returned. Numb with fear and cold, they had waited there for some miraculous turn of fate to deliver them. But nothing had happened.
For three days they had hidden in the rain and cold, with nothing to eat, their rags scant protection against the elements, till finally the Sonderkommando chief had found them, almost unconscious, while making his rounds. Unable to help them in any way, he had taken them to the quartermaster sergeant.
The woman, who was about thirty but who looked closer to fifty, had gathered her waning forces and thrown herself at Mussfeld’s feet, begging him to spare her life and those of her ten- and twelve-year-old children. She had worked for five years in a clothing factory in the ghetto, she said, making uniforms for the German army. She was still willing to work, to do anything, if only they would let her live.
All this was quite useless. Here there was no salvation. They had to die.
41
By the end of August, sixty-seven thousand Jews had been deported from the Lodz ghetto to Birkenau. Among them, Chaim Rumkowski, ‘King of the Jews’ of the Lodz ghetto, their protector and their mentor, was deported with his family, and perished in the gas-chamber together with more than sixty thousand other Jews from the ghetto over which he had exercised so much control, and, as he believed, protection.
42
None of the ghettos and camps in which at least some Jews had been kept alive for their labour, whether in Riga, Vilna, Siauliai or Lodz, was able to avert the final deportation, on the eve of their potential liberation. On August 6 the Jews in Kaiserwald camp were taken to the Riga docks, and loaded into boats. For two days the boats sailed along the Baltic coast. ‘There were no sanitary provisions,’ Maja Zarch, a survivor of the Dvinsk ghetto, later recalled, ‘and we were forbidden to go on deck.’ After two days the boats reached Danzig, and the Jews were taken to Stutthof. Other Jews arrived at the same time from the Estonian camps. All were shocked by what they saw: ‘Living corpses wandering aimlessly around, their eyes staring into nothingness, souls existing from hour to hour, with only the past as a crutch to lean on.’ Such was Maja Zarch’s description. ‘For a bit of amusement,’ she later recalled, ‘the Germans would put a woman in a crouching position on a narrow bench and make her stay like that until she would faint, or drop dead.’
43
While more and more Jews, and particularly Jewesses, were being brought to Stutthof from the camps in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, far to the south Jews were still reaching Birkenau. On August 16 a train from Athens arrived at Auschwitz with the 1,651 Jews from Rhodes and the 94 Jews from Kos who had been nearly a month on their deportation journey.
44
Through the tiny window at the top of one of the wagons, the twenty-two-year-old Violette Fintz from Rhodes ‘saw some people without hair and walking like lunatics. I said to my mother, “I think we’ve come to a lunatic asylum.”’
A voice was heard, through the carriage wall, calling out in Italian: ‘The children to the old.’ It meant nothing to those inside. Later they realized that it was a prisoner trying to save the young mothers, because if a mother was holding a child at the ‘selection’, she was automatically sent to the gas-chambers.
EVACUATIONS FROM EAST TO WEST
THE AUSCHWITZ REGION EVACUATIONS
A few moments after this mysterious message, the door of the carriage opened. ‘They started with the dogs and the Germans and “Raus!”’ Violette Fintz recalled.
It was about eleven in the morning. Amid the bedlam of noise and orders, the sun was shining. As Violette Fintz came down, she and one of her sisters were ordered to the left. Her mother, who tried to go with them, was seized by the hair by an SS man ‘with a huge dog’, and dragged to the right. She stood in the middle of the road calling, ‘My daughters.’ ‘I had the courage’, Violette Fintz later recalled, ‘to say, “Goodbye, Mother.” I never saw her again.’ She had lost sight of her father in the chaos and confusion, nor was she ever to see him again.
Speaking only Ladino and Italian, and some Turkish, the Jews of Rhodes and Kos were bewildered by the babble of German, Polish, Yiddish and Hungarian all around them. Those who had not been sent to the right, and, within a few hours, to their deaths, were taken to an underground gallery and ordered to undress. ‘They started to shave our hair, under our arms, our pubic hair. That was done by men who were laughing, mocking, shouting, “Raus! Raus!” It was so difficult for us to understand the orders, to understand what they wanted.’ After being shaved, the women from Rhodes were sent to the showers, and then, coming out of the other side of the building they found ‘SS men holding bellows and shouting at us to bend over and pushed the nose of the bellows into our anuses and vaginas’. This, Violette Fintz added, ‘was their way of disinfecting us’.
45