Authors: Martin Gilbert
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By the end of October 1944 the Red Army had driven the Germans from eastern Poland and from most of Hungary. In the recently liberated areas, the surviving Jews emerged from their hiding places and returned to their homes. The thirteen-year-old Icchak Soneson had returned with his parents and his younger sister to the village of Ejszyszki. In 1941, Ejszyszki had been the home of two thousand Jews. Only thirty had survived the massacres of the war. ‘We kept together,’ Soneson later recalled, ‘we took a few flats in neighbouring houses. We did our best to rebuild our lives.’ But on October 20 disaster struck. Polish Home Army men, known as ‘White Poles’ attacked the Jewish houses. Soneson’s mother and baby brother were killed, as well as two Soviet soldiers.
‘The Jews wanted revenge,’ Soneson recalled. ‘They got hold of arms and attacked the Poles. But the Soviets arrested these Jews, among them my father, who wanted to avenge the death of his wife and child.’ Soneson’s father was imprisoned by the Soviets in Kazakhstan, for five years; the young boy left Ejszyszki for Vilna, where he had been born, and eventually reached Palestine, as did his father. His mother and her son were among several thousand Jews, survivors of the Nazi terror, who were murdered after ‘liberation’.
30
‘Do not imagine’, another survivor, Joseph Feigenbaum, wrote to a friend in the West from the recently liberated town of Biala Podlaska on October 30, ‘that the handful of Polish Jews who survived the massacres have been spared thanks to their cleverness or material resources. No! Death simply did not like them and left them in this vale of woe, so that they may go on struggling with dark and gloomy life while they are bereft, and broken in body and spirit.’
31
In Warsaw, still held by German forces, a bunker was discovered
on October 27, in which seven Jews, among them three Hungarians, were in hiding. The seven Jews, survivors of the Warsaw uprising, were armed, and opened fire. They were all killed.
32
Other Jews were only saved when non-Jews, at grave risk, gave them shelter. In November 1944 a Polish doctor, Stanislaw Switala, took into his hospital and sheltered seven of the former leaders of the Jewish Fighting Organization, among them Tuvia Borzykowski, Itzhak Zuckerman, and his girlfriend, Zivia Lubetkin.
33
At Birkenau, the gas-chambers had ceased their work on October 31, and were slowly being dismantled. Not only the documents, but also the buildings of destruction were to be destroyed. When a train with more than five hundred Jews reached Birkenau on November 3, from the Slovak labour camp at Sered, the Birkenau administration office telephoned to Mauthausen: ‘We have a transport here; could you handle it in your gas-chambers?’ The answer was, ‘That would be a waste of coal burnt in the locomotive. You should be able to handle the load yourself.’
34
But Birkenau no longer had the apparatus for mass murder, and on November 6 the men from Sered were given their tattoo numbers, followed on November 7 by the women and children. The men were then sent to the factory zone at Gleiwitz, the women and children to the barracks. A twelve-year-old girl who survived this Sered transport later recalled that there were about a hundred and fifty children in the transport.
35
On November 25, at Birkenau, the demolition of Crematorium II was begun. ‘It is interesting’, a member of the Sonderkommando wrote, ‘that first of all the ventilating motor and pipes were dismantled and sent to camps—some to Mauthausen, others to Gross Rosen.’ The writer added, in a note dated ‘Today, November 26, 1944’: ‘We are going to the zone, 170 remaining men. We are sure that we are being led to die. They selected thirty persons who will remain in Crematorium V.’
36
On November 26 the last 204 members of the Sonderkommando were murdered. ‘I am going away calmly,’ one of them, Chaim Herman, had written on November 6 to his wife and daughter in France, ‘knowing that you are alive and our enemy is broken.’
37
Throughout December, the remaining crematoria at Birkenau were dismantled, men breaking down the walls and women clearing away the rubble. At the same time, the cremating pits and the pits
filled with human ash were covered up and planted with grass. Those Jews still in the barracks were also sent to work on the banks of the Vistula. ‘We would stand for hours on end’, Louise S. from Cluj later recalled, ‘in wooden clogs in the water, at a time when it was already very cold. Most of the women died at this work, which was beyond their powers.’ Back in the barracks at Birkenau ‘we would fall on our beds weary to death, and could only be roused with sticks and clubs in the morning to continue this terrible rigorous work.’
38
In the dwindling areas under German control, the killings continued. During November 1944 several of the Palestinian Jews who had been parachuted behind German lines were executed, Hanna Szenes in Budapest on November 7, Enzo Sereni in Dachau on November 18, and Havivah Reik in Kremnica two days later, together with Raffi Reiss and Zvi Ben Ya’acov.
39
A sixth parachutist, Peretz Goldstein, perished in Sachsenhausen, one of the first concentration camps of the Nazi era, and now, north of Berlin, being filled again with Jews evacuated from the regions about to be overrun by the Red Army.
In Budapest, the Fascist Nyilas continued their random slaughter. On November 6 they entered and pillaged a building in which many Jews had found shelter, killing nineteen Jews.
40
On November 15, as the marches from Budapest to the frontier continued, yet more Jews were taken from their homes in Budapest. ‘My mother was put on the march,’ Aviva Fleischmann later recalled. ‘She could not walk. She had unhealthy feet. She dragged along for five days. She could not carry on. So they shot her dead.’
41
On November 15, as the deportations from Budapest continued, the Hungarian authorities agreed to the establishment of an ‘international ghetto’ in the city, consisting of the seventy-two buildings assigned to house Jews under Swiss protection.
42
A week later, on November 22, those engaged in trying to protect as many Jews as possible in Budapest met in the Swedish Legation. Raoul Wallenberg was their host. Also present was Miklos Krausz, a Jew who represented the Swiss Legation, and the representatives, also Jewish, of the Portuguese and Spanish Legations, Dr Koerner and Dr Farkas.
43
Arie Breslauer, who was also present, recalled that Koerner and Farkas were rescuing Jews who had been converted to Catholicism.
44
The meeting heard that nearly eight thousand Jews had already crossed into Germany, with two thousand more about to cross; that thirteen thousand Jews were marching, and would reach the frontier in the next three days, and that ten thousand Jews had ‘disappeared’ on the march.
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It was agreed to try to help those whose ‘immunity letters’ had been taken away from them at the brick factory, on the eve of the march. Breslauer was given the official stamp of the Swiss Consulate, a typewriter, and blank protective letters, and on November 23, with an assistant, Ladislaus Kluger, and a driver, drove through the night to the former Austrian border. For four days, Breslauer and Kluger gave out as many protective documents as they could, about three hundred in all. On their return to Budapest on November 28 they prepared a report of what they had seen: hundreds of Jews, locked in a barn, with no medical care and no food. ‘Those who had money could get a cup of water.’ Many were dying. ‘I saw people who could still scream.’ In the barn, twenty Jews died ‘that night alone’.
Hungarian gendarmes had driven Breslauer from the barn. On the return journey to Budapest he saw a group of several hundred people: ‘Most of them were old, or pregnant women who were just not fit for work.’ He tried to get permission for them to return with him to Budapest, but this was refused. Nor was he allowed to speak to them. In Budapest, he enquired about them, hoping still to be able to help them. ‘I later learned from an authoritative source that these people were taken to the Danube, were shot and killed, and thrown into the Danube river.’
46
In Budapest, where 120,000 Jews still lived, the Nyilas gangs ruled the streets. On December 28 they entered the Jewish hospital and took away twenty-eight patients. Two days later, all twenty-eight were murdered.
47
On the afternoon of December 31, a gang of forty to fifty Nyilas broke into the largest of the houses under Swiss protection, the ‘Glass House’ department store, blasting open the locked doors with grenades and opening fire with machine guns. Three Jews were killed, including the wife of Rabbi Lajos Scheiber. But when the Nyilas tried to attack the eight hundred Jews in hiding in the building, a Hungarian military unit intervened, and the Jews were saved. Only the building’s patron, Otto Komoly, lured away for ‘negotiations’, was never seen again.
48
At Monowitz, where twelve thousand Jews from Birkenau had been employed as slave labourers in the synthetic oil and rubber factory, two thousand had survived. ‘That was a lot of survivors,’ Shalom Lindenbaum later recalled. In this respect, Lindenbaum added, ‘it was a “good” camp,’ but he noted that during the several Allied bombing raids on the factory, ‘we were apathetic because we did not believe that we would survive.’
On December 11, the festival of Chanukkah, when Jews celebrate the miracle of the lights at the time of the Maccabees, the surviving Jews in Monowitz found some candles and lit them in memory of that distant day of salvation. ‘One of us’, Lindenbaum recalled, ‘said that in Palestine it is certain that they are celebrating; they are celebrating because the Germans are beaten.’ Lindenbaum added: ‘as for ourselves, we said a prayer for the dead. We wept. Our death was sure.’
49
In the labour camps and factory zones of Upper Silesia, Jews had always dreaded the day when they would be judged too weak to work, and sent back to Birkenau, not to the barracks from which they had come, but to the gas-chambers. On December 25, at Gleiwitz, more than sixty men were picked out at a roll call as unfit for further work. ‘Our numbers were recorded and we knew what to expect,’ Alfred Oppenheimer later recalled. ‘Had we not known, the commander of the hut told us that—informed us tactfully, and with feeling—that a few days later we would be taken to the chimney.’ But ‘the chimney’, all the chimneys, had ceased working; they had, in fact, already been dismantled. ‘We, as mussulmen, were already marked and chosen to be taken to our death. But there were no more freight trucks to collect the men. No one was taken to Auschwitz.’
50
Among the camps to which Jews had been taken from Birkenau in September and October was Lieberose. There, under German and Ukrainian guards, they worked to build a holiday city for German officers, at nearby Ullersdorf. In December, as the Red Army drew ever nearer, Lieberose was closed down, and more than three and a half thousand Jews were marched out. They were being sent to Sachsenhausen.
Several hundred Jews were in the camp infirmary at Lieberose. On the eve of the march, they were shot, and the hut set on fire. The march then began. Each night, as darkness fell, the Jews were
ordered into a field and told to lie down. At first light they would be marched off again. Some were too weak to rise. As the morning march continued, the marchers would hear the sound of firing.
Less than a thousand of the marchers survived their ordeal. One of the survivors, Hugo Gryn, who had been sent to Birkenau from Beregszasz during the Hungarian deportations, later recalled how, during a moment of rest, sitting on the slushy roadside with his father, Geza Gryn, a lorry passed them by:
…by coincidence it had my father’s name still painted on its side and back. He had been a timber merchant and somehow a part of his confiscated transport fleet and we were on the same road.
It was a pathetic moment and to break the silence I said, ‘Just you wait—one day you’ll have it back again!’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think this was yours anyway!’ And then he explained that whenever he acquired a forest or lorries or suchlike, he rotated the acquisitions: something for my brother, something for me, something for my mother and something for himself. It seemed that everything I thought he owned was already a quarter mine.
Though it was academic, I was both touched and impressed. Finally, I asked him, ‘Why did you do it that way?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I made up my mind long ago that anything I have to give I want to give with a warm hand—and not wait until I have to give with a cold one.’
From Sachsenhausen, Hugo Gryn and his father were among thousands of Jews moved south to Mauthausen. And there, a victim of hunger and of typhoid, his father died. He was forty-five years old.
51
In another labour camp that winter, at Neumark, were several thousand women, likewise brought from Birkenau. Hundreds of them, too weak to work, were put into a special tent, and told that they were to be deported to Stutthof. No such deportation was in prospect. All were later shot at Neumark. While being kept in the ‘Stutthofers’ tent’, as it was called, their suffering became unendurable. Reska Weiss, who saw them, later recalled:
No one was allowed into the Stutthofers’ tent. If anyone was caught visiting a mother or a sister, she was never allowed to leave the tent again. The Stutthofers were seldom given food,
and on the rare occasions when it was supplied, it was placed on the ground in the dark in front of the tent. Then the strongest of them fetched it and distributed it.
Entering the tent from the blinding snow-whiteness, I could hardly distinguish anything in the semi-darkness, least of all the women lying on the ground. The stench was overpowering despite the airy tent. After a while my eyes became accustomed to the light, and I was completely overcome by what I saw.
I screamed in horror and shut my eyes to the sight. My knees trembled, my head began to swim, and I grasped the central tent-prop for support. It was hard to believe the women on the ground were still human beings. Their rigid bodies were skeletons, their eyes were glazed from long starvation….
For two months the Stutthofers had lain on the ground, stark naked. The meagre bundles of straw on which they lay were putrid from their urine and excreta. Their frozen limbs were fetid and covered with wounds and bites to the points of bleeding, and countless lice nested in the pus. Their hair was very short indeed, but the armies of lice found a home in it. No stretch of the imagination, no power of the written word, can convey the horror of that tent. And yet… they were alive… they were hungry and they tore at their skeletal bodies with emaciated hands covered in pus and dirt. They were beyond help. The SS guards denied them the mercy of shooting them all at once. Only three or four were called out daily to be shot.
For days I couldn’t swallow even a crumb of bread. The horror I lived through watching this agony will remain with me to the end of my days. Later I saw thousands of my fellow prisoners die from rifle shots, but even that could not compare with the terrible and unspeakable ordeal of the Stutthofers.
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