Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (13 page)
In the fighting now nearly ended, six thousand Jews had been killed in action with the Polish forces. A further sixty-one thousand had been among the six hundred thousand Polish soldiers taken prisoners-of-war by the Germans. From the first days of their captivity, the Jewish soldiers were subjected to particularly harsh treatment. One prisoner-of-war, Joseph Berger, later recalled how, on the Day of Atonement, he and other Jewish prisoners-of-war were forced to clean the lavatories with their bare hands, as a special indignity.
24
Another Jewish prisoner-of-war described how, marching with a group of Polish prisoners-of-war, he hurt his foot, and was unable to keep up with the rest:
The transport leader noticed this and told me to sit on one of the carts which accompanied us. I mounted the wagon, sat
down and took my shoes off to ease the pain in my feet, which were covered in blood. Unfortunately, the German who had given out the bread saw this. He made me get off the cart, aimed his rifle at me and bellowed: ‘Du kannst laufen, Jude.’ ‘You can run, Jew.’ He began pushing me towards those at the front, who were about five hundred metres ahead. By making a supreme effort I managed to avoid his bayonet and, given no alternative, began to run. For more than ten kilometres my ‘guard’ gave me no peace, constantly threatening to shoot me, cutting my coat with his bayonet. When the German cavalry passed us he pushed me among the horses so that they should trample me. In this fashion, under incessant threat of death, I reached Wegrowiec. I was a broken man, I wanted to cry from pain.
At Wagrowiec, this eye-witness later recalled, whenever the Germans discovered a Jewish prisoner-of-war, ‘they made him stand in a ditch full of water for more than half an hour’.
25
On September 28, before the Polish army had been finally defeated, and two days before German forces entered Warsaw, Soviet and German forces reached their pre-arranged line, east of Warsaw, and Poland was partitioned. Tens of thousands of Polish soldiers, among them several thousand Jews, gave themselves up to the Red Army as it occupied the eastern Polish cities of Vilna, Grodno, Bialystok, Brest-Litovsk, Pinsk, Rowne and Lvov. In certain areas, German troops withdrew to make way for their Soviet counterparts. Among the towns thus transferred from German to Soviet control were Przemysl, where Asscher Gitter had been among the forty-three leading citizens murdered by the Nazis, and Siemiatycze, where Yosl the turner had been shot.
As soon as the fighting stopped, but before the new border had been patrolled and closed, a mass movement of Polish Jews began, eastward, to the Polish territory which had so suddenly and unexpectedly come under Soviet control. In the six years between 1933 and 1939, three hundred thousand German Jews had left Germany as refugees; now, in the six weeks between the end of September and mid-November 1939, more than a quarter of a million Polish Jews were able to flee eastwards, crossing the rivers Narew, Bug and San, to the Soviet zone, and to the Soviet Union.
‘We only knew that we must get to the Bug,’ an eighteen-year-old
Jewish girl, Vitka Kempner, later recalled. ‘The Jews in the little towns on the Bug, they did a wonderful job,’ rescuing Jews, sheltering them, and helping them to cross the river. Vitka Kempner had come from the western Polish city of Kalisz: on the night after the Germans had locked many Jews in the city church, she had managed to jump from one of the windows, and to begin her journey eastward.
26
While some Jews were now shot in flight, others were ordered by the Germans to flee. From Pultusk more than eight thousand Jews, nearly half of the town’s population, were driven out of the town to the river Narew and forced to cross to the Soviet zone. The Jews of Pultusk could trace their residence in the town back to 1486. A Jewish festival, Succoth, was chosen for their deportation. The week of Succoth began on the evening of 28 September 1939, the day of the establishment of the Nazi-Soviet partition line.
27
Several large towns close to the new border were the scenes of sudden, mass expulsion. In each of them the Jews were expelled without time even to bundle up their essential needs. At Tarnobrzeg, some four thousand Jews were assembled in the market place, robbed of everything they carried, and then driven eastwards across the San, many being murdered on the way.
