Authors: Martin Gilbert
The need for speed had become a driving force behind the daily measures. On July 24 the Under-Secretary of State at the German Foreign Ministry, Martin Luther, warned Ribbentrop of the Italian government’s continued resistance to any deportation plans from the Italian-occupied zone of Croatia. The Italian Chief of Staff in Mostar, Luther reported, ‘has declared that he cannot give his approval to the resettlement of the Jews, all inhabitants of Mostar having received assurance of equal treatment.’
2
No such problems existed in either the General Government, or the Occupied Eastern Territories. On July 27, on the eve of the deportations from Przemysl to Belzec, a German proclamation warned that any Pole or Ukrainian ‘who tries to hide a Jew, or to assist him in hiding, will be shot dead’.
3
A part of this ‘action’ in Przemysl was seen by Josef Buzhminski, from his hiding place near the ghetto fence, bordering ‘Aryan’ Przemysl. It was from this hiding place that Buzhminski saw an SS man by the name of Kidash catch a Jewish woman who was holding a baby in her arms. The baby was about eighteen months old. ‘She
held the baby in her arms,’ Buzhminski recalled, ‘and began asking for mercy, that she be shot first, leaving the baby alive. From behind the fence there were Poles who raised their hands ready to catch the baby.’ The woman was about to hand the baby over to the Poles, when Kidash ‘took the baby from her arms and shot her twice’ and then ‘took the baby into his hands and tore him as one would tear a rag’.
4
‘The Occupied Eastern Territories are to become free of Jews,’ Himmler wrote to one of his senior SS officials on July 28. ‘The execution of this very grave order has been placed on my shoulders by the Führer. No one can deny me the responsibility anyway.’
5
In the Minsk region, General Commissar Kube reported to Gauleiter Lohse on July-31, ‘Jewry has been completely eliminated without any danger to manpower requirements.’ In the predominantly Polish area of Lida, ‘sixteen thousand Jews were liquidated, in Slonim, eight thousand, etc.’. In the previous ten weeks, Kube reported, fifty-five thousand Jews had been ‘liquidated’.
6
To achieve the Nazi goal, mass executions, like the deportations, had to be carried out every day. On July 28, an Einsatzkommando unit in White Russia recorded a ‘major action’ in the Minsk ghetto, ‘six thousand Jews are brought to pits’; and on July 29, ‘three thousand Jews are brought to pits’. The following days, the report noted, ‘were filled with cleaning weapons…’.
7
Among those who were shot in this action in Minsk were patients in the surgical ward of the Jewish hospital.
8
But there had been no quiet submission to the Nazi will. When the Jewish Council Chairman, now Moshe Yaffe, was ordered to address the Jews in Jubilee Square, in order to calm them down, he agreed to speak, then shouted to those assembled to run for their lives.
9
Several examples also survive of non-Jews protecting Jews: in the Volhynian town of Hoszcza a Ukrainian farmer, Fiodor Kalenczuk, hid a Jewish grain merchant, Pessah Kranzberg, his wife, their ten-year-old daughter and their daughter’s young friend, for seventeen months, refusing to deny them refuge even when his wife protested that their presence, in the stable, was endangering a Christian household.
10
In the last week of September, five hundred Jews were murdered in the town. The Kranzbergs survived. Their rescue, in the circumstances of the East, had been a rare act of courage. Less rare, if no less courageous, at the village of Le
Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France, where several dozen Jews had found refuge, when the police came in August to make a census of all Jews, the villagers hid them for three nights in a row, and the police could not find them.
11
On July 28 it was the turn of the Jews of Tarnow to be ordered out of their houses. All had to remove their shoes, and, barefoot, were driven with rifle butts and whips into the market square. There, everyone was ordered to kneel down, after which, as one eyewitness recalled, ‘Gestapo men walked among the kneeling people and took away the children….’
The children were taken to a shed at the edge of the square, and shot. ‘Indescribable lamentations, sobbing and weeping filled the market,’ the eye-witness recalled. ‘One could go mad,’ and he added:
In the corner of the square a thin, white-haired man was kneeling, and at his side his daughter, a slim brunette. A fat Gestapo man stopped near them, drew his revolver and killed the Jew. His daughter then leaped to her feet and cried to the Gestapo man in German: ‘You scoundrel! What did my father do to you that you shot him?’
The Gestapo man flew at her, hit her and threatened to kill her, too. The girl looked at him with a penetrating gaze. When he turned away, avoiding her eyes, she insulted him again, called him a mean coward who shot defenceless people, and shouted that he dared not look into her eyes.
‘Look straight into my eyes, you coward,’ she cried, ‘and shoot! These eyes will pursue you and haunt you all your life!’
The Gestapo man winced, turned away from the girl, as if to muster his courage, and after a moment aimed his revolver at her and shot her.
12
A few Jews, the eye-witness among them, were taken off as forced labourers. The Jews of Tarnow were then deported: to Belzec, and to their death.
13
Several hundred Tarnow Jews were given refuge by non-Jews. Among those who were saved in this way from deportation were the wife and daughter of Maximilian Rosenbusz, the head of the local Hebrew school in Tarnow, who had been taken to Auschwitz in June 1940 at the time of the camp’s construction, and who had
perished there. The man who gave shelter to the two women was Wladyslaw Horbacki, a former regional school inspector of the Polish Ministry of Education. Both women survived the war.
14
All those who tried to escape from these deportations were hunted down, as were those who tried to run away from labour gangs taken outside the ghetto for work. On July 28 two Jews were hanged in the Lodz ghetto for having escaped from a work gang. One, the fifty-one-year-old Szymon Makowski, had been among the earlier deportees from Pabianice to Lodz. The other was Josek Grynbaum, a boy of sixteen. After Grynbaum’s execution, a British certificate for Palestine was found in his clothing.
15
Suicide also continued to be a means of escape from the whim and tyranny of deportation. On July 31, the nineteen-year-old Bluma Rozenfeld jumped to her death from the fifth floor of a building in the Lodz ghetto.
16
Two days later, Lota Hirszberg, a woman of fifty-six, and one of the surviving deportees from Berlin to Lodz, killed herself by an overdose of sleeping powders.
17
***
On August 4, the first 998 Jews from Belgium were sent to Auschwitz, among them 394 women and 80 children under the age of sixteen. Less than a hundred of these deportees survived the war, and only two of the children. By the end of August, six trains had left for Auschwitz, with 5,669 deportees, of whom only 321 survived the war. Among the Belgian Jews murdered in this one month, 896 were children.
18
From Luxembourg, 723 Jews were deported; only 35 survived the war.
19
On August 4, in the Polish city of Radom, ten thousand Jews were ordered to assemble on Graniczna Street. The SS began shooting. ‘The defenceless Jews ran madly amidst flying bullets,’ the historian of the destruction of Radom Jewry has written. ‘The terror deprived men of their reason.’ As in Warsaw, only a valid work permit enabled a man and his family to escape deportation. As the ‘selection’ proceeded, the shooting continued, until nightfall. ‘On the pavement along the streets lay dead and wounded Jews. The reflectors threw a bright light on the bloodstained corpses.’ That night, ten thousand Radom Jews were deported to Treblinka, and gassed.
20
That same day, thirteen thousand Jews were rounded up in
Warsaw, ‘among them’, noted Chaim Kaplan, ‘five thousand who came to the transfer of their own free will’, and he added: ‘They had had their fill of the ghetto life, which is a life of hunger and fear of death. They escaped from the trap. Would that I could allow myself to do as they did!’
21
Near Minsk, the most eastern death camp had continued operation: in the Blagovshchina forest, three miles from the village of Maly Trostenets. On August 4 a train with a thousand Jews left Theresienstadt. Six days later it reached Maly Trostenets, where it stopped in open country. Forty ‘experts’ had already been taken off the train at Minsk. The remaining 960 deportees were ordered out of the train and into vans for the next stage of their journey, and driven off towards the forest. The vans were gas vans; once they reached the forest the doors were unlocked and the bodies of the deportees were thrown into open graves.
22
Of a thousand Jews sent from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets in a further deportation on August 25, only twenty-two of the younger men were taken to work at an SS farm. The rest were ordered into the gas vans and killed. Of the twenty-two men sent to the SS farm, two survived the hard labour and sadism of their overseers, and escaped in May 1943 to join the partisans. One was killed in action. One survived the war.
23
At Zdzieciol, west of Minsk, where Jewish Council members had actively encouraged the acquisition of arms, eight hundred Jews managed to escape on August 6, the day of slaughter on which three thousand perished. Of those who were able to break out of the ghetto, about one hundred and fifty were strong enough to form a partisan unit, headed by Hirsh Kaplinsky. The unit went into action almost at once; four months later, Kaplinsky was killed in action.
24
At nearby Mir, on August 9, two hundred Jews managed to escape to the forests.
25
That same week, six thousand were killed at Nowogrodek.
26
These were the survivors of the ‘action’ of December 1941, as well as several thousand Jews who had been brought into the Nowogrodek ghetto from the surrounding villages of Naliboki, Lubcz and Karelicze. One of the survivors of this second Nowogrodek action was Idel Kagan. He has recalled how, on August 7, the workshop in which he was working outside the ghetto was surrounded by Germans with machine guns, while the Jews in the ghetto were taken away, to the ravine at nearby Skridlewe, and
machine-gunned. ‘Some people survived, three or four. They came back. Then we heard from them what had happened.’
The surviving Jews of Nowogrodek also heard that a group of Jewish partisans was in the area, between Nowojelna and Lida. ‘To escape was easy,’ Idel Kagan later recalled. ‘But to escape—where to?’ As Kagan explained, the local farmers ‘used to take away the Jews’ money, and hand over the Jews. They already had their money. So why to feed them for ever and a day? The Germans were winning the war.’
‘We had the facilities to escape,’ Kagan reiterated. ‘But the weather was against us. If somebody didn’t give you a hiding place, you’d freeze to death.’ There were hazards, even in hiding. ‘The little peasant boy used to give you away,’ Kagan reflected. ‘The population didn’t want you.’
Kagan decided, nevertheless, to escape. He waited until the first snows, when the German guards would be preoccupied by the cold, and then escaped with fourteen others. The escapees walked through the snow for two to three hours. But crossing a river, Kagan fell through the ice. Regaining the bank, his body was so covered in ice that he could not keep up. When finally, and alone, he reached an isolated hut in the forest, he discovered that he had just missed the partisans. ‘I felt I would freeze to death. I began to walk back to camp. I didn’t want to freeze to death’.
Idel Kagan returned to Nowogrodek just in time. ‘My toes were already going black.’ Then, without iodine or bandages, his toes were cut off. His escape had failed, but he was still alive.
27
***
The evidence of the fate of individuals is fragmentary, surviving only by chance. At the beginning of the second week of August, at Treblinka railway station, Franciszek Zabecki witnessed an incident otherwise unrecorded. A Polish partisan, Trzcinski, from a nearby village, had reached the station after being forced to flee across the River Bug. He was on his way south, armed, in search of another partisan group, and intended to travel south on the regular train to Sokolow. At an adjoining platform were carriages waiting to be shunted on to the death camp spur. Then, as Zabecki recalled, ‘Trzcinski went up to a wagon, suddenly unfastened his coat, and gave a young Jew a grenade, asking him to throw it among the
Germans. The Jew took the grenade, and Trzcinski jumped into the moving passenger train and departed.’
Zabecki later learned that the Jew ‘threw the grenade in the death camp at a group of Ukrainians standing beside the Germans on the unloading ramp’. One Ukrainian was seriously wounded. ‘The revenge of the Germans and Ukrainians was terrible,’ Zabecki added. ‘The young men were beaten with sticks until they lost consciousness. All of them died.’
28
Another Polish eye-witness of Jewish resistance in the second week of August was Dr Klukowski of Szczebrzeszyn. On August 8, he noted, two thousand of the Jews of Szczebrzeszyn were ordered to assemble in the market place. It was said that a train was waiting to take them ‘to the Ukraine’. But, Klukowski commented in his diary, ‘Not one Jew appeared of his own free will. They therefore started to seize them….’
By nightfall, only a few Jews had been rounded up. Most of them ‘hid in such a way that they could not be found’. Klukowski added: ‘Many Poles, particularly youths, are enthusiastically assisting in the searches after the Jews.’
29
Only four hundred Jews were found. Thirteen were shot in the streets. The rest were deported. Two days later Klukowski wrote in his dairy: ‘We now know for certain that the train went towards Belzec. Everyone is convinced that those on it are dead already.’ That same evening, in Szczebrzeszyn, ‘three Jewesses who had come out of hiding were shot.’
30