The Holocaust (29 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
As for Sonia, henceforth she refused to tell anybody about Ponar, for fear, as Dvorjetsky explained, ‘that if the Germans might get wind of it, they would do away with her’.
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It was to be several months before an account of the massacres at Ponar reached the Jews of Warsaw. It too came from a woman who, like Sonia, had escaped from the pit on the morning of September 1. She was twenty-two years old. ‘As it took such a long time to shoot such a large number of people,’ she wrote, ‘the murderers took a break, wolfed down a good meal, and then finished their bloody, fiendish work.’
39
The work was finished only momentarily. Every day in September 1941 Jews were slaughtered by Einsatzkommando units. Even in Vilna, despite the establishment on September 6 of two ghettos, the ‘large’ and the ‘small’, the killers soon returned, taking to Ponar a further 3,434 Jews on September 12 and 1,267 five days later. Of those murdered, according to the careful statistics of the SS, 2,357
were women and 1,018 were children.
40
Even on the day of the setting up of the ghetto, a day on which it was intended to lull the Jews into some sense of security, killings had taken place. ‘When I arrived at the ghetto’, Avraham Sutzkever later recalled, ‘I saw the following scene. Martin Weiss—a member of the District Commissar’s staff—came in with a young Jewish girl. When we went in further he took out his revolver and shot her on the spot. The girl’s name was Gitele Tarlo.’ Gitele Tarlo was eleven years old.
41
‘The struggle against Bolshevism’, General Keitel informed his commanders on September 12, ‘demands ruthless and energetic measures, above all against the Jews, the main carriers of Bolshevism.’
42
It was not only the Germans who spoke in this tone. Many Ukrainian nationalists used similar language and sought a similar solution. On September 1, Ulas Samchuk, the editor of the newspaper
Volhyn
, told his readers: ‘The element that settled our cities, whether it is Jews or Poles who were brought here from outside the Ukraine, must disappear completely from our cities. The Jewish problem is already in the process of being solved, and it will be solved in the framework of a general reorganization of the “New Europe”.’ The vacuum that would be created by this reorganization was to be filled, Samchuk wrote, ‘by the true proprietors of the land, the Ukrainian people’.
43
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On September 13, in the General Government city of Piotrkow, eleven Jews reached the end of a series of tortures which had begun more than two months earlier. All were members of the Jewish Council of Piotrkow. All had been arrested when the Germans discovered that they had been cooperating with the Jewish underground movement in the ghetto. One Council member, Jacob Berliner, who had avoided capture, gave himself up to the Gestapo ‘out of loyalty to his comrades’. The underground link had spread to the ghetto in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, where the Gestapo arrested another senior member of the Jewish community, Kosherowski. After prolonged tortures, the twelve Jews were sent to a punitive camp. A few days later, their families received telegrams informing them of the deaths ‘due to illness’ of every one of the deportees. Their ashes were returned to the city.
44
On September 17 several thousand Kovno Jews were seized in the streets, most of them women and children. ‘They were taken to the synagogue for three days,’ the twenty-four-year-old Leah Klompul later recalled. ‘For three days graves were dug for them on the football field. Then they were taken there, and killed.’ Among those murdered were Leah Klompul’s mother Rachel, and her sister Gita. Her father had already been taken away six or seven weeks earlier with a number of other men, ostensibly for some labour task. ‘They were all killed in the woods.’
45
News of these Eastern massacres was carefully concealed. In Warsaw, only the war news was known. ‘The Nazis are victorious,’ Mary Berg noted in her diary on September 20. ‘Kiev has fallen. Soon Hitler will be in Moscow. London is suffering severe bombardments.’
46
Unknown to the Jews of Warsaw, or of Western Europe, the Eastern massacres continued without respite.
An eye-witness of three of these massacres was a German army officer, Lieutenant Erwin Bingel. Four years later, while a prisoner-of-war, he set down his recollections. On September 15, he recalled, he was ordered to report to the commander of the town of Uman, in occupied Russia, and instructed to set up guards on all railways in the area, and around the airport. He did so, discovering, as he put his men in place, that ditches had just been dug in the square in front of the airport.
At dawn on September 16, Lieutenant Bingel’s men were in place. They then saw a crowd of people brought to the ditches in front of the airfield, ‘not only men but also women, and children of all ages’. His account continued:
When the people had crowded into the square in front of the airport, a few trucks drove up from the direction of the town. From these vehicles a troop of field gendarmes alighted, and were immediately led aside. A number of tables was then unloaded from one of the trucks and placed in a line at distances from each other. Meanwhile, a few more trucks with Ukrainian militiamen commanded by SS had arrived. These militiamen had work tools with them and one of their trucks also carried chloride of lime.
The truck now drove alongside these ditches and the men on it unloaded six to eight sacks of chloride of lime at intervals of fifteen to twenty metres.
In the meantime, a number of transport planes (Model ‘Junker 52’) had landed at the airport. Out of these stepped several units of SS soldiers who, having fallen in, marched up to the Field Gendarmerie unit, subsequently taking up positions alongside it. As could be discerned from the distance, the two units were obviously being sworn in. I was then informed by my interpreter, who was Jewish—which fact, however, was known only to me personally—that he had learned that the people had been brought together following upon an order which had been posted in the streets of Uman and which had been given the widest publicity throughout Uman sub-district by the Ukrainian militia.
The order was for all Jews ‘in the town of Uman and its sub-district’, Jews ‘of all ages’, to assemble for the purpose of preparing ‘an exact census of the Jewish population’. Anyone not complying with this order would be punished ‘most severely’. Lieutenant Bingel’s account continued:
The result of this proclamation was, of course, that all persons concerned appeared as ordered. This relatively harmless summons, it was thought, could be connected in some way or other with the preparations we were observing.
It was because we took the matter so lightly that we were all the more horrified at what we witnessed during the next few hours.
One row of Jews was ordered to move forward and was then allocated to the different tables where they had to undress completely and hand over everything they wore and carried. Some still carried jewellery which they had to put on the table. Then, having taken off all their clothes, they were made to stand in line in front of the ditches, irrespective of their sex. The commandos then marched in behind the line and began to perform the inhuman acts, the horror of which is now known to the whole world.
With automatic pistols and 0.8 pistols these men mowed down the line with such zealous intent that one could have supposed this activity to have been their life-work.
Even women carrying children a fortnight to three weeks old, sucking at their breasts, were not spared this horrible ordeal.
Nor were mothers spared the terrible sight of their children being gripped by their little legs and put to death with one stroke of the pistol-butt or club, thereafter to be thrown on the heap of human bodies in the ditch, some of which were not quite dead. Not before these mothers had been exposed to this worst of all tortures did they receive the bullet that released them from this sight.
The people in the first row thus having been killed in the most inhuman manner, those of the second row were now ordered to step forward. The men in this row were ordered to step out and were handed shovels with which to heap chloride of lime upon the still partly moving bodies in the ditch. Thereafter, they returned to the tables and undressed.
After that they had to set out on the same last walk as their murdered brethren, with one exception—this time the men of the alternative firing squad surpassed each other in cruelty, lest they lag behind their predecessors.
The air resounded with the cries of the children and the tortured. With senses numbed by what had happened, one could not help thinking of wives and children back home who believed they had good reason to be proud of their husbands and fathers, who, they thought, were fighting heroically in the ranks of the German army on behalf of the Fatherland, whilst the so-called Elite troop, always referred to as unique, perpetrated the most horrible acts of cruelty in the honourable uniform of a nation.
Two of Lieutenant Bingel’s men suffered ‘a complete nervous breakdown’ as a result of what they had witnessed. Two others, arrested for having taken ‘snapshots of the action’, were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, and served their term in a military prison in Germany.
On September 22, Lieutenant Bingel and his men witnessed a second massacre, in Vinnitsa. This was followed by a third, also in Vinnitsa, carried out by Ukrainian militia who had been trained by the SS, and were commanded ‘by a small group of SS officers and NCOs’. In the first two massacres, Bingel calculated, first twenty-four thousand and then twenty-eight thousand Jews were killed. In the third, Ukrainian militia killings, six thousand were murdered. As Lieutenant Bingel recalled:
In the morning at 10.15, wild shooting and terrible human cries reached our ears. At first, I failed to grasp what was taking place, but when I approached the window from which I had a broad view over the whole of the town park, the following spectacle unfolded before my eyes and those of my men who, alerted by the tumult, had meanwhile gathered in my room.
Ukrainian militia on horseback, armed with pistols, rifles and long, straight cavalry swords, were riding wildly inside and around the town park. As far as we could make out, they were driving people along before their horses—men, women, and children. A shower of bullets was then fired at this human mass. Those not hit outright were struck down with the swords. Like some ghostly apparition, this horde of Ukrainians, let loose and commanded by SS officers, trampled savagely over human bodies, ruthlessly killing innocent children, mothers and old people whose only crime was that they had escaped the great mass murder, so as eventually to be shot or beaten to death like wild animals.
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In a village several miles from Vinnitsa, six Jews were in hiding, among them two little girls, the five-year-old Ingar and the three-year-old Victoria. Their parents, Alexander and Judith Lerner, who lived in Moscow, had sent them for safety to Vinnitsa two months earlier, to Judith Lerner’s parents. This couple, as the German armies approached, fled to the village, to the children’s great grandparents. All six were betrayed by a neighbour, and killed.
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***
September 22 was the beginning of the Jewish New Year. The ten days that followed were the Days of Awe of the Jewish calendar, ending on that most solemn of days, the Day of Atonement. In 1941, the ten Days of Awe saw a greater intensity of killing than any previous ten-day period of the war. At Vinnitsa, twenty-eight thousand Jews were murdered on September 22. Two days later, in Wolkowysk, two thousand women and children were taken from the already established ghetto and murdered. At Kovno, on September 26, the SS recorded the shooting, in the Fourth Fort, of ‘412 Jewish men, 615 Jewish women, 581 Jewish children’ described as ‘sick people and carriers of epidemics’.
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From many towns, young Jews sought to break out of the
German and Lithuanian cordons, and make for the forests. On the night of September 26 several hundred young men managed to escape from Swieciany. ‘This being the night before the expulsion,’ one of them, Yitzhak Rudnicki, later recalled, ‘Lithuanian police vigilantly patrolled the area. Nearby villages were informed that anyone who caught an escaping Jew and turned him over to the police would receive a reward.’ Nor did the young men know where to go. ‘The Germans were approaching Moscow,’ Rudnicki explained, ‘the front was far away, and we could not possibly get there.’
Some were captured, but some reached the comparative safety of the Naroch forest, fifty miles to the east. There, they joined other fugitives, and, with the arrival of Soviet partisans a year later, joined the partisan ranks. Others like Rudnicki, unable to see a way past the hostile villagers, returned to Swieciany, where he joined the ghetto underground, and, seven months later, escaped again, this time successfully, to become a partisan in the forests.
50
On September 22 it was the turn of 4,000 Jews in Ejszyszki to face the ordeal. Alerted by the leaders of their community, nearly five hundred managed to escape, but most were hunted down by German and Lithuanian police. ‘Bluma Michalowski and her sister were shot on the Lithuanian-Russian border not far from Radun,’ recalled one of the escapees, Shalom Sonenson. ‘They were given a Jewish burial. They were the lucky ones!’
51
Sonenson, reaching Radun safely, later learned that on September 23 all those unable to escape had been locked into three buildings, including the synagogue, and kept without food or water. Then, all the following day and night, they were forced to stand in the cattle market, still denied food and water. This ordeal continued throughout the night. Then, on the morning of September 25, 250 of the healthiest men were marched away.
52
To reassure those who remained, the Lithuanians read out a letter, alleged to be from Lev Milikowski to his wife, telling her: ‘We are in a courtyard of a farmhouse, and we are preparing a ghetto for you. Don’t be afraid!” It was a trick. Throughout that day, and September 26, in batches of 250, the Jews of Ejszyszki were led away to specially prepared pits, where they were shot.
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