Authors: Martin Gilbert
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On April 18, as the deportees from Zamosc were still on their way to Sobibor, yet another train left Theresienstadt for Poland. Its immediate destination was the ghetto of the small village of Rejowiec. But within a few months, almost all the thousand deportees had been sent on to Sobibor. Only two survived the war.
85
A second Theresienstadt deportation that month went direct to Warsaw, where the thousand deportees were put in the main synagogue. Shortly after their arrival, thirty-seven young men were taken away, to Treblinka, where the fourth death camp, after Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor, was still under construction.
86
That same day, April 25, 852 Jews from Wurzburg, and 103 from Bamberg, were sent eastwards from Germany in a special freight train ‘in the direction of Lublin’, as a telegram from the Wurzburg Gestapo informed Adolf Eichmann in Berlin and General Globocnik in Lublin.
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Two days later, on April 27, a further thousand Jews were deported from Theresienstadt to Izbica Lubelska. The sole survivor was a woman who, after two weeks in Izbica, managed to escape to Warsaw, where she lived under a false name until the end of the war.
88
Belzec, or Sobibor, claimed all the other Theresienstadt deportees of April 27.
Inside the Warsaw ghetto, the executions continued. ‘Last night sixty more persons were executed,’ Mary Berg, who was shortly to be given her freedom as an American citizen, noted in her diary on April 28. ‘They were members of the underground,’ she added, ‘most of them well-to-do people who financed the secret bulletins.
Many printers who were suspected of helping to publish the underground papers were also killed. Once again in the morning there were corpses in the street.’
89
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On April 29 a number of Jews working in the Ghetto Administration in Lodz were present when a large truck stopped to refuel on its way to the city. ‘The truck was fully loaded with luggage of all sorts,’ the Ghetto Chronicle recorded, ‘but chiefly with knapsacks belonging to the people recently resettled from the ghetto.’
These belongings were being sent to Pabianice, a small town south of Lodz, where they were to be sorted and graded for despatch to Germany. Hundreds of Jews, many of them from the Lodz ghetto, were to be employed in this task. Unknown to the observers in the Administration, to the writers of the Chronicle, or to the sorters in Pabianice, the owners of these belongings were all Jews who had earlier been sent to Chelmno, and gassed.
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It was already known in the Lodz ghetto that many of the deportees had been forced to throw down their belongings during the deportation. Once again, a logical explanation, and definite knowledge that the bundles had not gone on with the deportees to their destination, helped to hide the truth and to preserve the deception.
To those Jews still alive in the ghettos, the deception was also self-deception, strong because the will to survive was strong. One young Polish Jew, Ben Helfgott, then aged thirteen, later recalled how, as the deportation trains passed Piotrkow, Poles would say to the Jews who were watching: ‘You too will soon be turned into soap.’ ‘The Jews knew that the deportees would not return,’ Helfgott added, ‘but would their own fate be the same? Might they not be spared?’
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Deception and illusion went hand in hand: both were accentuated by a sense of isolation and hopelessness.
With each month, the surviving Jews of Europe hoped that the worst times were over. Those in the ‘working’ ghettos, such as Lodz, Bialystok or Dvinsk, lived a life of unremitting work, flickering hope, and recurrent fear. In the Dvinsk ghetto, following the slaughter of October 1941, the survivors had worked in the German soldiers’ canteen, and in several factories outside the ghetto. The ration for these labourers was 100 grams of meat once a week, some margarine, and a tablespoon of sugar every second day, to supplement the cabbage soup on which the non-workers had to subsist.
Typhoid killed hundreds. Lice and boils affected hundreds more. That winter, on the road from the ghetto to the factories, the corpses of hundreds of Russian prisoners-of-war had been found, covered in a thin layer of snow where they had fallen on the march. Maja Zarch later recalled:
One Sunday, when no one was going to work, an order was issued. Panic broke out once more. What now? We were all out in the yard when an announcement was made. We were terrified. The announcement was: ‘You are about to witness what happens to a woman who wants to hide her Jewishness.’ A beautiful blond woman was brought in with a noose attached to her neck and publicly hanged. Her crime? She was found walking in the street with her shawl covering her yellow star.
1
On the morning of 1 May 1942 the working Jews of the Dvinsk ghetto went to work as usual. During the day, someone ran into the factory to tell them that they had seen black canvas-covered vans with people inside leaving the ghetto. ‘This meant only one thing,’
Maja Zarch recalled, ‘another action. Each time Jews were taken to their deaths it was in one of these lorries.’
The workers returned along the road to Griva; Maja Zarch recalled the sequel:
As we approached the gates, an oppressive silence enveloped the ghetto. At the gates a drunken guard met us. He was rejoicing as his job had been well done.
Walking through the gates we saw puddles of blood, broken bottles and chairs strewn all over the place. This sight bore testimony to the fact that this last lot of people had put up a useless resistance.
We walked on, only to see sights that defy any description. Children’s bodies lay around, torn in half with the heads smashed in. We were stunned, speechless. Is it possible that such inhumanity to man by man can exist?
We returned to our barracks. It was like a morgue. We were scared to move. A few of us went to the toilet. On entering we heard voices faintly calling. We looked at each other. We thought we were going mad. We looked around—there was no one there. Yet the voices persisted. Urgent, muffled, faint. We could not move. It was as though we were rooted to the ground.
Then suddenly someone caught sight of faces, two teenage boys, deep in excrement with only their faces sticking out. They were on their last breath as they must have stood there most of the day. They had nothing to lose—this was their last chance for survival on this occasion. They had to be rescued immediately—but how?
We women could not reach them by bending over. We had no rope necessary for this operation. We ran to find some men who by now had returned from work and who also were as stunned as we. They dragged them out. The rest of the night we spent huddled together waiting for someone to come for us….
2
Only five hundred Jews now lived in the Dvinsk ghetto, survivors of a population of sixteen thousand less than twelve months earlier. Maja Zarch, whose thirteenth birthday was on the day of the May Day action, was to be the youngest survivor.
Not only the killings in the East, as in Dvinsk, but also the
deportations, from the Polish towns and villages, reached a new intensity in May 1942, with Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor each the scene of daily mass murder of Polish Jews. Repeatedly, the Jewish Councils, on whom the Germans thrust the burden of selecting the deportees, refused to comply. Early in May, in Bilgoraj, when the Jewish Council was ordered to compile a list of candidates for deportation, the Vice-Chairman of the Council, Hillel Janover, and three other members of the Council, Szymon Bin, Shmuel Leib Olender and Ephrain Waksszul, refused to do so. All four were shot dead on May 3. On the following day, the deportations from Bilgoraj to Belzec began.
3
Two days later, in the East Upper Silesian town of Dabrowa, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adolf Weinberg, refused to deliver a list of ‘resettlement’ candidates, or to reveal where those threatened with deportation were hiding. He and his entire family were deported.
4
At Markuszow, on May 7, the Jewish Council warned the Jews of the village of an impending ‘action’ and advised the community that ‘every Jew who is able to save himself should do so’.
5
At Szczebrzeszyn, a Council member, Hersh Getzel Hoichbaum, on learning that none of those sent away to be ‘resettled’ were ever heard of again, told his Council colleagues that he did not wish to be the despatcher of fellow Jews to their deaths, and hanged himself in his attic.
6
At Iwje, two Council members, Shalom Zak and Bezalel Milkowski, were among those selected to remain in the ghetto. They at once insisted on joining the deportees, and were killed, together with their families and 2,500 other Jews, on May 8. In a final gesture, Milkowski had taken off his Council member’s armband, telling the Germans that he did not want their ‘favour’.
7
In the Warsaw ghetto, the teachers and educationalists had declared Tuesday, May 5, as Jewish Child’s Day. In the Jewish calendar, it was Lag Ba’omer, marking the thirty-third day in the seven-week period between the festivals of Passover and Pentecost, a period also identified with a moment in the Roman siege of Jerusalem when there was a sudden and short-lived relief for the beleaguered Jews.
On that ‘festive’ day in Warsaw in 1942, all thirty orphanages and boarding houses in the ghetto, housing four thousand children, were the scenes of special games and entertainment. ‘We gave, to
children, more food on this occasion, some sweets,’ Adolf Berman later recalled, ‘and our slogan was to give the children at least some semblance of joy.’ But at the same time, Berman added, the ‘tragic race’ was going on ‘between the efforts of the Jewish public, and starvation’.
8
In March 1942, 4,951 Warsaw Jews had died of hunger; in April, 4,432: hunger, filth, and the diseases which followed so rapidly and savagely in their train, typhus and typhoid fever.
9
The climax of Child’s Day was a theatrical performance of children’s plays. The children, Berman recalled, ‘though depressed and weak, were still able to exhibit great beauty and charm’. In the audience, hundreds wept ‘from sheer happiness’. So successful was this moment of pleasure that a new date was set, July 23, for the festive opening of a special children’s house, intended for the entertainment and care of more than a thousand children.
10
‘People have become a little more optimistic,’ Ringelblum noted on May 8. ‘They’ve begun to believe that the war will be over in a few months and life will return to normal.’ This ‘good mood’, Ringelblum explained, had been aided by a series of ‘false communiqués’ circulating in the ghetto, within a week of a confident speech by Hitler in Berlin:
What is in these communiqués? Well, first we learn that Smolensk has been retaken through an airdrop of sixty thousand soldiers who joined forces with the Russian army camped west of Smolensk. The same communiqué has taken Kharkov. Another communiqué disembarked a whole army in Murmansk, borne by 160 ships, not one of which was sunk en route. Of course, when Hitler heard this news (this was after his May 1 speech), he collapsed. Then, the Allies won a great victory on Lake Ilmen, where the communiqué killed forty-three thousand Germans and took more than eighty thousand captive. This was the Nineteenth Army; the captives included two German generals. As though this were not enough, a communiqué has deposed Mussolini and made a revolution in Italy. Add to all this an ultimatum from Roosevelt to the German people giving them until May 15 to surrender.
‘In a word,’ Ringelblum reflected, ‘the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto aren’t content merely to recite Psalms and leave the rest in God’s
hands, they labour day and night to lay their enemy low and bring an early peace.’ Those in the ghetto, he concluded, ‘can’t bear it any longer, that’s why we try our utmost to see the war’s end as imminent’.
11
In his ironic reflection, Ringelblum was referring to the Yiddish saying: ‘Don’t rely on miracles, recite Psalms!’ He saw clearly that when people were starved for news and had no idea what was going on in the outside world, they would thrive, and indeed survive, on rumours. These rumours were seldom destructive. They usually reflected optimistic thoughts of victory and the imminent downfall of the enemy. It was as if each Jew was looking beyond the torment and fear of the unknown, hoping to find some kind of reassurance in what was, in fact, fantasy.
Unable to conceive of his own death, a man, even when surrounded by the death of others, grasps at any hope or rumour that might distance him from the realisation that he himself might be marked out for death. Any rumour which confirms that death might not be in prospect is acceptable. It was this psychological mechanism, the impossibility of conceiving of one’s own death, that gave the hopeful rumours their force, and laid the groundwork for the deceptions that were to come. One might fear the worst, one might dread it, one might be told of it in the starkest terms, but one could not believe it. Even harder to grasp was the pathology of those who were committing the murders.
Not only among the outside world of Allies and neutrals, but among the Jews themselves in the midst of these terrible events, it was impossible fully to conceive that a child could be butchered in the way that so many hundreds of thousands of Jewish children had already been butchered. Yet once it had proved impossible for the Jews who witnessed these horrors to enter into the pathology of their persecutors, then it was possible for hope also to survive, which the full realisation of what was taking place would long before have destroyed.
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On the morning of May 8 the Jews who awoke in the White Russian village of Radun, near Lida, found that the ghetto had been sealed off by the Gestapo. ‘No one could go out,’ Avraham Aviel, who was then fourteen, later recalled. ‘Neither could one go out to work.
Even those who had special passes could not leave.’ For four days the ghetto remained sealed. Then a group of Jews were given long-handled spades, and marched out of the ghetto. These Jews were ordered to dig pits. Realizing that the pits were intended as the graves of those in the ghetto, a number of them ‘took their spades and picked up rocks and some of them managed to flee’, among them Aviel’s father, who recounted the story to his son. The rest of the rebellious grave-diggers were killed; others, Aviel’s father recalled, ‘did not have the strength to run. They just stayed put.’