Authors: Martin Gilbert
Dr Oppenheimer remained in the pit of excrement for several hours. Finally:
We heard voices, people speaking and saying that the SS men had gone, that the gates were open. There were other prisoners-of-war, Jewish prisoners, also saved by some kind of miracle, because not all the huts were on fire. And then we cried out for help. A number of those Jewish prisoners came to help us, and pulled us out of this pit of excrement. We cleaned ourselves with snow. There was no water. We did what we could. Finally we were liberated by the Soviet army.
20
As the death marches continued from the Auschwitz region, tens of thousands of Jews were shot, their bodies thrown into the nearest roadside ditches. At Miedzna, a memorial tablet records the killing of 42 prisoners by the SS, at Jejkowice 33, at Lyski 27, and at Rybnik 358. At Leszczyny a memorial records the murder of 250 prisoners who had been taken from the march to an evacuation train. They had been shot down as they jumped from the train and tried to flee to the neighbouring forests.
21
Among the tens of thousands of Jews on the death marches was a Polish-born Jew, Moses Finkelstein. Under the name of Michael Fink, he had fought with the French resistance in the Vosges. Captured during an armed clash with the Germans, he had been deported to Birkenau. Now, within sound of the guns of the Red Army, he was killed.
22
At Birkenau itself, with the arrival of the Red Army expected hourly, the SS set fire to twenty-nine stores, including all the clothing inside them. Even so, when Soviet troops entered Birkenau on January 27, they found, in the six remaining storehouses, 836,255 women’s dresses, 348,000 sets of men’s suits, and 38,000 pairs of men’s shoes.
23
In many of the camps which it liberated, the Red Army also found a few inmates still alive: the largest number being the eight hundred sick prisoners left behind at Monowicz. The four and a half
thousand inmates who had been marched away from Monowicz were less fortunate: during an air raid alert they had scattered for protection in the forest, and then tried to remain there in hiding. But SS men surrounded them and opened fire, killing all but a hundred. The survivors were then marched on again, westward.
24
Among those evacuated from Birkenau on the eve of ‘liberation’ were a group of boys aged fourteen and fifteen, who had been part of a special ‘Cart Commando’: twenty children harnessed to a cart that would normally be pulled by horses. Sometimes these boys had been used to pull wood needed for the crematorium ovens. Sometimes they had been made to spread human ash—the ashes of Jews burned in Crematorium III—on to the paths inside the camp. Yehuda Bakon, who was not quite fifteen years old, later recalled that this had been done ‘so that people could walk on the road and not slip’.
On January 18 these boys were evacuated to Mauthausen. Yehuda Bakon later recalled how, on the march, ‘The children said, “It is good that our parents were killed in the gas-chambers. They did not have to undergo all this torture and suffering.” Because we saw they shot everyone who fell.’
25
At the Furstengrube coal mine, the sick inmates too weak to leave the hospital hut were not left for the Red Army to liberate. Instead, all two hundred and fifty of them were killed with hand grenades and automatic-rifle fire, and the hut then set on fire.
26
A few hundred Jews were able to escape from the marches, and hide in barns or ditches until the arrival of Soviet forces. Some found shelter with Polish families. On January 20 Louise S. from Cluj and several of her friends, marching from Birkenau, managed to escape in the thick mist, and although shot at, avoided capture. In the village of Brzezie a Polish farmer gave them hot coffee and bread, and let them sleep ‘on warm straw’ in his pig-sty. Whenever German soldiers entered the village, the farmer said the girls were Polish refugees. After three weeks, the Germans were gone.
27
None of those who survived the ‘death marches’ of January 1945 can forget the horror. ‘On the death march from Auschwitz,’ one survivor later recalled, ‘German women heard we were prisoners, and threw boiled potatoes. Those who picked up the potatoes died with a bullet—and a hot potato in their mouths.’
28
Dr Aharon Beilin later recalled how, on the march from Birkenau
to Kamienna Gora, ‘We started counting the shots. It was a long column—five thousand people. We know every shot meant a human life. Sometimes the count reached five “hundred”, in a single day. And the longer we marched, the more the number of shots increased. There was no strength, no food.’ One night, the four thousand survivors were locked in a long concrete bunker, an air raid shelter. ‘We felt that we had no air, that there was no air in this bunker, and those groups that were far from the door felt it much more than we did, and the screams, the tragic scenes, began, “Air, air!”…’
In the morning, a thousand corpses were found in the bunker. ‘It was death by suffocation, Beilin recalled, ‘horrible positions, naked, on their knees and with their mouths to the concrete floor. That’s where the last pockets of air were. From the pores of the concrete, they got the last bit of air.’
29
Not only for the fifty thousand from the Auschwitz region, but for a further six thousand or more from the labour camps around Czestochowa, and other labour camp regions in central Poland, the westward marches had begun. Some were lucky to be liberated at the last moment, before they could be evacuated, or shot. Others managed to run away at the last moment, and to hide. But for most, the marches were a time of agony for those who had already survived ‘selections’, camps and beatings. Raizl Kibel, on the march westward of girls from the Union factory, later recalled:
In a frost, half-barefoot, or entirely barefoot, with light rags upon their emaciated and exhausted bodies, tens of thousands of human creatures drag themselves along in the snow. Only the great, strong striving for life, and the light of imminent liberation, keep them on their feet.
But woe is to them whose physical strength abandons them. They are shot on the spot. In such a way were thousands who had endured camp life up to the last minute murdered, a moment before liberation.
Even today I still cannot understand with what sort of strength and how I was able to endure the ‘death march’ and drag myself to Ravensbruck camp, and from there, after resting a week or two, to Neustadt, where I was liberated by the Red Army.
30
Even on the death marches, the moment of liberation could come suddenly and unexpectedly. On January 22, Leilah Svirsky was with one group led into the forest to spend the night in an abandoned barracks. ‘We did not sleep that night. The following morning we noticed that our guards were gone. A strange sensation: no one is watching us any more….’ And then the Russians arrived. ‘The first Russian soldier we saw was a captain, a Jew named Weisbrot. He belonged to the first military Intelligence group of the army and rode a white horse. Our Messiah, we called him, and kissed the horse’s feet.’
It was 23 January 1945. Leilah Svirsky was free. ‘I am no longer one of a driven herd. I can decide my fate alone.’
31
Further west, the death marches continued. On one, which began on January 24 from the River Oder, thirty-three men and seventy women were ill, walking, but desperately in need of keeping warm. The SS escort then took their blankets away, so that more than thirty of them died of cold. On this same march, however, another SS man, Meyer, acted with unexpected compassion, buying food with his own money for the women, while other guards also shared out their rations with the marchers.
32
Among the Jews who managed to escape from a death march was Jakub Lichterman, the last cantor at the Noszik Synagogue in Warsaw, who had been deported to Majdanek in 1943, and to Birkenau in 1944. In Lichterman’s group of marchers, about twenty Jews had managed to slip away. ‘It was snowing. We ate snow. Many people died. I saw a little light in a hut. I decided to knock. The others said, “It is dangerous, it might be a German’s hut”. But I thought, “Must I die here? Maybe they will give me something.”’
Lichterman knocked on the door of the hut. ‘It was an Ethnic German. He gave me hot coffee in a bottle, and bread.’ Then, as Lichterman left the hut, two other escapees came up to him, desperate for a drink. ‘The bottle fell out of my hand. The coffee dropped in the snow. I went back. He had no more food. He gave me a box of matches and said, “There are lots of Germans around. If they catch you, they will kill you on the spot.”’
The Jews wandered off, each to a different part of the wood. Lichterman knocked on another door, another small hut. ‘Can you take me in?’ ‘How many are you?’ ‘Just one.’
Lichterman was taken in, hidden in a shack, and fed three times a
day. Eight days later, with the arrival of Soviet troops, Lichterman was saved: saved because, during a week of risk and danger, he had been given sanctuary by a non-Jew.
33
Other non-Jews risked their lives to save Jews. On January 29 the German Catholic, Oscar Schindler, who had earlier rescued several hundred Jews from Plaszow camp, was told of a locked goods wagon at the station nearest to his armament factory at Brünnlitz. The wagon was marked ‘Property of the SS’, and had been travelling on the railways for ten days, covered in ice. Inside were more than a hundred Jews, starving and freezing: Jews from Birkenau who had been at the labour camp at Golleschau, Jews who had once lived in Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Holland and Hungary.
Schindler had no authority to take the wagon. But he asked a railway official to show him the bill of lading, and when the official was momentarily distracted, wrote on it: ‘Final destination, Brünnlitz.’ Schindler then pointed out to the official that the wagon was intended for his factory.
34
Schindler ordered the railway authorities to transfer the wagon to his factory siding. There he broke open the locks. Sixteen of the Jews had frozen to death. The survivors, not one of whom weighed more than thirty-five kilogrammes, he fed and guarded.
35
Schindler was helped by his wife Emilia, who provided beds on which they could be nursed back to life. ‘She took care of these Golleschau Jews,’ Moshe Bejski later recalled. ‘She prepared food for them every day.’
In all, between 1943 and 1945, Schindler had saved more than fifteen hundred Jews by employing them in his factory, and treating them humanely. He died, in Germany, in October 1974. At his funeral in the Latin cemetery in Jerusalem, on the slopes of Mount Zion, more than four hundred of the Jews whom he had saved paid him their last respects.
36
***
‘The liberator is on the move, the knife is at the throat.’
37
With these words, written on January 17, Dov Levin, a young Jew then in liberated Vilna, decided to leave for Palestine, and, after nine months, reached his goal.
38
On January 27, ten days after Levin set off from Kovno, units of the Red Army entered Birkenau. Among those still alive in the camp
hospital was Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank. Otto Frank made his way across the Ukraine to Odessa, then by boat to Marseilles, and then to Amsterdam, where he found his daughter’s diary.
39
***
Survival was the dream of all who awaited the imminent arrival of the Allied armies. But the very act of hoping could lead to despair, with different dates being fixed in the mind for the moment of victory, the day of rescue. A Hungarian Jew, Moshe Sandberg, later recalled the mood in Muhldorf camp, near Dachau, where 1 January 1945 had originally been the date fixed in the inmates’ minds for the end of the war:
The first day passed, the second and the third and the fourth, on and on endlessly. We wondered how many had gone by and how many still remained until January 1, 1945, the date we decided would be the final one, by which time the war would surely end with the victory of the Allied powers, and whoever was lucky enough to see it would be able to leave this Hell. It was difficult to keep count of the days, the date we wanted approaching so infinitely slowly. Work hours seemed to get longer and the hours of sleep shorter.
At last came the awaited day, but it did not bring deliverance. The disappointment was bitter. What would become of us? We could not endure much longer. Some of our comrades were already dead and most of the others looked shadows of themselves and it was a wonder that their legs could still carry them. The few who still kept up their spirits had set January 15 as the latest date for the war to end, then they extended it for a fortnight, and then later and so on, but the last date I no longer remember.
With each new estimate the number of those who believed in it fell, while that of those who were apathetic about any guess rose. They stopped believing and hoping. Only two things remained in their thoughts: hunger and the beatings. How to get a little more food and how to get a little less beating. In a month of two we had turned into real camp denizens, indistinguishable from the veterans. The same way of thought, the same miserable appearance.
Now we could understand why they had laughed at us when
we expressed our hopes and speculated about the ‘last date’. The remark ‘The war will never end’ became clear to us. Death was the time of our deliverance.
40
In East Prussia, where Soviet forces were driving toward the sea, the many labour camps in the Danzig and Königsberg regions were evacuated, many by sea. More than six thousand women and one thousand men, all of them Jews, were driven from these camps towards Palmnicken, a small fishing village beyond Königsberg, on the shore of the Baltic Sea. During the march to the sea, more than seven hundred were shot. Most of the marchers were women. ‘Every time somebody bent down to scoop up a little snow to drink water,’ Celina Manielewicz later recalled, ‘the guard simply shot him dead.’