The Holocaust (27 page)

The Jewish Council in Gliniany, headed by Aaron Hochberg, ‘defended our people’, so Salomon Speiser recalled, ‘to the very day when they themselves fell victim to the murderers’.
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In the Volhynian town of Miedzyrzec, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Abraham Shvetz, committed suicide after the Germans ordered him to deliver a hundred, or according to another version, two hundred and fifty young and healthy Jews, ostensibly for labour in Kiev.
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Following a similar order to deliver a large group of able-bodied Jews for forced labour outside Rowne, Jacob Sucharczuk appealed to his fellow Council members not to submit any lists at all. When he was overruled, he went home and committed suicide. Some time later, when the Chairman of the Jewish Council at Rowne, Dr Bergman, was ordered to deliver a number of Jews for resettlement, he said he would deliver only himself and his family. Shortly afterwards, he too committed suicide.
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German reports make it clear that the Jews were not without resources of their own. ‘Jews continue to display hostile behaviour,’ one Einsatzkommando reported on August 9. ‘They sabotage German orders, especially where they are strong in numbers.’ But the fire power of the Germans was overwhelming: against machine guns, rifles and grenades, unarmed men had no means of successful resistance, or of protecting their women and children. The Einsatzkommando report of August 9 listed 510 Jews killed most recently in Brest-Litovsk and 296 in Bialystok. It added that Ukrainian militia commandos ‘have persons shot if they do not please them, as was done before’.
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As the Einsatzkommando units moved on to new towns and villages, the surviving Jews in the newly established ghettos were subject to the full rigour of segregation. On August 15 Hinrich Lohse, the Reich Commissar for the newly designated Eastern Territories of the Ostland region, covering what had earlier been Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and White Russia, issued a directive ordering all Jews to be registered; to wear two yellow badges, one on the chest, one on the back; not to walk on the pavements, not to use public transport, not to visit parks, playgrounds, theatres, cinemas, libraries or museums; not to own cars or radio sets. All Jewish property outside the designated ghetto area was to be confiscated. The ghetto was to be cut off physically from the rest of the town, its food supplies to be restricted to food that was ‘surplus’ to local needs. All able-bodied Jews were to be subject to forced labour.
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By August 15, the day of Lohse’s directive, the twenty-six thousand surviving Jews of Kovno had been forcibly removed from their homes throughout the city, to a small suburb, Viliampole, in which, henceforth, they were to be confined. Each person was allowed only three square feet of living space. Dr Grinberg later recalled:

Another survivor of the Kovno ghetto, Aharon Peretz, has confirmed that the creation of the ghetto was seen at first as a security against further pogroms.
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The daily murder of Jews in hundreds of smaller localities continued, unaffected by the establishment of ghettos in the larger towns and cities. On August 15, the day of confinement and apparent safety for the twenty-six thousand Jews in Kovno, six hundred Jews in Stawiski, near Bialystok, were taken to the nearby woods, and shot.
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Only sixty remained alive, as forced labourers. That same day, at Rokiskis, a two-day massacre began, in which 3,200 Jews were shot: men, women and children, together with ‘5 Lithuanian Communists, 1 Pole, 1 partisan’.
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On the second day of the Rokiskis killings, an official report drawn up in Berlin dwelt upon the attitude of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. Bishop Brisgys, the report stated, ‘has forbidden clergymen to help Jews in any form whatsoever. He rejected several Jewish delegations who, approaching him personally, asked for intervention with the German authorities. He will not admit any Jews at all in future.’
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On August 17, at Khmelnik in the Ukraine, three hundred of the ‘most healthy’ men were assembled. The pretext, Maria Rubinstein later recalled, ‘was that there was a need for workers. All were killed. It was known almost at once, because some people heard shots. My father was among them.’ So Grigory Rubinstein met his
death, leaving in the ghetto his wife Polina, and seven sons and daughters, the youngest Dina, only a year old.
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The Einsatzkommando justified their murders by tales of growing Jewish resistance, including the activities of special ‘destruction’ battalions of the Red Army whose task was to carry out sabotage behind the German lines. A ‘great number’ of Jews had been found in these battalions, among them many Jewish women.
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Even outside these battalions, another report stated, ‘the insubordinations of the Jews increases’, so much so that repair work had been stopped on the Kowel—Luck road. At Lida, the local brewery ‘was burnt down by Jews’.
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To prevent any show of Jewish resistance, the Germans resorted to massive reprisals. After a single German policeman had been shot dead in an ambush near Pinsk, the Einsatzkommando unit in the area reported that, ‘as a reprisal, 4,500 Jews were liquidated’.
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Jewish acts of defiance, however hopeless, were continuous. An Einsatzkommando report of August 22 tells of Jews in a town on the line of the German advance towards Kiev, giving ‘fire signals’ to the Red Army ‘even after the town had been occupied by German troops’. In this same town, one Jew had set fire to his house when he learned that it had been requisitioned by the German army, while another ‘managed to tell a German soldier that a box containing gunpowder that had been found, was harmless and not inflammable. A soldier who joined them smoking a cigarette suffered severe burns.’
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Jewish defiance took many forms. At Kedainiai, on August 28, an Einsatzkommando unit drove more than two thousand Jews, among them 710 men, 767 women and 599 children, into a ditch. Suddenly, a Jewish butcher jumped up, seized one of the German soldiers, dragged him into the ditch, and sank his teeth into the German’s throat with a fatal bite. All two thousand Jews, including the butcher, were then shot.

At nearby Kelme, where the Jews had been forced to dig the ditch in which they were to be shot, the local rabbi, Rabbi Daniel, asked the German commander for permission to speak to his congregation. Permission was granted, on condition that the rabbi would be brief. He spoke softly and unhurriedly, telling his congregation of the significance of the Jewish religious precept of
Kiddush Ha-Shem
, Hebrew for ‘the sanctification of the Name of God’, a term
used in Jewish tradition for martyrdom. After a while, the German officer interrupted. The time had come to finish. ‘Fellow Jews!’ Rabbi Daniel called out. ‘The moment has come when we have to fulfil the precept of sanctification of the Name which I just spoke about. I request only one thing of you: let us not panic; let us accept our fate willingly and lovingly.’ Rabbi Daniel then turned to the German commander with the words: ‘I have finished; you may begin now.’

When news of the destruction of the Jews of Kedainiai and Kelme reached the Jews of Kovno, Rabbi Shapiro of Kovno was asked by his troubled congregation which of the two reactions, that of Rabbi Daniel or that of the butcher, he thought to be more laudable. ‘In my opinion’, he replied, ‘they were equally noble.’ The farewell sermon of Rabbi Daniel ‘was the most fitting form of behaviour for him; on the other hand, the Jew who bit the German’s throat also fulfilled the precept of sanctification of the Name.’ Rabbi Daniel had glorified God’s name by spiritual devotion, the butcher by way of a physical act. ‘I am certain’, Rabbi Shapiro added, ‘that under certain circumstances Rabbi Daniel could also have done the same as the butcher.’
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The smallest act of resistance provoked savage reprisals. In September 1941 a White Russian villager, in explaining to a Soviet partisan parachutist why his village was reluctant to take part in anti-German action behind the lines, told the parachutist this story:

Among the Jews who urged resistance to German rule was a former Polish senator, Dr Jacob Wigodsky, who for twenty years had been the leader of Vilna Jewry. He was arrested in Vilna on
August 24 and held in prison.
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He was eighty-six years old. A week later, he was killed at Ponar.

With the United States still neutral, with Russian forces being driven eastward, and with Britain still on the defensive in North Africa, the German power to treat the Jews as it wished was unchallengeable. News of the killings, however, continued to reach the West, and was thought to be exclusively of Russian defenders in or behind the battle zone. As Hitler’s armies advanced, Churchill broadcast to the British people on August 24, ‘whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands—literally scores of thousands—of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the sixteenth century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.’

Churchill made no specific reference to the Jews: had he done so, it would have indicated to the Germans that British Intelligence was listening to their most secret messages. But he did make it clear that the Germans were carrying out what he called ‘the most frightful cruelties’, and he added: ‘We are in the presence of a crime without a name.’
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The week following Churchill’s broadcast, seventeen separate reports of the shooting of Jews and Russians, in groups of between 61 and 4,200, were sent to Berlin by secret radio code from the eastern front.
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Throughout August and September, the scale of killings increased. On August 25, at a conference in Vinnitsa, the German military and civilian authorities discussed the future of eleven thousand Jewish forced labourers who were then at Kamenets Podolsk. These were Hungarian Jews, mostly from the areas annexed by Hungary from Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, who had been deported by the Hungarian government, in an act of mass expulsion. The Germans demanded that these Jews be taken back, as they ‘could not cope’ with them. The Hungarian government refused. A senior SS officer, Lieutenant-General Franz Jaeckeln, then assured the Vinnitsa conference that he would ‘complete the liquidation of those Jews by September 1, 1941’.

Between August 27 and August 29, the eleven thousand Jews were marched out of Kamenets Podolsk, to a series of bomb craters ten miles outside the town. There, they were ordered to undress, and
machine-gunned. Many were buried alive.
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Franz Jaeckeln had kept his promise.
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One of those who was forced to dig what he believed to be anti-tank ditches at Kamenets Podolsk, Leslie Gordon, later recalled the deportation from Budapest to the east. On reaching a certain eastern town the Jews were forced out of the trucks and told: ‘Go eastward. Don’t come back. Don’t even look back.’ Some people left the group ‘to do the hygienic things on the side, and they were shot right on the spot’. With Leslie Gordon had been his sixty-eight-year-old father, his forty-three-year-old mother, his four brothers aged twenty-two, sixteen, fourteen and five, and his younger sister, aged eight. Only he survived, and he survived only because he had been taken away for a special task: