Authors: Martin Gilbert
We never found out what became of those two! The notorious Sergeant Arretaz of Saint-Gingolph turned people back like a sadist, whereas his confrere, the customs officer, ran and hid so as not to see the agonizing cortege of those sent back to the border, straight into the hands of the French militia.
Two of these poor wretched creatures slit their wrists on the bridge on the same day, while a woman (whom we had seen being hunted down in l’Haut de Morge) threw herself from the fourth story of the hotel in Saint-Gingolph where she was staying.
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Another Jewish couple who had succeeded in crossing into Switzerland at Novel were Elli and Jan Friedländer, Czech Jews
who had managed, while still in France, to find their son Saul a safe haven with Catholic nuns. Their son, who survived the war brought up as a Catholic, later received the copy of two letters and a telegram written by his parents. The first letter was dated September 30:
We reached Switzerland after a very tiring journey and were turned back. We were misinformed. We are now awaiting our transfer to the camp at Rivesaltes, where our fate will be decided in the way that is already quite familiar to you.
There are no words to describe our unhappiness and our despair. Moreover, we don’t have our baggage. Can you imagine our physical and mental state?
Perhaps if you could intervene at Vichy we would be spared the worst. It is not the camp that we are afraid of. You know that. If there is the slightest possibility of helping us, do not hesitate, we beg you. Act quickly. There must be a solution at Vichy that would be less catastrophic for us. Don’t forget the little one!
On October 3, Elli and Jan Friedlander sent a telegram from the camp at Rivesaltes. It read: ‘Without intervention Minister Interior, our imminent departure inevitable. Regards, Jan Friedlander, 3548 Rivesaltes, Block K.’
Two days later, the Friedländers were deported from Rivesaltes to Drancy. They believed that they were on their way to Germany. From the train, they threw out their second letter, the first few lines written in ink, the rest in pencil. The letter was addressed to the Director of the Catholic Boarding School to whom they had entrusted their son for baptism and for survival:
Madame, I am writing you this in the train that is taking us to Germany. At the last moment, I sent you, through a representative of the Quakers, 6,000 francs, a charm bracelet, and, through a lady, a folder with stamps in it. Keep all of this for the little one, and accept, for the last time, our infinite thanks and our warmest wishes for you and your whole family. Don’t abandon the little one! May God repay you and bless you and your whole family. Elli and Jan Friedländer.
Publishing this letter thirty-four years later, their son asked bitterly, ‘What God was meant?’
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Jan and Ella Friedlander were taken to Drancy. From there, with
a thousand other Jews, they were deported to Auschwitz. Of those thousand, only four men, and no women, survived. The Friedländers were among those who perished. Were they able to derive any comfort from the fact that their son had been spared, by their efforts, that terrible journey? Among those deported with them, and gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, were more than two hundred children, among them the three-year-old Solange Zajdenwerger and her four-year-old brother David.
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On September 23, 2,004 Jews were deported from Theresienstadt to Maly Trostenets, near Minsk. There were no survivors.
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Three days later a further two thousand were deported from Theresienstadt, also to Maly Trostenets.
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Three days after that, a further two thousand were deported from Theresienstadt, ‘probably to Maly Trostenets’.
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Once more, there were no survivors. Among the dead were Albert Lob from Worms, his wife Katherine, and their twenty-four-year-old son Ernst. Also killed was Sussel Spatz, born in the Austro-Hungarian town of Nowy Sacz in 1864, whose husband Peter, sent first to Buchenwald after the Kristallnacht in 1938, had died in Dachau two years later.
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A meeting of railway officials in Berlin on September 26, resumed on September 28, reflected the new pace and comprehensiveness of the deportation plans. It was decided that one train a day would go from the Radom district to Treblinka, one train a day from the Cracow area to Belzec, and one train a day from the Lvov district to Belzec. Each train was to consist of fifty freight cars and one passenger-car escort; and each train was to carry two thousand people. A new rail track was to be ready in November 1942 to link Lublin and Chelm with Sobibor.
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In October, deportees from Theresienstadt were sent by the improved railway services, not to the small gas-vans of distant Maly Trostinec, but to the gas-chambers of Treblinka. Of one thousand deportees on October 5, none survived.
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Of a further thousand on October 8, about twenty-eight escaped. The rest were gassed. Of the twenty-eight escapees, only two survived the war.
20
The three remaining deportations from Theresienstadt to Treblinka in October were more crowded: six thousand Jews in all. Not one survived.
21
In Warsaw, following the devastating deportations of August and September, the doctors in the ghetto who had been studying the
medical effects of starvation realized that the time had come to end their work. ‘Never have I experienced a feeling with such force’, wrote Dr Izrael Milejkowski, ‘as right now, writing a preface to this work. I hold my pen in my hand and into my room peers the spectacle of death from beneath black empty windows of abandoned, sullen buildings, standing on deserted streets that are strewn with the remains of plunder.’ Milejkowski ended his preface with a tribute to his fellow physicians in the ghetto: ‘You, my associates in misery, were part of the community. Slavery, famine, evacuation, you shared them all. Death hung constantly over your heads. But by your work you gave the assassins your reply. And this ringing answer will resound forever. “Non omnis moriar!”, “Not all of me shall die!”’
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Dr Milejkowski organized the final meetings, to hasten the typing of the accumulated material. Three months later, when the deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka were renewed, he was caught and deported. On the short journey to Treblinka, he committed suicide.
23
Medical experiments on defenceless prisoners had continued at Auschwitz without respite. ‘Today I preserved fresh material from the human liver, spleen and pancreas,’ Dr Kremer noted in his diary on October 3, ‘also lice from persons infected with typhus, in pure alcohol.’
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Five years later he explained how:
It was like this: I had been for an extensive period of time interested in investigating the changes developing in the human organism as a result of starvation. At Auschwitz I mentioned this to Wirth who said that I would be able to get completely fresh material for my researches from those prisoners who were killed by phenol injections. To choose suitable specimens I used to visit the last block on the right (Block 8), where sick prisoners from the camp came for medical examination.
During the examination the prisoners who acted as doctors presented the patients to the SS physician and described the illness of the patient. The SS physician decided then—taking into consideration the prisoner’s chances of recovery—whether he should be treated in the hospital, perhaps as an out-patient, or be liquidated.
Those attributed by the SS physician to the latter group were led away by the SS orderlies. The SS physician set aside for
liquidation above all those prisoners whose diagnosis was
Allgemeine Korperschwache
, ‘general bodily exhaustion’.
I used to observe such prisoners and if one of them aroused my interest, owing to his advanced state of starvation, I asked the orderly to reserve the given patient for me and let me know when he would be killed with an injection. At the time fixed by the orderly the patients selected by me were again brought to the last block, were put into a room on the other side of the corridor opposite the room where the examinations, during which the patient had been selected, had taken place.
The patient was put upon the dissecting table while he was still alive. I then approached the table and put several questions to the man as to such details which pertained to my researches. For instance I asked what his weight had been before the arrest, how much weight he had lost since then, whether he took any medicines, etc.
When I had collected my information the orderly approached the patient and killed him with an injection in the vicinity of the heart. As far as I knew only phenol injections were used. Death was instantaneous after the injection. I myself never made any lethal injections.
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On October 10, Dr Kremer noted in his diary two items of interest to him: ‘Fresh material from liver, spleen and pancreas taken and preserved. Had a stamp with facsimile of my signature made for me by prisoners….’
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Five days later he noted: ‘First frost this night, the afternoon again sunny and warm. Fresh material of liver, spleen and pancreas taken from an abnormal individual.’
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Four kilometres from Birkenau, in the village of Budy, Jewish women were brought to the schoolhouse which, circled by barbed wire, served as the centre of a small labour camp whose prisoners worked in the surrounding fields. There, in the first days of October, an incident took place of unusual savagery even for that savage and tormented region. An account of it was set down after the war by an employee of the Political Section at Auschwitz, SS Corporal Pery Broad, who learned of it from his superior, SS Lieutenant Maximilian Grabner. Summoned urgently to Budy by the camp guards, Grabner, his assistant, an investigator and two clerks entered Budy with what Grabner described as ‘a feeling of curiosity’. His account continued:
The guard saluted them. They heard a peculiar buzzing and humming in the air. Then they saw a sight so horrible that some minutes passed before they could take it in properly. The square behind and beside the school was covered with dozens of female corpses, mutilated and bloody, lying in complete chaos. All were covered only with threadbare prisoners’ undergarments. Half-dead women were writhing among the corpses. Their groaning mixed with the buzzing of immense swarms of flies, which circled round the sticky pools of blood and the smashed skulls. That was the origin of the strange humming sound which the newcomers had found so peculiar on their arrival. Some corpses hung in a twisted position on the barbed-wire fence. Others had evidently been thrown out from an attic window which was still open.
Grabner at once sought from the few survivors an account of the incident which had led to this gruesome scene. He was told, as Pery Broad later recalled, that:
The SS men, who acted as guards in the camp, used to get the German women prisoners to maltreat the Jewish women. If the former did not comply, they were threatened with being driven through the chain of sentries and ‘shot while escaping’. The bestial SS men regarded it as a pleasant pastime to look at the sufferings of the maltreated Jewesses. The result of this unbearable situation was that the German women always were in a state of fear lest the tormented Jewish women take vengeance on them for their terrible lot. But the Jewish women, who mostly belonged to intellectual circles (e.g. some had formerly been students of the Sorbonne, or artists), never even thought of stooping to the level of the vulgar German prostitutes and of planning revenge, though it would have been understandable if they had done.
The evening before, one Jewess was returning from the lavatory and was on her way upstairs to the sleeping quarters. A German woman thought she held a stone in her hand, but that, of course, was only her hysterical imagination. At the gate below, a sentry was standing guard. As everybody knew, he was that woman’s lover. Leaning out from the window, she cried for help, saying she had been hit by the Jewess.
All guards on duty immediately ran upstairs and together
with the depraved German women prisoners they began to hit the Jewish women indiscriminately. They threw some women down the winding stairs, so that they fell in a heap, one upon the other. Some were thrown out of the window and fell to their deaths. The guards also drove the Jewish women from the barracks into the yard. The German woman, who had instigated the butchering, stayed behind in the bedroom with her lover. This may have been what she originally intended.
The ‘rebellion’ was meanwhile mastered with bludgeons, gun butts and shots. Even an axe had been used as a weapon by one of the female capos. In their mortal fear a few Jewish women tried to creep under the wire fence in order to escape the butchering. They got stuck and were soon killed. Even when all the women lay on the ground, the fiends, drunk with blood, kept hitting the helpless victims again and again. They wanted, above all, to kill everybody, so as to destroy all witnesses of their atrocities.
At five that morning, the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, was told that there had been a ‘rebellion’ at Budy, but that it had been ‘successfully overcome’. He at once drove to Budy, Pery Broad recalled, ‘and inspected the traces of the bloody orgy. A few wounded women, who had hidden among the corpses, then rose and thought that they were saved.’ But as soon as Hoess left Budy, ‘the wounded women were shot.’
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***
As the killing of Jews continued, so too did the acts of resistance, bravery or defiance. In Lukow, near Lublin, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, David Liberman, had collected money from the Jews assembled in the main square on October 1, believing that he could use the money to ransom the Jews. On learning that the deportation was to continue, he shouted at the German supervisor of this action, ‘Here is your payment for our trip, you bloody tyrant,’ and, tearing the money into small shreds, slapped the German in the face. Ukrainian guards murdered him on the spot.
29
The assembled Jews, four thousand altogether, two thousand of whom were Slovak Jews deported to Lukow five months earlier, were sent to Treblinka, as planned, and gassed.
30