Authors: Martin Gilbert
Among the first Soviet soldiers to enter Berlin on May 2 was Semyon Rozenfeld, one of the survivors of the Sobibor revolt. After nearly seven months in hiding he had been liberated by Soviet troops in July 1944, and despite a still-infected wound in his right leg, demanded to be sent to the front. Again wounded, and briefly in hospital in Lodz, he had returned to his unit for the final battles and final triumph, to witness the capture of the Reichstag. At the age of twenty-three his hair had already turned silver white, his brow deeply furrowed. On the Reichstag wall he carved the words: ‘Baranowicze—Sobibor—Berlin’.
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It was a paean to Jewish suffering, struggle, and survival.
On May 2, in Lübeck harbour, several hundred Jews who had been evacuated from Stutthof were taken out in small boats to be put on board two large ships in the harbour, the
Cap Arcona
and the
Thielbek
. The captains of these ships refused to take them, however; they already had 7,500 Jews on board. The small boats were ordered back to the shore. But, as they neared land in the early hours of May 3, and the starving Jews tried to clamber ashore, SS men, Hitler Youth and German Marines opened fire on them with machine guns. More than five hundred were killed. Only 351 survived.
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That same day, May 3, the
Cap Arcona
was attacked by British aircraft in Lübeck Bay. Only a few of the prisoners managed to save their lives by jumping overboard.
63
At another camp near Lübeck, Neustadt-Glowen, Jewish women, who had been brought from the Breslau area and from Ravensbruck, were made to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches: a futile gesture of continuing German defiance as the Allied armies prepared for their last assault. ‘Everything was now a matter of physical endurance,’ Lena Berg recalled: ‘the food was wretched; we slept on the floor; and we were tormented by lice. Only by gritting our teeth could we go on.’ An ‘unusually warm spring’, she recalled, ‘helped us to hold out’. It helped those women who, like her, had survived so many separate torments, the Warsaw ghetto, Majdanek, Birkenau, Stutthof and the death marches.
Then, on May 2, the SS guards ‘failed to appear at roll-call’. The Jewish women at Neustadt-Glowen were free. ‘We walked out along the highway,’ Lena Berg recalled. ‘From the right a tank
draped with an American flag was coming our way and behind it tall, slender boys in American uniform. They were terribly embarrassed when unappetizing creatures who bore only a remote resemblance to women suddenly threw themselves at them, kissing and hugging them.’ Back in the camp, Lena Berg found wild enthusiasm. ‘But I, who had unflinchingly believed that the moment would come, now for the first time felt bewildered and lost.’
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One of the last concentration camps under German control was Mauthausen, together with its satellite camps at Gusen, St Valentin, Gunskirchen and Ebensee. In just over four months, more than thirty thousand people had been murdered at Mauthausen, or had died from starvation and disease. Jews and Gypsies formed the largest groups of those killed, but other groups had also been singled out by the Nazis: homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and tens of thousands of Spanish republicans. These Spaniards had been interned in France in September 1939, deported by the Germans to Mauthausen in 1940, and systematically worked to death in the stone quarry there, or shot at random. By January 1945 only three thousand of the Spaniards had remained alive. Of these, 2,163 had been killed in the next three months.
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Among those held prisoner in Mauthausen was the British naval officer, Lieutenant-Commander Pat O’Leary, GC, DSO. O’Leary’s biographer, Vincent Brome, has recorded how O’Leary witnessed what happened when a prisoner who had managed to escape was recaptured. An SS guard, O’Leary recalled, ‘launched a tremendous blow to the man’s jaw. The prisoner’s hand went up to ward off a second blow and the guard kicked him savagely in the stomach. As the man doubled up, another sledgehammer blow hit his jaw. He fell down. “Up! Up!” The SS man kicked him to attention again. Then alternately he slogged his jaw and kicked his stomach, eight, nine, ten, eleven times, until one tremendous kick in the pit of the stomach brought blood gushing from the man’s mouth; he screamed and fell down. The guard continued kicking him in the face, head, groin and legs. The twitching form at last lay quite inert and the pavement was quickly thick with blood.’
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Hundreds of prisoners had been murdered each month in Mauthausen by similar savagery. By April 1945, there was no means of washing in the camp. ‘At the time we were swarming with lice and
filth,’ the fifteen-year-old Yehuda Bakon later recalled. ‘I remember that we would sometimes pull out some two hundred lice on each one of us. When I would sit down and try to rise I would go dizzy and see nothing for a couple of minutes. That is how weak we were.’ During an Allied air raid, a bomb hit the prisoners’ camp, ‘and I saw, on the following morning,’ Bakon recalled, ‘people eating human flesh.’ Some of the camp inmates were eating the flesh of those killed in the air raid.
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On May 1, as the American army approached Mauthausen, the last death marches of the war began, from Mauthausen itself, and from the nearby camps of Gusen and St Valentin, to Gunskirchen and Ebensee. Hundreds of marchers fell to the ground as they marched, dying in the mud from sheer exhaustion.
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Among those who reached Gunskirchen alive was the Hungarian writer and journalist, Geza Havas. But on May 5, only a few hours before the Americans arrived, he died.
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At Ebensee, as the American armies approached, all thirty thousand prisoners were ordered into a tunnel packed with explosives. As the historian of Mauthausen, Evelyn le Chěne, has written: ‘The prisoners, to a man, blankly refused. The SS guards were paralysed with indecision. The hordes of humans swayed and murmured. For the first time since their arrest, the prisoners who were not already dying saw the possibility that they might just survive the war. Understandably, they neither wished to be blown up in the tunnel, nor mown down by SS machine guns for refusing. But they knew that in these last days, many of the SS had left and been replaced by Ethnic Germans.’ A quick consultation with some of the officers under his command made it clear to the commandant ‘that they too were reluctant either to force the men into the tunnel, or to shoot them down. With the war all but over, they were thinking of the future, and the punishment they would receive for the slaughter of so many human beings was something they still wished—even with their already stained hands—to avoid. And so the prisoners won the day.’
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Among those who had survived the last days at Ebensee was Meir Pesker, a Polish Jew from Bielsk Podlaski who had been deported to Majdanek, then to Plaszow, then to Mauthausen. ‘We saw that the Americans were coming,’ he wrote, ‘and so did the Germans.’ His account continued:
Suddenly a German Kapo appeared, a bloated primeval beast whose cruelty included the bare-handed murder of dozens of Jews. Suddenly he had become weak and emotional and he began to plead with us not to turn him in for he had ‘done many favours for the Jews to whom that madman Hitler had sought to do evil’. As he finished his pleading three boys overpowered and killed him, there in the same camp where he had been sole ruler.
We killed every one of the German oppressors who fell into our hands, before the arrival of the Americans in the enclosure of the camp. This was our revenge for our loved ones whose blood had been spilled at the hands of these heathen German beasts.
It was only by a stroke of luck—even if tainted luck—that I had survived.
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Among those at Ebensee on May 5, as the Germans prepared to flee, was Dr Miklos Nyiszli, the eye-witness of Dr Mengele’s brutality at Birkenau. Like all his fellow prisoners at Ebensee, he too had survived the death marches, including one from central Germany to Mauthausen on which three thousand had set off, and one thousand been killed on the march. ‘On May 5th,’ he later recalled, ‘a white flag flew from the Ebensee watch-tower. It was finished. They had laid down their arms. The sun was shining brightly when, at nine o’clock, an American light tank, with three soldiers on board, arrived and took possession of the camp. We were free.’
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Once more the moment of freedom was one of deep shock for the liberators. When American troops reached Mauthausen, they found nearly ten thousand bodies in a huge communal grave. Of the 110,000 survivors, 28,000 were Jews. Among the survivors was Sidney Fahn, the last of the five Czech Jews whose odyssey, beginning in Bratislava, had taken them to the Aegean island of Rhodes and the ‘selection’ on the ramp at Birkenau. At liberation, Sidney Fahn weighed eighty pounds.
Confronted by so many starving skeletons, well-meaning American soldiers brought chocolate, jam and other rich foods which the camp survivors ate, but which many could not digest, and died. Fortunately for Sidney Fahn, he was too weak to stagger from the hospital bed in order to claim his share of these enticing foods, ‘and so again’, he later recalled, ‘I survived: again my fate intervened.’
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Here, repeated in every liberated camp, was yet another insane version of reality for thousands of Jews: food, which had for so long been the life-giving substance, longed for with such desperation, was yet again the final blow. These emaciated men and women, here, as in other camps, were no longer used to such food, nor could their digestive systems cope with it. It was too rich, too fatty, too filling, and it killed, in the first hectic day of liberation, as surely as the bullets and the rifle butts of the day before.
More than three thousand of the 110,000 survivors at Mauthausen and its sub-camps died after liberation.
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Among the dead was Andor Endre Gelleri, the thirty-eight-year-old Hungarian novelist. He died of typhus, two days after liberation.
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When Geza Gryn died four days after liberation, his son Hugo was too weak even to follow his father’s corpse.
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The last of the death marches and death trains were still under German control, in the dwindling areas not yet captured by the Allies. In Theresienstadt, on May 4, the International Red Cross took over the camp, and on the following day, the last of the SS men fled. Only in the Sudeten mountains were the last of the death trains and death marches still within the dwindling orbit of the disintegrating Reich. One such death march had left Schwarzheide on April 18, then continued in two open railway wagons towards Theresienstadt. On May 6 the wagons had reached Leitmeritz, only three miles from Theresienstadt. There, with its SS escort still in command, it came to a halt.
‘Starving in open vans,’ Alfred Kantor, a deportee on one of the two railway trucks, noted on May 6, and he added, ‘Second van reports: sixteen more deaths and ten dying of cold and hunger.’ No engine was available for the train. But the guard was ‘still at his post’. When German railwaymen asked the SS chief if they could feed the prisoners with hot soup, the SS chief ‘gives in to their request to help’. That night, the SS man ‘yells “Everybody out!” Many dead bodies are brought down by the living, to the side of the track.’
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On May 8 the German armies surrendered to the Allies. ‘Our guards leave us to our fate and flee,’ Alfred Kantor noted at eleven o’clock that evening. ‘We can’t believe it’s over! 175 out of 1,000 are alive. Red Cross truck appears—but can’t take 175 men. We spend the night on the road—but in a dream. It’s over.’
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The war was over; the systematic murder of six million Jews was also at an end. But its reverberations continue to this day. Too many scars had been inflicted, too much blood had been spilled, for 8 May 1945 to mark the end of the story, or the end of tragedy for the two hundred thousand survivors of the ghettos, camps and death marches.
1
On May 10, in Flensburg naval hospital, SS General Richard Glueks, head of the concentration camp directorate, was found dead. It was not clear whether Glueks had committed suicide, or had been killed by ‘Jewish avengers’ who had already begun to track down and to kill a number of those who had carried out the policy of mass murder.
2
A small amount of vengeance there undoubtedly was, but vengeance was the path of a minority. ‘Sometimes’, Israel Gutman, a survivor of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Gunskirchen has written, the ‘desire and expectation of revenge’ were the ‘hope’ that kept camp inmates alive ‘during the final and most arduous stages of camp life’, but, once the war was over, ‘we find only a few cases of revenge, or organized vengeful activity on the part of the survivors.’
3
As Dr Zalman Grinberg, a survivor of the Kovno ghetto and the death marches, told those survivors who were still living in huts in Dachau on May 27, nearly a month after liberation, but a day nevertheless on which thirty-five Jews had died as a result of continuing illness and weakness:
Hitler has lost every battle on every front except the battle against defenceless and unarmed men, women and children. He won the war against the Jews of Europe. He carried out this war with the help of the German nation.
However, we do not want revenge. If we took this vengeance
it would mean we would fall to the depths of ethics and morals the German nation has been in these past ten years.
We are not able to slaughter women and children! We are not able to burn millions of people! We are not able to starve hundreds of thousands!
4
On May 20, Henry Slamovich, one of the Jews from Plaszow who had been saved by Oscar Schindler, returned with about twenty-five other young Jews, all of them survivors, to his home town of Dzialoszyce. ‘We thought to ourselves,’ he later recalled, ‘we had survived. We are alive, we are going to enjoy freedom.’ Even though his own home was now lived in by non-Jews, Slamovich was determined somehow to rebuild his life in his own town. But within a week, four of the twenty-five Jews who had returned were murdered by Polish anti-Semites. The rest of the young Jews realized they would have to leave. ‘It was sad, very sad,’ Slamovich recalled, thirty-five years later, in his home in San Francisco.
5