Authors: Martin Gilbert
On the following morning, January 7, Michael Podklebnik was
present when a truckload of deportees reached Chelmno from a nearby village. The deportees were told, over a loudspeaker: ‘Now you are going to the bath-house; you will get new clothes and go to work. Some people applauded—they were happy that now they were to work.’
The deportees went through a corridor, and into a truck on the other side. Some of the Jews saw these trucks, Podklebnik recalled, ‘and didn’t want to board them, but the SS had big sticks and they beat people and forced them to get in’. His account continued:
The next day we continued to work, and more people were brought in—we heard the screams from the trucks as the engine began working and the gas flowed in; then the screams died down, and we—five of us—were taken from a cellar and we had to take the clothes and shoes left behind and put them in a room which was already full of shoes and clothing.
And in the evening people came back from working in the woods.
They returned from work, but two or three were already missing—these people had grown weak and could no longer work: they were shot and left behind.
The next day I didn’t want to stay where I was. I was among the first five who were taken out to work in the forest. That’s where they dug the trenches: there were twenty-five people there and they were all digging trenches.
They were all completely dead. No one was alive any more. These people who were taken from the trucks were dead. But I remember that there was one in all that period, a man of my town, a healthy and strong man who still showed signs of life, and then someone approached him and shot him dead. But this was the only time. The man’s name was Jakobowitz.
When the trucks arrived we were still not permitted to go near them; we had to wait until they had stopped for two or three minutes and the fumes had dispersed. Then five or six people would open the doors and take out the corpses and place them right near the trenches.
The corpses would be placed carefully, side by side. Ukrainians and Germans, working in pairs, using pliers, would pull out the gold teeth and take off the rings of the murdered Jews. ‘If the
ring did not come off easily,’ Podklebnik recalled, ‘they would cut off the entire finger.’
After the gold teeth and the rings had been taken, the corpses were buried. This was the task of the thirty young men. On January 12, the corpses of the Jews from Podklebnik’s own village, Bugaj, were brought to the woods. His wife, his seven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter were among them: ‘I lay near my wife and two children and wanted them to shoot me,’ he later recalled. ‘One SS man told me, “You still have enough strength, you can work,” and he pushed me away. That night I came home and wanted to hang myself but my friends would not let me. They said that as long as my eyes were open, there was some hope.’
Several days later, Podklebnik managed to jump out of the truck taking the grave diggers to the woods. ‘By the time they turned round and started shooting,’ he later recalled, ‘I was already in the forest.’
19
No one in the ghettos of the General Government knew of the gassings at Chelmno. Jews waited and suffered, not knowing what lay ahead. In Warsaw, at the beginning of January, three Jews were killed in one day, while smuggling food. That in itself was an event which caused comment: three in a single day. One of those shot was the father of eight children. That too seemed cause for comment.
20
In Lodz, Ringelblum noted, ‘hundreds of people are said to be dying daily from cold and hunger’.
21
In Warsaw, too, one Friday in January, ninety bodies were discovered, sixteen of them from refugee centres, while even in a centre for foundlings, ‘a child froze to death’.
22
That same winter month, throughout the General Government, Jews were ordered to give up all furs and fur coats, ‘a severe blow to the poorer people’, Ringelblum noted, ‘who sometimes had nothing but an old tattered fur coat to wear’.
23
In the isolation of the ghetto, rumours abounded, not of death and slaughter, but of imminent rescue: of the advance of the Red Army virtually to the gates of Warsaw. Ringelblum described it in his notes:
…ex-newspapermen are spreading reports of exaggerated communiqués. They’re always far in advance of Russian army movements—a couple of hundred kilometres. After the breakthrough at Kholm, they advanced as far as Vilna; after the
victory at Mozhaisk, they sped past Smolensk, Vitebsk, Minsk, and the like. Stalin telegraphed them: ‘God, not so fast. I can’t keep up with you!’ On the 2nd of January, Jews were talking about the Russian occupation of Vilna, the German evacuation from Kiev.
24
In the Lodz ghetto, on December 16, the Germans demanded of Chaim Rumkowski that he provide Jews for ‘work battalions’. Rumours of this demand prompted fears that those who were not chosen to work might be deported. Four days after the German demand, Rumkowski informed the ghetto representatives that his aim was ‘to provide work for everybody’ inside the ghetto. ‘Everyone in the ghetto must have work as his passport. If new work battalions are prepared, I will report to the authorities that my reserves are mobilized and waiting to be employed.’ The enemies of the ghetto were those who launched stories ‘with the intention of disturbing society’s peace’. Of these people Rumkowski declared, ‘losing his temper’, as the Ghetto Chronicle recorded: ‘I would like to murder them.’
Rumkowski told the Jews of the Lodz ghetto, about the Germans: ‘They respect us because we constitute a centre of productivity.’ For this reason he would present them, Jews and Germans alike, with a plan for the New Year 1942. ‘The plan is work, work, and more work! I will strive with an iron will so that work will be found for everyone in the ghetto.’
25
More than one hundred and sixty thousand Jews were living in the Lodz ghetto as Rumkowski spoke. These included citizens of Lodz, deportees from towns in western Poland and deportees from Greater Germany. Within a week of the Elder pledging work for all, and protection through work, the Germans demanded the ten thousand Jews be found for ‘resettlement’: a special ‘Resettlement Commission’ chose for deportation Jews who had reached Lodz from Wloclawek and its environs the previous October, the families of Jews who had already been sent out of the ghetto for forced labour in Germany, prostitutes, and other so-called ‘undesirable elements’. Beginning on January 13, these ten thousand were ordered to report at the rate of seven hundred a day. Those not reporting would be ‘forcibly conducted to the assembly point’.
26
In Bialystok, the acting head of the Jewish Council, Ephraim
Barasz, felt a new security for the Jews of the ghetto when the German military authorities indicated a possible future order for the manufacture of boots for the German army. Summoning the Council department heads, he told them, as the protocol of the meeting recorded, that he was ‘certain’ that this order for boots ‘will protect the ghetto from calamity’. He therefore ‘demands that industry be assigned top priority in Jewish Council activities’.
27
Five months later, the order for boots arrived. ‘This is sufficient’, Barasz told his Council, ‘to ensure our security and that of the ghetto.’
28
Each ghetto was almost completely cut off from the outside world. News of the different fates of different ghettos was virtually non-existent. Only after the war was it possible to piece together the wider picture. Even as Rumkowski and Barasz spoke with confidence of security through productive work, more and more German, Austrian and Czech Jews were being deported to Riga: some to immediate death, others to labour camps, such as that at Salaspils, where prisoners were hanged ‘on the flimsiest pretext, after having been tortured before their death’, or died ‘from sheer exhaustion’. A thousand deportees from Theresienstadt had been sent to Riga on January 9; four hundred of them being transferred to Salaspils on arrival.
Of the thousand deportees of January 9, only 102 survived the war.
29
Two days later, on January 11, more than fifteen hundred Viennese Jews were seized, and sent likewise by train to Riga. One of them, Liana Neumann, later recalled how ‘there was no water. The coaches were sealed, and we could not leave them. It was very cold, and we chipped off some of the ice from the windows to have water.’ Many froze to death on the journey. On reaching Riga, ‘we were received by SS men, who made us run, and beat us up.’ Old people, and children, were taken away by force. They were taken away, and killed.
Liana Neumann was sent to work in a hospital; her job was to disinfect the clothing of those Jews who had been killed, for despatch to the German clothes store. With her were a number of local Latvian Jews. ‘There was a man from Latvia’, she later recalled, ‘who cried out all of a sudden, holding the coat of his little daughter, full of blood.’
30
At Chelmno, the gassing of whole communities was continuing day by day. Gypsies, too, were among the first victims. On January
7, the first of five thousand Gypsies, who had earlier been deported to the Jewish ghetto in Lodz from their encampments in Germany, were taken from Lodz to Chelmno by truck. All were gassed. With them was a Jewish doctor, Dr Fickelburg, and a Jewish nurse, whose name is unknown. They had been working as a medical team in the Gypsy section of the ghetto. They too were gassed.
31
On January 9, a thousand Jews from the nearby village of Klodawa were deported to Chelmno. Every one was gassed.
32
The deportation of Gypsies from the Lodz ghetto having been completed, on January 13 the deportation began of ten thousand Jews from the Lodz ghetto, also to Chelmno, at the carefully controlled rate of seven hundred a day. To lull the deportees with a belief in ‘resettlement’, they had been made to exchange whatever Polish or other money they had into German marks. They were also told that they could either sell their furniture, or leave it ‘for safekeeping’ at the carpenters’ shops in the ghetto.
33
Before leaving, each deportee was given a ‘free distribution’ of clothing: warm underwear, earmuffs, gloves, stockings, socks and clogs. They were also given ‘half a loaf of bread and a sausage for the road’.
34
The Chronicle of the Lodz ghetto recorded with precision the number of deportees: 5,353 men and 5,750 women.
35
The Chronicle only knew that they had been ‘resettled’, not that they had been deported to Chelmno, and gassed.
36
On 14 January 1942 the sixteen hundred Jews of Izbica Kujawska, in German-annexed western Poland, were ordered to assemble. Alarmed, the leaders of the Jewish Council warned the Jews of the order in advance. Several hundred managed to escape to nearby villages. Furious, the Germans took the members of the Jewish Council to a nearby wood, and shot them. The remaining Jews were then taken to Chelmno. All were gassed.
1
One witness of the destruction of the Jews of Izbica Kujawska was Yakov Grojanowski, a young Jew from the same village. A week earlier, he had been among twenty-nine Jews assembled in Izbica for a special work detail, and driven off, with their shovels, to Chelmno. There, fifteen of them had been taken to join the ‘grave-digger’ squad, of which Michael Podklebnik from Bugaj had also just become a member.
Yakov Grojanowski escaped from Chelmno on January 19. Eventually, on reaching Warsaw, he told the story of what he had seen and done to a devastated Ringelblum, who urged him to record every detail of his fourteen days at the death camp.
Grojanowski’s ordeal began in the cellar of an old castle in Chelmno village; a cellar in which the grave-diggers were kept overnight, its window bricked up to prevent their escape. His notes are published here in full:
Tuesday, 6 January 1942
We arrived at 12.30 noon. At both doors stood Gestapo men and gendarmes doing guard duty.
When we came into the second courtyard we were pushed out of the lorry. From here onwards we were in the hands of black-uniformed SS men, all of them high-ranking Reich Germans.
We were ordered to hand over all our money and valuables. After this fifteen men were selected, I among them, and taken down to the cellar rooms of the Schloss. We fifteen were confined in one room, the remaining fourteen in another. It was still bright daylight outside but down in the cellar it was pitch dark.
Some Ethnic Germans on the domestic staff provided us with straw. Later a lantern was also brought. At around eight in the evening we received unsweetened black coffee and nothing else. We were all in a depressed mood. One could only think of the worst, some were close to tears. We kissed each other and took leave. It was unimaginably cold and we lay down close together. In this manner we spent the whole night without shutting our eyes.
We only talked about the deportation of Jews, particularly from Kolo and Dabie. The way it looked, we had no prospect of ever getting out again.
Wednesday, 7 January 1942
Wednesday, 7 January, at seven in the morning, the gendarme on duty knocked and ordered us to get up. We hadn’t slept anyway, because of the cold. It took half an hour till they brought us black coffee and bread from our provisions.
We drew some meagre consolation from this and told each other there was a God in heaven; we would, after all, be going to work.
At about 8.30 in the morning (it was already late, because the days were short) we were led into the courtyard.
Six of us had to go into the second cellar room to bring out two corpses. The dead were from Klodawa (Kladow), and had hanged themselves. (I don’t know their names.) They were conscript grave-diggers. Their corpses were thrown on a lorry.
We met the other fourteen enforced grave-diggers from Izbica. As soon as we came out of the cellar we were surrounded by twelve gendarmes and Gestapo men with machine guns. We got on the lorry together with the twenty-nine enforced grave-diggers and the two corpses; our escort were six gendarmes with machine guns. Behind us came another vehicle with 10 gendarmes and two civilians. We drove in the direction of Kolo for about seven kilometres till turning left into the forest; after half a kilometre we halted at a clear path. We were ordered to get down and line up in double file.