Authors: Martin Gilbert
Within several hours the Germans succeeded in rounding up five thousand Jews. Their success sprang from the element of surprise. Thousands of Jews had no time to seek shelter, others were caught on their way to work.
Among the five thousand Jews deported to Treblinka on January 18 were 150 doctors, including Izrael Milejkowski, who had led the team of researchers studying starvation disease. During the train journey he committed suicide. News of Dr Milejkowski’s suicide was brought to Warsaw by his nephew, who managed to jump from the train and to make his way back into the ghetto.
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Another doctor who committed suicide on the journey was Zofia Binsztejn-Syrkin, chairman of the board of health of the Warsaw Jewish Council, and a former director of TOZ, the pre-war Organization for the Protection of the Health of the Jews of Poland.
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The Germans expected no resistance, but preparations to resist had been made in the ghetto throughout the autumn and winter. Tuvia Borzykowski’s group hid three pistols and three grenades. Those who had no weapons, he recalled, ‘armed themselves with lengths of iron pipe, sticks, bottles, whatever could serve to attack the enemy’.
A large number of Jews were being deported along the street as Tuvia Borzykowski watched. Suddenly, a small group of them, led by Mordechai Anielewicz, began to throw grenades at the German guards and at the special SS task force. Several of the Germans fell. Others ran away.
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All but two of the group of fighters were killed, among them the seventeen-year-old Margalit Landau, who had helped carry out the death sentence on Jacob Lejkin two and a half weeks earlier.
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Nine Jewish fighters were killed. But the armed clash had taken place. Jews had raised the standard of revolt. Then, as Tuvia Borzykowski recalled:
The fighters set up a barricade in a little house on Niska Street and held it against the German reinforcements which soon arrived. The Germans found it impossible to enter the house, so they set it afire. The fighters inside continued firing until the last bullet.
I should like to mention here one of the fighters, Eliyahu Rozanski (Elik). When he was mortally wounded, he asked one of the comrades to take his rifle so that it should not fall into German hands. Of the entire unit only Mordechai Anielewicz survived; in the final stage of the battle he fought with a rifle which he forced out of the hands of a German.
Though the unit was destroyed, the battle on Niska Street
encouraged us. For the first time since the occupation we saw Germans clinging to walls, crawling on the ground, running for cover, hesitating before making a step in the fear of being hit by a Jewish bullet. The cries of the wounded caused us joy, and increased our thirst for battle.
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On January 19 the Germans entered the ghetto once more. One of those in hiding that day was David Wdowinski. ‘Again we went into our shelters,’ he wrote. ‘Again the familiar voices, the heavy treads, the alarming hammering.’ The Germans were clearly nearby:
A child began to cry. Fright, alarm—we’ll be betrayed. The mother closed her hand tightly over the child’s mouth and nose. The crying stopped. The child was quiet, very quiet. The German went away. The quiet child was a little bluish in the face and from his mouth issued a small stream of bloody foam. It was never to cry again. So went a Jewish child into the other world.
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On January 21 the Germans began firing into windows, and hurling grenades. ‘All through the day’, Borzykowski recalled, ‘the ghetto resounded to the explosions in which hundreds of Jews perished.’ But the resistance continued, forty Jews going from house to house and rooftop to rooftop, not all of them armed, but taking arms from the Germans, and keeping up firing. Then, to the amazement of the fighters, the Germans withdrew from the ghetto. ‘At the time’, Borzykowski later wrote, ‘we had only ten pistols.’ Had the Germans known this, they would probably have continued the raids, and Jewish resistance ‘would have been nipped in the bud as a minor, insignificant episode’.
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‘We obtained faith’, Yitzhak Zuckerman later recalled, ‘that we can fight; we know how to fight.’
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Among the Jewish fighters killed was Tamara Sznajderman, one of the Jewish Fighting Organization couriers who had been on missions to Bialystok and elsewhere. She was the girlfriend of Mordecai Tenenbaum, leader of the growing resistance group in Bialystok.
