The Holocaust (22 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
Ten Jews died each day at Kampinos, weakened by more than a year and a half of privation. Zuckerman later recalled seeing people talking one to the other and then, ‘all of a sudden, out of a blue sky’, one of them would fall down, ‘and he was dead’.
After a few days in Kampinos, a visitor came looking for Zuckerman. This was Lonka Kozibrodska, a Jewish girl who had recently been among the deportees from Pruszkow to Warsaw, and was now acting as a courier, posing as a non-Jewish girl. The suspicion of the guards was roused, but ‘Brodska’, as she was known, managed to escape back to Warsaw. Zuckerman was at once summoned for interrogation:
I was beaten. My head was cracked open. My hands were wounded. First of all they wanted to know whether this woman was a Jewess or not. Since I knew that she did not have the Jewish badge I said that no, she is not Jewish, and that we had gone to school together and she must have heard about my being in this camp and come. Then they accused me of shaming the race and they would execute me, they said.
They said I was violating the Aryan race, if she is a Polish woman. I was not executed. I was put into a pit full of water. I can’t remember too much of that night. I had fever. I shivered.
In the morning I was taken in front of the entire camp and the commander announced, these were his words more or less, ‘This man knows when he was born but he does not know when he will die.’ But here he promised us solemnly that three days and three nights my body will hang from the gallows. And I stood there and waited for the moment of death. But I was put back into this pit. I wanted it all to be over with. And I beat on the doors. I wanted to be executed.
I applied to the sentry. I said, ‘Execute me.’ But I don’t know what happened, I don’t know whether I heard correctly. I heard the commander at night. There were various authorities there, various commanders. I heard somebody saying in Polish, ‘A pity on this boy.’
Zuckerman was released from the pit, and later from the camp: his colleagues in the collective had managed to raise enough money to bribe the camp authorities to release him. The camp commander had also decided to send back a hundred Jews ‘who could not work any more, who were just a burden on the camp’. As Zuckerman recalled:
One day at sunrise the commander appeared and told me, ‘Look here, it’s your responsibility. People who will break the line and will have no strength left to reach the railroad train, they will die on the spot.’
I took that responsibility. I organized the younger men and we carried the others, but many died. Not because we left them behind. They died, scores of people, out of the slow starvation death, this frightening death.
All of a sudden, when we were near the train, and were almost saved, these people lay down. They would utter the last word and then they died. They were taken away, numbers were written on their arms. They were put on a cart and taken to the cemetery.
36
Zuckerman returned to Warsaw, and began again to organize as best he could a resistance network. Among those active with him were Zivia Lubetkin and Lonka Kozibrodska.
37
While at Kampinos, Zuckerman had noted the presence, and cruelty, of the Ukrainian guards. There were Ukrainian guards also at another camp near Warsaw, at Lowicz. In Warsaw, it became
known early in May that ninety-one Jews had been murdered at Lowicz. The ‘basic cause’, Ringelblum noted, ‘has been the terrible treatment of those in the camp by most of the Ukrainian camp guards’, as well as the ‘starvation’ rations.
38
These Ukrainians had been brought by the Germans from south-eastern Poland, where many had lived before the war as a dissatisfied minority. Now they were taking their revenge, on Jews as well as on Poles. ‘The seventeen corpses brought to Warsaw from work camp on May 7th’, Ringelblum noted in his diary, ‘made a dreadful impression: earless, arms and other limbs twisted, the tortures inflicted by the Ukrainian camp guards clearly discernible.’
39
In Bedzin and Sosnowiec, each with a pre-war population of twenty-five thousand, Moses Merin was confident that he could govern, and protect, his people. Equally confident, in the Lodz ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski obtained German permission to open schools for five thousand Jewish children, the teaching to be in Yiddish and Hebrew. But in the Warsaw ghetto, the situation continued to deteriorate, with between five hundred and six hundred Jews dying of hunger every week. ‘Death lies in every street,’ noted Ringelblum on May 11. ‘The children are no longer afraid of death. In one courtyard, the children played a game tickling a corpse.’
