Authors: Martin Gilbert
Fifteen-year-old Monik Halter from Izbica clung to me the whole time. He embraced me, kissed me and said to me, ‘We’re all lost,’ and repeated his wish that his sacrifice should enable his mother and sister to remain alive.
Others said, ‘Once again eight innocent souls have left this world.’ The time passed amid sobs, wails and groans.
At about seven in the evening the chef brought a cauldron of kohlrabi soup and filled our bowls. A few of us, who were hungry, had some soup, but the majority didn’t touch it. Bitter tears flowed into the soup plate.
Together with the food a night-light was placed in our room. Nearly all of us said we were prepared to spend our lives in this terrible place, if we could thereby save our dear ones and survive to see punishment meted out to the murderers.
Meanwhile the gendarme ordered us to sing. At first we disobeyed. However when he threatened to shoot and opened the door, my two neighbours Meir Pitrowski from Izbica, and Jehuda Jakubowicz from Wloclawek, who had lately been resident in Izbica, begged me to stand up and sing.
I myself don’t know from where I drew the strength to get up because I was very tired. I addressed my comrades in a feeble voice: ‘Friends and honourable people, get up and sing after me; first we shall cover our heads.’
They stood up.
We covered the slop pail with a white shirt. Angrily the impatient gendarme, who stood in the open door, ordered us to sing at last. I therefore began to sing ‘Hear! O Israel, the eternal one is our God, the eternal one is unique’. Those assembled repeated each verse in depressed tones.
Then I continued: ‘Praised be his name and the splendour of his realm for ever and ever’, which the others repeated after me three times. We felt as if we were at the end of our lives. Sadness and fear gripped us. All were as sombre as if before the Last Judgement. We were very much mistaken in thinking we had now sung enough. The gendarme insisted that we go on.
I said: ‘Friends and honourable people, we shall now sing the “Hatikvah”.’ And we sang the anthem with our heads covered. It sounded like a prayer. After this the gendarme left and bolted the door with three locks.
We couldn’t stop crying and said that the world had never ever known such barbarism. To liquidate Jews and Gypsies in such murderous fashion, and to force us to sing on top of it. We hoped they would end up like ‘Haman’. The Almighty should put an end to this terrible fate.
Mosche Asch, a worthy man from Izbica, said, ‘We are a sacrifice, indicating that the time of the Messiah is at hand.’
The guard opened the door again and the German cook, a civilian, fetched a pail of black bitter coffee, which he poured into the bowl. (We had poured the remains of the kohlrabi soup into the slop bucket.)
Each of us took a piece of bread and some coffee.
After fifteen minutes the gendarme asked us to sing again. We tried to get out of it by pleading tiredness but to no avail. He ordered us to repeat after him: ‘We thank Adolf Hitler for everything!’ We did so. Then we had to repeat: ‘We thank Adolf Hitler for our food.’ Then he demanded that we sing again. We sang the ‘Hatikvah’, and afterwards the twenty-sixth Psalm. (That was our response to the torment in our souls.) Then he bolted the door again. We slept late into the night.
I woke in the middle of the night probably from cold or nightmares. I began thinking everything over again. I wanted to scream: ‘Where is God in heaven? How can he see our torment and permit the slaughter of the innocent. Why doesn’t he perform a miracle?’
Then it occurred to me that I had to escape from this prison. I carried a tiny flame to the walled-up window and tried loosening a brick with a knife. But my efforts were in vain. The frost which also penetrated the interior had frozen the bricks fast. After two hours of trying I lay down again disappointed.
By five in the morning everybody was awake because of the cold. We had a conversation. Getzel Chrzastowski, a member of the Bund, and Eisenstab, both from Klodawa (Eisenstab owned a furriers in Klodawa), had lost their belief in God because he didn’t concern himself with injustice and suffering. In contrast others, myself included, remained firm in our belief
and said, like Mosche Asch, that the time of the Messiah was at hand.
Friday the 9th in the morning we were again given bitter coffee. Asked if we had enough bread we said yes—we had some left over from before. At 8 a.m. the SS men appeared and were told that the Jews had spent an uneventful night. After the door was opened we had to go out and be counted.
The courtyard was already ringed round with gendarmes carrying machine guns. (It was the first time that the barrels of the guns were trained on us. We caught a terrible fright, thinking we were about to be shot.)
In the courtyard we saw two large carts full of gypsies with their wives, children and all their possessions. We were quickly loaded into a lorry in order to deny us the opportunity for communicating with the Gypsies. This, incidentally, was the only occasion on which we saw a transport with live victims.
We stood towards the front of the lorry, seven gendarmes with machine guns behind us. A car with eight SS men followed.
At our place of work we were surrounded by gendarmes. We undressed as before. We were counted, after which eight people were selected from out of our ranks.
We picked up the axes and shovels and started work. The bottom of the ditch was about 1.5 metres wide, the top five metres and its depth was five metres. The mass grave extended a long way. If a tree stood in the way it was felled.
Friday, 9 January 1942
On the third day of our tragic experiences the work was particularly difficult and harsh. Within an hour the first van with dead Gypsies arrived, twenty minutes later the second. ‘Big Whip’ raged without let-up. Whilst working we were able to get a little closer to the ‘eight’. Among them were Abraham Zelinski from Izbica, thirty-two years old, Gawerman from Izbica, seventeen years old, Zalman Jakubowski from Izbica, fifty-five years old, and Gershon Praschker from Izbica. Around five o’clock there wasn’t much to do, and they did not rush us as usual. Gershon Praschker who was down below in the pit got up, took his prayer book, and covering his head with his hand began to pray.
At about eleven in the morning they said to us: ‘Our death is a tragic death, a sacrifice on behalf of our relatives and of the whole Jewish people. We shall be in this world no more.’
On this day we ate at 1.30 p.m.
The temperature was down to twenty degrees below freezing. The gendarmes lit a fire to thaw out our bread. The bread tasted smokey and burnt. Lunch was very brief because another van with Gypsy victims had arrived.
In the afternoon ‘Big Whip’ went deeper into the forest to drain a bottle of schnapps. When he returned he started to scream: ‘Damn it; you don’t want to work,’ and began hitting out with the whip. He drew blood from the grave-diggers. Blood flowed from their heads, faces, brows and noses. Their eyes were swollen. On this day we buried seven to eight transports (batches) of Gypsies. We finished work at 5.30. The ‘eight’ were killed as usual.
We had to dress quickly and were chased back into the lorry. Then we were counted a number of times; this was obviously taken very seriously.
On arrival back at the courtyard of Schloss Kulmhof we were disagreeably surprised to see a new transport. They were probably a new batch of grave-diggers: sixteen men from Izbica and sixteen from Bugaj. Among those from Izbica were: 1. Moshe Lesek, forty years old, 2. Avigdor Palanski, twenty years old, 3. Steier, thirty-five years old, 4. Knoll, forty-five years old, 5. Izchak Preiss, forty-five years old, 6. Jehuda Lutzinski, fifty-one years old, 7. Kalman Radzewski, thirty-two years old, 8. Menachem Archijowski, forty years old. Among those from Bugaj was my friend and comrade Haim Reuben Izbizki, thirty-five years old.
Twenty of the old grave-diggers, together with five new ones (twenty-five in all), were driven into another room in the cellar. This room was somewhat smaller than the previous one. There we found bedding, underwear, trousers, suits as well as foodstuffs (bread, dripping, and sugar). These items belonged to the new grave-diggers.
Tired and broken in spirit, we sat down on the belongings. The first thing we questioned the new arrivals about was if any of our relatives were among them. Questions and answers mingled with our sobs. We heard voices from the adjacent room. I banged at the wall and shouted at a spot where a
missing brick let the air through. I asked if H. R. Izbizki was in the room. He came to the wall. I asked if at least his mother and sister had escaped.
The guard interrupted our conversation.
During supper Steier shared out dripping among us, and said, ‘May God not let me see so much suffering, hopefully I won’t be in this world tomorrow.’ (He was indeed killed the next day.)
Moshe Lesek shared out his sugar. After supper we covered the slop pail and recited the evening prayer.
Our prayer mingled with tears. Afterwards the new arrivals gave us some political news. They said that the Russians had already retaken Smolensk and Kiev, and were making their way towards us.
We wished they would with God’s assistance come and destroy this terrible place. Some of us debated where we would shelter during bombing attacks. Others said they wouldn’t remain alive, because it would take at least another month. Nobody believed that they would get out of this hell in the normal way.
The discussion about divine justice took place as follows: some of those present, also older people among them, had entirely lost their belief in God. They thought faith was nonsense and God didn’t exist. Otherwise he couldn’t simply watch our tortures without helping us. Those, myself included, whose faith had remained firm, asserted that it wasn’t for us to understand God’s actions. Everything, we said, was in the hands of God.
Then we at last covered ourselves with our clothes and fell asleep.
I want to add something important: on both Thursday and Friday the latest two transports comprised Jewish victims. They were younger and older people with suitcases and rucksacks. On their clothes a Jewish star was affixed front and back. We assumed they were diseased camp inmates whom the Nazis wanted to get rid of in this manner. They were buried with their belongings.
These events shook us to the core because up until then we had hoped that Jews in the camps would survive these terrible times.
Saturday, 10 January 1942
On Sabbath the 10th of January at 7 a.m. they brought us breakfast: bitter coffee and bread. After breakfast Moshe Lesek recited the prayer of penitence and confession, and we repeated it after him.
We had to endure the seven stations of hell until we had been counted several times. The guards pointed guns at us as we climbed into the lorry. We told the five newcomers they should stick closely to us.
Together with the new arrivals our group numbered fifty-three people. We were crushed together in the lorry. At the back stood ten gendarmes with machine guns at the ready. Behind us drove a limousine with ten SS men.
On arrival the old group was separated from the others and got ready for work. The newcomers still had to undergo all our tortures. This time the ‘eight’ weren’t selected immediately.
At about eleven o’clock the first van loaded with victims arrived. Jewish victims were treated in this way: the Jewish men, women and children were in their underwear. After they had been tossed out of the van two Germans in plain clothes stepped up to them to make a thorough check if anything had been hidden. If they saw a necklace round a throat they tore it off. They wrenched rings from fingers, and pulled gold teeth out of mouths. They even examined anuses (and, in the case of women, genitals). This entire examination was done most brutally.
It was only after the arrival of the Jewish transport that the ‘eight’ were selected. All the victims were from Klodawa—as Getzel Chrzastowski (who himself hailed from Klodawa) reported to us.
After the first van had been dealt with the ‘eight’ returned to their previous work, i.e. digging.
At 1.30 p.m. the second van arrived. At a certain moment Eisenstab from Klodawa began to cry softly. He told us he had no further reason for living since his wife and fifteen-year-old only daughter had just been buried. He wanted to beg the Germans to kill him so he could lie together with his nearest in the grave. We restrained him under the pretext there would still be time for that later. In the meantime he might be able to survive and exact revenge.
At 1.45 p.m. we consumed our lunch (bitter cold coffee and smoky bread).
As the ‘eight’ were on the point of completing their work two carloads of high-ranking SS officers arrived.
They got out and viewed the charnel house with pleasure. They received a report from ‘Big Whip’, after which they shook his hand in token of their contentment and appreciation.
In the afternoon we very hurriedly buried a further five transports. At about 6 p.m. everybody was deployed to fill in the ditch right up to the edge.
We were taken back to the Schloss in the usual way. Haim Reuben Izbizki got accidentally included in our group. Back in the cellar we all cried a lot. It is a fact that I was so tired that I didn’t recognise my best friend Izbizki. Today, as yesterday, we were so depressed that crying came quite naturally to us. Eisenstab wailed more than the others.
After the evening meal which consisted of a quarter litre of potato soup per person with black bitter coffee and bread, we carried the slop pail outside. Under a smoking lamp we said the evening prayer. Then Eisenstab recited ‘Kaddish’.
We talked only of the terrible catastrophe that had befallen the Jewish people. We were obviously witnesses of the extermination of an entire Jewish community (Klodawa). None of us were able to sleep. Suddenly Eisenstab got up. He was overwrought and began to sob. He screamed he had no cause to live any more. All hope had been taken away from him. He beat his head against the wall. Above all he bemoaned the fact that he couldn’t take his life. In the end he lay down exhausted and fell asleep.