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Twelve Germans were killed in the fighting. They died, Yitzhak Katznelson recalled a year later, ‘in utter bewilderment’, and he added:
SS agents who stood some distance away and many gendarmes who fled in confusion cried out: ‘The Jews are shooting!’ I, myself, heard these astonished cries from the lips of a vile loathsome German as he ran down the stairs of the house which he had entered for the deliberate purpose of killing us. ‘The Jews are shooting!’ he cried out in utter bewilderment. Something unheard of! Jews firing! ‘They have guns!’
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The Germans, Feigele Peltel later wrote, ‘had received their first blow at the hands of the contemptible Juden’.
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On the eastern front, the German armies were in disarray: cheated of their objective—the city of Stalingrad—surrounded by the Red Army, and driven back over hundreds of miles. No military setback, however, could halt the deportation of Jews. Indeed, it seemed only to make the deportations more urgent. On 20 January 1943 Himmler sent the Reich Minister of Transport a special letter about ‘the removal of Jews’ from the General Government, the Eastern Territories, and ‘the West’. For this, he wrote, ‘I need your help and support. If I am to wind things up quickly, I must have more trains for transports.’
‘I know very well’, Himmler added, ‘how taxing the situation is for the railways and what demands are constantly made of you. Just the same, I must make this request of you: help me get more trains.’
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That same day, the deportations from Theresienstadt to Birkenau were renewed, with two thousand deportees sent ‘to the East’. Of the two thousand, only 160 young men and 80 women were ‘selected’ for the barracks, and the rest were gassed.
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All the deportees from Theresienstadt to Birkenau were Jews who had already been uprooted from their homes in 1941, when they had been deported to Theresienstadt from Austria and Czechoslovakia. The new deportation seemed nothing more than another stage on their road; one more move at the whim of the conqueror.
In a train which left Holland on the day after Himmler wrote his letter on the need for ‘more trains’, the deportees were mental defectives from the Jewish mental hospital at Apeldoorn.
One historian of the destruction of Dutch Jewry, Dr Jacob Presser, has recorded, of the deportees:
They were escorted into the lorries with pushes and blows, men, women and children, most of them inadequately clad for
the cold winter night. As one eye-witness put it: ‘I saw them place a row of patients, many of them older women, on mattresses at the bottom of one lorry, and then load another load of human bodies on top of them. So crammed were these lorries that the Germans had a hard job to put up the tailboards.’
More than one document mentions pitiable screams. From the very start, the patients were thrown together indiscriminately, children with dangerous lunatics, imbeciles with those who were not fit to be moved.
The lorries hurtled to the station. The matter-of-fact, unadorned report of the station-master at Apeldoorn, who stood by the train throughout, gives us a few more particulars. At first everything went smoothly. The earliest arrivals, mainly young men, went quietly into the front freight wagons, forty in each. When the station-master opened the ventilators, the Germans quickly closed them again.
At first, men and women were put into separate wagons, but later they were all mixed together. Although it was a very mild night, it was ‘not nearly mild enough for old people in nightdresses to travel in open lorries’. As the night wore on, the more seriously ill were brought into the station. Some wore strait-jackets, ‘staggered into the carriages and then leant helplessly against the wall’.
The report goes on to say: ‘Of course, a person in a strait-jacket cannot protect himself if he slips between the platform and the train. I remember the case of a girl of twenty to twenty-five, whose arms were pinioned in this way, but who was otherwise stark naked. When I remarked on this to the guards, they told me that this patient had refused to put on clothes, so what could they do but take her along as she was. Blinded by the light that was flashed in her face, the girl ran, fell on her face and could not, of course, use her arms to break the fall. She crashed down with a thud, but luckily escaped without serious injury. In no time she was up again and unconcernedly entered the wagon.’
‘In general,’ the station-master went on, ‘the loading was done without great violence. The ghastly thing was that when the wagons had to be closed, the patients refused to take their fingers away. They simply would not listen to us and in the
end the Germans lost patience. The result was a brutal and inhuman spectacle.’
Early the next morning the commander of the German Security Police in Holland, F. H. Aus der Funten, called for volunteers among the nurses to accompany the train. Some twenty came forward; he himself chose a further thirty. The ‘volunteers’ travelled in a separate wagon, at the back of the train. All were offered the choice of returning home immediately after the journey, or working in a really modern mental home.
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The arrival at Birkenau of the mentally defective from Apeldoorn shocked even those Jewish inmates of the camp who had become used to the obscenities of deportation. One eye-witness of their arrival, Rudolf Vrba, recalled twenty years later the arrival of the Apeldoorn deportees after the twelve-day journey in the sealed cattle trucks:
In some of the trucks nearly half the occupants were dead or dying, more than I had ever seen. Many obviously had been dead for several days, for the bodies were decomposing and the stench of disintegrating flesh gushed from the open doors.
This, however, was no novelty to me. What appalled me was the state of the living. Some were drooling, imbecile, live people with dead minds. Some were raving, tearing at their neighbours, even at their own flesh. Some were naked, though the cold was petrifying; and above everything, above the moans of the dying or the despairing, the cries of pain, of fear, the sound of wild, frightening, lunatic laughter rose and fell.
Yet amid all this bedlam, there was one spark of splendid, unselfish sanity. Moving among the insane were nurses, young girls, their uniforms torn and grimy, but their faces calm and their hands never idle. Their medicine bags were still over their shoulders and they had to fight sometimes to keep their feet; but all the time they were working, soothing, bandaging, giving an injection here, an aspirin there. Not one showed the slightest trace of panic.
‘Get them out!’ roared the SS men. ‘Get them out, you bastards!’
A naked girl of about twenty with red hair and a superb figure suddenly leaped from a wagon and lay, squirming, laughing at my feet. A nurse flung me a heavy Dutch blanket
and I tried to put it round her, but she would not get up. With another prisoner, a Slovak called Fogel, I managed to roll her into the blanket.
‘Get them to the lorries!’ roared the SS. ‘Straight to the lorries! Get on with it for Christ’s sake!’
Somehow Fogel and I broke into a lumbering run, for this beautiful girl was heavy. The motion pleased her and she began clapping her hands like a child. An SS club slashed across my shoulders and the blanket slipped from my numbed fingers.
‘Get on, you swine! Drag her!’
I joined Fogel at the other end of the blanket and we dragged her, bumping her over the frozen earth for five hundred yards. Somehow she clung to the blanket, not laughing now, but crying, as the hard ground thumped her naked flesh through the thick wool.
‘Pitch her in! Get her on the lorries!’ The SS men were frantic for here was something they could not understand. Something that knew no order, no discipline, no obedience, no fear of violence or death.
We pitched her in somehow, then ran back for another crazy, pathetic bundle. Hundreds of them were out of the wagons now, herded by the prisoners who were herded by the SS; and everywhere the nurses. Still working.
One nurse walked slowly with an old, frail man, talking to him quietly, as if they were out in the hospital grounds. Another half-carried a screaming girl. They fought to bring order out of chaos, using medicines and blankets, gentleness and quiet heroism instead of guns or sticks or snarling dogs.
Then suddenly it was all over. The last abject victims had been slung into one of the overloaded lorries. We stood there, panting in the chill January air; and all our eyes were on those nurses. In unemotional groups they stood around the lorries, waiting for permission to join their patients.
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Rudolf Vrba later recalled how the SS men were watching the nurses ‘with a respect they seldom showed for anybody’, hoping that the nurses would be ‘selected’ to remain in the barracks. ‘God knows, we could use some decent medical help around here,’ one of them commented. But the doctor making the selection—his name is
not known—decided that the nurses must die. Vrba noted: ‘One of the SS officers shrugged and shouted, “Get the girls aboard! It seems they’ve got to go, too.” The nurses climbed up after their patients. The lorry engines roared and off they swayed to the gas-chambers.’
Not a single nurse, nor a single patient, survived.
Among the non-Jews who reached Auschwitz at this time was a Frenchwoman, Claude Vaillant Couturier, who had been deported from Paris in the last week of January 1943, with 230 French intellectuals, doctors and teachers. She reached Auschwitz on January 27. Three years later she recalled the fate of the Jewish deportees: