The Holocaust (112 page)

Lutz, who worked closely with Wallenberg, was a career diplomat in the Swiss consular service. Aged forty-nine in 1944, he had served before the war both in the United States and in Palestine. As the Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest, in charge of the department for
safeguarding the interests of foreign governments who were not represented in the Hungarian capital, Lutz was able to issue protective documents to Jews who held British, Rumanian and other citizenships. On one occasion he issued a collective passport listing 957 ‘protected’ Jews on a single Swiss passport.
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As Nyilas bands seized Jews throughout Budapest and marched them through the streets, more than seven and a half thousand protective documents were issued in a few days. But hundreds of Jews, taken by the Nyilas to the brick factory, were robbed of all their valuables. Their Swiss and Swedish documents were also taken away, as were the protective passes issued by the International Red Cross.

Within a few weeks, Charles Lutz had seventy-six buildings under Swiss diplomatic protection. More than twenty-five thousand Jews, finding shelter in them, were saved.
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But for tens of thousands of Jews, driven towards the old Austrian frontier, on November 6, no diplomatic protests or stratagems were of use. Hundreds died of exposure and exhaustion, or were shot down where they fell. At Issaszeg, seven men who had reported sick were shot, and their wives were compelled to dig the graves for them. The women were then also shot.
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A Jewish woman who was told of this incident later set down her own recollections of the marches. She had been driven out of Budapest for many miles, then brought back to the city:

Watching the long line of marchers, one Hungarian gendarme said to his companion, Paul Gidaly, a Jew who was masquerading as a non-Jew: ‘This is cruel. Why don’t they shoot them and toss them into the Danube instead of making them drag themselves miserably like this?’
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As many as thirty thousand Jews were driven from Budapest towards the old Austrian border. Their task, they were told, would be to construct an ‘East Wall’ for the defence of Vienna. At least seven thousand died, or were shot, on the march. But several hundred were saved when Raoul Wallenberg and Charles Lutz, travelling along the line of the march, reclaimed their respective wards, and distributed Swedish and Swiss protective passes.
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On October 15 the Germans evacuated Plaszow camp, in the eastern suburbs of Cracow. Some seven hundred of the twelve hundred Jews who had been working in Oscar Schindler’s factory at Plaszow were sent by train, not to Schindler’s new factory in the Sudetenland, but to the concentration camp at Gross Rosen. The journey took three days. ‘We arrived in the afternoon,’ Moshe Bejski later recalled. ‘We had to take off our clothes. It was cold. We remained naked from six in the afternoon until about noon the following day. There was nowhere to sleep.’

After two days in Gross Rosen, the Plaszow evacuees were sent on to Brünnlitz, in the Sudetenland. There, Oscar Schindler, their saviour in his factory near Plaszow, had opened a munitions factory, to which he had earlier evacuated five hundred of the Jews who had been working in his factory near Plaszow. Now he insisted that the seven hundred other Plaszow evacuees were also badly needed, if the armaments so essential for the German war effort were to be produced. He submitted a list of the seven hundred to the
SS, noting against each name some impressive, but purely fictional, skill, describing them as engravers, locksmiths and technicians.

The women from Schindler’s factory at Plaszow, some three hundred, had been evacuated, not to Gross Rosen, but to Auschwitz. Schindler at once sought their release, going personally to Auschwitz and bribing the Nazi officials there to let him take the three hundred women to his Sudetenland factory. There, they were able to rejoin their menfolk. Thus wives, daughters and even mothers were saved.

‘Every day from October 18 to May 8 at midnight’, Moshe Bejski later recalled, Schindler helped. ‘I will not leave you until the last SS man has left the camp,’ he told the Jews. ‘If a Jew lost his glasses,’ Bejski added, ‘Schindler went and bought glasses.’ Above the ration of a hundred grammes of bread, a bowl of so-called soup, and two cups of ersatz coffee each day, he provided extra rations. When a young Jewess became pregnant, an ‘offence’ punishable by death, Schindler went into Brno ‘and bought the necessary surgical equipment, and the doctor in the camp made an abortion.’
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Amid the murder of hundreds of thousands of children, often selected personally for death by Dr Mengele, there was one tiny group, the remnants of the twins who had been sent to Mengele’s special children’s barracks. By October 1944 there were about two hundred surviving children and in half-hell, half-haven, awaiting Mengele’s whim. That month, a high-ranking SS officer, visiting Birkenau, chanced upon the barracks in which these 150 Jews, mostly children, were living, relatively well-fed, so near to the slaughter of so many other thousands of children every week.

Shocked that any Jewish children at all were still alive, the SS officer ordered the 150 to stand outside their barracks. Ernest Spiegel, the twenty-nine-year-old twin who had been the eldest in the barracks since his arrival from Hungary five months earlier, sensed that something was wrong. ‘He ran to the gate’, several of the twins later recalled, ‘and announced that he had a most urgent message for Dr Mengele’. When Mengele heard what was happening, ‘he immediately ordered that “his” twins be returned to their barracks.’

From time to time the twins would be taken away for experiments, and some would never return. There were also moments of sadism and sudden death. One of the surviving twins, Moshe
Bleyer, later recalled: ‘The SS guard killed my father, and my twin brother Tibi died at my feet.’
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Despite these horrors, the twins were a small, privileged and protected band among the sea of horror and destruction; Ernest Spiegel himself, their guardian, was the only Jew in Auschwitz who received a ration card entitling him to purchase cigarettes from the non-Jewish prisoners’ store. Spiegel later recalled how:

Mengele protected his twins. But all other children had to die. On October 17 yet another ‘selection’ took place at Birkenau. Among those at the selection was a thirteen-year-old Hungarian girl, Eva Heyman. Eva’s mother, Agnes Zsolt, after speaking to many survivors of that selection, later described it, and the part taken in it by Mengele himself, at one of his ‘last and largest selections’:

Eva Heyman was gassed that day or the next. Also murdered at Birkenau on or about October 18 was Gisi Fleischmann, the head of the women’s Zionist movement in pre-war Slovakia, and, until her deportation to Birkenau in July or August 1944, a leader of wartime rescue attempts, especially for children.
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On October 20 there was another ‘selection’, mainly of Jews from Theresienstadt. The women had to enter a room naked, in single file. An SS doctor standing in the door gripped each woman by her arm and pushed her either into the next room, or to the other side of the room where other naked women, already selected for gassing, sat on a kind of gallery.
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The next train from Theresienstadt, with 1,715 deportees, was made up mostly of women with children, and orphans from the children’s home in Theresienstadt. Only 200 men and 51 women were selected for the barracks. The remaining 1,464 deportees were gassed.
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The last deportation from Theresienstadt to Birkenau, ‘Transport Ev’, took place on October 28, with 2,038 Jews packed into the cattle trucks.
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That same day, a train from Bolzano in northern Italy reached Birkenau. From it, 105 women and 59 men were sent to the barracks, and 137 men were gassed.
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The train from Theresienstadt, ‘Transport Ev’, reached Birkenau on October 30, after a two-day journey. Only 217 men and 132 women were sent to the barracks. The remaining 1,689 Jews were gassed.
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There now began the systematic destruction of the evidence. Ten days before the gassings of October 30, two small taxis and a prison car had brought a mass of documents to Crematorium III. These were the files about individual prisoners, death certificates, and charge sheets. All were burned.
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The destruction of evidence went in parallel with the last weeks of human killing.

The human evidence of Birkenau’s horrendous barracks was also being removed. Throughout October 1944, thousands of Jews were marched away from Birkenau to other camps, and to factories, in central and western Germany. These marches became a new form of torture, in which tens of thousands were to perish.

For many days, the marchers would be without food. Anyone who fell would be shot. ‘On the road as we were marching,’ the twenty-five-year-old Maria Rebhun later recalled, ‘we heard one, two shots, and a body fell. I remember there was a young girl, a fourteen-year-old, tall, very good-looking, with her mother. They liked the daughter very much. There came the moment the mother couldn’t walk. The girl supported her, tried to make her keep up with us, but to no avail. The Germans finally killed the mother. Two days later they killed the girl because she was so grief-stricken that she couldn’t take it any longer.’
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One of the camps to which thousands of Jews were sent from Birkenau was Dachau. The seventeen-year-old Mordechai Ansbacher later recalled how, on arrival in Dachau, they were met by a group of SS men singing:

From Dachau, the Jews evacuated from Birkenau were sent on various work details. While waiting to be allocated work, they received neither food nor water. ‘Most of the people were extremely weak,’ Ansbacher recalled, ‘and found it extremely difficult to hold out.’
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Another camp to which several thousand Jews were evacuated from Birkenau was Stutthof, near Danzig. ‘We hoped that we were going to Germany for work,’ Gedalia Ben Zvi, who had been born in Bratislava, later recalled, so that ‘again hope flickered in our minds that perhaps the situation would be better.’ But this hope was yet another illusion. ‘As soon as we alighted from the carriages,’ he recalled, ‘then we were received by a shower of blows and this was exactly like Auschwitz.’ The guards were mostly Germans, former criminals. ‘By them we were beaten as soon as we arrived.’

Gedalia Ben Zvi’s account continued: