Authors: Martin Gilbert
A week after Dr Menasche’s arrival in Birkenau, the camp was visited by SS Major-General Richard Glueks, head of the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, who noted that the ‘special buildings’ were not well located, and ordered them to be relocated. They should be sited, he wrote, where it would not be possible for ‘all kinds of people’ to ‘gaze’ at them.
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One result of this complaint was the planting of a ‘green belt’ of fast-growing trees around the two crematoria nearest the camp entrance.
On the day of Glueks’s report, June 15, a new labour camp was opened in the Auschwitz region, at the coal mines of Jaworzno.
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On the following day, Himmler’s permission was given for eight Jews in Birkenau, condemned to death for resistance activities, to be sent to the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, for experiments into jaundice.
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Five days later, on Himmler’s instructions, in what he called the interest of ‘medical science’, seventy-three Jews and thirty Jewesses were sent, alive, from Birkenau to the concentration camp of Natzweiler, in Alsace. On reaching Natzweiler, their ‘vital statistics’ were taken. They were then killed, and their skeletons sent as ‘exhibits’ to the Anatomical Museum in Strasbourg.
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Within a year and a half, Himmler ordered the skeleton collection to be destroyed because of the ‘deterioration of the military situation’.
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Allied forces were then approaching Strasbourg.
Since early 1943, the advance of the Red Army on the eastern front had led to the decision to dig up the corpses of hundreds of thousands of murdered Jews, and to burn them. A former Einsatzkommando chief, SS Colonel Paul Blobel, was appointed to supervise this task. The units operating under Blobel’s command were
known as the ‘Blobel Commando’ or ‘Special Commando 1005’.
One large-scale Blobel ‘action’ began on June 15, at the Janowska death pits in Lvov, when hundreds of Jewish forced labourers in Janowska were taken to the nearby mass murder site and forced to dig up the putrefying corpses. They were ordered to extract gold teeth and pull gold rings off the fingers of the dead. ‘Every day’, recalled Leon Weliczker, a survivor of the first of the Blobel ‘actions’, ‘we collected about eight kilogrammes of gold.’
The corpses had then to be burned. Leon Weliczker recalled how, as the disinterred corpses were put on the pyre:
The fire crackles and sizzles. Some of the bodies in the fire have their hands extended. It looks as if they are pleading to be taken out. Many bodies are lying around with open mouths. Could they be trying to say: ‘We are your own mothers, fathers, who raised you and took care of you. Now you are burning us.’ If they could have spoken, maybe they would have said this, but they are forbidden to talk too—they are guarded. Maybe they would forgive us. They know that we are being forced to do this by the same murderers that killed them. We are under their whips and machine guns. They would forgive us, they who are our fathers and mothers, who if they knew it would help their children. But what should we do?
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This question of what to do was asked by all surviving Jews: but none could know for certain the answer, or by what path life might be preserved. In mid-June the head of the Jewish Council of Sosnowiec, Moshe Merin, who for more than two years had sought the safety of his ghetto in compliance with German orders for labour gangs and deportees, was invited to a meeting with the head of the local SS, together with four other Council members. Neither Merin nor his companions was seen again. Those Jews who had believed in Merin, especially the ‘simple folk’, were in a panic, hoping that he might still find some way to lead them. His opponents were relieved that he, the ‘despotic tyrant’, had gone. It was later reported that Merin and the other four had been deported to Birkenau and gassed: the fate, six weeks later, of almost all the other Jews of Sosnowiec.
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Resistance, given so dramatic a manifestation in the Warsaw ghetto, continued elsewhere. Its most frequent manifestation was
escape. But the Germans were persistent in their search for escapees. In Lodz, the thirty-one-year-old Abram Tandowski, who had earlier escaped from the ghetto, was executed on June 12, together with two other Jews, the twenty-three-year-old Hersch Fejgelis and the twenty-nine-year-old Mordecai Standarowicz, both of whom had escaped from a labour camp. The heads of the Jewish police in the Lodz ghetto were made to watch the execution.
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In Minsk, a well known local doctor, Niuta Jurezkaya, had escaped from the ghetto to the forests. But she too was caught, brought back to Minsk, and tortured. ‘Who was with you?’ she was asked. ‘All of my people were with me,’ she replied; and was then shot.
Niuta Jurezkaya was shot on June 16. That same day, in Berlin, two hundred patients in the Jewish hospital were deported to Theresienstadt, many of them on stretchers.
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The same was the fate a week later of the residents of the Jewish old people’s home in Moravska Ostrava.
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For the old and the sick, revolt was impossible. For those who did revolt, the German power was impregnable. On June 19, Hillel Katz, held by the Gestapo in Paris, wrote to his baby girl of seven months, his ‘dear little Annette’, whom he had not seen since she was twelve days old:
Your desire to appear in our lives was fierce. Nothing counted with you, neither the dangers of wartime, nor our desire that you wait until after the war. Obviously, you could not share our earthly point of view, you who were still in eternity.
It was with love, joy and courage that we submitted to your imperious will. Your birth gave us such life as we have now.
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Hillel Katz was shot by the Gestapo: he helped to provide the Soviet Union with information about the German war effort. His daughter Annette survived. She is my cousin. Her grandfather, my great uncle, had been murdered in Czestochowa in the early months of the war.
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Almost all her other cousins, my cousins also, were later deported from Czestochowa to Treblinka: something I did not know either on my own first visit to Treblinka in 1959, or on my second visit in 1981.
In Lvov, on June 21, the Germans hunted down and killed the remnant of the ghetto population. In search of a hiding place, and survival, 500 Jews entered the city’s sewers; 350 were caught and killed. The remaining 150 hid in the sewers. After a week of starvation and stench, 130 had committed suicide.
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For escape and hiding to be effective, the help of non-Jews was almost always essential. In Lvov, it was a professional thief, Leopold Socha, and one of his pre-war companions in crime, Stefan Wrobleski, who made it possible for some Jews to survive the final round-up of June 21. One who was saved, seventeen-year-old Halina Wind, later recalled how, as the Gestapo surrounded the ghetto on June 1:
We did not know what to do. We went down with a group into the basement through a pipe, steps, water, a tunnel, other pipes. Finally we were crawling in the sewers of Lvov. We heard a rush of water. Suddenly we were standing on a narrow ledge against a wall. In front of us flew the Peltew river. Along this ledge very slowly and carefully people were moving. Sometimes there was a splash, when someone slipped and fell in or couldn’t stand the stress any more and deliberately jumped in.
At that moment, Halina Wind saw Leopold Socha, who, as a thief, had long been familiar with the sewers as a hiding place for his stolen goods. Socha took twenty-one of the Jews whom he found in the sewer to one of his subterranean hiding places, telling them to ‘stay put’ and promising to bring them food on the following day.
Halina Wind later recalled that among those hidden in the sewers by Socha was one whole family, Jerzy Chigier, his wife Peppa, their seven-year-old daughter Christine, and their four-year-old son Pawel. ‘We were brought food every day,’ she added, ‘always by different manholes so as not to arouse suspicion.’
One of those whom Socha sheltered was a pregnant woman, Weinbergowa. Shortly after giving birth, her child died. Weinbergowa survived.
Halina Wind also recalled how several of the group decided to leave that particular hiding place for some other refuge elsewhere in the sewers. ‘None ever returned. Three of them left one morning and we found their bodies the same evening.’
Each week Leopold Socha would take the dirty clothes of those in hiding and return them washed. He also brought them a Jewish prayer book which he had found in the now deserted ghetto. At Passover, knowing that Jews could not eat leavened bread, he brought a large load of potatoes which he pushed down through several manholes. ‘We were careful of the potatoes,’ Halina Wind later recalled, ‘always eating the rotten ones first, until we realized that the rats were having a feast on the fresh ones.’ On the day that the Red Army forced the German surrender at Stalingrad, Socha and Wrobleski brought those in hiding vodka to celebrate. Ten of the twenty-one Jews survived in that sewer hide-out, until liberation nearly a year later.
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Having completed the ‘action’ in Lvov, the SS turned to nearby Czortkow, where 534 Jews were living in the former Jewish religious school, and sent each day to work for the Germans. A normal day’s work lasted twelve to fourteen hours. Their food consisted of a hundred grams of bread each day, a little black coffee, and, as Gerta Hollaender later recalled, ‘a little sparse water, which was supposed to be soup’.
At five o’clock in the morning of June 23, the Jews woke up to find the school surrounded by Ukrainian policemen. The camp commandant, Thomanek, then appeared. ‘Like a beast sneaking to its prey,’ Gerta Hollaender wrote in her diary:
…he approached the people who were doomed to death. His head was bent a little forward, the plump face red like a cray-fish and in his sparkling eyes lust for murder. He stopped a few paces in front of his victims and stood, his legs spread wide and both hands resting on his sides, examining the miserable creatures for a few minutes without uttering a word, while they all stared at him in silence, dumbfounded with horror, as if they were hypnotized.
Then suddenly he screamed with his grating voice: ‘Lie down! Whoever raises his head will be shot!’ Obediently and without resistance almost five hundred people fell down and prostrated themselves in the dust. It was a pitiful sight, yet could they have done otherwise? Would resistance against this gang of murderers, armed from head to foot, be of any use?
Thomanek ordered some of the Jews to get up and wait at the
side. During the selection, Gerta Hollaender saw the man next to her, the camp barber, who had not been selected, raise his head and call out to Thomanek: ‘Mr Camp Manager, surely you know me, let me live.’ Then, she recorded in her diary:
Thomanek lifted his automatic rifle, leveled it and aimed in my direction. It seemed that he was aiming at me. For a fleeting instant it occurred to me that it would be better to be shot here, so that an end might come to the agonies, and I asked myself whether the bullet would cause pain, and at once the shot was fired.
Without knowing what had happened, I looked at my blood-stained right hand and my blood-spattered frock. As I raised myself a bit in order to look for my wound, I saw the barber lying crooked in a pool of blood. It was his blood spattered on my hand and frock.
Thomanek shot several other people. One man whose lung was hit suffered terrible agonies: he was groaning and coughing up blood. Only later when the sorting out was finished, and the men were driven to the big gate on the other side of the camp, a German gendarme released the man from the suffering by shooting him in the head.
The horrible dying of the man and the other gruesome sights made no impression on me any more. I was as if stupefied, and obeyed apathetically the Germans’ orders when the women were led to the rear entrance of the camp and were ordered to sit down in front of the bath-house.
The horror of the selection continued for several hours. During a brief moment of confusion, Gerta Hollaender was able to break away from the entrance to the bath-house, hiding in a nearby building. ‘Outside rose a tumult of wild crying,’ she wrote, ‘the begging voices of women, desperate cries, bawling commands, and cracking beatings. The pitiless bestial torturers were forcing the first miserable women on to the lorry.’
Gerta Hollaender survived, but the majority of those who had been held in the school were taken to Yagielnica and shot.
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All non-Jews who decided to hide and feed a Jew risked death, as did Jan Nakonieczny, who hid five Jews in a henhouse. The henhouse was only two feet high, four feet wide, and thirteen feet long. The five Jews were Henryk Sperber, his mother, his sister, his
fiancée and his cousin. All five survived the war. So too did their saviour.
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Following the crushing of the Warsaw ghetto revolt, Zivia Lubetkin had managed to reach Czestochowa from Warsaw. There, she told Rivka Glanc, a fellow member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, that, since the Warsaw uprising ended as it did, ‘it would be better for you to join the partisans. You will be able to kill more Germans and save more Jews.’ But Rivka Glanc replied: ‘We too want to stay with our own people until the very last.’
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On June 25 the Germans suddenly and unexpectedly began the final destruction of the Czestochowa ghetto. As best they could, the Jewish Fighting Organization, led by Mordechai Zylberberg and Lutek Glickstein, distributed their few weapons, and sent their members to their prearranged position in the bunkers. But the Germans stormed the bunkers, and most of the fighters were killed. The Jews had been poorly armed: the Germans captured thirty grenades, eighteen pistols and two rifles. Six fighters, commanded by Rivka Glanc, were cut off by the Germans. They had only two pistols and a single grenade. All six were killed.
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No mercy was shown to Jews who were captured, nor could those who escaped do so without leaving behind a tornado of reprisals. When six Jews at the Baltoji-Volke camp near Vilna fled into the woods while on a work detail cutting trees, sixty-seven of the camp’s three hundred inmates were shot immediately.
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South of Warsaw, that same day, June 29, five Poles were shot for hiding four Jews. One of the Poles was a child aged thirteen, another, a one-year-old baby. The four Jews were also shot.
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But Poles could also turn against Jews: that summer, in the woods near Wyszkow, Poles of the underground Home Army murdered Mordechai Grobas and his small group of fellow survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
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