Authors: Martin Gilbert
In the aftermath of the war, there were many such personal tragedies. Returning to her home in Lodz, the former physician-in-chief of the ghetto hospital, Dr Maria Ginsberg-Rabinowicz, committed suicide on learning that her daughter had not survived.
6
Seeking to return to their village of Choroszcza, near Bialystok, on May 22, two brothers, Icchok and Mejer Sznajder, were in a train which was stopped by Polish thugs. Mejer was beaten, taken away, and never seen again. He and Icchok had survived the Bialystok ghetto and Birkenau. ‘Icchok suffers depression as a result of his brother’s death,’ Dr Szymon Datner noted seventeen months later, ‘his brother with whom he had lived through such terrible times.’
7
Liberation and safety had proved inconstant partners. At Neustadt-Glowen, where Russian troops had taken over from the Americans within a few days of liberation, the Jewish women understood just how much Russian blood had been shed in nearly four years of fighting. ‘They had paid dearly for their victory,’ Lena Berg recalled, ‘and they celebrated with all the forthrightness and lack of restraint characteristic of Slavs.’ Those whom the Russians had liberated were recovering their health, their hair, even their looks. Lena Berg’s account continued:
The camp teemed with amorous couples, but the majority of the liberated women, despite their sympathy for their liberators
and admiration for the Red Army’s heroism, were reluctant to express their gratitude with their bodies. The Russians were unable to understand that and the situation led to sharp, and occasionally tragic, conflicts. ‘Aren’t you our girls?’ the Russians would say, surprised by the reluctance. ‘We shed our blood for you. We liberated you, and you refuse us a mere trifle?’
Intoxicated by victory and often literally drunk, they felt they were entitled to anything and everything. Several times they took women by brute force, and I shall never forget the heart-rending screams and tears of a fifteen-year-old girl raped by a Soviet private in the barracks in front of hundreds of women. ‘No! No! I don’t want to!’ the girl raved. We heard those words for a long time afterwards.
8
Many survivors were to be haunted by memories of these immediate post-war months. Returning to Poland after their liberation in Theresienstadt, fifteen-year-old Ben Helfgott and his twelve-year-old cousin Gershon were still emaciated, as they worked their way northward. Ben Helfgott later recalled how, while passing through Czechoslovakia, they had been showered ‘with food, warmth and sympathy’. This gave them a sense of well-being, as they reached Czestochowa, their first stop in Poland. The two boys waited at the railway station for the train to their home town of Piotrkow. In Ben Helfgott’s words:
Hundreds of people were milling around talking and gesticulating excitedly when suddenly two Polish officers accosted us. ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’ Somewhat taken aback and surprised, we replied, ‘Can’t you see? We are survivors from the concentration camps and we are returning to our home town.’ To our amazement, they asked for some proof which we immediately produced in the form of an Identity Card which had been issued to us in Theresienstadt, the place of our liberation.
They were still not satisfied and ordered us to come with them to the police station for a routine check. It seemed rather strange to us, but we had nothing to fear. Fortified by our experience in Czechoslovakia and believing in a better world now that the monster that tried to destroy the people of Europe was vanquished, we walked along with the two officers
chatting animatedly about the great future that was in store for the people of Poland.
The streets were deserted and darkness prevailed as there was still a curfew after midnight and street lighting was not yet restored. My cousin and I were tiring as we carried our cases which contained clothing we had received from the Red Cross.
Casually, I asked, ‘Where is the police station? It seems so far.’ The reply was devastating and shattering: ‘Shut your f… mouth you f… Jew’!!!!!
I was stunned, hardly believing what I had just heard. How could I have been so naive; so gullible? The Nazi cancer was removed but its tentacles were widespread and deeply rooted. How had I lulled myself into a false sense of security?
I believed what I wanted to believe. I had experienced and witnessed so much cruelty and bestiality yet I refused to accept that man is wicked. I was grown up in so many ways, yet I was still a child dreaming of a beautiful world. I was suddenly brought back to reality and began to fear the worst. Here I was in the middle of nowhere, no one to turn to for help.
At last we stopped at a house where one of the officers knocked at the gate which was opened by a young Polish woman. We entered a room which was dimly lit by a paraffin lamp, and we were ordered to open our suitcases. They took most of the clothing and announced that they would now take us to the police station. It seemed inconceivable to me that this was their real intention, but we had no choice and we had to follow events as they unfolded.
As we walked in the dark and deserted streets, I tried desperately to renew conversation so as to restore the personal and human touch, but it was to no avail. I endeavoured to conceal and ignore my true feelings and innermost thoughts, pretending to believe that they were acting in the name of the law, but they became strangely uncommunicative.
After what seemed an eternity, we arrived at a place that looked fearfully foreboding. The buildings were derelict and abandoned; there was no sign of human habitation; all one could hear was the howling of the wind, the barking of the dogs and the mating calls of the cats.
The two officers menacingly extracted the pistols from their holsters, and ordered us to walk to the nearest wall.
Both my cousin and I felt rooted to the ground unable to move.
When, at last, I recovered my composure, I emitted a torrent of desperate appeals and entreaties. I pleaded with them, ‘Haven’t we suffered enough? Haven’t the Nazis caused enough destruction and devastation to all of us? Our common enemy is destroyed and the future is ours. We have survived against all odds and why are you intent on promoting the heinous crimes that the Nazis have unleashed. Don’t we speak the same language as you? Didn’t we imbibe the same culture as you?’
I went on in the same vein speaking agitatedly for some time. Eventually, one of the officers succumbed to my pleas and said, ‘Let’s leave them. They are after all still boys.’ As they put away their pistols, they made a remark which still rings loud in my ears. ‘You can consider yourselves very lucky. We have killed many of your kind. You are the first ones we have left alive.’ With this comment they disappeared into the dark of the night.
9
Not every journey homeward was so brutal. In July 1945 David Shmueli, a Rumanian-born Jew who had served in the British army during the war, learned that his father, Yehiel Shmueli, was in Dachau, among the survivors. David’s sister Rachel later recorded:
My brother immediately ran to his commander and received permission to go to Dachau. There he entered the office and found the list containing my father’s name. He entered the shack and immediately noticed Father standing at the sink and washing dishes.
Father raised his head when he saw the door open, and looked back again at the dishes, for he didn’t recognize my brother and thought him a British soldier. My brother ran to him and embraced him and said in a voice filled with emotion: ‘Daddy, I’m your son David!’
Father raised his head in amazement and said: ‘Pardon me, sir, there’s some mistake here. My son is in Palestine and he’s not a soldier.’
My brother, in order to convince him, took out of his pocket
some family pictures from home, and thus he finally managed to convince him that he was his only son.
Then they burst out crying, not only they but everyone around them. Because Father had always told his friends in the camp that when he lay ill with typhus he had nightmares and also dreams of yearning, one of which was that his son came in an airplane, liberated the camp and said: ‘Father, you can take ten people with you. Choose those who were most kind to you and take them.’ And as if the dream came true, his son came to liberate him.
10
The Jews who had survived understood that their experiences could not easily be conveyed, if at all. ‘I realize’, wrote Dow Lewi, a survivor of Birkenau, on 4 August 1945, to his sister in Palestine, ‘that you, over there, cannot imagine even a hundredth part of the suffering, fear, humiliation and every kind of bullying that we lived through.’ Lewi added: ‘People who live and think as normal people cannot possibly understand.’
11
The survivors did not expect to be understood. But they did expect to be allowed to live in peace. It was not to be: on August 20 anti-Jewish riots broke out in Cracow, followed by further riots in Sosnowiec on October 25 and in Lublin on November 19. Within seven months of the end of the war in Europe, and after a year in which no German soldier was on Polish soil, 350 Jews had been murdered in Poland.
12
Thousands more faced danger when they returned to their home towns and villages. On September 1, Yaakov Waldman, who had escaped the Chelmno deportation from Uniejow on 20 July 1942, was killed in nearby Turek.
13
In October 1945 eight Jews were killed in Boleslawiec by one of several Polish underground groups still engaged in killing Jews.
14
In December 1945 eleven Jews were killed by Poles in the village of Kosow-Lacki, less than six miles from the former death camp at Treblinka.
15
In February 1946, nine months after the Allied victory in Europe, four Jewish delegates to a Jewish communal convention in Cracow were murdered on the train from Lodz. The Polish government offered to give them a state funeral, as victims of anti-Communist forces, albeit Poles. Zerah Warhaftig, one of the main organizers of the convention, refused. ‘I said they died as Jews, not in the fight for Communism.’
16
On 1 February 1946 the
Manchester Guardian
published a full report of the situation of the Jews still in Poland. The four headlines to the report read:
JEWS STILL IN FLIGHT FROM POLAND
DRIVEN ABROAD BY FEAR
POLITICAL GANGS OUT TO TERRORIZE THEM
CAMPAIGN OF MURDER AND ROBBERY
Since the beginning of 1945, the newspaper reported, 353 Jews had been murdered by Polish thugs. ‘Unfortunately,’ it added, ‘anti-Semitism is still prevalent in spite of the Government efforts to counteract it.’ As a result of the war, this anti-Semitism, ‘always present in Polish society’, had been ‘greatly aggravated by German propaganda’. Since the end of the war, ritual murder accusations had been made against Jews in Cracow and Rzeszow. In Radom, a hospital for Jewish orphans had been attacked. In Lublin, two Jews, already wounded by thugs while on a bus, had been tracked down to the local hospital and murdered there, in their hospital beds.
17
On 5 February 1946, four Jews were killed in Parczew, the forests of which had been the scene of so much Jewish suffering and heroism scarcely two years earlier.
18
Six weeks later, on March 19, one of only two survivors of the death camp at Belzec, Chaim Hirszman, gave evidence in Lublin of what he had witnessed in the death camp. He was asked to return on the following day to complete his evidence. But on his way home he was murdered, because he was a Jew.
19
Five days before Hirszman’s murder, the British Ambassador in Poland, Victor Cavendish Bentinck, reported from Warsaw that food supplies belonging to the Chief Rabbi’s Emergency Council had been allowed to proceed in a car flying the Union Jack. Yet even with this protection, the car had been stopped ‘and four Polish Jews, one of whom was a woman, travelling in it, were taken out and shot by the roadside for being Jews’. The Ambassador added that anyone with a Jewish appearance was in ‘danger’, and on March 28 the Foreign Office learned that a group of Jewish leaders travelling from Cracow to Lodz had been seized, tortured and murdered.
20
On Easter Sunday, April 21, five Jews were driving along the main road towards the southern Polish town of Nowy Targ. All five were survivors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Mauthausen. The
oldest, Benjamin Rose, was thirty-five. Leon Lindenberger was twenty-five. Ludwig Hertz, Henrych Unterbruck, and the only girl among them, Ruth Joachimsman, were twenty-two.
As the five Jews approached the outskirts of Nowy Targ, their car was flagged down at what appeared to be a police check-point. The five Jews were ordered out of the car and shot. Their killers had been members of the former underground forces of the Polish Home Army. The five bodies were stripped of their clothing and left naked on the highway.
The Nowy Targ murders caused consternation among the Jews of Cracow, the nearest Jewish community of any size, a community of survivors. On April 24, at the public funeral organised by the Jewish community in Cracow, five thousand Jews were present, one of whom, Joseph Tenenbaum, later wrote: ‘and there I witnessed something that lashed me with an iron rod. Windows opened, and guffaws poured out from the windows, balconies and porches. Gibes, scabrous and cynical, rained on the marching mourners. “Look, Jas, where did they come from, the Jews? The devil, I never knew so many of them were left alive.”’
Six days after the funeral of the five who had been murdered at Nowy Targ, another seven Jews were murdered at almost the same spot. The oldest, Bela Gold, was forty-three. The youngest, Salomon Dornberg, was eighteen. Their funeral too was held in Cracow, on the evening of May 2, almost a year since the end of the war.
21
That same May, Eliahu Lipszowicz, a former deputy to the partisan leader Dr Yehezkiel Atlas, and in 1944 an officer in the Red Army, was murdered by an anti-Semitic Pole at Legnica in Silesia.
22
At Biala Podlaska, in June, two Jews were murdered: of the six thousand Jews in the town in 1939, only three hundred had survived the war. After the killings, those who remained decided to leave Poland altogether.
23