Authors: Martin Gilbert
In the days that followed, the Jewish community pressed the Germans for news of where the old and sick had been taken. ‘At the moment they’re in transit camps,’ they were told by the Gestapo, ‘and from there they’ll be sent to the permanent convalescent homes. As we don’t know in advance who’s being sent where, you’ll have to be patient for a few days, until everything is in order.’
Repeated enquiries could not locate those who had been deported. Then the Jewish community were informed that ‘a few of the old people had died of heart failure, brain fever or pneumonia’. The rest of the deportees were said to be in a town called Padernice, ‘and were in good health’. But, as Dr Gross later recalled, ‘No map showed where Padernice might be, because it did not exist.’ Dr Gross continued:
Little by little we understood that we would never see the dead again, unless we followed in their footsteps. We lived in a state of constant dread, for we could see the sword hanging over our own heads and knew that we would go the same way sooner or later. The Germans were exploiting our working power, but would clearly exterminate us too. The hermetically sealed gas-wagons which were first tried out on our folk were about to commence the great action of ‘purifying’ Europe of the Jews, which was afterwards perfected in the large extermination camps.
The old people, who had been choked by exhaust fumes piped back into the lorry through a specially designed tube, had been taken to the neighbouring forest and buried or burnt. It was rumoured that they had been buried near Winiary. ‘Nobody knew precisely,’ Dr Gross later recalled, ‘because the roads had been strictly blocked on that day, but it was clear that the action had taken place near Kalisz, for the lorries returned within three hours.’
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A new policy was emerging: to deport, and to gas, and to do so unobserved by passers-by or curious soldiers: to take the killings off the streets and away from the environs of the towns and cities. It was to take several months before this policy could be put into
effect. But with the German army at the gates of Moscow, British forces on the defensive in Egypt, and the United States still neutral, the Germans had time enough. Meanwhile, further evidence of the unsatisfactory nature of visible execution reached Berlin in the form of a letter of protest from the Commissioner of the Territory of Slutsk, who reported, first by telephone and then by letter, the statements of German troops in Slutsk during a round-up on October 27. Jews and White Russians had been ‘beaten with clubs and rifle butts’ in the streets; rings were pulled off fingers ‘in the most brutal manner’; and in different streets were ‘the corpses of Jews who had been shot’. The action, he added, ‘bordered already on sadism’, the town itself being ‘a picture of horror’.
The recipient of this letter, Wilhelm Kube, the Commissioner General of White Russia, sent this letter on to Berlin, to the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg. ‘Peace and order cannot be maintained in White Russia with methods of that sort,’ Kube wrote. And he added: ‘To have buried alive seriously wounded people, who then worked their way out of their graves again, is such extreme beastliness that this incident as such must be reported to the Führer and the Reich Marshal.’
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The evolving plans for murder by gas would ensure that most future killings would be done behind a mask of secrecy, by methods which far fewer people would have to see, and in circumstances which would reduce to a minimum the chance of disgust or discovery. In anticipation of the new method, individual Jews were now refused permission to emigrate, even within regions under German influence. In refusing an application from a Jewish woman, Lily Satzkis, to move from Nazi Germany to Vichy France, Adolf Eichmann noted on October 28: ‘in view of the approaching final solution of the European Jewry problem, one has to prevent the immigration of Jews into the unoccupied area of France.
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Meanwhile, the shootings in the East continued, despite the advancing plans for a less public method. At each ‘selection’ in the Eastern ghettos, as in Kovno, the Germans had imposed a system of work permits, whereby those who had a permit were exempt, together with their families, from the selection. As an added cruelty, the German authorities in each ghetto imposed upon the Jews themselves, through the Jewish Councils, the burden of saying who should receive the work permits and who should not.
One such incident took place in Kovno on October 26. On that day, when the Chairman of the Jewish Council was ordered to post a notice in the streets of the ghetto that two days later, October 28, all the inhabitants of the ghetto—men, women and children, including the aged and sick—were to gather in the Democracy Square, and that no Jew might remain at home at that time. Such work permits as existed were to be given out by the Council itself.
