The Holocaust (56 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
The third experiment, carried out by Dr Clauberg, was described by the Dutch doctors as the one ‘most practised’.
The women were put on the table. With the assistance of an electrically driven pump a white cement-like fluid (possibly Barium) was driven into the uterus. As the fluid was pumped in, Rontgen photos were taken. The women were extremely ill under this experiment. They felt as though the abdomen was going to burst. After getting up from the table they rushed to the lavatory where the fluid came out again. The pains caused by this experiment were equivalent to labour pains. The fluid which was evacuated was often mixed with blood. The experiments were repeated several times. Those patients that could
not be used owing to a small Os Uteri or those patients upon whom the experiments were completed, were sent to Birkenau, another camp, where they were killed. This was practised on practically all women at Auschwitz, about four hundred all told.
The aim of the experiment was not to affect sterility, nevertheless it is certain that many women owing to the inflammatory reaction set up did become sterile and many died from peritonitis due to a ruptured uterus.
A fourth experiment, carried out by SS First Lieutenants Weber and Munch, involved the reaction of the blood to various injections, among them malarial parasites, pure carbolic, and air. ‘Many other cruelties were performed’, Mackay added, ‘which have not been set down.’
2
***
Auschwitz was now ready to receive Jews from all over Europe: to gas the old, the sick, the infirm and the young, and to ‘select’ the able-bodied for forced labour, and for medical experiments. On July 15 the first two thousand deportees were sent from Holland to Auschwitz. Most of them were German Jews who had found refuge in Holland between 1933 and 1939. On the previous day the Germans had announced that they were going for ‘labour service in Germany’.
3
Two weeks later, in Amsterdam, the Gestapo Commander assured the Jewish Council that ‘all Jews taken to Germany are undoubtedly doing ordinary work.’ In addition, he promised them that the Germans had made ‘absolutely certain’ that deported families would be kept together.
4
The two thousand deportees from Holland had been sent east in two trains. Both trains reached Auschwitz on July 17. At Auschwitz, 1,251 men were sent to the barracks at Birkenau where they were tattooed on their forearm with the numbers’ 47088 to 47687 and 47843 to 48493. Of the women deportees, 300 were taken to the barracks and likewise tattooed, with the numbers 8801 to 8999 and 9027 to 9127. The remaining 449 deportees were gassed.
5
These included all the children, the elderly and the sick.
The ‘numbering’ of Jews at Birkenau was not only administratively tidy. It was also a method of depersonalising tens of
thousands of men and women, who were being reduced to a cipher, a mere number. Once they had been tattooed, the only thing that was important about them was their number. Whatever productive work that was to be had of them was as if from a machine: a machine with a serial number by which alone it functioned. The tattoo on the forearm also inhibited escape: it was an indelible mark instantly recognisable. Unlike circumcision, which had become under German rule a tell-tale mark and curse only for Jewish men, the tattoo identified Jew and Jewess alike.
As the deportations from Holland gathered momentum, many Dutch Jews were given shelter by non-Jews. In the small town of Winterswijk, near the German frontier, hiding places were found for 35 of the 270 Jews. Eight miles away, at Aalten, of 85 Jews, 51 were hidden by non-Jews, and survived the war.
6
On July 16, the day after the first Dutch deportation, seven thousand Jews were rounded up in Paris. They were taken, first, to an indoor stadium, the Velodrome d’Hiver, and then to an unfinished suburban building complex at Drancy. The original plan was for them to be deported on July 18, but the train was not ready. Adolf Eichmann was angered, pointing out, as SS First Lieutenant Heinz Rothke, his Paris representative, noted on July 19, ‘that it was a matter of prestige: difficult negotiations had been successfully concluded with the Reich Transport Ministry for these convoys and now Paris was cancelling a train.’ Such a thing ‘had never happened to him before. The whole affair was “disgraceful”.’
7
Matters were soon rectified. On the very day of Eichmann’s protest, July 19, the first thousand Jews, 879 men and 121 women, were deported from Paris to Auschwitz. These deportees from France included 386 Polish-born Jews, and many other Jews born in towns as far away as Odessa, Istanbul, Leningrad, Moscow and Jerusalem. On July 21 these thousand deportees reached Auschwitz. A selection was made, and 375, probably all those over forty-five, were gassed. The other men and women, 615 in all, received tattoo numbers and were sent to the barracks.
8
But only seventeen of the men sent to the barracks, and none of the women, survived the war.
9
On their arrival at Auschwitz, the Jewish deportees were met with a combination of threats and deception. If there were several trains on a single day, haste was the predominant mood. Rudolf Vrba,
deported from Slovakia in July, recalled how, on arrival, the Jews in his carriage ‘began to throw out all the corpses of the dead. But all of a sudden there were voices, “Juden, raus, raus, raus—schnell, schnell, schnell.” “Jews, out, out, out—quick, quick, quick….”’
DEPORTATIONS TO AUSCHWITZ
THE WESTERN DEPORTATIONS
Vrba was selected for the barracks, where he worked first as a clerk and later as one of those prisoners forced to sort out the belongings of the new arrivals. Later he recalled the days on which there was, perhaps, only a single train, and hence less hurry. On such occasions, Vrba noted, the SS ‘might grant you the gentle technique, with humour’. This, he recalled, was the gist of the ‘gentle’ approach:
Ladies and gentlemen, we are so sorry. Look just at this mess! How do they treat people! Would you please get out and please don’t get in touch with those criminals—they are here only for taking your luggage and if you have got unmarked luggage and you are afraid that you might, it might get lost, just take it with you, but which you have got names on it, just don’t worry. We are keeping a good eye that none of those criminals can take anything away. And our German honesty, about which I hope you have got no doubt, is a guarantee that all your property will be given to you. Now the whole thing is to make the whole procedure—please don’t make us any trouble—so that we can give you water and allow you the basic sanitary conditions to be restored after this dismal journey.
In this way, Vrba added, the SS, while looking around at the ‘excrement and urine and blood around the wagon’, pretended it was all some terrible mistake. But the gentle or brutal techniques had only one objective, neither to be gentle nor to be brutal, but to ensure that the people who had arrived reached the gas-chamber ‘as soon as possible and without a hitch’.
10
The Jews who arrived at Auschwitz had been given many promises. Lilli Kopecky, who, like Vrba, was deported from Slovakia that summer, recalled a Dutch Jew asking, angrily, ‘Where is my wife, where are my children?’ The Jews in the barracks said to him, ‘Look at the chimney. They are there. Up there.’ But the Dutch Jew cursed them. ‘There are so many camps around,’ he said. ‘They promised me we would be kept together.’
‘This’, Lilli Kopecky reflected, ‘is the greatest strength of the
whole crime, its unbelievability.’ The explanations, and the warnings, were simply disbelieved. Lilli Kopecky herself recalled how, ‘when we came to Auschwitz, we smelt the sweet smell. They said to us, “There the people are gassed, three kilometres over there.” We didn’t believe it.’
11
In the East, the Einsatzkommando units had returned to the almost daily pattern of slaughter of the autumn of 1941. On 13 July 1942, two days after the first medical experiments had been performed at Auschwitz, a German engineer, Hermann Graebe, witnessed the round-up of several thousand Jews in the Rowne ghetto in the Volhynia. Graebe was present in order to prevent the deportation of a hundred Jews employed in the engineering works of which he was the manager. Immediately after the war he recalled, of the events of July 13:
On the evening of this day, I drove to Rowne and posted myself with Fritz Einsporn in front of the house in the Bahnhofstrasse in which the Jewish workers of my firm slept. Shortly after 2200 the ghetto was encircled by a large SS detachment and about three times as many members of the Ukrainian militia. Then the electric arclights which had been erected in and around the ghetto were switched on. SS and militia squads of four to six men entered or at least tried to enter the houses. Where the doors and windows were closed and the inhabitants did not open at the knocking, the SS man and militia broke the windows, forced the doors with beams and crowbars, and entered the houses. The people living there were driven on to the street just as they were, regardless of whether they were dressed or in bed.
Since the Jews in most cases refused to leave their houses and resisted, the SS and militia applied force. They finally succeeded, with strokes of the whip, kicks and blows, and rifle butts, in clearing the houses. The people were driven out of their houses in such haste that small children in bed had been left behind in several instances.
In the streets women cried out for their children and children for their parents. That did not prevent the SS from driving the people along the road at running pace, and hitting them, until they reached a waiting freight train. Carriage after carriage was filled, and the screaming of women and children and the
cracking of whips and rifle shots resounded unceasingly. Since several families or groups had barricaded themselves in especially strong buildings and the doors could not be forced with crowbars or beams, the doors were now blown open with hand grenades.
Since the ghetto was near the railroad tracks in Rowne, the younger people tried to get across the tracks and over a small river to get away from the ghetto area. As this stretch of country was beyond the range of the electric lights, it was illuminated by small rockets. All through the night these beaten, hounded, and wounded people moved along the lighted streets. Women carried their dead children in their arms, children pulled and dragged their dead parents by their arms and legs down the road toward the train. Again and again the cries, ‘Open the door! Open the door!’ echoed through the ghetto.
12
‘Can there be a clearer picture than Graebe’s’, one historian has asked, ‘of defenceless civilians resisting as best they could overwhelming odds?’
13
But the odds were overwhelming, and in the following two days, five thousand Rowne Jews were murdered.
In the Molczadz ghetto, in White Russia, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Ehrlich, a refugee from Silesia, together with a locally born Council member, Leib Gilerowicz, urged the German authorities not to embark upon a ‘resettlement’ action. Both men were tortured and killed.
14
Another member of the Molczadz Jewish Council, Josef Korn, warned other Jews of the impending action, and urged young people not to sleep at home, but to make preparations ‘in case anything happened’.
15
A thousand Jews were seized in the Molczadz ghetto on July 15, driven to nearby woods, and shot. That same day, another thousand Jews were murdered in Bereza Kartuska, thirty miles to the south. At Horodzei, east of Molczadz, a further thousand Jews were murdered on July 16. Shalom Cholawski has recalled how, on July 17, when the news of these Horodzei killings reached the Nieswiez ghetto, eight miles away, it ‘struck our ghetto like a bolt of lightning’. His account continued:
All delusions dissolved. What we did not know then was that this was no isolated incident. A wave of slaughter had already
wiped out Jewish ghettos in White Russia and the Ukraine.
On that day, we, the Jews of the Nieswiez ghetto, gathered at the new synagogue. The congregation stood still as death. The Kaddish—the Jewish prayer for the dead—was spoken. Silent anguish gave way to moaning, to choked tears. Our grief was for those fallen Jews. Or did each person sense that the congregation was reciting Kaddish for itself?
At the memorial meeting, I rallied the mourners: ‘Fellow Jews! We are isolated and cut off from the Jewish world, from the world at large. It may be that not a word of our plight has been heard. It may be that we are the last of the ghettos and the last of the Jews. We must fight for our lives! We shall defend the ghetto, the place of suffering. We will fight as would the last remaining Jews on the soil of their homeland. We will prepare, now, to strike. We will be on the alert. The right moment may come at any time!’
The entire population of the ghetto was with us. Last-minute arrangements were concluded. A plan of attack was finalized. As soon as the Germans advanced and surrounded the ghetto, a pile of straw would be ignited near the synagogue. The fighting groups would set fire to assigned houses, thereby directing the battle towards the forest, our cover. All would flee there.
16