Authors: Henry Orenstein
The morning of October 28 they were all taken to the Gestapo headquarters in Hrubieszów. Ebner saw Julek and his group in the jail and was preparing to shoot them when Julek told him that he knew where a large cache of gold had been hidden by the Judenrat. He offered to show Ebner where it was on condition that he and a small group of Jews be permitted to stay in Hrubieszów. Ebner, who needed people to clean up the ghetto, agreed. Julek led him to the gold, and that was how the Jatkowa camp got started.
I was assigned to one of several small groups whose job was to go from house to house in the now-empty ghetto, remove the furniture and other belongings of the Jews who had lived there, and load it all onto wagons, which were then driven to one of the warehouses in which the Germans stored the possessions of the Jews they had killed.
I spent the next four or five weeks doing this work. It was eerie entering the empty Jewish houses. When the action had started, the Jews had been permitted to take very little with them, so almost everything in the houses was intact. Pots of food still stood on top of the stoves, clothing hung in the closets, most of the beds had been made. It was as if people had somehow felt obliged to leave everything in order.
We worked without much supervision, but no one thought of escaping; we were all too tired of running and hiding. It was unseasonably warm November weather.
Large-scale killing had now stopped. The great majority of the Hrubieszów Jews were dead. Many had gone to the Sobibór gas chambers; thousands of others, including my parents, relatives, friends, and neighbors, had been killed in and around Hrubieszów, most of them by one man, Ebner. From time to time the Gestapo still caught a few Jews in hiding and would take them to the cemetery to be shot. Sometimes they didn't even bother to do that; one day on the way to work we passed two Jewish women lying in the middle of the street. Their faces looked as if they were asleep, but their heads lay in pools of blood. They had been found in hiding by Alex, a member of the Gestapo, who had taken them out on the street and shot them on the spot.
Alex was a strange man; he spoke perfect Yiddish. He must have been raised by a Jewish family to speak the language so well. Those few people who were still in hiding were by now in desperate need of water, and Alex would walk around the empty houses calling out in a low voice in Yiddish, to make them think he too was a Jew, and they would answer him. He would then shoot those poor souls he had been able to deceive. He was in his late thirties, with curly, dark blond hair and watery blue eyes. It was obvious from his swaggering walk and patronizing manner how he relished his power over the few Jews left alive.
During this miserable time one thing kept us going: the news from all the fighting fronts was great. Everywhere the tide of the war was turning against Hitler. Some of the Poles had shortwave radios on which they listened to the BBC. One very nice man, a former teacher of mine, was providing us with information, sometimes at considerable danger to himself. And although they distorted many facts, the German war communiqués, which were published in the local newspapers, accurately reported the names of the towns where battles were taking place, so we had a pretty good idea where the fronts were.
First came the news of Montgomery's victory in the desert at El Alamein. Even the great Rommel, the Desert Fox, had been defeated. The BBC told the world of the tens of thousands of German and Italian prisoners taken. So the English had done it at last.
Then came another bolt from the blue. The Americans had landed in North Africa! Finally they were on this side of the Atlantic. Once again the New World had come to the rescue of the Old.
And then there was the incredible news from the Russian front. Stalingrad, where the remnants of the Russian army had held on for weeks in bitter house-to-house fighting, the city that had become an obsession with Hitler, now became his nemesis. While Russian soldiers sacrificed their lives among the ruins of Stalingrad, Stalin was moving fresh troops from Siberia, mostly under cover of night, to the two exposed flanks of the elite German Second Army under General Friedrich Paulus. So fanatically determined was Hitler to capture the city bearing Stalin's name that he pushed Paulus's army into the tip of a large enclave without adequately securing its flanks.
On November 19 the Russians struck. The ground was covered with snow, it was freezing, and the Germans and their allies were exhausted. The Russians broke through with tanks and infantry and poured through the gaps they had opened to the northwest and southwest of Stalingrad.
Four days later they closed the trap; three hundred thirty thousand Germans were surrounded. We could hardly believe itâinvincible just a short time ago, Hitler was now actually losing the war. We assumed he would order Paulus to break out and rejoin the main German forces, saving his army, as the British had at Dunkirk. But no; the maniac's dark soul was so consumed with hatred, with his contempt and loathing of his own generals, that he ordered Paulus to make a stand and fight on in surrounded Stalingrad.
Then he made a second big mistake; he ordered Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and his army to abandon their drive on the Caucasus and try to rescue Paulus and his men. This put an end to any chance the Germans had of capturing the Baku oil fields. The Russians held off von Manstein, and that sealed the fate of the German Second Army.
All this was balm to our broken hearts, and it gave us a wonderful feeling of satisfaction to know that the greatest murderer in history would soon have to pay the price and meet the terrible fate awaiting him. But as far as our own lives were concerned, the great war news was coming too late. Our parents and most of the people we loved were dead. We were living and working in a ghost town, and Ebner and the rest would never let us come through alive to bear witness against them. And even if by some miracle we did survive, what would it mean, to go on living in this cruel, heartless world? I turned these thoughts over and over in my mind during those terrible days.
In retrospect, I can see now that what kept me alive more than anything else was my intense, almost fanatic desire to live to see Hitler destroyed. As if by osmosis I could feel how he was squirming in agony, with the agony growing worse at every defeat. I wanted him to suffer, to pay for all the evil things he had done. Now the bastard was like a rat in a trap, lying to his countrymen, deceiving them, but knowing deep down that all was lost, and there was no way out for him. I used to lie awake imagining how this devil incarnate must be feeling, having reached the pinnacle of power, having basked in the subservient adulation of his fellow Germans, having all Europe prostrate at his feet, and now the nightmares he must be suffering night after night, in terror of the retribution that awaited him.
By the end of November our work of collecting the contents of the empty houses that had belonged to Jews was coming to an end,
and at the same time the population of the Jatkowa camp increased. Julek got permission from the Gestapo for other Jews in hiding to join our group. Soon the number of Jews in the camp had grown to one hundred. We carried out a variety of assignments, and in effect served as a central pool of free labor for the Gestapo and the local police to draw upon at will.
Fred had a bad scare when Ebner summoned him one day to the Gestapo building. Usually such a summons meant death, so we were all extremely apprehensive. When Fred arrived, he was directed to Ebner's office, where he found him sitting at his desk. Standing on one side of him was a Ukrainian policeman and on the other was Brenner, a Jewish lawyer from Lublin.
Brenner lived among the Poles as a
Volksdeutsche
(a German who had lived in Poland since before 1939), and Fred knew this. Ebner pointed to Brenner, and in his sharp, cutting voice asked Fred,
“Ist er Jude?”
(Is he a Jew?) Of course Fred knew that Brenner was, but to say so would have meant his death, so he tried to pretend he didn't know him. Then Ebner gestured to Fred to inspect Brenner's penis. “
Ist er Jude
?” Ebner screamed again. Fred knew that to irritate Ebner when he was in such a mood was to risk his own life as well. He became so confused and frightened that instead of Brenner he went over to the Ukrainian and said to him, “Drop your pants.” The Ukrainian and Ebner burst out laughing. Realizing his mistake, Fred then turned to Brenner, who obligingly took out his penis. Fred tried to fudge, saying, “Well, it looks as if it might have been circumcised, but there are cases in which there is some question ⦔
This was too much for Ebner.
“Raus!”
(Get out!) he yelled at Fred. Now in complete panic, Fred took the wrong turn out the door and ran into the prison yard. He heard Brenner's screams, and ran back through the building and out into the street. He returned to Jatkowa completely unnerved.
Many of the Jews in Jatkowa were the only survivors in their entire families. They were very lonely, and naturally befriended others in the same situation. A few marriages were arranged, but most of these couples simply lived together. Before the war most Jewish girls in Hrubieszów were virgins when they married. That had now changed; we all knew we were living on borrowed time, and the girls were eager to make love so that when the time came to die, they would at least have experienced one of life's most talked-about pleasures.
I had always been very shy. Only twice before had I had the opportunity to make love to a girl: the first time was some months before the war, when a Polish maid let me know she wouldn't be averse to a visit from me to her bedroom behind our kitchen. I was tempted, but my room was right next to my parents' bedroom, and I was afraid of being caught. The second time was with Itka Kaufman in WÅodzimierz during the Russian occupation. Now, at Jatkowa, I discovered that there were two girls interested in me. One of them was Sarah Shechter, a pretty girl of about seventeen (I was nineteen), with brown eyes, brown hair, pale skin, and a slim body. The problem was that in Jatkowa we worked all day, and at night we were not allowed to leave our quarters, where we slept two or three to a room.
But one day Sarah and I were assigned to a group loading hay for the German army. We were given twenty minutes for lunch, so we lay down on a small haystack, out of sight of the soldier who was supervising us and who had sat down to have lunch himself. Sarah and I kissed and then I lay on top of her and embraced her. The proximity of the German made us even more nervous than we would have been in any case, but we both wanted badly to make love even and were willing to take the risk. Even so, my lack of experience and Sarah's virginity made matters difficult. I was struggling with the problem when we heard someone coming. We hastily readjusted our
clothes and sat up, pretending to be talking, when a Ukrainian policeman appeared. He stared at us suspiciously and said, “Go back to work.”
I was very embarrassed and couldn't look Sarah in the eye as I offered a few clumsy excuses. She was nice about it, though. She took my hand and whispered, “You're very sweet.” That made me feel a little better, and I swore to myself that next time I would manage things more efficiently.
One morning the Gestapo dealt the Jatkowa camp a new blow. First they summoned Julek and Rabinowitz to the Gestapo building. Then, during our morning roll call, they selected about half of the Jatkowa Jews and had the Polish and Ukrainian police load them onto a truck, telling the rest of us to return to our quarters. When the truck pulled out we were left in a state of shock and feared the worst. Later in the day Fred was piling wood in the yard when a young boy, Shepsel, came and told him that Demant was in the camp asking for him. Fred was very frightened; any summons from Demant was bad news. He went out into the street, where Demant was waiting. “What are you doing, Doctor?” he asked. Fred told him that he had been ordered to stack the wood. Demant shook his head. “You don't work any more; you are taking over for Brandt.”
Fred knew immediately what that meant: Julek, Rabinowitz, and the others had been killed. Later we found out that they had been driven to the Jewish cemetery and shot. Ebner had personally shot Julek. A rumor spread that Julek had kept up his contacts with the German civilians who had been involved in running the ghetto before the action, and the Gestapo didn't like it. After Julek was killed, Wagner recommended that Fred be made the new head of the camp. He was told to move into the house where Julek had lived. Each morning he was to receive orders from the Gestapo for the day and
then assign the various jobs. He was also responsible for the distribution of food and for other administrative details. Fred had, of course, no choice but to accept this new post; to refuse would have meant instant execution. But by accepting it he placed himself and his family in greater danger; one false step, the slightest mistake, and all of usâperhaps even the entire campâwould be liquidated.
We lived in constant terror of Ebner, who was a real lunatic. He used to go to the Jewish cemetery at night and stand for hours on top of the pits containing the bodies of hundreds of the people he had killed. The very sight of him made us freeze with fear. Then suddenly, one day in the middle of December, we learned to our astonishment that Ebner had been killed. He had been shot by Baran, a Polish partisan, who had been hiding in his mother's house when someone tipped off the Gestapo. Having killed thousands of people with impunity, Ebner must have believed himself invulnerable. He went out to the house alone, accompanied only by his driver, to get Baran. Ebner entered the house while Baran was asleep in the loft and shot his mother dead. When Baran heard the shot, he looked down from his hiding place, saw what had happened, and shot Ebner with a rifle, mortally wounding him. Ebner staggered out of the house and died before he could reach his car. It wasn't until much later, after a long manhunt, that the Gestapo found Baran and killed him.
Ebner's death was a momentous event for us at Jatkowa. This cold-blooded murderer of thousands of men, women, and children had been a constant evil presence in our minds, and when we learned that he was dead, it felt as if the devil himself had died. We were exuberant, but at the same time fearful that the Gestapo would take their revenge on us. Apparently, though, at least some of them were almost as relieved as we were; Ebner had intimidated even his henchmen in the Gestapo.