In the Sewers of Lvov (17 page)

Margulies made his way through the tunnels towards the Peltwa. Then he followed the river north, back towards the ghetto district. Along the way the river flowed under another of the great boulevards, Legionov Street, towards the Opera House. This magnificent theatre was built in the early nineteenth century, beside the River Peltwa. Along the banks of the river, a parade of trees and gardens were planted, leading up to the forecourt. There, its classic portico towers above the street. On the roof, a pair of gilded phoenixes stand on either side of a magnificent gilded goddess, holding aloft a laurel.

When the Peltwa was diverted underground it was made to run directly underneath the Opera House and, in the bowels of that stately palace, is a maze of tunnels that lead down to the river. Socha had pointed them out to Margulies on one of their sojourns together. Having found the right tunnel, he would emerge into a workmen’s access chamber, built into the side of the building. From there it was simply a case of pushing open a pair of steel trap doors and stepping out into the street.

He waited until past midnight before emerging from the side of the building. The blackout gave him sufficient cover to cross the wide open square to the safety of the narrow streets that led away to the west. He made his way to the factory where he knew the caretaker. He made contact and the caretaker led him inside the building and hid him in the rafters, above the shop floor. He planned to stay there until dawn, to wait for the workers from the camp, but he was discovered long before they arrived. A Yorkshire terrier that belonged to the works’ foreman began
circling beneath him, yapping and declaring his presence. The foreman came to investigate and pointed at him. ‘Come down, come down now,’ he shouted.

Margulies did as he was told.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked the foreman.

‘Let me stay here tonight. I have to get back to the Janowska camp.’

Korsarz explained that he had been left behind when the brigade left the day before and he was waiting for the next shift. The foreman believed him. At dawn the brigade arrived, the men spread out across the shop floor and got down to work. They were producing cheap wooden furniture; stools, chairs and tables. Margulies moved unnoticed on to the shop floor and mingled with the workers, just another anonymous face. Apart from Klara’s sister, Margulies also wondered about two of his brothers who had been sent to the camp some months before the liquidation. It was an attempt to make contact with everyone who could not be accounted for. ‘I met this fellow,’ Margulies recalled. ‘He was from another town, and I said to him, give me your armband and stay here in the factory tonight. Let me go to the camp in your place.’

Margulies explained that he needed to make contact with people there and that he would return with the next morning shift. The switch was agreed. At the end of the day, the workers poured out of the factory building and assembled into two blocks of fifty, ten rows of five. In the heart of the group was Margulies wearing the armband. Each worker also had, embroidered on to his shirt just above the heart, his camp number, which, of course, Margulies did not have.

They marched down the Janowska Road, past a high concrete wall. The size of the complex was hard to gauge from the outside. It was not nearly as large as Auschwitz or Buchenwald, but it was substantial. Beside them, as they marched, were the tram tracks that ran from the heart of the city and terminated near the entrance. Along these they had efficiently transported thousands of people from the ghetto in the little open tram waggons. On the right, looming up before them was a large imposing gate,
constructed in the Nazi neo-classical style: two massive, rectangular concrete columns supporting a plain concrete roof, and atop each column stood the German eagle and swastika. On one column was displayed the words: ZWANGSABEITS-LAGER DER SS (Forced Labour Camp of the SS). Straddling the road, beside the gate were two guard houses. It was at that point the road crossed the Lvov–Tarnopol/Kiev railway line and everything that lay beyond it was forbidden. As they marched past the guard houses and turned into the gate a guard barked at them:

‘
Kabben ab
!’

Obediently, they doffed their caps and turned to the sentry who was counting heads. Margulies knew this was only a formality: ‘All he wants to know is, are there fifty heads in each brigade? He doesn’t look at your number. If he’s got fifty, he’s happy.’

They were marched down past some office buildings towards an inner compound, passing two sentry posts armed with machine-guns. Further on to the right, was a row of smart summer houses, to the left, a large compound surrounded by barbed wire. There, above the entrance to the inner compound, was the sign that had appeared throughout Europe wherever these establishments had flourished: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. They were led on to this parade ground, where they formed into ranks again to be re-counted. Margulies was standing right in the heart of the Janowska camp.

Though the camp had been there for less than two years, it was estimated that as many as 200,000 people had perished behind its walls. Pre-eminent throughout eastern Europe, its history was similar to that of a dozen other places. Soon after the Nazis arrived in Lvov they set about establishing their authority with well-rehearsed ruthlessness. Along with the sign posts in German, the proclamations announcing new laws and regulations, came the preparations to construct a forced-labour camp. The site was chosen by virtue of the location of the Janowska cemetery. The western half of the cemetery had been Jewish, which the conquerors had decided to flatten immediately under tank treads. On the ground that they cleared, some 150 metres away from the road, they constructed a relatively simply compound,
surrounded by electrified wire fencing. Behind it rose a steep hill, at the foot of which there had been at one time a sand quarry, commonly known ever since as Piatski, or the ‘sands’.

Around the parade or assembly grounds, they had constructed simple barracks to house the workforce. The capacity was doubled with the construction of a second series of barracks behind the first. At the southern end of the ground they built the workshop complex. This was a series of buildings where men laboured to produce anything from metal buttons for uniforms to leather belts, electrical fuses to door handles. It was a labour-intensive, all-purpose factory. The entire compound was completed by the beginning of October 1941.

It was not the only labour camp in the area. Within the vicinity of Lvov there were several labour camps, Kurowice, Jaktorow, Winniczki, Wielkie, Mosty, Brzuchowice, Dornfeld, Hermanow, and there were others. What singled out Janowska was its link with another camp, constructed and maintained in great secrecy – Belzec.

In 1940, the Germans constructed a labour camp near the village of Belzec on what had been the Partition Line that divided German and Russian occupied Poland. Quickly following the German attack against the Soviet Union in June 1941 work began on the expansion and transformation of the Belzec camp. During the winter months of 1941–2, the first gas chambers were installed and by March 1942 they received the first shipment, 1001 inhabitants of the town of Theresienstadt.

It was the first purpose-built death camp in Europe and was able to dispose of some 5000 people a day. The location of Belzec had been carefully considered. It lay some seventy-five kilometres up the railway line from Lvov to Lubin. South and to the east of Lvov, well served by good rail links, was the vast hinterland of Galicia and beyond it the Ukraine. To the west, again on a good line that ran across to Vienna, were Cracow and the major towns of southern Poland. Most of the transports to Belzec passed through Lvov, that is to say, through the Janowska camp, and the labour that was available there was exploited in the transportation process. Belzec did not have a large workforce, so much
of the processing of those sent there was carried out by the workforce at the Janowska camp. After the trains had pulled in at the marshalling yards, the passengers were marched into the camp and on to the assembly ground. There, they were ordered to strip before they were marched back, naked, to the same transports. These trains, fifty to sixty waggons apiece, would then complete the journey to Belzec, while workers at Janowska would sort out the clothing and other belongings piled on the parade ground.

The camp had originally meant to provide slave labour for the establishments inside the walls. As the complex grew, it provided labour to other factories in and around the city. This labour force was fed barely enough to keep it alive and was worked hard enough to ensure premature death. By February 1942, most people in the area had heard the name Janowska Lager and knew that being sent there was virtually a death sentence. Life-expectancy was only a few months. If the person was not beaten senseless by the guards, he would probably be starved on the derisory food, or engulfed in one of the epidemics that regularly swept through the barracks. The strong and quick-witted might survive six months. Because the death toll was so high, the population was constantly made up from the ghetto, hundreds or a thousand each time. What began as a labour camp had become an extermination camp. It was estimated that at one point the death toll had reached more than 2000 a week. Keeping up those numbers meant a constant supply of fresh labour, which came from all across Galicia and even from western Europe. Each morning brigades of men would shuffle out of the gate and march down to the various factories, like the Heereskraftwagenpark 547 (military auto-repair depot), and back again after a twelve- or fourteen-hour shift. The purpose was to use the human resource to the greatest possible economic advantage.

To cope with the growing population, the camp quickly expanded. Further up the road, at number 122, a site previously owned by a Jewish industrialist was taken over and there the SS established two industrial complexes: the Deutsche Ausreustungswerke or DAW (German Armaments Works) and
the Vereinigte Industrie Betreib – VIB (United Industrial Plant). The entire complex now stretched down to the Janowska Road and along it for more than half a kilometre. A large concrete wall was thrown up around the DAW and VIB sites, which ran along the road up to the main gate. Beyond that was a twelve-foot-high brick wall, crowned with barbed wire which was overlooked every fifty metres by a watchtower. Behind the brick wall they constructed facilities to cater for a much larger establishment of officers and men that would run the complex. There were shops, a casino where the SS could be entertained with films and travelling cabarets, and even stabling for their horses.

On the far side of the inner compound was a row of villas that had been built before the war and which had been commandeered for the SS officers. SS Obersturmführer Gustav Wilhaus’s villa stood towards the southern end of the row and afforded from its balcony a view over the entire ground.

Connected to the stables and surrounded by another brick wall, were the women’s barracks. This prison within a prison stood at one corner of the main inner compound, but all links with the male inhabitants were limited by a double fence of barbed wire. It had been built to house up to 10,000 labourers, but in practice the working population rarely rose above 6000.

Margulies stood silently while his brigade was counted again before they could be dismissed. From within his brigade he had already met two brothers named Sukakhan, whom he felt he could trust. He had explained, ‘I’ve come to search for somebody. A friend, a brother and sister perhaps …’

Once the counting had finished, there was a mad scramble to the barracks to retrieve their kettles, in order to be fed. Margulies was given a spare one and then led to the kitchen. By the entrance, five-day-old cadavers were suspended from a gallows. They had been trussed up by the feet and then lowered into a large bath of water. Inside he was given a ladle of warm dirty water and a thin piece of dark bread. There he listened to the men around him describe the place where he now was.

Death had been established from the outset as the one and only
form of punishment and when it was so easily and cheaply exploited, it became the norm, not the exception. Death was at the heart of every activity – and it sent men insane. Wilhaus, by all accounts, was a homicidal madman. Sometimes, if a new transport arrived carrying women and children, he had them brought up to his villa and, as he had no use for the children, had them thrown into the air while he took aim and shot at them from the verandah. He often did this in the presence of his little daughter who used to applaud his successes.

On other occasions he used to take aim at a labour squad on the parade ground, trying to remove a nose or an ear or a finger. After this, he would move amongst the prisoners to extract the wounded. He would then march them to the other end of the parade ground and finish them himself with a bullet in the skull.

Executions were stunningly macabre. Men were hung by the legs, beaten until dead and then sometimes even disembowelled. Everywhere was a kind of mad hatred, a violence that beggared the imagination. As the temperature regularly dropped well below freezing during winter, people were often simply left outside to freeze, or placed in large barrels of water. In the morning they would appear like elongated balls of snow on the ground, or their cadavers were chipped out of frozen barrels of ice. Untersturmführer Fritz Gebauer, Wilhaus’s subordinate was known simply to take hold of a man and strangle him with his own hands.

By 1943 the regime was confronted by different priorities. As the Soviet successes had continued throughout the summer, the Germans began to find methods of disguising their work. They decided to remove any evidence of mass slaughter and the only way to do that was to dig up all the mass graves that were scattered throughout eastern Europe and dispose of the corpses. Colonel Paul Blobel, a former Einsatzkommando chief, was given the task of supervising this massive operation. Two weeks after the liquidation of the ghetto in Lvov, one of Blobel’s units arrived at the Janowska camp. Out of the workforce they created new brigades, so-called ‘Death Brigades’, to dig up the innumerable mass graves scattered about the Piatski, and elsewhere.