Authors: Martin Gilbert
It was not to Barlogi railway station, however, but to a small villa known as the ‘Palace’ or the ‘Mansion’, on the road to Chelmno, that the seven hundred Kolo deportees were brought; and kept there overnight.
On the following morning, December 8, eighty of the Kolo Jews were transferred to a special van. The van set off towards a clearing in the Chelmno woods, a few miles away, on the River Ner. By the time the journey was over, the eighty Jews were dead, gassed by exhaust fumes channelled back into the van. Their bodies were thrown out of the back of the van, and it returned to the Mansion. After eight or nine journeys, all seven hundred Jews from this first day’s deportation from Kolo had been gassed.
76
For four more days, until December 11, the lorries came to Kolo. Each day up to a thousand Jews were deported, as they believed, to the ‘East’ to agricultural work, or to work in factories. Michael Podklebnik later recalled how, on the last day, when it was the turn of the sick Jews of Kolo to be deported, the drivers were advised ‘to drive carefully and slowly’.
77
All went to Chelmno, the sick and the able-bodied alike, men and women; and all were gassed there on the morning after their arrival. The new scheme was now in being: the deportation of whole communities ‘to work’ in the so-called ‘East’, a deception which was followed by the immediate murder of the community by gas.
***
On 7 December 1941, as the first seven hundred Jews were being deported to the death camp at Chelmno, Japanese aircraft attacked the United States Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Unknown at the time either to the Allies or to the Jews of Europe, Roosevelt’s day that would ‘live in infamy’ was also the first day of the ‘final solution’.
The news of Pearl Harbor reached the Jews of German-occupied Europe within forty-eight hours. ‘Most people believe that the war will not last long now,’ Mary Berg noted in her Warsaw diary on 9 December 1941, ‘and that the Allies’ victory is certain.’ America’s entry into the war, she added, ‘has inspired the hundreds of thousands of dejected Jews in the ghetto with a new breath of hope’.
1
This hope was tragically misplaced, On December 10, just over one thousand Jews who had been deported from seven villages to the ‘rural’ ghetto at Kowale Panskie were deported yet again, to Chelmno, to be pushed into the vans which had carried the Jews of Kolo to their death.
2
Four days later, on December 14, all 975 Jews from the nearby riverside village of Dabie were likewise driven to Chelmno, kept overnight in the Palace, and gassed in the vans on the morning of December 15.
The Einsatzkommando killings also continued unabated: 14,300 Jews were murdered in the Crimean city of Simferopol on December 13, 14 and 15.
None of this was known in the Warsaw ghetto, beset by its own troubles, starvation, executions and random shootings. On December 14, Ringelblum recorded, at a Jewish funeral, a German policeman ‘suddenly, without warning, began shooting at the funeral procession’. Two of the mourners, Ringelblum noted, ‘fell dead on the spot’, one of them ‘Mrs Runda, the director of the old people’s home’. Five Jews, including a child of ten, were wounded. ‘Jews have no peace,’ Ringelblum commented, ‘even when accompanying their dead to eternal rest.’
3
In Paris, on the following day, more than forty Polish-born Jews were shot for resistance, among them Nysin Alterleib, Simon Nadel and Israel Bursztyn, each of whom had been
born in Warsaw forty-five years before, and the twenty-five-year-old Albert Borenheim, also born in Warsaw.
4
December 15, the day of these executions in Paris, marked the first day of the Jewish festival of Chanukkah, during the eight days of which Jews recall the triumph of the Maccabees more than two thousand years earlier. That same morning, in Warsaw, fifteen Jews were shot to death in the courtyard of the ghetto prison, ‘within earshot’, Chaim Kaplan noted, ‘of thousands of people’. His account continued:
The cries of the victims in the prison courtyard were heard by the throng outside. Rage and frustration turned into mass weeping. Other prisoners locked inside the prison began to shout and beat their heads against the walls. There is nothing more nerve-shattering than the concerted weeping of a great crowd. The wailing at this hour in history was an echo of the weeping and lamentation decreed upon the generations of the people of Israel. It was a protest against the loss of our human rights. The sentence was carried out by Polish policemen in the presence of rabbis and other representatives of the Jews. The Poles fired the shots—and they too wept. They had been given no choice either.
5
In the East, the Einsatzkommando continued its work throughout December. After the Channukah festival, it was the Jews in one of the smallest ghettos, that in Radom, near Lida, who were its target. Avraham Aviel was a witness to what occurred:
…suddenly a group of Germans arrived. They wore special uniforms and came from Lida. They were on motorcycles. They went from house to house and were searching for people who were not local residents. And they did find about forty Jewish refugees who had been living for quite some time in Radom. They took them outside of town, up on a hill about one and a half kilometers out of the town. We heard shots immediately. Thereupon a few moments later they returned and gave instructions that we had to go out and bury these men. I was among these people. We had been living at the edge of the ghetto near the hill. We were driven out there and we buried these bodies. That was the first time I had ever seen so
much Jewish blood spilled. It was very cold then. There was frost. The ground was frozen….
6
In Riga, a forty-year-old Latvian, Yanis Lipke, who worked as a loader in the German air force storehouse in the city, was charged by the Germans to take a group of Jews from the ghetto each morning to the storehouse, and to supervise their work. Outraged by the massacres he had witnessed in the first weeks of the German occupation, Lipke was determined to find ways of helping as many Jews as possible. During his daily journey into the ghetto, he would smuggle in food and medicine. He also befriended two Latvian drivers, working for the German air force, Karl Yankovsky and Janis Briedys, with whom he planned to rescue as many Jews as possible from the ghetto.
On December 15, with the help of Briedys, Lipke smuggled ten Jews out of the ghetto, finding them hiding places in the cellars of houses belonging to his friends, and hiding four Jews in his own house.
When a further six Jews were smuggled out of the ghetto, Lipke took three of them to his home. It was then that he decided to build a special hiding place underneath a shed near his house. Bringing logs and cement, and building a henhouse above the entrance to the hide-out, Lipke built a secure haven, helped in his task by his wife Iohanna and their eldest son, Alfred.
7
Each week, more Jews reached Riga from the Reich. One of the arrivals in December was Joseph Carlebach, the Chief Rabbi of Hamburg and Altona. Among the deportees on the same train was Josef Katz, a twenty-three-year-old Jew from Lubeck, who later recalled:
A tall, thin man with a long, flowing beard stands before SS Major Lange and the other SS officers. With his furrowed face and stooped back, he looks like one of the Jewish patriarchs of old. It seems as if the whole burden of the past centuries were resting on his shoulders.
‘Stand up straight, buddy, when I’m talking to you,’ the Major tells him sharply. ‘What’s your occupation?’
‘Chief Rabbi,’ the Jew says clearly and proudly, eyeing the Major from top to bottom.
‘Ha, ha, ha! Chief Rabbi! Just see you don’t open up shop here again. You hear, Chief Rabbi?’
No reply comes from the lips of the Jew.
‘Did you hear me, Judas?’
Still no reply.
Suddenly the SS Lieutenant-Colonel reaches out and strikes the Chief Rabbi full in the face with his fist.
8
In the Lodz ghetto, Jewish doctors worked in a special Gypsy section which had been attached to the ghetto, and into which several thousand German, Austrian and Czech Gypsies had been deported. One of these doctors, Dr Dubski, himself a recent deportee from Prague, died on December 17 while performing a consultation in the Gypsy camp. Dubski died of the spotted typhus which he was trying to treat.
9
A second Jewish doctor, Karol Boetim, also from Prague, died on December 29 of spotted typhus, likewise contracted while he was working in the Gypsy camp.
10
A third doctor then drew his turn by lot to replace Dr Boetim. The third doctor was the thirty-two-year-old Aron Nikelburg, a paediatrician, who had completed his studies in Berlin before returning to Poland to practise in Warsaw. He was one of thirteen doctors brought from Warsaw to Lodz in May 1941 by Chaim Rumkowski, the Eldest of the Lodz ghetto. Dr Nikelburg died of typhus on 26 January 1942, ‘the latest victim’, the Chronicle noted, ‘of his own profession’.
11
Among the German, Czech and Austrian Jews who had been deported to the Lodz ghetto were 250 who were only Jews according to Nazi designation. Although of Jewish birth, all 250 were baptized Christians. On Christmas Eve they held two services, one for Catholics and the other for Protestants. The Catholic service, attended by forty people, was conducted by Sister Maria Regina Fuhrmann, a Carmelite nun from Vienna, and a Master of Theology. Two Catholic priests, both Jews by birth, were among those at the service.
12
Since November 1941, the German authorities in Lodz had instituted a Jewish postal service, for postcards to be sent out of the ghetto. Hundreds of cards were written by the dwellers of the ghetto, addressed to relatives and friends in Poland and Czechoslovakia. For seven months, until it was suspended on 5 June 1942, this
postal service gave those in the ghetto a sense of security, of a link with the outside world. Most of the cards which have survived never left the ghetto: on them are overprinted messages which indicate that the Germans did not want them to reach their destination. These overprints read: ‘Write legibly!’ ‘dirty!’ ‘Not understandable’, or ‘Hebrew, Yiddish language not allowed’.
13
Some cards, however, did reach their destination. Oskar and Paula Stein, who had been deported from Prague to Lodz in October 1941, wrote three cards to a relative in Prague. Each card reached its destination. ‘Send us as often as possible’, one message read, ‘the maximum permitted amount, because we need money most urgently.’ One of the cards sent to the Steins, however, was sent back to Prague with the rubber stamp notation: ‘Return. At the moment there is no mail delivery on the addressee’s street.’
14
***
The discussion planned by Heydrich for January 2 had been postponed because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States. One of those who would be sending a delegate to Heydrich’s discussion was Hans Frank. On December 16, in Cracow, he explained to his Cabinet the reason for this Berlin meeting. ‘I want to tell you quite frankly,’ he began, ‘the Jews must be done away with in one way or another.’ The war would only be a ‘partial success’, he said, ‘if the Jewish clan survived it’, and he reminded his Cabinet of Hitler’s words in January 1939: ‘Should united Jewry again succeed in provoking a world war, not only will the nations forced into the war by them shed their blood, but the Jew will have found his end in Europe.’
Frank, who had recently visited Berlin, told his colleagues that a ‘great discussion’ would take place at the meeting in January, as a result of which ‘a great Jewish migration will begin, in any case’. His remarks continued:
But what should be done with the Jews? Do you think they will be settled in the Ostland, in villages? We were told in Berlin: ‘Why all this bother? We can do nothing with them either in the Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat. So liquidate them yourselves’.
Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible, in order to maintain here the integral structure of the Reich.
15
The many German officials waiting throughout the Reich for instructions realized that a decision was imminent. Some even assumed that it had already been taken. ‘Clarification of the Jewish question’, Hinrich Lohse was informed from Berlin on December 18, ‘has most likely been achieved by now through verbal discussion.’
16
The killings in the East were not restricted to Jews. On the night of December 21, the bodies of several thousand Soviet prisoners-of-war were laid out by the Germans along a six-kilometre stretch of road in Minsk. On the previous day most of the Russians had been deliberately frozen to death in a march across the open fields. Some had been shot when, in desperation, they had sought some shelter from the fierce wind.
17
In Vilna, when thousands of Jews were driven from the ghetto to the railway junction after a heavy blizzard, to clear snow from the lines, they found hundreds of Soviet prisoners-of-war shovelling the snow, half-naked, many of them without boots. ‘Among the Jews’, Reuben Ainsztein has written, ‘was my sister Mania Liff, who saw a Jewish woman give a piece of bread to a Russian. This was noticed by a German guard who at once shot dead both the Russian and the Jewess.’
18
Like the Jews being gassed that week at Chelmno, the dead Jewess outside Vilna and the dead Russian prisoners-of-war at Minsk and Vilna were murdered without even their names being recorded. They had become, in Nazi eyes, vermin to be ‘exterminated’. On 6 January 1942 Michael Podklebnik was among thirty young men brought to Chelmno to dig pits for the corpses of those who had been gassed. The previous group of diggers had all been shot. But on the wall of the cellar in which they were to live, Podklebnik and his fellow diggers found several scratched inscriptions: ‘No one leaves this place alive’; ‘Whoever can, should save himself’; ‘Every day, two or three of us are being taken away and they do not return’; ‘No one survives this place very long’; and ‘When people are taken to work, they are being shot’.