The Holocaust (77 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
The corpses were duly provided. Seven months later Eichmann was informed that 115 people had been killed for their skeletons: seventy-nine Jews, thirty Jewesses, four central Asians and two Poles.
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In this way, mass murder was made to serve the cause of one of the most bizarre, and obscene, forms of ‘science’.
Transports of Jews reached Birkenau every day, ‘guiltless people,’ Salmen Lewental noted, ‘unaware of their fate.’ As a member of
the Sonderkommando from December 1942, Lewental was one of several hundred Jews whose task was to ‘burn and smash their remains’. Other Jews, at the railway siding, gathered up ‘all packages and suitcases’.
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These packages and suitcases were taken to a part of the camp known as ‘Canada’, the huts in which the Jews of a so-called ‘Clearing Commando’ would unpack them, sort them, and prepare them for dispatch to Germany. Hundreds more Jews, mostly women, were employed in the huts of ‘Canada’, assembly point of the remaining wealth and possessions of more than two million Jews. Rudolf Vrba later recalled how the camp Trusties, or Kapos, would give the order, ‘Clearing Command, forward!’
With that we marched into Canada, the commercial heart of Auschwitz, warehouse of the body-snatchers where hundreds of prisoners worked frantically to sort, segregate and classify the clothes and the food and the valuables of those whose bodies were still burning, whose ashes would soon be used as fertiliser.
It was an incredible sight, an enormous rectangular yard with a watchtower at each corner and surrounded by barbed wire. There were several huge storerooms and a block of what seemed like offices with a square, open balcony at one corner. Yet what first struck me was a mountain of trunks, cases, rucksacks, kitbags and parcels stacked in the middle of the yard.
Nearby was another mountain, of blankets this time, fifty thousand of them, maybe one hundred thousand. I was so staggered by the sight of these twin peaks of personal possessions that I never thought at that moment where their owners might be. In fact I did not have much time to think, for every step brought some new shock.
Over to the left I saw hundreds of prams. Shiny prams, fit for a firstborn. Battered prams of character that had been handed down and down and down and had suffered gladly on the way. Opulent, ostentatious, status-symbol prams and modest, economy prams of those who knew no status and had no money. I looked at them in awe, but still I did not wonder where the babies were.
Another mountain, this time of pots and pans from a
thousand kitchens in a dozen countries. Pathetic remnants of a million meals, anonymous now, for their owners would never eat again.
Then I saw women. Real women, not the terrible, sexless skeletons whose bodies stank and whose hearts were dead.
These were young, well-dressed girls with firm, ripe figures and faces made beautiful by health alone. They were bustling everywhere, running to and fro with bundles of clothes and parcels, watched by even healthier, even more elegant women kapos.
It was all a crazy jigsaw that made no sense to me and seemed sometimes to verge on lunacy. Beside one of the storerooms I saw a row of girls sitting astride a bench with zinc buckets on either side of them. One row of buckets was filled with tubes of toothpaste which the girls were squeezing out on to the bench and then throwing into the other, empty buckets. To me it seemed thoroughly un-German, an appalling waste of labour and material; for I had yet to learn that perhaps one tube in ten thousand contained a diamond, a nest egg that some pathetic, trusting family had felt might buy privilege or even freedom.
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The wealth collected in ‘Canada’ came from Jews who were alive on arrival at Birkenau, but who were dead by the time their belongings had been sorted. Just before being gassed, further ‘wealth’ was extracted from the women: their hair. On 4 January 1943 the head office of the SS administration wrote to all concentration camp commandants, including Hoess at Auschwitz, requesting them to forward human hair for processing at the firm of Alex Zink, Filzfabrik A.G., at Roth near Nuremberg. For each kilogramme of human hair, camp commandants would receive half a mark.
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From January 7 to January 24, fifteen trains reached Auschwitz, from Belgium, Holland, Berlin, Grodno and the Bialystok region. From them, about four thousand Jews were selected for the barracks, and more than twenty thousand gassed. To enable such numbers to be ‘processed’ rapidly, and even to increase the scale and pace of the killing, four new crematoria were under construction, planned to come into operation in March. On the train from Belgium which arrived on January 18, 387 men and 81 women were
sent to the barracks, while the remaining 1,558 deportees, including all the children and old people, were gassed.
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On the train which left Theresienstadt on January 20, 160 young women and 80 young men were taken to the barracks at Birkenau, and the remaining 1,760 Jews loaded into lorries and driven to the gas-chamber. Only 2 of the 160 women and 80 men survived the slave labour of the next six weeks. Taken to marshland four miles from Auschwitz, they were forced to stand knee-deep in the marsh, digging out sand and stones. They were barefoot, and dressed in rags. Many, as the historian of Theresienstadt has recorded, ‘contracted frostbite and their festering fingers fell off’. But, crippled as they were, they had to carry on. SS women beat them with sticks and set Alsatian dogs on them. They had to rise at 3.30 a.m.; for breakfast they were given tea made of herbs; at 5 a.m. they marched to their place of work whence they returned between 6 and 7 p.m. to the strains of the camp band, carrying the bodies of their fellow prisoners murdered at work by the SS men. Their supper consisted of saltless hot water, with pieces of beetroot or bits of nettles swimming in it, and four ounces of bread.
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One of those who recorded some of the events at Birkenau was a member of the Sonderkommando whose twenty-nine-page notebook was found in 1952 buried near one of the crematoria. He recorded how, at the beginning of 1943:
The gas-chamber was crowded with Jews and one Jewish boy remained outside. A certain sergeant came to him and wanted to kill him with a stick. He mangled him in a brutish manner, blood was dripping on all sides, when all of a sudden the maltreated boy, who had been lying motionless, jumped to his feet and began to regard, quietly and silently, his cruel murderer with his childish gaze. The sergeant burst into loud cynical laughter, took out his revolver and shot the boy.
The author of this notebook also recorded how another of the SS men at Birkenau, SS Staff Sergeant Forst, ‘stood at the gate of the undressing room in the case of many transports and felt the sexual organ of each young woman that was passing naked to the gas-chamber. There were also cases when German SS men of all ranks put fingers into the sexual organs of pretty young girls.’
AUSCHWITZ—BIRKENAU
Another episode was recorded by this unknown author as an example of how the Germans were capable both of ‘torturing people and of mastering their minds’. It took place with the arrival at Birkenau of a group of ‘shrivelled, emaciated’ Jews from another camp:
They undressed in the open and singly went to be shot. They were horribly hungry and they begged to be given a piece of bread at the last moment while they were still alive. Plenty of bread was brought; the eyes of those men, sunken and dimmed due to protracted starvation, now flashed with a wild fire of staggering joy, they snatched big chunks of bread with both hands and voraciously swallowed, at the same time descending the steps straight on to be shot.
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On 14 January 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt met at Casablanca in North Africa to plan the strategy for an Allied invasion of Western Europe. News of the Casablanca Conference gave hope to the surviving Jews. In Kovno, a wife who had sworn not to have children while disaster threatened now became pregnant, confident that Casablanca would be a prelude to victory, and rescue.
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Rescue was more than two years away for the surviving Jews of Kovno; there was little chance of finding safety by escape or hiding. At Pilica, in southern Poland, on January 15, a Polish woman and her one-year-old child were shot for hiding Jews.
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Jewish resistance continued to grow: on January 14, at Lomza, the Chairman of the Jewish Council refused to hand over to the Gestapo forty Jews ‘of his own choosing’. Nor would the Jewish police agree to participate in the selection. The Gestapo themselves thereupon ‘selected’ the Jews, including two Council members.
