The Holocaust (90 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
We were forty in the cattle truck, the train started out and then after a while stopped. Shooting began. We discovered that some of the younger people managed to hide screwdrivers, and
opened the engine cabin. Many were killed, some managed to escape to the woods. One of them was Yosif Makovsky, a friend of mine, now living in Israel. Then the train stopped in Treblinka, it stopped for a long time. We felt the smell of burning. It hung all over Treblinka. We thought that we will be taken there. In desperation one of the girls in the cattle truck squeezed through the little window gap. The Germans caught her and led her into the camp.
Finally the train moved, leaving Treblinka. The heat was terrible, we had no water, our mouths were like dry wood. We were insane with thirst. Everyone tried to give the German guards all their valuable possessions for a drop of water. But we pushed each other to be near the little window, and only spilled and lost the precious drops. We went berserk, hitting each other. The train stopped many times. We finally arrived in Lublin. When we were still in Bialystok we were told that girls from previous transports will come to our window and will tell us that we were being sent to work. Indeed, that’s what happened. But we could not stand it any longer, we decided to commit suicide.
There was amongst us a doctor from Lodz, Charnoleskaya, who had a razor and she began slashing our wrists. We were beside ourselves, pushing and shoving and stretching out our hands. She cut one of my wrists and a fountain of blood burst out and I fell. I remember distinctly, it reminded me of Sienkiewicz’s
Quo Vadis
. I had no strength left in me to lift myself to have my other hand cut. We were lying on the floor losing blood. Next morning the Germans opened the door. I was alive.
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Bertha Sokolskaya was sent to a labour camp at Blizyn, in the Lublin region. Among the other Jews deported from Bialystok were several thousand who were taken by train to Majdanek. Among these was Samuel Pisar, then aged fourteen, who later recalled the journey to the camp:
No air, no water, no food. How long we were inside these cattle cars I don’t really know. I remember someone saying seventy-two hours. We were horribly dehydrated. I saw people with faces that were literally blue, licking their own sweat;
there was urine and excrement all over the floor. It was like a sewer.
When we stopped and the doors were opened, blinding floodlights lit up the night. A long line of SS men, each holding a restive police dog on a short leash, stood along the ramp. A short order—Everything Out—and several of the great beasts leaped into our car. In the space of seconds, two or three of the half-conscious prisoners were torn to pieces. Horrified, the prostrate men dragged themselves up with their last ounce of strength and staggered out. Other bodies lying on the floor the dogs did not touch; they were dead. Of the hundred or so men in the car, more than a score had succumbed along the way.
On the railway platform there was panic—blows, screams, and the gruff barking of the dogs. I held my suitcase up against my chest for protection as I stumbled over corpses.
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The pace and pattern of murder was unchanging. On August 25, at Janowska camp, the SS had selected twenty-four of the prettiest Jewish girls in the camp, aged between seventeen and twenty. That night, they were the ‘guests’ of the SS at an all-night ‘party’, something strictly forbidden according to Nazi prohibitions against ‘race defilement’. In the morning, there was a suggestion that the girls should be allowed to remain alive, to work henceforth as cleaners in the labour camp. But one of the girls jumped out of the truck carrying them back to the barracks. She was shot, and the other twenty-three taken to the execution site.
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These girls were murdered on August 26. On the following day, all the Jews employed in the cement factory at nearby Drohobycz were murdered, among them the thirty-six-year-old Dr Mojzesz Bay, a graduate of the Sorbonne.
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Behind the lines in German-occupied Russia, a Polish Jew, Zygmunt Grosbart, who had earlier been the interpreter of an SS officer, Lieutenant Bingel, succeeded, first in passing essential Intelligence information to the Soviet partisans in the nearby forests, and then in escaping to the partisans himself.
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Forty Jews in hiding in the forests of Koniecpol, however, were attacked by Poles, and many of the fugitives were killed.
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Jews in hiding were rarely fortunate. In the autumn of 1943 a group of young Jews in the Wlodawa region attacked a former Jewish farming estate, the Turno Estate, then being used by the
Germans. In what had once been David Turno’s barns, the crops were ready to be shipped to Germany. The Jewish raiders set the buildings on fire. One of those in the attack, Hersh Werner, later recalled:
As we were pulling out of the burning estate, I noticed a bulky form crawling on all fours, like an animal, and making very strange noises. I showed it to Symcha who was near me, and we both decided that it might be a human being, perhaps a Jew. We both took him by the arms, and dragged him along with us.
After we covered about five miles from Turno, we sat down to rest and looked at the human mess we were dragging. He was covered with hair like an animal, his clothes were torn, he couldn’t stand up on his two feet, and he looked like a skeleton. He could hardly talk, but from his mumblings we learned that this man was Yankel, David Turno’s relative, and my friend from Warsaw.
From his mumblings, we understood that he had stayed buried in the barn, in a hole under the feed trough for the cows. No one knew that he was there and he lived there for over a year. He ate the food that was given to the animals and never stood up. The heat from the burning buildings had forced him out of his hole.
We walked to our base, and tried to help Yankel. He couldn’t hold any food, and the following day he died.
‘We buried him in the woods’, Harold Werner added, ‘and I cried over what had happened to my friend’.
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On September 1 the Germans began the final deportations from Tarnow to Birkenau. For two days the Jews resisted with arms. But none of those who took up arms survived. As with the resistance in nearby Sandomierz, the only reports that survive of the resistance of the Jews came from Polish eye-witnesses.
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In Tarnow, according to a Polish underground report, the Germans used grenades to break up the resistance, then loaded the surviving Jews into goods wagons, the insides of which were covered with carbide and lime. According to the Polish report, the wagons were then ‘sealed, inundated with water, and sent off to extermination’.
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It was also on September 1, in Vilna, that the deportations to the
Estonian labour camps had begun. Among those who disappeared during the deportations was Hirsh Glik, the twenty-three-year-old author of the song of hope and defiance, ‘Never say that you have reached the very end’. On the first day of the deportations, the Jewish resistance group in Vilna, the United Partisans Organization, issued a proclamation, ‘Jews, prepare for armed resistance!’ Death was certain. ‘Who can still believe that he will survive when the murderers kill systematically? The hand of the hangman will reach out to each of us. Neither hiding nor cowardice will save lives.’
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On September 6, following the deportation of more than seven thousand Vilna Jews to the labour camps in Estonia, Jacob Gens urged the ten thousand Jews who had not been deported to register with the Jewish Council, in order ‘to be able to return to normal life in the ghetto as soon as possible’.
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The partisans now made for the forests. ‘I send you an additional group of fighting Jews,’ Abba Kovner wrote on September 10 to the commander of one of the Soviet partisan units in the region.
Most of the Jews in Vilna were, however, in despair, broken, starving and afraid. ‘I saw desperate people commit suicide,’ Kovner later recalled. Not the ‘battle of an underground’, Kovner added, but the ‘very existence’ of a fighting resistance organization, ‘was the amazing and incredible achievement’.
Those who reached the forests fought as best they could. Vitka Kempner’s exploit at the beginning of July had been a source of pride to the Jewish fighters. ‘Lithuanians did not do it,’ Kovner later recalled, ‘nor Poles, nor Russians. A Jewish woman did it, a woman who, after she did this, had no base to return to. She had to walk three days and nights, with wounded legs and feet. She had to go back to the ghetto.’ Were she to have been captured, Kovner added, the whole ghetto might have been held responsible.
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Two months after she returned to Vilna, Vitka Kemper blew up an electric transformer inside the city, and then made her escape from the scene of her sabotage. On the following day she managed to enter the labour camp at Keilis on the outskirts of Vilna, where she smuggled out several dozen prisoners, leading them from the camp to the forest. Later, with five other Jewish partisans, she entered the town of Olkiniki and set fire to the turpentine factory there.
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On September 14 the Gestapo summoned Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna Jewish Council, to their headquarters. A friend urged him to flee, but he replied that if he were to run away, ‘thousands of Jews will pay for it with their lives’. Gens went to Gestapo headquarters, and did not return. He was shot, it was said, for maintaining contact with the United Partisans Organization, and for financing its activities.
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Nine days later, the Vilna ghetto was ‘liquidated’. The pretext was a further deportation of all Jews to the labour camps in Estonia, but after eight thousand of the ten thousand surviving Jews had been taken to Rossa Square, beaten and robbed, there was a selection. More than sixteen hundred men were sent to the Estonian labour camps, but five thousand women and children were sent to Majdanek, and to its gas-chambers. Several hundred old and sick Jews were sent to Ponar, and shot. By September 25, only two thousand Jews remained in Vilna, in four small labour camps:
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the remnant of fifty-seven thousand inhabitants of that once vibrant secular and spiritual Jewish centre, the Jerusalem of Lithuania.
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The reality of extermination was so terrible that the civilised mind of man rebelled against it. ‘Persistent rumours circulate’, wrote Jakub Poznanski, in the Lodz ghetto, on 27 September 1943, ‘about the liquidation of the ghettos in various Polish cities. In my opinion, people are exaggerating, as usual. Even if certain excesses have taken place in some cities, that still does not incline one to believe that Jews are being mass-murdered. At least I consider that out of the question.’
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Poznanski’s doubts were a sign of the isolation of one ghetto from another. So little was known by the Jews in any one locality of the fate of the Jews elsewhere. In the labour camp at Nowogrodek, the two hundred and fifty survivors of the once flourishing Jewish population of five thousand had no idea of the events that had so recently taken place in Vilna, or in Bialystok. All they knew was that their destruction could be ordered at any moment; that urgent efforts were needed if they were to avoid being slaughtered.
With enormous difficulty, a tunnel was dug under the wire of the camp, out towards the surrounding woods. Some of the prisoners saw no point in making the escape bid, arguing, as Idel Kagan later
recalled, ‘If we are going to die why run for it?’ But by September 22 the tunnel was ready, and the escape began.
‘When I came out of the tunnel’, Idel Kagan later recalled, ‘there was a tremendous machine-gun fire. The guards did not know what was happening. Because we had light in the tunnel, people lost their sense of direction when they came out into the dark. Some ran back towards the camp by mistake.’
Of the two hundred who escaped, eighty were killed or captured. The others reached the woods, and survived as best they could, searching for food, and for partisans. Idel Kagan had no weapon, only a pistol cover. But with this, he was able to give sufficient impression of being armed, so as to demand food from a farmer. Finally, after hiding by day and walking by night for ten days, he reached the partisan group led by Tobias Belsky.
Belsky’s three hundred partisans were not only an armed unit. They had also been, since their first days in the forest, the protectors of more than a thousand women, children and old people, who had managed to escape from the surrounding ghettos, or whom Belsky and his three brothers had succeeded in rescuing. In an area without any large forests, the Belsky brothers had still managed to fend off repeated German searching. One of the four brothers, Zusl, followed Soviet instructions and took a group of eighty fighters into the woods as an unencumbered unit, devoted solely to anti-German attacks. Tobias Belsky and his fighters remained with the ‘family camp’, as did his other brothers Asael and Achik. With them was Idel Kagan, who recalled how the brothers opened a bakery, a sausage workshop, a shoe repair workshop and, eventually, a munitions workshop, all of which were much used by the Soviet partisans in the neighbourhood. Tobias Belsky’s fighters would also go out from time to time on an anti-German expedition, to cut telegraph wires. Later in the war, Asael Belsky was killed in action near Königsberg. His girlfriend, Haya Dzienciolski, whose escape from Nowogrodek in July 1941 had led to the establishment of the family camp, survived. One of her first acts, with the Belsky brothers, had been to try to rescue their parents from the village of Stankewicz. But the Germans had already taken them to their deaths.
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With the destruction of each ghetto, the Germans continued to gather the clothing and belongings of the dead. On September 6 the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle noted a further ‘twelve freight cars’ of used shoes reaching the ghetto. ‘The old-shoe workshop’, it added, ‘will be busy for many months just sorting this vast quantity.’ Leather shoes had to be sorted from other shoes. Men’s, women’s and children’s shoes had to be separated. Right shoes had to be sorted from left shoes, ‘whole shoes from half shoes’, black shoes from brown shoes, and finally, ‘and this is the hardest job of all’, the matching pairs ‘have to be ferreted out’.
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