The Holocaust (18 page)

The fall of France did not lead, as Hitler expected, to a negotiated peace with Britain. He therefore launched a ‘blitz’ on London, and many other British cities. At sea, German submarines sought to destroy Britain’s trans-Atlantic lifeline. With Britain under virtual siege, and the United States still neutral, the Germans continued to pursue their anti-Jewish policies, unhampered by the outside world. On 1 August 1940 the first expulsion began from Cracow, with its eighty thousand Jewish inhabitants and refugees. In the first two weeks of August, a third of the Jews of Cracow were driven out to Warsaw and to other Polish towns. By the end of October, fifty thousand had been deported.
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Anti-Jewish laws were now introduced in three of the countries under German rule, control or influence. On August 10 the Rumanian government passed racial laws, as did Vichy France on October 3, and the German authorities in Belgium on October 28. In Rumania, the introduction of these laws coincided with an outburst of anti-Jewish violence, as Chaim Barlas, a Jewish Agency representative, reported from neutral Turkey on August 13: ‘Every day Jews are being thrown out of railway carriages.’ It was true, Barlas added, that the Rumanian newspapers, acting under government instructions, ‘tell the people not to molest the minorities, but in regard to the Jews this appeal has no effect whatever’.
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In France, the end of August saw both personal and community tragedies. On August 26 the German Jewish philosopher and literary critic, Walter Benjamin, a refugee in France since Hitler had
come to power in Germany, was crossing into Spain with a group of refugees, in search of yet another place of refuge. At Port Bou, the first town on the Spanish side of the border, the local police chief threatened to send the refugees back. In despair, Benjamin committed suicide. He was forty-eight years old.
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On the day after Benjamin’s suicide, another Jew, Israel Karp, was shot by the German military authorities in Bordeaux. His had been an individual act of resistance, one of the first of the war in occupied France. Karp had attacked a detachment of German soldiers marching in goose-step through the town.
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Also on August 27, the government of Marshal Pétain abrogated the pre-war French decree of 21 March 1939 which forbade all incitement to race hatred.
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In Luxembourg, just over a week later, on September 5, the German occupation authorities introduced the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and at the same time seized all 355 Jewish-owned businesses and handed them over to ‘Aryans’. In addition to Luxembourg’s pre-1933 Jewish community of 1,171 Jews, a further three thousand Jews from Germany had, between 1933 and 1940, found refuge in the Duchy. Hundreds now sought escape, through France, to Spain or Switzerland. Altogether, seven hundred were able to escape to safety.
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On September 1, in Kovno, the Soviet authorities ordered the Japanese Consul, Sempo Sugihara, to leave the city. Up to that moment he had issued, it was later calculated, about 3,400 visas for Jews in Kovno to travel eastward, through Moscow and Siberia, to Japan and beyond. Even on September 1, on his way to the railway station with his family, Sugihara continued to stamp the precious transit visas. He did so, it was later reported, ‘in the street and at the station, even through the window of the train compartment, until the train actually began to pull away from the platform.’
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In Poland, the isolation of Jews from the rest of the population was being accelerated by regulations forcing Jews to live only in one section of the town. Some of these specially created ghettos were marked by signs on the streets at which they began, and known as ‘open’ ghettos. Others were surrounded by wooden fences, or barbed wire, or by high walls built for the purpose. Many ghettos were on the outskirts of the town, usually in the dirtiest and poorest suburbs, or in some deserted, or even ruined factory area.
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Week by week during 1940, the number of enforced ghettos
grew: the Czestochowa ghetto was one of three established in March; the Lodz ghetto was one of two ghettos closed in May. In each ghetto, the German authorities ordered the Jewish Council to carry out its demands, whether for money, forced labour or the reduction in size of the ghettos themselves. In the Lodz ghetto, these responsibilities were carried out by the Chairman of the Council, Chaim Rumkowski, known as the ‘Eldest of the Jews’, who quickly became a controversial figure. On September 6, in Warsaw, Ringelblum noted in his diary:

As yet, Warsaw had no ghetto. ‘People’s spirits have improved,’ Ringelblum noted on September 9. ‘The Jewish populace believes the war will end in two or three months, because of the recent bombardments.’
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These ‘bombardments’ were the first British air raids on Berlin, beginning on the night of August 25, when eighty British bombers struck at the German capital. In Berlin itself, the Jews of the city were to suffer more than non-Jews in these air raids, which continued with growing intensity. On September 24, William Shirer, one of several American newspaper correspondents in Berlin, noted in his diary:

For non-Jews in Berlin, September 24 marked the first night of one of the most formidable propaganda films made in Nazi Germany,
Jew Suss
. A fictional story, it told of the life and death of an eighteenth-century court Jew, Suss Oppenheimer, Chief Minister of the Duke of Wurttemberg.

Suss Oppenheimer is shown in the film as a half-assimilated Jew who goes from ghetto to court within a few years. Through money and black magic he and his fellow Jews scheme to seize power by manipulationg the corrupt, drunken Duke of Wurttemberg whom they see as the archetype of the pliable non-Jew. The Jews who remain in the ghetto appear on the screen physically repulsive. But the message of the film is that they are less dangerous than Suss, who has acquired a veneer of court polish, and that no infamy was too great if it served the Jews in their quest for money and power.

A film suffused with hatred,
Jew Suss
was shown in cinemas throughout the Reich and occupied Europe, as well as at special sessions for the SS and the Hitler Youth.
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Even the world of film and entertainment had been recruited to serve the cause of race hatred.

The second winter of the war was approaching; in labour camps throughout the Reich, Jews continued to suffer torment. Early in September, Ringelblum had noted, from reports reaching him in Warsaw, that ‘worst of all’ the labour camps in the General Government was the one near Belzec. ‘There have been cases’, he wrote, ‘when weak people were shot to death. Happened to an old man of over sixty.’ At another camp, in Jozefow, ‘four hundred became sick with bleeding diarrhoea. They were dispatched while still sick.’ When Jews in Otwock were seized for forced labour, and a large number escaped, ‘more than ten paid with their lives’.
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Sometimes there were moments of reassurance. In Szczebrzeszyn, on October 1, Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary: ‘Today the Jews had a happy day because almost all of them came back.’ These were the young men sent for forced labour to Belzec. ‘The Jews had paid 20,000 zloty for freeing them,’ Klukowski added.
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On
October 16, however, Klukowski noted that at the airfield at Klemensow, just outside Szczebrzeszyn, ‘the workers are complaining that the Germans beat them with rubber truncheons for no reason, and they are beating Poles and Jews alike.’
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From Lodz, in October 1940, some two hundred and fifty young men were taken for work at Ruchocki Mlyn, in the Poznan region, straightening a river bank. One of these young men, Leo Laufer, then aged eighteen, later recalled the deaths of many of his fellow prisoners, forced to live like cattle in a barn: ‘They were dying like flies, not so much from no food, because I believe there was almost sufficient food to sustain yourself. They died from the frost, and mainly they died from lack of hygiene. Never in my life do I recall seeing lice by the bushel.’
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Amid these torments, the Jewish spirit struggled to retain its strength, and sanity. On October 2 the Yiddish song-writer, Mordche Gebirtig, wrote a ballad bidding his fellow Jews to be merry: ‘Jews, be gay, don’t walk about in sadness, but be patient and have faith.’ Gebirtig urged the Jews: ‘Don’t relinquish for a moment your weapon of laughter and gaiety, for it keeps you united.’ His song ended:

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Of the 400,000 Jews of Warsaw, more than 250,000 lived in the predominantly Jewish district. The remaining 150,000 lived throughout the city, some Jews in almost every street and suburb. On 3 October 1940, at the start of the Jewish New Year, the German Governor of Warsaw, Ludwig Fischer, announced that all Jews living outside the predominantly Jewish district would have to leave their homes and to move to the Jewish area. Whatever belongings could be moved by hand, or on carts, could go with them. The rest—the heavy furniture, the furnishings, the stock and equipment from shops and businesses—had to be abandoned.

Warsaw was to be divided into three ‘quarters’: one for Germans, one for Poles, and one for Jews. The Jews, who constituted a third of Warsaw’s population, were to move into an area less than two and a
half per cent of the total city: an area from which even some overwhelmingly Jewish streets were to be excluded.

THE WARSAW GHETTO

More than a hundred thousand Poles, living in the area designated for the Jews, were likewise ordered to move, to the ‘Polish quarter’. They too would lose their houses and their livelihoods. On October 12, the second Day of Atonement of the war, a day of fasting and of prayer, German loudspeakers announced that the move of Poles and Jews into their special quarters must be completed by the end of the month. ‘Black melancholy reigned in our courtyard,’ Ringelblum noted. ‘The mistress of the house’—a Pole—‘had been living there some thirty-seven years, and now has to leave her furniture behind. Thousands of Christian businesses are going to be ruined.’
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The moving began at once. ‘The removal of the Jews from the suburbs,’ Ringelblum noted on October 13, ‘as well as from poverty-stricken Praga’—across the Vistula—‘signifies their complete ruination; they will not even have the money to resettle.’ Ringelblum added: ‘Today was a terrifying day; the sight of Jews moving their old rags and bedding made a horrible impression. Though forbidden to remove their furniture, some Jews did it.’
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Another eye-witness, Toshia Bialer, who later escaped from the ghetto with her husband and son, described just over two years later the events of that third week of October: