Authors: Martin Gilbert
It was not at Auschwitz, however, at Belzec, or at Chelmno, but at Sobibor, that the largest number of Jews was gassed in May 1942. In that one month, more than thirty-six thousand Jews were brought to Sobibor from nineteen communities between the Vistula and the Bug.
25
One of those communities was Turobin, from which 2,750 Jews were deported on May 12. Among the deportees was Dov Freiberg, a fifteen-year-old boy from Lodz, whose mother had taken him first to the Warsaw ghetto, then sent him away to Turobin for safety. ‘Most of the people didn’t believe that there was extermination,’ he later recalled. ‘Of course, we knew there were
isolated cases of murder, but we didn’t know about mass extermination. We didn’t want to believe it.’
Shortly before the deportation, a Jew had come to Turobin and told the Jews about the deportations from nearby towns. ‘Do not believe what you are told—they are not sent to the Ukraine at all, they are being sent to Belzec and killed there.’ Of course, Freiberg later recalled, ‘nobody gave credit to his words—we just thought that he was spreading panic.’
On May 12 the Jews of Turobin were assembled in the market place, told that they were to be resettled in the Ukraine, were then marched to the nearest railway station, several miles away at Krasnowka. There, joined by several thousand Jews from nearby villages, they were driven into goods wagons. ‘They piled us into the carriages,’ Freiberg recalled. ‘We were jammed to such an extent that there was no room to stand at all. Many people fainted. Also, in my own carriage, two women died in the course of the journey.’
Just to the east of Lublin was a notorious concentration camp, Majdanek, which was becoming known throughout the region as a place of severe hard labour. As the train moved eastwards, through Lublin and beyond, ‘we were happy’, Freiberg later recalled, ‘not to go in the direction of Majdanek, because we knew that Majdanek was a hard labour camp. We were rather happy to see that we were going eastward.’
As the train continued eastward, it seemed as if the story of resettlement in the Ukraine was indeed true. After three or four hours, the train reached Sobibor. At the entrance to the camp were written the words:
SS Sonderkommando Umsiedlungslager
, ‘SS special unit resettlement camp’. As Freiberg later recalled:
Everything was done at a lightning speed. We had no time to think. The SS people began shouting, ‘Schneller, schneller!’ ‘Hurry up, hurry up!’—and they brought us to a particular point. It was some sort of a small gate, and then they would tell us, ‘Links, rechts’.
To the right or to the left. These were not selections. Anybody who came was actually exterminated, so this selection was temporary—let me say, for a few hours or a few seconds. ‘Links, recht’ meant men apart and women and children apart. The arrangement was simply different for men and for women. I was, of course, taken together with the men.
Women and children went the way I only came to know later, as during the first period that camp, compared with what it was later, was rather primitive. It didn’t really operate in the night, only in the morning. So men stayed there on the spot during the night, while women and children went straight to the gas-chambers, since there was no arrangement for everybody at that time.
There was a band there in the place. This was in Lager Eins—Camp No. 1. There was a band which was playing. And on that night, when we arrived there, when we spent the night there, in spite of the fact we didn’t know what was going on—of course, the rumour was afloat, but we didn’t yet believe—still we had an uncanny feeling.
Then in the camp we were already a few hundred metres from gas-chambers and the Germans still managed to hoodwink; they still assured us that within a few weeks we would rejoin our families—but we saw their belongings piled up. They said: ‘They are getting new clothes.’ In Camp 3, they said, they were to be concentrated and then sent to the Ukraine.
Camps 1 and 2 were, in fact, one camp, but as far as the various tasks and functions were concerned, one was separated from the other. One camp was for the experts—that means to say professional people—joiners, shoemakers etc.; whilst Camp 2 was composed of people who dealt with transports—everything in that connection. Lager 3 was the gas-chambers. At first people were buried in big pits—layers of people—that’s how it operated.
In the morning the Germans came and began to select people who had some trade—tailors, shoemakers, joiners and so on; and I had a feeling that something was going wrong. Then I remembered the Jew who had told me about the extermination—I began to think about my family.
I was not an artisan, so my situation didn’t look too good. They were choosing young and able-bodied people, singling them out by saying: ‘Du!’ I was in the group. After about half an hour most of the transport had been taken to the gas-chambers and we were left behind, to be sent to work.
Of the 2,750 Jews deported from Turobin to Sobibor on May 12, only 150 were ‘sent to work’. As Dov Freiberg later recalled:
We worked all that day in groups; I was working in the transfer of belongings—people were undressing and we had to take their various belongings and place them in piles. I worked there for about an hour, and wherever we went, we saw that people had disappeared.
There was a dog. That dog belonged to an SS man from Camp 3—we called him Beddo. The SS man was responsible for the ‘showers’—the gas-chambers. Later on this dog was passed to SS Sergeant Pavel; he called him ‘Mensch’ (‘Man’), and when he set the dog on the prisoners he would say: ‘Man, get that dog!’ He said. ‘You are my deputy.’ That’s what he would say to the dog.
Whoever was caught by the dog would be killed by the Germans, because the Germans didn’t like seeing any wounded or sick people around. I was bitten twice by that dog—I still have the scars. It was a fluke that I remained alive in spite of it.
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Within a week of the Turobin deportation, trains had begun to reach Sobibor from Theresienstadt, a distance of more than five hundred miles. Of two thousand Jews deported from Theresienstadt to Sobibor on May 17, in two separate trains, there was not a single survivor.
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Dov Freiberg was one of the few surviving witnesses of the fate of these deportees from Czechoslovakia, Austria and Germany. As he later recalled:
They didn’t know exactly what was going to happen to them. Even if they feared, they didn’t believe. But the treatment was that they would leave the carriages in great speed. They would be concentrated in one place. There would be the separation between men and women and children. People would enter a closed yard with barbed-wire entanglements on both sides. In the yard there were also sheds for showers and there was a door in a building in the middle of it and people had the impression that they were entering a bath-shower. There was a man who would come and, as it were, preach to the people concentrated there.
This man, Dov Freiberg later recalled, was known as ‘the Preacher’. His speeches were ‘adapted to each transport’. But their import was the same:
He would say that people were being sent to the Ukraine. They would have to work.
They would have to work hard. Some people asked what was going to happen to women. He would answer and say that women were also supposed to work there. That was more or less the gist of his speech. Then he would say that here you must strip but do it quickly because we have very little time. Try to do it as fast as you possibly can.
People would invariably give credit to his words. They would undress and arrange their belongings and there was a special box office where valuables were surrendered. At that time people would surrender money and gold but sometimes they would also bury part of their belongings, particularly gold and money, hoping to come back to that place one day and retrieve their belongings. Then they would walk a distance of about three hundred metres.
That walk was to the gas-chamber. But almost invariably some Jews would be ordered by the SS and Ukrainian guards to stay behind. ‘Sometimes they would leave people there just to play with,’ Freiberg recalled. ‘They would have all sorts of torture. They would leave some people out of the transport and we could see what was going on. The shrieking was bloodcurdling. And then we would see their belongings soaked with blood.’
Freiberg survived as part of the small group of labourers: sorting through the clothing of the victims, cleaning the residential quarters of the Ukrainians, and, for a short time, ‘shearing women’s hair before they entered the gas-chamber’.
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Another who survived at Sobibor was Itzhak Lichtman. He had been deported from Zolkiewka, near Lublin, to Sobibor on May 22. On reaching the camp, he became one of the five shoemakers, kept alive to make boots and slippers for the SS and their families. Later he recalled how, in a transport from Holland, a hospital nurse, Mrs Hejdi, who had arrived with her husband, was sobbing. ‘Are you crying because your husband left you?’ the SS laughed, knowing that her husband had just been gassed. Whereupon ‘they brought a Czechoslovak middle-aged prisoner and told them, ‘You are husband and wife.’ Then they forced them to sleep together.
29
Beginning on May 4, and continuing without pause for eleven days, more than ten thousand Jews were deported from the Lodz ghetto to Chelmno, and gassed. These were the Jews who had been brought to Lodz from Western Europe six months earlier. On May 4, one thousand had been deported. All those sent away, the Ghetto Chronicle recorded that same day, ‘had their baggage, knapsacks, and even their hand-held parcels taken away from them’. News of this, the Chronicle added, ‘has cast a chill over the ghetto’.
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On the following day it was noted that at least one Jewish doctor, also a former deportee, was being sent with each transport of a thousand Jews.
31
On May 6, with the third deportation, the ghetto learned that as the deportees were about to board the train, ‘the guards ordered them to step back five paces from the train, and then to throw all their baggage to the ground, not only their knapsacks and suitcases, but their hand-held parcels, bags etc. as well’. They were only allowed to keep their bread. The sight of wagons returning to the ghetto, noted the Chronicle, loaded with the bedding and blankets of the deportees, ‘caused a feeling of hopelessness among passers-by’.
The Jews were deported according to their place of origin: Berlin first, then Vienna, then Dusseldorf, followed by more from Berlin, then Hamburg, Vienna, Prague and Cologne. The final transport was from Luxembourg. Those Jews, some 260 in all, who had long before been converted to Christianity, asked to be kept together, and to be ‘resettled’ in a group. Their request was granted.
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Baptism could not protect either those who had converted to Christianity to save their lives, or those whose conversion, often many years before the war, had been an act of faith.
To calm the fears of those who were ordered to leave their baggage at the station, the Germans announced ‘that they would receive their baggage in the next train’. The trains themselves were ordinary passenger trains, made up of third-class carriages. ‘Each person leaving the ghetto is given a seat,’ the Chronicle recorded on May 6, the train ‘returning the same day, at eight o’clock p.m.’ It had left at seven o’clock in the morning ‘on the dot’.
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The timetable, the third-class carriages, and the promise that the baggage would soon follow, were all deliberate devices of a deceptive normality. All the deportees were taken to Chelmno and gassed. On May 7, the fourth day of the ‘resettlement’ of the once proud,
prosperous Western European Jews, the Ghetto Chronicle commented: ‘Ghosts, skeletons with swollen faces and extremities, ragged and impoverished, they now left for a further journey on which they were not even allowed to take a knapsack. They had been stripped of all their European finery, and only the Eternal Jew was left.’
34
During the first six days of the deportations, six of the deportees committed suicide, fearing the worst. But the meaning of the deportations was unclear. ‘Tears of joy or of terrible despair,’ the Chronicle noted on May 11, ‘everyone reacts one way or the other upon hearing his name called.’
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The death toll in the ghetto was so high that resettlement offered the illusion of a better chance for life. Every day, as Western European Jews died in the ghetto of starvation, it served as a reminder of the precariousness of life under duress. On May 5, the second day of the deportations, a sixty-three-year-old Jew from Frankfurt had died: Professor Jakob Edmund Speyer, who, as the Ghetto Chronicle recorded, ‘ranked among the greatest inventors in the field of medical chemistry’, one of the discoverers of Eukodal, ‘a preparation that constitutes an improvement over morphine’. He was also a noted researcher into the use of vitamins.
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On May 12 a further nine hundred Western European Jews were deported from Lodz. Another seven Jews had committed suicide, among them the sixty-three-year-old Rosa Kaldo, originally from Hungary, who, the Chronicle reported, ‘threw herself from a fifth-floor window,’ dying immediately.
37
The deportations continued on May 13 and again on May 14, when among those deported, and gassed on arrival at Chelmno, was the Viennese pianist, Leopold Birkenfeld, who for the past six months had entranced the ghetto with his music.
38
The last of the deportations took place on May 15. ‘On the final day,’ the Chronicle noted, ‘the German guards treated the deportees in relatively mild fashion, allowing them to take their possessions with them.’ Even so, fears for his fate had led to another suicide attempt. ‘The person making the attempt’, recorded the Chronicle, ‘cut the veins in his arms; however this did not help him avoid deportation. After bandages were applied and the bleeding stemmed, he was sent to the train station’. The Chronicle added that, ‘on the whole it must be said that in these tragic moments before another journey into the
unknown, the exiles from the West preserved their equanimity to a greater degree than have their brothers here in similar situations. Lamentation, screaming, and wailing at the final assembly points were characteristic features of the previous deportations, whereas during this deportation the Western European Jews made an outward display of considerably greater self-control. On the other hand, they lost that self-control at the train station and, by causing confusion, drew down repressive measures from the guards.’