Authors: Martin Gilbert
***
During October, rumours of impending deportations spread through the Bialystok region. Ephraim Barasz, head of the Jewish Council in Bialystok itself, believed that the city could be spared if its factories worked to fulfil the German needs. ‘It is imperative’, he had told his fellow Council members and the heads of the various ghetto workshops, on October 11, ‘that we find means to postpone the danger, or at least reduce its scope.’
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Barasz was not the only person in the Bialystok region who did not believe that they would be deported. The region had been annexed to Germany in June 1941, and was entirely separate, administratively, from the Eastern Territories. ‘People came from Slonim,’ a girl from Siemiatycze, Helen Bronsztejn, later recalled. ‘They were running away from the horrors over there. We didn’t believe it. “People, why don’t you listen,” one man cried out. “My wife was killed. My son was killed.” People said: “This is the Third Reich. They won’t do it to
us
.”’
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On 2 November 1942, however, on the twenty-second anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in support of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, the deportations finally came to the Bialystok region, though not to the city. Once more, the pattern of terror, courage, deportations, revolt and destruction was repeated.
From Siemiatycze, 3,200 Jews were deported; Helen Bronsztejn was one of the very few who found shelter in a Polish home. Resistance, too, was widespread. In Lomza, a member of the Jewish Council, Dr Joseph Hepner, committed suicide ‘rather than cooperate with the Nazis’.
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In Marcinkance, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Aron Kobrowski, called out to the Jews who had been brought to the railway station: ‘Fellow Jews, everybody run for his life. Everything is lost!’ As the Jews ran towards the ghetto fence, attacking the guards with their bare fists, 105 were shot. Kobrowski, who had hid in a cellar, was discovered, and, with his brother and two other Jews, began shooting with revolvers at the Germans. The Germans replied with hand grenades, ending the revolt. Only a fragment of the Jews succeeded in reaching the forests, where they joined the growing number of partisans.
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From almost a hundred towns, villages and hamlets in the Bialystok region, mass escapes took place. Almost all six hundred Jews of Lapy fled. Of four hundred Jews at Suprasl, only 170 could be rounded up; of Zambrow’s four thousand Jews, almost half escaped; of nearly six hundred Jews in Drohiczyn, almost half escaped. But the recapture rate was high. Of seven hundred who escaped from Ciechanowiec, only sixty succeeded in avoiding recapture.
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Many of the Jews who fled found shelter with Poles. Some were betrayed by Poles. A few survived. ‘My parents suffered death for having kept Jews,’ recalled Henryk Woloszynowicz of Waniewo;
‘my father was murdered on the spot, my mother was taken and murdered at Tykocin.’
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As the trains took the Jews of the Bialystok region to Treblinka, some managed to jump from the wagons, and to survive: eleven of the deportees from Siemiatycze survived in this way. But J. Kohut, a teacher, remained with his students, singing with them as the train proceeded the Jewish national anthem, ‘Hatikvah’, ‘Hope’. All but 152 of the 3,200 deportees from Siemiatycze were gassed. The 152 became slave labourers in Treblinka. One of the few survivors of the 152 later recalled how, on one occasion, they were driven naked out into the snow, where many were shot. One of the Siemiatycze Jews to die in Treblinka, Samuel Priss, was killed with a pick-axe in front of his father. Another Siemiatycze Jew, Kalman Kravitz, saw his two younger brothers ‘savagely beaten to death with an iron bar’.
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Samuel Rajzman, from Warsaw, was in Treblinka when the Jews from the Bialystok region were brought there. ‘The most heartrending scenes took place that winter’, he later recalled, ‘when women were compelled to strip their children at temperatures of twenty to thirty degrees below zero in the yard or in open barracks whose walls were of thin plywood. The unfortunate creatures had nervous shocks, cried and laughed alternately, then wept desperately while standing on line in the cold, their babies pressed close to their breasts. The hangman lashed their naked bodies to force them into silence.’
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So massive had been the round-ups on November 2 in the Bialystok region, involving as they did more than one hundred thousand Jews, that thousands were kept for several weeks in special camps elsewhere in the region, before being taken to Treblinka. In one such camp, just outside Bialystok, guarded by Ukrainians, a few Jews were able to escape when their guards, overcome by a bout of particularly heavy drinking, passed out. Two of those who escaped eventually came back: one caught, and one of his own accord. Their fate was horrible, as a young married man, Meir Peker, later recalled:
I had contemplated escape, but because of my small child, could not see us succeeding, and so we remained. There were a few other families in the same position. It was my misfortune to
have to stay and see what befell those who were captured by the murderous Germans.
A girl who had fallen behind the escapees was caught, and in the course of the terrible tortures which followed, admitted that she had broken through a board in the toilet against the fence and escaped. They tore out her hair and poked out her eyes with their fingers, and when she had lost consciousness, they killed her.
There was also a young man who had returned of his own accord. It seems that he was frightened of going into the forest and believed that they would pardon him and allow him to go back to work in his trade.
He was, undoubtedly, afraid of the Gentiles in the area, as they had handed over the roving Jews to the Germans. With his capture, the beastly and vicious tortures began. The German in charge of the Ukrainian guards broke the boy’s hands, first one, then the other, joint by joint. This done, two Ukrainians stretched him out on a chair, still half-conscious, and broke his back: they then laid out his lifeless body, like an empty sack, and emptied their rifles into it.
I saw these things with my own eyes, and curse the day on which I was forced to witness such bestial atrocities. For many days this picture would not leave me, the face of the bound youth, contorted with terror from the tortures, the eyes protruding from sockets as if they were two superfluous items detached from the face. It is hard to forget.
Meir Peker also recalled the next stage of his deportation:
At midday a train arrived and a German with a stick separated the prisoners, some to the left, some to the right. I was parted from my wife and child. A Russian guard, one of the POWs, a Gentile as good as any Gentile, was pleased to announce to us that those on the right were to be taken to a labour camp, and those on the left to Treblinka. He already knew our fate. I never saw my family again.
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The deportations continued through the winter, to Treblinka and also to Belzec. On November 2, in Zloczow, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Dr Meiblum, refused to sign a document stating, in order to justify the deportation, that the ghetto had to be closed
because of a typhus epidemic. He was shot.
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Among the 2,500 deportees from Zloczow was the Yiddish poet S. J. Imber, nephew of the author of the ‘Hatikvah’. Imber’s wife and friends sought to guard his last manuscripts. But later they too were killed, and Imber’s writings were lost with them.
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On November 3 the Jews of Zaklikow were deported to Belzec. Dana Szapira, then eight years old, later recalled how, at the time of the deportation, ‘there was a Jewish woman dentist. Her leg was broken. A German came, not a bad sort, and took her out on a stretcher.’ The ‘good’ German then went off to see what could be done to help the woman. While he was gone, a German soldier, known as ‘Moustache’, came up. ‘“What are you doing here?” he said, and shot at her, not to kill her, but to see her writhe. Slowly, here and there, here and there, she was killed.’
Dana Szapira and her mother were hidden by a Polish farmer. They survived, living inside a cubby hole in his cowshed. One day the farmer heard a knock on the door: it was a Jew, holding in his arms his teenage son. ‘I have been hiding in the woods for months,’ the Jew told the farmer. ‘My son has gangrene. Please get a doctor.’
The farmer went to the Gestapo and told them about the two Jews. ‘He got two kilogrammes of sugar for reporting them,’ Dana Szapira recalled. ‘They were taken away and shot.’
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Here, the same man had both saved and betrayed: a bizarre example of the disjointing of moral values, in the unending atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Not only did individuals succumb, but throughout Europe the hitherto apparently natural conventions of human trust were undermined.
In a study of Polish—Jewish relations in the Second World War, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of how in Lukow the Jews hid in the surrounding woods for some time after the ‘resettlement action’. It was ‘a frequent occurrence’, Ringelblum wrote, ‘for Polish children playing there to discover groups of these Jews in hiding: they had been taught to hate Jews, so they told the municipal authorities, who in turn handed the Jews over to the Germans to be killed.’
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Confirmation of the flight of numerous Lukow Jews to the surrounding forests, as well as the part played by the local population in tracking down the Jews and denouncing them, is to be found in the diary of a local Polish teacher from Lukow, S. Zeminski, who wrote in his diary on 8 November 1942:
On 5 November, I passed through the village of Siedliska. I went into the cooperative store. The peasants were buying scythes. The woman shopkeeper said, ‘They’ll be useful for you in the round-up today.’ I asked, ‘What round-up?’ ‘Of the Jews.’ I asked, ‘How much are they paying for every Jew caught?’ An embarrassed silence fell. So I went on, ‘They paid thirty pieces of silver for Christ, so you should also ask for the same amount.’
Nobody answered. What the answer was I heard a little later. Going through the forest, I heard volleys of machine-gun fire. It was the round-up of the Jews hiding there. Perhaps it is blasphemous to say that I clearly ought to be glad that I got out of the forest alive.
In Burzec, one go-ahead watchman proposed: ‘If the village gives me a thousand zloty, I’ll hand over these Jews.’ Three days later I heard that six Jews in the Burzec forest had dug themselves an underground hide-out. They were denounced by a forester of the estate.
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Rescue and denunciation; the historian is overwhelmed by the conflicting currents of human nature.
From Belgium, France and Holland, and from several Polish towns, the deportations to Birkenau continued throughout November and December 1942. A Jew from Ciechanow, Noah Zabludowicz, later described the round-up in his town on November 5: ‘As we were standing in lines on the day of the deportation,’ he recalled, ‘there was this woman who was holding a baby of a few months old in her arms. The baby began crying and whimpering. One of the SS men said: “Give me that child, will you?” Of course, she resisted. But he said this rather courteously, so she eventually, tremblingly, she gave him the baby. He took the infant and threw it—with its head to the road. And, of course, the child died.’ As for the mother, Zabludowicz added, ‘She could not even cry.’
1
On the evening of Friday, November 6, in preparation for the deportation from Drancy, one thousand Jews were locked into twenty cattle trucks on the railway siding. Among the deportees was the twenty-one-year-old Leo Bretholz, an Austrian Jew who had fled from Vienna to Luxembourg in 1938, then fled to Belgium, then, in May 1940, to France. In October 1942 he had managed to find safety by crossing into neutral Switzerland. But his safety was short-lived. Arrested on Swiss soil by the Swiss police, he was sent back to France, as were nearly ten thousand Jews who crossed to Switzerland in search of safety in September 1942, when the Swiss Police Instruction of September 25 had denied entry to refugees ‘on the grounds of race alone’, claiming that they could not be considered ‘political’ refugees.
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On being sent back across the border, Bretholz was interned by the French police in Rivesaltes, then sent to Drancy. In Drancy, he later recalled:
There was hardly enough space to sit or squat. The train stood all night on the railway siding in the station of Drancy—Le Bourget. In the middle of the car there was one bucket to be used by the occupants for their sanitary needs.
After a few hours, the bucket was full, and human waste overflowed. Thereafter, the people relieved themselves directly on the floor. The process of dehumanization had started in earnest. The putrid stench was unbearable, but it concerned us less than the thoughts of what was so ominously lying ahead of us.
At 8.55 in the morning of November 7, according to its precise schedule, the train moved eastward. Leo Bretholz had already discussed during the night, with two friends, the possibility of escape. Now, as the train began its eastward journey, they were determined at least to try. His account of the journey continued:
The moans of the elderly, the screams of the children, the ‘Sha! Sha!’ ‘Hush! Hush!’ plea of a mother to her infant, were being drowned by the clatter of the death train as it moved through the French countryside of contrasting bucolic beauty and serenity.
My thoughts flashed back to my childhood. Then, the sound of a train had that soothing, even romantic, quality—and it made me dream of faraway places I would have liked to visit. At this time, however, it was striking a note of fateful doom and finality. The gamut of emotions accompanying the rattle of the train ranged from hysterical cries of despair by many, to absolute silence of fatalistic resignation by others.
The scenes were unbearable to the witness, who had all intentions to keep a clear mind and a cool grasp of the situation. We needed to keep our senses intact, as our decision was made to escape before the train would reach the devil’s enclave, Nazi Germany itself.
Two parallel iron bars in the rectangular opening in the corner of the cattle car represented the only obvious obstacle to our escape. We had to go to work immediately. The mood of the occupants provided the impetus, and set the stage. Many among them shouted words of encouragement. Our decision would give them some measure of hope, if only symbolically.
We took off our sweaters, soaked them in human waste,
wrung them out, thereby giving the fabric greater tensile strength. We then wrapped them around the iron bars, tourniquet-style. Working feverishly, we applied that twisting method until the bars showed some inward bending. Relaxing the tourniquet, we tried with our hands to bend the bars in the other—outward—direction. The bars began to give.
We repeated that process for several hours, until the bars were loose enough in the frame, we were able to bend them at will. Having achieved this, we put the bars back into their normal position. All we had to do now was to wait for darkness to provide the cover for our escape. It was now early afternoon, and our attempt was only a matter of a few hours away.
By evening, the din which had emanated from the ghost-like forms in the car throughout the day had somewhat died down. We were now six or seven hours into our journey to oblivion, and many had dozed off, collapsed from exhauston or fainted. An old lady on crutches—one of her legs had been amputated below the knee—pointed a crutch toward us, faintly uttering the French words: ‘Courrez, courrez et que Dieu vous garde!’ ‘Run and may God watch over you!’ This woman’s gesture of encouragement keeps flashing back to me through the veil of time. I shall never forget her words, or her face.