Authors: Martin Gilbert
The train was made up of sixty covered wagons, crammed with people. There were old people, young people, men, women, children and infants in quilts. The doors of the wagons were bolted, the air gaps had a grating of barbed wire. Several SS men, with automatic weapons ready to shoot, stood on the foot-boards of the wagons on both sides of the trains and even lay on the roofs.
It was a hot day; people in the wagons were fainting. The SS guards with rolled-up sleeves looked like butchers, who after murdering their victims washed their blood-stained hands and got ready for more killing. Without a word, we understood the tragedy, since ‘settling’ people coming to work would not have required such a strict guard, whereas these people were being transported like dangerous criminals.
After the transport arrived, some fiendish spirit got into the SS men; they drew their pistols, put them away, and took them out again, as if they wanted to shoot and kill straight away; they approached the wagons, silencing those who were shrieking and wailing, and again they swore and screamed.
Shouting, ‘Tempo, schnell,’ ‘At the double, quickly,’ to the German railwaymen who had come from Sokolow Podlaski, they went off to the camp, to take over their victims there ‘properly’. On the wagons we could see chalk marks giving the number of people in the wagon, viz.: 120, 150, 180 and 200 people. We worked out later that the total number of people in the train must have been about eight to ten thousand.
The ‘settlers’ were strangely huddled together in the wagons. All of them had to stand, without sufficient air and without access to toilet facilities. It was like travelling in hot ovens. The high temperature, lack of air, and the hot weather created conditions that not even healthy, young, strong organisms could stand. Moans, shouts, weeping, calls for water or for a doctor issued from the wagons. And protests: ‘How can people be treated so inhumanly?’ ‘When will they let us leave the wagons altogether?’
Through some air gaps terrified people looked out, asking hopefully: ‘How far is it to the agricultural estates where we’re going to work?’
Twenty wagons were uncoupled from the train, and a shunting engine began to push them along the spur-line into the camp. A short while later, it returned empty. This procedure was repeated twice more, until all sixty wagons had been shunted into the camp, and out again. Empty, they were returned to Warsaw for more ‘settlers’.
27
On July 28, six days after the deportations had begun, and when it was clear that they were to continue on a substantial scale, young Jews from the pioneer youth movements met to discuss the possibility of resistance. ‘Various questions were raised at that meeting,’ Zivia Lubetkin later recalled. ‘“What can we do? We have no guns….”’ One idea was to flee to somewhere safe, outside Warsaw. ‘We rejected this idea. How many Jews can we save that way? Very few. Is there any point in trying to save those few when millions are dying? No, we all will share the same fate and it is our duty to stay with our people until the very end.’
28
At this meeting of July 28, a Jewish Fighting Organization was set up, known by its Polish initials ZOB,
Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa
. The meeting decided: ‘We, the youth, would take all the responsibility on our shoulders.’ At that moment there were ‘only two pistols in our entire arsenal’.
29
The Jewish Fighting Organization made one of its first tasks to try to link up the different ghettos, to prepare joint schemes, to smuggle arms and individuals, and to pass on messages and funds.
***
On July 29, to entice as many Jews as possible to the trains, notices were put up in the Warsaw ghetto offering a free issue of three kilogrammes of bread and one of jam for any families that would go voluntarily to ‘resettlement’. The announcement added the reassurance that families would not be separated. For Jews who were starving, the offer was irresistible. Thousands volunteered. The Germans, exploiting the results of their starvation policy, allocated 180,000 kilogrammes of bread and 36,000 of jam for the new operation.
30
Three months later Ringelblum estimated that a minimum of twenty thousand Jews had accepted the German offer. These were people, he wrote, ‘driven by hunger, anguish, a sense of hopelessness
of their situation’, people who ‘had not the strength to struggle any longer’ or who ‘simply had no place to live’.
31
The posters set a short time limit for acceptance of the German offer: only two or three days. ‘If the Germans are already giving out bread, it must be a sign that they need us. Otherwise why waste the flour?’ people said to each other. For many, Feigele Peltel recalled, ‘the possibility of assuaging their hunger just once, and the Germans’ repeated promises of employment, were enough….’ Fears of deportation were set aside. ‘After the resettlement,’ a friend told Feigele Peltel, ‘we might perhaps survive in another town.’
