Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (104 page)
All those who were able to flee from the blazing buildings were shot. About twenty Theresienstadt Jews managed to escape the blaze and the bullets, and to hide in the forest until the arrival of the Red Army six days later. Taken to Moscow by their liberators, they were kept for two years in a Siberian camp on the Chinese border, before being released, in 1946.
38
On June 30, the 1,795 Jews deported from Corfu reached Birkenau. An eye-witness of their fate was a Hungarian Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, who was then employed in Birkenau as doctor to the Sonderkommando. After the war he recalled how, on the morning of July 1, he was making his ‘morning rounds’:
All four crematoria were working at full blast. Last night they had burned the Greek Jews from the Mediterranean island of Corfu, one of the oldest communities of Europe. The victims were kept for twenty-seven days without food or water, first in launches, then in sealed boxcars.
When they arrived at Auschwitz’s unloading platform, the doors were unlocked, but no one got out and lined up for selection. Half of them were already dead, and the other half in a coma. The entire convoy, without exception, was sent to number two crematorium.
Work was accelerated during the night, so that by morning all that remained of the convoy was a pile of dirty, dishevelled
clothes in the crematorium compound. I gazed sadly at the hill of rags, which, little by little, grew wet and soggy beneath a fine autumn rain.
Glancing upward, I noticed that the four lightning rods, placed at the corners of the crematorium chimneys, were twisted and bent, the result of the previous night’s high temperatures.
39
In Vilna, on July 2 and 3, as the city awaited the arrival of the Red Army, there were two thousand Jews working in the Kailis factory, emaciated, but heartened by their imminent liberation. But more than eighteen hundred of them were seized and taken to Ponar, where they were shot. Less than two hundred workers managed to hide, and to remain in hiding until the Red Army entered the city on July 13. In the battle for Vilna, which had lasted five days, eight thousand German soldiers were killed.
40
From Birkenau, more and more Jews were now being sent to factories inside the Reich. On July 1, one thousand Jewish men were sent to the synthetic oil works at Schwarzheide, on the Berlin-Dresden autobahn.
41
Among those deported was a young Czech Jew, Alfred Kantor. ‘You dirty rats!’ the camp commandant at Schwarzheide addressed the new arrivals. ‘I’ll show you what a concentration camp really is! So you think you’ve been places?’
42
Alfred Kantor noted, of one SS man at Schwarzheide: ‘Jumping on a man’s intestines makes him feel merry.’
43
On July 4, one thousand Jewish women were sent from Birkenau to Hamburg, where they had to demolish houses bombed in Allied air raids.
44
That same day, 250 prisoners from Alderney camp on the Channel Islands were put on board ship to be sent back to the mainland. The ship was attacked by British warships, and sank. All the prisoners were drowned. Most of them were French Jews.
45
The Theresienstadt deportations to Birkenau had ceased on May 18, and were not to begin again until September 28.
46
But two small deportations in July, and one in September, ostensibly of Jews in Theresienstadt who were to be exchanged for Germans in Palestine or Switzerland, had no survivors.
47
One of those deported from Theresienstadt in July 1944 was Dr Erich Salomon, a pioneer photographer, whose photographs of pre-war statesmen had become
a feature of international conferences. Salomon, who fought in the German army in the First World War, had been taken prisoner on the Marne, and spent three and a half years in captivity. In 1933, with the rise of Hitler, he fled to Holland, and it was from Holland, in 1942, that he had been sent to Theresienstadt, then, in 1944, to an unknown destination, possibly Belsen. Whatever the destination, he did not survive it.
48
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In March 1944 the surviving Jews of Cracow had been seized and deported to a camp at Plaszow. Here, while working as slave labourers, and subjected to the sadistic whims of the camp commandant, Amnon Goeth, thousands had been murdered. Near Plaszow was a factory which manufactured kitchen utensils, run by a German Catholic, Oscar Schindler, a man who, like all the factory managers in the neighbourhood, was allowed to employ Jewish workers.
Schindler, whose relations with the Gestapo were outwardly cordial, had always done his utmost to protect the Jews who worked in his factory. When the Gestapo tried to transfer some of his workers to Plaszow, Schindler, by bribery and persuasion, was able to keep them. By the summer of 1944, more than five hundred Jews were under Schindler’s protection.
49
In Warsaw, the search continued for Jews in hiding. On July 10, thirty men and several women ‘of Jewish origin’ were shot in the Pawiak prison.
50
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In France, a German-born Jewess, Marianne Cohn, had been active in helping Jews to escape through France to Switzerland. Caught by the Germans while accompanying a convoy of Jewish children to Switzerland, she refused to be freed as an ‘Aryan’ according to her forged documents, and insisted upon remaining with the children. She was executed in the early hours of July 8, together with five non-Jewish resistance fighters, at Ville-La-Grande, between Paris and Lyons.
51
That week, the deportees from Hungary were being taken from the suburbs of Budapest. But the news smuggled out by the escapees Vrba and Wetzler in April, Mordowicz and Rosin in May, telegraphed from Switzerland to London and Washington on
June 24, led to demands from the King of Sweden, the Pope, and the Geneva-based International Red Cross, as well as from Britain and the United States, to the Hungarian Regent, urging him to halt the deportations. On July 7, Horthy agreed to do so. On July 8, the deportations stopped.
52
By this time, a total of 437,000 Hungarian Jews had already been deported.
53
More than 170,000 remained in Budapest, from where Eichmann had intended to begin the deportations in the second week of July.
On July 9 a Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, reached Budapest from Sweden with a list of 630 Hungarian Jews for whom Swedish visas were available. No longer in danger of deportation to Auschwitz, these Jews were desperate nevertheless for whatever protection they could receive.
Raoul Wallenberg, the man who now sought to protect the Jews of Budapest from further disasters, was the great-great-grandson of Michael Benedics, one of the first Jews to settle in Sweden, at the end of the eighteenth century, and a convert to Lutheranism. Wallenberg’s father had died of cancer three months before his son’s birth in August 1912. In his youth, Wallenberg had studied in the United States. In 1936 he spent six months studying management at the Midland Bank at Haifa: it was there that he had met many refugees from Hitler. In 1944 four American institutions, the American-based World Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the State Department, and President Roosevelt’s recently established War Refugee Board, had persuaded the Swedish Foreign Ministry to send Wallenberg to Budapest, with instructions to do whatever he could to help save the surviving Jews of Hungary.
54
Wallenberg’s first list of ‘protected’ Jews was given to the Hungarian government together with a Swiss list of seven hundred Jews whose emigration for Palestine had been approved by the British government. To guard these Jews against local hostility, a number of ‘protected’ houses were set aside for them.
55
The deportations had already stopped. The months of protection, and diplomatic rescue activity, had begun. Within three weeks, at the initiative of the Swiss representative in Budapest, Charles Lutz, a large department store, the Glass House, was declared to be the ‘Swiss Legation Representation of Foreign Interests, Department of Immigration’,
and several hundred Budapest Jews were able to register as Swiss-protected persons.
56
Anticipating every advance of the Red Army, the Germans continued to kill or move the surviving Jews of Eastern Europe. On July 12 the remaining eight thousand Jews of the Kovno ghetto were taken by train to Stutthof. But in those last hours, hundreds were killed in Kovno itself. ‘When we left the ghetto,’ Dr Aharon Peretz later recalled, ‘the entire ghetto was in flames. We saw groups of people gathering in the cemetery where they had dug graves and the corpses were put in graves. The entire ghetto was in ruins. There were feathers flying out of pillows, there were pieces of furniture, and there was a desert.’
57
At this moment of slaughter and deportation, a Lithuanian carpenter, Jan Pauvlavicius, who had already taken several Jews into hiding, including a four-year-old boy, built a hiding place next to his cellar for yet more Jews. This cellar he equipped with two bunks on which eight people could lie, and a small opening to the vegetable garden above, to provide the hide-out with air.
Pauvlavicius was able to carry out his act of rescue even as the Jews were being deported from Kovno. Dr Tania Ipp, one of those whom he saved, later recalled: ‘He was like a father to us—a man only to be admired.’ As well as hiding nine Jews in the hole which he had dug next to his cellar, Pauvlavicius also found refuge elsewhere for two Soviet prisoners-of-war who had escaped from Germany, and for another young Jewish boy.
