Authors: Martin Gilbert
On April 12 there was a rumour in the Warsaw ghetto that an ‘extermination squad’ had reached Warsaw itself. This squad, so rumour reported, had ‘begged’ the local Gestapo for permission ‘to go on a rampage through the ghetto for just two hours’. Permission, Ringelblum noted, ‘was not granted’. ‘One is always hearing reports’, he added, ‘about extermination squads that are wiping complete Jewish settlements off the face of the earth.’
Ringelblum also made a note of the fate of 164 German Jews who had come to Warsaw in mid-April, ‘the cream of the young people’. They had been sent to the ‘penal camp’ at Treblinka, ‘where most of them were exterminated in a short time’. Also at Treblinka, ‘out of 160 Jewish young people from Otwock only 38 were left’, after only three weeks at the camp.
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Unknown to Ringelblum, or to the Jews of Warsaw, the labour
camp at Treblinka was in the process of being transformed into a death camp, for Warsaw Jewry. The rumours that month were of other places and plans, however. ‘It is said that all the Jews will be settled in Arabia or somewhere,’ Mary Berg noted in her diary on April 15. She added that because the hours of curfew had been reduced, it was said that ‘regular workshops’ were to be set up in the ghetto ‘which would ensure steady jobs for the Jews’. This, Mary Berg added, ‘seems to contradict the talk of mass deportation’.
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In those communities where Jews had not yet been deported, the random killings continued. Early in April, in the Mlawa ghetto, a number of Jews were seized, among them several who were sick. They were made to stand on boxes, their hands tied behind their backs, and ropes tied around their necks. Then, for more than an hour, they were kept waiting, while their families were made to stand opposite them. All the while, the German policemen were mocking the victims, laughing, and dancing in front of them.
As the men stood there, one of them, Leibl Rumaner, died of a heart attack. Another, Mordechai Volarsky, declared: ‘I wish we were the last victims.’
Jews were then taken from the crowd and ordered to pull the boxes from under the feet of the surviving victims. All were killed. That same day, two Jewish women were shot because bread and cakes were found on them. The Jews could no longer control their feelings: they were crying and shouting, to the fury of the Germans, who announced, to calm them, that the punishment was over, that nothing bad would happen to them in the future.
Two weeks later a hundred more Jews were seized in Mlawa, divided into two groups of fifty, and lined up facing each other. An announcement was then read out, stating that because, during the hangings of two weeks earlier, the Jews of the ghetto ‘have cried and shouted’, so now a new punishment was necessary. A hundred men ought to be shot. But the Gestapo had been ‘kind enough’ to reduce the number to fifty. If any Jew were to weep, however, or if the smallest sound were heard, all hundred would be shot.
The new victims were surrounded by German policemen with machine guns. All those assembled stood ‘as if blood had frozen in their veins’. No sigh could be heard. The Gestapo chief then addressed the policemen: ‘This is your fate,’ he said, ‘but also your good honour, to annihilate so many Jews. You should be proud,
and carry out your task energetically. Shoot straight in the head.’
Five Jews were taken to the pit. Only then did it become clear which of the two groups was to be shot. The men led to the pit were ordered to face the firing squad. They were not blindfolded. One of the first five moved his head at the moment of firing, and was unscathed. He was ordered to wait at the side.
As each group of five tumbled into the pit, the commander shook the hands of the firing squad. Finally, the man who had moved his head and avoided death in the first group was taken back to the pit and shot: the fiftieth victim.
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The fifty who had been spared were then ordered to cover the dead with earth. Shlomo Malevantshik, a deportee from the nearby village of Szrensk, was among the saved. His brother Leibel had been among those shot. As Shlomo began to shovel earth on the bodies he heard his brother’s voice crying: ‘Shlomo, what are you doing, I am still alive!’ But the Gestapo ordered the shovelling to continue. This, noted the historian of Szrensk, was ‘the most dreadful tragedy of those dreadful times’.
Two of the dead, Yehiel and Jacob Shchepkovski, were the sons of a shoemaker from Szrensk. Before the war, the historian of the village recalled, ‘there was always the sound of singing from his workshop. His love of children was widely known in the town. He was prepared to fight the whole world for his children.’ When his sons Yehiel and Jacob were shot, ‘It is not surprising that he lost his reason.’
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As the Jews of Mlawa waited, numbed by the savagery of the two mass executions, one Einsatzkommando unit, working deep inside the Soviet Union, reported back to Berlin that the whole Crimea had been ‘purged of Jews’. More than ninety thousand Jews, the Einsatzkommando unit reported, had been murdered in the Crimea in the previous four and a half months.
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On April 3, 580 Jews were seized in Berlin for deportation ‘to Poland’. On the eve of the deportation, 57 committed suicide. Six months later, when more than nine hundred were seized and sent to Estonia, 208 committed suicide.
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Suicide was the conscious decision to end the unendurable: to refuse to remain at the whim of tormentors whose cruelties were sadistically drawn out: to die at one’s chosen moment.
On May 4, in Lodz, a deportee from Frankfurt, the sixty-year-old Julia Baum, hanged herself. ‘The reason’, noted the Ghetto Chronicle that same day, was ‘fear of deportation’.
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Within a week, five more German Jews committed suicide in Lodz, rather than face a second ‘resettlement’.
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Fear of the unknown had led to what Michael Etkind, a survivor of the Lodz ghetto, has called ‘the courage to commit suicide’.
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Suicide was a recognition not just of helplessness but of hopelessness. For the better educated, even when thousands were still alive around them, it followed the realization that there was no escape. Rabbinical wisdom opposed suicide. Rabbi Oshry had laid down six months earlier, during one of the German raids on Kovno ghetto, that although a man knew that he would ‘definitely be subjected to unbearable suffering by the abominable murderers, and so hoped to be buried among Jews, he still was not allowed to commit suicide.’ Oshry had gone on to say that permitting suicide, even to avoid witnessing the suffering and death of loved ones, meant ‘surrendering to the abominable enemy’, and as such was not permitted.
Rabbi Oshry also noted that, in Kovno, the Germans often remarked to the Jews: ‘Why don’t you commit suicide as the Jews of Berlin did?’ Suicide, he said, was viewed ‘as a great desecration of God, for it showed that a person had no trust in God’s capability to save him from the accursed hands of his defilers.’ The murderers’ goal, Oshry commented, ‘was to bring confusion into the lives of the Jews and to cause them the greatest despondency in order to make annihilating them all the easier.’
Oshry later reflected: ‘I say proudly that in the Kovno ghetto there were only three instances of suicide by people who grew greatly despondent. The rest of the ghetto dwellers trusted and hoped that God would not forsake His people.’
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On the evening of Friday, April 17, shortly after the coming of the Sabbath, the Gestapo entered the Warsaw ghetto. Going from building to building with a list of names, they ordered the caretakers to summon those on the list. Six caretakers who hesitated were shot. Alexander Donat has recalled how those on the lists ‘were told to walk straight ahead, and were shot through the back of the head’.
Fifty-two corpses, he wrote, ‘were left lying in their own blood that night’.
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‘Only when morning came,’ noted Chaim Kaplan, ‘and we found the bodies at the house gates round the ghetto, did we discover the extent of the calamity.’ Kaplan added:
At 36 Nowolipki Street a man by the name of Goldberg was killed. He was a barber in peacetime, and when the war broke out he went to work in the quarantine house. His wife worked there too. When he was killed, his wife set up a terrible wailing and would not leave his side. To silence her, they killed her too. Both were left lying by the gate. In death as in life they remained inseparable.
The baker, David Blajman, on Gesia Street, was murdered in the same way. They came to take the husband but the frantic wife ran after him. To rid themselves of this hindrance, the murderers killed her along with her husband. The morning light revealed both bodies at the gate.
At 52 Leszno Street, Linder was killed. At number 27 on the same street a father and son were killed. So it went down to the last victim.
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In her diary on April 28, Mary Berg noted that on the night of April 17 ‘fifty-two prisoners were killed, mostly bakers and smugglers’. Her account continued:
All the bakers are terrified. Epstein and Wagner, who own the bakery in our house, no longer sleep at home. The Germans come to various houses with a prepared list of names and addresses. If they do not find the persons they are looking for, they take another member of the same family instead. They lead him a few steps in front of the house, politely let him precede them, and then shoot him in the back. The next morning these people are found lying dead in the streets. If a janitor fails to open the door for the Germans as quickly as they want him to, he is shot on the spot. If a member of the janitor’s family opens the door the same fate befalls him, and later the janitor is summoned to be killed, too.
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In mid-April a new death camp was ready to receive deportees. This was Sobibor camp, in a remote woodland area near the River Bug.
As at Chelmno and Belzec, there were to be almost no survivors: the aim of the camp was to kill, not to segregate and preserve for forced labour.
One of the sixty-four survivors of Sobibor, Moshe Shklarek, was not quite fifteen years old when, on April 17, he was deported in a train from Zamosc, with 2,500 other Jews. On its journey, the train was guarded by Ukrainians. No food or water was given to the deportees. Three days later, the train reached Sobibor: a journey in normal times of less than four hours. All the deportees were then taken, first to Camp No. 2, the barbers’ huts, and then on to Camp No. 3, the gas-chamber: all except Shklarek. This one young man, out of 2,500 deportees, was chosen to work with the hundred or so Jews in the ‘Corpse Commando’, the ‘Work Commando’ and other camp duties. Shklarek later recalled the characteristics of some of the camp staff, among them SS Technical Sergeant Michel Hermann:
He treated his servants decently, but his victims rudely and brutally. Because of the slippery-tongued speeches which he delivered to the arrivals at camp, we nicknamed him the ‘Preacher’. When a new transport would arrive Hermann would deliver his lying speech, in which he assured the arrivals that this was a transit camp where they would only undergo classification and disinfection, and from here they would be taken to work in the Ukraine until the war was over.
In his apartment in the camp there was concentrated the abundant property that the arrivals had brought with them—silver, gold, rings, watches, jewellery and various other valuables. Actually, he was the camp treasurer.
All the transports passed into Hermann’s hands; he classified the arrivals, ordered them to strip and instructed them how to arrange their clothing so they would get it back when they came out of the ‘bath house’. He would escort the people on the special road that led from Lager No. 2 to the barbers’ huts and from there—to the gas-chambers. With his tricks and his smooth tongue, Hermann was more dangerous than his comrades in crime.
Another of those whom Shklarek recalled was SS Staff Sergeant Paul Grot:
Grot was the leader of the Ukrainian ‘columns’, between the two rows of whom the camp prisoners were frequently ordered to pass, to be scourged with leaden whips, rubber clubs and all kinds of flagellation instruments with which the servants of the Nazis, who stood on both sides of the row, were equipped.
Grot carried out this task with zeal and pleasure. He had a trusted assistant in this work: his dog, Barry, a wild beast the size of a pony, well trained and obedient to the short, brutal orders of his master. When he heard Grot cry ‘Jude!’, the dog would attack his victim and bite him on his testicles. The bitten man was, of course, no longer able to continue his work, and then Grot would take him aside and ask him in a sympathetic voice, ‘Poor fellow, what happened to you? Who did such a thing to you? It certainly must be hard for you to keep working, isn’t it? Come with me; I’ll go with you to the clinic!’ And, sure enough, Grot accompanied him, as he accompanied scores of workers every day, to the Lazaret, to the giant grave behind the worn-out hut, where armed Ukrainian ‘bandagers’ greeted the sick and bitten men.
In most cases, these men would place buckets on the heads of the victims, after they made them get into the pit, and would practise shooting, along with Grot, who was, of course, always the most outstanding shot.
Grot would return from the clinic satisfied and gay—and look for more victims. His dog knew his master’s temperament and helped him in his murderous pleasures. Sometimes Grot would have himself a joke; he would seize a Jew, give him a bottle of wine and sausage weighing at least a kilo and order him to devour it in a few minutes. When the ‘lucky’ man succeeded in carrying out this order and staggered from drunkenness, Grot would order him to open his mouth wide and would urinate into his mouth.
A third SS man at Sobibor, technical Sergeant Bauer, was noted for his perverse sense of humour. Shklarek, who was then working in the German soldier’s casino at Sobibor, recalled:
One day he told a story about the ‘stupid Jews’: a transport of naked women was brought into the ‘bath house’. One woman saw Bauer as he stood on the roof, waiting for the doors to be hermetically sealed so that he could order that the
gas-taps be opened. The woman stopped the armed soldier who stood by the entrance door and asked him, ‘What’s the officer in uniform doing on the roof? Is something wrong? How can we wash ourselves here inside while they’re fixing the roof?’
The guard pacified her, saying that in just a moment the roof would be fixed and, as for her, she need not hurry to push herself inside; there would be enough room for her, too.
This was Bauer’s story about the naive Jewess. At the end of his story Bauer dissolved in laughter; he even succeeded in infecting the camp commander and the officers around the casino with his laughter.
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