Authors: Martin Gilbert
Among those who had survived the journey from Rhodes was the Czech-born Sidney Fahn. Later he was to recall how, on the platform at Birkenau, he saw the last of his wife Regina and their tiny son Shani. ‘It happened so quickly,’ John Bierman has written, ‘that Sidney scarcely realized what had occurred. One moment they were side by side; the next they were forking off in different directions, he and Rudolf to the right, Regina and the baby to the left. He called out to her, and she turned eyes wide with uncomprehending fear on him before being swallowed up in the crowd of prisoners, kapos and SS guards.’
Like many of the prisoners in the barracks at Birkenau, it was to be several days before Sidney Fahn could really comprehend that he would never see his wife and child again; that they had already, in the jargon of the barracks, ‘gone up the chimney’. Many years later
Sidney Fahn recalled how, on his second day at Birkenau, ‘I happened to see a girl named Olga whom I had known in Bratislava and I gave her my wife and child’s photographs and documents and asked her to look out for them. But she just shook her head and said, “They won’t need these any more.” She had been there two years and knew all there was to know about Auschwitz, but still I didn’t realize what she meant. Then I was put into a barrack hut just one hundred metres from the crematorium in Block 4 and I could see the smoke rising all day and all night, and still I couldn’t believe it. Finally, after two more days, I believed it.’
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Of the 1,673 Jews from Rhodes who reached Birkenau on August 16, only 151 survived the war. Of the 94 from Kos, 12 were to survive.
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The Red Army was now reaching town after town in which tens of thousands of Jews had lived before the war. But with the exception of a few dozen Jews who had managed in each town to survive in hiding, mostly in Christian homes, the Jews were dead, and with them the Jewish life of many centuries. In liberated Lvov, one of the survivors wrote on August 24, with her husband Mulik, to a friend in Palestine:
We were rescued thanks to our neighbour, a nun of noble birth, who at the last moment prevented us from going to the ghetto and persuaded us to hide. She had had a presentiment of the imminent disaster, but we did not believe her.
It is impossible to describe that period of our life while we remained in concealment under the permanent threat of search. We were living in the vicinity of Zloczow while all the other members of the family were in Lvov (with the exception of Jozio who was in Brzuchowice). We have lost all hope of seeing Jozio again. Max is no longer among the living and the same is true of Nathan, his wife and his sister-in-law. The same happened to Polek.
The heart has turned into stone, the pain takes our very breath away; we cannot even weep any longer.
We dreamt of dying a natural death. By day and by night we kept with us a dose of poison, and great was our grief when that poison was poured out. We were afraid that we might fall into
the hands of the Gestapo, where we would be unable to put an end to slow death under cruel torture.
What can you know, who are living over there, of the horrors of such a protracted, excruciating death!
We lived a life of that kind for over two long years, and the mark of Cain is engraved on our foreheads. You would not recognize us, so greatly have our faces changed. Mulik is beginning to regain his balance gradually, since he has succeeded in getting work. Instead of living the life of a criminal he is once more starting to live the life of a man who enjoys equal rights.
There is no greater sensation in town than the appearance of a Jew in the streets. Only three per cent of the Jewish population have survived.
The terrible events as well as the two long years of starvation have exhausted our strength. We have no clothing and no footwear. We had to sell part of our property in order to buy food. All the rest was pillaged by the murderers during the pogrom, when we fled from our home.
Yet I do hope that we shall succeed in rebuilding our lives in view of Mulik’s diligence and talents, if we are treated in accordance with our natural gifts and not thrashed all the time with whips because we are Jews.
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Where they could, Jews fought in the battles for liberation. On August 25, large numbers of Jewish members of the French resistance, mostly Polish-born Jews, took part in the battle for the liberation of Lyons. Other Jewish units, led by Robert Gamzon, successfully blew up a German military train at Mazamet, and participated in the liberation of Castres.
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In Slovakia, a special unit of Jews from the labour camp at Novaki fought in one of the main battles of the uprising, from August 31 to September 3, and later in the battle for Banska Bystrica.
More than fifteen hundred Jews joined the sixteen thousand Slovak soldiers and partisans who took part in the revolt. Of the 2,100 partisans who were killed in action, 269 were Jews.
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One partisan battalion commander, Edita Katz, a Jewess, covered the retreat of her men with a machine gun, until her ammunition ran
out. She then used hand grenades to hold off the Germans and the Hlinka Guard, until hit and killed.
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Within four weeks of the outbreak of the Slovak revolt, the Jewish units, and the Slovak fighters, were joined by Jewish parachutists sent from Palestine, among them a woman parachutist, Havivah Reik, who was captured during the battle at Kremnica at the end of October, and imprisoned.
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Among the Jews who were in Slovakia during the uprising, and survived, were two of the escapees from Birkenau, Rudolf Vrba and Czeslaw Mordowicz. During the uprising Mordowicz was captured and, together with several thousand surviving Slovak Jews, deported to Birkenau. The Auschwitz number tattooed on his forearm, if discovered by the camp authorities, would have meant the torture and execution always meted out to an escapee. But on reaching the tattoo barrack, Mordowicz had a magnificent multiscaled fish tattooed over and around the original number, and then a new number tattooed elsewhere.
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The Germans reacted savagely to the Slovak uprising. Tibor Cifea, a Jewish partisan, was shot, and left hanging for three days as a warning.
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Pavel Ekstein was executed less than two months before his eighteenth birthday. In all, 722 Jews were ‘specially handled’ on the spot, mostly shot, or hanged. A Swiss Red Cross official, Georges Dunand, who was in Bratislava, tried as best he could to ameliorate the Jewish suffering. But Eichmann sent an emissary to Bratislava to ensure that the deportations were carried out, and a total of 8,975 Slovak Jews were deported to Birkenau.
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Trekking southward from Slovakia, one of the parachutists from Palestine, the twenty-four-year-old Abba Berdichev, hoped to bring some succour to the Jews of Rumania, his birthplace. ‘I hope’, he had written before leaving Palestine, ‘that this time luck will be with me, because the desire and determination to fulfil my duty as a Jew is still strong.’ Berdichev was captured while still in Slovakia, charged with spying and sabotage, and shot.
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At Birkenau, two separate policies were in effect. Simultaneously with the arrival of Jews from the Lodz ghetto, Rhodes, Kos, and from Slovakia, most of whom were gassed, other trains continued to take Jews from the barracks at Birkenau to the factories and labour camps of Germany. On August 29, while seventy-two sick Jewish adults and youths and several pregnant women from a
labour camp at Leipzig, were brought to Birkenau and gassed, 807 Jews were sent from Birkenau to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, for work in a dozen nearby factories. On August 30, a further five hundred Hungarian Jews were sent by train from Birkenau to Buchenwald, to be sent on to a Junkers aircraft factory at Markkleeberg.
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Others Jews were kept in Buchenwald, from where, as one young Jew from the Lodz ghetto, Michael Etkind, later recalled, ‘no one escaped. No one was missing—except the dead.’
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Even as more and more Jews were being taken out of Birkenau to the factories and camps of western Germany, all four gas-chambers of Birkenau continued to be operated without respite. On August 30 there was a total of 874 prisoners employed in the Sonderkommando, burning the bodies in the crematoria. A day shift and a night shift ensured that the fires were always blazing. A further four hundred prisoners were employed burning bodies in trenches.
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However close Germany might be to defeat, the evil ‘selections’ went on. Among the new arrivals at Birkenau in early September were 1,019 Jews sent from Holland who reached Birkenau on September 5, of whom 549 were gassed.
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Dr Gisella Perl, who watched these Dutch deportees arrive, later recalled ‘a group of well-dressed, white-bearded gentlemen go by, fully dressed, with hats and gloves and well-cut overcoats. They carried fine plaid blankets and small overnight cases in their hands, like diplomats going to some important conference.’ These were ‘rich people’, Gisella Perl was later told, ‘who had been able to hide until now, thanks to their money and connections’. Most were gassed. ‘Only a very few came out of the selection alive,’ she recalled, ‘dressed in rags like the rest of us.’ Her account continued:
A few days later I spoke to one of these newcomers. He worked on the refuse heap near the crematorium. In that short time, the elegant, well-groomed man, who had looked like a diplomat, had become a dirty, lice-infected, human wreck, his spirits broken. He was a Dutchman and he spoke German.
I saw him go over to one of the camp foremen and whisper to him under his breath, anxiously, hurriedly. The foreman looked at him expectantly, and the new prisoner reached under his rags and brought out a small leather pouch, the kind which
usually holds tobacco. He opened it with trembling hands and shook the contents into his palm.
Like a million little suns the diamonds shone and sparkled in his dirty, broken-nailed hands. Grinning broadly, the foreman nodded and held out three miserable uncooked potatoes, and the elderly man, shaking with impatience, tore them out of his hand and put them to his mouth, chewing, swallowing, as if every bite gave him a new lease of life. The little pouch full of diamonds already rested in the pocket of the foreman and he kept his hand on it, caressing the stones almost tenderly.
Here, in this Stock Exchange of Hell, the value of a bag of diamonds was three uncooked potatoes. And this value was the real one. Three potatoes had positive value, they prolonged life, gave strength to work and to withstand beatings, and strength meant life, even if for a short time only. The bag of diamonds itself was good for nothing. For a while, a short while, it might delight the eyes of a ruthless murderer, but when the day of reckoning came—it would not save his life.
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It was not only new arrivals who had to go through the selection procedure. Those who, like Lena Berg, had been in the barracks for many months, were also subjected to repeated selections. ‘One after the other the women would be ordered to strip,’ she later recalled. ‘Sores to the right; abscesses to the right; rashes to the right; flabby breasts to the right. Eye-glasses to the right.’ A chain formed by camp officials holding hands ‘separated the rejected from the more fortunate inmates’. Lena Berg’s account continued:
Half an hour later those selected to die would be marched slowly to Barrack 25. An hour before, they had all been fighting for a piece of bread, for an assignment to a Kommando, for a thousand and one other trivial things living people are concerned with. Now it was all over. The kapo would be very impatient: why did such carrion move so slowly? And she would urge them on with kicks and abuse.
Barrack 25 got no food. Prisoners sat there locked up for hours, sometimes for days, without food, without a swallow of water, without toilet facilities, dying before their deaths. For Auschwitz was governed by a strict rule: Berlin always had to confirm the gassing of those selected and, occasionally, confirmation
was delayed. Berlin had plenty of other things to attend to.
From that death barrack came screaming and lamentation, ‘Water, for God’s sake, a little water.’ But no one responded. No one walked over to that barrack, no one ever gave the dying water. Helplessly, hands stretched out between the bars, imploring, but in vain. Barrack 25 was taboo.
When it was dark the trucks came for them, headlights flashing, engines roaring up, then silenced. When the engines started again, there was the screaming, the last horrible cries of the women taken to the gas-chamber.
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On September 6, at Birkenau, Salmen Gradowski, a member of the Sonderkommando, who had been in Auschwitz since February 1943, collected together the notes which he had managed to write over the previous nineteen months, describing his deportation and first day at the camp, and buried them. He chose one of the pits of human ashes in which to bury them, explaining in a covering letter: ‘I have buried this under the ashes, deeming it the safest place, where people will certainly dig to find the traces of millions of men who were exterminated.’ Gradowski dedicated his notes to the members of his family ‘burnt alive at Birkenau’, his wife Sonia, his mother Sara, his sisters Estera-Rachel and Liba, his father-in-law Rafael and his brother-in-law Wolf. In his covering letter he wrote:
Dear finder, search everywhere, in every inch of soil. Tens of documents are buried under it, mine and those of other persons, which will throw light on everything that was happening here. Great quantities of teeth are also buried here. It was we, the Kommando workers, who expressly have strewn them all over the terrain, as many as we could, so that the world should find material traces of the millions of murdered people. We ourselves have lost hope of being able to live to see the moment of liberation.
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