Authors: Martin Gilbert
One young girl, the daughter of Benjamin Liebeskind, tried to escape by jumping out of a window. She fell into the hands of the waiting Ukrainians and was shot. Among those hiding in the ghetto was Moshe Wohlreich, who had earlier succeeded in escaping from one of the trains on its way to Treblinka. He too was caught, and brought to the synagogue.
On Saturday December 19, at 9.30 in the morning, forty-two men were taken out of the synagogue, and led along the road towards Rakow. The Gestapo was waiting for them there with a truck and tools. They were given spades and shovels, led into the Rakow forest and ordered to dig five long ditches. The Jews, who worked under the strict surveillance of two SS men, decided that if the Nazis tried to shoot them, they would kill them and run away. At 3.30 that afternoon, German and Ukrainian reinforcements arrived. The Jews refused to obey the command to take off their clothes. Some of them attacked the guards, and a few managed to escape. The rest were shot.
That night, the Jews in the synagogue were taken out in groups of fifty and led to the Rakow forest. As they left the synagogue, where the people already knew about the newly dug graves, some of them tried to escape. The Germans opened fire and many were killed and left lying near the synagogue.
The Jews marched to Rakow through the darkness, weeping, reciting Psalms and saying the ‘Shema Israel’, ‘Hear! O Israel’, as they went to their own funerals.
Forced to strip, 560 Jews were shot in the Rakow forest that night. Those who were only wounded were buried, together with the dead, in the mass grave. A tale is told of a certain Saneh, a former abattoir worker, who pulled himself out from among the corpses and, half naked, reached the home of a pre-war friend of his, the municipal dog-catcher, who was an Ethnic German. This dog-catcher, notwithstanding his previous friendship, gave Saneh over to the Germans.
A few other instances have been recorded of people who managed to get out of the mass graves. The Piotrkow historian, Tadeusz Nowakowski, relates that after one mass execution in the Rakow forest, a Jew managed to crawl out from under the mountain of corpses and ran wildly through the streets, ‘bloody and half-naked’. When he reached the neighbourhood of the hospital, he was caught by the German police who shot him on the spot.
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Among those murdered in the Rakow forest that day was the thirty-seven-year-old Sara Helfgott, and her eight-year-old daughter Lusia. Among the survivors still in the ghetto was Lusia’s elder brother Ben.
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Throughout German-occupied Poland, Jews searched for the whereabouts of their deported relatives. On December 21, M. Michner, a Jew who was working in the Schultz tailoring workshop in the Warsaw ghetto, sent a postcard to the Jewish Council at Turobin to ask about the fate of his son Izaak Michner. His card was returned by the German postal authorities with a derisive note: ‘Your son Izaak Michner has gone to Abraham’s bosom. He is dead.’
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In the Warsaw ghetto, three leading rabbis, Alexander Zysze Frydman, Klonimus-Kelmisz Szpiro and Szymszon Sztokhammer, wrote a prayer for those who had been deported: ‘Almighty God, defender of all those who have been taken away, protect them against poverty and misery, give them the strength to survive and to withstand the torture inflicted by their persecutors. Provide them with food, and cause them to live in health, and to return to their families; and the smaller children, who have been torn out of the arms of their mothers and fathers, let them appear—according to the example of the Exodus from Egypt—and come back to their parents….’
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Deception masked the unthinkable reality. At Treblinka that Christmas, signboards were put up at the station. Each of the station buildings was given a spurious name: ‘Restaurant’, ‘Ticket office’, ‘Telegraph’ and ‘Telephone’. The main store containing the clothing of the victims was covered with train schedules announcing the departure and arrival of trains to and from Grodno, Suwalki, Vienna and Berlin. ‘When persons descended from the trains,’
Samuel Rajzman later recalled, ‘they really had the impression that they were at a very good station from where they could go to Suwalki, Vienna, Grodno and other cities.’
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Rajzman also recalled ‘huge signposts’ with the inscription ‘To Bialystok and Baranowicze’, a station clock, and an ‘enormous arrow’ on which was printed: ‘Change for Eastbound Trains’.
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As 1943 opened, a new German deception was sprung on the surviving inhabitants of the Polish ghettos. Jews were to be sent, it was said, not to ‘work in the East’, but to a neutral country, as part of a special exchange programme. Germans overseas would return to Germany. Jews from German-occupied Europe would be sent to Palestine.
At Opoczno, all Jews with ‘relatives in Palestine’ were asked to register. Many came out of hiding to do so. In all, five hundred registered. It was yet another trick. On 6 January 1943, all five hundred were deported, sent to Treblinka and gassed.
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Aaron, a young man of twenty-two who was in this deportation, later recalled the journey. As the train set off, he and the other deportees hoped that they were travelling westward, to a neutral country. Then, the train stopped, and the engine was uncoupled. Soon, it joined up again at the other end of the train. ‘Within a few moments the train began to move off,’ the young man recalled. ‘At first there was a terrifying silence. Everybody waited for a miracle to happen or an abyss to open.’ His account continued:
But the miracle did not happen, and within a few moments we knew definitely that the train had changed its direction and we were travelling eastwards.
It was as though there was an explosion and a collapse in the carriage. People shrieked to the high heavens. The little children in the carriage could not understand what it all meant, but they also began to cry at the tops of their voices.
I looked at my own family members and it seemed to me as though they had all grown old in a single moment. My little sister Malkale, who was nine years old, understood what it all meant and was weeping bitterly, ‘Mother, but I never did anybody any harm.’ My sister Rochele, who was twelve years old, clung to me and said, ‘Aaron, I am terribly afraid. Look after me…’ and she clung to me with all her strength.
My sister Bracha, who was pregnant, wept in a loud voice.
She was about twenty-eight. ‘But my baby hasn’t even been born yet, and never sinned, why is he doomed?’ Her husband stood stroking her hair. Looking at them I could no longer restrain myself, and also began weeping; but did my best to weep silently, so that my voice should not be heard.
It was now plain that the deportees were being taken to Treblinka:
I looked round at the people. They were images of dread and horror. Some tore their hair, some flung themselves about in despair, and some cursed with all their strength.
A woman clutched her baby to her breast with all her force. The child began to make strangled noises, while the woman whispered loving words to it and pressed it to her heart all the more.
‘Look what she’s doing, look what she’s doing. She’s gone mad,’ came cries from all sides.
‘It’s my child, mine, and I want him to die a holy death. Let him die a holy death.’ And by the time people succeeded in getting the child away, he was choked.
One Jew near us went mad. Round his neck was a white scarf. He took it off and tried to tie it to one of the iron hooks in the carriage wall in order to hang himself. People tried to stop him. He punched and kicked with tremendous force and cried: ‘Let me hang myself!’ They succeeded in dragging the scarf out of his hands and he collapsed in the corner.
A group of young men in the sealed carriage made plans to try to break out. But many parents argued against such a plan: ‘Mother sat at a loss,’ the young man recalled. ‘What will happen to us?’ his mother asked. ‘Don’t let us separate. Don’t let us separate. Death is lying in wait everywhere. Let us die together, at least.’
After a few hours the train came to a halt. It was the middle of the night. The doors of the carriages were opened ‘and the chill air burst into the carriage and beat down on the exhausted and fainting travellers’. The young man recalled:
Into the carriage climbed a group of Mongols and Ukrainians, submachine guns in their hands. The carriage was crowded from end to end, but still room was made for them. Everybody crowded and crushed together in fear, while they began to rob and pillage the passengers. Ample experience had
taught them where such travellers hid their belongings. First they went to the women, tore off whatever clothes they were still wearing, thrust their hands into their bosoms and their private parts, and found money and jewellery. They pulled rings off fingers. Most of the travellers were exhausted and had no spirit of resistance. The few who refused or resisted were beaten with the rifle butts.
‘Diengi davay!’ ‘Hand over the money,’ they kept shouting and cursing and abusing. It had been clear enough that we were being taken to slaughter.
Among those in the carriage was the head of the Jewish Council of Opoczno, Przydlowski. It was clear, he told the deportees, that the end had come. ‘Anyone who could run away should do so.’
Aaron and some other young men decided they would try to make a run for it. First, Aaron said goodbye to his parents. But, as he later recalled: ‘When I came to my sister Bracha I almost changed my mind and wanted to go back on my resolution. “What has my unborn baby done? Why is he doomed never to see the light of the world?” she went on whispering in a tremulous voice.’
The young men made their plans, and jumped. The guards were shooting. Many were killed. But between bursts Bracha’s brother managed to jump unharmed, falling into a ditch filled with snow. There, he sank in the snow out of sight. He was, he later recalled, ‘in an alien and hostile world’, but he had made his escape, and was to survive the war.
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In Radomsko, the German authorities assured members of the Zionist youth groups in the ghetto that they were to be sent to Palestine as part of a ‘special exchange programme’, whereby German nationals interned by the British in Palestine would be returned to Germany. But the chairman of the Jewish Council, Gutstadt, warned them that this was ‘another Gestapo trick’, and urged them to flee while they could. Hundreds did so.
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Acts of resistance continued, as did the reprisals which so deterred resistance. In Czestochowa, on January 4, several young men and women, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization, among them Mendel Fiszlewicz, were caught up in a ‘selection’. They possessed only one pistol and one knife, but Fiszlewicz used his pistol to attack and wound the German commander of the
‘action’. After the first shot, Fiszlewicz’s pistol jammed, and he was killed by one of the guards.
As a reprisal, the Germans took twenty-five men out of the line-up, and shot them on the spot. Then, as a further reprisal, three hundred women and children were sent to nearby Radomsko, where the deportation to Treblinka was in progress.
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All three hundred were gassed, together with four thousand five hundred Radomsko Jews.
From each death camp, the clothes of the murdered Jews were cleaned and sent to Germany. For those Jews murdered at Chelmno, the sorting of the clothes was done in Pabianice, south of the Lodz ghetto. The German administration of the Lodz ghetto then sent the clothes to the German People’s Winter Aid Campaign, for distribution among needy Germans. On January 9 the Campaign complained to the administration that the jackets, dresses and underwear just received had not been properly cleaned. Many articles ‘are badly stained and partly permeated with dirt and bloodstains’. On 51 of 200 jackets sent to Poznan, ‘the Jewish stars had not been removed!’ If those receiving the clothes were to become aware of their origin, the Winter Aid Campaign would become ‘discredited’. A further complaint was that, despite promises, the Ghetto administration had supplied ‘various assorted articles of clothing, but no whole suits’.
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In the forests and fields of the Volhynia, several Jewish resistance groups were actively engaged in sabotage of strategic railway lines, and the destruction of German storage depots. As soon as Soviet partisans entered the area, most of these units joined the Soviet partisan movement. Since May 1942, Moshe Gildenman had built up a unit of more than a hundred Jews north of Zhitomir. In January 1943, Gildenman’s unit was accepted by one of the Soviet partisan brigades as the Special Jewish Fighting Company. Since August 1942, fifteen Jews who had escaped from Zhitomir formed a partisan group commanded by a former corporal of the Polish army, Haim Henryk Rozenson. They too joined the Soviet partisan brigade at the end of 1942.
Small, detached groups could not always survive the German manhunts long enough to find or to join a professionally trained
Red Army unit. A group of Jews who escaped from Olyka was almost entirely wiped out in January 1943. One of the groups that was organized in Dubno under the command of Yitshak Wasserman was completely destroyed in battle with the Germans. Of the members of the Radziwillow-Brody group, after several battles with the Germans and the subsequent manhunts, only one of their number, Yechiel Prochownik, survived to tell its story.
It is estimated that between fifteen and sixteen hundred Volhynian Jews managed to survive long enough in the woods to join Soviet partisan detachments; by the end of 1943 more than ten per cent of those in the Soviet partisan movement were Jews. In the Rowne Brigade, the commander of the reconaissance unit, Alexander Abugov, was a Jew, as was Dr Ehrlich, commander of the Brigade’s medical services.
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In Minsk, on January 9, the twenty-year-old Jewish partisan Emma Radova was caught, tortured and killed. But she betrayed nobody.
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The deportations to Chelmno, Belzec and Sobibor had almost ended, the majority of Poland’s pre-war Jewish communities having been deported and gassed during 1942. It was Birkenau that had become the focal point of mass murder of Jews from the rest of German-occupied Europe. On 2 November 1942 the head of the Ancestral Heritage Institute in Germany, Dr Sievers, wrote to Dr Karl Brandt, asking for 150 skeletons of Jews.
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‘We have the opportunity’, Dr Sievers had explained earlier, ‘of obtaining real scientific evidence by obtaining the skulls of Jewish Bolshevik commissars, who are the exemplification of the sub-human type, the revolting but typical sub-human type.’ Each head, Dr Sievers explained, must be detached from its body, dipped in preservative liquid, and put in a specially prepared hermetically sealed tin.
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