The Holocaust (58 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
In Warsaw, an SS Major, Hermann Höfle, had been appointed Plenipotentiary in charge of deportations. On July 22 he went to see the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Adam Czerniakow, who noted in his diary Höfle’s order ‘that all Jews, irrespective of sex and age, with certain exceptions, will be deported to the East. By 4 p.m. today a contingent of six thousand people must be provided. And this (at the minimum) will be the daily quota.’
In ordering Czerniakow to cooperate in the organization of this massive deportation, Höfle added, as Czerniakow noted, ‘that for the time being my wife was free, but if the deportations were impeded in any way, she would be the first one to be shot as a hostage.’
6
That same day, July 22, the ghetto walls were surrounded by Ukrainian and Latvian guards, in SS uniforms, armed, and at twenty-five-yard intervals.
7
The round-up and deportation of Jews from Warsaw now began. Adolf Berman, who was responsible for many of the orphanages in the ghetto, later recalled:
On that very day, the first victims were the Jewish children, and I shall never forget the harrowing scenes and the bloodcurdling incidents when the SS men most cruelly attacked children—children roaming in the streets; took them by force to carts, and I remember, fully, those children were defending themselves. Even today the cries and shrieking of those children are clear in my mind. ‘Mama, Mama,’ this is what we heard. ‘Save us, mothers.’
8
The deportations from Warsaw continued, almost without pause, until September 12. In those seven weeks, a total of 265,000
Jews were sent by train for ‘resettlement in the East’. Their actual destination was Treblinka, and its three gas-chambers. Death, not slave labour, was their fate. It was the largest slaughter of a single community, Jewish or non-Jewish, in the Second World War.
No one book, certainly no one chapter, can tell the story of those seven weeks, each day of which saw the murder of more than four thousand Jews. Merely to list the names of the murdered ones, a line for each name, would take nearly seven thousand printed pages. Among the many hundreds of Jewish doctors deported from Warsaw and gassed at Treblinka was Zofia Zamenhof, a graduate of the University of Lausanne, whose brother, shot by the Gestapo in January 1940, had been one of the first victims of Nazi terror in Warsaw.
9
Another of those who were gassed, Salomea Bau-Prussak, had been the first woman, Jewish or non-Jewish, to receive a doctor’s degree from a Polish university. A leading neurologist, her clinical abilities and broad medical knowledge were widely known in Poland, and abroad. During the ghetto months, while active in distributing underground literature, she had sheltered and cared for a fellow doctor, a woman physician sick with typhus.
10
Many Jews committed suicide, among them Leon Endelman, one of Poland’s leading ophthalmologists.
11
It was to Czerniakow, Chairman of the Jewish Council, that the Germans had looked for cooperation in the deportations: for a fixed number of Jews to be delivered daily to the railway sidings, the
Umschlagplatz
, at the northern edge of the ghetto. The Germans had assured Czerniakow that only unemployed Jews would be sent for ‘resettlement’. As the overwhelming majority of the population of the ghetto was employed, Czerniakow had convinced himself that the ‘resettlement’ would therefore ‘only’ apply to some ten or twenty thousand people, mostly the recent arrivals from Germany and Czechoslovakia. But on July 22 the Germans had demanded six thousand Jews a day, and a day later increased their demand to seven thousand a day.
12
‘When I asked for the number of days per week in which the operation would be carried out,’ Czerniakow noted in his diary on July 23, ‘the number was seven days a week’. His diary entry continued: ‘It is three o’clock. So far, four thousand are ready to go. The orders are that there must be nine thousand by four o’clock.’
13
They demand from me to kill the children of my nation with my
own hands, Czerniakow noted in his diary, later that day. ‘There is nothing left for me but to die.’
14
That day, Czerniakow committed suicide.
Each day, several thousand Jews were taken from their homes or seized in the streets, and then marched on foot, or forced into trucks or horse-drawn carts and driven, to the Umschlagplatz. Those whom the Germans wished to keep in the ghetto, at productive work, were issued with a special employment card, or
Ausweis.
Sometimes even these cards proved insufficient protection, unless they were stamped ‘Operation Reinhard’, with a Nazi eagle and a swastika, and the inscription ‘Not subject to resettlement’. Anyone without such a card was deported. Alexander Donat later recalled:
I saw a young mother run downstairs into the street to get milk for her baby. Her husband, who worked at the Ostbahn, had as usual left earlier that morning. She had not bothered to dress, but was in bathrobe and slippers. An empty milk bottle in hand, she was headed for a shop where, she knew, they sold milk under the counter. She walked into Operation Reinhard. The executioners demanded her Ausweis. ‘Upstairs… Ostbahn… work certificate. I’ll bring it right away.’
‘We’ve heard that one before. Have you got an Ausweis with you, or haven’t you?’
She was dragged protesting to the wagon, scarcely able to realize what was happening. ‘But my baby is all alone. Milk…’ she protested. ‘My Ausweis is upstairs’.
Then, for the first time, she really looked at the men who were holding her and she saw where she was being dragged: to the gaping entrance at the back of a high-boarded wagon with victims already jammed into it. With all her young mother’s strength she wrenched herself free, and then two, and four policemen fell on her, hitting her, smashing her to the ground, picking her up again, and tossing her into the wagon like a sack.
I can still hear her screaming in a half-crazed voice somewhere between a sob of utter human despair and the howl of an animal.
15
Such scenes were repeated every day, in every street. Many Jews, resisting or fleeing, were killed on the spot, often by Ukrainian,
Latvian and Lithuanian volunteers, or their German SS officers. All who could not prove that they were employed by a German firm were seized and taken to the Umschlagplatz. The slightest hesitation in showing one’s papers, Samuel Rajzman later recalled, ‘a smile that the Germans did not find sufficiently pleasant, meant death on the spot. People were killed in their homes, in their courtyards, in the streets. In the end many preferred being deported to having their papers checked.’
16
Even during the march to the Umschlagplatz, the guards did not hesitate to shoot, and to shoot to kill. ‘The people had to march at a given tempo,’ David Wdowinski later recalled. ‘He who walked too quickly was shot. He who fell on the way was shot. He who strayed out of line was shot. He who turned his head was shot. He who bent down was shot. He who spoke too loudly was shot. A child who cried was shot.’ Others were beaten by rifle butts as they marched. ‘If a man, thus beaten, fell, he too was shot.’
There were acts of heroism even at the Umschlagplatz. As Wdowinski recalled, Nahum Remba, the Secretary of the Jewish Council, and his wife, ‘used emergency ambulances and drove to the Umschlagplatz to rescue as many children as they could’. Even though, as an official of the Jewish Council, Remba had a certain immunity, he and his wife ‘took their lives in their hands in this courageous act. In this way, they saved hundreds of Jewish children….’
17
***
For every one who was saved, if only for a day or two, thousands were taken. Yitzhak Katznelson was told of an incident at a round-up on Swietojerska Street, from one of the hundreds of small factories:
At the shrill sickening commands of the SS, ‘Herunter!’—‘Go downstairs’—all men and women had to descend into the yard of the factory. Amongst those that went down into the yard was the wife of the manager, Krieger. She was a young woman in her ninth month of pregnancy. The vile SS man pushed her over to the side where the queue condemned to go to Treblinka was standing. Thereupon the grey-headed Zuckerman approached the SS man and said, ‘This woman is an outstanding worker, she is an artist at her job.’ The SS man stared at the young woman and her abdomen. He then seized hold of his
whip and set about Zuckerman with murderous fury. He hit him on the head with the lead-weighted end until the blood poured from him. ‘What! You want to save a pregnant woman?’
The pregnant woman was taken away. So too, in that round-up, was Katznelson’s sister-in-law Dora, and her sister, Fania. Their mother, Esther Dombrowska, a leading philanthropist in pre-war Lodz, was shot dead in the street by a Ukrainian. ‘The Ukrainians and the Germans are good companions,’ Katznelson wrote bitterly a year later. ‘May the very memory of these two nations be blotted from the world.’
18
Katznelson wrote these words in July 1943, a year after the start of the Warsaw deportations. Within another year, he himself had been deported to Auschwitz, and gassed. His diary, written on the eve of his deportation from Vittel, in France, is a testament to his Warsaw friends deported between July and September 1942, among them the fifty-seven-year-old writer and dramatist Shlomo Gilbert. ‘You’, he wrote, ‘who are so inured to sickness, so scorched in God’s own fire. Oh, where are you, and your gentle daughter, who though frail like you, was always alive to the word of God! Just like you!’
19
Shlomo Gilbert and his daughter were among the 265,000 Warsaw Jews who were gassed at Treblinka. After Gilbert’s deportation, Ringelblum searched his apartment for any hidden notes and diaries, but in vain.
20
Also deported was the diarist Chaim Kaplan. By chance, Mary Berg survived, her mother’s American citizenship having enabled them both to be sent from Poland, and then to America. But there were few such exceptions. Orphan children especially had no means of protection, no chance of a work permit, no avenue of escape. During those seven weeks, a hundred orphanages and children’s homes were emptied, and their children, more than four thousand sent to Treblinka. Outside Warsaw, at Otwock, the children in orphanages there, including one for the children of refugees from Germany, were murdered in the town itself, as were the two hundred children in nearby Miedzeszyn: both resort towns for the Jews of pre-war Warsaw.
21
The children’s guardians and teachers met their death together with their children. Among the guardians who chose this path was Janusz Korczak. Nineteen years later, Adolf Berman recalled the scene outside Korczak’s orphanage:
I’ll never forget the way the Germans were shouting at them—‘Alle Herunter!’ ‘All get off!’ And his only concern, the only concern of Korczak, was that the children had not had time to dress properly, they were barefooted. Stephania Vicinska told the children that they were going on a trip, that this was a little outing, that at last they were going to see woods and fields and the flowers they had been yearning for and which they’d never seen in their lives; and one could see a smile flickering on the pale lips of those children.
After a few hours they were put into the death carriages and this was the last journey of the great educator.
22
In his notes, which he tried to keep throughout the deportations, Ringelblum recorded many acts of heroism. But each act of resistance provoked savage reprisals. A Jew ‘grabbed a German by the throat’ and managed to wound him. The German ‘went berserk and shot thirteen Jews in the courtyard’.
23
Feigele Peltel, watching Jews being forced into one of the waiting trucks, recalled how, after the initial shock, ‘all the victims showed resistance; not one submitted willingly. They argued, they pleaded, and some even tried to force money into the hands of their captors—but all to no avail; no one was released from the van.’
24
On one occasion, walking towards her home:
Several vans went by, loaded with Jews, sitting and standing, hugging sacks that contained whatever pitiful belongings they had managed to gather at the last moment. Some stared straight ahead vacantly, others mourned and wailed, wringing their hands and entreating the Jewish police who rode with them. Women tore their hair or clung to their children, who sat bewildered among the scattered bundles, gazing at the adults in silent fear. Running behind the last van, a lone woman, arms outstretched, screamed:
‘My child! Give back my child!’
In reply, a small voice called from the van.
‘Mama! Mama!’
The people in the street watched as though hypnotized. Panting now with exhaustion, the mother continued to run after the van. One of the guards whispered something to the driver, who urged his horses into a gallop. The cries of the pursuing mother became more desperate as the horses pulled
away. The procession turned into Karmelicka Street. The cries of the deportees faded and became inaudible, only the cry of the agonized mother still pierced the air.
‘My child! Give back my child!’
25
That child, with tens of thousands of other children, many of them separated from their parents, was deported to Treblinka. There, as at Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor, death alone awaited them. As the trains reached Treblinka station, the Polish railwayman, Franciszek Zabecki, witnessed heart-rending scenes. The first train to arrive, on the morning of July 23, ‘made its presence known from a long way off, not only’, he later recalled, ‘by the rumble of the wheels on the bridge over the River Bug, but by the frequent
shots from the rifles and automatic weapons of the train guards’.
26
Zabecki’s account continued:
TREBLINKA