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That same day, in Warsaw, Menahem Zemba, a distinguished rabbinical scholar, and since 1935 a member of the Warsaw Rabbinical Council, gave rabbinical approval for all efforts of resistance. ‘Of necessity we must resist the enemy on all fronts,’ he said, and he went on to explain that, confronted by a ruthless foe and a programme of ‘total annihilation’, Jewish religious law ‘demands that we fight and resist to the very end with unequalled
determination and valour, for the sake of sanctification of the Divine Name.’
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From the deportation trains, Jews now jumped whenever they could, despite the risk of being crushed under the wheels, or shot by the guards. On January 15 a total of seventy-seven Jews managed to jump from a train on its way east from Belgium, and did so before it reached the German frontier. German SS men, and members of the Flemish SS, tracked most of them down.
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On January 15 the Germans decided to empty the camp at Zaslaw in which thousands of Jews from the towns and villages of the River San were being held. All the inmates were sent by train to Belzec, and gassed. The twenty-one-year-old Yaacov Gurfein was in one of the last deportation trains. For two days and three nights the deportees were locked into the train, while it stood stationary. They were given neither food nor water. Then the train set off. ‘When we saw that the train was moving to Belzec,’ Gurfein later recalled, ‘one person jumped out. Then people again had this spark of hope. I don’t think I would have jumped were it not for my mother. She pushed me out.’
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When the last train left Zaslaw for Belzec, only one Jew managed to survive, Jaffa Wallach’s younger brother, Emil Manaster, who succeeded in jumping from the train, and who found refuge, like his sister Jaffa, with the Polish engineer, Jozef Zwonarz.
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In Birkenau, a similar spark of hope survived. Rivka Liebeskind later recalled her first Friday night there, on January 22, crowded with hundreds of other women into one of the huts, or ‘blocks’, tier upon tier. Candles had been acquired and, ‘on the top shelf of our block—we were at the time ten to twelve girls—we lit those candles. We lit the candles and quietly began singing the songs for the Sabbath. We did not know’, she added, ‘what was happening around us, but after a few minutes we heard stifled crying from all the shelves around us. First we were frightened, then moved. Then we saw that they could jump from one shelf to another. There were Jewish women who had already been there for years. They gathered around us and listened to our prayer and singing; soon there were those who came off their own shelves and asked to be allowed to bless the candles.’
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On 18 January 1943, after nearly four months without a single deportation, the Germans entered the Warsaw ghetto, intent upon a further deportation to Treblinka. ‘We were in the ghetto and hid in an attic,’ Bluma Shadur later recalled. ‘They went from house to house and killed people, throwing them out of the windows and taking whatever they could.’ Her own young brothers were among those taken, stripped naked, and deported to Treblinka.
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Among those deported on January 18 was Meir Alter, a well-known cantor of pre-war Warsaw. ‘With him’, Stanislaw Adler has recalled, ‘they dragged out his father and his brother Mieczyslaw.’ On the way to the Umschlagplatz, Alter supported his father, who was blind, and moving with difficulty. When asked by the SS escort why the old man did not walk by himself, Alter explained that his father was blind. The Nazi fired a shot, ‘killing the blind man instantly…’.
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Another of those killed in the streets was the director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Yitzhak Gitterman, who had been a ‘moving spirit’ behind self-help in the ghetto, and who was shot while talking to two friends on the stairs outside his apartment.
More than six hundred Jews were killed in the streets during that day of round-ups.
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An eye-witness later recalled:
The action proceeded at a rapid pace. It did not help to show a work card; all had to be taken to the Umschlagplatz. The ‘life certificates’, which had given their holders illusions, were torn up by SS men. There were no longer ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ Jews; all were condemned to death. The Jewish hospital was emptied out. The patients who could still walk were dragged to the Umschlagplatz; those who could not were killed on the spot.
The cries of the victims were drowned by rifle and machine-gun fire. The road to the Umschlagplatz was strewn with bodies of the dead and the dying. Those still alive would lift their eyes to the passing Jews, hoping for help, but no one paid any attention.
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