The Holocaust (12 page)

From the first day of the German advance into Poland, Jewish soldiers fought alongside Polish soldiers in the battles for the frontier, and, later, in the battles around Warsaw. Inside Warsaw, more than three thousand Jews were among some ten thousand citizens killed during more than a week of intense aerial bombardment.

In western Poland, Saturday, September 2, saw the heavy air bombardment of several cities. In Piotrkow, home of fifteen thousand Jews, Romek Zaks was killed that day, ‘the first Jewish victim’.
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On Sunday, 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. They could do nothing to halt, or even to slow down, the pace of the German advance across Poland. As the German forces advanced, and within hours of their occupation of a town or village, Jews were singled out for abuse and massacre by special SS ‘operational groups’, acting in the rear of the German fighting forces. That same Sunday, September 3, a few hours after German troops had entered the frontier town of Wieruszow, one of these SS groups seized twenty Jews, among them several prominent citizens, took them to the market place, and lined them up for execution. Among these Jews was Israel Lewi, a man of sixty-four. When his daughter, Liebe Lewi, ran up to her father to say farewell, a German ordered her to open her mouth for her ‘impudence’, and then fired a bullet into it. Liebe Lewi fell dead on the spot. The twenty men were then executed: among them Abraham Lefkowitz, Moshe Mozes and Usiel Baumatz.
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The air bombardment continued to take a heavy toll. On September 4, more than a thousand Jews who had managed to flee from Piotrkow to the nearby village of Sulejow, believing that they would be safe in this remoter corner, were killed as German bombers twice attacked the village, and fighters strafed those who sought to flee. Among the people killed in Sulejow was one of Piotrkow’s leading rabbis, Jacob Glazer, his daughter and his grandchild. The
Goldblum family was wiped out in its entirety. Entering Piotrkow itself on September 5, the Germans tried to set fire to the predominantly Jewish section of the city, shooting dead those Jews who ran from the burning buildings. After the fires had died down, German soldiers entered a house which had escaped the flames, took out six Jews, and ordered them to run. As the Jews ran, they were shot. Five died violently; the sixth, Reb Bunem Lebel, died later of his wounds.
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POLAND

In the first ten days of the German advance, such onslaughts against unarmed, defenceless civilians were carried out in more than a hundred towns and villages. In the city of Czestochowa, home of thirty thousand Jews, 180 Jews were shot on September 4, ‘Bloody Monday’.
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At the village of Widawa, home of one hundred Jewish families, the Germans ordered the rabbi, Abraham Mordechai Morocco, to burn the Holy books. He refused, whereupon they burned him, with the Scrolls of the Law in his hands.
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On September 8, in the city of Bedzin, where more than twenty thousand Jews lived, two hundred were driven into the synagogue, which was then locked, and set on fire.
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At Mielec, on September 13, thirty-five Jews were arrested in the communal baths, taken to the slaughterhouse, and then burned alive. Another twenty were burned alive in the synagogue.
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In every conquered town and village, the Germans forced the Jews to clear rubble, to carry heavy loads, to hand over any gold, silver or jewellery, to scrub floors and lavatories with their prayer shawls, and to dance in front of their captors. Elderly Jews had their beards cut off with scissors, or ripped from their chins. Young religious Jews had their sidelocks cut, or torn from their faces, amid much laughter and ribaldry.

On September 10, General Halder, of the German General Staff, noted in his diary that some SS men, having ordered fifty Jews to work all day repairing a bridge, had then flung them into a synagogue and shot them. Light sentences had been imposed on the killers. But even these light sentences were later overruled, by Himmler personally, on the grounds that they came under a general amnesty. At the trial of one of the killers, the Judge Advocate had pleaded that, ‘as an SS man, he was particularly sensitive to the sight of Jews. He had therefore acted quite thoughtlessly, in a spirit of adventure.’
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In the first fifty-five days of the German conquest and occupation of western and central Poland five thousand Jews were murdered behind the lines: dragged from their homes, and from their hiding places.
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‘On the first day’, Eda Lichtmann has recalled, of the occupation of Pilica, ‘the Germans took people, especially men, to work, and forced them to clean and collect the dust with their hands: Jewish men. They were ordered to undress, and behind each Jewish man there was a German soldier with a fixed bayonet who
ordered him to run. If the Jew stopped, he would be hit in the back with a bayonet. Almost all the Jewish men returned home bleeding and amongst them—my father.’ Then, a few days later, on September 12, ‘large trucks appeared all of a sudden’, soldiers jumped off the trucks, then went from house to house, seizing men, irrespective of their age.

Thirty-two Jews were seized that day in Pilica, as well as four Poles. First they were photographed, and their names recorded. Then they were marched into the market place and forced to call out, in German: ‘We are traitors of the people.’ Then they were taken away in trucks. Eda Lichtmann ran after the trucks, with a friend whose father had also been seized. ‘We ran after them until a small forest. All the Jews taken were already dead on the ground. My father as well, shot in many parts of his body.’ Jews and Poles: all were dead. ‘I kissed my father; he was as cold as ice.’
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In 1939 the Jewish New Year began on Thursday, September 14. That day, German forces entered the Polish city of Przemysl, where seventeen thousand citizens, one third of the population, were Jews. Forty-three leading Jewish citizens were arrested, taken to forced labour, savagely beaten, and then shot.
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Among the forty-three was Asscher Gitter, whose son had emigrated to the United States in 1938, hoping that one day his father would join him. In Sieradz, on New Year’s Day, five Jews and two Poles were shot.
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That same day in Czestochowa, Order No. 7 of the German Civilian Administration transferred all Jewish industrial and commercial enterprises to ‘Aryan’ hands, such enterprises to be taken over ‘without distinction whether the owner fled or remained’.
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At Piotrkow, a decree issued on the eve of the New Year forbade Jews to be outside their homes after five o’clock in the afternoon. The twenty-seven-year-old Getzel Frenkel, coming home five minutes late, was shot dead for his breach of this decree.
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Even while these outbursts of confiscation and killing were taking place throughout western Poland, a conference was held in Berlin on September 21 at which the long-term future of Polish Jewry was discussed. The host of the conference was Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Central Security Office. Those present included the commanders of several of the SS operational groups in Poland.
Those who could not be present were sent a secret note of the discussion.

Opening the meeting, Heydrich stressed, as the secret note recorded, that what he called the ‘planned overall measures (i.e., the ultimate aim)’ were to be kept ‘strictly secret’. He also insisted that a ‘distinction’ must be made between what he called ‘the ultimate aim, which requires a prolonged period of time’ and the ‘stages’ leading to the fulfilment of this ultimate aim.

Heydrich told the conference that, as a prerequisite of the ‘ultimate aim’, Polish Jews were to be concentrated in the larger cities. If possible, large areas of western Poland ‘should be cleared completely of Jews’, or should at least have in them ‘as few concentration centres as possible’. Elsewhere in Poland, Jews should be concentrated only in cities situated at railway junctions, or along a railway, ‘so that future measures may be accomplished more easily’.

To ensure that all instructions for the movement of Jews were carried out on time, Heydrich added, a Council of Jewish Elders was to be set up in each city. In case of ‘sabotage of such instructions’, these Jewish Councils were to be threatened with ‘the severest measures’.

This ‘concentration of Jews in cities’ meant the creation of ghettos, such as had not existed in Europe since the Middle Ages. To facilitate this ‘concentration’, Heydrich noted, orders would probably have to be given ‘forbidding Jews to enter certain districts of that city altogether’. At the same time, farmland belonging to Jews should be taken away from them: ‘entrusted to the care’ of neighbouring German ‘or even Polish’ peasants.
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On September 23, two days after Heydrich’s conference, the Jews celebrated the holiest day in their calendar, the Day of Atonement, a time of repentance, solemnity, and hope for the year to come. For the Nazis, it was a time for cruel indignities, as it was to be for the next five years. At Siemiatycze, a town whose Jewish population of five thousand was already much enlarged by two thousand refugees from western Poland, SS men broke into the synagogue in the middle of the opening prayer, and sang their own hymn in its place: then, on the following day of prayer, they again entered the synagogue, already crowded. ‘A great panic’, writes the historian of the Jews of Siemiatycze, ‘broke out among the worshipping Jews. Many jumped out of the windows. In the synagogue on
Drogoczyner Street, Yosl the turner was shot while trying to escape, and remained hanging on the window-sill.’
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At Wegrow, the rabbi was ordered to sweep the streets. Then he was ordered to collect the refuse in his fur hat. While he was bending over to carry out this order, he was bayoneted three times. ‘He continued working,’ it was later learned in Warsaw, ‘and died at work.’
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At Kielce, home of more than eighteen thousand Jews, hundreds were seized, that Day of Atonement morning, from some of the smaller houses of prayer in the city, and dragged to the market place. There, Maria Feferman-Wasoff has recalled, ‘their beards were sliced off. Bareheaded, and in their fringed prayer shawls, they were forced to dig ditches.’ In the midst of those digging she had caught sight of her own uncle, Abish Kopf, a small, fragile man, and a scholar. ‘Now the sweat was rolling down his face,’ she recalled, ‘and the white prayer shawl was soiled, drenched and twisted on his back. Uncle Abish’s daughters, Andzia, Mania and Dorka, pleaded with the amused guards. “Please,” they cried, “let our father go, can’t you see he is collapsing?” All they received was loud laughter. Someone standing close by remarked with bitterness, “If there is a God, let Him strike these Nazis dead.” Late that night the Jews were set free.’
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At the small town of Raciaz, on that same sacred day, all old and weak Jews were ordered to shave off their beards. They were then harnessed to dustcarts, ‘and made to drag the carts from place to place’, as one eye-witness, Abraham Altus, later recalled, while other Jews had to load refuse on the carts. ‘Since the Nazis were drunk with spirits and liquor,’ Altus continued ‘they cruelly thrashed the old men, while some stood photographing these scenes of horror and hell. Between the beating and the photographing they made us dance and jump, and hit us with sticks and mistreated us.’ These torments continued throughout the Day of Atonement, until, bleeding and abased to the very earth’, Abraham Altus wrote, ‘desolate and broken and confused, we were no longer capable of standing or praying. Our spirits were numbed and our eyes were closed against tears. So we simply lay on the floor at home.’

‘After we had rested a while’, Altus added, ‘and our spirits returned to us, then we burst out weeping, weeping without a break like forsaken children.’
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In Piotrkow, the Day of Atonement was marked by another aspect of the new ‘Nazi order’. The Germans forced several thousand Polish prisoners-of-war, many of them Jews, into the hall of the Jewish Religious School, and, forbidding access to lavatories, forced these thousands of men to relieve themselves in the school hall. They were then given prayer shawls, Holy books, the curtains of the Holy Ark and the beautifully embroidered covers of the Scrolls of the Law, and ordered to clean up the excrement with these fine and sacred objects.
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Almost all of western Poland was now under German control. In Poland’s eastern regions, Soviet forces were advancing, according to one of the secret clauses of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: cutting off the Polish army from any possible regrouping in the Vilna or Lvov regions. Warsaw, on that Day of Atonement, was still holding out, a city besieged. But during the day there was an intense German artillery and air bombardment, striking with particular ferocity on the main Jewish district. ‘In the midst of this bombardment,’ a fifteen-year-old Warsaw schoolgirl, Mary Berg, recorded, ‘a strange meteorological phenomenon took place: heavy snow mixed with hail began to fall in the middle of a bright sunny day. For a while the bombing was interrupted, and the Jews interpreted the snow as a special act of heavenly intervention: even the oldest among them were unable to recall a similar occurrence.’ But later in the day, when the snowstorm was over, the Germans ‘made up for lost time with renewed fury’.
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