Authors: Martin Gilbert
Among the thirteen thousand Jews killed at Poniatowa on November 5 was Israel Feiwiszys, one of the leading Jewish composers and conductors in pre-war Poland. On the outbreak of the war he had gone from Lodz to Warsaw for safety, and in the Warsaw ghetto had become the conductor of the youth choir. He was fifty-five years old.
6
According to Polish underground sources, Jews at Poniatowa who realized what was taking place had managed to set fire to the military storehouse and the barracks. But those who had carried out this act of defiance ‘were shot at once by machine guns, and their bodies were thrown into the sewage canals’. One of the barracks, this report added, ‘contained a squad of fighting Jews, who hid the group that had set fire to the buildings. But the struggle ended with the death of all the fighters in the burning buildings.’
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The survivors of such massacres were few, as were the survivors from the continuing deportations to Birkenau. Among those gassed at Birkenau in November was Riccardo Pacifici, Rabbi of Genoa, and historian of the Genoa Jewish community. This community could trace its origins to AD 511. On November 3 Rabbi Pacifici and two hundred of his congregation, as well as one hundred Jewish refugees from northern Europe who had found shelter in Genoa, were deported to Birkenau.
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Not one of them survived.
On November 5 it was the turn of the children of the Siauliai ghetto in Lithuania to be deported to Birkenau. Two members of the Jewish Council in Siauliai, Aron Katz and Berl Kartun, had tried to save the children. They were deported with them, and gassed.
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In the undressing chamber, Jews from the Sonderkommando were ordered to undress the children. A member of the Sonderkommando recorded what he saw in notes which were later buried near the gas-chamber, and were among several such fragments discovered after the war in the places where they had been hidden. This eye-witness in the inner sanctum of hell recorded:
And there a girl of five stood and undressed her brother who was one year old. One from the Kommando came to take off the boy’s clothes. The girl shouted loudly, ‘Be gone, you Jewish murderer! Don’t lay your hand, dripping with Jewish blood, upon my lovely brother! I am his good mummy, he will die in my arms, together with me.’ A boy of seven or eight stood beside her and spoke thus, ‘Why, you are a Jew and you lead such dear children to the gas—only in order to live? Is your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?’
10
On November 9, four hundred Jews were deported to Birkenau from Florence and Bologna. More than three hundred were sent to the barracks, but eighty-five were gassed. Among those gassed was the fifty-year-old Armando Bachi, an Italian army officer who had won the Military Cross in the First World War. By 1938 Bachi had risen to the rank of Lieutenant-General in the Italian army. He was gassed with his family.
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That same day, in Theresienstadt, the head of the Council of Elders, Jacob Edelstein, was accused with three other Jews of having falsified the daily reports concerning the number of Jews in the ghetto, thus enabling fifty-five Jews to avoid deportation.
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Edelstein and those accused with him were later deported to Birkenau, together with their families.
Thursday, 11 November 1943, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Germany’s defeat in 1918. On that same Armistice Day in 1943 a punishment was devised for forty-seven thousand Jews, many of them elderly, who had not yet been deported from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Birkenau. The event chosen for Theresienstadt on November 11 was a census. For this purpose, beginning at four o’clock in the morning, all forty-seven thousand Jews were taken outside the ghetto to a large square, formerly an army drill ground. There they were forced to stand throughout the morning.
One of those present, Zdenek Lederer, later recalled how, shortly after midday, three SS officers who had come from Prague by car began the census. Inevitably, with such large numbers on the square, their figures did not tally. They began again. Again the numbers did not match:
By then it was five o’clock and the shivering multitude was becoming agitated and fearful of the approaching night. The old people sat on the damp ground, and children cried and it began to drizzle. Still the results did not tally. Gradually confusion expanded into chaos; symptoms of panic appeared. The weary ranks disintegrated. The SS men disappeared, nobody knew what would come next or what the Germans intended. Even the gendarmes lost their heads having been left without orders. Meanwhile the drizzle turned into rain.
It was night, and in the dark the freezing crowds walked aimlessly around in utter confusion. All attempts of the officials of the Jewish administration to restore order among this desperate and miserable mass of humanity proved futile.
While part of the crowds pressed from the drill ground towards the gate of Theresienstadt, other groups were already streaming back, shouting in the dark that a cordon of gendarmes was barring their return. It was now nine o’clock. Sobbing women tried to protect their children from being trampled on. Many of the aged collapsed by the roadside.
Yet no order came permitting the prisoners to leave the drill ground. It was an ironic situation—all these people pushing, pressing, longing to be allowed to return to the misery of the ghetto.
Finally, at ten o’clock, a few volunteers succeeded in organising the return of the prisoners to the ghetto. Women, children and elderly people were helped back and protected from the whirlpool of maddened humanity. But it took another two hours to empty the drill ground. A stretcher service was improvised and car lamps illuminated the drill ground, enabling the gendarmes to pick up aged people who had collapsed.
Several Jews died during that day of torment. Others, taken ill as a result of their exertions, died soon afterwards. The ‘census’ death toll was estimated at between two and three hundred.
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In ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, there had been an earlier tragedy, unconnected with any anniversary, revenge or plan. In the suburb of Praga, on the eastern side of the River Vistula, eight ghetto fighters were in hiding in a loft, filled with boxes of ammunition and explosives. One of the fighters was wounded, and it was while
trying to heat a spoonful of ointment for her that a lighted match fell to the floor. A fire began, the crates exploded, and within minutes the loft was ablaze.
Five of the fighters were burned to death. Three were able to break a hole in the ceiling, and get out on to the roof. One of the three was Tosia Altman, whose dress had caught fire. She died on the roof. Another, Meir Schwartz, fled to a nearby block of flats, and was given sanctuary in a cupboard: but during a German search of the flats, although his hiding place was not discovered, he died of a heart attack. Only one of the eight, Eliezer Geller, survived. ‘We were crushed by our misfortunes,’ recalled Feigele Peltel, herself still in hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw.
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To deter Poles from giving shelter to Jews, the Germans intensified their searches and arrests. ‘As a sort of object lesson,’ Feigele Peltel recalled, they set fire to a house on Kazimierz Place, in Warsaw, ‘killing the entire Gentile family living there because they had given asylum to Jews.’
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But still the will to survive animated those in hiding. ‘Do not think our spirit is broken,’ Yitzhak Zuckerman wrote on November 15 in a letter to Palestine.
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Whether broken or unbroken, the spirit could not always triumph, at least not in the temporal world, against superior force and evil intent. At the Skarzysko-Kamienna ammunition factory, one of the most ferocious of all the labour camps in German-occupied Poland, the morning of November 16 saw the camp surrounded by Ukrainians who, directed by SS men, approached the barrack in which had been dumped those who had collapsed from weakness and exhaustion during the night shift. The Ukrainians announced: ‘Come out, all those who are weak will receive a double portion of soup.’
At first, the offer was successful, as many of these weak, sick and starving slaves staggered from the barrack in search of the life-giving soup. Suddenly, however, the danger became apparent, as they saw the armed Ukrainians and the lorries beyond. Those who could run began to run. All were shot down. The rest were loaded on the lorries, to be driven to an execution site in the camp itself.
As the trucks moved off, the Ukrainians threw in a few pieces of bread to the victims. Despite their weakness, those Jews who could now began to fight among themselves for the bread, and to fight with every ounce of strength and viciousness they could summon
up. An eye-witness, Roza Bauminger, later recalled: ‘It suddenly dawned on me what hunger really was, I who was so hungry myself. Inside the lorry, I saw scenes from Dante’s Inferno. The sick people forgot about their illnesses, and, at that moment when they were being driven off to their deaths, they fought. For each of them, the piece of bread was more important than the thought that they were going to be killed.’ The bread represented salvation, the salvation of that particular moment, the means to assuage, for a few brief moments, the terrible pangs and pain of hunger: salvation, even though, half an hour later, they would be killed.
