Authors: Martin Gilbert
The deportations from France had continued throughout August. Individual Catholics protested. At the same time, on August 28, the Germans ordered all Catholic priests who sheltered Jews to be arrested.
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One priest, a Jesuit, had hidden eighty Jewish children destined for deportation. He too was arrested.
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On August 26 more than four hundred children under the age of twelve had been deported from Paris to Auschwitz and gassed.
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On August 28 the deportees included 280 children of sixteen and younger, among them Michel Rozes, who was only one and a half years old, deported with his mother and his five-year-old sister Sarah.
The journey from Paris to Auschwitz took three days. Albert Hollender, one of only eight survivors of the convoy, later recalled:
Piled up in freight cars, unable to bend or to budge, sticking one to the other, breathless, crushed by one’s neighbour’s every move, this was already hell. During the day, a torrid heat, with a pestilential smell. After several days and several nights, the doors were opened. We arrived worn out, dehydrated, with many ill. A newborn baby, snatched from its mother’s arms, was thrown against a column. The mother, crazed from pain, began to scream. The SS man struck her violently with the butt end of his weapon over the head. Her eyes haggard, with fearful screams, her beautiful hair became tinted with her own blood. She was struck down by a bullet in her head.
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On the day of the arrival of this train at Auschwitz, a new German surgeon, Dr Johann Kremer, who had reached the camp on the previous evening, and was to live in the SS Officers’ Home near Auschwitz station, noted in his dairy: ‘Tropical climate with 28 degrees centigrade in the shade, dust and innumerable flies! Excellent food in the Home. This evening, for instance, we had sour duck livers for 0.40 mark, with stuffed tomatoes, tomato salad etc.’ The water, Kremer added, was infected, ‘so we drink seltzer water which is served free’.
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Two days later Kremer noted: ‘Was present for the first time at a
special action at 3 a.m. By comparison, Dante’s inferno seems almost a comedy. Auschwitz is justly called an extermination camp!’
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The Jews whom Kremer saw being gassed on September 2 were from France, including seventy boys and seventy-eight girls under fifteen. Many of the children had been deported without their parents, among them Helene Goldenberg, aged nine, and her sister Lotty, aged five; also Henri Garnek, aged eleven, and his brother Jean, aged three.
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Asked after the war about what he had seen on September 2, Kremer told his questioners:
These mass murders took place in small cottages situated outside the Birkenau camp in a wood. The cottages were called ‘bunkers’ in the SS men’s slang. All SS physicians on duty in the camp took turns to participate in the gassing, which were called
Sonderaction
, ‘special action’. My part as physician at the gassing consisted in remaining in readiness near the bunker.
I was brought there by car. I sat in front with the driver, and an SS hospital orderly sat in the back of the car with oxygen apparatus to revive SS men employed in the gassing, in case any of them should succumb to the poisonous fumes.
When the transport with people who were destined to be gassed arrived at the railway ramp, the SS officers selected, from among the new arrivals, persons fit to work, while the rest—old people, all children, women with children in their arms and other persons not deemed fit to work—were loaded on to lorries and driven to the gas-chambers.
I used to follow behind the transport till we reached the bunker. There people were first driven into the barrack huts where the victims undressed and then went naked to the gas-chambers. Very often no incidents occurred, as the SS men kept people quiet, maintaining that they were to bathe and be deloused.
After driving all of them into the gas-chamber, the door was closed and an SS man in a gas-mask threw contents of a Cyclon tin through an opening in the side wall. The shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they were fighting for their lives.
These shouts were heard for a very short while. I should say
for some minutes, but I am unable to give the exact length of time.
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Non-Jewish eye-witnesses, like the three Germans, Herman Graebe, Kurt Gerstein and Dr Kremer, or the two Poles, Dr Klukowski and railwayman Zabecki, saw and recorded every facet of the Jewish fate. So terrible were the scenes at Treblinka station, Zabecki noted, that from September 1942 no more passenger trains stopped there, as hitherto: only military trains, and deportation trains being divided up and shunted into the death camp.
