Cruel World (69 page)

The Nazis allowed the Vichy government to send a series of entertainers and lecturers for the edification of the workers, but these, which included Vichy officials and even a French SS officer, were scorned for the exercises in propaganda they obviously were. Courses and exams were offered so that students could continue their education as promised, but they were of low intellectual content, and the long work hours and crowded living conditions were not conducive to study. Various attempts to initiate sports programs failed, largely due to the exhaustion and malnutrition of the participants. Despite all, the French students and older workers still managed to put on plays and theatricals (one production of
The Barber of Seville
had fifty-eight performances), and derived considerable pleasure from thinking up innumerable go-slow types of resistance.

Overt resistance could mean death.
²⁷
The French and Dutch student workers, despite their elevated status, in fact had no more rights under German law than did those from the East. In the world of punishment the SS reigned supreme. The slightest infraction, such as writing graffiti, giving
food to an
Ostarbeiter
, writing “Long live escape” in a letter home, failing to doff one’s cap, taking an unauthorized trip, or any perceived act of sabotage, could become grounds for imprisonment in the special punishment camps, where national status no longer mattered. The installations had a variety of names, ranging from Education Camp to Punishment Camp, but there was little difference in their programs. Here the workers were starved and subjected to all the refinements of SS sadism. One young Frenchman remembered his horror at his first sight of his fellow inmates, who were

Work in these establishments was in fact punishment. At Nuremberg barefoot prisoners shoveled gravel until they dropped of exhaustion. Those who collapsed were apt to be shot. Young men were sent to clear land mines, and stood for hours in the snow for roll calls. The guards around them amused themselves by having them jog and do push-ups just after the minuscule bread rations had been distributed, so that the food became coated with mud. Inmates were whipped, and forced to beat other prisoners to death. Medical care, as in all such camps, was minimal; the death rate from shootings, beatings, diseases such as typhus and dysentery, and of course malnutrition, was enormous. Five hundred of the 800 Frenchmen incarcerated at the Grossbeeren camp succumbed. Those who survived these camps were often in such bad condition that they died soon after their release back into the labor force.

If forced labor was a trap of varying levels of cruelty for non-Jewish young people of every occupied nation, to be avoided by any means possible, for Jewish youth it offered the only small possibility of survival. In Germany, the Nuremberg Laws and subsequent decrees, which excluded Jewish students from mainstream training and education and destroyed their families’ economic resources, drove many of them into blue-collar jobs at an early age. By May 1940 registration for forced labor
had been made obligatory for all German Jews eighteen and over, and by early 1941 some 20 percent of them had been called up.
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In the following months call-ups increased and the minimum age continued to fall; by the spring of 1941, Jewish fourteen-year-olds were common in the workplace.
³⁰

The usual protections provided to child laborers were not granted to Jews, and apprentice training programs for skilled labor were closed to them. The young workers routinely labored long hours and were given the most dangerous, repellent, and unhealthy jobs. As the relentless drafting of German men into the armed forces continued, the number of Jews and foreign laborers working in the Reich soared. By the late summer of 1942, at the huge Zeiss-Ikon plant in Dresden, only 500 free German workers were left out of an original 7,000. Here, Jewish girls of fifteen and sixteen, in the so-called kindergarten, worked day and night shifts amounting to twenty-four hours out of forty-eight.
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These extreme conditions, combined with the reduced food and clothing rations allowed to Jews, especially those sent to camps in the country or to factories where lodging and sanitation were, as usual, minimal, led to rapid declines in health.

Legitimate businesses were not the only ones using Jewish labor. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps also used inmate labor to build and expand its camps, which were conveniently sited near granite quarries and other such projects, and to work in SS-run companies such as the German Earth and Stoneworks Co., Ltd., established in 1938. The work, at first mostly punitive, by the mid-1930s had become more profit-oriented, and in the spring of 1939 the SS formalized its industrial wing by establishing an SS Economic and Administrative Office.

Deportations of Jews from the expanded Reich to Russian and Polish ghettos had started in October 1941. In the summer of 1942, when the mass deportations from the Western occupied countries began, the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka being fully operative, the often life-saving stopovers in the ghettos became logistically unnecessary, and the transports went directly to the death camps. By early October 1942, even Jews already in concentration camps in Germany were sent to the East.
³²
In Berlin, where most of the remaining German Jews were by this time, those working in war industries, particularly in munitions factories, were exempted from the first transports, but in early 1943, under pressure to make the capital as well as the concentration camps
judenrein
(free of Jews), SS units raided the weapons factories and seized thousands of Jewish workers. They did not get them all: Goebbels fumed that “shortsighted industrialists” had warned 4,000 in time, who were now “wandering
about Berlin … and are naturally quite a public danger,” and ordered that they be hunted down immediately.
³³

In Poland, random groups of Jews aged fourteen to sixty had also been set to work by the Wehrmacht immediately after the German invasion in 1939. The labor consisted at first of clearing rubble, breaking stones in quarries, and other heavy construction work on fortifications, drainage projects, and roads. The Luftwaffe dragooned hundreds more for airfield construction. On some sites run by German industries, relatively good wages were paid at first for the grueling twelve- and even eighteen-hour shifts.
³⁴
Later the Jewish Councils would continue to supply workers on demand.

The SS also expanded its forced labor to Poland, and by early 1940 had a network of some 400 Forced Labor Camps for Jews (ZALs). Among the duties of these inmates, like those from Germany, were the construction of the extermination camps and the ongoing expansion of Auschwitz. Eventually, the major concentration camps, such as Auschwitz and Majdanek, would have their own in-house labor sections, and sub-camps would be specially set up for private firms such as I. G. Farben. In these units, the Jewish laborers, if they could survive the often horrendous conditions, were protected from extermination for varying lengths of time. Thousands of boys and girls were selected for forced labor in the ZALs in the weeks before the dissolution of the ghettos and during the roundups as the deportation trains were being loaded.

In smaller Polish towns Jews were sometimes warned ahead of time of the coming departures, but nothing could prepare them for the chaotic inhumanity of the process. Infants were often shot on the spot as houses were cleared. Once assembled, typically in the town square, triage was brutal. The old and sick were thrown bodily into waiting trucks, which took them to the cattle cars. The same was done to children and toddlers, whose parents, if they were fit enough to work, were frequently commanded to leave their babies behind. Many mothers and fathers refused this order, thereby unknowingly condemning themselves to death.

The chaos of these horrific scenes was deceptive: the usefulness of each group had been carefully calculated beforehand. Older girls and boys were separated from their families, forced forty or fifty at a time into trucks, and, with no time for farewells, driven directly to work camps. The larger ghettos were also not cleared all at once, but in multiple raids that left useful industries intact, a strategy that inspired some ghetto councils to certify children as young as ten as bona fide workers in order to save them.

Further triage took place upon arrival at the concentration camps. The terrible selection process of the deportees arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau from Poland and other European countries, in which lives were lost and saved by the merest chance, has been immortalized in myriad histories, books, and films. Here Anne Frank was selected to work, thereby gaining a few more months of life, as was Elie Wiesel, who survived. Both of them were in their teens. For small children there was no hope. With a very few exceptions, such as twins or others who seemed useful in some way to the medical researchers, they were trucked or marched directly to the gas chambers, sometimes with a relative, but often enough, it would appear, without any familiar adult to comfort them. The SS had learned a lot from the slaughters in Russia. Considerable efforts were made to prevent panic, which might lead to the situation getting out of control, and to reassure the doomed as they awaited their turn in the gas chamber. A photograph survives of mothers and children sitting calmly in a little grove of trees at Auschwitz, waiting for their “showers.”

For those who went to the four extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka there was no selection. Here even greater efforts of deception had been made. At Sobibor, newcomers saw only a few barracks and some fences covered with pine branches behind which were trees.
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Treblinka was much more elaborate: there they arrived at a cheerily painted train station complete with a fake clock, timetables on the walls, carefully tended flower plots, and inviting benches.
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It is clear from the accounts of contemporary observers, however, that the passengers on the trains knew something terrible awaited them. Zygmunt Klukowski, the Polish town doctor of Szczebrzeszyn, which lay on the rail line to Belzec, noted on April 8, 1942:

Treatment of the 5,000 or more people who arrived at the death camps in each transport depended on their country of origin. Eastern Europeans were greeted by guards with whips and screaming SS soldiers, while those from Western Europe, which included whole carloads of unaccompanied children, were more often met by polite guards and “medical staff” ready to “help” those who had become sick on the journey. This must have been quite a large number, if conditions on the trains, observed by many along their slow routes, are any indicator. Hubert Pfloch, a young Austrian draftee whose train to the Eastern Front was just behind a transport, watched as it was loaded and made its way to Treblinka on August 21, 1942:

Unaware of their fate, Jewish women and children too young for work calmly await the deadly showers of Auschwitz
.
(photo credit 13.2)