Authors: Martin Gilbert
That night the prisoners-of-war were locked in an abandoned stable, and in the local synagogue. On the following day, between Lubartow and Parczew, a second massacre took place: only 400 of the 880 reached the outskirts of Parczew alive. There, Arieh Helfgot, one of the survivors, later recalled, ‘a delegation of Jews came out to meet us in order to conduct negotiations with our murderers. We were astonished at their courage, as they could quite easily have died together with us.’
These local Jews gave the SS men money, in return for permission to provide the prisoners-of-war with food. That night the prisoners-of-war were again locked in the local synagogue. But during the night, with the help of the same local Jews who had come so bravely to intercede for them, forty of the prisoners managed to escape.
The local Jews then found them civilian clothes, and hiding places.
On the following morning the remaining 360 prisoners-of-war were again marched off, and once more subjected to bursts of machine-gun fire; less than two hundred survived, to be imprisoned in another prisoner-of-war camp, at Biala Podlaska. The transfer to Soviet territory never took place. At Biala Podlaska, refused medical attention, most of the survivors of the march died of typhus.
9
There were other Jewish prisoners-of-war murdered that winter, among them 320 who had been captured by the Germans in central Poland, but who had also been born east of the new demarcation line. They were sent in sealed, unheated cattle trucks towards the border town of Wlodawa. They too were told that they would be sent across the border. During the train journey, with frequent halts at sidings, more than two hundred died of starvation, or froze to death. In the forest between Wlodawa and the village of Sobibor, the train was stopped and the survivors were ordered to remove the corpses. After they had done this, the men were led into the forest, where the SS guards opened fire with automatic weapons. The prisoners-of-war tried to run away, but only a few succeeded; 120 were killed. Some days later, in return for payment, the Wlodawa Jewish Council obtained the permission of the Germans to remove the wounded and to bury the dead in the Jewish cemetery of Wlodawa.
10
News of the Parczew and Wlodawa killings did not reach Warsaw for several months. There, it was the publication on January 13 of the forced labour decree of December 11 that had created a sudden panic. ‘This decree’, Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary, ‘will uproot all of Polish Jewry and bring utter destruction upon it.’
11
Two days later Kaplan wrote again:
The forced labour decree gnaws away at our people. Because of the extent of the catastrophe, the Jews do not believe that it will come to pass. Even though they know the nature of the conqueror very, very well, and his tyrannical attitude toward them has already been felt on their backs; even though they know he has no pity or human feeling in relation to the Jews—in spite of all this, their attitude toward the terrible decree he has published is one of frivolity. I do not join them in this. Thousands and perhaps tens of thousands will become slave labourers—that is, if the tyrant’s defeat does not intervene.
12
Not the tyrant’s defeat, however, but his capacity for killing, dominated the talk and experience of Warsaw Jewry. Early in January, the Germans had arrested Andrzej Kott, the leader of a secret youth association, the Polish People’s Independent Action, dedicated to action against the occupying power. Kott was of Jewish origin: his family had converted to Catholicism some time in the past. Using his Jewish origin as their reason, the Gestapo arrested 255 Jews at random, including many professional people: industrialists, engineers, furriers, businessmen, lawyers, hatters, doctors and teachers, tailors, tie-makers, book-keepers, chemists and musicians. Beginning on January 18, and continuing for seven days, all those arrested were taken in groups to the Palmiry woods, outside Warsaw, and shot. Among those murdered were the dental surgeon Franz Sturm, the lawyer Ludwik Dyzenhaus, and the photographer Pinkus Topaz.
13
‘Every house is filled with sadness and a spirit of depression,’ Kaplan noted in his diary on January 24, before news of the executions had become known. ‘The Kott affair brought misfortune to a number of families among the intelligentsia, whose husbands or sons were arrested for no legal reason. And those who had not yet been arrested live in mortal fear. Every echo of footsteps on the stairs in the dark of night drives mute panic into their hearts.’
14
That same week, the Germans ordered all synagogues and houses of prayer in Warsaw to close.
Following the publication of the forced labour decree, thousands of Jews were taken from the main Polish cities. Plans were also made to deport Jews from Slovakia for forced labour. On January 30, in Berlin, Heydrich announced the setting up of a special government bureau, IV-D-4, for handling all deportation details, including the continuing removal of Jews from the annexed regions of western Poland.
Labour camps were set up near the Soviet frontier, in the expectation, as Zygmunt Klukowski, a Polish doctor in the Lublin region, noted in his diary, ‘that there will be some heavy fighting in our area’. Klukowski listed several towns and villages near which ‘very solid trenches were being built’, among them Frampol, Zamosc and Belzec, all in the border zone.
15
Jews were sent to work at each of these labour sites. But ‘from the outset’, Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on February 4, ‘the People
of Hope did not believe that the decree of forced labour would be put into effect. As is the way with Jews, they didn’t understand the decree in its simple sense’, trying to find in it instead ‘some hint for an enormous financial contribution’.
16
But Kaplan himself was fully aware of what the decree meant. He wrote, the next day, of a Jew who had been ‘caught for forced labour’ in Warsaw:
The work consisted of transferring cakes of ice from one place to another. The terrible cold pierces the flesh. Who could endure the icy chill? But there was no choice. It was the Nazis’ order and, as such, could not be avoided. The Jew did his job with gloves, but the Nazi overseer forced him to do the work barehanded. The Jew was forced to fulfil the wishes of the oppressor, and with terrible suffering he moved the ice cakes barehanded, in below-zero cold. The Jew fell under the agony of this torture. His palms were so frozen that they are beyond help and his hands will have to be amputated.
17
Each day, new rules made the life of Warsaw Jewry more difficult. On February 7 Ringelblum noted that ‘Jews may not visit the public libraries which were built through Jewish philanthropy’, and the Jews could only travel by train on presentation of a ‘delousing certificate’, each certificate being valid for only ten days.
18
Four days later he recorded incidents where Jews who had been taken off to work in a garage ‘are ordered to beat one another with their galoshes’. A Jew who had been seized while at prayer wearing his phylacteries ‘was forced to work all day in them’. Workers were divided into groups and made to fight each other: ‘I have seen people badly injured in these games.’ On another occasion, a rabbi ‘was ordered to shit in his pants’.
19
The cruelties and indignities recorded by Ringelblum and Kaplan in Warsaw were repeated in every Polish city under Nazi rule. In Piotrkow, on February 18, two German sergeants seized two Jewish girls, the eighteen-year-old Miss Nachmanowicz and the seventeen-year-old Miss Satanowska, forced them at gunpoint to the Jewish cemetery, and raped them. The Nuremberg Laws against ‘race defilement’ had proved no protection.
20
On February 19 a report from Warsaw, sent through Copenhagen, was published in England, in the
Manchester Guardian
. ‘The humiliations and tortures inflicted upon the Jewish
workmen,’ the report declared, ‘who are compelled by their Nazi overseers to dance and sing and undress during their work, and are even forced to belabour each other with blows, show no signs of abating.’
21
In his diary, Ringelblum recorded mounting indignities. On February 21 he recorded how Germans, whom he called ‘the Others’ or ‘the lords and masters’, threw a woman out of a moving tram. Large numbers of Jewish women had been seized from various cafés, and taken away, ‘no one knows where to; it is said that about a hundred came back a few days later, some of them infected’. He had heard about a ten-year-old boy, beaten on the head, who ‘went mad’, and of a place where ‘during the work registration those Jews who said they were sickly were killed’.
22
On March 6, Ringelblum recorded how, at a house in the Jewish district, ‘three lords and masters ravished some women; screams resounded through the house’. The Gestapo, Ringelblum added, ‘were concerned over the racial degradation’ involved, ‘but are afraid to report it’.
23
Every morning, several hundred Jews, collected by the Jewish Council, were assembled for forced labour: in early March their task was the clearing of snow from the centre of Warsaw. ‘You can recognize them,’ Chaim Kaplan noted, ‘not only by the “Jewish insignia” on their sleeves, but by their gestures, by the sorrow implanted in their faces. They receive no pay for this,’ Kaplan added, ‘not even food. The Gentiles too are required to work, but they are paid.’
24
The Lublin region deportations had been abandoned: but six weeks later, on 22 April 1940, SS General Odilo Globocnik, the most senior SS officer in the Lublin district, proposed a substantial extension of the labour-camp system throughout the Lublin region to make use of a much larger number of Jews, isolating men from women. These camps were set up at once: in July 1940 there were more than thirty, employing ten thousand Jews; the number of forced labourers doubled by the end of the year.
25
From Piotrkow, Jews were taken to two nearby swamps, where they were forced to dig canals and ditches. Some of those who were taken off for this work were only twelve years old. Many were forced to work naked and barefoot, standing in the water up to their waists. Many died of pneumonia or tuberculosis.
26
The purpose of these labour camps was actual physical work, albeit in cruel conditions. But from the first days of the German conquest of Poland, two other types of camp had been created, both near the Free City of Danzig, annexed to the Reich on the outbreak of war. The first was in the woods near the village of Piasnica, twenty-five miles north-west of Danzig, to which mental defectives had been sent since October 1939. ‘It is said’, Ringelblum had noted on 7 February 1940, ‘that many hundreds of madmen had been killed,’ although he did not know where.
27
The second camp was in the village of Stutthof, twenty miles east of Danzig. Several hundred Danzig Jews had been deported to Stutthof in the third week of September, among them the writer and journalist Jacob Lange, and the cantor of the Danzig synagogue, Leopold Shufftan. Within a few weeks, most of them had died.
28
A Polish Socialist leader, who was imprisoned at Stutthof for fifteen months, later described a ‘mass slaughter’ of Jews at Stutthof during the Passover of 1940. This festival of Jewish liberation from bondage began, in 1940, on the evening of April 23:
All the Jews were assembled in the courtyard; they were ordered to run, to drop down and to stand up again. Anybody who was slow in obeying the order was beaten to death by the overseer with the butt of his rifle.
Afterwards Jews were ordered to jump right into the cesspit of the latrines, which were being built; this was full of urine. The taller Jews got out again since the level reached their chin, but the shorter ones went down. The young ones tried to help the old folk, and as a punishment the overseers ordered the latter to beat the young. When they refused to obey they were cruelly beaten themselves. Two or three died on the spot and the survivors were ordered to bury them.
The surviving Jews were then sent to a smaller camp at Gransdorf where discipline, the Polish Socialist reported, ‘was even more severe’. His account continued:
One single Jew, a sculptor, was left in Stutthof. The SS men took all his works, put him to a carriage loaded with sand, and forced him to run while flogging him with a lash. When he fell down they turned the carriage over on him; and when he nevertheless succeeded in creeping out of the sand they poured
water on him and hung him; but the rope was too thin and gave way. They then brought a young Jewess, the only one in the camp, and with scornful laughter they hanged both on one rope.
Women also were detained at Stutthof, the Polish Socialist recalled. ‘The beautiful ones had to clean the houses of the overseers and officers; most of them were pregnant, and were released from the camp. The young Jewess above mentioned was also pregnant, but instead of being released she was hanged.’
29
***
On February 8 the Germans had ordered the setting up of a ghetto in Lodz, and chose as the site of the ghetto two of the most neglected districts of the city. Of a total of 31,721 apartments in this ghetto area, most of them with a single room, only 725 had running water. The use of electricity in the ghetto was forbidden between eight in the evening and six in the morning.
30
More than 160,000 Jews were moved inside the ghetto, which was ‘closed’ on May 1, from which day the German police were ordered to shoot without warning any Jew who might approach the barbed-wire fence which now surrounded it.
31
The evacuations from Germany to the Lublin region continued. On 12 March 1940, all 160 Jews from the Baltic port of Schneidemuhl were taken in sealed freight cars to Lublin. They were allowed to take with them only the clothes they wore: no other possessions, not even suitcases, bedding, food or dishes. In the bitter weather, some deportees had their coats taken away from them. From Lublin, these 160 men, women and children were marched in the freezing weather, along rough roads covered in snow, to three small villages more than twenty kilometres away. There they found the survivors of twelve hundred deportees from Stettin who, in their fourteen-hour march from Lublin, had left seventy-two Jews dead at the roadside.
32