The Holocaust (80 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
Babikier and his son had two bottles, which they decided to break over Germans’ heads in Treblinka if and when it became certain that they were going to be killed. In the meantime the train went on, for quite some time; according to their calculations they should have reached Treblinka long ago. The train stopped. They asked the Ukrainian where they were going. He told them they were going to Lublin:
By now Malkinia was twenty kilometres behind us. Indescribable joy pervaded the carriage. People kissed and congratulated each other. Niomke said to my father: ‘You’ll see, we’ll remain alive after all.’
The man who had cut his throat gestured for help. There were no means to help him and he died. Dr Gawze, who sat
apathetically, keeping his own injection until the last moment, now rushed to the assistance of the other doctor and his son, ordered them to drink water with soap suds to make them vomit. I gave the rest of his water, but it did not work. The father put his arm round his son’s waist, felt his pulse with his other hand, their faces were joyous, they were swaying like drunks. After a while they died. The man whose belt broke came round. They put all the four dead together in a corner of the carriage.
When the fear of death passed, came the worry about water. Their tongues were dry, they were calling for water, but no one gave it to them. At one stop one person gave the Ukrainian a gold watch, and he brought two bottles of water. Everyone reached for the bottles, they fell and broke and no one got any water. The shooting stopped, everyone thought they were going to a labour camp. No one had heard about Majdanek. After midnight they arrived at Lublin and stopped at a railway platform. All night they stayed in the carriage with their tongues hanging out with thirst like dogs. From the whole train came cries for help. Suddenly there was shooting.
In the morning it was discovered that the Germans were shooting people who could no longer stand the heat and the thirst and left carriages. Dawn came. They saw a group of Jewish women, marching in formation. They asked them by gestures—by pointing at their necks—whether they were brought here to be killed. The women shook their heads in denial. They began to curse them loudly, for they were certain that the Germans had put them up to it, wishing to deceive them.
At 7 a.m. they were unloaded. By the carriages stood SS men and Ukrainians with large dogs, and beat them as they came out. They put them in fives. Whenever anyone moved out of line the dogs attacked him and bit him. They breathed deeply the air of which they were so short for such a long time. They asked the Ukrainians for water and were told that they are going to a camp and will get everything here.
Before the carriages lay a few naked bodies. Those were the people shot in the night, who tried to get out of the carriages. They had undressed in the train, because they were so unbearably hot.
Dr Kaplan was told that his daughter is dead in a carriage of a train which arrived earlier. A cordon of SS men with dogs surrounded them and they moved off.
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During the Bialystok deportation, twelve young Jews managed to escape from the ghetto and find refuge in the nearby forests. Led by Eli Baumats, they obtained arms, and on February 13 struck at a German police unit at Lipowy Most. One of their number, Moshe Slapak, known to his fellow partisans as ‘Maksym’, was killed in this engagement. Two months later, on the night of May 24, a second group of young Jews, sixteen in all, organized by Judith Nowogrodzka, likewise managed to break out of the ghetto, led out by Szymon Datner.
Datner’s destination was a nearby wood, but he and his group were forced to return that same night to the ghetto. When they did so, they discovered that three of the young men with them had disappeared in the darkness. ‘I went out alone to find them,’ Datner later recalled. ‘Two German guards came across me. I shot first. The shooting continued. Both Germans were killed. One died on the spot. The second died of his wounds two days later, attended on his deathbed, on Gestapo orders, by a Jewish doctor, Tuviah Cytron.’
Datner returned to the Bialystok ghetto, and again, on June 3, set out for the woods, together with another would-be partisan, Chaim Chalef, and the group of sixteen. This time they managed to reach the woods, and were to fight, first alone and later with Red Army partisan units, until liberation.
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Jews were deported from Bialystok to Treblinka, to Majdanek and to Auschwitz. During the deportation to Auschwitz, several Jews had tried to jump out of the trains. Passing through Lodz, a husband, wife and daughter had managed to jump. The mother was shot dead. The father and daughter reached the ghetto. The father, Chaim Jankelewicz, distraught at his wife’s death, hanged himself. The daughter, with a broken leg, was taken in by Rumkowski.
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Among the deportees from Bialystok to Auschwitz was Dr Aharon Beilin. During the ‘selection’, he later recalled, the SS doctor ‘whistled the aria “La Donna e Mobile” from
Rigoletto
’. At this particular selection, 150 men and 150 women, including Dr Beilin, were selected for the barracks at Birkenau. The rest, more than four thousand seven hundred, were gassed, among them Dr Beilin’s
mother. As he later recalled, the four thousand seven hundred were sent ‘the way which I later learned was the way to the crematorium’. Then, ‘I saw these trucks, three or four hours later—that’s how long we waited—through a barbed wire; we were standing on the other side of the fence—we had not yet entered the camp. I saw these trucks returning with coats and I saw my mother’s coat. I then understood that she was no longer with us.’
Beilin was a physician for epidemic diseases. He had worked as such in the Bialystok city hospital, and later in the ghetto. During his first month in Birkenau, as he later recalled, a Dutch physician arrived:
He asked me—he said: ‘Tell me, colleague, when shall I see my wife and children?’ I said: ‘Why do you ask me this question?’ He said to me: ‘We were told on the ramp at Birkenau that those who were fit for labour were going to a separate camp, and the women and children would go to another camp in which they would get better treatment; and after two weeks there would be a reunion.’ And he asked me: ‘When will this reunion take place, and how?’
I told him the truth, but then I was sorry. He told me: ‘Small wonder that the Germans accuse the Jews of spreading atrocity stories—it is impossible what you are telling me now!’ I showed him the crematoria, a hundred yards outside the camp, and I asked him: ‘Do you see that building? What do you think it is?’ He said: ‘That is a bakery’.
Two weeks later, Dr Beilin saw the Dutch physician again:
He called me. I wanted to evade this meeting. I saw him from afar and he came up to me. It was very embarrassing to me. He said, ‘Colleague, you were right. It is murder.’
I later learned from his Dutch colleagues that he had committed suicide by hanging himself. This was the most popular method of committing suicide in Birkenau. He hanged himself on the electrified barbed wire.
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On February 6, Himmler received a report on the ‘quantity of old garments’ collected from Birkenau and the camps in the Lublin region. The list included 97,000 sets of men’s ‘old clothing’, 76,000
sets of women’s ‘old clothing’, 132,000 men’s shirts, 155,000 women’s coats and 3,000 kilogrammes of women’s hair. The women’s hair filled a whole freight car.
Children’s items on the list included 15,000 overcoats and 11,000 boys’ jackets, as well as 9,000 girls’ dresses, and 22,000 pairs of children’s shoes. Also listed were 135,000 handkerchiefs and 100,000 hand towels. All were to be distributed, some of them to the Reich Youth Leadership.
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The question had also been raised three weeks earlier, by Himmler personally, after a visit to Warsaw, as to what to do with watch glasses, ‘of which hundreds of thousands—perhaps even millions’ were lying in warehouses in Warsaw.
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The Jewish clothing sent to the Reich filled 825 freight cars. In addition, the amount of foreign currency, gold and silver listed was considerable, including half a million United States dollars, and 116,420 dollars in gold.
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Clothes, valuables, hair: these were among the spoils of the German war against the Jews. Children and their parents were equally stripped of their pathetic possessions at the entrance to the gas-chamber. On February 11, in a deportation from Paris to Birkenau, were 123 children under twelve, many deported without their parents. Also on that train, and also gassed, was the sixty-six-year-old rabbi, Ernest Ginsburger, awarded the Medaille Militaire in the First World War, while serving as Chaplain in the French Eighteenth Army Corps.
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At the German border, three Jews had managed to escape from this train. They were caught, and forced back on to the train. Of 998 Jews deported, 143 men and 53 women were sent to the barracks: the remaining 802 deportees, including all the children, were gassed.
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The belongings and clothes of the dead were sorted by prisoners in the ‘Canada’ section of Auschwitz for despatch to Germany. One of the destinations, for further sorting, was Dachau. Among those in Dachau when railway carriages full of clothes reached the camp from Birkenau was Pastor Heinrich Grüber. ‘We were shaken to the depths of our soul’, he later recalled, ‘when the first transports of children’s shoes arrived—we men who were inured to suffering and to shock had to fight back tears.’ Later they saw yet more thousands of children’s shoes: ‘this was the most terrible thing for us, the most
bitter thing, perhaps the worst thing that befell us.’
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Children and adults, artisans and artists, the unknown and the well known; Birkenau devoured them all. Among the Russian-born Jews who had been living in Paris when the Germans entered the city in June 1940 was the artist Aizik Feder. Born in Odessa in 1885, fleeing Russia at the age of nineteen to avoid being sent to Siberia, he had studied painting first in Berlin and then in Geneva, becoming a pupil of Matisse in Paris in 1910. Feder belonged to the group of Jewish artists of the ‘Ecole de Paris’, exhibiting for the first time in 1912. In 1926 he spent some time in Palestine, painting landscapes. Following the German occupation of Paris, he sought contact with the resistance, but was arrested, imprisoned, and then sent to Drancy, where he drew seventeen pastel and watercolour portraits of his fellow internees.
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On February 12, in Drancy, Aizik Feder managed to smuggle out a letter to his wife. ‘Tomorrow I am leaving,’ he wrote. ‘My morale is good. Our separation will not be long. I beg you not to be desperate. We’ll see each other again soon. Take care of my belongings. All that belongs to me belongs to you. Courage! Courage! Courage!’
On February 13, the fifty-eight-year-old Feder was one of the thousand Jews deported to Auschwitz. Only 311 were selected for tattooing and for the barracks. Less than twenty survived the war. Feder was not among them.
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The German government continued to press those states not under its direct control to deport its Jews. In an agreement signed on February 22, the Bulgarian government allowed the Germans to deport all eleven thousand Jews from two areas occupied by Bulgaria in 1941: the former Yugoslav region of Macedonia, and the former Greek region of Thrace.
The Germans allocated twenty special trains for these deportations, starting from six collecting points. At the railway stations of Demir-Hisar and Simitli, where there was a change of trains because of the wider gauge, the Germans gave priority in changing trains to ‘invalids on stretchers’ and women who were ‘ready for childbirth’. Conditions inside the trains, and on the barges, in which some of the deportees were sent up the Danube, were horrific: terrible overcrowding,
no sanitary arrangements, virtually no food, and no water.
THE BALKANS
Each morning on their journey northward the trains would stop in the open countryside, and the bodies of those who had died during the night were thrown out. The Germans would not allow any form of burial. Several hundred sick and old people died during the six-day journey, which ended at Treblinka.
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Shortly after these Thracian and Macedonian deportations, all Jewish property and belongings in Thrace and Macedonia were confiscated and sold. The money raised had first to go towards the cost of the rail and boat ‘fare’ to Treblinka. The rest was then deposited in bank accounts, and, to give those still in Greece a sense of normality, the deposit statements sent to their Jewish owners. These statements reached Treblinka long after the Jews had been murdered.
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‘The German Reich’, so stated the Bulgarian agreement of February 22, ‘is ready to accept these Jews in its eastern regions.’ A month after the agreement was signed, ‘these Jews’ were dead.
In Italy Mussolini continued to reject all appeals for the deportation of Jews. On February 22, the day of the Thrace and Macedonia deportation agreement with Bulgaria, the German government learned that the Italian military authorities in Lyons had forced the French police chief in the city to annul an order for the arrest of several hundred Jews who were to have been sent to Auschwitz ‘for labour service’. Three days later, Ribbentrop complained personally to Mussolini that ‘Italian military circles, and sometimes the German army itself, lacked a proper understanding of the Jewish question.’
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