Authors: Martin Gilbert
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In the town of Nowogrodek, in which Jews had lived since 1484, the Germans, who had entered the town on July 3, asked for fifty volunteers to serve as members of the Jewish Council. People ‘pushed to join’, Idel Kagan later recalled. Some were the natural leaders of the community, others were people for whom some sort of ‘public office’ had always been an aspiration. ‘They were then arrested, and disappeared.’ A further fifty Jews were then seized at random, on the spurious charge of having sheltered Soviet parachutists—of whom there had been none. These fifty were taken to the town square and shot, while a German band was playing. Jewish women were then forced to wash the blood from the stones.
Following the execution of the fifty, Jews were seized throughout Nowogrodek for various menial tasks. One of them, a twenty-two-year-old woman, Haya Dzienciolski, was forced to clean out a hall, while her friend was made to stand on a table and sing songs. Haya Dzienciolski decided not to accept any further humiliation. Finding a pistol, she left Nowogrodek for a nearby village. Her escape, Idel Kagan later recalled, ‘was the first resistance’. After a short while in hiding, she went into the nearby village of Lida and took out with her a young man, Asael Belsky, with whom she was in love. Later she was able to smuggle her own parents out of the ghetto, followed by Belsky’s sister and the sister’s boyfriend. Slowly, there grew up in the countryside around Nowogrodek a group of young people determined not to be caught or forced into the ghetto. In this way, the forest communities began.
Inside Nowogrodek, Jews continued to be seized in the streets and taken out of the town. But those who saw them being led away had no idea that they were about to be shot. Local peasants, indeed, in order to make a little money, would tell the Jews in Nowogrodek that they had seen those who had been taken away working on the roads, and would offer to smuggle parcels and messages to them.
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No such work was in progress: but the parcels enriched the peasants, and the messages gave, to the Jews, a false hope and sense of normality.
On July 7, a special raiding party of Einsatzkommando 3, under the command of First Lieutenant Hamann, an SS officer, began the systematic slaughter of Jews throughout Lithuania. Their first action, that day, was to kill thirty-two Jews in Mariampole. Hamann conducted his operation with eight to ten ‘trustworthy’ men of the Einsatzkommando, ‘in cooperation’ with large numbers of Lithuanian militiamen.
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With every day of the German advance into Russia, tens of thousands of Jews found themselves trapped behind the German lines. So rapid was the advance that no one could outrun it. Local units, Lithuanian or Ukrainian, joined in the hunt for victims. Following the first furious slaughter in streets and homes, sites were chosen, such as the Ninth Fort in Kovno, or the empty fuel pits at Ponary, outside Vilna, beyond the view of witnesses.
The first Ponary executions took place on July 8. A hundred Jews at a time were brought from the city to Ponary, to a ‘waiting zone’. Here, in what had once been a popular holiday resort for Vilna Jewry, they were ordered to undress and to hand over whatever money or valuables they had with them. They were then marched naked, single file, in groups of ten to twenty at a time, holding hands, to the edge of the fuel pits, and shot down by rifle fire. After they had fallen into the pit, no attempt was made to see if they were all dead. If anyone moved, another shot was fired. The bodies were then covered, from above, with a thin layer of sand, and the next group of naked prisoners led from the waiting area to the edge of the pit. From where they had waited, the people had heard the sound of rifle fire, but had seen nothing.
In the twelve days following July 8, as many as five thousand Vilna Jews were murdered in this way.
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In the smaller towns and villages, whole communities could be killed in a single day. On July 10, in the village of Jedwabne, all sixteen hundred Jews were driven into the market place by the SS, tortured for several hours, then driven into a barn and burned alive.
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In Drohobycz, a member of the local Einsatzkommando, the thirty-five-year-old SS Sergeant Felix Landau, kept a diary. In 1934, Landau had been one of the instigators of the murder of the
Austrian Chancellor, Dr Engelbert Dollfuss. Landau noted, on July 14:
Again I am roused from deep sleep. ‘Get up for execution!’ Alright, why not? Among the inmates are two women. One can admire them—they don’t even want to take a glass of water from us. I will certainly guard them well; should anyone try escape, I shall shoot.