32
Reading the offer of bread and jam, many Warsaw Jews asked, as David Wdowinski recalled: ‘If over there things were not so bad, and here we have to live in hiding and suffer hunger, and since we can be together with our families, why not go?’ And so, Wdowinski added, ‘entire families, bag and baggage gave themselves up. And, indeed, they were not separated. They were gassed all together.’
33
Thousands of Jews sought safety by shutting themselves behind locked doors. One such was Baruch Zifferman, who told his story to Feigele Peltel when he met her a few days later:
The Germans had sealed off Nowolipki Street, where he was hiding with his wife and young son in Birnbaum’s house, whose massive iron door was very hard to open.
As the Germans yelled, ‘All Jews downstairs!’ the residents had locked the door and stayed where they were. Then came the familiar loud banging to open the iron door. Crashing blows by iron bars came next, accompanied by barked commands in German to open the door at once. The five Jews within crouched petrified, not stirring, wondering whether the door would hold.
The angry shouting of the Germans and the pounding on the door grew louder. At last, groaning and creaking on its hinges, the door gave way, and several scowling Ukrainians forced their way in, ordering everyone to put up his hands. After being searched and robbed of their valuables, the trembling victims were commanded to line up against the wall. Even with their carbines aimed at him, Zifferman did not dream that the invaders would actually fire; he supposed they were bent merely on intimidation. But the shots broke into his thoughts, and he toppled to the floor.
When he came to, everything was quiet. The Ukrainians had left. His wife, his son, and the Birnbaums lay dead.
34
By August 2, the twelfth consecutive day of the deportations from Warsaw, more than seventy-six thousand Jews had been deported.
35
‘We have no information about the fate of those who have been expelled,’ Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on August 2, shortly before he himself was deported. ‘When one falls into the hands of the Nazis one falls into the abyss. The very fact that the deportees make no contact with their families by letters bodes evil.’
36
That evil was later described by one of those who survived it, Samuel Rajzman:
Immediately after their arrival, the people had to leave the trains in five minutes and line up on the platform. All those who were driven from the cars were divided into groups—men, children, and women, all separate. They were all forced to strip immediately, and this procedure continued under the lashes of the German guards’ whips. Workers who were employed in this operation immediately picked up all the clothes and carried them away to barracks. Then the people were obliged to walk naked through the street to the gas-chambers.
The Germans had given this street to the gas-chambers a name,
Himmelfahrstrasse
, ‘the street to heaven’. As Rajzman explained, ‘The whole process of undressing and the walk down to the gas-chambers lasted, for the men eight or ten minutes, and for the women some fifteen minutes. The women took fifteen minutes because they had to have their hair shaved off before they went to the gas-chambers.’
37
At Treblinka station, before the trains were uncoupled and sent into the death camp twenty coaches at a time, the Polish railwayman, Franciszek Zabecki, witnessed many scenes of savagery. Four of these concerned Jews who had tried to escape:
I saw a policeman catch two young Jewish boys. He did not shut them in a wagon, since he was afraid to open the door in case others escaped. I was on the platform, letting a military transport go through. I asked him to let them go. The assassin did not even budge. He ordered the bigger boy to sit down on
the ground and take the smaller one on his knee, then he shot them both with one bullet.
Turning to me, he said: ‘You’re lucky, that was the last bullet.’ Round the huge stomach of the murderer there was a belt with a clasp, on which I could see the inscription ‘Gott mit uns’, ‘God is with us’.
38
The second incident took place after a train, arriving late in the evening, had been kept overnight at Treblinka station. On the following morning a Ukrainian guard:
…promised a Jewess that he would let her and her child go if she put a large bribe in his hand. The Jewess gave the Ukrainian the money and her four-year-old child through the air gap, and afterwards, with the Ukrainian’s help, she also got out of the wagon through the air gap.
The Jewess walked away from the train, holding her child by the hand; as soon as she walked down the railway embankment the Ukrainian shot her. The mother rolled down into a field, pulling the child after her. The child clutched the mother’s neck. Jews looking out of the wagons called out and yelled, and the child turned back up the embankment again and under the wagons to the other side of the train.
Another Ukrainian killed the child with one blow of a rifle butt on its head.
39
A third incident witnessed by Zabecki also took place at Treblinka station:
One mother threw a small child wrapped up in a pillow from the wagon, shouting: ‘Take it, that’s some money to look after it.’ In no time an SS man ran up, unwrapped the pillow, seized the child by its feet and smashed its head against a wheel of the wagon. This took place in full view of the mother, who was howling with pain.
40
A fourth incident involved Willi Klinzmann, from Wuppertal, one of the two German railwaymen who supervised the shunting work at the station:
There was an SS man from the camp in Klinzmann’s flat. A frightened, battered Jewess who had managed to get out of a wagon came into the station building. She probably thought
she would be safe here. Crossing the threshold of the dark corridor close by the door of the German railwaymen’s quarters, she uttered a loud groan and a sigh.
Willi rushed out into the corridor, and seeing the woman he shouted: ‘Bist du Judin?’, ‘Are you a Jewess?’. The SS man rushed out after Willi. The frightened Jewess exclaimed: ‘Ach, mein Gott!’ ‘Oh, my God!’, escaped to the waiting-room next to the traffic supervisor’s office and fell down exhausted near the wall. Both the Germans grabbed the woman lying there; they wanted her to get up and go out with them. The Jewess lay motionless.
It was already late evening. As I went out to see to a military transport passing through the station, I shone my lamp on the woman lying there; I noticed that she was pregnant, and in the last months of pregnancy at that. The Jewess did not react to the German’s calls, uttering groans as if in labour. Then Klinzmann and the SS man from the camp began to take turns at kicking the Jewess at random, and laughing.
After dispatching the train, I had to go into the office again through the waiting-room, but I could not do it. In the waiting-room a human being, helpless, defenceless—a sick, pregnant woman—had been murdered. The impact from the hobnailed boots was so relentless that one of the Germans, aiming at her head, had hit too high, right into the wall.
I had to go into the office and pass close to the murderers, since the departure of a train to Wolka Okraglik station had to be attended to. My entrance made the criminals stop. In their frenzy they had forgotten where they were, and somebody plucked up courage to break in and stop them in their ‘duty’ of liquidating ‘an enemy of Hitlerism’.
They reached for their pistols. Willi, drunk, mumbled ‘Fahrdienstleiter’, ‘Traffic supervisor’. I closed the door behind me. The butchers renewed the kicking. The Jewess was no longer groaning. She was no longer alive.
41
In Warsaw, on August 3, the Ringelblum circle decided that the time had come to begin to bury their archive. The first set of documents was placed in ten tin boxes and milk cans, and buried by one of the circle, a schoolteacher, Izrael Lichtensztajn. Going to a school
building where he had once taught, he buried the boxes deep in the ground. He was helped in his task by two of his former students, Dawid Graber and Nachum Grzybacz.
Graber was nineteen years old. ‘The men who buried the archives’, he wrote, ‘know that they may not survive to see the moment when the treasure is dug up and the whole truth proclaimed.’ ‘Yesterday we sat up till late at night,’ Grzybacz, who was eighteen, wrote. ‘Now I am in the midst of writing, while in the streets the terrible shooting continues.’ Grzybacz added: ‘One thing I am proud of, namely, that in these disastrous and horrible days I had been chosen to help bury the treasure, in order that you may know of the tortures and murders of the Nazi tyrants.’
42
Lichtensztajn, Graber and Grzybacz were not to survive the war: but their boxes and milk cans did. In them was preserved a formidable record of the destruction of Jewish Warsaw, and of Polish Jewry.
43
As the deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka continued, gathering in intensity during August, the pace of deportation and murder was accelerated throughout German-occupied Europe. On 23 July 1942, SS Colonel Viktor Brack, the euthanasia expert on Hitler’s staff, informed Himmler that General Globocnik ‘believes that we must carry out the entire operation against the Jews at a faster pace, for the difficulties that might turn up can freeze the entire operation, and then we will be stuck midway through’. Brack advised that all able-bodied Jews should be castrated, and the rest exterminated.
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