The Holocaust (64 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
The deportees were now driven southwards, along the railway line in the direction of Otwock. ‘They were weak because of the heat, and the dust choked them,’ another eye-witness recalled of this stage of the march, adding that the gendarmes ‘repeated again and again, “Schnell! Schnell!” “Quick! Quick!” and beat them. A Polish traveller passing by the train recalled after the war, how, every few yards along the railway line he had seen ‘the corpses of old men and women’.
After several hours, the Jews from Rembertow reached the outskirts of the ghetto of Falenica. That same day, throughout Falenica itself, the Germans had gathered the Jews near the railway station, searched for Jews in hiding outside the ghetto, and killed those whom they had found in hiding. Also during August 19, the children of the ghetto were taken out, as if to mark the start of the continuing march and deportation. They were, however, shot in the ghetto itself, and their bodies thrown into a ditch.
The time had come to send the Jews of Rembertow and Falenica to Treblinka. Two Jews, resisting the order to assemble, killed the first German to enter their apartment, striking him down with an
axe. Both were shot. Then, as one of the Jews to survive the deportation, a young man by the name of Najwer, noted in his diary, ‘Latvian auxiliaries sit around and watch. They play. They choose someone from the dense crowd and shoot at that living target. Hit or not? Sometimes someone asks to be killed. But he has to ask again and again. And when he
is
shot, it is done as an act of grace.’ Najwer himself was later murdered.
From the railway station of Falenica, just outside the ghetto limits, a train was waiting. On it, that August 19, the Jews of Rembertow and Falenica were taken to Treblinka, the wagons ‘sprinkled’, as a Polish eye-witness later recalled, ‘with undiluted lime and chlorine’.
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On August 23 the fifty-two-year-old Jankiel Wiernik was among several thousand Jews deported from Warsaw to Treblinka. One of less than a hundred survivors of the camp, Wiernik later set down his recollections of that first day, when he was among a few Jews separated from the mass of the deportees, and put with the small work squad. The squad’s first task was to remove corpses from a train which arrived that afternoon from Miedzyrzec. ‘Eighty per cent of its human cargo consisted of corpses,’ he later recalled. ‘We had to carry them out of the train, under the whip-lashes of the guards. At last we completed our gruesome chore. I asked one of my fellow workers what it meant. He merely replied that whoever you talk to today will not live to see tomorrow.’
Wiernik’s account continued:
We waited in fear and suspense. After a while we were ordered to form a semicircle. Then Sergeant Franz walked up to us, accompanied by his dog and a Ukrainian guard armed with a machine gun. We were about five hundred persons. We stood in mute suspense. About one hundred of us were picked from the group, lined up five abreast, marched away some distance and ordered to kneel. I was one of those picked out. All of a sudden there was a roar of machine guns and the air was rent with the moans and screams of the victims. I never saw any of these people again. Under a rain of blows from whips and rifle butts the rest of us were driven into the barracks,
which were dark and had no floors. I sat down on the sandy ground and dropped off to sleep.
The next morning we were awakened by loud shouts to get up. We jumped up at once and went out into the yard amid the yells of our Ukrainian guards. The Sergeant continued to beat us with whips and rifle butts at every step as we were being lined up. We stood for quite some time without receiving any orders, but the beatings continued. Day was just breaking and I thought that nature itself would come to our aid and send down streaks of lightning to strike our tormentors. But the sun merely obeyed the law of nature; it rose in shining splendour and its rays fell on our tortured bodies and aching hearts.
I was jolted from my thoughts by the command: ‘Attention!’ A group of sergeants and Ukrainian guards, headed by Franz with his dog Barry stood before us. Franz announced that he was about to give a command. At a signal from him, they began to torture us anew, blows falling thick and fast. Our faces and bodies were cruelly torn, but we all had to keep standing erect, because if one so much as stooped over but a little, he would be shot because he would be considered unfit for work.
When our tormentors had satisfied their thirst for blood, we were divided into groups. I was put with a group that was assigned to handle the corpses. The work was very hard, because we had to drag each corpse, in teams of two, for a distance of approximately three hundred metres. Sometimes we tied ropes around the dead bodies to pull them to their graves.
Suddenly, I saw a live woman in the distance. She was entirely nude; she was young and beautiful, but there was a demented look in her eyes. She was saying something to us, but we could not understand what she was saying and could not help her. She had wrapped herself in a bed sheet under which she was hiding a little child, and she was frantically looking for shelter. Just then one of the Germans saw her, ordered her to get into a ditch and shot her and the child. It was the first shooting I had ever seen.
I looked at the ditches around me. The dimensions of each ditch were 50 by 25 by 10 metres. I stood over one of them, intending to throw in one of the corpses, when suddenly a German came up from behind and wanted to shoot me. I
turned around and asked him what I had done, whereupon he told me that I had attempted to climb into the ditch without having been told to do so. I explained that I had only wanted to throw the corpse in.
Next to nearly every one of us there was either a German with a whip or a Ukrainian armed with a gun. As we worked, we would be hit over the head. Some distance away there was an excavator which dug out the ditches.
We had to carry or drag the corpses on the run, since the slightest infraction of the rules meant a severe beating. The corpses had been lying around for quite some time and decomposition had already set in, making the air foul with the stench of decay. Already worms were crawling all over the bodies. It often happened that an arm or a leg fell off when we tied straps around them in order to drag the bodies away. Thus we worked from dawn to sunset, without food or water, on what some day would be our own graves. During the day it was very hot and we were tortured by thirst.
When we returned to our barracks at night, each of us looked for the men we had met the day before but, alas, we could not find them because they were no longer among the living. Those who worked at assorting the bundles fell victim far more frequently than the others. Because they were starved, they pilfered food from the packages taken from the trains, and when they were caught, they were marched to the nearest open ditch and their miserable existence was cut short by a quick bullet. The entire yard was littered with parcels, valises, clothing and knapsacks which had been discarded by the victims before they met their doom.
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Meanwhile, in the part of Poland which had been annexed to Greater Germany, the deportations spread, preceded by scenes of terror. At Lask, on August 24, the Jews were locked into a church. One woman gave birth to a baby. Both she and the newborn child were killed. Three Jews managed to escape. Of the rest, about eight hundred were sent to factories in the Lodz ghetto, more than two and a half thousand to Chelmno, where they were gassed.
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That same day, at Zdunska Wola, 1,100 Jews were driven to the Jewish cemetery. Dora Rosenboim was with her brother. ‘Being ill
with a lung inflammation and very weak and not able to run, he fell on the ground and the Germans shot him, and I could not even save him.’ At the cemetery the slaughter began. ‘They tore children from their mothers’ arms and tore them to bits, shot and murdered mercilessly, so that a thousand victims fell in a single day. And those of us who remained alive had to bury the dead Jews.’ Shortly afterwards, her thirteen-year-old son was seized. ‘To this day we do not know what became of him,’ she recalled in 1946, ‘but we understand that we will never see him, our only child, our eyesight itself.’
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In the regions of the General Government where the deportations were to Treblinka, these too were continuing from day to day without interruption. ‘I seem to lose my reason in this atmosphere of doom and idleness,’ the fifty-three-year-old Gertrude Zeisler, a deportee from Vienna, had written from the Kielce ghetto on August 13.
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Eleven days later, on August 24, she was almost certainly among the many thousand Jews deported from Kielce to Treblinka. At Kielce station they were loaded on the trains by Ukrainian and German SS, and by the Polish police. The journey, which normally would take little over three hours, took twenty-four: many fainted from the heat and thirst, and hundreds died of suffocation. Others, in desperation, drank their own urine to try to avoid dehydration. When the train reached Treblinka, Izak Helfing later recalled, ‘nearly a third of us were dead’.
At Treblinka, the women were the first to be sent to the gas-chambers. Then, as Helfing recalled, ‘a certain Friedman’ cut a Ukrainian in his throat with a razor blade. The guards at once opened fire, and many were killed or wounded. The shooting went on for a long time. By the time it was finished, eighty per cent of the men and boys were dead. Helfing was fortunate to be able to hide among the corpses, and then to slip among the labourers. ‘For an entire day I employed myself by dragging the corpses away from the train cars. When nightfall came, I hid myself straightaway among the dead. Thus did I evade the gas oven for four days on end.’
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In the Lodz ghetto, every patch of waste ground had been given over to cultivation of vegetables. Throughout the summer, the hundred thousand inhabitants of the ghetto waited for the moment
when the main crop, the cabbages, would be ready to eat. Then, amid a heat wave in August, when the temperature reached 45 degrees centigrade, almost the whole cabbage crop was, as the ghetto chronicle recorded, ‘devoured by an enormous mass of caterpillars’. In this way, the Chronicle added, ‘the work of so many hands, so much energy, and the last ounce of people’s strength were lost with them!’ Those who suffered most were ‘little people without resources’, who had worked alone, or with their families, ‘giving every free minute they had to that tedious back-breaking work’. Now they were helpless for, as the chronicler wrote:
They had thought that by Sisyphean labour they would be able to set a little something aside for the hard winter months to come, they believed in some better tomorrow, assured them by the labour done in the hours free from the demands of the ghetto, and now, suddenly, disillusionment and despair!
But a Jew is a fatalist. He believes that if something happened, it was meant to be.
And, besides, he consoles himself with the knowledge that he has already suffered greater losses and ordeals and somehow survived them too. He must only think of how to protect his remaining vegetables from this plague, since the caterpillars are already moving on to the beets (for lack of anything else to feed on), so those too will soon be under serious attack.
Perhaps a salt, or even a soda solution will be found so that we can somehow go on living and survive this grievous affliction while we wait for a better tomorrow. Such is our mentality!
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Into the Lodz ghetto, at this very moment, were brought the remnants of the Jewish ghettos from a dozen small towns around Lodz, among them those from Lask and Zdunska Wola. ‘Pale shadows trudge through the ghetto,’ the ghetto chronicler noted on August 28, ‘with endemic swellings on their legs and faces, people deformed and disfigured, whose only dream is to endure, survive—to live to see a better tomorrow without new disturbances, even if the price is a small and inadequate ration’.
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In the Volhynia, August 1942 saw the massacre of more than sixty thousand Jews. It also saw the escape of tens of thousands to the woods. At Kostopol, on August 24, a Jew, Gedalia Braier, called upon his fellow Jews to run. All seven hundred ran. But less than ten survived the war. At Rokitno, where sixteen hundred Jews were assembled on August 26, surrounded by armed Ukrainians, a Jewish woman called out, ‘Jews! We are done for! Run! Save yourselves!’ and more than seven hundred managed to reach the woods. At Sarny, where fourteen thousand Volhynian Jews were assembled on August 28, two Jews, one a carpenter with his axe, the other, Josef Gendelman, a tinsmith with his tin-cutters, broke through the fence surrounding the ghetto and led a mass escape. Three thousand Jews reached the gap in the fence, and sought to push their way through it. But the Ukrainians were armed with machine guns, and two and a half thousand Jews were shot down at the fence. Five hundred escaped, but many of these were killed on their way to the woods, and only a hundred survived the war and its two more years of privation, manhunts, and frequent local hostility.
On August 25, when a group of Jews was taken from the town of Zofjowka, under guard, to dig burial pits, one of their number, Moshe-Yossel Schwartz, realising what was intended, urged his fellow Jews to attack their guards. They did so, using their spades to crush the heads of one of the German policemen and two of the Ukrainians. They then fled. But on the way to the woods, Schwartz was shot and killed.
Elsewhere in the Volhynia, individual Jews sought to challenge the German power. In Szumsk, two young women attacked the chief of the police, ‘choking him and biting him until they were shot to death’. In Turzysk, a young man, Berish Segal, stole a gun, hit a German policeman in the face with it, but was shot by other policemen.
The Jews who reached the Volhynian woods and formed small partisan bands did so six months before the arrival of Soviet partisans from White Russia. When the Soviet partisans came, Jews helped them, and were protected by them. But in the interval, the death toll was high. Of a group of a hundred Jewish partisans and escaped Soviet prisoners-of-war near Radziwillow, only one, the platoon commander, Yechiel Prochownik, survived. Another of the Jewish partisan leaders, Moshe Gildenmann, began his
anti-German activities with ten men and a single knife. A year later, in the marshes north of Zhitomir, Gildenmann’s group was to guide to safety a Russian division surrounded by the Germans.
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