Authors: Martin Gilbert
Although Lau had earlier received an offer to escape back to his home town in Slovakia, he had declined, calling now upon the Jews of Piotrkow ‘to fulfil the will of God with joy’. He was then deported to his death.
The Piotrkow deportation ended on October 21. More than twenty thousand Jews had been deported and killed. Less than two thousand succeeded in hiding. In the weeks ahead, these ‘illegals’ were to face the daily risk of discovery.
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On October 23, as part of the process of Allied counterattack, General Mark Clark met in Morocco with the leaders of the Algerian resistance, to plan for ‘Operation Torch’, the Allied landings in North Africa. Among those whom he met was a Jew, Jose Aboulker, one of the leaders of Algerian resistance. As a result of this meeting, the United States provided Aboulker and his colleagues with 800 sten guns, 800 grenades, 400 revolvers and 50 portable radios. These arms were landed on November 5, enabling the resistance groups to paralyse the main strategic points in Algiers, and to prevent any effective Vichy response to the American landings three days later.
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With these landings, the 117,000 Jews of Algeria were freed from the danger of deportation to metropolitan France, to Drancy, and beyond. But at the same moment, with the German occupation of Tripoli, 2,600 Jews were seized and taken to forced labour at Giado. For fourteen months they worked,
in severe conditions, building military roads. During those months, 562 died of starvation and of typhus.
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In Tunis, on December 9, German soldiers rounded up 128 Jews and marched them to a labour camp. One young Jew, who was sick, fell down with exhaustion on the march. A German soldier shot him dead.
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In Nazi-occupied Europe, the deportations continued. On October 24 the Jews of Lichtenstein were deported. Eight months earlier there had been a complaint from Eichmann’s office in Berlin that a number of Jews in Lichtenstein were still being allowed to visit a public café, to eat there, ‘and to have a cup of coffee’.
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On October 25, in the eastern Polish town of Oszmiana, the Germans demanded four hundred Jews. In order to save the remaining six hundred, Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna ghetto, agreed that all old people should be given up. Many were hiding in the thousands of ‘malines’, or secret hiding places, in basements, attics and cupboards.
Reporting on this decision two days later, Gens told his fellow Council members in the Vilna ghetto:
Today I will say that it is my duty to soil my hands, because terrible times have come over the Jewish people. If five million people have already gone it is our duty to save the strong and the young, not in years only, but in spirit, and not to indulge in sentimentality. When the rabbi in Oszmiana was told that the number of persons required was not complete and that five elderly Jews were hiding in a ‘maline’, he said that the ‘maline’ should be opened. That is a man with a young and unshaken spirit.
I don’t know whether everybody will understand this and defend it, and whether they will defend it after we have left the ghetto, but the attitude of our police is this—rescue what you can, do not consider your own good name or what you must live through.
All these things that I have told you do not sound sweetly to our souls nor yet for our lives. These are things one should not have to know. I have told you a shocking secret which must remain locked in our hearts.
Gens had only ‘regret’, he said, that there were no Jewish police present when the ‘action’ was carried out in the nearby villages of Kiemieliszki and Bystrzyca. ‘Last week’, he explained, ‘all the Jews
were shot there, without any distinction.’
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Jacob Gens believed that by helping to supervise the actions, he and the Jewish police could save a percentage of those who would otherwise be killed. But not all his Council members shared his confidence or moral convictions. Early in the following month, Zelig Kalmanovitch noted in his diary: ‘We have bought our lives and our future with the death of tens of thousands.’
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On October 26 the first deportations from Theresienstadt to Birkenau took place: 1,866 Jews were deported. On arrival, 350 men under fifty were selected for the barracks, while all the other deportees, the old men, all the women, and all the children, were gassed. Of the 350 men ‘selected’ for forced labour, only 28 survived the war.
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In the next two years, twenty-five trains were to leave Theresienstadt for Birkenau, with a total of more than forty-four thousand deportees, of whom less than four thousand were to survive.
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From Opoczno, on October 27, three thousand Jews were sent to Treblinka.
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During the deportation, a few managed to escape to the nearby forests, where they established a partisan group, the ‘Lions’. Led by Julian Ajzenman, this group succeeded in damaging German rail communication in the Opoczno region, but not enough to halt the pace of the deportations.
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During October alone, eighty-two thousand Jews were deported to Treblinka and gassed, among them the twenty thousand Jews from Piotrkow deported between October 14 and October 21.
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A further seventeen thousand Jews were deported to Sobibor, among them eight thousand from Wlodawa and the surrounding towns and villages. Aizik Rottenberg, a bricklayer from Wlodawa, who survived, later asked:
You may also wonder why eight thousand people did not fight the Nazis. But a hundred men armed with machine guns are more powerful than an unarmed crowd. The young ones would have tried to escape, but refused to abandon their parents; they knew it would mean the death of the older people, and how was it possible to leave behind the helpless little brothers and sisters without support?
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That same October, sixty-four thousand Jews were deported to Belzec, among them, on October 28, two thousand children and six
thousand adults from Cracow. Among the adults was Gizela Gutman, a leading pediatrician.
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On October 28 a ‘top secret’ SS directive ordered all children’s stockings and children’s mittens from the death camp stores to be sent to SS families.
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On October 28, a former Jewish soldier in the Polish army, Mieczyslaw Gruber, who was being held with several hundred other Jewish prisoners-of-war in the Lipowa Street prison camp in Lublin, escaped together with seventeen other Jews held captive there. Under the code name ‘Mietek’, Gruber and his fellow escapees established a small partisan group in the woods north-west of Lublin, taking under their protection Jews who had escaped five months earlier from the village of Markuszow, on the eve of their deportation to Treblinka.
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News had begun to reach the West that the Jews deported ‘to the East’ were being murdered by gas. Most of this news reached neutral Switzerland from Germany, and was passed on at once to London, Washington and Jerusalem. These reports soon found an echo in the speeches and declarations of Allied statesmen. On October 29 a protest meeting was held in London, under the chairmanship of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Winston Churchill wrote to the Archbishop, for those at the meeting: ‘The systematic cruelties to which the Jewish people—men, women, and children—have been exposed under the Nazi regime are amongst the most terrible events of history, and place an indelible stain upon all who perpetrate and instigate them. Free men and women denounce these vile crimes, and when this world struggle ends with the enthronement of human rights, racial persecution will be ended.’
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Inside Warsaw, the Jewish Fighting Organization had continued to prepare itself for action. On October 29 Eliyahu Rozanski, a member of the Organization, killed Jakub Lejkin, Szerynski’s replacement as commander of the Jewish police in the ghetto. Rozanski’s accomplices were Mordechai Grobas and a seventeen-year-old girl, Margalit Landau. Their act was met, Ringelblum later noted, with the ‘heartfelt acclamation of the Jewish population’.
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Thereafter, thirteen Jewish policemen, those who had been particularly active in the August and September deportations, were killed. Also killed, on November 29, was the head of the economic
section of the Jewish Council, a hated, active collaborator.
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‘We wanted everyone to know’, Zivia Lubetkin later wrote, ‘that from now on there would be reprisals for every criminal act committed against Jews.’
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In the Bialystok ghetto, the Jews received two messengers from the Warsaw ghetto, Tamar Sznajderman and Lonka Koziebrodzka. ‘They had faces radiant with cheerfulness,’ Bronia Klibanski later recalled. ‘They brought us new hope, news and regards from the other part of the movement which, for some time, had been without contact with us.’
Bronia Klibanski added that the two girls from Warsaw ‘inspired all of us with plenty of courage and hope. We began to believe that Vilna’s ghetto, too, would be there to stay’.
The leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization in Bialystok was Mordecai Tenenbaum. He would meet his fellow conspirators, Bronia Klibanski later recalled, to the whistled tune of the Hebrew song, ‘There in the Plain of Jezreel’.
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In Bialystok, too, resistance was developing. The historian Reuben Ainsztein has pointed out, also, that in that city the number of Germans and Austrians who helped Jews was unique in the history of the Jewish resistance movement in Poland. One of these was Schade, a German Social Democrat, and the manager of a textile mill.
Through a group of Jewish girls, led by Maryla Rozycka, Schade maintained contact with the Jewish resistance organization inside the ghetto and with the Jewish partisans in the forests, supplying them with arms, clothes and valuable information. After the liquidation of the ghetto he hid twelve Jews in his factory. All twelve survived until the arrival of the Red Army.
Another German who helped Jews was a man by the name of Beneschek, a Sudeten German and a Communist. Beneschek was in Bialystok hiding from the Gestapo under a false identity. As manager of another textile mill situated on the border of the ghetto, he employed both Jews and Poles, and was instrumental in making it possible for Jews to smuggle arms into the ghetto. Beneschek also provided the Jews with false documents and money, and introduced another Sudeten German, Kudlatschek, to the Jewish resistance organization.
It was Kudlatschek who was in charge of the motor pool of all
the textile mills in the city. A number of Jews left Bialystok in Kudlatschek’s own car, travelling in it to partisan territory, and transporting arms back to the Jewish resistance organization in the ghetto from Grodno and other distant, and for Jews inaccessible, towns.
The Jews of the Bialystok ghetto were also helped by a number of German soldiers stationed in the city, from whom they obtained a few weapons, and several wireless sets. Arms also reached the ghetto from Walter, a Viennese, and Rischel, a German, who worked as storekeepers in the ‘Beutenlager’, or ‘Booty Stores’, in Kolejowa Street; until their posting to a front-line unit, they enabled the Jews working for them in the Stores to take arms back into the ghetto.
Another German, Otto Busse, who was in charge of a painting shop attached to the SS units in Bialystok, helped the Jews employed in his shop to smuggle pistols and several rifles into the ghetto. Two other Germans in Bialystok were sentenced to death for helping Jews.
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Some Jews were helped, others were betrayed. Near Cracow, at the end of October, six members of the Jewish Fighting Organization who set off for the forests near Rzeszow, armed with pistols and a knife, were betrayed by local peasants. They survived the first German manhunt, but later, in a second, unexpected clash, five of the six were killed.
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Inside Cracow, in November and early December, the Jewish Fighting Organization sabotaged railway lines, raided a German clothing store, and killed, in separate attacks, a German soldier, a German policeman, an SS man, a German air force pilot, two Gestapo detectives and a senior clerk of the German administration.
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By the end of 1942 the once vibrant pre-war Jewish community of Yugoslavia had been destroyed: at four camps, Loborgrad, Jasenovac, Stara Gradiska and Djakovo, more than 30,000 men, women and children had been starved, tortured and shot.
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More than 4,500 Jews, escaping from their homes, joined the Yugoslav partisans. Of those Jews who fought with the partisans, 1,318 were killed in battle.
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At Birkenau, the corpses of more than one hundred thousand Jews
gassed during the autumn of 1942 had been dumped into deep pits behind the farmhouse which had been converted into Birkenau’s gas-chamber. As more and more Jewish ‘transports’ reached the camp, the two hundred men of the Sonderkommando, who had since April been forced to drag the bodies from the pits to the crematoria ovens, were joined by two hundred more Jews and ordered, as their most urgent task, to dig up and burn the remaining corpses.
Enormous pyres were built out of stacks of wood. The wood was then drenched in petrol, the corpses dug up, placed on the pyres, and burned. To dig up and then to destroy so many corpses, the Sonderkommando worked by day and by night, pulling the corpses from the pits, laying them on the pyres, and, when the fire died down, covering the ash with earth.
During November, as this task drew to an end, the Sonderkommando realized that they too would be murdered, to ensure that no witnesses survived of what they had done. A plan was made to escape, but was discovered at the beginning of December. The escape bid was foiled. As a punishment, almost all members of the Sonderkommando who were still at work were taken from Birkenau to the gas-chamber at Auschwitz Main Camp, where they were killed.
A few days later, three hundred Jews were selected from the trains reaching Birkenau from ghettos in Poland, to form a new Sonderkommando. Their task was to take the corpses of those who had just been gassed, including often their own families, and to drag them to new pits where the fires were never allowed to die down. After six or seven weeks, five members of this new Sonderkommando managed to break out beyond the camp perimeter. All five were caught and shot. Their bodies were then exhibited in the camp as a deterrent to any further escape bid.
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