Authors: Martin Gilbert
A small band of young men and women now came to understand that the killings were part of a wider, sinister plan. As Yitzhak Zuckerman recalled, ‘In the East it burned and in the West it burned. Chelmno is in the Warthegau area and we were right in between, in the middle.’ Of course, he added, ‘the fire would reach us. We, the Jews of Warsaw, knew we were no better. We would not be spared.’
Looking back upon those years, Zuckerman later recalled the isolation of the Jews of Warsaw. ‘We thought the entire world was being defeated,’ he said. ‘The undergrounds all over the world had not yet started operating.’
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In spite of what they felt to be their total isolation, a small group of Warsaw Jews decided to organize for resistance. ‘There can be no doubt’, one of their underground newspapers wrote on March 28, ‘that Hitler, sensing that the downfall of his regime is approaching, intends to drown the Jews in a sea of blood.’ The cultural and educational work that had continued in the ghetto would have to give way to preparation ‘for such difficult days’. Despite the destruction, ‘mobilization of the vital forces of the Jews’ would have to begin. ‘From generation to generation,’ the article added, ‘we are troubled by the burden of passivity and lack of faith in our own strength; but our history also contains glorious and shining pages of
heroism and struggle. We are obliged to join these eras of heroism….’
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The young Jews were able to build upon certain existing preparations. Three months earlier, Emanuel Ringelblum was invited, during a break in a lecture that he was giving on the history of the Jewish labour movement, by two of the organizers of resistance, Mordecai Anielewicz and Yosef Kaplan, to a room in which they showed him ‘two revolvers’. These revolvers, they explained, ‘were to be employed to train youth in the use of arms’.
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As these preparations continued, so did the deportations, gassings and random killings, without respite. On April 1 a further thousand Jews were deported from Theresienstadt to the ghetto at Piaski. Only four were to survive the war.
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On April 2 a further 965 Slovak Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and held in the barracks at Birkenau; by the end of the month, eight more transports brought the number of Slovak Jews deported to Birkenau to eight thousand in a single month.
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April 2 was Passover, festival of the liberation of the Jews from their bondage in Egypt. In different towns it was remembered in different ways. The historian of the Jewish community in Jaworow, in Eastern Galicia, has recorded:
During the Passover holidays of 1942, there came to Jaworow a high-ranking Nazi, a fellow by the name of Steuer. His ferocious deeds will never be erased from the memory of Jaworow Jews, and those of Grodek, Krakowice and Janow. Each time this Hitler satrap visited a town or village, he left a trail of tears, torture and sorrow. His appetite for loot was insatiable, and the Jewish Council had no choice but to supply him with whatever they could….
Steuer made surprise visits to the Council and lashed out at those present. Unexpectedly he forced his way into Jewish homes, swept the dishes from the table to the floor, smashed the furniture and obscenely humiliated the women. He flogged Ida Lipshitz. He grabbed Polka Cipper who was married to the Jew, Dolek Guttman, ordered her to undress, ground her bare toes with his boots, and whipped her unmercifully. He delighted in striking blows at women with bare fists until their blood flowed, and chasing them nude into the cold outdoors.
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The Jews of Jaworow were unaware of the deportations to Belzec: deportations of which they, too, would be the victims within a few months. But Jews escaping from Lublin did bring to Warsaw accounts of the killings in their city, and of the deportations from Lublin to Belzec between March 15 and March 26, when ten thousand Jews had been seized, deported and gassed. ‘We tremble at the mention of Lublin,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on April 7. ‘Our blood turns to ice when we listen to tales told by refugees from the city. Even before they arrived in the Warsaw ghetto, the rumours reaching us were so frightful that we thought they came from totally unreliable sources.’
The refugees had not mentioned Belzec. ‘When the great hunt began,’ Kaplan noted, ‘thousands of Jews were rounded up and led—where? Nobody knows.’ Kaplan added: ‘That is the Nazis’ way. Forty thousand homeless and panic-stricken Jews were taken by the Nazi overlords and led to some unknown place to be massacred. According to one rumour they were taken to Rawa-Ruska and were electrocuted there.’
