The Holocaust (82 page)

Shachne Hiller not only survived the war, but was eventually united with his relatives in the United States. Karol Wojtyla was later to become Pope, as John Paul II.
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Several thousand able-bodied Cracow Jews, Moses and Helen Hiller among them, were sent to a slave labour camp in the suburb of Plaszow. The conditions of work at Plaszow were later described by one of the Jews there, Moshe Bejski. There was a case, he later recalled, where a man who was whipped, and cried, had to go to the commandant’s office ‘and inform him that he thanked him for his punishment, and when he turned around he was shot in the back.’ On another occasion, all fifteen thousand prisoners were called to witness a double hanging, of a boy named Halbenstock and an engineer, Krauwiert:

The majority of the Cracow deportees had been sent to Birkenau, and gassed. Such was the scale of murder there that four new gas-chambers had been under construction for some months, to enable the Jews to be gassed and cremated in the quickest possible time. Built to the most modern design, each of the new brick buildings had a vast underground undressing room adjacent to the underground gas-chamber, with the crematorium ovens above reached by special electrically controlled lifts.

The gas-chamber and crematorium in Auschwitz Main Camp, or Auschwitz I, was known henceforth as Crematorium I. The four new gas-chambers and crematoria at Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, became known as Crematorium II, Crematorium HI, Crematorium IV and Crematorium V. Crematorium IV was the first to be ready: it began operation on March 22. Crematorium II began operation
nine days later, on March 31; Crematorium V four days after that, on April 4; and Crematorium III on June 25.
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On March 15, in the Theresienstadt ghetto, a fifty-two-year-old woman died of hunger. She was one of the many thousand Theresienstadt Jews to die in the ghetto, before deportation to Birkenau. Her name was Trude Neumann. From 1918 until 1942 she had been a mental patient in an institution near Vienna. In 1942 she had been sent to Theresienstadt together with all Jewish mental patients in the Vienna area.

Trude Neumann was the daughter of Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement. Her son Stephan, born in the year in which she had been taken ill, had been educated at a British public school, and was, in 1943, an officer in the British army.
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On the day of the death of Herzl’s daughter in Theresienstadt, the deportations began of the Jews of Salonica: an ancient Sephardi community. Ten thousand had been deported by the end of March, a further twenty-five thousand in April, and another ten thousand in May. They had no idea of their destination, having been told that it was a ‘resettlement’ area in Poland.

Each deportee from Salonica was allowed to take a food parcel for the journey, and up to fifteen kilogrammes of clothing for the ‘resettlement’ area. It was in fact Birkenau.

For many generations the Jews of Salonica had serviced the port as stevedores and dockworkers: the smooth working of the port depended upon them. But the Nazi design would allow no exceptions, no logic, no special pleading. Jews from the villages around Salonica were also deported, except from Aicatherine, where the local Director of police gave the Jews three hours to flee after receipt of the deportation order. Thirty-three Jews fled, and were hidden by Greek villagers. Three, who were unable to leave, were shot.
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Each act of escape or resistance still led to immediate and massive reprisals. On March 16, in Lvov, a Jew, Engineer Kotnowski, killed an SS policeman who was noted for his cruelty. The next day, as a reprisal, the Germans burst into the ghetto and hanged eleven Jewish policemen from the balconies in the main street of the ghetto. That same day more than a thousand Jews were taken out of the working groups and shot, while in Janowska camp, nearly two
hundred Jews were killed: a reprisal ratio of almost twelve hundred to one.
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Jews who had managed to hide were continually being betrayed. In the village of Topczewo, the thirty-year-old Dr Julian Charin, a Jew from nearby Lapy, had his hiding place betrayed. His Christian rescuers could save him no more. A graduate from Padua University just before the war, he had later worked at the Bialystok Jewish hospital. He was shot on March 18: one of tens of thousands of Jews betrayed for money, fear or sheer hatred.
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That same day, in Auschwitz Main Camp, the Jewish underground fighter Lonka Kozibrodska, who had been captured in June 1942 while on a mission to Bialystok, and sent to Auschwitz as an ‘Aryan’ Pole, died of typhus.
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She was twenty-six years old. Her ‘Aryan’ disguise had not failed her: her fate was that of millions of Poles, who, like the Jews, were marked out for labour camp, prison, ill-treatment, execution and death.

March 20 was the eve of the festival of Purim, day of rejoicing at the downfall of Haman the Jew-hater. That day, in Czestochowa, more than a hundred Jewish doctors and their families were taken to the cemetery and shot. Among those killed was the forty-four-year-old neurologist, Dr Bernard Epstein, whose postgraduate work had been done in Vienna and Paris. He was murdered with his wife and two sons.
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Another of those shot down in the cemetery at Czestochowa was a woman gynaecologist and obstetrician, Dr Kruza Gruenwald: she was fifty-six years old.
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Another of the murdered doctors, Irena Horowicz, a former general practitioner in Lodz, was thirty years old. She was murdered with her three-year-old child.
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Lawyers and engineers were also murdered in the Czestochowa cemetery that day: that same Czestochowa which is revered by Polish Catholics for the shrine of the Madonna there. On the following day, March 21, the actual day of the Purim festival, there was another ‘Purim massacre’ in nearby Piotrkow. That day, Jews living legally in the ghetto were told that there was to be an exchange with German citizens living in the settlement of Sarona, in Palestine. Ten people were needed for this exchange, the Germans declared. All must possess university degrees: that was the only condition for emigration.

The Jews chosen for Palestine were driven out of Piotrkow in
Gestapo cars, and then driven round the city a few times, before being taken, as darkness fell, to the Jewish cemetery. A deep pit had been dug. The Gestapo lined up the ‘chosen’, made derisive speeches amid much drinking and laughter, and then ordered the Jews to undress.

Among the Jews shot that night at the Piotrkow cemetery was Dr Maurycy Brams, a paediatrician and popular figure among the poor Jews of pre-war Piotrkow, shot that day with his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter, Hannah—‘Ania’. The teenage girl had managed to run away from the cemetery at the last moment, but the Gestapo chased her among the tombstones until they caught her. Also shot that night was a young lawyer, Simon Stein, killed with his mother, and the psychiatrist Dr Leon Glatter.

Part of the Nazi ‘Purim game’ was to ‘revenge’ the ten sons of the Jew-hater Haman. These ten had been hanged in the biblical story. But only eight Jews had been brought from Piotrkow that night, so the Jewish watchman of the cemetery and his wife were included, at the last moment, in the execution.
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In Radom, all Jewish doctors were taken that Purim to nearby Szydlowiec, ostensibly to ‘go to Palestine’. On arriving in Szydlowiec they found graves, newly dug, awaiting them. Among those killed were the neurologist Dr Wladyslaw Cung and the gynaecologist Dr Anatol Fryd.
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Tens of thousands of Jews were still in hiding throughout the General Government, the Eastern Territories and the Ukraine. But German searches for them were continuous. On March 22 Dr Klukowski noted in his diary, in Szczebrzeszyn, where he had earlier witnessed the harrowing scenes of deportation:

On March 25 an anonymous letter, written by a German, was forwarded by Hans Frank from Cracow to Berlin, to Hitler’s Chancellery. In the letter, the writer described with disgust the liquidation of an eastern ghetto, and told of how children were thrown to the ground, and then had their heads deliberately trampled on with boots.
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On the same day that this letter was received in Berlin,
Der Sturmer
announced in triumph that ‘the extermination of the Jews is in progress’.
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On April 5, the third and last train bringing Jews from Macedonia for ‘resettlement’ reached Treblinka. All were gassed.
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That same day three hundred Jews from the ghettos of Sol and Smorgon were deported to Ponar. They had been told that they were to be ‘resettled’ in the Kovno ghetto. On reaching Ponar, they realized that they had been deceived. That night a fifteen-year-old Vilna schoolboy, Yitshok Rudashevski, noted in his diary the story that reached Vilna within a few hours: ‘Like wild animals before dying, the people began in mortal despair to break the railway cars, they broke the little windows reinforced by strong wire. Hundreds were shot to death while running away. The railway line over a great distance is covered with corpses.’
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All those Jews from Sol and Smorgon who survived the rail-side massacre of April 5 were shot in the pits at Ponar by the German and Lithuanian SS men. A few hours later, five thousand more Jews reached Ponar, mostly young men from the ghettos of Swieciany and Oszmiana, whom the Gestapo feared might find a way of escaping from the ghettos in order to join the growing number of Jewish and Soviet partisans. These five thousand were sent first to the Vilna ghetto. Then, as with the Jews of Sol and Smorgon, they were sent on as if to the Kovno ghetto, ‘where there was more room’. Just outside Vilna their train came to a halt. They too had been brought to Ponar. Sensing the danger, these young men tried to break out of the freight cars and fought, with revolvers, knives and fists. They were shot down in the cars themselves, and along the railway line. A few dozen managed to escape to Vilna. The rest were killed on the spot.
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The Polish journalist, W. Sakowicz, noted in his diary:

Among those participating in this Ponar massacre of April 5 was SS Sergeant Wille. ‘While shooting,’ noted a German Security Police report, Wille ‘was attacked by a Jew’ and wounded ‘by two knife blows in the back and one blow in the head’. He was immediately taken to the military hospital in Vilna. ‘His life is out of danger,’ the report continued, and added: ‘A Lithuanian policeman was fired at while some fifty Jews tried to escape, and he is badly wounded.’
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In Vilna, the poet Shmerl Kaczerginski was standing not far from the ghetto gate. ‘I saw a young fellow sneaking in,’ he later recalled, ‘bloody, weary, disappearing quickly into a doorway.’ In the security of someone’s home, the young man then ‘pulled off his clothes, washed away the blood, tied up his wounded shoulder’, and whispered to those who had crowded around him: ‘I come from Ponar!’

Kaczerginski added: ‘We were petrified’. The young man told them: ‘Everyone—everyone was shot!’ The tears rolled down his face. ‘Who?’ he was asked. Did he mean the four thousand who were being sent to Kovno? ‘Yes!’
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A month after the Germans had been humiliated by Bulgaria’s refusal to allow Bulgarian Jews to be deported, Hitler personally urged the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to allow the Jews of Hungary to be ‘resettled’. The two men met at Klessheim Castle, near Salzburg, on April 17. Horthy, aware of what was intended, was adamant: ‘The Jews cannot be exterminated or beaten to death,’ he insisted. Hitler then set out his own reasoning, as recorded on the following day by his interpreter: