The Holocaust (21 page)

It was in these conditions, Shklarek added, that one of the women went into labour ‘and brought into the world a Jewish baby, destined for pain and destruction’.
¹⁵

The deportees came not only from Polish towns, but from Austria. Beginning on February 15, and continuing at weekly intervals for five weeks, one thousand Jews a week, all men, were brought by train from Vienna to the ghettos of Kielce and Lublin, and from there to work in the labour camps on the Soviet border, building fortifications along the River Bug.
¹⁶

There was also, in February, a deportation from Holland, where, as in Denmark and Norway, the Jews had been spared the fate of Polish Jewry. On February 19 a German patrol in Amsterdam entered a tavern run by a Jewish refugee from Germany, Ernst Cahn. In the tavern, a protective device which Cahn had installed, an ammonia flash, went off by accident, spraying the Germans with the irritant fluid. Cahn was at once arrested, and, three days later, as a reprisal for his act of ‘resistance’, the SS raided the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, seized 425 Jews, most of them young men, subjected them to beatings and abuse, and then, on February 27, deported 389 of them to the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

One of the deportees later recalled how, on the journey from Amsterdam to Buchenwald, the German guards ‘seemed to have a special prediliction for people with glasses, whom they would hit straight in the face’.
¹⁷

During their time in Buchenwald, twenty-five of the deportees died, some from the brutal treatment, some shot while attempting to escape.

After two months at Buchenwald, all but three of the remaining 364 were deported to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. There, all of them were put to work in the punitive stone quarries, hauling massive blocks of stone up a steep incline. As they climbed the 148 steps, they were whipped and beaten.

On the third day after the arrival of the Dutch deportees at Mauthausen, the camp guards began machine-gunning the climbers on the steps. On the fourth day, some ten young Jews linked hands and jumped to voluntary death. The Germans referred to those who
had jumped as ‘parachutists’. In order to prevent a recurrence of this collective suicide, the remaining prisoners were placed under the charge of two particularly sadistic guards, one known as ‘the blonde fraulein’, the other as ‘Hans the killer’. By the autumn, there were no survivors.
¹⁸

Ernst Cahn, the man whose alleged resistance had led to this mass murder, was tortured at Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, but refused to reveal who had fixed the offensive ammonia bottle in his tavern. On 3 March 1941 he was shot by a German firing squad: the first person to be shot by firing squad in Holland since the German occupation ten months earlier.
¹⁹

***

In the Warsaw ghetto, Emanuel Ringelblum had been recording in his notes the news that reached him from elsewhere in Poland, as well as events in the ghetto itself. Ringelblum was forty-one years old, a historian deprived of a university library, pupils or the possibility of publishing his work. But he continued writing and collecting material with a calm dedication, determined that this terrible episode of Jewish history would be recorded.

During February 1941, Ringelblum noted that in Plonsk a group of Jews had been locked up in the synagogue ‘until they hacked the Holy Ark to bits’. The two Cracow rabbis, Kornitzer and Rappaport, who had been sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz, ‘are no longer alive’. Their ‘only sin’ had been that they had appealed against the continuing deportations from Cracow. The Auschwitz camp in which they died was the punishment camp, set up for Polish political prisoners in June 1940, and at that time seldom used to punish Jews.

In Warsaw, a ban had been imposed ‘on selling of merchandise to Jews’. But Jewish cultural activity was flourishing: in more than a hundred of the 1,700 courtyards around which the apartments of the ghetto were built, Yiddish schools had been set up, whose pupils were celebrating the anniversary of the birth of Mendele Mocher Seforim, the ‘father’ of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. Libraries, also, were to be found in ‘dozens of courtyards’.

Ringelblum wanted every facet of ghetto life to be recorded, however cruel. On Leszno Street, he wrote, ‘the head of a Jewish smuggler is thrust through a hole in the basement of the gutted post
office building. Six guards see him, call over two Jews, and order them to pull the man out. They do it, receiving a blow from the guards in the act. They order the smuggler to crawl back into his hole again, and, as he crawls, pierce his head with their bayonets. His screams ring through the quiet street.’
²⁰

In January 1941, two thousand Jews had died of starvation in the Warsaw ghetto. The February toll was just as high. ‘Almost daily’, Ringelblum noted on February 28, ‘people are falling dead or unconscious in the middle of the street. It no longer makes so direct an impression.’ The streets themselves were ‘forever full of newly arrived refugees’. Scabies were widespread because of lack of soap. In the streets, hawkers plied their wares with the cry: ‘If you must buy a rag, buy a clean one.’

