Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (111 page)
In panic, the Russians seized the leading Kapo, a German, ‘and in a flash threw him alive into the burning furnace’. The Jews of the Sonderkommando, ‘seeing’, Lewental wrote, ‘that they were faced with an accomplished fact, and realizing that retreat was no longer possible, decided to begin their revolt. Distributing such tools as they had been able to assemble, they cut the wire near their crematorium, and fled into the nearby countryside.’ During the escape, the Jews killed three SS corporals, Rudolf Erler, Willi Freese and Josef Purke.
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The men at Crematorium II had used neither arms nor grenades. Some of them hoped to find an escape route through the adjoining area in which the ‘Cleaning Installations’ Commando was living. They were joined there by Sol Schindel, a Jew from the southern Polish city of Rzeszow, who worked in the ‘Cleaning Installations’ squad. Schindel later recalled how ‘as we ran past the watch tower, I saw the SS men shooting with machine guns. I saw many dead already lying on the ground. I threw myself to the ground and crept through a hole in the barbed-wire fence into the women’s camp.’ There, Schindel met a Kapo from the ‘Canal Cleaning’ Commando, with whom he was on friendly terms, joined the squad, and managed to get back to the barracks. The Sonderkommando men continued beyond the wire, in search of somewhere to hide in the fields and farmsteads between Birkenau and the River Sol.
Within minutes of the break-out through the wire near Crematorium II, the alarm siren had sounded. Almost immediately, SS men with dogs drove up in trucks and surrounded the whole area of the break-out. Catching up with those who had managed to get beyond the wire, the SS gave no quarter. Most of the escapees were shot. The rest found brief sanctuary in a barn. Not wishing to take risks, the SS set fire to the barn, then shot the escapees as they ran out.
Only twelve of those who had escaped were still outside the wire, and alive. About two hundred and fifty had been killed outside the wire, among them their leader, Jozef Dorebus, known in the camp as Jozef Warszawski. Later that day, a further two hundred men of the Sonderkommando were shot inside Birkenau.
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There had also been preparations for revolt among the Sonderkommando
of Crematorium III, across the ramp from Crematorium II. There, explosives had also been hidden, thanks to the girls at the Union factory. Most of the prisoners were in the attic of their barracks when the break-out from Crematorium II took place. Coming out as they heard the sirens, they saw that SS troops had surrounded ‘their’ crematorium. A few moments before the SS entered their barrack, they were able to move the explosives from their hiding place and pour them down the latrine. The leader of the SS troops ordered all prisoners locked up in one room and the barracks searched, but the explosives were not discovered. The men of Crematorium III were then marched across the ramp to Crematorium II and ordered to burn the six hundred corpses that were still lying in the gas-chamber. Later that afternoon, the bodies of those who had been shot trying to escape from Crematorium II were brought to Crematorium III, stripped, and burned in ovens.
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Twelve men from Crematorium II had not yet been recaptured. SS patrols with dogs found them, exhausted, in an empty building on the other side of the river. They were killed, and their bodies brought back to Birkenau.
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On October 9 the SS arrested three Jewesses in the Union factory, Ella Gartner, Toszka and Regina. On October 10 they arrested two other women, one of them Roza Robota. Fourteen men from the Sonderkommando who worked in Crematoria III and V were also arrested on October 10, among them another of the leaders of the revolt, Jankiel Handelsman, who, with Jozef Dorebus, had been deported from Paris to Birkenau in March 1943.
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All the arrested men and women were tortured, but none broke under torture. None of the men survived the interrogation, but Roza Robota managed to smuggle out a message from the cell in which she was being held: ‘You have nothing to fear—I shall not talk.’ The note went on, Israel Gutman later recalled, to tell her fellow conspirators ‘that we should continue our work, that she knew quite well what was in store for her, and that others would not be involved’.
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Roza Robota and three other Jewish girls were hanged in the women’s camp at Birkenau on 6 January 1945. All the women then in the camp were ordered to watch the execution. ‘They went calmly to their death,’ Raizl Kibel later recalled. ‘Despite the torture, they betrayed no one.’
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The last words Roza uttered were ‘that vengeance would come’.
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On 9 October 1944, two days after the revolt of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau, the Jews celebrated the festival of Simhat Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law. Since the day of the revolt, 650 boys, most of them between fourteen and sixteen, had been locked into two of the barracks. Most were from Hungary, the remnant of those who had been brought from Hungary in May, June and July.
A number of these boys planned to break out. But when, at midnight on October 9, one boy managed to climb up the pole in the centre of the barracks, to a window near the roof, the guard at the front door of the barracks saw him. The escape bid was foiled. On October 20, all 650 boys were then taken to the undressing room, and ordered to undress. One of those 650, Nahum Hoch, later recalled the cruel sequel:
Some of us were frozen—we could not utter a word; like myself—I could not speak a syllable. Others began reciting a confessional prayer, and others sang. They took us through a little ante-chamber, opened a great door and put us into this hall. In the hall it was completely dark except for a small beam of light at the foot of the door by which we had entered.
They shut the door behind us, and I heard the weeping for the first time. After some time—I don’t know whether it was a matter of seconds or minutes—they opened the door and told us to come out again, back to the same camp we had come from. We were led into one part of the hall, and the SS commander, a tall man—I think maybe it was Hoess but I don’t know for sure—it was the same officer who had first separated me from Dad when I arrived at the camp—he called out the first boy in the line, grabbed hold of him, felt his muscles and ordered him to do ten knee-bends and then run to the wall and back; then he turned him around. We were facing left and he was turned to the right.
Then he called another boy—the one who had climbed that pole. He happened to be from my town—Salmanovitch was his name. He asked him how old he was (he was a short boy). The boy answered: ‘Nearly one hundred.’ He said: ‘You pig! Is that the way to speak to me? You’ll be sent right back in there.’
I was the third boy. I was frozen. I looked at him. He ordered me to do knee-bends, then run to the wall and back, and he sent
me to the right, too, like the other boy. In this way he selected fifty boys. In the middle of this selection process the other boys realized that a selection was taking place, and they began to slip across to the right side. The SS man separated us and would not let them cross to the other side, over to us.
Of the 650 boys who had been put through this ‘selection’, only the fifty who had been sent to the right were ordered to get dressed. They were then taken away to the railway line, to unload potatoes. The remaining 600 were gassed, among them Salmanovitch, the boy who had climbed the pole.
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Salmen Lewental recorded that day, in his notes, the fate of the boys. ‘In the middle of a bright day,’ he wrote:
Six hundred Jewish boys aged from twelve to eighteen, dressed in long striped clothes, very thin; their feet were shod in worn-out shoes or wooden clogs. The boys looked so handsome and were so well built that even these rags did not mar their beauty.
They were brought by twenty-five SS men, heavily burdened [with grenades]. When they came to the square the Kommandoführer gave the order for them to un[dress] in the square. The boys noticed the smoke belching from the chimney and at once guessed that they were being led to death. They began running hither and thither in the square in wild terror, tearing their hair [not knowing] how to save themselves. Many burst into horrible tears, [there resounded] dreadful lamentation.
The Kommandoführer and his helper beat the defenceless boys horribly to make them undress. His club broke, even, owing to that beating. So he brought another and continued the beating over the heads until violence became victorious.
The boys undressed, instinctively afraid of death, naked and barefooted they herded together in order to avoid the blows and did not budge from the spot. One brave boy approached the Kommandoführer [standing] beside us […] and begged him to spare his life, promising he would do even the hardest work. In reply he hit him several times over the head with the thick club.
Many boys, in a wild hurry, ran towards those Jews from the Sonderkommando, threw their arms around the latter’s necks, begging for help. Others scurried naked all over the big square
in order to escape from death. The Kommandoführer called the Sergeant with a rubber truncheon to his assistance.
The young, clear, boyish voices resounded louder and louder with every minute when at last they passed into bitter sobbing. This dreadful lamentation was heard from very far. We stood completely aghast and as if paralysed by this mournful weeping.
