The Holocaust (7 page)

Several thousand German Jews had already fled to Poland. There, however, the Jewish community looked with alarm at growing anti-Jewish activity. One incident caused particular concern: the ‘Przytyk pogrom’. To the south of Warsaw, on Saturday, March 7 the Jews in the village of Przytyk learned that a group of peasants had gathered to attack them. ‘My mother gave me two bottles of benzine, and matches to throw,’ the nine-and-a-half-year-old Shalom Lindenbaum later recalled, ‘but nothing happened.’ Then, on Monday, March 9, market day, ‘with sticks and stones they came’.
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The peasants who attacked the Jews that day broke into the village square, entering Jewish houses, smashing the windows, and breaking the furniture. Two Jews, a shoemaker Josef Minkowski and his wife Chaya, were tortured to death. Their children, who were discovered hiding under the bed, were savagely beaten.

Gathering in the village square, the Jews decided to resist. One of them, Shalom Lasko, aged twenty, a religious Jew, fired a revolver, killing one of the peasants in the attacking gang.
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News of the Przytyk pogrom horrified Polish Jewry. The successful self-defence was forgotten in the spectre of the two deaths, and in the implications for the future of Polish Jewry.
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Tens of thousands of Polish Jews sought safety in emigration. By the end of 1936, a record annual influx of Polish Jews—11,596 men, women and children—had been admitted to Palestine.
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But even at the rate at which Britain was granting Palestine certificates, such emigration could never be anything but a minor amelioration for three million Polish Jews; and Arab hostility inside Palestine to Jewish immigration was already leading to violent Arab protests and to the decision by the British authorities to seek a drastic reduction in the number of future certificates.

On 15 April 1936, just over five weeks after the Przytyk pogrom, the Palestinian Arabs began a General Strike in protest against Jewish immigration. Violent acts against Jewish property and against individuals culminated in the killing of two Jews in Tulkarm on the first day of the strike. On April 19 nine Jews were killed in Jaffa, and on April 20 a further five. Meeting in Jerusalem on May 7, the Arab leaders demanded an end to Jewish immigration.

Within a month, twenty-one Jews had been killed in Arab attacks. Six Arabs had been killed by the British police. No Arabs had been killed by Jews.
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The news of the killing of Jews in Palestine had a disturbing impact on the emigration from Germany. On June 12, two Berlin Jews, Wilfrid Israel and Lola Hahn Warburg, telegraphed to Jerusalem for funds to strengthen the defences of the children’s village of Ben Shemen, between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, as many German Jewish parents were now worried about sending their children to Palestine, despite a comprehensive youth programme of training and settlement.
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In Germany, Hitler moved steadily to consolidate his power. Secret rearmament, begun by his predecessors, increased in scale and speed. On 7 March 1936 Hitler sent German troops into those parts the Rhineland Province which, although within the borders of postwar Germany, had been demilitarized since 1918 under the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler’s action flouted a solemn Treaty. But it went unchallenged by Britain and France. Hitler had achieved his first success in breaching international law. Inside Germany, the creation of ‘Jew free’ villages continued. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, driven out of their professions, found themselves with no means of livelihood. Placards inscribed ‘Jews not wanted here’ appeared on more and more buildings. Jewish schoolchildren were forbidden to sit on the same benches as non-Jews, and were subjected to abuse from teachers and pupils alike. In every sphere of daily life, the segregation enjoined by the Nuremberg Laws was being enforced.

In the summer of 1936 a German Jew, Stefan Lux, one of over two thousand Jewish film producers who had been forced to give up their professional work, decided to make a public protest against the continuing persecutions. The place he chose for his protest was the assembly room of the League of Nations building in Geneva. There, on 3 July 1936, surrounded by journalists in the Press Gallery, he committed suicide. He was forty-eight years old.

Stefan Lux left a letter to Anthony Eden, the British Cabinet Minister responsible for League affairs. In this letter, Lux said that he had killed himself in order to draw attention to the persecutions in Germany. ‘I do not find any other way to reach the hearts of men,’ he wrote, adding that the persecutions had failed to pierce the ‘inhuman indifferences’ of the world.
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In August 1936 the Polish Ministry of Commerce, in Warsaw, ordered all shops throughout Poland to include, as part of the shop sign, the name of the owner as it appeared on his birth certificate.
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This made the fact that the owner was Jewish obvious to every Pole, and provided instant incitement for the anti-Semite.

Jews fled from Poland, as from Germany, and fled in vast numbers. Between 1921 and 1937, 395,223 Polish Jews emigrated.
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Yet this enormous figure was little more than ten per cent of Polish Jews. Half of Germany’s Jews were able to find refuge, and many of them safety, in emigration. Polish Jewry was so large as to be without prospect of safety through flight.

In Hitler’s phraseology and in the Nazi propaganda, the Jews were an evil disease, poisoning the blood of decent humanity, a conscious plague-bacillus infecting the pure, innocent ‘Aryan’. But
it was the virus of anti-Semitism which was much in evidence in 1936, spreading across national borders as if those borders did not exist. ‘The virus spread’, a young Polish Jew, Ben Helfgott, later recalled, as he remembered—he was then seven years old—signs daubed on Jewish-owned shops in his home town of Piotrkow: ‘Don’t buy at Jewish shops’, ‘Jews out’, and the equally Nazi-echoing slogan: ‘Get out to Palestine’.
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The power of Nazi Germany was still confined to the borders of the Reich, and it was in Germany that the dangers seemed greatest, the pressures most severe. On September 7, a twenty-five-per-cent tax was imposed on all Jewish wealth, substantially reducing the power of the Jewish community to help those who were now jobless. Denunciation of Jews and Jewish values continued: on November 29 the Minister of Agriculture, Walther Darre, declared that liberalism and democracy were ‘Jewish conceptions’, and that all democratic governments were ‘essentially Jewish’.
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Throughout 1937 the German government increased its military and air strength. ‘We seem to be moving,’ Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on April 14, ‘drifting steadily, against our will, against the will of every race and every people and every class, towards some hideous catastrophe.’
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In Poland, on May 13, Polish anti-Semites attacked the Jews of Brest-Litovsk, under the slogan ‘We owe our troubles to the Jews’. In Germany, a young Jew of twenty, Helmut Hirsch, in despair at the unyielding pressures against his people, had been caught with a revolver and a suitcase of bombs. He was charged with intending to assassinate Streicher. Hirsch was then tried, and sentenced to death. As Hirsch was technically an American citizen, although he had never been to America, the American Ambassador, William Dodd, appealed to Hitler to commute the death sentence. But Hitler’s reply, Dodd told the American journalist William Shirer, ‘was a flat negative’. Dodd then sought a personal interview with Hitler to plead the case; he was ‘rebuffed’.
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At dawn on June 4, Helmut Hirsch was executed with an axe. Eight days later, a number of Jews accused of ‘race defilement’ were sent to Dachau concentration camp, where some three hundred Jews were being held.

The German government lost no opportunity to extend its racial laws. On July 15, the Geneva Convention in respect of Upper Silesia
expired. German Jews in Upper Silesia now faced the full rigour of those laws: expulsion from their jobs, loss of the rights of citizenship, segregation from the community around them. The application of the Nuremberg Laws to Upper Silesia had been promulgated two weeks before the expiry of the Geneva Convention.
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The desperate search for safety continued: in 1937 a further 3,601 German Jews reached Palestine, as did 3,636 Jews from Poland.
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But these figures, so much lower than those for 1936, reflected new restrictions imposed by the British Mandate authorities as the Arab revolt against Jewish immigration continued.
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For the Jews of Germany, this was an ominous development, reflected in Palestine itself by the deaths, between April 1936 and the end of 1937, of 113 Jews, and by the first Arab deaths, fifteen in all, in Jewish reprisal raids, despite the condemnation of such reprisals by the Jewish National Council in Palestine.
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In Germany, the Jews registered one small success in the late autumn of 1937. David Glick, a Pittsburgh lawyer, and the unofficial representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the ‘Joint’—negotiated with the Gestapo the release of 120 of the three hundred Jews then being held in Dachau. The Gestapo agreed to release them on condition that the 120 Jews emigrated immediately to a country beyond Europe. At Glick’s urging, the British Consul General in Munich, Consul Carvell, agreed to issue Palestine visas on condition that £5,000 was paid into a bank outside Germany to assist the settlement of the released men in Palestine. The Joint agreed, and paid the money. The Jews were released.

Glick’s experiment was later repeated on a larger scale. Its second success was when three thousand German Jews were sent with a similar payment to Bolivia, financed by Don Mauricio Hochschild, a Jewish tin-mine millionaire in Peru.
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At the same moment that the Germans were agreeing to Jewish emigration, anti-Jewish propaganda was intensifying. On 8 November 1937 an exhibition opened in Nuremberg, ‘The Eternal Jew’, portraying the Jew as a taskmaster for international Bolshevism, aimed at enslaving Germany within the Soviet system.
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In 1937, as in 1936, anti-Jewish actions had again spread throughout Eastern Europe. In Poland, 350 physical assaults
against Jews were recorded in the single month of August. In the Rumanian town of Piatra Neamt, twenty-six out of the town’s twenty-eight Jewish barristers were dismissed, and there were anti-Jewish riots in several towns throughout the year. On 21 January 1938, in a law which abrogated the minority rights of Jews—established in 1918—many Jews who had lived in Rumania since 1918 were deprived of their citizenship.
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Four months later, on May 29, the Hungarian government published its first Law specifically restricting, to twenty per cent, the number of Jews allowed to hold jobs in commerce, industry, the liberal professions, and the administration.
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In four years, the German government had turned Jews into less than second-class citizens. Now other governments, and other peoples, especially those in Eastern Europe, looked with envy at the Nazi achievements, and allowed their own anti-Jewish prejudices to flourish.

Not every nation in Europe on the eve of the Second World War was so sophisticated as to be able to resist the pressures of more than six years of Nazi propaganda. This propaganda, in the press and on radio, in books and films, in schools and universities, stirred up deep jealousies and hatreds, casting the Jew as the scapegoat for all existing ills and dangers, great and alleged. To an ill-educated person, to a poor person, to a person whose secure world was under apparent threat from outside, international forces, the Nazi cry ‘the Jews in our misfortune’ rang like a clarion call.

In some countries, such as Italy, anti-Jewish hatred was hard to fan. In others, like Rumania, it was substantially fanned among large numbers. In Poland, it succeeded even more widely. The emancipations of mind and judgement which had been set in train by the French Revolution in 1789, and had so marked the progress of the nineteenth century, was far from universal. The concept of the Jew as an alien and outsider remained a convincing one in many lands: jealousy of the Jew who had succeeded, contempt for the Jew who had failed, willingness to believe in sinister changes and evil design, were still capable of being stirred up into physical violence over large parts of Europe, and especially Eastern Europe.

On 30 January 1938, Hitler celebrated the fifth anniversary of his coming to power. For five years he had rearmed Germany, and given repeated notice to the world that he considered himself responsible for German-speaking people wherever they lived, whether in his birthplace, Austria, in the Sudeten mountain borderlands of Czechoslovakia, in the Free City of Danzig, or even in the western provinces of Poland. As yet his growing armies had crossed no frontier. The Rhineland province of Germany had been remilitarized and the Saar had been reincorporated to Germany by the overwhelming vote of its population. Neither action had led to the death of a single foreign soldier.

Even Hitler’s anti-Jewish record over five years was open to positive interpretation. German Jews had been allowed to leave, and to leave in their tens of thousands. No more than two hundred had been killed, most of them in the first fourteen months of his rule.
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The number of Jews, as well as of political opponents, liberals and churchmen, held in concentration camps, had continually dropped. The negotiated release of the 120 Jews from Dachau had been a prelude to further negotiations and further releases.

But for those actually involved, the signs were terrifying. German Jews had been deprived of the rights of citizenship. The fate of the three hundred Jews still inside Dachau was not known until early in 1939, with the publication in Paris of an account by a former prisoner. He described his arrival in the camp on 4 February 1938: