Authors: Martin Gilbert
I know about everything, and let God be of such help to you that this escape is a success. I pray and hope that He will help you to survive and tell the world, as witnesses, how they murdered a people.
But as for me, where will I go? To the city, to hide? Who will hide me? I have no friends among the Aryans who will take me in. I am not young enough to go to the woods with you. I will only be a hindrance to you, and you will be captured because of me. I cannot run like some of you, and if I go with you, you will not leave me behind on the road, and it will be your end, too.
When you escape, the German police will shoot everyone left here, and I am better off dead than on the road, a hindrance to you. What have I to live for? My wife and seven children have been killed, and I, too, want to die.
Goldberg told the would-be escapees: ‘Good night! Good luck! God help you to survive this war, and give me an easy death!’ Then he closed his eyes, and turned his head away to sleep.
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The Janowska revolt took place on the morning of November 19. It is not known how many Germans were killed or how many Jews managed to escape. The eighteen-year-old Leon Weliczker, whose parents and six brothers and sisters had all been killed in Lvov or in Janowska, did get away, together with a Jew by the name of Korn. A Polish friend of Korn lived in one of the suburbs of Lvov, and through him the two escapees found a second Pole who was already hiding twenty-two Jews. They were allowed to join the others. All twenty-four Jews then remained in hiding until Lvov was liberated by the Red Army eight months later.
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Another unit of the ‘Blobel Commando’, had been sent to the Borki woods, near Chelm, thirty miles east of Lublin. These were Jews who had been taken out of Majdanek on the day of the ‘Harvest Festival’, among them Josef Reznik, one of the former Jewish soldiers in the Polish army who had been held as prisoners-of-war at the Lipowa Street camp in Lublin since November 1939.
Reznik later recalled how, on the evening of the ‘Harvest Festival’, an SS officer, Major Rollfinger, had entered their barrack ‘filthy all over, covered with blood’, to announce to the three hundred inmates that they were not to be killed. For two weeks they remained at Majdanek. Then another SS officer addressed them. ‘You are not considered as prisoners-of-war from now on,’ he told them. ‘You are Jews, unworthy of life; you are now supposed to work.’
At Borki the three hundred Jews were ordered to dig. ‘I was digging with my spade,’ Reznik later recalled, ‘and after removing two or three spadefuls of earth, I felt the spade hit something hard and then I saw it was the head of a human being.’
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More than thirty thousand bodies were dug up at Borki, in eight long trenches. All were burned. Then the bones were ground to a powder in a special machine, and taken away in sacks: thirty sacks a day. Most of the corpses were Red Army men, taken prisoner by the Germans in the autumn and winter of 1941; all had been murdered. Some were Italian soldiers, killed after Italy had abandoned the German cause, and they had become prisoners-of-war. Others were Jews, among them children from Hrubieszow.
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Even as the graves were being uncovered, new corpses were brought and thrown into them. ‘One of the graves would remain open all the time for new corpses,’ Josef Reznik recalled. ‘The new
corpses would be coming all the time, continuously. A truck would bring warm bodies, which would be thrown into the graves. They were naked like Adam and Eve.’ Reznik also recalled how, when one of the mass graves was opened, ‘we saw a boy of two or three, lying on his mother’s body. He had little white shoes on, and a white little jacket. His face was pressed against his mother’s, and we were touched and moved, because we ourselves had children of our own.’
After the graves had been emptied, disinfected, and filled with earth, grass was planted over them. The bodies had meanwhile been placed on massive pyres, a thousand on each pyre. ‘There were two pyres of bodies going all the time,’ Reznik recalled, ‘and they burnt for two or three days, each heap of the dead.’
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Today, a small memorial plaque marks the site.
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The mass executions continued, aimed at destroying the remnants of many Jewish communities. At Sandomierz, on November 19, a thousand Jews were taken from the ghetto to the Jewish cemetery. There, they were shot; a monument marks the site.
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At Miechow, the Jews were taken to the nearby forest, and shot down. One of the victims managed to wound a German official with a knife. He was set upon by dogs and torn to pieces. The other Jews were shot. Here too, a stone memorial marks the site.
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As fragments of information reached the West, the Jews who read them were distraught. ‘Half of the night I spent reading the last report, No. 9, from Poland,’ Ignacy Schwarzbart noted in his diary, in London, on December 1. ‘It is the end of Polish Jewry. The remaining Jews in hiding are hunted like beasts, picked up and killed.’ The Poles denounced the Jews, he added. ‘But there are some Poles who pay with their lives for hiding Jews.’
31
A few Jews continued to believe that safety lay in work and compliance to the bitter end: such was the assurance given, on December 12, by the Chairman of the Jewish Council in Wlodzimierz Wolynski, to the remnant of the ghetto. But the assurance was in vain. By the end of December, all had been ‘resettled’.
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The conflict between escape and reprisal could not be resolved. Following the escape of several Jews from Kovno early in December, an execution was ordered as a reprisal. On December 16, the day before the execution, the German authorities in the city agreed
to a request for 7 litres of schnapps and 140 cigarettes, as a bonus for the seven executioners.
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Some Jews tried to escape even from Birkenau. On November 13, Fritz Lustig had tried, but been caught. He was shot ten days later.
34
On December 21, a Pole, Stanislaw Dorosiewicz, and a Jew, Hersh Kurcwajg, escaped from Auschwitz, after killing an SS guard.
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They were not recaptured.
36
In Warsaw, on December 22, the Polish underground reported that the Gestapo had discovered a group of sixty-two Jews in hiding in the cellar of a building on Krolewska Street. All the Jews were killed.
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Despite the savage penalties, a few Poles continued to hide Jews. Feigele Peltel has recorded how Dankiewicz, a Pole living in Pruszkow, near Warsaw, hid a Jewish woman named Zucker in a large tile stove. The stove was hollow, and could be entered from the top, which ‘masqueraded’ as a metal flue. Despite frequent searches, the hiding place was never discovered.
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By the end of 1943, several Jewish resistance groups were active throughout France, among them the Organisation Juif de Combat, founded in 1942, and the Jewish Scout Movement, which had been in existence since 1923. Several thousand other Jews joined the various French underground groups, Communist, Socialist and Gaullist. One French resistance group, the National Liberation Movement, had been founded by a Jew, Maurice Löwenberg, who was killed by the Gestapo, under torture, at the end of July 1944. The leader of the Scouts, Captain Robert Gamzon, was among several Jews who rose to command specifically Jewish resistance units in the Toulouse-Lyons area. The work of these units included preparing hiding places and food for hundreds of Jewish women and children, smuggling Jews across the borders to Switzerland and Spain, and engaging the Germans in combat. A total of 124 members of the scouts resistance group were killed in 1943 and 1944, thirty of them in action, twenty-one shot by the Germans after capture, and seventy-three after being deported to the concentration camps, among them Birkenau, Natzweiler and Mauthausen.
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In the barracks at the concentration camp of Mauthausen, on the Danube, a British prisoner-of-war, Lieutenant-Commander Pat
O’Leary, who had been accused of being a British spy, found himself assigned as the cleaner of Block 5. The Kapo, or overseer, of the block was a German chosen for his brutality: a merchant seaman before the war, he had murdered his mother. He was, O’Leary later recalled, ‘over six feet tall and the epitome of brute force’.
The only occupants of Block 5 were seven Jews. Fifteen years later, O’Leary told their story to Vincent Brome, who recorded it as follows:
With no other purpose than brutal destruction the SS had said that all seven must die by Christmas. But the emaciated skeletons were still dragged out every morning to work in the stone quarries. Silent, drooping, they set off, some with tears in their eyes, some talking to themselves, some with the furtive look of hunted animals.
The Kapo had put it to them bluntly: ‘You must all die by Christmas. You had better choose amongst yourselves who goes first.’
When no one volunteered for death in the first week, he addressed them again. ‘If you don’t choose, I will.’
The following day, somewhere out in the stone quarries, while seven skeletons struggled to move stones weighing more than they themselves did, with heavy snow soaking their thin garments and tongues sucking the snow to quench their thirsts, the Kapo suddenly leapt on one man, dragged him down, and as his screams echoed round the quarry, beat out his brains with a pick-axe.
That evening the remaining six crowded round Pat. News of a possible Allied invasion had swept across Europe and the mysterious drumming of intelligence had carried the message into the heart of Mauthausen. Was it possible that the invasion would begin soon, and once begun would break through swiftly? Was there, possibly, the hope that… or if not…? Could they at least believe that the bombing raids might scare the SS or the Kapo into relaxing their sentence? Had they any hope if they hung on, tried to evade the death by pick-axe? Was there any point in struggling?
Pat spoke very carefully. Many things were possible. Hope sprang indestructibly for those about to die, and he did not
wish to destroy a hope which might miraculously realize itself. They seemed to feel better after he had spoken.
In the second week there were still no volunteers for death. The ragged file of scarcely human men, who seemed tall because they were paper-thin, whose eyes were large in sunken faces, whose voices were sometimes whispers from weakness, staggered out into the ice-cold dawn, but no one volunteered to die.
Two amongst them were father and son, a boy of nineteen, frequently in tears, and the father aged forty-five, who looked seventy. He was a Jewish tailor who had deliberately withdrawn from political life of any kind to remain completely innocent, but he was a Jew and that was enough. The son had hardly begun adult life and if he possessed any coherent views of the world, they were scarcely worth exterminating.
They stayed together as much as possible, sleeping next to one another, and sometimes, far into the night, Pat heard the old Jew’s slow, melancholy voice trying to soothe his son’s fears. Or they talked to Pat and occasionally the great owl-like eyes enlarged in the thin faces, stared at Pat as though he had it in his power to save them, and would not save them. Always Pat encouraged them, helped them in their illnesses, tried to add scraps to their food; but what they needed even more than food was some re-affirmation of their right to live, and several times the old man turned away, tears in his eyes, and shambled back to his stinking bunk, while Pat cursed his powerlessness.
At the end of November the Kapo spoke to them again. ‘You’re not dying quick enough. It’s easy to do it. You can walk out in front of the wire and get machine-gunned. Or—you can run into the wire. You frizzle quick then. But get a move on—time’s getting short.’
No one died the next day; but on the following night when they returned from the quarry one of their number was again missing, and crowding round Pat, five Jews in terrible fear spoke of the cries they had heard. On the hundred steps which led down into the quarry, the berserk Kapo had torn another emaciated body to pieces with his pick-axe. There followed the same questions about the British, the Allies, the hope of an armistice before the year was out; but the Jewish tailor and his son were fatalistic now and the father said to Pat: ‘We may
walk into the wire tomorrow.’ It was clean and simple. The flash which shrivelled life was better than a long death by mutilation and starvation.
Three days later there were still five Jews, each no longer interested in the fate of the others, and all fighting desperately with the cunning of despair to remain alive.
By the beginning of December the snow was very deep, the winds icy, and the five Jews could not sleep very much because of the cold. One day in the second week in December another man did not return from the quarry. And on the 15th, Pat heard the Jewish tailor say to his son, ‘There’s no hope. We had better die.’ The boy burst into tears. The tailor said again to Pat the next day. ‘We shall walk into the wire’. But they did not. December 18 came and still the four Jews remained in a state resembling life. Still Pat tried to help them. Encouragement seemed the last indignity when hope had so long died, but Pat talked to them and sometimes they seemed stronger afterwards.
Sometimes, too, he looked down at his own fast-wasting body and knew that he could not continue losing weight himself at such a rate without collapse. Originally he had weighed 160 lb. Now he was 90 lb and still losing weight. His face had yellowed, his absurd cotton clothes hung on bones, a sense of deep lethargy very easily overtook him, and hunger pains sometimes brought him awake in the night as though a knife had entered his bowels. He drank more and more water. Everyone drank and drank.
Still he wondered why he remained alive, why they had not shot him, why the fate reserved for the Jews was not his also. If espionage against the religion of Nazism was a crime too simple to redeem by sudden death, this expiation, this long-drawn-out death by hardship and starvation was the kind of penance paid only for the most mortal sin; but why should he still be allowed hope while the Jews had none?
In the early morning of December 23 he began to clean the bunks of Block 5. Suddenly he saw the Jewish tailor leading his son gently by the hand towards the door. The boy sobbed and there were tears in the old man’s eyes. Outside, with clumsy, fumbling steps, the old man began running, his arm around the boy. They could not run properly. They had not the strength.
But they stumbled hopelessly towards the margin, and the shots which Pat expected did not come.
They did not run straight and clean into the electrified wire. They blundered into it, and Pat felt the great blue flash as if it had seared his own body. And there on the ground were the two twitching bodies, entwined with one another, and presently still.
It was very silent and empty in the block that evening. The two remaining Jews were cowering animals. One shivered continuously. Tomorrow was the 24th and one must die. Neither spoke, and when Pat went to them and used whatever words he could find to hold their broken minds together, they stared back mutely.
The dawn was cold, grey, and misty. They could hardly walk as they left for the stone quarry, but one distorted drive remained: nothing mattered but the will to survive for another single day. The man who came back was a ghost, with fixed eyes and twitching lips, who tried to talk to Pat but could not articulate clearly. The last glimmering of the human spirit had almost gone. An animal looked out from the prison of shrivelled flesh and made meaningless whimpers.
On Christmas morning the Kapo almost carried him from the block. That night, as the sound of a Christmas carol came across from one of the blocks, Block 5 was empty.
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