The Holocaust (92 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
The boy’s mother had been in hiding in Warsaw, wearing a gold crucifix in the hope that the authorities would believe that she was a Christian. When her son was taken away from her, she had hung this crucifix around his neck.
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In Riga, the Latvian Yanis Lipke had continued to devise methods of rescuing Jews from the ghetto. Isaak Dryzin later recalled how he and his brother, an engineer, were approached by Lipke while working in one of the work gangs outside the ghetto. Lipke told the two brothers to go to the ghetto gate on the Day of Atonement, October 10. That morning, Lipke approached the guards at the ghetto gate. ‘Give me some Yids to work in my kitchen garden,’ he said, in what Isaak Dryzin later recalled as ‘drunken familiarity’, adding: ‘Here, take two packets of cigarettes.’
For these two packets of cigarettes, Lipke received the Dryzin brothers, as well as a third Jew, Sheyenson, all three of whom had been waiting at the gates. Lipke took them to the nearest doorway, tore off their yellow stars, gave them peasants’ hats to put on, and drove them out of Riga, to a farm of another friend. There, like the Jews whom Lipke had earlier taken from the ghetto, they were hidden in barns and haystacks.
His mission accomplished, Yanis told the Dryzin brothers: ‘tomorrow I will go to the ghetto again and will keep bringing people here every day.’ That same night he began to plan a similar rescue, which he was able to carry out on the following day.
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For the ‘Goebbels calendar’, the Day of Atonement had always
been a central date. On that day, at Plaszow camp outside Cracow, fifty Jews, mostly elderly people, were chosen for their ‘final day of judgement’, and killed.
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At Sobibor, however, the Jewish prisoners in Camp No. 1, the labour camp, were allowed to pray. All six hundred gathered in a hut. A third of them were girls and boys of fifteen and sixteen. One of the young boys, Yaakov Biskowitz, noticed several older men among those who were praying. These were Jews, most of them Red Army prisoners-of-war, who had been brought from Russia; now they were ‘whispering among themselves’.
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The slaves of Sobibor were preparing to revolt, led by these Red Army veterans. Among the Red Army men, now captives, was a Jew who took the lead in planning revolt, Alexander Pechersky. Aged thirty-four, Pechersky had been a student of music before the war, writing music for plays in his home town of Rostov-on-Don. He had gone to the front on the very first day of the war. On his second day at Sobibor, he had been invited to join the underground committee where it had been agreed, as he later wrote, ‘to give me the leadership’.
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To make revolt possible, several of the Jewish girls who worked in the SS quarters, polishing shoes and cleaning floors, had managed to steal a few hand grenades, some pistols, a rifle, and a submachine gun.
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Meanwhile, the trains continued to arrive with new victims. On the morning of October 11, before the conspirators were ready with their plans, a group of new deportees, already undressed and on the way to the gas-chamber, tried to run in the direction of the barbed wire. The guards began to shoot, killing many of them instantly. The others were dragged naked to the gas-chambers. ‘That day’, Alexander Pechersky recalled, ‘the crematorium burned longer than usual. Huge flames rose up in the grey autumn sky and the camp was lit with strange colours. Helpless and distressed, we looked at the bodies of our brothers and sisters.’
On the night of October 13, Pechersky, and his co-conspirator, Leon Feldhendler, a Polish Jew, distributed knives and hatchets, as well as warm clothing.
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Then, in the early afternoon of October 14, their plan was put into action. As individual German and Ukrainian guards entered the huts on their regular tours of inspection, they were attacked. Nine SS men and two Ukrainians were killed,
whereupon, as Yaakov Biskowitz later recalled, the signal was given for the revolt to begin, the password ‘Hurrah’.
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Of the six hundred prisoners in Camp No. 1, three hundred escaped. Nearly two hundred were shot by the SS and Ukrainian guards while trying to break out; the rest were killed in the camp with the arrival of military and police reinforcements from nearby Chelm. Many of the escaped prisoners joined partisan units: one of them, Semyon Rozenfeld, a Russian Jew who later joined the Red Army, was in Berlin on the day of victory.
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Among the three hundred Jews killed in the revolt was Max Van Dam, a thirty-three-year-old Dutch painter, who before the war had travelled and painted in Italy, France and Spain. In July 1942, when the deportations from Holland had begun, Van Dam was hidden by a Dutch friend, Professor Hemmelrjik, in the village of Blaricum. Later that year he tried to reach Switzerland, was caught, sent to Drancy, and from there to Sobibor.
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On October 21, a week after the Sobibor revolt, all two thousand Jews in the Minsk labour camp, the last survivors of the Minsk ghetto, were rounded up and killed in pits outside the city. On the day of this massacre, twenty-six Jews hid in an underground bunker which had been built by two Jewish stonemasons. In the first month three died; the survivors buried them in the ground on which they themselves lay. Two girls left the hide-out in search of food; they were captured and killed. After eight months, only thirteen of the twenty-six remained alive. There was no more food. The children were in a coma and the adults were weak from hunger. It was then that a girl called Musya left the hide-out in search of food. She did not look like a Jewess, but she took the risk, nevertheless, of running into somebody who knew her and might denounce her to the Germans. During her search for help, Musya met Anna Dvach, a White Russian woman with whom she had worked in the same factory before the German invasion. Her friend took her home, gave her food and shelter, and then sent her back with food for the other survivors. From that day until the arrival of the Red Army six months later, Anna Dvach ensured the survival of the thirteen Jews.
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Between July 1941 and October 1943 more than five thousand
Jews had fled to the forests around Minsk. As many as five thousand of those who had fled had been killed on their way to the partisan areas, or in German manhunts. But others had survived to fight in the growing number of partisan units, or to be protected, as were some six hundred women and children, in another family camp, known as the ‘Family Detachment’, commanded by Shlomo Zorin.
Unknown to the Jews in hiding or in action, the head of the first small Minsk underground organization, an officer in the Red Army known as Isai Pavlovich Kazinets, had in fact been a Jew whose real first name was Joshua. In June 1941 two of his children had been shot during the mass flight eastward; his father, a Red Army soldier in 1919, had been killed by anti-Bolshevik forces in south Russia.
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Kazinets himself had been caught and killed before the end of 1941. Nor did his underground group survive. Only the Jews in the ghetto sustained effective resistance in Minsk.
Jewish partisan units were indeed active throughout White Russia, Lithuania and the forests of Poland. One such unit began its operations in the Vilna region on October 7, when it destroyed more than fifty telegraph poles on the Vilna to Grodno road, cutting the wires and breaking the insulators. This group carried out five more operations in October; one of them, on October 17, under the command of Abba Kovner, destroyed two bridges and two railway engines. On October 23 telephone and telegraph lines were both destroyed on the Vilna to Lida railway.
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Also on October 23, an incident took place in Birkenau, symbolizing the courage of unarmed individuals. At the time of the Warsaw ghetto uprising six months earlier, three thousand Jews had been persuaded by the Germans to emerge from hiding on the grounds that, as owners of South American passports, visas, or promissory visas, they would be spared deportation. These Jews were not sent to Treblinka, Majdanek or the labour camps in the Lublin region, but to two camps, one at Bergen-Belsen, the other at Vittel, in France. There they had awaited their transfer to South America.
On October 23, 1,750 Polish Jews from the group held at Bergen-Belsen were deported to Birkenau. There, they were driven into the undressing chamber by SS Sergeant Major Josef Schillinger. A former roll-call leader in the men’s camp at Birkenau, Schillinger had become feared and hated for his habit of choking Jews to death
while they were eating their meagre meals.
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The women were ordered to undress. As they did so, the German guards, as usual, seized rings from fingers and watches from wrists.
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During this activity, Schillinger himself ordered one of the women to undress completely. This woman, who according to some reports was a former Warsaw dancer by the name of Horowitz, threw her shoe in Schillinger’s face, seized his revolver, and shot him in the stomach. She also wounded another SS man, Sergeant Emmerich.
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The shooting of Schillinger served as a signal for the other women to attack the SS men at the entrance to the gas-chamber. One SS man had his nose torn off, another was scalped.
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Schillinger died on the way to the camp hospital. The other SS man fled. Shortly afterwards the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess, entered the chamber, accompanied by other SS men carrying machine guns and grenades. They then removed the women one by one, and shot them outside.
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The revolt of the Jewish women at Birkenau was recorded by two prisoners who worked in the camp. One of them, a Jew, Stanislaw Jankowski, remembered only one other such attempt, when a Soviet prisoner-of-war, who was about to be shot with four other comrades, snatched the gun of an SS man, ‘but did not manage to make use of it and was overpowered’.
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The second prisoner, Jerzy Tabau, who later escaped from Birkenau and passed news of the episode to the West, noted that, after October 23, ‘the extermination of Jews continued relentlessly….’
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One such gassing, recorded by Dr Albert Menasche, a deportee from Salonica, was of 2,500 girls, including his own eleven-year-old daughter Lillian. Locked in the notorious Block 25 for three days, with no food and almost no water, on October 25 the girls were all gassed. Menasche added: ‘Eight hundred Jewish girls from Salonica were burned on that cursed day.’
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Lena Berg, from Warsaw, was an eye-witness of the death of the women and girls from Greece:
They had been brought to Auschwitz only weeks before, slender, black-eyed against the sleet and cold of the northern October. They sang a sentimental song called ‘Mama’, whose melody made one weep.
In a few weeks Auschwitz had withered those exotic flowers,
their fiery eyes had become dull in sunken sockets, empty and dead. Emaciated, dirty, repulsive, those Greek women could barely drag themselves around. Once so shapely, they now had legs like sticks and their breasts hung like bags. Their complexions, made velvet smooth by the southern sun, were now covered with horrible abscesses, vermin bites, and the marks of scabies incessantly scratched. They stank of gangrene, dysentery, unwashed sweat, and wretchedness.
When they went to their deaths they sang the ‘Hatikvah’, that song of undying hope, the song of an old people which has always carried the vision of Zion in its heart. Since then, every time I hear ‘Hatikvah’ I always see them, the dregs of human misery, and I know that through mankind flows a stream of eternity greater and more powerful than individual deaths.
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On 16 September 1943, less than seven weeks after the fall of Mussolini, as German forces occupied all but the southern tip of Italy, the first twenty-four Jews had been deported from Merano, in northern Italy, to Birkenau.
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Even though Allied forces, fighting in the south of Italy, were forcing the Germans back towards Rome, the deportation of Jews was a high priority for the German occupying power. Of the thirty-seven thousand Jews who suddenly found themselves in danger, only a few hundred managed to escape over the mountain passes to Switzerland. In Italy itself, several thousand found refuge in Catholic homes and institutions.
The Pope also helped the Jewish community in Rome that September, offering whatever amount of gold might be needed towards the fifty kilogrammes of gold demanded by the Nazis, which the community could not raise in full on its own.
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At the same time, at the Capuchin convent on the Via Siciliano, Father Benoit, under the name of Father Benedetti, saved large numbers of Jews by providing them with false identification papers. In this work he was helped by the staffs of the Swiss, Hungarian, Rumanian and French Embassies in Rome and also by a number of Italians—among them the ‘marshal of Rome’, Mario di Marco, a high official of the police, who was later tortured by the Gestapo but did not disclose what he knew.
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On October 16, the Germans combed the houses and streets of
Rome in search of Jews who, regardless of age, sex or health were taken to the Collegio Militare. A few days earlier, Pope Pius XII had personally ordered the Vatican clergy to open the sanctuaries of Vatican City to all ‘non-Aryans’ in need of refuge. By the morning of October 16, a total of 477 Jews had been given shelter in the Vatican and its enclaves, while another 4,238 had been given sanctuary in the many monasteries and convents in Rome. Only 1,015 of Rome’s 6,730 Jews were seized that morning. Held for two days in the Collegio Militare, they were then deported to Auschwitz. ‘The children were crying,’ a non-Jewish eye-witness later recalled. ‘Everywhere you could hear pleas for help and cries of distress.’
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Of the 1,015 Jews deported from Rome on October 18, only 16 survived the war. Within two months, a further 7,345 Jews had been seized throughout northern Italy. Of these, 6,746 were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, or died soon afterwards.
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Near Trieste, at a camp set up principally for Italian prisoners-of-war, and in which three thousand Italian soldiers were murdered by SS and Ukrainian guards, 620 Jews from Trieste were also murdered. The camp, La Risiera di San Sabba, was run by SS men transferred to Italy from the Polish death camps.
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