The trains from Lublin had indeed set off in the direction of Rawa-Ruska. But ten miles before that town their journey had ended, at Belzec. The shocking details brought by the refugees related, not to the fate of the deportees, but to the savagery of the Germans in Lublin itself, as the deportations began. As Kaplan recorded:
As Jews tried to escape, the Nazis hunted them down. Heeding the advice of the prophet, ‘Wait a little until the danger is past’, some Jews tried to conceal themselves in obscure holes and corners. Perhaps God would have mercy and spare them? Perhaps the Keeper of Israel would take pity? But the killers discovered the hiding places and swiftly put to death anyone they found. Some of the Jews suffocated in these airless holes even before the Nazis discovered them, for the doors could not be opened from within and there was no one to open them from without because everyone above ground had been arrested.
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What was unknown in Warsaw was known at Szczebrzeszyn, one of the towns nearest to Belzec. On April 8 the Polish doctor, Zygmunt Klukowski, noted in his diary ‘a great depression among
the Jews’, and he went on to explain: ‘We know now for certain that one train every day from the direction of Lublin, and one from the direction of Lvov, of twenty-odd wagons, each are going to Belzec. Here, they are taking the Jews out of the trains, pushing them behind barbed-wire fences and killing them either by electrocution or poisoning with gas, and after that they burn the remains.’
Klukowski added:
On the way to Belzec people can see horrifying scenes—especially the railwaymen—because the Jews know very well why they are being taken there, and on the journey they are given neither food nor water. On the station in Szczebrzeszyn the railwaymen could see with their own eyes, and hear with their own ears Jews offering 150 zlotys for a kilo of bread (i.e. about a month’s wages), and a Jewess took off a gold ring from her finger and offered it in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. The inhabitants of Lublin told me of some incredible scenes which are happening there among the Jews, shooting the sick on the spot, and outside the town—shooting the healthy ones and transporting thousands of others to Belzec.
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Even for those Jews unaware of Belzec, the spring of 1942 had become a time of horror. ‘When will this terrible bloodshed finally end?’ Dawid Rubinowicz asked in his diary on April 10, after three Jews had been murdered in a village near his own Bodzentyn. ‘If it goes on much longer then people will drop like flies out of sheer horror.’
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Neither in Jaworow, nor in Warsaw, nor in Bodzentyn, was the truth about Belzec known. Meanwhile, immediately following the Lublin deportations, thousands of Jews from Eastern Galicia had been deported to Belzec and gassed, among them six thousand from Stanislawov on March 31, a thousand from Kolomyja on April 2, twelve hundred from Tlumacz on April 3 and fifteen hundred from Horodenka on April 4.
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Among the Jews deported to Belzec from the Lublin region on April 9 were eight hundred from Lubartow.
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No day passed without a deportation, the railway routings having been meticulously planned, and the pace of gassing devised to match the number of arrivals. At Chelmno, too, the killings continued throughout April, at least eleven thousand Jews being
murdered there in the single month, from more than ten communities in the Warthegau.
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From the Lodz ghetto, more than twenty-four thousand Jews had been deported to Chelmno in March. All had been gassed.
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To maintain the deception of deportations to labour camps, an SS officer visited the Lodz ghetto on April 12, ten days after this third major ‘resettlement’ had ended, to explain the whereabouts of the forty-four thousand Jews deported from the ghetto since January. All had been sent to Chelmno, and gassed: but the SS officer ‘explained’ to the 115,000 Jews who remained ‘that the deportees had all been brought to a camp near Warthbrucken’, where a total of one hundred thousand Jews were already ‘located’. The SS man added that some thirty thousand Germans, settlers, he said, from Galicia, had earlier stayed in this camp, and had left behind ‘well-equipped barracks and even furniture’. Provisions for the Jews, he assured their worried relatives and friends, ‘were excellent, and deportees fit for work were repairing roads or engaged in agriculture’.
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Warthbrucken was the German name for Kolo, the town nearest the Chelmno death camp. Workshops were to be set up there ‘in the very near future’, the SS officer explained.
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It was an explanation cleverly designed to put the ghetto dwellers even more at their ease. For in the Lodz ghetto, workshops and survival were synonymous, so that the ‘large influx of new orders’ during April for shoes and knitted goods, as well as for clothing for the German army, gave an even greater sense of security.
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To maintain the deception that the camp near Kolo was a work camp, the Germans arranged for postcards to be sent from the deportees to say that they were ‘in good health’. One such postcard, sent from a family that had been deported in January to Chelmno, from Turek, reached the Lodz ghetto in mid-April. This single card, with its encouraging message, was of sufficient importance to merit a special mention in the Ghetto Chronicle. No mention was made of the lack of postcards from any of the forty-four thousand Lodz deportees. At the same time there was ominous news: the arrival in the ghetto of large numbers of sewing machines, in the drawers of which notes and printed matter had been found from which ‘one may conclude that they were sent here from small towns in Kolo and Kutno counties’.
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These were in fact the sewing machines of the
Jews of Kolo, Bugaj, Dabie, Izbica Kujawska, Klodawa, Sompolno, Kutno, Krosniewice and Zychlin, all of whom had been deported to Chelmno and gassed between mid-December 1941 and mid-April 1942.
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The Germans were determined to maintain total deception. ‘The Reichsführer desires’, wrote Himmler’s personal secretary to the Inspector for Statistics on April 10, ‘that no mention be made of the “special treatment of the Jews”. It must be called “transportation of the Jews towards the Russian East”.’
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Even ‘special treatment’—
sonderbehandlung
—was understood to be too explicit a term.
While seeking to maintain their deception, the Germans also denounced those Poles who tried to help Jews. ‘It is unfortunate’, declared a German proclamation issued in Lvov on April 11, ‘that the rural population continues—nowadays furtively—to assist Jews, thus doing harm to the community, and hence to themselves, by this disloyal attitude.’ Poles were entering Jewish homes, the proclamation warned, to sell the Jews, ‘at inflated prices’, bread, butter, poultry and potatoes. Together with the money which the peasants took from the Jews, they also ‘carry away from these homes pests, and germs of diseases, and distribute them over the village’.
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***
From throughout the Lublin region, once so vibrant a centre of Jewish life, the deportations to Belzec continued. On April 11, Zygmunt Klukowski noted in his diary that the Jews of Szczebrzeszyn had heard ‘that today there was a transport of Jews from Chelm’. After their train had reached Belzec, ‘the empty train—the so-called
Judenzug
—went back to Zamosc. Towards evening came the news that Zamosc was surrounded. Everyone is sure that now the round-up and transportation of the Zamosc Jews to their deaths will begin. In our town, the fear is indescribable. Some are resigned, others are going around the town insanely looking for help. Everyone is convinced that any day now the same thing will happen in Szczebrzeszyn.’
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As feared, the round-up of Zamosc Jews took place. An eyewitness, David Mekler, later recalled:
On 11 April 1942, the SS, SD and the mounted police fell like a pack of savages on the Zamosc Jewish quarter. It was a
complete surprise. The brutes on horseback in particular created a panic; they raced through the streets shouting insults, slashing out on all sides with their whips. Our community then numbered ten thousand people. In a twinkling, without even realizing what was happening, a crowd of three thousand men, women and children, picked up haphazardly in the streets and in the houses, were driven to the station and deported to an unknown destination.
The spectacle which the ghetto presented after the attack literally drove the survivors mad. Bodies everywhere, in the streets, in the courtyards, inside the houses; babies thrown from the third or fourth floors lay crushed on the pavements. The Jews themselves had to pick up and bury the dead.
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News of the Zamosc deportation reached Szczebrzeszyn on the following day, April 12. ‘Several hundred were killed on the spot,’ Klukowski noted, ‘apparently some tried to resist. However, we don’t have any details and we don’t know anything for sure. Among our own Jews there is a great panic. Some old Jewish women were sleeping in the Jewish cemetery, they would rather die here in their own town—among the graves of their own people—than in Belzec, among horrifying tortures.’
Some Jews, Klukowski added, were taking the risk of ‘running away’ to other villages. Many others were ‘preparing hide-outs on the spot’. Others were sending their children to Warsaw ‘to be cared for by trusted Aryans’.
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