Authors: Martin Gilbert
At Munkacs, in Hungarian Ruthenia, and at the Hungarian town
of Satoraljaujhely, a number of Jews tried to resist being put on the train to Birkenau, but they were shot down by the SS. The remainder, cowed, entered the wagons.
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During the five-day journey from Munkacs, which began on May 22, many went mad. Some died during the first three days inside the sealed wagons. At one town on the journey, all corpses were removed, and those who had gone mad were shot.
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On May 25 the German representative in Budapest, SS Brigadier General Edmund Veesenmayer, reported to the German Foreign Ministry that 138,870 Jews had been deported to their ‘destination’ in the past ten days.
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That same evening, May 25, as the group of Hungarian Jews were being led to one of the two more distant gas-chamber buildings in Birkenau, they sensed that something was wrong, and scattered into the nearby woods. Special searchlights, installed around the gas-chamber, were at once switched on by the SS, who opened fire on those seeking to flee. All were shot. A similar act of revolt, similarly suppressed, took place three days later, on May 28.
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On the following day, May 29, several thousand Jews who had been deported from the southern Hungarian city of Baja reached the German frontier. Only then, after three and a half days in the wagons, were the doors opened for the first time: fifty-five Jews were found dead, and two hundred had gone mad.
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One eye-witness of the arrival of Hungarian Jews at Birkenau was a German soldier whose account was eventually passed on to British military Intelligence. He was a member of a German anti-tank artillery unit, transferred from the Russian front to the west. During the journey, the train on which he and his unit were being transferred had to stop for a few days owing to ‘jammed railways’. At the place where it stopped, it was shunted on to a side track. The side track was at Auschwitz junction, at the entrance to the spur line into Birkenau.
On the siding, alongside the soldiers’ train, stood a goods train. Its tiny upper windows were covered in barbed wire. The train was guarded by the SS.
The soldier’s account, as sent to London, read:
This train was full of Hungarian Jews brought up for extermination. Nobody was allowed near the train, but some
of the soldiers managed to get near all the same, and caught glimpses of what was going on.
The Jews were packed together in the carriages, men, women, children, old people; they were not allowed out and had to obey the calls of nature inside. The carriages were full of excrements, and a putrid fluid was trickling from the carriages.
The captives cried out for water but it was forbidden to bring them any. Some of the soldiers did it all the same, in spite of the SS guards’ threats. The Jews offered them valuables, rings, watches, etc., in return, but the soldiers refused. One Jew insisted on throwing his watch to a soldier, making the gesture of throat-cutting to indicate that he was going to his death anyhow, and the watch was no more use to him. One SS man accepted valuables from the captives in return for giving them half a loaf of bread.
This went on for two days when the death train was emptied and the inmates were driven into the camp. Meanwhile the soldiers had found out through interviews with the local locomotive driver who had to shunt the trains, and with SS guards, what was going on in this camp. The engine driver told them to watch out at nightfall; then they would see smoke coming out of twelve chimneys that were visible at some distance, and smell the burned flesh—that was the mass cremation of the people murdered during the afternoon hours in gas-chambers.
Indeed, when night fell after the emptying of the death train, the chimneys began to smoke and the smell of burned flesh filled the air. Also open fires were seen—the corpses being burned on pyres because the crematorium could not deal with the masses of victims. Another crematorium, bigger than the first, was seen under construction nearby. The soldiers—the whole unit witnessed the events—were aghast. They had heard of these things before but could not believe them. They stayed up all night and discussed what they had seen. Even the most diehard Nazis were silent and pale. No action was possible; the guns had been sent ahead, they had next to no arms, and the place was full of SS.
The following day, six carriages rolled out of the death camp and were put on the side track for the night. The soldiers crept into the carriages to inspect the contents. It consisted of the
clothes of the Jews murdered on the previous day—all with labels of Hungarian firms—anything from shorts to shirts, men’s and women’s underwear, to babies’ swaddling clothes, shoes, suits, dresses, etc., all addressed to Textilverwaltung, Litzmannstadt (the German Textile Administration in Lodz), which was to use them.
The engine driver said he could hardly hold out any longer at this place, but what could he do? He was scarcely able to eat his meals for disgust. He told the soldiers appalling stories from the camp, especially the treatment of women, which defy description.
There was also a real romantic drama. One SS man had fallen in love with a Jewish girl and became intimate with her. He protected her and managed for months to get her out of the death batches into some batch which was still to remain alive. But in the end he was found out. The SS man and the girl were killed immediately.
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Inside Birkenau, two Jews who had witnessed the first ten days of the Hungarian arrivals escaped on May 27. One, Arnost Rosin, was a Czech Jew, the other, Czeslaw Mordowicz, was Polish-born. They managed to reach Slovakia, and their report, combined with that of two earlier escapees who had fled before the Hungarian deportations, reached the West towards the end of June. The two earlier escapees were the young Slovak Jew, Rudolf Vrba, and an older Slovak Jew, Alfred Wetzler. In their report, Vrba set out the fate and the statistics of the deportations into Birkenau since the summer of 1942, when he himself had arrived from Slovakia.
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Even while Rosin and Mordowicz were struggling to cross the Tatra mountains, trekking southward, but only able to move by night, into Slovakia, Edmund Veesenmayer was again reporting to Berlin on the scale of the deportations from Hungary. On May 25 he gave 138,870 as the number of Jews already deported.
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Six days later, on May 31, the figure had risen to 204,312.
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That same day, from one of the trains reaching the German border, forty-two corpses were removed, one of them a child’s, before the train proceeded to Birkenau.
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At Birkenau, the torments imposed upon those sent to the barracks reduced many of them to despair. Leon Szalet has recalled
how, on one occasion, the prisoners were ordered to drink out of the unflushed toilet bowls. ‘The men could not bring themselves to obey this devilish order,’ he wrote. ‘They only pretended to drink. But the block-führers had reckoned with that; they forced the men’s heads deep into the bowls until their faces were covered with excrement. At this the victims almost went out of their minds—that was why their screams had sounded so demented.’
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A prisoner in the women’s camp at Birkenau, Halina Birenbaum, has recalled how many women with diarrhea relieved themselves in soup bowls or in the pans provided for ‘coffee’; then they hid the utensils under the mattress to avoid the punishment awaiting them for doing so. The punishment was twenty-five strokes on the bare buttocks, or kneeling all night long on sharp gravel, holding up bricks. These punishments, Halina Birenbaum added, ‘often ended in the death of the “guilty”.’
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At least twice after the arrival of the Hungarian Jews, blood was taken from Jewish girls in considerable quantities, almost certainly, as one Jewess recalled, ‘for wounded German soldiers’. No medical help or additional food rations were given to those from whom normally excessive quantities were taken, ‘and many of them died soon after’.
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On June 3, as the Hungarian deportations continued, Rudolf Kastner, summoned by Eichmann, urged Eichmann to allow six or eight hundred Jews from the provinces to travel to Budapest, in order to avert their deportation. ‘Your nerves are too tense, Kastner,’ Eichmann replied. ‘I shall send you to Theresienstadt, or perhaps you prefer Auschwitz.’ Eichmann added: ‘You must understand me. I have to clean up the provincial towns of their Jewish garbage. I must take this Jewish muck out of the provinces. I cannot play the role of the saviour of the Jews.’
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Eichmann did eventually agree to a Jewish request that 1,686 Hungarian Jews be allowed to leave Hungary for Switzerland.
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But he refused absolutely to increase that number, or to halt the provincial deportations to Birkenau, even though he had sent a Hungarian Zionist, Joel Brand, to negotiate the ‘sale’ of a million Hungarian Jews to the Allies. At the very moment that Brand was explaining Eichmann’s proposals to British, American and Jewish leaders in Istanbul and Aleppo, the Jews who were meant to be the basis of the bargain were being gassed.
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On June 3, a further train arrived at Birkenau from France. Among those who had been deported on it was the nineteen-year-old Freda Silberberg, who later recalled with some bitterness how, in the village near Lyons where she had been living, ‘it was not the Germans who arrested us, it was the French police.’ Reaching Birkenau, Freda Silberberg watched as a Dutch woman handed her mother a baby for safety. At the selection, her mother was sent to the right with the baby. ‘I wanted to go with her’, Freda later recalled. Then Dr Mengele said, ‘She is going with the baby to a place where there are special creches to look after them.’
Freda Silberberg was sent with fifty other girls to the left. Reaching the barracks, they asked those whom they found inside what had happened to the people who were sent to the right, their mothers, brothers, sisters. In the barracks was a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl from Belgium, Mala Zimetbaum. It was she who tried to comfort the new arrivals. ‘They had to go into another camp,’ she told them. But after a while, as Freda Silberberg later recalled, ‘you realised something was wrong, you saw convoys arrive and then nobody came into the barracks at all.’
The impact of Mala Zimetbaum on the new arrivals was considerable. ‘She was the one who tried to make it easier for us when we arrived,’ Freda Silberberg later recalled. But even Mala Zimetbaum could not hide forever the truth that Freda’s mother, and the baby she had taken for safety, were dead.
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On 6 June 1944 the Allied forces landed in Normandy. The long-awaited second front was in being. In the east, the Red Army was poised to renew its offensive. That same day, on the Greek island of Corfu, the Germans rounded up 1,795 Jews. All were deported to Birkenau, where 1,500 were gassed on arrival.
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Also on June 6, 260 Jews living on the island of Crete, who had been seized on May 20, were taken, together with four hundred Greek hostages and three hundred Italian soldiers, Germany’s former allies, a hundred miles out to sea, beyond the island of Santorini, where the boat was scuttled. All were drowned.
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On the Greek island of Zante, not far from Corfu, the Mayor, Lukos Karrer and the leading churchman, Archbishop Crysostomos, not only alerted the Jews to the danger, but sent 195 of them to
remote villages in the hills. Unfortunately, 62 Jews, all of them elderly, who could not make the sudden journey into the rough terrain, were seized by the Gestapo in Zante and taken to the port. ‘If the deportation order is carried out,’ Crysostomos declared, ‘I will join the Jews and share their fate.’ But when the boat arrived from Corfu to collect them, it was already so packed with Jews that it did not stop.
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In the Lodz ghetto, news of the Normandy landings, heard on illegally owned radios, circulated throughout the ghetto. Hitherto, war news had been spread cautiously and slowly, in order to protect the owners of the radios. Such was the joy on this occasion, however, as Lucjan Dobroszycki, a survivor of the ghetto, has written, ‘that for a moment people seemed to forget themselves’, behaving as if Lodz would be liberated ‘in a very short while’.
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The German authorities realized that the news of the landing could only have reached the ghetto by illegal radios. Searches were mounted, and six Jews arrested.
One of the Jews who could not be found was Chaim Widawski, a young man who, the Chronicle noted on June 8, was well known in the ghetto and ‘widely popular’. It was feared, the Chronicle added, ‘that he will commit suicide rather than turn himself in to the German authorities’.
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On June 9, Chaim Widawski’s body was found in the street. He had taken poison.
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One young boy in the Lodz ghetto, reflecting on the D-Day landings, wrote in his diary: ‘It is true. The fact has been accomplished. But shall we survive? Is it possible to come out of such unimaginable depths, of such unfathomable abysses?’
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‘Could we be granted victory this year, 1944?’ asked Anne Frank, in hiding in Holland. ‘We don’t know yet, but hope is revived within me; it gives us fresh courage, and makes us strong again.’
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With every day of the Allied struggle on the Normandy beaches and across the fields of northern France, Jews were being gassed in Birkenau, or hunted down and shot throughout German-occupied Europe. On D-Day itself, Hanna Szenes, one of the Palestinian Jews parachuted behind German lines by the British to make contact with the Hungarian and Slovak resistance, was caught on the Hungarian border. ‘Even if they catch me,’ Hanna Szenes told Reuven Dafni, a fellow parachutist, on the eve of her mission, ‘that will become known to the people in the concentration camps. They will know that someone was coming to try to help them.’
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