The Holocaust (31 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
From the end of June 1941 to the end of December, at least forty-eight thousand Jews were murdered at Ponar. After the killings of September 3, six are known to have crawled out of the pit alive, and survived. All of them were women.
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One of the survivors of the October killings, Sara Menkes, returned to Vilna, where she told Abba Kovner the story of a former pupil of his, Serna Morgenstern. At the edge of the pit, Sara Menkes reported:
…they were lined up; they were told to undress; they undressed and stood only in their undergarments and there was this line of the
Einsatzgruppen
men—and an officer came out, he looked at the row of women and he looked at this Serna Morgenstern; she had wonderful eyes, a tall girl, long-braided hair—he looked at her searchingly for a long time and then he smiled and said, ‘Take a step forward.’ She was dazed, as all of them were. No one wept any more, no one asked for anything; they must have been paralysed and she was so paralysed she did not step forward and he repeated the order and asked, ‘Hey, don’t you want to live? You are so beautiful. I tell you to take one step forward.’
So she took that step forward and he told her, ‘What a pity to bury such beauty under the earth. Go, but don’t look backward. There is the street. You know that boulevard, you just follow that.’ She hesitated for a moment and then she started marching, and the rest, Sara Menkes told me, ‘We looked at her with our eyes—I don’t know whether it was only terror or jealousy, envy too, as she walked slowly step by step and then the officer whipped out his revolver and shot her in the back.’
‘Must I tell more?’ Abba Kovner asked the court to which he told this story.
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Throughout October 1941 the Eastern killings continued. In the newly established ghettos of Kovno and Vilna, work passes were handed out, and those who did not receive them, women and children especially, were sent to the Ninth Fort, or to Ponar. On September 25 the Kovno Jewish Council had been ordered by the Germans to distribute five thousand work permits to workers and their families. Cruelly, the Germans thrust on the Council the burden of choice. The Council discussed refusing to distribute the permits, and even burning them. But after a long debate it decided that it had no moral right to condemn five thousand Jews to death by not distributing what then appeared to be ‘life permits’.
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On October 4, the Kovno ghetto was raided, and fifteen hundred Jews who had no work permits were taken to the Ninth Fort and murdered. But from the hospital in Kovno, no one was taken away, even though none of them had work permits. Instead, the building was locked, and then set on fire. Patients, doctors and nurses were burned alive. ‘Even now,’ Zalman Grinberg recalled three and a half years later, ‘I can see the blazing hospital. It seems like a bad dream, but, alas, it was true!’
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On October 6, two days after the slaughter in Kovno, a similar selection was made in the Dvinsk ghetto, where only those with work permits were spared. The rest, the majority of those in the ghetto, were led away, no one knew whither. The selection took two days. At the end of the first day, a woman, who had been among those led away, returned. ‘She was hysterical and uncontrollable,’ Maja Zarch later recalled. ‘When she eventually quietened down, it transpired that she had been in a group that had been taken for slaughter. She described in detail what had happened. She had fallen into the mass grave and had been taken for dead but had escaped from among the corpses….’
The selection in Dvinsk continued on October 7, when the woman who had escaped from the pit on the previous day was among those taken away, ‘never to return’. Maja Zarch also recalled how a woman, returning from work, could not find her son. ‘For days she walked around—a woman possessed, talking to her son’s hat, clutching it, kissing it.’
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In Rowne, on October 7, more than seventeen thousand Jews were driven from their homes, marched towards the pits, and then ordered to undress. A Jewish eye-witness, Major Zalcman, later recalled that those who refused to undress had their eyes gouged out. Zalcman also recalled that as the Chief Rabbi of Rowne, Ma-Jafit, was telling his congregation that their deaths would not be in vain, he was shot dead by an SS man.
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It was the second day of the Jewish harvest festival of Succoth.
On October 10, three days after the Rowne massacre, Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, commander of the German Sixth Army, issued a directive in which he explained that ‘the most essential aim of the campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist system
is the complete crushing of its means of power, and the extermination of Asiatic influences in the European region’. His directive continued:
THE VOLHYNIA
This poses tasks for the troops that go beyond the one-sided routine of conventional soldiering. In the Eastern region, the soldier is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war, but also the bearer of an inexorable national idea and the avenger of all bestialities inflicted upon the German people and its racial kin.
Therefore the soldier must have full understanding for the necessity of a severe but just atonement on Jewish sub-humanity.
An ‘additional aim in this’, Reichenau went on to explain, ‘is to nip in the bud any revolts in the rear of the army, which, as experience proves, have always been instigated by Jews’.
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Reichenau’s directive was copied by General von Manstein, who issued it in the Crimean city of Simferopol nine days before the killing of 4,500 Jews at the Crimean port of Kerch, and three weeks before the murder of 14,300 Jews in Simferopol itself.
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Two days after Reichenau issued his directive against ‘Jewish sub-humanity’, was Hoshana Rabba, the Great Prayer, a day which is considered by many Jews to be a day of judgement. An eyewitness of that day, October 12, in the Eastern Galician town of Stanislawow, recalled four years later how, that morning, the Jewish streets ‘were suddenly surrounded by the Gestapo men and Ukrainian militia’, the latter summoned from the whole district, and how ‘old and young, men and women, were driven out of their houses to the town hall squares’. His account continued:
I felt quite certain that my labour card would serve to shield and save me. So I went out and even took a pregnant woman with me in order to pass her through as my wife. (Her husband had fled with the Red Army.) According to the official announcement all forced workers and their wives were to be released.
No sooner had I entered the street than I was attacked by a gang of Ukrainian young ruffians shouting wildly, ‘Look! There are still Jews!’ They whistled. The Ukrainian militia appeared and began dragging me along with all the other Jews.
A blind old women aged 104 who lived in my courtyard was also dragged along, and no attention was paid to all her entreaties to be allowed to remain where she was.
I was ordered to carry the old woman on my back, while at my side strode two companions. One pushed me along with his rifle butt and shouted that I was going too slowly and idly; while the other kept on hitting me for being in such a hurry.
Beaten and bleeding, I dragged my way to the town hall square. Not a single Jew of all those I saw there was uninjured. They were wounded and bruised, and blood was running on all sides. From the square they were led off in separate groups. To begin with they were loaded on huge lorries which afterwards returned empty. Then the Germans and Ukrainians began to hurry up very much indeed and ordered them all to line up in three rows, each three men deep.
These rows began to drag along, covering a length of three kilometres and containing many thousand Jews. We were driven to the road behind the town, towards the new Jewish cemetery at Batory. When we approached we understood the full horror of the situation. The sound of shots reached us from the cemetery.
We were driven into the cemetery with cruel, brutal beatings. I saw that the Germans were driving the people standing on the one side towards the graves, while those standing on the other were being permitted merely to stand and watch. Then came an order, ‘Hand over all valuables!’ I used the tumult and hubbub, and crossed over to the side of the watchers.
The German stormtroops together with the Ukrainian police took up their stations beside the machine guns. Fifteen of the stormtroops shot, and fifteen others loaded the guns. The Jews leapt naked into the graves. The bullets hit them while jumping.
Three graves had been dug there. The work of excavation had lasted for about a fortnight. It had been done by young Ukrainians who were members of the Petlura organisation. The Germans then explained to the Jewish Council that the Ukrainians were preparing stations for anti-aircraft against Bolshevik air attack. Nobody even imagined that six thousand Jews would meet with their deaths at this place.
The graves were deep, the naked people fell one on the other,
whether dead or alive. The heap of bodies grew higher and higher. I stood and gazed. Early in the morning the murderers had stationed a group of Jews to watch the scene. This was far worse than death, and many people of our group, who could bear it no longer, burst out with shouts, ‘Take us and murder us as well!’ And the murderers satisfied them, and began dragging people from our ranks off to the graves as well.
My turn came. The only thing I had in mind was to reach the grave as soon as possible so that an end might be made of it all. ‘Take off your clothes!’ I was ordered, and quickly stood naked. Three of us approached the grave. There were shots. Two of us fell. Suddenly something strange happened. There came an order, ‘Cease fire!’ The stormtroopers standing ready stopped their shooting. I stood astonished and confused. One of the murderers approached me and said, ‘Jew, you are lucky. You are not going to die. Dress again, quickly.’
The graves were filled to overflowing. All round lay the dead, strangled, trodden underfoot, wounded. Those of us who remained alive felt ourselves to be infinitely unfortunate. There were about one thousand seven hundred of us left in the cemetery grounds. We were afraid to move from the spot. One of those in command of the action announced that ‘the action was completed’, and that the survivors might return to their homes.
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More than two years had passed since the German invasion of Poland in 1939. In the East, more than a hundred days had passed since the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The victorious German war machine destroyed whatever it wished to destroy: Polish intellectuals, Soviet prisoners-of-war, Yugoslav partisans, French resistance fighters, each felt the full force of superior power. The Jews, scattered among many nations, few of them sympathetic, were singled out for murder and abuse. Reprisals, and the threat of reprisals, inhibited Jew and non-Jew alike, even the bravest. In Warsaw, on October 15, the Germans imposed ‘punishment by death’ on all Jews who left the ghetto without permission, and on any person ‘who deliberately offers a hiding place to such Jews’.
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These were not idle threats: later that same month, as a punitive measure and as a warning, German policemen drowned thirty Jewish children in the water-filled clay pits near Okopowa Street.
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‘Write and record!’
What Goering had called the ‘final solution’ in May 1941 was under active discussion five months later in Berlin, Cracow and Prague. ‘As far as Jews are concerned,’ Hans Frank told the ministers of the General Government in Cracow on 9 October 1941, ‘I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done away with one way or another.’
1
On the following day, at a meeting in Prague at which Adolf Eichmann was present, the notes of the discussion recorded that ‘the Führer wants the Jews to leave the centre of Germany and this matter has to be dealt with immediately’. It was the transport problem, the meeting was told, that ‘constitutes a difficulty’.
2
That difficulty was being overcome. On October 16 the first of twenty trains left Germany ‘for the East’. By November 4 they had all completed their journey, taking 19,837 Jews to the Lodz ghetto. One of these trains, with 512 Jews, came from Luxembourg. Five trains, with 5,000 Jews in all, came from Vienna, a similar number from Prague, and 4,187, in four trains, from Berlin. Other trains came from Cologne, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Dusseldorf.
3
As in 1933 and again in 1938, many German Jews responded to the renewal of persecution by committing suicide. Hildegarde Henschel, who was among the deportees from Germany to Lodz in October 1941, later recalled not only the suicides, as many as 1,200, but also the efforts of the German authorities, often successful, to revive those who had attempted suicide. It was these Jews, she noted, whom the Germans deported first.
4
The arrival of the ‘Western European’ Jews in the Lodz ghetto made a considerable impression: six months later, one of the ghetto chroniclers recalled how, as the deportees arrived: