Authors: Martin Gilbert
No Polish town was free from such incidents. In Piotrkow, a Jewess, Miss Usherowitz, sold her father’s apartment to a Pole for six hundred zlotys, the equivalent of about five American dollars. That same day she was murdered, together with a friend Mrs Rolnik, and a young man, Mr Maltz, with whom she shared her apartment.
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Whether for money or out of hatred, the murder of Jews continued.
The climax of these post-war killings came on 4 July 1946. Three days earlier, an eight-year-old Polish boy from Kielce, Henryk Blaszczyk, disappeared from his home. Two days later he returned, claiming that he had been kept in a cellar by two Jews who had wanted to kill him, and that only a miracle had enabled him to escape. In fact, he had been to the home of a family friend in a nearby village. The friend had taught him what to say after his return.
On July 4 a crowd of Poles, aroused by rumours of Jews abducting Christian children for ritual purposes, attacked the building of the Jewish Committee in Kielce. Almost all the Jews who were inside the building, including the Chairman of the Committee, Dr Seweryn Kahane, were shot, stoned to death, or killed with axes and blunt instruments. Elsewhere in Kielce, Jews were murdered in their homes, or dragged into the streets and killed by the mob.
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Forty-two Jews were killed in Kielce that day. Two, Duczka and Adas Fisz, were children. Four, Bajla Gerntner, Rachel Zander, Fania Szumacher and Naftali Teitelbaum, were teenagers on their way to Palestine. Three, Izak Prajs, Abraham Wajntraub and Captain Wajnreb, were officers in the Polish army. Seven could not be named. One of those whose name was unknown was a survivor of Birkenau, a fact disclosed by the tattoo number on his arm, B 2969.
The Jews of Kielce published the names of the dead in the one surviving Polish—Jewish newspaper, in a black border.
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The name of the Jew who had been in Birkenau was never found. The numbers B 2903 to B 3449 had been given to those Jews in a train from Radom on 2 August 1944 who had been ‘selected’ for the barracks.
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Radom and Kielce are only fifty miles apart.
Following the Kielce ‘pogrom’, one hundred thousand Polish Jews, more than half the survivors, fled from Poland, seeking new homes in Palestine, Western Europe, Britain and the United States, Latin America and Australia.
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***
The facts of Jewish wartime suffering were only slowly coming to light, as letters, documents, diaries and fragments were discovered. Vast quantities of material, however, were lost forever, hidden in hiding places no one survived to identify, burned or destroyed by
the Germans as they withdrew. On September 18 the first of the tin boxes and milk cans hidden by Emanuel Ringelblum’s ‘Joy of Sabbath’ circle was dug up in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. The second was found four years later, in 1950.
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Among the Jews who remained in Poland were some who saw their task as recording the history of the war years. On 24 March 1947 the organization of Jewish writers and journalists in Poland wrote, from Lodz, to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, in search of financial help for the forty Jewish writers in their organization:
They are living under very difficult circumstances but are loath to forsake the ruined land that they might better absorb the atmosphere of the dreadful Jewish catastrophe and render it into literary and scientific work. We consider it a mission of particular importance that these Jewish writers provide, for the future generations, prose and poetry which will portray and document the recent experiences. Would that we now had such literary records from our forefathers of the Spanish era.
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Five manuscripts of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau, which are among the most vivid contemporary documents of the war, were discovered at different times between 1945 and 1962: that of Salmen Lewental on 17 October 1962. The notes of the Greek Jew were only found in the earth around one of the crematoria, in the late autumn of 1980, buried in a thermos flask. It was discovered there only by chance, by Polish schoolchildren planting a tree.
As the decades passed, many survivors, and the relatives of survivors, sought to return to the scenes of their youth, to the scenes of their family’s suffering, even to the scenes of their own torment. The sites of the mass murder of Jews became places of solemn pilgrimage. For Jews in the Soviet Union, visiting these sites, such as Babi Yar in Kiev, and Rumbuli near Riga, Ponar outside Vilna or the Ratomskaya street pit in Minsk, became a means of renewing and asserting their sense of Jewish identity.
In the twenty years following the war, Babi Yar filled up with rubbish, mud and water, forming a deep lake. ‘It was motionless,’ Sara Kyron later recalled, ‘and mixed up with silt, and it seemed
from afar to be greenish, as if the tears of the people who had been killed there had come out of the soil.’
Above the Yar, a wall had been built to mark it off from an adjoining brickyard. One evening in 1961, the wall collapsed. Streams of clay and mud, mixed up with the remains of human bones, gushed out into the streets of Kiev below. In the wake of the rushing waters, a garage was completely destroyed, fires broke out, and the stream of liquid clay, reaching the nearby tram depot, overturned tram cars and buried alive in its onward rush both passengers and tramway workers. That night, as soldiers were busy digging out the dead, and searching for survivors in the mud, a second wave of liquid clay burst out from the Yar, wreaking further havoc, and death. In the two disasters, twenty-four citizens of Kiev were killed. A few days later, as a tram passed the site of the disaster, an old woman suddenly began to shout: ‘It is the Jews who have done this. They are taking vengeance on us. They always will.’
Sara Tartakovskaya, going by taxi to work on the morning after the disaster, was told by the taxi driver: ‘One could not fill up Babi Yar. Jewish blood is taking revenge.’
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***
Year by year, Jews throughout the world search for some echo of the past that is gone. In 1976 a Riga-born Jew, Jules Lippert, who had left Riga for the United States as a child in 1939, returned to the city of his birth. It was also the city in which his father had been murdered, his father whom he had not seen since he was eight years old. Lippert went to Rumbuli, where his father must have been murdered. ‘I remembered he was tall, close to six feet,’ Lippert later wrote. ‘He was bald and the youngest of three brothers and he smoked cigars.’ Lippert went on to ask:
How did you die, dear father? What thoughts crossed your mind as your brief thirty-eight years were extinguished here in Riga? Did the bullets find their mark quickly or did you suffer for interminable moments in agony? Where are your remains, where are they, where are they—I’ll never know.
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In June 1981 a gathering of survivors was held in Jerusalem. More than six thousand survivors gathered there, from all over the world, to exchange recollections, to seek long-lost friends, and to
make one last desperate search for relatives who might, possibly, have survived. For many of those who gathered in Jerusalem, as for more than one hundred thousand survivors elsewhere, the passage of four decades had often brought with it new torments. Gone now were the years of struggling to adjust to new societies, of learning new languages, of earning a living, of bringing up a family, of being too busy for retrospection. Illness, old age, retirement, time for reflection, the questions asked by children and grandchildren, had revived memories and nightmares. Some survivors had never been able to drive out of their minds the evil associations: whether it was the barking of a dog, the cracks of a whip, or the smell of burning.
Others found the terrible images returning, or experienced a growing sense of guilt that they, alone perhaps of forty or fifty members of their family, had survived. The miracle of survival turned into an agony of personal self-recrimination.
For one survivor, Jona Jakob Speigel, the Jerusalem gathering of June 1981 had represented a different type of opportunity. When Theresienstadt had been liberated in May 1945 he had been only three and a half years old. He had been brought up in Britain by foster parents, knowing and being told nothing of his concentration camp past, nor of the deportation of his mother, Elsa Speigel, to the Minsk ghetto, when he, Jona, was only five and a half months old. He had first learned these facts in 1962, shortly before his marriage. For nearly twenty years he tried to find out more about himself, but other than the facts related here, he could find nothing.
Travelling to Jerusalem in 1981, Jona Speigel hoped to meet at least one person who had known his mother in Vienna, where she had been a milliner; or someone who had looked after him in Theresienstadt, between 1942 and 1945. But although hundreds of those at the gathering did find friends from their concentration camp days, and even relatives, Jona Speigel found no one.
On his return to London, Jona Speigel continued his search, but in vain. ‘Deep down,’ he wrote, ‘I realized that it was a hopeless task.’
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Perhaps someone reading these lines will recall Elsa Speigel, or her orphan son, and bring him some fragments of memory with which to link him to his lost past.
The pain of not knowing can never be assuaged. For those who survive, it mingles and sometimes overwhelms the feeling of personal guilt for survival. There was also gratitude for those who
made survival possible. In February 1946, Rudolf Wessely, who had reached London from Prague on 1 July 1939, wrote to the people who had given him a new home in Britain:
All efforts to trace my parents on the continent having failed, I must assume that they are amongst the victims of Nazism. I feel it to be my duty, to do what they would undoubtedly have done, had they been alive; I should like to thank you and express my deepest gratitude for having saved me, their son, in 1939, for having enabled me to live a full life and for the opportunity I thus gained to fight actively on the side of Britain.
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Eric Lucas, who had left Germany after the Kristallnacht in November 1938, and had seen his parents for the last time as the train taking him to Britain had pulled out of the frontier station, wrote, when the war was ended: ‘We have waited, and hoped, for a sign or message from our parents. It will never come.’ ‘Overwhelming and crushing disaster’, Lucas added, ‘came upon millions of us. It leaves the wounded and sore human heart lonely. The disaster has spoken to each one directly.’
Lucas went on to ask: ‘Can I ever grasp it? Can I fathom out why my father and my mother had to perish at the hands of insanely brutalised human beasts? Can I understand why the kind, help-seeking eyes of my father had to behold the slow, scientifically organized dying of himself and my mother, and the people with him in the death camp?’
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The survivors tell their story to their children, set it down in memoirs and testimonies, relive it in nightmares. They have so much to remember of parents, children, friends, communities, society and civilization, all destroyed: not only precious Jewish lives, but the rich, complex, vibrant fabric of Jewish life. Not all survivors wish the destruction to be commemorated, as it has been increasingly in recent years, by ceremonies, monuments, dedications, lectures, books and banquets. ‘We do not want your commemorations!’ David Wdowinski wrote in 1964. ‘We, who do not even have graves to rest in peace—we do not need your easy tears, your empty words.’ Too many people had forgotten. ‘Leave us be. We do not need your prayers and your benedictions.’ One day, perhaps, ‘some new, clean generation will remember our
agony’, bestowing upon the dead, and upon the long dead survivors, the final Hebrew prayer for the dead, ‘God, full of compassion’.
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Each survivor faces the past, and confronts the future, with a burden which those who did not go through the torment cannot measure. ‘I may bear indelible scars in body and soul,’ Cordelia Edvardson has written, ‘but I don’t intend to reveal them to the world—least of all to the Germans. That is the pride of the survivor. Hitler is dead—but I am alive.’
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***
Between 1939 and 1945 the Germans killed many millions of non-Jewish civilians in Germany itself, and in every occupied country, often in massive reprisal actions or after prolonged torture. The shooting down in cold blood of unarmed, defenceless Greeks, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Russians, and men, women and children of a dozen other nationalities, all of them civilians who had taken no part in military action, was a feature of Nazi rule throughout Europe. Among those murdered were as many as a quarter of a million Gypsies, tens of thousands of homosexuals, and tens of thousands of ‘mental defectives’. Also murdered, often after the cruelties of tortures, were several million Soviet prisoners-of-war, shot or starved to death long after they had been captured and disarmed.
As well as the six million Jews who were murdered, more than ten million other non-combatants were killed by the Nazis. Under the Nazi scheme, Poles, Czechs, Serbs and Russians were to become subject peoples; slaves, the workers of the New Order. The Jews were to disappear altogether. It was the Jews alone who were marked out to be destroyed in their entirety: every Jewish man, woman and child, so that there would be no future Jewish life in Europe. Against the eight million Jews who lived in Europe in 1939, the Nazi bureaucracy assembled all the concerted skills and mechanics of a modern state: the police, the railways, the civil service, the industrial power of the Reich; poison gas, soldiers, mercenaries, criminals, machine guns, artillery; and over all, a massive apparatus of deception.
In the concentration camps, Jews were not people, but
figuren
, ‘numbers’ or ‘figures’. But these ‘figures’, these ‘men’ who had
become ‘dogs’, did not intend to die without there being a record of what had been done to them. The Jewish desire that the evidence of mass murder and inhuman torture should survive was an overwhelming one. Dr Aharon Beilin has recorded how, at Birkenau, he once saw a boy working, who told him that he had been castrated in a medical experiment in the camp. This boy asked Dr Beilin to examine him. ‘I said I could not help him, but the boy said, “No, I want you to see what they are doing to us.”’
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