With a smile of satisfaction, without a trace of compassion, looking like proud victors, the SS men stood and, dealing terrible blows, drove them into the bunker. The sergeant stood on the steps and should anyone run too slowly to meet death he would deal a murderous blow with the rubber truncheon. Some boys, in spite of everything, still continued to scurry confusedly hither and thither in the square, seeking salvation. The SS men followed them, beat and belaboured them, until they had mastered the situation and at last drove them [into the bunker]. Their joy was indescribable. Did they not [have] any children ever?
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Protectors and persecutors
On 13 October 1944, Soviet forces entered Riga, where yet another Jewish community had been destroyed, a community which in 1935 had numbered more than thirty thousand Jews. Among the few survivors were those Jews who had been hidden in various farms in the region by Yanis Lipke. On the day of liberation, three Jews whom Lipke had hidden on a farm outside the town, Dr Shmulian, Yuter Shnayder, and the eighteen-year-old Girshman, were discovered by the retreating Germans and shot. During the battle for liberation of Riga, three Latvians who lived in the same farm, Yan Miller and his sisters Elza and Lyda, were killed, victims of the last bombardment; non-Jews who had risked their lives to help Jews. Now, both rescued and rescuers were dead.
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Not far from Verona in nothern Italy, an Italian partisan detachment was in action against the Germans. Known as the ‘Eagle’ group, it had already fought in several bitter battles. Its leader was a twenty-three-year-old Jewish girl, Rita Rosani, who had been with the partisans for nearly a year. During the battle she was killed.
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In Verona, a street has been named in her memory.
In Hungary, on October 15, the Arrow Cross Hungarian Fascist Organization seized power in Budapest. On the previous day, Admiral Horthy’s government had promised to release Hanna Szenes and the other imprisoned Palestinian parachutists. Now the parachutists, and all 170,000 Budapest Jews, were again at risk, three months after the halting of the deportations to Auschwitz.
On October 16 the Germans returned to Budapest. The Nyilas, a Fascist group whose members had been arrested by Horthy in July, were released and armed.
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They at once began to drag Jews from their houses and made them walk the streets, as Arie Breslauer recalled, ‘with their hands above their heads’.
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Then, for ten days,
Jews were forbidden to leave their houses. Women in labour could receive no help. The dead could not be buried. No food could be bought and no doctor summoned to attend the sick. At the same time, Nyilas gangs seized a large number of Jewish forced labourers in the Obuda suburb, drove them across the Margit and Chain bridges linking Obuda with Pest, and, while they were still on the bridge, shot them and threw their bodies into the waters of the Danube.
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On October 17, Adolf Eichmann returned to Budapest. He at once demanded fifty thousand able-bodied Jews to be marched on foot to Germany, to serve as forced labourers there. All the remaining Jews of Budapest, he wanted to be assembled in ghetto-like camps near the capital.
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‘You see,’ Eichmann told the Hungarian Jewish leader, Rudolf Kastner, ‘I am back again. You forgot Hungary is still in the shadow of the Reich. My arms are long and I can reach the Jews of Budapest as well.’ The Jews of Budapest, Eichmann added, ‘will be driven out on foot this time’.
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These deportations began on October 20. Even as Soviet troops approached Budapest from the south-east, Jews from Budapest were marched westward, away from the advancing Soviet forces, to dig anti-tank trenches. Beginning on October 22, twenty-five thousand men and boys and ten thousand women and girls were taken, in four days, for this task. As the Red Army drew even closer, thousands of the marchers were shot or died.
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On October 23 the Hungarian government agreed to allow twenty-five thousand Jews to be sent to Germany for forced labour.
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That same day, a poster issued in Budapest announced that all Jews with foreign passports or foreign nationality would be exempt from forced labour. The Swiss Consul, Charles Lutz, at once began issuing further documents, similar to those which he had issued in July, stating that the holder was to be regarded as a Swiss citizen, and appeared in a collective passport held at the Swiss Consulate. The Swedish representative in Budapest, Raoul Wallenberg, likewise continued to issue protective documents, about four and a half thousand in all.