Authors: Martin Gilbert
Two members of the Nieswiez Jewish Council supported the call to revolt: Jacob Klaczko and Yerechmiel Szklar. At the meeting in the synagogue, Szklar appealed to those present not to run away, not to leave behind the old, the sick and the children, but to remain in the ghetto to fight and die there, with dignity. The Council’s Secretary, Miss Lachewicki, also supported those who wanted to resist.
17
On July 18, while the Jews of Nieswiez prepared their act of resistance, an Einsatzkommando unit reached the nearby village of Szarkowszczyzna. There, the head of the Jewish Council, Hirsh Berkan, had already warned the community in advance that a mass execution was being prepared. As soon as the danger was imminent, an order was given ‘for everyone to flee in order to save himself’. On the eve of the action, the village was set on fire and, by the light of the flames, nine hundred Jews escaped. When the Germans came they found six hundred, mostly the elderly and the sick.
The Einsatzkommando unit had been cheated of nine hundred
victims. But it murdered the six hundred, and in the woods, local farmers helped the Germans to track down some of those who had escaped. But even after the manhunt, more of Szarkowszczyzna’s Jews were still alive, hiding in the woods, than had been killed.
18
On July 20, in the Warthegau, there was a further deportation from Kowale Panskie to Chelmno. Those who were sick, however, were shot in the hills just outside the village. A male nurse, Z. Stein, refused to leave his sick patients. He was killed with them.
19
Among those killed near Kowale Panskie that day were two Jews from Uniejow: Lenczycki, who was forced to dig his own grave and then shot, together with his son. One Jew escaped: Yaakov Waldman, also from Uniejow.
20
In Kleck, the Germans surrounded the ghetto on the night of July 20, intending to murder all fourteen hundred Jews in the morning. That night, one of the Jews, Moshe Fish, tried to organise a mass escape. While it was still dark the ghetto was set on fire. Led by Fish, four hundred Jews managed to break out before the Germans could open fire with their machine guns. Many of the four hundred were killed however, as they ran towards the forest. At dawn, the thousand Jews who remained in Kleck were slaughtered in the ghetto. Reaching the forest with Leva Gilchik, a Jew from the nearby ghetto of Kopyl, Fish and Gilchik formed a Jewish partisan detachment. Six months later, they were both to fall in battle against the Germans.
21
The Jews of Nieswiez, like those of Kleck, were marked for destruction on July 21. On the previous evening they made their preparations. Gasoline and kerosene were their main weapons. They also had several gun parts and even parts of a machine gun smuggled out of the German gun repair shop by two Jewish girls working there, Rakhil Kagan and Liya Dukor. These girls were able to reassemble both the guns and machine gun and to teach the young men of the ghetto how to use them. At the same time, every Jew was ordered to provide himself with some means of defence, whether it was an axe, a knife, a hammer, or even a stout piece of wood. These preparations had been intensified when news reached Nieswiez of the massacre of the Jews in the nearby village of Gorodya.
22
On the morning of July 21, Megalif, the head of the Jewish
Council, announced that the German commander had ordered an immediate selection. Only essential workers, first and foremost thirty textile workers, would not be taken. But even they would not be allowed to keep their families with them. Then, as Shalom Cholawski recalled:
The members of the underground and the mass of Jews standing at the gate replied resolutely, ‘No! There will be no selection! If some are to live, then all must; if not, we shall defend ourselves!’
Megalif returned to the German commandant with our answer. The Germans opened fire. The fighting unit in the synagogue answered with a surprise volley of machine-gun fire. The Germans crashed through the ghetto gate. The Jews drew their knives and irons. They reached for their pile of stones. I saw a group of Jews attack a charging German and kill him. Klaczko, an older man, and Yisrael Shusterman battled with one of the policemen and knocked him dead. The Germans increased their firing. A battle began between Jews with steel weapons and Germans and police with guns. More skirmishes, hand-to-hand combat, shooting.
Soon the ghetto was filled with dead and dying. Throughout the streets, bodies lay like discarded puppets. The Jews set fire to their houses. The flames spread quickly towards the centre of the town. A horde of local peasants from the outlying neighbourhood swarmed into the ghetto, plundering before all was devoured by the fire. The madness of their pillaging and the fury of the Germans to kill matched the frenzy of every Jew, man, woman, child, to flee from the burning ghetto.
People were running, screaming, crying. I went to check the various fighting posts and then returned to my position. Siomka Farfel, Shmuel Nissenbaum and I were caught in a volley of gunfire at the post where I was stationed. We jumped into an underground bunker at Anuteshnik’s house. After a few moments we escaped to the attic. There we lay on the floor with knives in hand, facing the ladder, the only access to the attic.
A group of Germans entered the house. One of them took hold of the ladder, shook it, and began to go up. We held our breath, set to strike. Suddenly, another soldier called to the one climbing, ‘We already looked the place over, let’s go.’ The soldier hesitated and then went down the ladder. They left.
From the attic we could see crowds of non-Jews with arms full of clothes and goods, wildly jumping and jeering whenever a Jew was shot. We remained in the attic until we were able to sneak out. We ran south through the alleys, circled the city, crossed the Nieswiez-Horodzei road, and entered the fields of grain.
Small groups of Jews like ours burst forth from the ghetto. Once outside, some were beaten by zealous peasants. Others were killed in flight. Small groups succeeded in reaching the forest. I saw Simcha Rozen carrying his small son wrapped in a pillow. As Simcha ran, he passed the bundle to a Christian woman standing near the gate and then continued running towards the woods.
23
Among those killed in the battle were Yerechmiel Szklar and Jacob Klaczko.
24
Megalif, a lawyer from Warsaw who had fled to Nieswiez in September 1939, did not seek safety in the woods. Realizing that his earlier reluctance to be associated with the resistance had led to his unpopularity, he took his place in the first line of those being deported. ‘Brothers,’ he said, ‘I know you had no trust in me, you thought I was going to betray you. In this, my last minute, I am with you. I and my family—we are the first ones to go to our deaths.’
25
Cholawski and his colleagues fled eastward. Reaching the forests, they met one group who had escaped from Kleck.
26
Another escapee from Nieswiez who succeeded in reaching the forests was the Nieswiez Council Secretary, Miss Lachewicki, who had managed to leave the ghetto, together with her father, on the day after the slaughter.
27
In the forests, Cholawski was joined by Simcha Rozen, as well as by Rachel Filler, a young mother who had escaped, with her son, from the ghetto of Timkowicze.
28
They also found, as Cholawski later recalled, the remnants of many murdered communities: ‘Jewish families, some children, sometimes parents, even old men—they were there in the forest, and were afraid to leave their hiding places.’
Cholawski and his fellow escapees set up ‘family camps’ of Jews, whom they protected against German manhunts, against hostile peasants, and against starvation. They set up a Jewish fighting unit, and urged Jews in as yet untouched ghettos to join them.
29
To another part of the forests of White Russia came 120 Jews who escaped from Dereczyn on July 24, the day of the destruction of the ghetto there, when three thousand Jews were killed. In the forest, these 120 met Jechiel Atlas, a twenty-eight-year-old doctor whose mother and sister had been murdered in the destruction of another of the White Russian ghettos, that of Kozlowszczyzna. Dr Atlas organized the escapees from Dereczyn into a small partisan band. ‘We have not come here to live,’ he told them. ‘Our chances to survive are almost nil. Our sacred task is to avenge our dead, to fight and die if necessary.’
For four months Jechiel Atlas and his men attacked German troop trains and military convoys. Then, on December 5, when his unit was surrounded by the Germans, he was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, he told his men: ‘Pay no attention to me. Go on fighting. Avenge our tormented people.’
30
Vengeance was a much-heard cry, driving individual Jews to acts of hopeless heroism. On July 4, in the Odessa region, a Jewish girl, Riva Meierson, joined the Soviet partisans. Later she was caught and shot, her name recorded in the court-martial records at the time of her execution.
31
***
In the East, in the areas occupied by Germany only after June 1941, there had been almost no deception. There had been no time to cog and lull and starve and coerce, no ‘civilisation’ in any form, just brutality without deception. The Jews in the East who saw what was happening did what they could to resist, to try to escape. They did so in almost every case without hope of success, but with defiance, barricading themselves in their ghettos, setting fire to their houses as the killers came for them, running to the woods through the barrage of the machine-gun and grenade attack. Wherever possible, those who reached the forests set up family camps to protect the women, the children, the old and the sick who could not fight or forage. They also formed partisan bands to attack any German military units or lines of communication which might be vulnerable. In the East, Jewish resistance was the main hope of those who had murder hurled at them, even though it rarely meant survival. It was a final act of desperation.
In the areas occupied by the Germans in Western Europe in 1939
and 1940, no immediate killings and no savage butchery in the streets had taken place. In these areas there had been a veneer of civilised, or at least rational, behaviour by the German occupying power. Rules and regulations had been imposed to restrict Jewish activities, but not to kill Jews. Even in the Polish ghettos, there seemed hope of survival through work, hope of being able to find enough to eat for some, if not all. Above all, especially in Western Europe, there was the deliberate mystery of deportation. There were no brief violent marches to a death-pit three or four miles away, but ordered assembly at railway stations for deportation to a distant, unknown and unidentified destination.
In Western Europe, the German rule was to create the maximum deception and to deny the Jews any knowledge of what was happening, either to their fellow Jews in the East, or to those local Jews who had been deported earlier. This policy of deception fitted in, and was designed to fit in, with the typical pattern of Jewish survival throughout the ages, the traditional dependence upon the utmost restraint, and the reliance for survival upon every type of ingenuity. The Jewish will to survive and the German policy of deception were linked in what for the Jews was a tragic magnetism. The German promise seemed clear: there was a means to save yourself if only you could find it. There was a chance to survive, even if the odds were not good. There was work at home or resettlement far away: fortifications to be dug or harvests to be brought in, a thousand miles to the east. All the evidence available seemed also to make it clear that Jews were surviving, some by submission, others by cunning, each one by using whatever resources he or she could muster.
The power of deception, and the power of self-deception, worked upon each other in fatal grasp.
In the Warsaw ghetto, tormented by hunger, and by the daily random shootings, cultural life had continued. Plans had gone ahead for the opening of a special Children’s House in the ghetto on 23 July 1942. Meanwhile, on July 18, a performance of the play
The Dying Prince
was given by the students of Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. The play had been written by Korczak himself. Among those present was the poet Yitzhak Katznelson.
1
That same day, the chairman of the Warsaw Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, informed the Council, and the Jewish police, that the Germans had given him assurances that they had no intention of resettling the population of the ghetto. Eye-witnesses reported, however, that a train, composed of several dozen goods wagons, was at that very moment being made up in the railway sidings adjoining the ghetto at its northern limit.
2
On the following day, July 19, Heinrich Himmler sent a secret directive from Berlin to SS Lieutenant-General Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, head of the German police forces in the General Government, which began: ‘I herewith order that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government be carried out and completed by December 31.’ Himmler explained that these measures were required ‘with a view to the necessary division of races and peoples for the New Order in Europe, and also in the interest of the security and cleanliness of the German Reich and its sphere of interest’. To avoid providing a ‘point of application’ for resistance, and in order to eliminate ‘a source of moral and physical pestilence’, a ‘total cleansing is necessary, and therefore to be carried out’.
3
On July 21 the Germans seized sixty Jews in the Warsaw ghetto,
among them three members of the Jewish Council. At the same time, a number of Jews were shot in the streets, or in their homes.
4
On the following day, July 22, a telegram was received at Treblinka station ‘informing us’, as the Polish railwayman Franciszek Zabecki recalled, ‘of the running of a shuttle service from Warsaw to Treblinka with settlers’. The trains would be made up of sixty covered goods wagons. After unloading, the trains were to be sent back to Warsaw. ‘Our astonishment was immense. We wondered what sort of settlers they were, where they were going to live and what they were going to do? We connected this news with the mysterious buildings in the forest.’
5