58
One of those whom Pauvlavicius saved at the moment of the final deportation was a Jewish woman, Miriam Krakinowski, who had managed to break away from the line of deportees in the confusion of the moment. On reaching Pauvlavicius’s house, she had been taken into the cellar, where Pauvlavicius took a broom, swept aside the wood shavings covering a small trap door, and knocked on the floor. ‘I saw a small door being pushed up,’ Miriam Krakinowski later recalled. ‘He told me to go down the steps. I couldn’t see where I was going, but I didn’t say anything. Gradually the room became lighter, and I found myself in a very small, hot room filled with half-naked Jews. I began to cry as they asked questions about the fate of the ghetto.’
The Jews hidden in Pauvlavicius’s cellar remained there for three weeks, until the day of liberation. ‘After liberation,’ Miriam Krakinowski
recalled, ‘Pauvlavicius was killed by Lithuanians who hated him for saving Jews.’
59
One of those deported from Kovno to Stutthof on July 12, Vera Elyashiv, has recalled the long train journey, in sealed wagons. ‘There were some who got hysterical,’ she wrote, ‘and some screamed in a terrifying way. People started to hit the wagon walls with their fists.’ Two men managed to break the small window and jump out. Through the cracks between the boards, Vera Elyashiv wrote, ‘it seemed that one fell under the wheels of the train and a second was hit by a bullet when he got on his feet and started to run.’ The train continued for two days. There was no food or drink, and ‘a terrible stench’. On the third day the train reached Stutthof:
The door was slid open, and framed in a blinding sky was the fat face of an SS officer. He seemed quite revolted by what he saw. Withdrawing a little, he announced that all the women and children must come out and that the men remain inside, so that they could be counted separately.
Soldiers’ hands and rifle butts got the reluctant, frightened and by now weakened women and children out of the wagons. I, as with most of the others, could hardly stand and hardly knew what was happening when suddenly the doors of the wagons were closed. I could hear father crying out my name, his cry almost drowned by the noise of the engine and the other cries. I must have tried to run, because I fell and when I got up I could see the back of the fast-disappearing train. This was the last I saw of my father.
60
On July 12 Shalom Cholawski entered his home town, Lachowice, now liberated by the Red Army. Before the war Lachowice had been the home of about three thousand Jews. ‘The streets were empty,’ he later recalled, ‘houses were entirely empty. The wind was blowing, but we were breathing the spirit of death….’
61
On the following day, July 13, the first Soviet soldiers entered Vilna, among them many Jewish partisans who had joined in the final three-day battle for the city. One of those partisans, Abba Kovner, later recalled how he reached the quarter that had been the ghetto: ‘I saw a desert of ruined walls.’ The streets were empty. Then he saw a woman turn the corner of the deserted street, holding a girl in her arms:
In the first moment she stopped and shouted and screamed and wanted to hide. Some of us wore German uniforms; booty, captured uniforms which we had been wearing when we were partisans. Perhaps she thought that the Germans had returned. The German army perhaps had returned. But once she recognized us, she ran towards us and in an hysterical voice she started relating her story.
The girl whom she had been holding looked about three years old. Perhaps she may have been older, four and a half years, maybe. They had been hiding in a little cave in the wall more than eleven months. I don’t know how they survived in this dark hole. She broke down. She cried bitterly and in that moment the girl who was in her arms who looked as though she had been dumb opened her mouth and said: ‘Mommy, mother, may one cry now, mother?’
And I was told that for these eleven months, the mother, day in and day out, told the girl that one shouldn’t and must not cry lest someone hear this outside and they be discovered. Now when the girl heard the mother crying, she asked her that question. I can speak of other scenes which I saw, but this matter of the girl, perhaps this speaks more eloquently than many other events.
62
On July 13, at a pit near Bialystok, a group of Jews were at work, as part of the ‘Blobel Commando’ set up in Bialystok a year earlier, digging up and burning the bodies of those massacred in the autumn of 1941. Suddenly, German soldiers armed with automatic weapons surrounded them in a semi-circle. ‘I was in the first row,’ Abraham Karasick later recalled. ‘I saw that near me they were coming.’