Authors: Martin Gilbert
***
At the Ninth Fort in Kovno, Christmas 1943 saw the end of their tether for the sixty-four men and women who had been formed into a unit of the ‘Blobel Commando’, to dig up and then to burn the corpses of more than seventy thousand Lithuanian, German and Czech Jews, murdered in the Ninth Fort in the autumn and winter of 1941. By December 1943 they had dug up and burned more than twelve thousand bodies, seven thousand of them Jews from Kovno. Examination of the bodies showed that many of the victims had been buried alive.
The members of ‘Blobel Commando’ in the Ninth Fort included twelve members of the Jewish Fighting Organization from the Kovno ghetto, several Russian—Jewish prisoners-of-war, among them a major in the Red Army, Mikhail Nemyonov, a few Jewish
women, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, three non-Jews, and one of Lithuania’s best known rabbis, Gabriel Shusterman.
An escape committee was formed, and security maintained by another of the Russian—Jewish prisoners-of-war, ‘Mishka the Tramp’, a former Soviet naval officer. A locksmith among the prisoners, Pinchas Krakinovsky, made keys to open the cells, and then, on the eve of the escape, drilled 314 holes, with primitive tools, in a long-forgotten iron door leading out of the fort near the cells.
On December 24 the escape plans were ready. That evening, as the guards celebrated Christmas Eve, all sixty-four prisoners made their way out of their cells, through the door, up a rope ladder, over the fortress wall, and, rolling like logs in prostrate bundles, across the deep snow of the surrounding fields. But despite the festive carousing of the guards, the escape was noticed, and thirty-two escapees were quickly rounded up. Another five were shot, trying to resist capture. Eight more were caught on their way to the ghetto. Nineteen reached the ghetto undetected. One of the nineteen, Rabbi Shusterman, died soon afterwards of frostbite, suffered during the escape.
The escape of members of ‘Blobel Commando’ from the Ninth Fort provided witnesses of the fate of tens of thousands of Jews. ‘You are more important than I,’ the head of the Jewish police in Kovno, Moshe Levin, told them. ‘You must remain alive to tell the world what you saw with your own eyes in the Ninth Fort.’ To ensure that the escapees did remain alive, Levin hid them in a secure bunker, equipped with lighting, heating and water.
While in hiding, the escapees were given weapon training by another Russian-Jewish prisoner-of-war, Captain Israel Veselnitsky, himself from an Orthodox Jewish farming family from the Ukraine. They were then smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto, to join the partisans in the Rudniki forest, ninety miles to the east. Six of them later fell in battle. One of the escapees, Major Nemyonov, committed suicide. He was too old, he said, to run, and ‘happy to die by my own hand as a free man’.
41
Also on December 24, the Jews in ‘Blobel Commando’ at Borki were ready to try to escape, although there were more German guards than prisoners. In frozen ground, without proper tools, they had dug a tunnel from under the barracks to the field beyond the
camp fence. It took six weeks to dig. At dawn on December 14 all was ready.
All sixty prisoners entered the tunnel led by the escape organizer, Oscar Berger. One of the escapees, Josef Reznik, later recalled how a fellow escapee was so large that he had to be pushed through the opening at the end of the tunnel. As he was being pushed out into the field Reznik recalled, ‘There was noise, and this alerted the Germans. It was impossible to wait for everyone.’
Of the sixty prisoners who tried to escape, only three survived the war. It is not known how many died in the camp, in the tunnel, at the tunnel exit, or on the way to the nearby woods. Several of those who escaped joined the Soviet partisans across the River Bug, and fought eventually in the ranks of the Red Army. One of them, Singer, fell in a partisan battle. Another, Aharonowicz, was wounded in battle in the Carpathians. A third, Josef Sterdyner, testified at the trial of the Borki guards in West Germany in 1962. A further survivor of the revolt at Borki, Josef Reznik, was a witness at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Reznik testified that after his escape he had been helped in hiding by a Polish priest.
42
The opening months of 1944 saw no pause in the search for victims, or in the cruelties of the slaughter. At Birkenau, at Christmas 1943, Madame Vaillant Couturier, a non-Jew, had been opposite the notorious Block 25, the ‘Waiting Block’, when she had seen Jewish women brought naked from the barracks. These were women who had been judged too sick or too frail to work, or even chosen at random. From Block 25, after being kept for up to a week without food or water, they were all sent, invariably from that hut, to the gas-chamber. Of the fate of the women who had been brought to Block 25 that particular Christmas, Madame Vaillant Couturier recalled how uncovered trucks were driven up to the block, and then:
…on them the naked women were piled, as many as the trucks could hold. Each time a truck started, the famous Hessler ran after the truck and with his bludgeon repeatedly struck the naked women going to their death.