As well as recording the information that reached him, Ringelblum sought out those from whom he could take testimony. ‘Terrible case of a three-year-old refugee child,’ he noted at the end of February. During the journey to Warsaw, ‘the guard threw the child into the snow. Its mother jumped off the wagon and tried to save the child. The guard threatened her with a revolver. The mother insisted life was worthless for her without her child. Then the guard threatened to shoot all the Jews in the wagon. The mother arrived in Warsaw, and here went out of her mind.’

In every street of the ghetto, beggars. ‘Child in arms, a mother begs—the child appears dead,’ Ringelblum noted. Three- and four-year-old children were begging, ‘and that is the most painful’.

Ringelblum was not alone in recording Jewish suffering under the Nazis. ‘Even young people in labour camps do it,’ he wrote. ‘The manuscripts are discovered, torn up, and their authors beaten.’
²¹

The number of labour camps in German-occupied Poland continued to grow. In March 1941, in the annexed region of East Upper Silesia, a special organization was created, under the control of General Albrecht Schmelt, for the employment of Jewish skilled labour, both men and women, in factories throughout the region. The factories paid normal wages for the work, but transferred half the wage to the Schmelt organization. These Jews were employed in mining, metallurgy and textiles.

From Lodz, two hundred Jews volunteered for work in Germany in return for a wage of nine marks a week, to be sent to their families in Lodz. They were sent to an autobahn-building camp, to
work for sixteen hours a day, shovelling earth. ‘You bloody Jews here,’ the camp commander greeted them, ‘you are going to sweat blood here,’ whereupon, as one fourteen-year-old boy later recalled, ‘he took a large stave and with one blow struck
two
chaps—who were killed.’
²²

Conditions in these camps quickly worsened. The share of the wage paid to the labourer was reduced almost to nothing. When the first workers came back ‘most of the girls’, as Frieda Mazia, of Sosnowiec, later recalled, ‘were swollen with hunger, ill—sometimes with TB or rheumatoid arthritis; they told us how they had suffered, described the tortures, the prolonged roll calls, the meagre rations….’

Frieda Mazia also witnessed, in Sosnowiec, a public execution. A Jewish mother had bought an egg from a Polish peasant so that her child would not die of hunger. Both mother and peasant were hanged: the bodies left hanging for two or three days, ‘so one couldn’t avoid seeing them—if we wanted to go out we had to pass them’.
²³

In Kielce, several thousand of the deportees from Vienna, and all sixteen thousand Jews of Kielce itself, were driven into a ghetto zone on 7 April 1941. The zone was at once declared a ‘contagious’ one: entry and exit were forbidden. To amuse himself, one German Governor of Kielce renamed the ghetto streets. Among the names he chose were Jerusalem Street, Moses Street, Zion Street, Palestine Street, Non-Kosher Street, Grynszpan Street—after the murderer of vom Rath in November 1938—and Happy Street.
²⁴
‘I will somehow manage to survive,’ wrote Gertrude Zeisler, a fifty-two-year-old deportee from Vienna. ‘Since the sun is shining, things do not seem so terrible any longer.’
²⁵

Hunger stalked all the ghettos: ‘Two weeks ago’, Ringelblum noted in Warsaw on March 18, ‘some two hundred Jews died. Last week there were more than four hundred deaths. The corpses are laid in mass graves, separated by boards. Most of the bodies, brought to the graveyard from the hospital, are burned naked.’
²⁶

In Lodz the rate of starvation was almost as high as in Warsaw. ‘Although the ghetto of Lodz was initiated as a mere trial,’ a Cologne newspaper commented on April 5, ‘as a mere prelude to the solution of the Jewish question, it has turned out to be the best
and most perfect temporary solution….’
²⁷
A week later, the Germans announced publicly that any Jews leaving the Lodz ghetto would be shot on sight.
²⁸

Such shootings had already begun. On March 12, as the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle recorded, the thirteen-year-old Wolf Finkelstein ‘was shot dead by a sentry. The boy received a fatal wound to his lungs and heart.’ On March 19, the thirty-one-year-old Rafal Krzepicki ‘was shot dead around midnight’. On March 23 the twenty-year-old Awigdor Lichtenstein ‘was shot dead near the latrine…’.
²⁹
‘Tonight’, the Chronicle noted on March 26, ‘forty-four-year-old Chana Lewkowicz was shot dead’, while, in the House of Culture, ‘there was a musical recital today….’
³⁰

***

On Sunday, 6 April 1941, Palm Sunday, the Germans invaded Yugoslavia and Greece. There were many thousands of Jews serving in the Yugoslav and Greek armies. As both countries were overwhelmed by the force of the German onslaught, Jews fell alongside their fellow soldiers-in-arms. On April 13 German troops entered Belgrade. There, according to one account, the first civilian to be shot in cold blood was a Jewish tailor, who, as German troops marched by, spat at the column and shouted out, ‘You will all perish.’
³¹

There were more than seventy thousand Jews living in Yugoslavia in 1941, as well as several thousand refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. In Greece, seventy-five thousand Jews now came under joint German and Italian rule. For a while, the Greek Jews were unmolested. Mussolini’s Italy did not share the fanatical anti-Semitism cultivated in Nazi Germany during the previous eight years. But in Yugoslavia, Hitler had an ideological and physical ally in the Croat Ustachi movement, and from April 1941, with the establishment of an independent Croat state, Jews were singled out for savage treatment; thousands were murdered in the first months of the new regime.

The rabbi of the Yugoslav town of Vinkovci, Mavro Frankfurter, was the father of David Frankfurter, who had shot Wilhelm Gustloff in Switzerland in 1936. Then, the father had condemned his son’s action. Now, as German soldiers occupied the town, Rabbi Frankfurter was made to stand on a table while soldiers spat in his
face, pulled out the hair from his long beard, and struck him with their rifle butts.
³²

On April 13, in Belgrade, German troops and local Germans ransacked Jewish shops and homes. On April 14, as Hungarian troops occupied parts of northern Yugoslavia, five hundred Jews and Serbs were seized, and shot. On April 16, German forces entered Sarajevo, and, with local Muslims, plundered and demolished the main synagogue.
³³

In Sarajevo, Mustafa Hardaga, a Muslim, the owner of a building in which a Jew, Josef Cavilio, had a factory manufacturing steel pipes, sheltered Cavilio and his family for ten days. Posters on the streets warned the locals not to give shelter to Communists and Jews. The Hardaga family defied the order. After six weeks in hiding, Josef Cavilio, his wife and children managed to escape over the mountains to Mostar, in the Italian zone.
³⁴

In Warsaw, Ringelblum noted on April 17 that the high cost of food, the fall of Yugoslavia, and the work camps were ‘the awful trio that determines our situation in the ghetto’. It was the festival of Passover, of the flight of the Jews from their bondage under Pharaoh. But in Warsaw, the savagery of the German guards was unabated, even against Jewish policemen. Vicious reprisals were carried out for the merest acts of independence. In his notes for April 17, Ringelblum recorded how a German guard had taken a sack of potatoes away from a Jewish woman:

Ringelblum had two pieces of encouraging news to report. The first was from the towns of Bedzin and Sosnowiec, where no ghettos had been established, owing to the efforts of Moses Merin, the head of the Jewish Councils in East Upper Silesia, who had also successfully resettled in Bedzin and Sosnowiec the six thousand Jews forced
to leave the town of Auschwitz, while at the same time keeping the mortality in his two towns ‘actually lower than it had been before the war’. On a recent visit to Warsaw, Ringelblum commented with some sarcasm, Merin had received ‘a royal reception’.

The second piece of encouraging news was that seven Warsaw Jews had managed to smuggle themselves across the border to Slovakia, had reached Bratislava, on the Danube, and migrated from there to Palestine.
³⁵

These seven Jews had been
chalutzim
, young people who had trained before the war for work in Palestine. Another would-be Palestinian pioneer was the twenty-five-year-old Yitzhak Zuckerman, who in September 1939 had been in Soviet-occupied Poland, but had crossed back into German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940, in order not to abandon his Jewish youth movement. On the last day of Passover, April 24, while at a Zionist ‘collective’ in the ghetto, Zuckerman was seized, together with a hundred other Jews in the collective, and taken to a camp in the Kampinos forest, to dig canals and drain swamps.