Authors: Martin Gilbert
On September 3 the World Jewish Congress in Geneva learned of eleven deportations in August from the main internment camps in southern France and the Pyrenees, including Gurs and Les Milles. Five days later, in a letter to Jerusalem, Lichtheim reported that ‘at least ten thousand have already been deported, despite a strong protest by two leading clergymen in southern France, the Archbishop of Toulouse and the Bishop of Montauban.’
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Throughout the first two weeks of September,
The Times
in London published full reports of the deportation of Jews from France. It had received these reports from its own correspondent at the frontier between Vichy France and neutral Spain. Each report was published in London on the day after it was received in Spain.
On September 7 the main article on the imperial and foreign page of
The Times
was headed: ‘Vichy’s Jewish victims, children deported to Germany’. The article told of the unabated ruthlessness of the deportation campaign. Women and children, it stated, ‘suddenly notified’ that they could visit their relatives in various internment camps, were then ‘forced to accompany the deportees without being given any opportunity to make preparations’. At Les Milles there had been eighty-six attempted suicides: ‘some men had cut their veins with broken glass.’ Recently ‘a train containing four thousand Jewish children, unaccompanied, without identification papers or even distinguishing marks, left Lyons for Germany.’ But where in Germany was not known.
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In the House of Commons on September 8, Winston Churchill referred to the deportations from France during the course of a comprehensive survey of the war situation. The ‘brutal persecutions’ in which the Germans had indulged, he said, ‘in every land into which their armies have broken’, had recently been augmented by ‘the most bestial, the most squalid and the most senseless of all their offences, namely the mass deportation of Jews from France, with the pitiful horrors attendant upon the calculated
and final scattering of families’. Churchill added: ‘This tragedy fills me with astonishment as well as with indignation, and it illustrates as nothing else can the utter degradation of the Nazi nature and theme, and the degradation of all who lend themselves to its unnatural and perverted passions.’
Pausing for a moment, Churchill declared: ‘When the hour of liberation strikes Europe, as strike it will, it will also be the hour of retribution.’
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In the days following Churchill’s speech,
The Times
continued to report the deportation of Jews from France, and to stress the opposition of the French people to the collaboration of the Vichy government in these measures. On September 9, it published news of the dismissal by the Vichy authorities of General de St-Vincent, the military Governor of Lyons, who had ‘refused to obey Vichy’s order’ on August 28 ‘to cooperate in the mass arrests of Jews in the unoccupied zone’. General de St-Vincent had, it appeared, refused to place his troops at the disposal of the authorities in order to round up Jews.
The news item of September 9 also told of a Vichy order for the arrest of all Roman Catholic priests who were sheltering Jews in the unoccupied zone. ‘Some arrests’, it added, had already been made. In reply to these arrests, Cardinal Gerlier, the Archbishop of Lyons, had already issued a ‘defiant refusal’ to surrender those Jewish children whose parents had already been deported, and who were being ‘fed and sheltered’ in Roman Catholic homes.
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A main news item in
The Times
on September 11 reported ‘popular indignation’ in Lyons following the arrest and imprisonment of eight Jesuit priests who had refused to surrender ‘several hundred’ children for deportation; children whom they had kept hidden ‘in buildings belonging to the religious order’.
The Times
also reported that the Papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Maglione, had informed the French Ambassador to the Vatican ‘that the conduct of the Vichy government towards Jews and foreign refugees was a gross infraction’ of the Vichy government’s own principles, and was ‘irreconcilable with the religious feelings which Marshal Pétain had so often invoked in his speeches’.
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In Warsaw, on September 3, disaster struck the fledgling Jewish Fighting Organization. One of their leaders, Yisrael Zeltzer, had already been arrested with a group of youngsters. Then, on
September 3, Joseph Kaplan, another of its leaders, was arrested. His colleague Shmuel Braslaw, while trying to find out where Kaplan was being held, was stopped on the street by uniformed Germans. He tried to pull a jackknife out of his pocket but was shot on the spot. Alarmed, Yitzhak Zuckerman and the remaining leaders decided to transfer their ‘treasure’, the small cache of grenades and revolvers which they had been able to assemble, to a new hiding place. The ‘treasure’, hidden in a sack of vegetables, was being carried to its new hiding place by Reginka Justman when she was stopped by a sentry, the arms were seized, and Reginka shot.
A few days later, both Kaplan and Zeltzer were taken to the Umschlagplatz. On the way they were ordered out of the line, marched to the entrance of a building, and shot. Aryeh Wilner, the group’s representative with the Polish underground, told his devastated colleagues: ‘Our weapons have been taken from us. We should therefore vanish off the face of the earth, burrow down and hide, prepare and train there, and then re-emerge once we have become a force that can assault the enemy in a single attack.’ Some suggested going out on the streets, to attack the Germans with their bare hands, and die. But Yitzhak Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin persuaded them to try to rebuild the broken force. ‘Our remaining strength’, Zuckerman later recalled, ‘would be dedicated to that end. No effort would be spared.’
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Neither compliance, nor resistance, could stop the juggernaut of death. At Birkenau on September 5 about eight hundred Jewish women, too weak to work, almost too weak to walk, were gassed. The gassing was watched by Dr Kremer, who described it as ‘the most horrible of all horrors’. Another SS doctor in the camp, Heinz Thilo, commented to Kremer that day: ‘we are located here in “anus mundi”’, the ‘anus of the world’.
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Kremer was not to forget the gassing of those eight hundred women. ‘When I came to the bunker,’ he recalled five years later, ‘they sat clothed on the ground. As the clothes were in fact worn out camp clothes, they were not let into the undressing barracks but undressed in the open. I could deduce from the behaviour of these women that they realized what was awaiting them. They begged the SS men to be allowed to live, they wept, but all of them were driven to the gas-chamber and gassed. Being an anatomist I had seen many horrors, had dealt with corpses, but what I then saw was not to be
compared with anything ever seen before.’
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The gassing of the eight hundred women had taken place at noon. Eight hours later it was a train from Holland whose deportees were gassed. Of 714 Jews in that train, only 53 women were sent to the barracks. All the other occupants were gassed. ‘Another special action with a draft from Holland,’ Kremer noted. ‘Men compete to take part on such actions as they get additional rations—1/5 litre vodka, 5 cigarettes, 100 grammes of sausage and bread.’
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The relentless killing missed no day and took no rest. The Nazis had cut off each Jewish community from the outside world, and from all other Jewish life, and using this isolation they worked without respite to destroy. In Warsaw, during a massive round-up on September 6 and 7, more than a thousand Jews were killed in the streets, including hundreds who, as Ringelblum noted, were ‘forced to kneel on the pavement’ to be shot.
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One death of these thousand was witnessed by Feigele Peltel, who later recalled:
On Gesia-Zamenhof I suddenly caught sight of an old woman walking all alone. How had she gotten there? Probably she’d been left alone in the house, and was now seeking a hiding place. I anxiously watched her halting steps. She was conspicuous in the deserted street. Two German automobiles happened to pass by; a young German jumped out and called to the old woman. She was evidently deaf; the German easily caught up with her, pulled out his revolver and fired twice. She toppled, bleeding profusely. The German calmly returned to his car and drove away. The incident had passed like a flash. We were not permitted by the Ukrainians to approach the dead woman, we passed by the corpse with lowered heads.
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Those with work cards were permitted to remain in the Warsaw ghetto. ‘Did this coveted card mean only that I would be among the last to perish?’ Feigele Peltel asked herself, when she received her card but her friends did not. ‘Unable to control myself any longer,’ she recalled, ‘I broke down and wept.’
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But the work card was the sole guarantee of remaining in the ghetto. Every family, with its bundles, passed by a ‘selection’ point, hoping against hope that deportation could be avoided. ‘Even the faintest glimmer of hope for survival’, Feigele Peltel recalled, ‘was more powerful than any fear of selection.’
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At the Umschlagplatz itself, Jews sought the magic work cards, and sent urgent messages back to the workshops. One such message, preserved by Ringelblum, was sent by Rabbi Jechiel Meir Blumenfeld, a member of the Warsaw rabbinate. His appeal to the director of the workshops in which he had hitherto been employed was successful. He was taken out of the line and back to the workshop. But two weeks later, in the workshop itself, he was shot.
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Survival had been offered to those with work cards. But their children were not intended to benefit. Samek, a father, decided to carry his two-year-old daughter Miriam past the selection point in a knapsack. First, he gave her a sedative. Then, with his wife, he joined the line. Alexander Donat has recorded the sequel, and the fate, first, of another father and child, as Samek waited his turn:
The column advanced slowly while up ahead the SS officer grandly dispensed life and death, left and right, links und rechts. In the tense silence the wails of a baby suddenly rose. The SS officer froze and a thousand men and women held their breaths. A Ukrainian guard ran out, plunged his bayonet several times into the knapsack from which the criminal sounds had come. In seconds the knapsack was a blood-soaked rag. ‘Du dreckiger Schweinehund!’ ‘You filthy pig-dog!’ the SS officer shouted indignantly, bringing his riding crop down on the ashen face of the father who had dared to try smuggling his child past. Mercifully, the Ukrainian’s bullet put an end to the father’s ordeal then and there. Thereafter it became routine for guards to probe every bundle and knapsack with their bayonets.
At that moment, Samek and his wife were only three ranks away from the SS men:
All the blood drained from Samek’s face, but his wife was stronger at that moment—or was it weaker?—or did she merely have presence of mind? ‘Take off the knapsack!’ she hissed. As if in a trance, he did so and without losing his place in the ranks, he edged over to the end of the row of marchers and carefully deposited the knapsack on the curb. It took no more than a fraction of a minute. Then he went back to his original place, eyes vacant.
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Such, at a moment of supreme danger, was the instinct for survival, the desperate Will to live, numerous examples of which have come down to us: the decision of an instant, for which there could be neither precedent nor logic.
A similar incident was witnessed by Samuel Rajzman. A mother had chloroformed her eleven-month-old baby, he later recalled, in order to smuggle it through the selection in a sack, but, ‘just as she was being directed to the right side, the baby awoke and suddenly began to wail in its sack.’ One of the Ukrainian guards pierced the baby with his bayonet through the sack. ‘Then he returned the sack to the mother and ordered her to go leftward. A few moments later a shot resounded and the mother with her sack collapsed on the pavement.’
Rajzman added that throughout the deportation, ‘We tried in vain to find out where and for what purpose all these people were being sent away, but the German machine worked flawlessly; no one learned what happened to the victims.’
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The destination was Treblinka, and death. Between September 6 and September 9, more than thirty thousand Jews were deported from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. On September 10 more than five thousand were deported, a further five thousand on September 11, and 4,806 on September 12. The deportations then ceased for nine days.
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September 11 had been the eve of Jewish New Year. Among those deported that day was the seventy-one-year-old Hillel Zeitlin, philosopher, journalist and author, whose
Alphabet of Judaism
had been published in 1922. Zeitlin was seized that day with other patients in the Jewish hospital; given, as all patients were, five minutes to ‘pack’ their belongings.
Zeitlin put on his prayer shawl, took with him a volume on Jewish mysticism, and walked towards the Umschlagplatz. ‘His dignified figure,’ Hillel Seidman later recalled, ‘his flashing eyes and’ vigorous gait cast awe on all around. Even the murderous Ukrainian militia were impressed. They did not push him brutally and did not molest him. He walked immersed in his thoughts, his lips murmuring incessantly and his eyes staring afar.’
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Zeitlin was deported to Treblinka and gassed. That same day, on the ramp at Treblinka, Meir Berliner, a Jew from the Argentine who had been visiting relatives in Warsaw on the outbreak of war, and
was now deported, stabbed an SS man with a knife.
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Whatever resistance was possible was also futile. Meir Berliner’s gesture saved nobody. But it served as a signal of human dignity, and as a gesture of outrage. Inside Treblinka, however, a number of those chosen for the gruesome task of burning the bodies, sorting the clothing of those who had been gassed, and cleaning the trains, were trying to organize themselves into a resistance group, to plan a mass escape. One of the leaders of this plan was a Jew from Warsaw, Alfred Galewski, an engineer. Another Warsaw Jew, Samuel Rajzman, who was deported to Treblinka on September 17, recalled three years later: