A Brief Stop On the Road From Auschwitz (8 page)

I note down the exact figures and dates, in fact I scour the archives and sources for the exact figures and dates, because I want to reconstruct your world as you see it before it’s liquidated, and I need something to build it with, and I don’t know what else I can understand. But I soon notice that the exact numbers and dates merely reconstruct the widening gulf between what’s happening around you and what can be understood. The ghetto’s enclosed inside a wall of lies and euphemisms that no reason can penetrate.

Between January 16 and 29, 1942, 10,003 people are dispatched from the ghetto for onward transport and relocation. They’re permitted to take 12.5 kilos of luggage each and are promised that they’ll be able to exchange their ghetto currency for up to ten German Reichsmarks at the assembly point. Between February 22 and April 4, 1942, 34,073 people are dispatched from the ghetto. Between May 4 and 15, 1942, 10,914 are dispatched. Altogether, from January 16 to September 12, 1942, 70,859 people are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź to be suffocated to death in the airtight compartments of the trucks that shuttle to and from the docking wall of a manor known as “the
castle” in a small village sixty kilometers northwest of Łódź called Chełmno in Polish and Kulmhof in the language of the new masters.

I could have filled the rest of this book with figures and dates from lists detailing the dispatch and delivery of people who will never be heard from again, but apart from the fact that nothing can be understood from those lists, I also don’t trust them. The figures are too precise, of course, and the abbreviations too arbitrary.
Ausgeliefert
is sometimes written
ausg
., sometimes
a.g
., sometimes just
ag
. Precise figures and arbitrary abbreviations are the crowbars of Nazi euphemism. They break up the established links between word and experience, between what happens and what is possible to understand. Why is 12.5 kilos of luggage the permitted amount? Why not ten, or fifteen? Why does the labor deployment, in a
Sonderaktion
(special action) for the “dejudification of the Warthegau” (
die Entjudung des Warthegaus
), require 1/8 liter of spirits per man per day? Why not a half liter, or a quarter? Amtsleiter Hans Biebow, the Nazi commandant of the Łódź ghetto, writes to the
Herrn Reichsbeauftragten für das Trinkbranntweingewerbe beim Reichsnährstand, Kleiststrasse, Berlin W32
, to request extra spirit rations and extra cigarette rations for the extra staff required to dejudify Warthegau—that is, the part of Poland now belonging to the German Reich, with its center a city now called Litzmannstadt, whose Jews are now being gassed to death in a small village called Chełmno, situated on the banks of the River Ner. The staff deployed for such a
Sonderaktion
, Biebow emphasizes, must unconditionally,
unbedingt
, be allocated an extra ration of spirits.

All this is somehow reassuring from a purely linguistic point of view: the fact that a man with the power to hire people for a
Sonderaktion
whose object is to dejudify Warthegau lacks the
power to give them an extra ration of spirits. The fact that he repeatedly has to approach the high command of spirit allocations in Berlin and bow and scrape and attach certificates from the health authorities in Litzmannstadt testifying to the workers’ need of spirits while on duty. Reassuring, because the long-winded sentences hint at some kind of meaning and the long-winded bureaucracy at some kind of order, but all of it, of course, entirely incomprehensible, since the words have been detached from their significance and the bureaucracy from its logic. Anyone with permission to transport 70,000 or 80,000 or, were it technically possible, 100,000 individuals to the gas vans in Chełmno ought not to have to concern himself with permission to dispense 1/8 liter of spirits a day to the extra staff that must be recruited to carry out the disgusting (yes, that’s what it says,
ekelerregend
) work.

Not in the world as it has been understood until now.

A man named Josef Zelkowicz is listening to Chaim Rumkowski in front of the fire station at 13 Lutomierska on that hot afternoon of September 4, 1942, and as usual takes notes on what he sees and hears. Zelkowicz’s notes will survive the liquidation of the ghetto and the liquidation of Zelkowicz himself (in Auschwitz in 1944). Mortifying sobbing erupts, he notes, after the exhortation to mothers and fathers to deliver up their children. Piteous wailings erupt, he writes, after the declaration that the limbs must be cut off to save the body. Ice in every heart, he writes. Despair in every eye. Hands clenched convulsively. Faces rigidly contorted.

They all know. Little by little, the decrees have become brutal and the euphemisms have been stripped bare. Already in the second wave of transports, in February 1942, the promised exchange of money into German Reichsmarks is abandoned, and the travelers are brusquely told that the 12.5 kilos of minutely itemized luggage they’ve been urged to take with them to the assembly point are to be left behind when they board the train. The ghetto lies sleepless over the luggage left behind. And over the luggage that’s sent back.

Everyone knows, but no one understands.

“The fact is,” Josef Zelkowicz notes in September 1942, “that no one has even a vestige of doubt that the deportees from the ghetto are not being taken to any other location. They are being led to perdition, at least the elderly.… They are being thrown on the garbage heap, as they say in the ghetto.… If so, how can we be expected to accept the new decree? How can we be expected to live on after this?”

I don’t think anyone has the right to ask that question in retrospect, but Zelkowicz asks it there and then. How can you go on living once you’ve been commanded to “sacrifice” your old, your sick, and your small children as a price for doing so? How can you go on living in a world where such a decree can be conceived and formulated? Let alone a world in which such a decree can be organized and implemented.

Many cannot live on. After each wave of dispatches comes a wave of suicides. People throw themselves from the windows, or hang themselves from beams and doorposts, or cut their arteries, or use poison, or take an overdose of some sleeping drug they’ve been fortunate enough to have access to, or get themselves shot by the German guards at the ghetto fence. That last one doesn’t require much effort. The German guards readily shoot even those
who don’t want to be shot. All suicides are noted in the diary or daily chronicle maintained by the Jewish ghetto administration, without German knowledge, in premises on the third floor at 4 Kościelny Square. Thousands of typewritten diary pages, sometimes in Polish, sometimes in German, filled with observations and details of daily life in the ghetto, of deaths and births (!), of reductions in rations, of consignments of turnips and potatoes, of the lack of matches and fuel, of production quotas and actual production, of the weather, and of an old man, clearly ill, standing with an emaciated boy on a street corner, trying to sell something that looks like an onion. An escalating number of entries about starvation, transports, and suicides. Faced with the transports of September 1942, parents attempt to kill their children and themselves. Not all succeed.

Sixteen thousand people are offered up on those days in September, handed over for onward transport, according to lists compiled by thirty-eight people working twelve-hour shifts in the offices of the Jewish ghetto administration on the second floor of the building in Kościelny Square, plowing through the nineteen files that contain the ghetto register of inhabitants, copying thousands of family names and exact ages onto individual cards and sorting them by district and address before carrying them up to the Evacuation Committee on the third floor, which picks out the cards of those to be dispatched and sends them on to the Jewish ghetto police for execution.

Yes, this is what Josef Zelkowicz typewrites in Polish in the ghetto diary on September 14, 1942. Outside the diary, handwriting in Yiddish, he notes that everyone seems to have lost their senses. He also notes that the selection cards soon prove redundant because within a day or two the Germans lose patience and send their own people into the ghetto, ignoring the cards and
picking the inhabitants out at random, shooting those who try to hide or refuse to obey or have the wrong expression on their faces. In the actions of September 1942, 600 people are shot by the Gestapo. Two of them in the backyard of 7 Żytnia Street, where the residents are ordered to file out for German inspection. Among them a mother and her four-year-old daughter. It’s Zelkowicz narrating. The mother and daughter are holding hands tightly and smiling, the mother to show she’s a viable survivor and the daughter because she’s happy to be out in the sun. The German orders the mother to hand over her daughter. The mother hands nothing over and keeps on smiling. Mother and daughter are taken out of the line and given three minutes to think about it. Three minutes, not a second more. For some reason, the German is smiling, too. The ranks of neighbors are shaking with dread, but as discreetly as possible so as not to draw attention to themselves. When the three minutes are up, the mother and daughter are ordered “against the wall” and the German shoots them both, one pistol shot to each neck.

Zelkowicz tries to find words for what happens in the ghetto on those September days in 1942 but despairs of being believed. He senses that there will be those who, a few decades on, will claim it’s all lies and deception. So at regular intervals, as if to pinch himself, he puts down in writing that this is really happening, that this is “one hundred percent factual,” that it’s happening before his eyes here and now, however inconceivable and preposterous it may sound to those who will one day read what he’s writing. And actually, however inconceivable and preposterous what’s happening may sound even to those who are living through it, here and now. When the only way to go on living is to fail to grasp what’s happening. These are days when the people of the ghetto do not cry like humans, writes Zelkowicz.
They bark like dogs, howl like wolves, cry like hyenas, roar like lions. They don’t cry like humans because the pain isn’t a human pain that can be responded to with human tears. These are days when the ghetto is a cacophony of wild noises in which only one tone is missing: the human tone. Humans aren’t capable of bearing such suffering. Beasts perhaps, but not humans.

So people don’t cry.

Josef Zelkowicz strains his vocabulary and hunts for metaphors: people are shot “like mad dogs”; a woman who has just lost her three sons “laughs as wildly as a hyena”; a woman whose husband has just been shot before her eyes “hiccups like a crazed ostrich,” and every hiccup “is a poisoned dart to the heart.” In every apartment “a pocket of pus” is bursting, in every room there’s “a roaring, rumbling, hiccuping, hysterical volcanic eruption,” through every window and broken door “lava pours into the courtyards and streets. One dwelling infects the next, one house the next, one street the next. The whole ghetto quakes, churns, riots, runs amok.”

With the “sacrifice” of the old, the sick, and the young children in September 1942, Josef Zelkowicz’s world ruptures. He can’t understand how the ghetto can live on after such a thing, still less how those responsible for selecting the victims could do so, and he’s genuinely surprised, no, upset, in fact, to see that “the appalling shock” instead seems to transform itself into a kind of detachment. The brutal purge is hardly over before the struggle for survival resumes, as if nothing had happened. “People who have just lost their loved ones now talk of nothing but rations, potatoes, soup, and so on! It is beyond comprehension!”

The next entry in the ghetto diary: “During the first twenty days of September the weather was lovely and sunny, with only a few brief showers.”

I don’t know how you all go on living and perhaps I don’t want to know, but I do know that you’re still alive. That 85,000 people live on after September 1942, and that 73,000 survive until August 1944. That the Łódź ghetto is still in existence in August 1944, whereas the Warsaw ghetto is not.

In the Warsaw ghetto, life does not go on. In May 1943, the Warsaw ghetto is liquidated. In the space of two months, from July 24, 1942, to September 24, 1942, 270,000 people of all ages and conditions, no haggling over the old, the sick, and the young, are transported onward. Warsaw’s Chełmno is called Treblinka. In Treblinka, the diesel engines are bigger and connected to stationary gas chambers in a purposely built block where many more people can be killed in a shorter time. No driving around in trucks through the woods; the bodies are burned in situ. It’s more efficient that way. In the Warsaw ghetto, the chairman of the Jewish Council is Adam Czerniaków, not Chaim Rumkowski. When he’s ordered by an SS-Hauptsturmführer, one Hermann Worthoff (who has just liquidated the ghetto in Lublin, whose Chełmno or Treblinka is called Bełzec), to deliver 10,000 people and a transport of children by July 24, 1942, he takes his own life. “I cannot send defenseless children to their deaths,” he writes in his farewell letter.