Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (85 page)
Another of the Jews deported from Warsaw to Majdanek after the ghetto revolt was Israel Gutman, who had been wounded in the eye during the fighting. By good fortune, he was allowed to go to the camp hospital in Majdanek. While in the hospital, Gutman and the other patients heard a noise outside, and looked out of the window. ‘All this took only a few seconds,’ he later recalled, ‘because all those who had got up to look at what was happening were quickly driven back from the windows.’ But what he saw was to be engraved on Gutman’s memory. ‘I saw the march of naked people. I saw amongst them a boy—I do not know how old he was, about ten years of age—I saw that the boy had in his arms a smaller child. I saw two SS men, one pointing out this picture to the other, and laughing.’
In the few seconds available to him, Gutman tried to look in the eyes of the two SS men, ‘stealthily, because a direct gaze was too dangerous. I wanted to see in their eyes if there is no expression of a self-struggle—a spark of humanity in those eyes. I always met the same gaze. When we were sad and grieving, they were happy. Whenever they could torture us, they laughed. They were drunk with blood.’
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Thirty-six years later, a survivor of Majdanek, Wanda Bialas, told a court in Düsseldorf of how Jewish children ‘were enticed with sugar lumps by Nazi SS guards to mount the lorries to take them to their deaths in the gas-chambers’.
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Some Jews, sent from Warsaw to Majdanek, were sent away again after a few days to other camps in the Lublin region, among them Budzyn, a camp that provided labour for the Heinkel aircraft factory nearby. One of those sent to Budzyn was David
Wdowinski, who later recalled how the camp commandant ordered all the newcomers, ‘exactly 807 men’, to stand in two lines. He then went up to one of the Jews ‘and told him to step out of line, and ordered him to undress’. As the Jew began to undress, the commandant ‘began shouting at him, “Hurry up! Undress completely!” until he was stark naked. And then he took out a pistol and killed the Jew on the spot, and said to us, “This is what is going to happen to each one of you if you are not going to hand over everything you’ve got here with you and on you.”’
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At Trawniki, the Jews deported from Warsaw included Emanuel Ringelblum, who was later smuggled out of the camp by the Jewish underground and returned to Warsaw, where he found refuge in a bunker in the ‘Aryan’ part of the city. At Poniatowa, the second of the two labour camps to which Jews had been deported from Warsaw, the Jews resisted. Hundreds were killed, and hundreds more committed suicide. In his Warsaw bunker, Ringelblum began work on a history of Trawniki, and also of the Jewish Fighting Organization.
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Thus, at the very moment of deepest depression, when the hopelessness of revolt had been made clear in all its cruelty, a man who had witnessed the worst torments of his people, and understood that many must go unavenged, settled down amid daily dangers to record what could be recorded; he, an historian in his mid-forties, convinced that the truth must survive, even if those who recorded it would not.
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Also in hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw was Abrasha Blum, a friend of Ringelblum, one of the organizers of armed resistance in the ghetto, and a member, with Yitzhak Zuckerman, of the Coordinating Committee of Jewish Organizations. Blum, in hiding, retained his power to inspire others. But he was betrayed, arrested, and tortured by the Gestapo. Feigele Peltel, who saw him in prison, was the last of his friends to see him alive:
How horrible he looked! His face was livid and swollen on one side, his head bloody, his hands bruised, his mouth bleeding, he was barely able to walk. I appealed to the police to let him lie down. They permitted him to lie down but went on torturing him with their questions. Abrasha was weak and incoherent.
After a prolonged investigation, the police sent us out of the
room. Abrasha did his best to walk, grimacing with pain. When I asked in a whisper how he was feeling, he was unable to utter a word.
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On May 10 or May 11, Abrasha Blum was shot.
***
News of the Warsaw ghetto uprising spread throughout German-occupied Europe, thrilling those Jews who heard it. But the pressure against Jews in hiding was relentless. Hundreds were killed in the Parczew forest when, that same Passover, the Germans launched a major military action against the partisans, and the refugees in the family camp which the partisans were protecting.
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Zeew Jungsztajn, one of the refugees in the forest, who had just reached his ninth birthday, later recalled how, after three hours of aerial bombardment, ‘the forest began to burn. The Jews were in the bunkers. The Germans discovered many bunkers. They caught two young boys who betrayed a bunker in which there were many Jews and Russians, who were shot.’
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The refugees in the Parczew forest were soon to find a new protector who organized them under his command, Yekhiel Grynszpan, whose group grew from eighty fighters in mid-1943 to three hundred a year later. From the outset of Grynszpan’s command, in April 1943, he led a number of successful attacks on German, Ukrainian and Polish police posts in the area, as well as setting fire to the German police headquarters in Parczew itself.
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At Treblinka, during the very first days of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the small group of Jews employed there to sort the clothes of those who had been gassed, and to carry out menial tasks for the SS, were in the last stage of preparing for a break-out. Their target date was April 1, and three separate ‘combat units’ had been organized under the leadership of Dr Julian Chorazycki, a fifty-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist who had practised before the war in Warsaw.
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In Treblinka, Chorazycki had been put in charge of a small infirmary.
A former captain in the Polish army, Chorazycki had managed to make contact with a Ukrainian guard at Treblinka who, in return for a substantial sum of money, was willing to buy arms for the rebel group. A few such purchases had already been smuggled in when,
on April 19, the deputy commander of Treblinka, Kurt Franz, entered Chorazycki’s medical office, and saw a packet of banknotes peeping out of the doctor’s apron pocket.
‘Give me that money,’ screamed Franz. But Chorazycki attacked him with a surgical knife, wounding him in the neck.
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Jumping out of the window, Franz called out that the doctor must be captured alive.
Chorazycki himself then jumped through the window, walked a few steps, stumbled, and fell. He had taken poison. An eye-witness of what followed, Kalman Feigman, later recalled:
They lifted Chorazycki up. He still showed some signs of life. All the prisoners were assembled in the camp’s courtyard. They lined us up in rows and ordered us to watch how they wash out the doctor’s stomach. The cruellest of them all, the Ukrainian Rogoza, opened the doctor’s mouth, pulled his tongue with some kind of sharp instrument and poured water in. After this Franz jumped on Chorazycki’s stomach, and with his shoes on started to skip on his stomach. Two Jews were forced to pick the doctor up feet first, and so the water came out. They repeated this a few times. However, Chorazycki did not move. They put him nude on a bench and beat him. The doctor showed no signs of life. He was apparently dead.
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With Chorazycki’s death, Samuel Rajzman later recalled, ‘we had no qualified leader, and none of us wanted to take the moral responsibility for an unsuccessful coup.’
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Two weeks later, on May 3, there was a second blow to the plans for an uprising when one of the underground commanders, Rakowski, was searched, and money found on him. For this crime, he was shot. The money had been intended for the purchase of arms.
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***
All over German-controlled Europe, deportations and attempted escapes continued. From Belgium, on April 19, fourteen hundred Jews had been deported ‘to the East’. One of those deported, Suzanne Kaminsky, was only thirty-nine days old; she had been born on March 11. The oldest of the deportees, Jacob Blom, was ninety years old. Because of previous escapes on trains from Belgium, even the small windows of the cattle trucks were boarded up.
Escape was uppermost, however, in the minds of many of the deportees. Three Belgians who were then at liberty, a young Jewish doctor, Youra Livschitz, and his two non-Jewish friends, Jean Franklemon and Robert Maistriau, arranged to stop the train at a small station well inside the Belgian border. There, they were able to open three of the wagon doors. Five deportees managed to escape. Before reaching the frontier, a further 231 deportees jumped from the train: twenty-six bodies were later found alongside the railway.
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In Cracow, on April 29, the Jewish resistance fighters who had been captured during the December uprising, and held in prison, were driven by truck to Plaszow camp. During the short drive, they were able to break out of the truck, but most of them were machine-gunned by the guards. Among the few who escaped being shot was Abraham Leib Leibowicz, founder of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Cracow. He was recaptured, however, taken to Plaszow, and shot.
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Also on April 29, the Jewish women fighters held in prison in Cracow were being transferred, on foot, from one prison to another. As they reached the road in front of the second prison, two of them, Gusta Draenger and Gola Mira, attacked the nearest SS men with their hands. The other women at once joined in, among them Rose Jolles and Genia Maltzer. Mira and Jolles were killed by machine gun fire. Maltzer and Draenger escaped. Most of the others were killed.
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Six months later Draenger, who had joined her husband Szymszon, gave herself up to the Gestapo after he had been captured.
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On April 30, two thousand Jews were deported from Wlodawa to Sobibor. On arrival at the unloading ramp, they attacked the SS guard with bare hands and pieces of wood torn from the wagons. All of them were killed by grenades and machine-gun fire.
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Preparations for revolt had also been made inside Sobibor, but they too were doomed to failure. Dov Freiberg, who had been taken to Sobibor in its first days, in May 1942, later recalled:
…there was a captain from Holland, a Jew. He headed an organization, secret organization. It was a period when there were difficulties among the Ukrainians and we thought maybe we could get in touch with them. We heard stories about the
partisans from them and some contact was established between this Dutchman and the Ukrainians for a revolt.
They began plotting an uprising. And then one day in a roll call they took him out, this Dutchman, and began questioning him. ‘Who were the ringleaders?’
This man withstood tortures and endless blows and he never said a word. The Germans told him that if he does not speak they would give orders that the Dutch block would be ordered to move to Camp III and they will be beheaded in front of his eyes. And he said, ‘Anyway you are doing what you wish, you will not get a word out of me, not a whisper.’ And they gave the orders to this Dutch block to move, all of them, about seventy people, and they were brought to Camp III. On the next day we learned that the Germans kept their word.
They beheaded the people. Yes, they cut off their heads.
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All ghetto and death camp inmates understood, and had to accept, that the price of revolt was torture and mass execution. The Germans were always able to call, as in the Parczew operation, on whatever weapons they judged necessary, including heavy artillery, and air power. Reprisals were continuous: in Riga, at the end of April, during a search for weapons, the Germans found a list of names. It was not at all clear what the list referred to. But three hundred of those on the list were seized, and shot.
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***
At Birkenau, throughout April, medical experiments had continued. Aaron Wald, from Poland, one of the few survivors of the castration experiments, later recalled:
In April 1943 the SS doctor Schumann arrived in our block, no. 27, in Birkenau, and took all the men between twenty and twenty-four years old to Auschwitz, Block 21. First they shaved us, bathed us, gave us an enema (two litres), and two intramuscular injections.
At first, I resisted, I wanted to run away. Professor Schumann said: ‘We need it for an experiment.’ After the operation I was in terrible pain for forty-eight hours. Ninety per cent of the patients died. After eight days, I had to go back to work.
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On April 28 an SS telegram instructed the camp commandant at
Auschwitz to place 120 women on the list of ‘prisoners for various experimental purposes’.
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The young girls on whom the experiments were carried out quickly became old and decrepit in appearance, probably because of the damage done to their sex glands by the experiments. The victims’ wounds healed badly, causing all of them prolonged suffering. Many of them died.
The medical experiments at Auschwitz were veiled in secrecy. Block 10 and its residents were isolated from the rest of the camp. The windows were shuttered, so that the women could see only through cracks in the shutters what was going on directly opposite their own block. There they saw the ‘Death Square’, the execution ground for Block 11, where the murder of Polish and other prisoners was constantly taking place. The daily sight of these executions only intensified the women’s fears. When they heard that Professor Clauberg was coming on one of his regular visits, they would hide in corners and become hysterical, crying out: ‘The obese butcher is coming! The revolting rooster is here!’
The first experiments, intended to provide evidence about the effects and consequences of sterilization, were carried out on a number of young Jewish girls between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. All were from Greece. First, they were sterilized by X-rays. Then their ovaries were removed. Or, three months after the sterilization, parts of their reproductive organs would be removed and sent to the Research Institute in Breslau. Such experiments were performed two to three times a week. Each experiment would ‘use up’ about thirty women. Hundreds of women, having been mutilated by these experiments, were then sent to Birkenau and to its gas-chambers.
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