Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (35 page)

“This is something, you know, the world has never understood; how perfect the machine was. It was only lack of transport because of the Germans’ war requirements that prevented them from dealing with far vaster numbers than they did; Treblinka alone could have dealt with the 6,000,000 Jews and more besides. Given adequate rail transport, the German extermination camps in Poland could have killed all the Poles, Russians and other East Europeans the Nazis planned eventually to kill.”

*
Although the lists of survivors of Treblinka and Sobibor are believed to be complete, it is impossible to place accurately the circumstances of the deaths of those who perished during or after the revolts.

10

I
N
APRIL
–
MAY
1943 a new wave of transports began which would continue throughout the summer. Some brought survivors of the desperate rebellion of the Warsaw ghetto. Others were from the Russian and Polish ghettos which were being cleared of the remnants of their populations as the Germans began the long retreat from Stalingrad. Others came from Holland, from Vienna, and even from Germany.

The threat of “practical measures” announced by the Allies in their combined statement of December 17, 1942, had turned out as time went by to mean not rescue projects but the pursuit of Allied victory. This, both the British and the American governments had become persuaded, was the only real solution to the catastrophe of the Jews in Europe. In retrospect it can, of course, be appreciated that the magnitude of the events seemed at the time to defy any large-scale solution; yet it is impossible not to think that there were things which could have been done if the will had existed more generally, up to the highest level.

In America, Britain, Switzerland, Sweden and some of the Latin American countries there were certainly individuals, and some newspapers, who tried their utmost to pressurize or to inspire governments into action; but for reasons outside the scope of this book they were unable to fire a sufficiently strong general will.

To take first some cases where this will did, in particular instances, exist. Early in 1943, when the Germans had ordered that the 25,000 Jews of Sofia be deported to Poland, one man – Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, Apostolic Delegate to Turkey, later Pope John xxiii – acted without thought of political expediency or of what the Nazis might do. “When Monsignor Roncalli found out about this,” said Luigi Brescani, a confidential servant of Roncalli’s, “he wrote immediately a personal letter to King Boris. I had never before seen Monsignor Roncalli so disturbed. Before I carried this missive to a certain person able to put it personally into the hands of King Boris, Monsignor Roncalli read it to me. Even though calm and gentle as St Francis de Sales come to life, he did not spare himself from saying that King Boris should on no account agree to that dishonourable action … threatening him among other things with the punishment of God.”
*

As we know from Richard Glazar’s story, 24,000 Bulgarians – those who had been in Salonika – did die in Treblinka in the spring of 1943; but there can be little doubt that the 25,000 Jews of Sofia were saved by the intervention of the future Pope and the courage of a king.

There is also the action taken by the Danish underground when, with the official sanction of the Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Christian Günther, they spirited 7,000 people (seven-eighths of the country’s Jews) from Denmark to Sweden, where they lived safely till the end of the war. By that time Sweden had already admitted approximately 35,000 Jewish refugees; and after the war the Swedish government waived the repayment of a thirty-million kroner loan which they had made to Denmark and Norway for the support of their Jewish co-citizens in Sweden.

Later, in 1944, there were to be other successes. Ira Hirschmann, President Roosevelt’s appointee on the War Refugee Board (finally formed in January 1944) managed to persuade the Rumanians that the war was lost and that it was in their interest to stop the Germans from killing those who remained of the 185,000 Rumanian Jews. In March 48,000 people were returned to their homes.

And in June 1944, after hundreds of thousands had been deported from Hungary, there was the action of the heroic Swede, Raoul Wallenberg, who went to Budapest with stacks of so-called “protective Swedish passports” and issued them to anyone who could provide any semblance of a family or business connection with Sweden. Moreover he persuaded the Hungarian authorities to lease him apartment houses in Budapest which were then put under the protection of the Swedish embassy and where these people were housed. This crash programme is said to have saved some ten thousand people. (By this time, of course, the situation had changed somewhat in that Himmler, aware that the war was lost, had begun to co-operate with certain Jewish agencies. In addition to those saved by Wallenberg’s initiative, and others who were hidden by non-Jewish compatriots, many with the connivance of German officials, a further 20,000 were taken out of Hungary, some to a “tolerable” camp in Vienna and some to Switzerland.)

But for 1942–3 the figures tell their own story. It was all but impossible to escape, certainly from anywhere in Eastern Europe. The hope of both the Western and the Eastern Jews was focused chiefly on America – traditional haven of the oppressed – and Great Britain, because of Palestine. But even if these countries had opened their borders – and although this step was urged by many liberals in both countries, there was no question of either government’s agreeing to it – a refugee’s first step had to be an attempt to escape to one of the neutral countries: Spain, Portugal, Sweden or Switzerland.

In November 1942 it was announced over the Swiss radio that 14,000 refugees had managed to make their way into Switzerland.
*
In August 1942 the Swiss government had invoked an emergency law which had been passed in October 1939, under which anyone crossing the frontier illegally was to be expelled. “About 100,000 people,” said Councillor von Steiger, Minister of Justice at the time, “were trying to escape to Switzerland from France, sometimes a hundred a day.” The traditional right to sanctuary, he said, was not a right in the juridical sense. The mass entry of refugees represented a danger to the security of the State. To which a pastor in Basle replied: “If these people clamouring for admission were politically oppressed, prisoners of war or deserters they would and could be accommodated. It is the fact that they are Jews that excludes them from receiving the traditional sanctuary of our country.”

From 1939 to 1941 30,000 European Jews reached the United States by way of Italy, Spain and Portugal. In 1940 4,400 Polish Jews escaped from Lithuania to Japan, the United States and – a few hundred of them – Palestine. Between 1940 and 1944 from 31,000 to 41,000 Jews escaped from France to Spain and Portugal. In 1942 a number of Polish Jews managed to leave the USSR with the Polish Anders Army, including 850 children, mostly orphans. These children were admitted into Palestine in 1943.

In May 1939 a British White Paper on Palestine had restricted Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years. From September 1939 to the spring of 1941 about 12,000 were, in fact, brought in illegally. Immigration to Palestine in late 1942 and 1943 was limited to 350 Jews from Europe. One of the blackest memories for many of the people in Britain who were struggling to help the Jews was the government’s refusal in January 1942 to admit to Palestine 769 refugees without British permits who had come from Rumania on the freighter
Struma.
This vessel, which was not seaworthy, was towed out to sea by the Turks on February 24, and Sank with the loss of all on board: 70 children, 269 women and 428 men.

On April 19, 1943, began the British-us conference on refugees, in Bermuda. It ended on April 30 and was described by Myron Taylor in a memorandum to Cordell Hull as “wholly ineffective [as] we knew it would be”. On May 19 a debate on refugee problems in the British House of Commons laid bare both the despair of concerned individuals and the position taken by the government.

Eleanor F. Rathbone, MP for the English universities, who had recently produced a heartrending pamphlet entitled
Rescue the Perishing
, advocated passionately a twelve-point programme for immediate rescue measures. These included the supply of blocks of unnamed visas to British consuls in neutral European countries; the offer of guarantees and financial aid to neutral countries, to encourage them to admit more refugees; the provision of transport facilities; admission to Palestine by cancelling the conditions set out in the White Paper of May 1939; pressure on German satellites and appeals to the people of enemy and enemy-occupied countries; the examination of the possibility of exchanging civilian internees with Axis sympathies for Jewish and other potential victims of the Nazis; and the setting up of refugee camps in distant places. Point Twelve was the adoption of the principle that, whatever other nations might do or leave undone, “the British contribution to the work of rescue should be the speediest and most generous possible without delaying victory.”

It was to this last point that the government mainly addressed itself in its reply, given by Mr Peake, Under-Secretary for the Home Department, and by Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. In the prevailing circumstances, they said, nothing but the most minimal rescue attempts was possible. Almost everything the government had tried – including saving a number of children for whom visas to Palestine were available – had failed as a result of German determination to block such attempts. The only solution – the one thing to be aimed for – was military victory by the Allies.

A week before that day the Swedish government had agreed to ask Germany to release 20,000 Jewish children who would be cared for in Sweden until the end of the war, provided the United States and Great Britain agreed to share the cost of their food and medical supplies, and would place them in Palestine or some other haven when the war was over. The British Foreign Office indicated its approval of this imaginative proposal on May 19, the day of the above-mentioned debate, and transmitted it to the State Department.

Almost precisely the same argument as had taken place in the House of Commons that day, had raged in America for months. Here too the desperate requests of innumerable public figures, Christians and Jews, left unmoved the State Department which controlled the issuing of life-saving visas. For a variety of political and emotional reasons, the American government – perhaps even more than the British – was wary of seeming to fight “a war for the Jews”. In 1940, when France fell and Britain stood alone, it took the State Department only eight days, from July 6 to July 14, to decide to admit 10,000 English children to the us on visitors’ visas, waiving all regulations. The Swedish proposal, on the other hand, received no reply from Washington for five months. Then, on October 11, the State Department suggested that the project should not be limited to Jewish children, and that it should be channelled through the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees (a thoroughly ineffectual body). The British hastily revamped the project to include some Norwegian children. But by the time the changed plan reached the Swedes in January 1944, Sweden had more or less burnt its boats with Germany by welcoming many Danes and Norwegians, and the plan was dropped.

It is, of course, questionable whether the Germans would have entertained such a project – they had already refused to allow Norwegian children into Sweden. But Sweden’s position was undeniably “special” (“That’s where they got their steel from,” Stangl was to say); it is unlikely that as many as 20,000 children would have been let go, and probably none from the East. But at least some might have been saved, from some of the Western countries. As it was, in the eight months it took to kill this plan, many more than 20,000 children had been slaughtered in Treblinka and elsewhere.

On May 12, 1943, in London, Smul Zygielbojm had committed suicide in protest. “By my death,” he wrote in a farewell note addressed to the President and Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile, “I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people.”

*
Quoted from
While Six Million Died
, Arthur D. Morse.

*
According to
Encyclopedia Judaica 1972
, page 907, 11,000 Jewish refugees entered Switzerland between 1942 and 1944.

11

“T
HAT APRIL
,” said Richard Glazar, “the main preoccupation of the
SS
was to keep the camp going, to keep us occupied, to justify their own positions there. This is when, with again almost no transports arriving, Stangl ordered the camp ‘street’ to be built, new fences to be put up, the forest cleared, a 200 installed, the famous railway station made to look totally genuine; with a false clock, everything painted in beautiful, garishly bright colours; the ‘petrol station’, again with flowers around it; wooden benches dotting the landscape like a luxury spa – it was not to be believed. And during all those weeks, the preparations for the uprising continued, the military part now firmly in Rudi Masarek’s hands. In the course of that month there was the business with Dr Choronzycki, a very popular man; another blow when he died.…But, there were other doctors.…”

It was also in the spring that a new method was evolved for the burning of the dead. Two enormous iron racks were constructed (the second one only after the first had proved itself efficient). “They sent us out into the countryside to forage for disused rails,” said Glazar. These racks, called “the roasts”, each held several hundred stacked-up bodies, and were used from then on not only for the incoming transports, but also to burn thousands of partly decomposed corpses dug up by excavators and either thrown into “the roasts” by the machine or carried on stretchers by two men at the double. “We always had to run,” said one of the very few survivors of this death-camp detail, in trial evidence in Germany (and also in Poland), “and we had to be careful never to carry just one adult corpse, but always to add a couple of children – otherwise it would have looked as though we were shirking.”