Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (46 page)
From the ghetto at Piaski, Moritz Mayer was allowed to send a postcard. Its message read: ‘We hope and pray with unswerving faith in God that, in time, the Almighty will rectify all things.’
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The historian of the destruction of the Jewry of Worms has commented on this message: ‘There is no greater courage than the one required to sustain hope and faith in the presence of evil.’
34
On March 26 it was the turn of more than two thousand of the Jews in the ghetto at Izbica Lubelska to be deported, to ‘make room’, they were told, for the recent deportees from Theresienstadt. These were the 1,001 Jews from ‘Transport Aa’ of March 11, and a further 1,000 on ‘Transport Ab’, which had left Theresienstadt on March 17. From this second group of 1,000, only three were to survive the war.
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Deportations from the ghetto at Izbica Lubelska to Belzec were to take place each time a new deportation reached the ghetto from the west. None was spared. Nor was escape from Izbica Lubelska possible. ‘The Jews of Izbica are completely disorientated,’ the Polish doctor, Zygmunt Klukowski, of nearby Szczebrzeszyn, was to note in his diary on March 29, ‘don’t know what to do, whether to hide or sit still and wait. They are afraid to go beyond the town because the Germans kill them without question if discovered. We keep hearing of such incidents.’
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With the daily deportations from the west paralleled by daily deportation to ‘the east’, rumours abounded throughout the Lublin region. On March 26 Klukowski noted in his diary:
There is great unhappiness and fear among the Jews. From everywhere comes the news about the incredible violence against the Jews. They are bringing trainloads of Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and even from Belgium. They are also resettling the Jews from various towns and villages and taking them somewhere towards Belzec. Today I heard a story about what they did to the Jews in Lublin. It is difficult to believe it’s true. Today they deported the Jews from Izbica—they were also taken to Belzec where there is supposed to be some monstrous camp.
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At this ‘monstrous camp’ more than six hundred thousand Jews were murdered in less than a year.
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No selection was made to keep alive those capable of work: only a few hundred were chosen
to be part of a
Sonderkommando
, or ‘Special Commando’, some employed in taking the bodies of those who had been gassed to the burial pits, others in sorting the clothes of the victims and in preparing those clothes and other belongings for despatch to Germany. Eventually, the members of this Sonderkommando were also murdered. ‘The procedure is pretty barbaric,’ Josef Goebbels noted in his diary on March 27, ‘one not to be described here most definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews.’
‘On the whole,’ Goebbels added, ‘about sixty per cent will have to be liquidated, whereas only forty per cent can be used for forced labour.’ In fact, at Belzec, even the two or three per cent of arrivals who were sent to join the Sonderkommando were then murdered. The measures necessary, Goebbels noted, were being carried out by the former Gauleiter of Vienna, General Odilo Globocnik, who was acting ‘with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention’. A judgement was being visited upon the Jews, Goebbels concluded, that, ‘while barbaric, is fully deserved by them’.
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At Auschwitz, the gas-chambers and crematoria being built at nearby Birkenau were not yet ready. The first deportees, 999 Slovak Jewish women, were therefore kept in barracks after their arrival at Auschwitz on March 26. In the following four weeks, Jews reached the camp every few days, the majority, more than six thousand, being men and women from Slovakia.
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But there were also 1,112 Jews from Paris, most of them Polish-born, who had been seized in Paris in the previous months, held in detention camp at Compiègne, and who reached Auschwitz on March 30.
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Here, they waited with the Slovak Jews, not knowing what was in prospect.
This first deportation from France had left Paris three days earlier, on March 27, as ‘special train 767’. As with all the deportations of the coming two years, a precise timetable had been devised for it:
| 27 March | |
| Bourget-Drancy | dep 17.00 |
| Compiegne | arr 18.40 |
| | dep 19.40 |
| Laon | arr 21.05 |
| | dep 21.23 |
| Reims | arr 22.25 |
| 28 March | |
| | dep 9.10 |
| Neuberg (frontier) | arr 13.59 |
| 30 March | |
| Auschwitz | arr 5.33 |
Of the 1,112 deportees on this train from Paris, one, Georges Rueff, managed to jump from the train and escape. Of the rest, only twenty-one were alive five months later. Among those on the train who were to be gassed during the summer was the forty-four-year-old Israel Chlebowski, who had been born in Przytyk, the village in which the pogrom of 1936 had so shocked Polish Jewry. Others murdered from this train of March 27 were the forty-year-old Ignatz Baum, born in Haifa; Henry Eckstein, born in London in 1915; several Jews born in French North Africa, including Sadia Sarfati from Oran and Maurice Behar from Tunis; a twenty-nine-year-old Jew born in Constantinople, Abram Adjibel, and Moise Schneider, aged forty-one, who had been born in the then Austro-Hungarian frontier town of Auschwitz, to which he was now, unsuspecting, to return.
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***
By the end of March 1942 the gassing of Jews was taking place daily at Chelmno and Belzec. At the same time, gas-chambers were under construction at Birkenau and Sobibor. To gain a first-hand report of the effectiveness of the new system in action, Gestapo chief Heinrich Muller sent Adolf Eichmann to Chelmno. Nineteen years later, in a courtroom in Jerusalem, Eichmann recalled his visit:
There was a room—if I remember correctly—perhaps five times as large as this one. Perhaps it was only four times as big as the one I am sitting in now. And Jews were inside. They were to strip and then a truck arrived where the doors open, and the van pulled up at a hut. The naked Jews were to enter. Then the doors were hermetically sealed and the car started.
Eichmann could not recall how many people were inside the van, explaining to the court:
I couldn’t even look at it. All the time I was trying to avert my sight from what was going on. It was quite enough for me what
I saw. The screaming and shrieking—I was too excited to have a look at the van. I told Muller that in my report. He didn’t derive much profit from my report and afterwards I followed the van. Some of them knew the way, of course. And then I saw the most breathtaking sight I have ever seen in my life.
The van was making for an open pit. The doors were flung open and corpses were cast out as if they were some animals—some beasts. They were hurled into the ditch. I also saw how the teeth were being extracted. And then I disappeared; I entered my car and I didn’t want to look at this heinous act of turpitude. Then I took the car; for hours I was sitting at the side of the driver without exchanging a word with him. Then I knew I was washed up. It was quite enough for me. I only know that I remember a doctor in a white apron—there was a doctor in white uniform. He was looking at them. I couldn’t say anything more. I had to leave because it was too much, as much as I could stand.
According to Eichmann, he had told Muller that the scene at Chelmno was ‘horrible, it’s an indescribable inferno’.
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At Belzec, the man in charge of the killings was Christian Wirth, who was also given the task of choosing someone to organize a third death camp, at Sobibor. Wirth chose Franz Stangl, who went to prepare the site at Sobibor, helped by Michel Hermann, formerly the head male nurse at the largest of the German euthanasia centres, Schloss Hartheim. Stangl later recalled his first visit to Belzec, by car from Sobibor. ‘The smell,’ he said, ‘oh God, the smell. It was everywhere.’ Stangl’s account continued:
Wirth wasn’t in his office; they said he was up in the camp. I asked whether I should go up there and they said, ‘I wouldn’t if I were you—he’s mad with fury. It isn’t healthy to be near him.’ I asked what was the matter. The man I was talking to said that one of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them—oh God, it was awful. A bit later Wirth came down. And that’s when he told me….
I said to Wirth that I couldn’t do it, I simply wasn’t up to such an assignment. There wasn’t any argument or discussion.
Wirth just said my reply would be reported to HQ and I was to go back to Sobibor. In fact I went to Lublin, tried again to see Globocnik, again in vain; he wouldn’t see me. When I got back to Sobibor, Michel and I talked and talked about it. We agreed that what they were doing was a crime. We considered deserting—we discussed it for a long time. But how? Where could we go? What about our families?
Stangl continued with the construction of the gas-chambers and crematoria at Sobibor. One afternoon, before the gas-chambers were finished, Wirth arrived unexpectedly. Stangl was at once summoned to the still unfinished gas-chamber. ‘When I got there,’ he later recalled, ‘Wirth stood in front of the building wiping the sweat off his cap and fuming. Michel told me later that he’d suddenly appeared, looked around the gas-chambers on which they were still working and said, “Right, we’ll try it out right now with those twenty-five work-Jews: get them up here.” They marched our twenty-five Jews up there and just pushed them in, and gassed them. Michel said Wirth behaved like a lunatic, hit out at his own staff with his whip to drive them on. And then he was livid because the doors hadn’t worked properly.’
Wirth ordered the gas-chamber doors to be changed, and left.
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At camp Jungfernhof in Riga, Gerda Rose-Wasserman was present on March 26 at a further selection of German Jews for work at the alleged ‘fish factory’ in Duenamuende. That day the Germans asked for fifteen hundred ‘workers’. Many refused to be separated from their parents; others were tempted by the promise of easy indoor work and the likelihood of better food at such a location. ‘But when some of the young people’, Gerda Rose-Wasserman later recalled, ‘wanted to go along with their parents,’ SS Sergeant Seck, the commandant of Jungfernhof, refused to give them permission to do so. Gerda Rose-Wasserman went down on her knees, begging to be allowed to go along with her mother and little brother. ‘Seck just smiled at her,’ Gertrude Schneider, the historian of the Riga ghetto, later wrote, ‘said something about how pretty she was, and refused her pleas. To many of the inmates, his behaviour seemed ominous, but for those already loaded upon the trucks, such second thoughts came much too late.’
As a result of the pressure of those who hoped for better conditions away from Riga, four hundred more Jews than the SS had asked for left the city that Sunday, March 26. They were taken, not to a distant labour camp, but to the nearby Bikernieker forest. On the following day several trucks entered the Riga ghetto, and were unloaded. ‘Their cargo was an assortment of personal effects of the people who had been resettled. There were clothes that had been taken off hurriedly by their owners—still turned inside out—stockings attached to girdles and shoes encrusted with mud. The trucks also yielded nursing bottles, children’s toys, eye-glasses, bags filled with food, and satchels containing photographs and documents.’
The women from the ghetto were ordered to sort out the clothes. The best items were to be sent to Germany, the rest to be distributed among the inmates of the ghetto. Gertrude Schneider later recalled how, as the women worked at the sorting, ‘They recognized many of the clothes, some by the names that had been sewn into them, some by the identity cards still in the pockets, and there were of course, dresses, coats and suits which they had seen on their friends and neighbours when they had left the ghetto only a few days before.’ Her account continued:
Soon everyone in the ghetto knew about the cargo that the trucks had brought and about the conditions of the clothes. It did not take any great imagination to understand what had happened to their owners. No longer did anyone scoff at the tales of the Latvian Jews nor think that this could happen only to Ostjuden and never to the Jews from Germany. In many houses, in the ghetto,
Kaddish
, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, was recited. The German ghetto was plunged into despair.
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Among those murdered at the Bikernieker forest that day was Chief Rabbi Joseph Carlebach.
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Throughout Eastern Europe, rumours abounded as to some sinister fate for the growing number of Jews being deported ‘to the East’. But the exact nature of that fate was still unknown. Also unknown was the reason: the ‘final solution’, worked out administratively at Wannsee, remained a tight secret. Even so, evidence that the killings were not to be limited to a single region, or to chance,
began to be clear to the Jews in Warsaw towards the end of March 1942, with a second messenger with evil tidings. The first had been Heniek Grabowski, who had brought with him in November 1941 an account of the mass killings in Vilna that autumn. The second was Yakov Grojanowski, who now gave his eye-witness account of the disposal of the murdered Jews and Gypsies at Chelmno.
One of those who had heard both messengers tell their stories was Yitzhak Zuckerman. He and his friends had been trying for some months to organize at least the nucleus of an underground organization. ‘We, after we heard the story about Vilna on the one hand and the story about Chelmno on the other, we believed that this was the system and this was the plan.’ Until then, he recalled, ‘we could not believe that a nation in the twentieth century can pronounce a sentence of death on a whole nation, and we used to ask ourselves: “They degrade us, they suppress us, do they plan to exterminate us all?” We did not believe that.’
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