28
At the bank of the San, several thousand Jews, driven out of Rozwadow, Lezajsk and Lancut, were forced over the river. An eye-witness of these events recalled, immediately after the war:
We arrived at the river San on the third day of our exile. What happened there is difficult to describe. On the bank of the river Gestapo-men were waiting and driving people into a boat, or rather raft of two unbalanced boards, from which women and children fell into the river. We saw floating corpses everywhere; near the bank women stood in the water, holding their children above their heads and crying for help, to which the Gestapo-men answered by shooting. Blood, masses of floating corpses. It is impossible to describe the despair, shouts and helplessness of people in such a situation.
29
Hardly had the expulsion of Jews eastward been completed, than a new policy, emanating from Berlin, led to the expulsion into German-occupied Poland of thousands of Jews from the eastern towns of Greater Germany. On October 17, more than a thousand
Jews from the former Czechoslovak city of Moravska Ostrava were deported by train to the Lublin region of Poland, and there forced to build a labour camp for themselves. In the Nazi terminology of deception, the camp was given the name ‘Central Office for Jewish Resettlement’.
As one of their number, Max Burger, later recalled, the Jews deported from Moravska Ostrava were put into railway coaches—passenger coaches—on October 17. The coaches were placed under SS guard, locked and sealed. On October 18 the train began to move. No water was available, and when, at Cracow station, those in the train pleaded for water, and Poles on the platform wished to help them, Stormtroops chased away the Poles ‘with rifle blows’. On reaching Nisko station, in the Lublin region, all engineers, builders and doctors among the deported Jews were ordered to leave the train. Because the doors of the train were sealed, they had to clamber out through the windows. Then, surrounded by SS guards, they found themselves among other Jews who had been deported from Prague and Vienna.
A German officer then addressed them. He was Adolf Eichmann, now in charge of ‘Jewish resettlement’, as he had earlier been in charge of emigration. ‘About seven or eight kilometres from here,’ Eichmann told them, ‘across the river San, the “Führer” of the Jews has promised a new homeland. There are no apartments and no houses—if you will build your homes you will have a roof over your head.’ There was ‘no water’, Eichmann added. ‘The wells are full of epidemics, there’s cholera, dysentery and typhus. If you dig for water, you’ll have water.’
The deported Jews were then sent across a pontoon bridge to the ‘resettlement’ region. Once there, such luggage as they had been able to bring was opened, and German soldiers ‘just took whatever they wanted’.
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Thousands of other Jews soon arrived: elderly Jews from Vienna, Jews who had been captured trying to escape from Moravska Ostrava to Prague, Jews caught on the outbreak of war at Hamburg docks, waiting to board ship for the United States, and Jews from the port city of Stettin.
The conditions in the Lublin region, and in the city of Lublin, were harrowing: in December 1939 the Commander-in-Chief of the German Army Group South, Field Marshal Blaskowitz, who served briefly as Military Governor of Poland, reported that many Jewish
children arrived in the transport trains frozen to death, and that those who survived the journey then died of starvation in the villages in which they were ‘resettled’.
31
Also sent to Lublin were several thousand Jewish prisoners-of-war. They were put in a special camp in the city itself, at 7 Lipowa Street, and allowed to write short letters to their families. Almost none of the letters was posted. Five years later, at the time of the liberation of Lublin, they were found in the Nazi archives in Lublin. Their ‘senders’ had subsequently been killed after more than four years of torment in the Lipowa Street camp.
32
From the first week of the invasion of Poland, the Germans had established a euthanasia programme for ‘mental defectives’: not only Poles and Jews, but also Germans. The site to which mental patients were sent, and then killed, was in a forest near the village of Piasnica, not far from Danzig. Here, from the middle of October 1939 until the end of the year, several thousand ‘defectives’ were killed: twelve hundred of them being Germans who were sent there from psychiatric institutions inside Germany. Kurt Eimann, the SS officer in charge of the executions, was later accused—at Hanover in 1968—of having personally shot the first victim in the back of the head, as an example for the rest of his men.
33
One victim of this programme was Adolf Lipschitz, a psychiatric patient in a hospital near Poznan, and a Jew. One day in November 1939, Lipschitz’s father, who lived in Warsaw, was summoned to Gestapo headquarters, where he was presented with a bill for his son’s treatment starting on 1 September 1939, the day of the German occupation of the hospital, and ending on October 19. When asked why the bill was only up to October 19, he was told that on that day his son, together with all the other mentally ill, had been shot. The bill covered the cost of his son’s maintenance up to the day of his execution. The father was then presented with a receipt, and with a death certificate signed by a doctor.