We drive a few kilometres along the main road till we reach a wood. We go into the wood and look for a spot suitable for mass executions. We order the prisoners to dig their graves. Only two of them are crying, the others show courage. What can they all be thinking? I believe each still has the hope of not being shot. I don’t feel the slightest stir of pity. That’s how it is, and has got to be. My heart beats very faintly when I recall being in the same position once. In the Federal Chancellery on 25.7.1934, I was also in peril of my life. At that time I was younger and thought it was all over. Yet I had the firm conviction that my death won’t be in vain. It happened differently, however. I stayed alive, and now I stand here and shoot others.
Slowly the grave gets bigger and deeper. Two are crying without let-up. I let them dig more so they can’t think. The work really calms them. Money, watches and valuables are collected. The two women go first to be shot; placed at the edge of the grave they face the soldiers. They get shot. When it’s the men’s turn, the soldiers aim at the shoulder. All our six men are allowed to shoot. Three prisoners have been shot in the heart.
The shooting goes on. Two heads have been shot off. Nearly all fall into the grave unconscious only to suffer a long while. Our revolvers don’t help either. The last group have to throw the corpses into the grave; they have to stand ready for their own execution. They all tumble into the grave.
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In Kishinev, the killings began on July 17, with the entry of German and Rumanian forces into the city. The German forces included an Einsatzkommando unit. Thirty-eight years earlier, in the notorious Kishinev pogrom, the deaths of forty-nine Jews had provoked worldwide protest, Christian as well as Jewish. The scale of that
pogrom had shocked the civilized world. Now, killing had become commonplace. In a single week, five thousand of Kishinev’s Jews had been murdered, yet even then the killings continued.
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Among those killed in Kishinev was Judah Leib Zirelson, a member of the Rumanian parliament from 1922, a Rumanian Senator from 1926, Chief Rabbi of Bessarabia, and the leader of Orthodox Jewry in Rumania. He was eighty-one years old.
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The first news of these Eastern killings reached England on July 18, through intercepted German police messages which told of the mass shooting of ‘Jews’, ‘Jewish plunderers’, ‘Jewish bolshevists’ and ‘Russian soldiers’ in numbers ranging from under a hundred to several thousand at a time.
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One such execution took place in Minsk on July 21, when a group of forty-five Jews were forced to dig pits, then roped together and thrown into the pits alive. The SS then ordered thirty White Russian prisoners to cover the live Jews with earth. But the White Russians refused. The SS then opened fire with machine guns on Jews and White Russians alike: all seventy-five were killed.
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To the anger of the Germans, the Jews in White Russia had managed to organize a ‘signal service’ between villages, to warn of the arrival of Einsatzkommando units. As a result of these warnings, one unit commander reported on July 23, the Jews ‘escape into the surrounding forest and swamps’.
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But the ability to flee, or to resist, was minimal. The Germans were armed, the Jews unarmed, while from among the local populace, especially in Lithuania and the Ukraine, hundreds could be found willing not only to round up Jews, but to kill them. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union the anti-Semitism of centuries had been given an unprecedented opportunity to be translated into brutal action.
The speed and scale of the slaughter gave no time for organized resistance. The Germans continued, in every town, to destroy the natural leaders. ‘By now’, reported one Einsatzgruppe on July 24, from the town of Lachowicze, ‘the entire Jewish intelligensia has been liquidated (teachers, professors, lawyers etc…)’. Of the professional classes, only doctors had been spared, to remain alive with the survivors in a specially created ghetto. But the numbers killed exceeded by far the intelligentsia of the town: this particular Einsatzgruppe reported, with the usual precision, a total of 4,435 ‘liquidated’ in Lachowicze.
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In Lvov, where several thousand Jews had been murdered at the beginning of July, there had been a pause in the killing. For the tens of thousands of surviving Jews there was no logical reason to believe that the killing would start again. But on July 25 the local Ukrainians launched the ‘Petlura action’, a three-day orgy of killing to ‘avenge’ the murder of Simon Petlura by Shalom Schwarzbard, fifteen years before. Thousands of men and women were seized, ostensibly for forced labour. Most were taken to a prison in the city, where they were beaten to death. Hundreds disappeared without trace. At least two thousand were killed.
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As the ‘Petlura action’ began in Lvov, in Belgrade a seventeen-year-old Jewish boy, Hayim Almoslino, in despair at the daily murder of Jews, threw a petrol bomb at a German car, hoping to set the car on fire. He failed, and fled. On the same day, there were four other such attacks on German vehicles, one by a sixteen-year-old Serbian girl who, the Germans reported, ‘confessed that a Jew had incited her to the deed’.
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The Germans acted swiftly, determined to prevent any further acts of resistance, even those in which no Germans were killed. On July 27, 1,200 Jews were brought to the camp at Tasmajdan, just outside Belgrade. They were then divided into their professions. Every tenth person was declared a hostage, and 120 hostages taken to Jajinci and shot.
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In the east, with every week, German forces overran more Soviet cities: and in each city Russians and Russian Jews were massacred from the first hours of the occupation. One Einsatzgruppe report at the end of July listed those murdered in its region of operations: at Vinnitsa 146, at Berdichev 148, at Proskurov 146, at Zhitomir 41. These were only the first killings. Nor were these killings committed only by the Germans. At Chorostkow, in Eastern Galicia, where 30 Jews had been killed by the Einsatzkommando, its own report noted that a further no Jews had been ‘slain by the population’.
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In the Eastern Galician town of Drohobycz, a second execution was in progress, recorded once again by SS Sergeant Felix Landau, in his diary entry for July 28:
In the evening we drive into town. Here we experience things it is impossible to describe. We drive to the prison. The streets tell of murder. We would like to take a closer look at
everything, but it is impossible to enter the gas chambers and cellars of the prison without gas masks. In a side turning we notice some Jewish corpses covered with sand. We look at each other in surprise. One living Jew rises up from among the corpses. We dispatch him with a few shots.
Eight hundred Jews have been herded together; they are to be shot tomorrow. We drive further along the street. Hundreds of Jews with bloodstained faces, with bullet holes in the head, broken limbs and gouged-out eyes, run ahead of us. One of the Jews carries another one, who is bleeding to death.
We drive to the Citadel. Here we see things no one has ever seen on earth before. It is absolutely impossible to describe them. Two soldiers stand at the entrance to the citadel. Wielding sticks as thick as fists, they lash furiously at the crowd. Jews are being pushed out from inside. Covered with blood, they collapse on top of one another—they scream like pigs—we stand and look on.
Who gave the order to kill the Jews? No one! Somebody ordered them to be set free.
They were all murdered because we hate them.
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Throughout Eastern Galicia and the Volhynia, the Ukrainian population frequently provided an added dimension of danger for the local Jews. The Jewish historian Philip Friedman, who was in Lvov during these terrible months, and who subsequently carried out considerable historical research into the fate of the Jews of Eastern Galicia and the Volhynia, has recorded how, in Lvov, the Ukrainians themselves seized Jews and turned them over to the authorities. In Buczacz the pogrom was directed by the local Ukrainian intelligentsia. In Delatyn, the pogrom was largely the work of the music teacher Slawko Waszczuk; in Stanislawow, of Professor Lysiak, of the local teachers’ seminary.
In Dubno, Friedman writes, the pogrom was carried out under the direction of several members of the new Ukrainian municipal administration. In Tarnopol, a Ukrainian pharmacist, a teacher, and several others participated with the Germans in planning the pogrom. In Kosow Huculski, the leading figures in the massacre of the Jews included a former Ukrainian schoolteacher who, before the war, had been the foremost agitator against the Jews. In Skalat, a Ukrainian priest and a Ukrainian judge were members of a delegation
that presented an anti-Jewish petition to the Germans. In Jablonica, after the Ukrainian priest incited the local Eastern Carpathian mountaineers against the Jews, several Jews were dragged at night from their beds and drowned in the Czeremosz River. In Gliniany, the Ukrainian priest Hawryluk incited his parishioners against the Jews.
Also in Gliniany, the local Ukrainians staged a People’s Court, ‘on the Gestapo style’, as Salomon Speiser later recalled. ‘They condemned eleven people to die, took them to the woods and shot them all.’ Among those shot was Drescher, the local Jewish teacher, Polack the carpenter, and the fourteen-year-old Aryeh Borer.
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