Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (81 page)
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Throughout February, a division of the Red Army, the Sixteenth (Lithuanian) Division, had been training for combat. Many of its twelve thousand men were Jews. On February 23 the Division attacked the Germans at Alexseyevka, in the Ukraine, Jewish riflemen and machine-gunners charging on foot across the snow-covered plain. For two days the Division struggled against superior German firepower until, its ammunition gone, it was ordered to withdraw. Several hundred Jews lay dead.
The Lithuanian Division fought for a further twenty-eight
months, until the last day of the war. During its advance, it was to take more than twelve thousand Germans prisoner. Its soldiers were to include twelve Heroes of the Soviet Union, and one Heroine, Roza Deweltow, who had been born in Vilna in 1919, and who was killed in action shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday.
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The Bialystok deportation was coming to an end. In the train which reached Birkenau on February 6, only 85 men and 47 women, from more than two thousand deportees, were sent to the barracks. The rest were gassed. In the train which reached Birkenau on February 7, only 123 men, and no women, were sent to the barracks.
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The Germans had promised Ephraim Barasz, the head of the Jewish Council in Bialystok, that only ‘non-working’ Jews would be deported. The survivors of the action were outraged and bewildered that so many able-bodied men and women had been taken. But at a meeting on February 27, those who wished to try to organize some form of resistance decided, after a long discussion, not to try to escape from the ghetto in anticipation of a further action, but to resist within the ghetto, and to resist ‘to the last Jew’.
41
In the Lodz ghetto, an increase in work orders gave a renewed sense of security. ‘Sizeable orders have been confirmed,’ the Ghetto Chronicle noted on February 27. Among the twenty-six largest workshops, orders had included the manufacture of 1,354,172 pairs of shoes.
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Two weeks later, Chaim Rumkowski told the workshop delegates that ‘young people must be given the production jobs’, in place of people aged fifty and over who had been ‘utterly exhausted by hard physical labour’. It was clear that this made the old people liable for ‘resettlement’. But Rumkowski stressed, ‘We will have to be firm, for everything is at stake here.’
43
Two weeks after Rumkowski’s speech, a further ‘resettlement’ was carried out. Among those deported were all those ‘with active tuberculosis’ and others who were ‘hopelessly sick’. The deportees were mainly taken from among 850 Jews recently brought into the ghetto from Poznan. But, as the Chronicle noted, ‘a small number of skilled workers from the Poznan contingent, primarily shoemakers, were spared resettlement’. Of the 850 Poznan deportees, 23 were ‘assigned to the shoe factories’. Among those deported were some who, as they were taken in horse-drawn carts from the ghetto, sang
the Zionist anthem ‘Hatikvah’—Hope.
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Their destination was unkown: their fate, death.
Few could escape the ghettos: even to approach the guards at the walls or wire was to risk death. But risks continued to be taken, and success was possible. In March 1943 a twelve-year-old boy, Matti Drobless, managed to escape from the Warsaw ghetto with his fourteen-year-old sister and his nine-year-old brother. In the ghetto, their mother had died of illness, and their father had been deported, together with their aunts and uncles, during one of the earlier round-ups. ‘The three of us were weak,’ Drobless later recalled, ‘barely skin and bones’. His account continued:
We left the ghetto via the sewers and first tried to stay with a Polish family—the head of the household had worked for my father. They took all the valuables we had managed to remove from our home—our mother’s jewellery and other items—and after three days he told us we would have to leave. Otherwise, he said, he would inform on us. We cried and pleaded but to no avail.
So we headed for the forests and swore that whatever happened we would stay together and never part.
Our survival was based on our will to live and the talents we adopted. We stole food from the farms and removed articles of clothing from the washlines. We scrounged and when there was no alternative we sent our youngest brother into homes to beg. We taught him prayers and instructed him to pose as a Polish war orphan.
I still bear the scars on my legs when I failed to outrun the dogs we encountered. I carry other types of scars, too.
We thought we were the only Jews left in the world. We would survive, but I believed that we would be the sole survivors. We never met another Jew in our wanderings through the forests. I once asked my sister, perhaps out of despair, what would be our fate at the war’s end. She replied: ‘There is a place called Palestine. There, Jews are living and building a home, a state. When this is over we’ll be going home to Palestine.’
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At Treblinka, following a visit by Himmler, orders were given for the digging up and burning of the hundreds of thousands of corpses that had been dumped in vast pits behind the gas-chambers. Yankel
Wiernik was among those prisoners who had to perform the task. ‘Wherever a grave was opened,’ he recalled two years later, ‘a terrible stench polluted the air, as the bodies were in an advanced stage of putrefaction. It turned out that women burned easier than men. Accordingly, corpses of women were used for kindling fires.’ Wiernik added: ‘The sight was terrifying, the worst that human eyes have ever beheld. When corpses of pregnant women were cremated, the abdomen would burst open, and the burning of the fetus inside the mother’s body would become visible.’
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Himmler also visited Sobibor at this time. According to an eye-witness, three hundred young Jewish women, the prettiest that could be found, had been selected on that occasion in Majdanek, and brought specially to Sobibor, where Himmler had watched them, naked, being gassed. Several survivors also recalled how SS Staff Sergeant Hubert Gomerski and another SS man used to amuse themselves by swinging Jewish children by their legs and then flinging them to their deaths. He who threw a Jewish child farthest won. Eye-witnesses also described how Gomerski would walk past the lines of Jews as they left the cattle trucks and kill those who appeared too weak to be able to walk to the gas-chambers by smashing their skulls with a heavy iron watering can.
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On March 2, in one of the almost daily deportations to Birkenau, the deportees, who came from Paris, included the thirty-five-year-old Yetta Flater, who had been born in New York, the fifty-six-year-old Helene Rosenberg, born in London, and Mazel Menace-Misrahi, born in Jerusalem seventy-two years before. On this same train were Jews who had been born in Kiev, Odessa, Vitebsk, Minsk and Moscow. More than three hundred of the deportees of March 2 were over seventy years old.
Of the thousand deportees of March 2, only a hundred men and nineteen women were selected for work.
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Two of them, Joseph Dorebus and Jankiel Handelsman, were to be among the leaders of the revolt in Birkenau a year and a half later. Another of the deportees, Chaim Herman, who was later sent to work in the Sonderkommando, pulling the bodies out of the gas chamber and taking them to the crematorium, buried underground some letters in Flemish and Yiddish describing his experiences. But he did not survive.
49
A further deportation train from Paris, on March 4, was sent, not
to Birkenau, but to the Polish town of Chelm, east of Lublin, from where it is possible that the majority of the deportees were sent to Sobibor, and gassed. A minority, it is known, were sent to Majdanek, of whom several were to survive the war.
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Among those who did not survive the deportation of March 4 was the Munich-born painter, Hermann Lismann. After studying painting in Lausanne, Rome and Paris before the First World War, Lismann had seen active service in the German army. When Hitler came to power in 1933 he had fled to France. There, in 1939, he was interned, escaped, was caught, and deported.
51
In the Eastern Territories and in the Ukraine, the slaughter continued, as hitherto, without deportations. On March 5 more than a thousand Jews were murdered outside the Khmielnik ghetto. The Chairman of the Jewish Council, Shmuel Zalcman, who had maintained contact with the Jewish underground, and advised them on how to organize resistance in the ghetto, was betrayed, arrested, and dragged through the town tied behind a horse-drawn cart, until he died.
52
At Swieciany, on the night of March 6, twenty youngsters armed only with two revolvers and a single rifle, managed to escape from the ghetto to the forest. They were the lucky ones.
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Also lucky were forty-eight thousand Jews of Bulgaria: those living within the pre-war borders of the state. At first, it seemed that they too would be deported, as had those from the Bulgarian-occupied zones of Thrace and Macedonia. Following German insistence, the Bulgarian government had indeed ordered the deportation of all Jews from Bulgaria proper, some of whom had already been interned. But the deportation order led to such an outcry from the Bulgarian people, including many intellectuals and church leaders, that the government rescinded the order, and Jews already taken into custody were released.
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In the northern part of Bulgaria, farmers had threatened to lie down on the railway tracks to prevent passage of the deportation trains. It was also said that the King himself had intervened. Despite the fact that he was German, of the family of Coburg, he was known to be opposed to the anti-Semitic measures then in force in Bulgaria, helpless though he considered himself to be in the face of the German might. The release of the Jews, which took place on March 10, came to be known in Bulgaria as a ‘miracle of the Jewish people’.
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The Bulgarian experience highlights the possibility that was open to certain states in Europe to refuse to allow their Jewish citizens to be deported. There were several other occasions on which this refusal was exercised. By March 1943, Finland, Italy and Hungary had each likewise chosen to refuse, and had refused successfully, the German government’s demands to deport Jews to Germany. Slovakia and Vichy France, however, had complied with the German demands, and had done so with alacrity, as had Vidkun Quisling’s government in Norway. Those countries whose governments agreed to deport Jews also put their local police forces at the disposal of the Germans in the work of rounding up Jews.
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On the eastern front, the Red Army was about to attack the Germans at Sokolovo. Among the Soviet forces was a thousand-strong battalion of Czechoslovak troops, soldiers who had fled from Czechoslovakia to Poland in March 1939, and from Poland to Russia in September 1939: part of the survivors of five and a half thousand Czech Jews who had sought refuge on Soviet soil, and been deported by the Soviet authorities to labour camps, where three thousand of them had perished.
Of the thousand men in the Czech battalion at Sokolovo, six hundred were Jews. The battle began on March 8 and lasted for three days. By the end of it, 140 of the Jews had been killed and 160 severely wounded. Among the Jews in the battalion was an eighteen-year-old girl, Malvine Friedmann, one of eighteen Jewish nurses who served at Sokolovo. During the battle, she saved more than seven severely wounded men by carrying them out of the danger zone.
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The battle of Sokolovo ended on March 13. On the following morning, in Cracow, in German-occupied Poland, two thousand Jews were rounded up for deportation. Even before the trains could leave for Birkenau, several hundred small children were shot in the entrance to one of the houses, and several hundred old people were killed in the street. Also killed were those who were sick.
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When the Gestapo entered the hospital, an officer ordered Dr Zygmunt Fischer to abandon his patients. He refused to do so, and was shot, together with his wife and child.
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The patients were then killed in the wards.
One eye-witness of the events of March 14 in Cracow was Maria Hochberg-Marianska, a Jewish woman living on the ‘Aryan’ side who had given home and shelter to Jewish children. Three years later she described the fate of the Jewish children in the ghetto orphanage:
At midday cars drove up before the institution. The Gestapo men flung themselves upon the children. Little ones, three years of age, were flung into baskets and placed on platforms or hoisted on to carts. The older children were driven off to the Plac Zgody, flanked by armed soldiers. There, they joined the grown-ups. The baskets with the little ones were emptied behind the city like so much rubbish. They were thrown into a ditch, most of them alive. Some were killed by a blow with a rifle butt before burial.
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Among those deported from Cracow were Moses and Helen Hiller, whose two-year-old son had been given refuge by Josef Jachowicz and his wife in nearby Dabrowa. Neither parent survived. When Shachne cried out for his father and mother, as he often did, Jachowicz and his wife feared that neighbours would betray them to the Gestapo. Mrs Jachowicz became very attached to the little boy, loved his bright inquiring eyes, took great pride in her ‘son’, and took him regularly to church. Soon, he knew by heart all the Sunday hymns.
A devout Catholic, Mrs Jachowicz decided to have Shachne Hiller baptised, and went to see a young parish priest, Karol Wojtyla, who had a reputation for wisdom and trustworthiness. Revealing the secret of the boy’s identity, Mrs Jachowicz told the priest of her wish that Shachne should become a ‘true Christian’ and devout Catholic like herself.
Wojtyla listened intently to the woman’s story. When she had finished, he asked: ‘And what was the parents’ wish, when they entrusted their only child to you and to your husband?’ Mrs Jachowicz then told him that Helen Hiller’s last request had been that the child should be told of his Jewish origins, and ‘returned to his people’ if his parents died. Hearing this, Wojtyla replied that he would not perform the baptismal ceremony. It would be unfair, he explained, to baptise Shachne while there was still hope that, once the war was over, his relatives might take him.