Beyond the railway lines, Zabecki recalled, and parallel to them, ran a concrete road, beyond which was an excavation overgrown with bushes. Fugitives, seeing this thicket, often hid there before fleeing further away. But, ‘more often than not’, they died there from wounds received as they had jumped from the train: injuries from falling, or shots from the guards. The SS men knew about this, Zabecki wrote, and scoured the thicket with a dog.
As Zabecki’s own allotment was not far away from the thicket, ‘I saw quite a few tragedies.’ One of them took place on September 1, as a train of deportees stood in the station, waiting to be shunted forward. Several had managed to break out of the trains and, being shot at all the while, had made for the thicket:
One of the SS men who had arrived at the station that day—he was Kurt Franz, deputy commandant of the camp—came out with his dog along the road. The dog, scenting something, pulled the SS man after it into the thicket. A Jewess was lying there with a baby; probably she was already dead. The baby, a few months old, was crying, and nestling against its mother’s bosom.
The dog, let off the lead, tracked them down, but at a certain distance it crouched on the ground. It looked as if it was getting ready to jump, to bite them and tear them to pieces. However, after a time it began to cringe and whimper dolefully, and approached the people lying on the ground; crouching, it licked the baby on its hands, face and head.
The SS man came up to the scene with his gun in his hand. He sensed the dog’s weakness. The dog began to wag its tail, turning its head towards the boots of the SS man. The German swore violently and flogged the dog with his stick. The dog
looked up and fled. Several times the German kicked the dead woman, and then began to kick the baby and trample on its head. Later, he walked through the bushes, whistling for his dog.
The dog did not seem to hear, although it was not far away; it ran through the bushes whimpering softly; it appeared to be looking for the people. After a time the SS man came out on to the road, and the dog ran up to its ‘master’. The German then began to beat it mercilessly with a whip. The dog howled, barked, even jumped up to the German’s chest as if it were rabid, but the blows with the whip got the better of it. On the ‘master’s’ command it lay down.
The German went a few paces away, and ordered the dog to stand. The dog obeyed the order perfectly. It carefully licked the boots, undoubtedly spattered with the baby’s blood, under its muzzle. Satisfied, the SS man began to shoot and set the dog on other Jews who were still escaping from the wagons standing in the station.
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That same day, in Wlodzimierz Wolynski, the Germans ordered the Jewish Council to provide seven thousand Jews. A member of the Council, Jacob Kogen, realizing that these Jews would be taken outside the town and shot, committed suicide, together with his wife and thirteen-year-old son. He did not want to be the one ‘to decide who was to be taken away’.
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The Germans searched for their victims unaided. In all, in four days, 13,500 Jews were found, and killed. Five hundred managed to escape. After the first day of the ‘action’ the Treasurer of the Jewish Council, David Halpern, came out of the cellar in which he had been hiding in order to make enquiries about offering the Germans a ransom for the surviving Jews. He was caught, and killed on the spot.
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In the Lodz ghetto, on September 1, the Gestapo went to the hospitals. ‘Such despair was never seen in the ghetto,’ wrote the photographer Mendel Grossman, ‘even during the deportations.’
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‘The Germans threw the patients from the staircases,’ recalled Dr L. Szykier, director of the health section of the ghetto, ‘tore them from operating tables.’
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In one of the hospitals, Ben Edelbaum’s sister Esther had just given birth to a baby girl. On September 1 the baby was seven days old, with ‘a headful of jet black hair’. As no one at
home could agree on a name, it was agreed to wait until mother and baby returned. That morning Ben Edelbaum and his parents learned that the hospital had been cordoned off. They hurried to it:
When we got there, the whole area had already been cordoned off. Hundreds of people gathered around and were being kept in place behind the ropes. Dawid made way for us and we were able to get close to the ropes where we had full view of the whole scene. Inside, within the cordoned area, we saw German soldiers and Sonder run about frantically giving commands and taking orders. Several shots were fired in the air and we saw doctors and nurses leaving the entrance of the hospital. They were escorted by a soldier and taken to a waiting truck. It then drove away, out of the area and out of the ghetto. Two more trucks drove up and the Germans, with the assistance of the Sonderkommando, began going from room to room evacuating every patient who was able to get out of bed and walk down with them.
The people who came to witness this brutal eviction of their loved ones cried and yelled and pleaded to the Almighty to send a lightning bolt down to strike every German. We stood there in a huddle, sobbing and wringing our hands and watching the helpless, sick men and women being herded into those trucks and carried away. Then, as the next group of patients was being escorted to a waiting truck, we saw Esther. She stood there on the truck, looking around to see if we were there, but she didn’t see us. She was pale and frightened as she stood there in her pink nightgown.
Oh God, how we wanted to jump over the rope, pass the soldiers with their bayonets fixed, run over to her and tell her how much we loved her; but we were forcibly and physically restrained by the Sonder. The people kept shouting, ‘Murderers, where are you taking our loved ones?’ ‘Murderers!’ ‘Murderers!’ Esther and the rest of the patients in the truck stood there in shock, silent and terrified. Soon the truck drove off and we knew we would never see our beloved Esther again. There was now only one truck waiting. A German soldier got into the truck behind the wheel and drove it closer to the hospital-building wall. There was silence for a moment. No one could figure what was going to happen next.
There were now about six to eight soldiers standing around
the truck plus about eighteen more positioned around the rope. Some of the soldiers looked very young, especially one who looked as if he had just graduated from the Hitler Youth. Even the SS uniform he was wearing seemed large on him. Suddenly, two Germans appeared in an upper storey window and pushed it open. Seconds later a naked baby was pushed over the ledge and dropped to its death directly into the truck below. We were in such shock that at first few of us believed it was actually a live, newborn baby. We thought it was an object of some kind until we saw another and another being hurled out the window and into the waiting truck. We had no more tears left. Our eyes had dried out. We could no longer cry and shout and scream since our throats were hoarse and parched as we stood there looking up to the window and to the Almighty. ‘Dear God! Why are you doing this to us? It we have sinned take us, but why are you permitting this to happen to innocent newborn babies? Why? Why? Why?’
The SS seemed to enjoy this bloody escapade. Just then the youngest of the bunch asked his superior if it was all right to catch one of those ‘little Jews’ on his bayonet as it was coming down. His superior gave him permission, and the young SS butcher rolled up his rifle sleeve and caught the very next infant on his bayonet. The blood of the infant flowed down the knife on to the murderer’s arm and into his sleeve. He tried his talent once more, and again he was successful in catching the wailing child on his sharp bayonet. He tried a third time but missed and gave up the whole game, complaining it was getting too ‘messy’.
Each time a baby was hurled out that window we were certain it was our first little niece and my parents’ first granddaughter. We knew that one of the babies was ours for sure. Questions kept whirling in my mind: ‘Why this? Why did this have to happen? Why are human beings so cruel to other human beings?’
I hardly knew my little niece, but I realized I would miss her very much. It was all so useless and purposeless and so unnecessary for that to have happened. It was thirty years before I could bring myself even to talk about it. Now, when I do, I can refer to her only as my niece or as Esther’s infant girl, because, you see, we didn’t even have time to give her a first name.
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More than two thousand hospital patients were deported from Lodz that day, including four hundred children and eighty pregnant women. Eighteen patients who tried to escape were shot. The deportees were sent to Chelmno and gassed.
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But neither their destination nor the fate of these hospital patients was known in the ghetto, where one of the chroniclers, Josef Zelkowicz, commented: ‘And how much effort and manoeuvring had been required to get them into the hospital in the first place! Pull was needed to obtain a bed, even one in a corridor, a passageway. How happy was the family that was able to place a loved one in the care of a hospital! Then, all of a sudden….’
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On the following day Zelkowicz noted that two hundred Jews had managed to leave the hospital during the round-up, but had all been found and deported. Also deported, he wrote, were people ‘who had applied for admittance to the hospital’, but had not yet been admitted. Many of the children who had been deported were in hospital long after they need have been, because, while ‘essentially cured and healthy’, their parents had used ‘special “pull”’ to have them stay on at the hospital. ‘Depression and sadness’, he added, ‘reign in the workshops….’
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