The head of the Council, Dr Elkes, immediately sent four people to the home of the Kovno rabbi, Rav Avrohom Dov Ber Kahana-Shapira, to ask whether they must obey the German order or not; how could the Council give out the passes, thus giving life to a few, but condemning many others to death?
It was late at night when the four emissaries came to the rabbi’s house. The rabbi, seriously ailing, was already asleep. Despite this, his wife woke him and told him about the delegation. Upon hearing the gravity of the new decree, he began to tremble in anguish and almost passed out.
Recognizing the responsibility that lay upon him, Rabbi Shapira told the delegation that Jewish history was ‘long and bloody and replete with such evil decrees’. Nevertheless he could not rule on the matter immediately. He needed time. That night he did not return to his bed, but searched through volumes dealing with the relevant aspects of Jewish law. After lengthy deliberation, he ruled as follows: ‘If a decree is issued that a Jewish community be destroyed and a possibility exists to save some part of this community, the leaders of the community are obligated to gird themselves with the courage necessary to act with the fullest sense of the responsibility that lies upon them and to take every possible measure to save as many as can be saved.’
This meant that the Council should give out the work permits. Though many without these permits would die, the head of the Council had ‘to take courage’, the rabbi asserted, and distribute them in such a way as to save as many lives as possible: giving them, where possible, to those with the largest families, all the members of which would thus be exempted from the deportation.
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The round-up in Kovno took place on October 28. Dr Aharon Peretz, who was present in Democracy Square that morning, later recalled the events of the day:
…at six in the morning it was still dark. But from all alleys, from the ghetto, you could see people pouring to the place destined for them to gather. Mothers with prams, pushing children. There was snow falling. And they all gathered in that square—twenty-seven thousand people.
The Council was told that they want to select the working people to increase their rations. And the second part, those who do not work will be sent somewhere else, and will be given other food rations. After the previous actions, we did not believe. But it is the nature of a human being always to believe that he will remain alive, he will be spared. Some twenty-seven thousand people gathered, not knowing their fate.
All of a sudden a truck arrived and an SS man, Rauca, jumped off. In the ghetto he was known. He mounted a small hill, he was a tall man, he looked like a racehorse—and started to pass the Jews for inspection. We did not know what the game meant. But the place, the centre where he stood—we started grasping the game. He would separate with the movement of his finger—right or left. To the left, we saw the healthier, the younger, less the children. They were accompanied by Jewish policemen.
To the other side, there were people with many children, the older, in rags, tired, and so on. And when we realized that they were received by Germans and Lithuanians, beaten up and treated entirely differently, we understood that this was the side of death, and the other was the side for those to live. This was the power of this regime and rule. They would divide the people. And in this way, also break their resistance. Because everybody hoped to live.
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Rauca continued all day with the selection, clutching a leather whip with metal tips, drinking coffee, and munching sandwiches, his dog at his feet. One by one, as people stepped forward, his voice could be heard calling, ‘You left, you right.’ For Rauca, recalled Leon Bauminger, ‘Right was death and left was life.’ When Bauminger’s turn came, Rauca stared, ‘for what seemed like an eternity’, at the blond hair of the twenty-eight-year-old Cracovian, then waved him to the left.
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No one who was sent to the left, to life, and who survived the torments of the next three and a half years, has forgotten that
moment. Vera Elyashiv, then eleven years old, reached Democracy Square with her father and her grandparents as SS men, ‘cursing, abusing and hitting about with the butts of their rifles’, sorted the thousands of Jews into long narrow columns. ‘Then a terrible and incomprehensible thing happened,’ she later wrote. ‘Grandfather and grandmother were thrown to the right and father and I to the left. Of all the terrible moments that were to follow, this was one of the worst for me. I don’t think I’ll ever forget their big helpless eyes. They kept turning to us with outstretched arms and their lips were moving but no words came out.’
Vera Elyashiv’s account continued:
Two Gestapo officers pushed them brutally away. Only when I saw them joining the other separated group I started to cry. Father told me not to move and he ran to the officer. He returned after a few minutes, his face bleeding. I shut my eyes and let myself be dragged on by him. The first snow started to come down. Large wet flakes covered our shoulders, heads and faces.
That day ten thousand people were taken away by the SS.
We, the remaining, were kept in the square until the evening. When eventually the orders were given to leave, many dead bodies remained behind on the snowy ground.
Father and I returned ‘home’ to the tiny flatlet we had in the poor Jewish quarter of Kovno, which had become the ghetto. All the cupboards and drawers were open and turned out. Father undressed me and put me to bed—he didn’t talk to me that night. I slept in grandmother’s bed. There was no need any more to sleep two in a bed. I squeezed grandmother’s pillow in my arms and cried myself into sleep.
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Those Kovno Jews who were sent by Rauca to the right could still not believe that they had really been marked out for death. ‘That morning in Democracy Square,’ a Lithuanian doctor, Helen Kutorgene, noted in her diary, ‘nobody suspected that a bitter fate awaited them. They thought that they were being moved to other apartments.’
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They were indeed taken, not to the Ninth Fort, but to the houses of the small ghetto. On the night of October 29, Dr Peretz has recalled, everyone sent to the small ghetto ‘was trying to find a better place, there was better order, because they thought they
would stay there’.
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Then, at four in the morning, all those in the small ghetto were ordered to assemble again. It was still dark. But with the dawn a rumour began, that prisoners had been digging ‘deep ditches’ at the Ninth Fort, and by the time those who had been sent to the small ghetto were led away towards the fort, Helen Kutorgene noted in her diary, ‘it was already clear to everybody that this was death’.
Dr Kutorgene added that once the Jews whom Rauca had sent to the right realized where they were being sent:
They broke out crying, wailed, screamed. Some tried to escape on the way there but they were shot dead. Many bodies remained in the fields. At the fort the condemned were stripped of their clothes, and in groups of three hundred they were forced into the ditches. First they threw in the children. The women were shot at the edge of the ditch, after that it was the turn of the men. Many were covered while they were still alive. All the men doing the shooting were drunk. I was told all this by an acquaintance who heard it from a German soldier, an eye-witness, who wrote to his Catholic wife: ‘Yesterday I became convinced that there is no God. If there were, He would not allow such things to happen.’
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The massacre had been carried out by German SS men and Lithuanian police. On return from the killing, one of the Lithuanians ‘boasted’—as a Jew, Alter Galperin later recalled—‘that he had dragged small Jewish children by the hair, stabbing them with the edge of his bayonet, and throwing them half alive into pits’. The smallest children ‘he just threw into the pit alive, because to kill all of them first is too much work’.
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One of the few survivors was a twelve-year-old boy. It was only when he managed to return to the main ghetto on October 30 that those in the ghetto realized the full horror. Avraham Golub, an assistant in the Jewish Council, later recalled how the boy, ‘covered in dirt and smeared with blood’, stumbled into the Council office. Golub’s account continued:
…he reported how everyone was forced to strip and made to march in groups of one hundred to the edge of freshly dug pits. The guards fired on each group as they stepped forward.
Some were only wounded but they too fell into the deep pits and were covered with a layer of earth.
The boy was with his mother, was covered by her, and so was not hit [by bullets]. The boy and his mother were destined to be the second layer of bodies from the top of the grave.
His mother had embraced him and covered him. She bent forward and fell into the pit with him, so that he was not suffocated by the layer of earth poured on top.
When it was dark, the boy slowly moved to the edge of the pit. With great effort he pushed away the bodies around him and crawled out.
There he was able to see that the earth which covered the pit was moving, meaning that many others were still alive in the pit but were unable to save themselves.
Under darkness he escaped back to the ghetto and was later smuggled out. No one knows if he is alive today.
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