40
In the Lodz ghetto, the deaths from starvation and the suicides had also mounted. On April 21 a mentally ill woman, the forty-one-year-old Cwajga Blum, who was often seen at the ghetto’s edge, was ordered by a German sentry to dance in front of the barbed wire. She did as ordered. ‘After she had performed a little dance,’ the Ghetto Chronicle recorded, ‘the sentry shot her dead at nearly point-blank range.’
41
***
For almost a year, the Jews of France had been spared the cruelties and killings of German-occupied Poland. But as many as forty thousand foreign-born Jews had been interned in metropolitan France, and a further fourteen thousand in French North Africa: in these internment camps ‘several thousand perished’.
42
Many Jews in France, especially those who had come from Poland before the war, in search of work, and a life free from anti-Semitism, were drawn into the growing resistance network.
On 10 May 1941, at Suresnes, the Germans executed the twenty-year-old Axon Beckermann, the first Jew to be shot for resistance in France.
43
Ten days later, the first measures designed to drive Jews out of French economic life were promulgated: no Jew was to be allowed to engage in the wholesale or retail trade, or to own a restaurant, a hotel or a bank. Restrictions on the number of Jews who could be lawyers, doctors, midwives or architects, however, were not introduced until later in the summer; even radios, forbidden to Polish Jews since the first months of the war, were not forbidden to French Jews until August 1941.
Several hundred Jews in France, with United States or Latin American passports, had managed to leave, legally, for Lisbon, and for the New World. But on 20 May 1941 the Central Office of Emigration in Berlin sent a circular letter to all German consulates, informing them that Goering had banned the emigration of Jews from all occupied territories, including France, in view of the ‘doubtless imminent final solution’.
44
This was the first official reference to any such ‘final’ solution, or
Endlösung
. Within two weeks, on June 2, the threat of arbitrary arrest was embodied in a law authorizing the ‘administrative internment’ of all Jews in France, whether French-born, or foreign-born.
45
The Jews of German-occupied Europe followed each phase of the war with close attention. ‘The Jewish populace is in a depression these days,’ noted Ringelblum on May 11, after German forces, having entered Athens, forced the British troops to evacuate Greece altogether, and to prepare for the defence of Palestine against possible German attack. A ghetto humourist coined the epigram: ‘If the Germans win the war, 25 per cent of the Jews will die; if the English win, 75 per cent’—because it would take such a long time for a British victory.
46
On May 11 Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew to England where he insisted that peace was possible between Britain and Germany. His mission was quickly denounced by Hitler as the act of a lunatic. But in Warsaw, the thirty-five-year-old Alexander Donat later recalled, ‘people went wild’ as the news of Hess’s mission broke on May 13. ‘The war would now soon be over. Our suffering had not been in vain after all, and liberation was just around the corner.’ Said one wisecrack: ‘Mit Hess iz geshen a ness,’ ‘Hess has wrought a miracle.’
47
Hess was denounced by Hitler, and Britain remained at war with
Germany. The United States and the Soviet Union were still neutral; Yugoslavia and Greece were now defeated. Britain was alone. But there were rumours of Russia’s imminent entry into the war. When Stalin replaced Molotov as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissioners, becoming Soviet Premier, Warsaw Jews celebrated with ‘Stalin Premier’ bread.
48
For twenty months, Poland up to the River Bug had been under German occupation. For twenty months, the Jews in occupied Poland had been cut off from the outside world, from world Jewry, and from the rights and protections afforded civilians in wartime. Jewish prisoners-of-war continued, after twenty months, to be deprived of the protection laid down for all prisoners-of-war by the Geneva conventions. On May 15 the Jewish prisoner-of-war camp at Biala Podlaska, near the Soviet border, was closed down, and the surviving prisoners taken by sealed train to Konskowola, further west. When the train was unloaded, it was discovered that four of the prisoners-of-war had managed to break their way out of the wagons during the journey. As a reprisal, twelve others were murdered on the spot.
49
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For several months, German reconnaissance aircraft had been flying over the border regions of western Russia, but the two million and more Jews on Soviet territory felt safe from danger. Despite the deportation of several thousand Jews to labour camps in April and May 1940, on Stalin’s orders, for the mass of Soviet Jews there was no immediate threat to their existence. On June 21 Zalman Grinberg, a leading Jewish doctor in Kovno, noted in his diary: ‘The peaceful life is running its usual course.’
50
That Saturday night, in the Soviet border town of Siemiatycze, there was a ball: attended, as had become usual for some days, by the German border patrol from the other side, and by many Jews. At four o’clock on the Sunday morning, the ball was still in progress. ‘Suddenly,’ the historian of Siemiatycze has recorded, ‘bombs began to fall. The electricity in the hall was cut off. Panic-stricken and stumbling over each other in the darkness, everyone ran home.’
51
Unknown to the Jews of Siemiatycze, of Nazi-occupied Europe, or of the Soviet Union, the mass murder of Jews was about to begin: the killing, not of thousands, but of millions.
‘It cannot happen!’
Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union launched on 22 June 1941, marked a tragic turning-point in German policy towards the Jews. In the twenty-one months before Barbarossa, as many as thirty thousand Jews had perished. Of these, ten thousand had been murdered in individual killings, in street massacres, in punitive reprisals, in outbreaks of savagery in the ghettos, and in the labour camps. Twenty thousand had died of starvation in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos. But in no Jewish community had more than two or three per cent been murdered, while in Western Europe, the Jews had been virtually unmolested.
From the first hours of Barbarossa, however, throughout what had once been eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as in the Ukraine, White Russia and the western regions of the Russian Republic, a new policy was carried out, the systematic destruction of entire Jewish communities. These were the regions in which the Jew had been most isolated and cursed for more than two centuries, the regions where Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Ethnic German and Jew had been most marked in their distinctive ways of life, in which language differences had been a barrier, social divisions a source of isolation, and religious contrasts a cause of hatred. The German invaders knew this well and exploited it to the full. In advance of the invasion of Russia, the SS leaders had prepared special killing squads, the
Einsatzgruppen
, which set about finding and organizing local collaborators, Lithuanians and Ukrainians, in murder gangs, and were confident that the anti-Jewish hatreds which existed in the East could be turned easily to mass murder. In this they were right.
In the first hours, many Jews in Western Europe, in Greater Germany, even in German-occupied Poland, saw the German
invasion of the Soviet Union as a hopeful sign. ‘The Jews somehow believed that the Russians would advance,’ Zivia Lubetkin later recalled, ‘beat the Germans, and perhaps this would mean the end of the war.’
1
At four o’clock on the afternoon of June 22, as a German announcer broadcast the news of the invasion of Russia over the loudspeakers in Grzybowski Place, another Warsaw resident noticed that the Jews in the square ‘were trying unsuccessfully to hide their smiles’.
2
‘With Russia on our side,’ Alexander Donat recalled, ‘victory was certain and the end for Hitler was near.’
3
The German forces advanced rapidly, however, and it soon became clear that the sudden upsurge of hope had been premature. ‘What good will it do to me when I am dead,’ one Warsaw ghetto-dweller said to another, ‘if they come to my grave and say, “Mazel Tov, congratulations, you won the war”?’
4
But still some optimism survived. ‘Don’t worry,’ a Red Army officer told the Jews of Nieswiez as his men withdrew eastwards, ‘we’ll be back.’
5
In Kovno, the twenty-five-year-old Leon Bauminger, a refugee from Cracow, had a chance to hide as a non-Jew. But when he saw the Jews of Kovno being driven to a special ghetto area in the Slobodka suburb, house of a famous Talmudic academy, he decided to join them. ‘What will be with all the Jews will be with me,’ he told himself. It was rumoured that the Germans would send all the Jews to Madagascar. Bauminger later recalled: ‘I said to myself: I will be the Robinson Crusoe on Madagascar.’
6
Yet the slaughter in the East began from the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Helped by Lithuanian, Latvian and Ukrainian policemen and auxiliaries, the Einsatzgruppen moved rapidly forward behind the advancing German forces. An eye-witness later recalled how, at the frontier village of Virbalis, Jews ‘were placed alive in anti-tank trenches about two kilometres long and killed by machine guns. Lime was thereupon sprayed upon them and a second row of Jews was made to lie down. They were similarly shot.’ Six more times, a new line of Jews were driven into the trench. ‘Only the children were not shot. They were caught by the legs, their heads hit against stones and they were thereupon buried alive.’
7