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On November 17, of 995 Jews brought to Birkenau from Holland, 531 were taken to be gassed, among them 166 children.
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At the same time, 164 Poles were brought to the gas-chamber, twelve of these being young women from a Polish underground group. The member of the Sonderkommando whose manuscript was among those discovered after the war, recorded:
A certain young Polish woman made a very short but fiery speech in the gas-chamber, addressing all who were present, stripped to their skins. She condemned the Nazi crimes and oppression and ended with the words, ‘We shall not die now, the history of our nation shall immortalize us, our initiative and our spirit are alive and flourishing, the German nation shall as dearly pay for our blood as we possibly can imagine, down with savagery in the guise of Hitler’s Germany! Long live Poland!’
Then she turned to the Jews from the Sonderkommando, ‘Remember that it is incumbent on you to follow your sacred duty of revenging us, the guiltless. Tell our brothers, our nation, that we went to meet our death in full consciousness and with pride.’
Then the Poles knelt on the ground and solemnly said a certain prayer, in a posture that made an immense impression, then they arose and all together in chorus sang the Polish anthem, the Jews sang the ‘Hatikvah’.
The cruel common fate in this accursed spot merged the lyric tones of these diverse anthems into one whole. They expressed in this way their last feelings with a deeply moving warmth and
their hope for, and belief in, the future of their nation. Then they sang the ‘Internationale’.
At that moment the vans arrived, marked deceptively and mockingly with the symbol of the Red Cross. The tins of gas pellets were taken from the van, and gas was thrown into the chamber. All perished, ‘amidst singing and ecstasy, dreaming of uniting the world with bonds of brotherhood and of its betterment’.
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Although, despite the advance of the Red Army, the German killings of Jews continued unabated, Germany’s allies hesitated, fearing retribution. On November 17 the Rumanian dictator, General Antonescu, warned his Cabinet against acceding to German plans to massacre those Jews who had been deported to the eastern Rumanian territory of Transnistria during the autumn of 1941. Hundreds of thousands had perished during those deportations, but hundreds of thousands more had survived in camps and ghettos.
‘Regarding the Jews who are in danger of being murdered by the Germans,’ Antonescu told his Cabinet, ‘you have to take measures and warn the Germans that I don’t tolerate this matter, because in the last analysis I will have a bad reputation for these terrible murders. Instead of letting this happen, we will take them away from there.’
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Antonescu moved quickly to win credit with the Western Allies. A month after his warning, the Jews of Transnistria began to be sent back to Rumania: first were 4,400 orphans who had lost both parents. More than fifteen thousand Jews were repatriated. Many of the orphans were subsequently allowed to proceed to Palestine, the first three hundred in March 1944, a further nine hundred in April 1944, allowed by the Rumanian authorities to leave Rumania, by the Turkish authorities to land at Istanbul, and by the British authorities to enter Palestine without obstacle, on collective passports.
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In German-occupied Poland, the destruction of labour camps had continued throughout November. At Szebnie, where the labourers tried to revolt, 3,898 men, women and children were deported to Birkenau on November 4. When the train reached the camp on the
following day, 952 men and 396 women were sent to the barracks, 2,550 men, women and children to the gas-chambers.
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At Janowska camp, the liquidation of the corpse-burning squad had begun on October 25. There were about one hundred and thirty men in the squad. But the deception was such that, as each group of inmates was selected, they believed they were being sent to a camp somewhere else. Before being marched out, each member of the squad was given warm clothing and a pair of good shoes: a clear sign that they were to be sent elsewhere. They were then marched out to ‘the sands’, and shot.
As soon as it became clear to the thirty or so Jews left in Janowska exactly what had happened to their colleagues, they decided to try to escape. Not all the surviving inmates joined the escape plan. One of them, Jehuda Goldberg, a man in his forties, had been a member of the First World War Polish underground, fighting for Polish independence against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Between the wars, Goldberg had been a schoolteacher in Lvov. When told, on the evening of November 18, that there was to be an escape attempt that night, he went to bed. Other prisoners approached him, asking if he was not aware of what was happening. Goldberg answered them: