Authors: Martin Gilbert
A few women also managed to survive the massacre. ‘Some tried to escape from the transport,’ Aharon Peretz later recalled. ‘I was asked to go to a neighbouring house, where there were women with dum-dum bullets in their bodies.’
32
The number of those murdered was recorded, once again, in the precise statistics of the Einsatzkommando: ‘2,007 Jewish men, 2,920 Jewish women, 4,273 Jewish children.’ There was the added comment, ‘cleaning the ghetto of superfluous Jews’. Of the total death toll of 9,200, nearly half were children.
33
An SS officer, Captain Jordan, now promised the Jewish Council that the killing was over. ‘You have nothing to be afraid of in the future; you will work and live; you will work for the German army, and we will take care of you!’ With that, Dr Zalman Grinberg recalled, ‘he throws 10,000 marks on the table and states that this was the first payment to the ghetto for the work they will do.’ Nobody trusts the German promise. ‘However,’ Grinberg noted, ‘the coming months and years proved him to be true. Life in the ghetto became hard, everyone being forced to fulfil extreme physical labour.’
34
Kovno had become a ‘working ghetto’.
***
Kovno Jews began to work in the German shops and factories. In Vilna, the same prospect was in store, but not before one final
‘action’, as the Germans described it. This particular ‘action’ began on November 3, and lasted for three days, during which more than a thousand Jews were killed. When the ‘action’ was over, a group of rabbis told the head of the Jewish Council, Jacob Gens, that he had no right to select Jews and hand them over to the Germans. Gens answered that by surrendering the few, he was rescuing the others from extinction. The rabbis replied, however, with a ruling of Maimonides, ‘Better be all killed than one soul of Israel be surrendered.’
35
Following the November killings, there were twelve thousand Jews in Vilna with valid work passes, and at least three thousand in hiding. Searches for those without passes continued until the end of the year, and those caught were killed at Ponar. But Vilna, like Kovno before it, had now become a ‘working ghetto’. ‘Days began which we called days of civilization,’ Meir Dvorjetzky later recalled. ‘The large actions stopped.’
36
As soon as they stopped, the Jews found help in an unexpected quarter: a German army sergeant, Anton Schmidt, who helped to smuggle Jews out of Vilna in military trucks. These Jews went to Bialystok, just inside the border of the Greater Germany, believing that this would enable them to escape destruction. Schmidt, who was from Austria, was later caught, and executed.
37
Gens in Vilna, Dr Elkes in Kovno, and Ghetto Elders in a hundred scattered towns and villages throughout the Eastern Territories, sought, in their different ways, to preserve, amid the slaughter, the precarious balance between work and death. Each had to decide how best to serve the needs of his community. At Kleck, on October 31, two members of the Jewish Council, Elisser and Lipe Mishelevski, had been shot together with two hundred other Jews: the ‘crime’ of these Council members was to have tried to make contact with non-Jews outside the ghetto, in an attempt to obtain more food for the ghetto.
38
In Minsk, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Eliyahu Myshkin, was active in helping hundreds of young Jews to escape to the forest. He was killed during an ‘action’ in Minsk on November 7, when twelve thousand Jews were slaughtered in pits outside the city.
The heads of several of the Jewish Council departments in Minsk—Rudicer of the economic section, Dulski of the housing section, Goldin of the workshop section, and Serebianski, the police commander
—had all cooperated with resistance groups, providing clothing, shoes, hiding places and false documents. Serebianski went so far as to hire members of the resistance into the ghetto police. Also active in helping the resistance in Minsk were two of the secretaries in the labour department, Mira Strogin and Sara Levin.
39
The massacre at Minsk on November 7 was followed within three days by the arrival in the city of the first German Jews, one thousand who had been deported from Hamburg. ‘They felt themselves as pioneers who were brought to settle the East,’ one eyewitness later recalled.
40
The deportees from Hamburg were followed within days by more than six thousand deportees from Frankfurt, Bremen, and the Rhineland. On November 18 a train arrived from Berlin. The twenty-two-year-old Haim Berendt was among the deportees from Berlin. On reaching Minsk, he later recalled, ‘the carriages were opened and they started beating us up, driving us out of the carriages in a hurry and, within a moment, there was complete chaos. He who succeeded in getting out of the door was beaten up. Women, children and men.’
The Berlin deportees were taken beyond the ghetto of Minsk Jews to a special ghetto for the Jews of Germany, known as ‘Ghetto Hamburg’. There, they became a part of the Jewish labour force in Minsk.
41
German Jews were also deported to Riga and Kovno. On November 27 the first of nineteen trains left the Reich for Riga: it came from Berlin. Even as this train was on its way from Berlin, the Riga ghetto was the object of a massive raid, during which 10,600 Jews were seized, taken to pits in the nearby Rumbuli forest, and shot. When the train from Berlin arrived a few days later, most of the thousand German Jews were likewise taken out to Rumbuli, and killed.
42
Then, in a second, three-day raid on the Riga ghetto, from December 7 to December 9, a further twenty-five thousand Riga Jews were killed, among them the eighty-one-year-old doyen of Jewish historians, Simon Dubnov.
According to one account, Dubnov was murdered by a Gestapo officer who had formerly been one of his pupils.
43
Another account tells of how, sick and with a fever, with enfeebled legs, he could not move quickly enough out of the ghetto, and was shot in the back by a Latvian guard. According to this account, Dubnov’s last words, as
he fell, were, ‘Schreibt un farschreibt!’, ‘Write and record!’
44
This exhortation in Yiddish was typical of Dubnov, the lover of historical record, and the firm believer in the Yiddish culture of Eastern European Jewry, a culture which was being swept away.
With this second Rumbuli massacre, eighty per cent of Riga Jewry had been murdered. The few survivors were put into a forced labour camp, ‘the little ghetto’, the women being imprisoned separately from the men.
45
The Riga ghetto was ready for any further deportees from Germany.
The subsequent deportees from Germany, beginning with 714 who left Nuremberg on November 29, and 1,200 sent from Stuttgart on December 1, were sent to labour camps, or to the Riga ghetto: in all, seventeen thousand more Jews were to reach Riga, and forced labour, that winter.
46
A further fifteen thousand German Jews were sent to Kovno, principally from Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Breslau and Frankfurt. An eye-witness in Kovno, Dr Aharon Peretz, later recalled how, as the deportees were being led along the road which went past the ghetto, towards the Ninth Fort, they could be heard asking the guards, ‘Is the camp still far?’ They had been told they were being sent to a work camp. But, Peretz added, ‘We know where that road led. It led to the Ninth Fort, to the prepared pits.’ But first, the Jews from Germany were kept for three days in underground cellars, with ice-covered walls, and without food or drink.
47
Only then, frozen and starving, were they ordered to undress, taken to the pits, and shot.
In the suitcases of the murdered deportees were later found printed announcements, urging them to prepare for a difficult winter. For this reason, some had brought little heating stoves with them. Later, the Jews inside the Kovno ghetto heard of the resistance of these German Jews when they reached the Ninth Fort. ‘They did not want to undress,’ Peretz explained, ‘and they struggled against the Germans.’
48
But it was a hopeless struggle and the killing of these deportees was recorded by the Einsatzkommando with its accustomed precision: on November 25, 1,159 Jews, 1,600 Jewesses and 175 Jewish children, ‘settlers from Berlin, Munich and Frankfurton-Main’; and four days later, 693 Jewish men, 1,155 Jewesses and 152 Jewish children, ‘settlers from Vienna and Breslau’.
49
Amid this slaughter, a Lithuanian, Dr Petras Baublis, the head of
the Infants’ House in Kovno, risked his own life and the safety of his family by offering to smuggle Jewish children out of the ghetto and to hide them in his Infants’ House. To ensure their safety, Dr Baublis, who had a number of close friends among the Lithuanian Catholic priesthood, obtained blank birth certificate forms, which the priests then agreed to authenticate with church seals and signatures, stating that this was a Christian child.
Among the Jewish children saved by Baublis was the two-year-old Ariela Abramovich, whose father later testified that he knew of at least another seven children similarly saved. Another Jewish child, Gitele Mylner, who had been born only a few months before the massacre, was also handed to Baublis by her parents: he gave her the name Berute Iovayshayte, and a certificate stamped by the church authorities stating that she was a Christian child.
50
No Jewish community, however small, no Jewish family, however remote, was safe from the questing killers. In a small village east of Chernigov, only one Jewish couple lived. Yakov Gorodetsky and his wife Dvoira were peasants. Forty-three years later their grandson, also Yakov, spoke of how his grandparents, remembering as they did the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918, could not envisage in 1941 the barbarism that was about to be unleashed. Fortunately, their three sons were in safer regions when invasion came.
In June 1941 Dvoira Gorodetsky was fifty-nine years old, her husband Yakov, sixty-two. Both were murdered on October 30. All three of their sons fought in the Red Army, and survived the war.
51
***
Throughout the late autumn and early winter of 1941, details had filtered through to the West of many eastern executions. On November 14, in a message to the
Jewish Chronicle
on its centenary, Winston Churchill gave public recognition to the Jewish suffering. ‘None has suffered more cruelly than the Jew’, he wrote, ‘the unspeakable evils wrought on the bodies and spirits of men by Hitler and his vile regime. The Jew bore the brunt of the Nazis’ first onslaught upon the citadels of freedom and human dignity. He has borne and continues to bear a burden that might have seemed to be
beyond endurance. He has not allowed it to break his spirit: he has never lost the will to resist.’
Churchill’s message continued: ‘Assuredly in the day of victory the Jews’ sufferings and his part in the struggle will not be forgotten. Once again, at the appointed time, he will see vindicated those principles of righteousness which it was the glory of his fathers to proclaim to the world. Once again it will be shown that, though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.’
52
***
Inside the Warsaw ghetto, the deaths from starvation were accelerated by the winter cold. ‘The most fearful sight is that of freezing children,’ Ringelblum noted in mid-November. ‘Little children with bare feet, bare knees and torn clothing stand dumbly in the street weeping. Tonight, the 14th, I heard a tot of three or four yammering. The child will probably be found frozen to death tomorrow morning, a few hours off.’ Six weeks earlier, Ringelblum recalled, when the first snow had fallen, some seventy children were found frozen to death on the steps of ruined houses.’
53
On the morning of November 17, Warsaw Jewry was shocked to learn of the death sentence carried out on eight Warsaw Jews, for leaving the ghetto ‘without permission’. Six of those sentences were women. All had been caught after crossing into Aryan Warsaw in search of food. ‘One of the victims,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary, ‘a young girl not quite eighteen, asked the Jewish policeman who was present at the execution to tell her family that she had been sent to a concentration camp and would not be seeing them for some time. Another young girl cried out to God imploring Him to accept her as the expiatory sacrifice for her people and to let her be the final victim.’
Kaplan noted that it was the Jewish police who had been ordered to tie the hands and cover the eyes of those about to be executed. The two men among them refused, however, to be bound or blindfolded. Their wish was granted. ‘The execution squad’, Kaplan wrote, ‘was composed of Polish policemen. After carrying out their orders, they wept bitterly.’
54
‘All past experience’, Ringelblum noted, ‘pales in the face of the fact that eight people were shot to death for crossing the threshold of the ghetto.’ The execution ‘has set all Warsaw trembling’. A few
SS officers had attended, ‘calmly smoking cigarettes and behaving cynically all through the execution’. Three members of the Jewish police were also present; one of them, Jakub Lejkin, was said to have ‘distinguished himself with his zeal in dragging the condemned from their cells’.
One of the six executed women was a beggar, another was a woman with three children. ‘It is said’, Ringelblum added, ‘that the prisoners bore themselves calmly.’
55
The deaths from cold continued: ‘In the streets’, Mary Berg noted on November 22, ‘frozen human corpses are an increasingly frequent sight’. Sometimes a mother ‘cuddles a child frozen to death, and tries to warm the inanimate little body. Sometimes a child huddles against his mother, thinking that she is asleep and trying to awaken her, while, in fact, she is dead’.
56
Inside the Warsaw ghetto, news of a horrific kind arrived during November. Hearing it, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, summoned the leading members of the underground to hear the messenger. His name was Heniek Grabowski. ‘I came to Czerniakow,’ Zivia Lubetkin later recalled. ‘It was in the evening, there was no electricity, and Heniek told his story.’ Grabowski had been sent by the Jews of Warsaw to Vilna, and he had returned.