The Holocaust (100 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
Katznelson, who before the war had translated Heine’s lyrics into Hebrew, had been best known in Poland for his light verses, songs and poems for children: songs reflecting youthful pleasures and the joys of life.
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On the night of April 30, Katznelson and his surviving son were gassed.
As the killings continued on Polish soil, Polish Jews were fighting with Polish units in the Allied armies in Italy. At Monte Cassino, many Jewish soldiers were among the Polish and Allied dead. Among the Jews who fought with the Polish army in Italy was Dr Adam Graber, a surgeon of the Jewish hospital in Warsaw between the wars. In 1932, and again in 1935, Graber had been a representative of the Polish Maccabi at their World Games, held in Palestine. In 1939, as head of a field hospital with the Polish forces, Dr Graber had been captured by the Russians, who later allowed tens of thousands of captured Poles, among them many Jews, to join the Polish forces who fought in North Africa and Italy. On May 11, Dr Graber was among those who fell at Monte Cassino.
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That same day, in Warsaw, forty-three women were taken from the Pawiak
prison, and shot. Fifteen of these women were Jewish: one of them was shot with her four-year-old child.
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On May 18 it was the turn of a Jewish partisan leader in the Parczew region, Aleksander Skotnicki, to fall in action when his unit ran into a tank force of the heavily armoured SS Viking Division.
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In preparation for the imminent arrival of several hundred thousand Hungarian Jews, some of whom would be chosen for forced labour, the German industrial plants in the Auschwitz region began to expand. At Gleiwitz there were to be four such plants: one, for the production and packing of black smoke for smoke screens, was opened on May 3. The others were for repairing railway carriages and oil wagons, for making railway bogies and gun carriages, and for repairing and remodelling military motor vehicles.
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The factories in the Auschwitz region had expanded during the first five months of 1944, using both prisoners-of-war and Jews. Among the prisoners-of-war were Polish, Yugoslav, Soviet, French and British soldiers.
In the power station and coal mine at Neu Dachs, known also by its Polish name, Jaworzno, more than sixteen hundred prisoners were employed by May 1944.
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At the synthetic petrol plant at Blechhammer, opened on April 1, four thousand prisoners were employed, among them almost two hundred women who were in the SS and prisoners’ kitchens and laundry.
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At Bobrek, from April 22, the two hundred and fifty prisoners in the Siemens Schuckert works had included fifty children: all were employed making electrical apparatus for aircraft and submarines.
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A further labour camp at Myslowice provided thirteen hundred slave labourers for the Furstengrube coal mines, working the old mine, and constructing a new one.
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Another thousand prisoners were employed at the Laurahutte steel works, making anti-aircraft guns.
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At the Gunthergrube coal mines there were six hundred prisoners, most of them Jews brought from Birkenau, working the old mine and constructing a new one.
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In May 1944, on the eve of the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews to Birkenau, a new labour camp was opened at Sosnowiec, the second there, for nine hundred prisoners needed to work the gun-barrel foundry and shell production of the Ost-Maschinenbau Gesellschaft works.
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Between Birkenau and Auschwitz Main Camp, fuses for grenades were manufactured at the Union factory.
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At Monowitz, the synthetic oil and rubber factory was already absorbing tens of thousands of Jewish workers, as well as some British prisoners-of-war, all non-Jews.
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Hungarian Jews were also to be sent from Birkenau to the labour camp on the site of the Warsaw ghetto, to continue to clear the rubble, and to search for valuables.
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On May 15 the trains from Hungary began crossing Slovakia and southern Poland, on their way to Birkenau. Mel Mermelstein, who was among the earliest of the deportees from Hungary, later recalled the change in mood as the train crossed from Slovakia into Poland, and stopped at a town somewhere inside the German-occupied area:
Tall buildings were in sight and the air was thick. I managed to get to the little barbed-wired window. Another train just like ours was in sight.
I began to shout across, ‘Who are you…? Where are you coming from…?’
‘We are Dutch Jews… We are headed for Germany… to a labour camp…’
The SS ran over to put a stop to our communication. From across I could hear a woman scream to the guard, ‘You killed my child… my baby’s dead… you killed it, you Nazi swine… I’ll kill you!’
He turned his head toward the noise, removed his automatic weapon and delivered a burst of fire into the boxcar. I heard another SS shout back derisively, ‘With what will you kill me, you bitch?’
‘With my bare hands.’
Another burst, but this time in the air as he moved away to the other end of the transport.
On May 16 the tattoo numbers at Birkenau were given a new series, beginning with the letter A. The seventeen-year-old Mermelstein, arriving on May 21, was given the tattoo number A.4685. But only those chosen for work were given numbers.
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A specially built railway spur now brought the trains to the very gates of two of the
gas-chambers, only a few yards’ walk away. ‘When we arrived in Birkenau,’ one eye-witness wrote four months later, ‘such a smell of burning flesh wafted towards us that in the groups arriving at night, who not only smelt the stench but saw the flames rising from the crematoria, many committed suicide at once.’
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A Jewess from Hungary, Judith Sternberg, later recalled the moment of arrival at Birkenau:
Corpses were strewn all over the road; bodies were hanging from the barbed-wire fence; the sound of shots rang in the air continuously. Blazing flames shot into the sky; a giant smoke cloud ascended above them. Starving, emaciated human skeletons stumbled toward us, uttering incoherent sounds. They fell down right in front of our eyes, and lay there gasping out their last breath.
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With each arriving train from Hungary, selections were made, and some men and women from each train were sent to the barracks. But within a few days, twelve thousand Jews were being gassed and cremated every twenty-four hours. Alter Feinsilber, one of the few survivors of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau, noted, of these Hungarian transports:
If the number of persons to be gassed was not sufficiently large, they would be shot and burned in pits. It was a rule to use the gas-chamber for groups of more than two hundred persons, as it was not worth while to put the gas-chamber in action for a smaller number of persons. It happened that some prisoners offered resistance when about to be shot at the pit or that children would cry and then SS Quartermaster Sergeant Moll would throw them alive into the flames of the pits.
I was eye-witness of the following incidents: Moll told a naked woman to sit down on the corpses near the pit, and while he himself shot prisoners and threw their bodies into the flaming pit he ordered her to jump about and sing. She did so, in the hope, of course, of thus saving her life, perhaps. When he had shot them all, he also shot this woman and her corpse was cremated.
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Two of the gas-chambers, numbered II and III, were at the end of the railway spur. But two more, IV and V, were some way across the
camp, nearly three thousand yards, at the edge of the Birkenau woods. To these two more distant gas-chambers, the Jews were marched on foot. Those who were sick, as well as old men and women who were too weak to walk, and sometimes children, were taken from the railway ramp to these two distant gas-chambers by truck. Ten months later, Alter Feinsilber recalled how, when those brought by truck reached the gas-chamber: ‘they were dumped into the yard just as is done when refuse is dumped from lorries into pits, expressly prepared for that purpose.’ When it happened, Feinsilber added, ‘that after gassing we found a still moving body among the corpses, we did not want to throw a still living person into the fire and then one of the SS men finished him off with a revolver shot.’
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HUNGARY
From the first days of their arrival in Birkenau, Hungarian Jews were among those taken from the barracks for work, not only in the factories of the Auschwitz region, but in many distant factories and projects in the Reich. On May 15, a thousand Jews were sent
to a factory at Wustegiersdorf; others were to go to factories at Brünnlitz, Hamburg and Schwarzheide, as well as to a building site of Ullersdorf, south-east of Berlin, which was being prepared as an SS recreation and rest centre.
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For the new arrivals, the moment of the selection was bewildering and without meaning. Hugo Gryn, a fourteen-year-old boy from Beregszasz, in the Hungarian-annexed eastern region of Czechoslovakia, later recalled his arrival in Birkenau with his father, his mother and his younger brother:
We were exhausted, thoroughly demoralised and frightened and the train stood for some time. We could only hear the shunting of engines, crunch of people walking outside, and eventually, well into daylight, the door pulled open and people being now herded out, and an amazing scene. It reminded me of what I imagined a lunatic asylum would be like, because in addition to the SS who were moving up and down and pushing people around towards the head of the platform, the other people there wore this striped uniform, with a very curious-shaped hat, and they were just moving up and down taking so-called luggage out of the train. One of them I would say saved my life, because he went around muttering in Yiddish, ‘You’re eighteen, you have a trade,’ which I took to be the mutterings of a lunatic because it was such a curious thing to say—that’s all he kept saying to people—particularly to young people.
My father was there and took it seriously, and by the time we in fact came to the head of this platform where the selection was taking place I had already been rehearsed, so that when the SS man says: ‘How old are you?’ I said I was nineteen; and ‘Do you have a trade?’ ‘Yes, I’m a carpenter and a joiner.’ My brother who was there was younger, he couldn’t say he was nineteen, and so he was sent with the old people the wrong way and my mother went after him. The SS man quite crudely and violently pulled my mother back. She said, ‘Well, I want to be with my little boy, he’s frightened.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘you will meet him later.’ Well that of course was in fact the last time I saw my brother….
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Gabi Gryn was eleven years old.
The deceptions which alone made the murder of so many people
possible were continued to the very door of the gas-chamber where, as Yehuda Bakon, a deportee from Hungary, was later told by the Sonderkommando, the word ‘showers’ was written ‘in all languages’. Of the Jews who were about to be gassed, Yehuda Bakon was told:
They were brought into the chambers for undressing. There were benches, and there were hangers with numbers. Sometimes women would be separated from the men, but when there was no time, they were put into those chambers together, and had to undress all together. The SS men would warn them, ‘Please, remember the number of your hanger for the clothes. Tie both shoes well, and put your clothing in one pile, because they will be handed back to you at the end of the showers.’
They would ask for water. They were very thirsty after the long journey in those sealed trucks. They were told, ‘Hurry. Coffee is waiting. Coffee is ready in camp. The coffee will be cold.’ And similar things to calm them, to mislead them.
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During the second half of May, tens of thousands of Jews were deported to Birkenau not only from Hungary, but from Theresienstadt, Italy, Belgium, Holland, France and the former Polish city of Sosnowiec: more than thirty trains in fifteen days.
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Of the 575 Jews brought to Birkenau from Fossoli, in Italy, on May 16, 518 were gassed, among them the seventy-seven-year-old Daria Bauer, who had been born in Florence, the six-year-old Elena Calo, also from Florence, the three-year-old Alina di Consiglio from Rome, and Gigliola Finzi, born at Roccastrada in Italy less than three months before the deportation.
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There was also one deportation in May which did not go to Birkenau, but to Kovno. Leaving Paris on May 15, the train reached Kovno three days and three nights later. Of the 878 deportees, only 17 survived the war. On May 19, the day after these Paris deportees reached Kovno, the SS ordered the prisoners to undress. A Lithuanian eye-witness, Pavilas Tcherekas, later recalled how, ‘understanding what that meant, the prisoners threw themselves at the SS and disarmed some of them. There was shooting. The prisoners fled, running in all directions, but they were in a concrete enclosure. Bullets poured from the guard towers.’ None escaped.
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