34
On October 21, while the deportations continued of Jews to the Lublin region, and of mentally ill to Piasnica, in Warsaw four citizens were executed for ‘possession of firearms and ammunition in violation of the regulations’. One of them was listed in the official German announcement as ‘A Jew, Samson Lutsenburg’.
35
Four days later, in Cracow, Hans Frank, Governor of a newly created administrative area, the ‘General Government’, covering central
Poland, including Warsaw and Cracow, announced, in the first issue of his official General Government gazette, that ‘as of now’ all Jews living in the newly created region ‘are obliged to work’, and that they would, ‘with this aim in mind’, be formed into forced labour teams.
36
Henceforth, all Polish Jewish males between the ages of fourteen and sixty had to register for work, and were rapidly taken off to a growing number of forced labour camps, of which there were twenty-eight in the Lublin region, twenty-one in the Kielce region, fourteen in the Warsaw region, twelve in the Cracow region and ten in the Rzeszow region by the end of 1939.
In order to end the random and cruel abduction of Jews seized on the streets and taken to forced labour, a Jewish Council, which had already been set up in Warsaw in conformity with Heydrich’s directive of September 21, offered to organize a daily quota of Jewish workers, provided that the abductions stopped. The Germans accepted this suggestion, and in October set a quota for ‘work brigades’ which averaged 381 men a day. Providing this quota thus became the responsibility of the Jewish Council, and of its Chairman, Adam Czerniakow.
The abductions ceased, and the brigades were created by voluntary enlistment, made up mostly of Jewish refugees in the city, and of poor Jews for whom the pittance paid was their sole income.
37
The process of confining the Jews according to Heydrich’s directive of September 21 began just over a month later, on October 8, with the order to establish a ghetto in Piotrkow by the end of the month. All Jews who lived outside the ghetto-designated area were forced to leave their homes and to move into the ghetto. The only Jews who were later allowed to live outside the ghetto were Dr Shanster, who had converted to Christianity sixty years earlier, Jacob Witorz, who held Turkish citizenship, his wife and two sons Beniek and Shimek, and a Jew who was an Egyptian citizen, Kem, with his wife and twelve-year-old son Jerzyk.
38
Before the end of the year, a second ghetto had been set up in nearby Radomsko, while plans were also being made for a ghetto to be established in Lodz, the home of Poland’s second largest Jewish community.
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In Lodz, where 233,000 Jews made up a third of the city’s population, daily incidents characterized the fate of Polish Jewry. Mary Berg, who had gone from Warsaw to Lodz, and had begun to
keep a diary, recorded how, on November 2, she looked out of her window:
A man with markedly Semitic features was standing quietly on the sidewalk near the curb. A uniformed German approached him and apparently gave him an unreasonable order, for I could see that the poor fellow tried to explain something with an embarrassed expression. Then a few other uniformed Germans came upon the scene and began to beat their victim with rubber truncheons. They called a cab and tried to push him into it, but he resisted vigorously. The Germans then tied his legs together with a rope, attached the end of the rope to the cab from behind, and ordered the driver to start. The unfortunate man’s face struck the sharp stones of the pavement, dyeing them red with blood. Then the cab vanished down the street.
40
The Germans who carried out such atrocities had been exposed for more than six years to the full venom of anti-Jewish propaganda: at school, in the newspapers, in their place of work, in the streets, and in their military indoctrination. ‘Behind all the enemies of Germany’s ascendancy’, a Berlin anti-Communist magazine declared on November 2, ‘stand those who demand our encirclement—the oldest enemies of the German people and of all healthy, rising nations—the Jews.’
41
On November 7 the Germans began the expulsion of Jews from western Poland. Three regions were each to be ‘cleared’ of Jews: the former Polish corridor, now part of Danzig-West Prussia; the Poznan region, now the Warthegau; and the Plonsk region north of Warsaw, now part of Greater East Prussia. From these three regions, forty thousand Jews were driven out; each family forced overnight, or at most in a few days, to abandon its home, its livelihood and its possessions, and move into one of the towns of the newly established General Government region of Poland.