They knew they were going to the gas-chamber and tried to escape. They were massacred. They attempted to jump from the truck and we, from our own block, watched the trucks pass by and heard the grievous wailing of all those women who knew they were going to be gassed.
1
Perhaps it was these same women whom Rudolf Vrba saw being put on open lorries to be taken to one of the gas-chambers. ‘They were all prisoners already,’ he later recalled, ‘and they knew that they were going to the gas-chamber, and they were quiet. And somehow people were accustomed to live with the moment, with the knowledge that death will come.’ But when the lorry motors
started, the noise ‘created a panic’. A terrible noise arose, Vrba recalled, ‘the death cry of thousands of young women’, who were already ‘reduced to skeletons’. Many tried to jump out of the lorries, knowing ‘that they can’t succeed’. But still they tried.
As the women tried in vain to break out, a rabbi’s son, Moshe Sonnenshein, called out, in Vrba’s presence, ‘God—show them your power—this is against You.’
‘Nothing happened,’ Vrba added. Then Sonnenshein cried out, ‘There is no God.’
2
Among the most remarkable documents to have survived the war is the manuscript written in Birkenau by one of the members of the Sonderkommando, Salmen Lewental. This particular manuscript was discovered in 1962 in a jar buried in the ground near Crematorium III, where Lewental worked. The gaps in it are words destroyed by dampness which seeped into the jar. Lewental, who did not survive his gruesome work, recalled in his note book what may have been the same episode witnessed in its opening stages by Madame Vaillant Couturier and Rudolf Vrba.
Lewental’s account is headed ‘3,000 naked people’. It reads:
This was at the beginning of 1944. A cold, dry lashing wind was blowing. The soil was quite frozen. The first lorry, loaded brimful with naked women and girls, drove in front of Crematorium III. They were not standing close to one another, as usual, no; they did not stand on their feet at all, they were exhausted, they lay inertly one upon another in a state of utter exhaustion. They were sighing and groaning.
The lorry stopped, the tarpaulin was raised and they began to dump down the human mass in the way in which gravel is unloaded on to the road. Those that had lain at the edge, fell upon the hard ground, breaking their heads upon […] so that they weakened completely and had no strength left to move. The remaining [women] fell upon them, pressing them down with their weight. One heard […] groans.
Those that were dumped down later, began to extricate themselves from the pile of bodies, stood […] on their feet and tried to walk […] the ground, they trembled and jerked horribly with cold, they slowly dragged themselves to the bunker, which was called
Auskleidungsraum
, ‘undressing room’ and to which steps led down, like to a cellar.
The remainder [of the women] were taken down by men from the Kommando who swiftly ran upstairs, raised the fainted victims, left without help, extricated them carefully, crushed and barely breathing, from the heap [of bodies] and led them quickly downstairs. They were a long time in the camp and knew that the bunker (the gas-chamber) was the last step [leading] to death.
But still they were very grateful, with their eyes begging for mercy and with [the movements] of their trembling heads they expressed their thanks, at the same time giving signs with their hands that they were unable to speak. They found solace in seeing tears of compassion and [an expression] of depression […] in the faces of those who were leading them downstairs. They were shaking with cold and […].
The women, taken downstairs, were permitted to sit down, the rest of them were led into this [con]fined, cold room, they jerked horribly and trembled with cold, [so] a coke stove was brought. Only some of them drew near enough to be able to feel the warmth emanating from the small stove. The rest sat, plunged in pain and sadness. It was cold but they were so resigned and embittered with their lives that they thought with abhorrence of physical sensations of any kind…. They were sitting far in the background and were silent.
Lewental then set down the story of a girl from the ghetto of Bedzin, who had been brought to Birkenau ‘towards the end of the summer’, and who now talked as she lay ‘helpless’:
She was left the only one of a numerous family. All the time she had been working hard, was undernourished, suffered the cold. Still, she was in good health and was well. She thought she would survive. Eight days ago no Jewish child was allowed to go to work. The order came. ‘Juden, antreten!’ ‘Jews, leave the ranks!’ Then the blocks were filled with Jewish girls. During the selection nobody paid attention whether they looked well or not, whether they were sick or well.
They were lined outside the block and later they were led to Block 25, there they were ordered to strip naked; [allegedly] they were to be examined as to their health. When they had stripped, all were driven to three blocks; one thousand persons in a block and there they were shut for three days and three
nights, without getting a drop of water or a crumb of bread, even.
So they had lived for three awful days and it was only the third night that bread was brought; one loaf of bread weighing, 1,40 kilogramme for sixteen persons, afterwards […]
‘If they had shot us then, gassed us, it would have been better. Many [women] lost consciousness and others were only semi-conscious. They lay crowded on bunks, motionless, helpless. Death would not have impressed us at all then.
‘The fourth day we were led from the block, the weakest were led to the
Krankenstube
(infirmary), and the rest were again given the normal camp ration of food and were left […] were taken […] to [life].
‘On the eighth day, that is five days later, we were again ordered to strip naked,
Blocksperre
(permission for prisoners to leave the blocks) was ordained. Our clothes were at once loaded and we, after many hours of waiting in the frost, were loaded into lorries and here we were dumped down on the ground. Such is the sad end of our last mistaken illusions. We have been, evidently, cursed even in our mothers’ wombs, since such a sad end fell to our lot.’
The girl from Bedzin had finished her story. As Lewental noted:
She could no more pronounce the last words because her voice became stifled with flowing [tears] […] from […] some women still tried to wrench themselves away, they looked at our faces, seeking compassion in them.
One of us, standing aside and looking at the immensity of unhappiness of those defenceless, tormented souls, could not master his feelings and wept.
One young girl then cried, ‘Look, what I have lived yet to see before my death: a look of compassion and tears shed because of our dreadful fate. Here, in the murderers’ camp, where they torture and beat and where they torment, where one sees murders and falling victims, here where men have lost the consciousness of the greatest disasters, here, where a brother or sister falls down in your sight, you cannot even vouchsafe them a [farewell] sigh, a man is still found who took to heart our horrible disaster and who expressed his sympathy with tears. Ah, this is wonderful, not natural. The tears and sighs of a
living [man] will accompany us to our death, there is still somebody who will weep for us. And I thought we shall pass away like deserted orphans. The young man has given me some solace. Amidst only bandits and murderers I have seen, before my death, a man who still feels.’
She turned to the wall, propped her head against it and sobbed quietly, pathetically. She was deeply moved. Many girls stood and sat around, their heads bowed, and preserved a stubborn silence, looked with deep revulsion at this base world and particularly at us.
One of them spoke, ‘I am still so young, I have really not experienced anything in my life, why should death of this kind fall to my lot? Why?’ She spoke very slowly in a faltering voice. She sighed heavily and proceeded, ‘And one should like so much to live a little bit longer.’
Having finished, she fell into a state of melancholy reverie and fixed her gaze on some distant point; fear of death emanated from her wildly shining eyes. Her companion regarded her with a sarcastic smile, she said, ‘This happy hour of which I dreamed so much has come at last. When the heart is full of pain and suffering, when it is oppressed by the criminal world, full of baseness and low corruption, [full of] limitless evil, then life becomes so troublesome, so hard and unbearable that one looks to death for rescue, for release. The nightmare, oppressing me, will vanish forever. My tormented thoughts will experience eternal rest. How dear, how sweet is the death of which one dreamed in the course of so many wakeful nights.’
She spoke with fervour, with pathos and with dignity. ‘I am only sorry to sit here so naked, but to render death more sweet one must pass through that indignity, too.’ A young emaciated girl lay aloof and was moaning softly, ‘I am… dy… ing, I… am… dy… ing’ [;] a film was covering her eyes which turned this way and that […], they begged to live […].
A mother was sitting with her daughter, they both spoke in Polish. She sat helplessly, spoke so softly that she could hardly be heard. She was clasping the head of her daughter with her hands and hugging her tightly. [She spoke] ‘In an hour we both shall die. What tragedy. My dearest, my last hope will die with you.’ She sat […] immersed in thought, with wide open, dimmed eyes […] threw […] around her so […].
After some minutes she came to and continued to speak, ‘On account of you my pain is so great that I am dying when I think of it.’ She let down her stiff arms and her daughter’s head sank down upon her mother’s knees.
A shiver passed through the body of the young girl, she called desperately, ‘Mamma!’ And she spoke no more, those were her last words.