Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (79 page)
They were taken to a red-brick building, which bore the letters ‘B-a-d’, that is to say ‘bath’. There, to begin with, they were made to undress and given a towel before they went into the so-called shower room. Later on, at the time of the large convoys, they had no more time left to play-act or to pretend; they were brutally undressed, and I know these details as I knew a little Jewess from France who lived with her family at the ‘Republique’ in Paris. She was called ‘little Marie’.
Little Marie was the sole survivor of a family of nine. Her mother and her seven brothers and sisters had been gassed on arrival. When I met her she was employed to undress the babies before they were taken into the gas-chamber. Once the people were undressed they took them into a room which was somewhat like a shower room, and gas capsules were thrown through an opening in the ceiling. An SS man would watch the effect produced, through a porthole. At the end of five or seven minutes, when the gas had completed its work, he gave the signal to open the doors, and men with gas masks—they too were internees—went into the room and removed the corpses. They told us that the internees must have suffered before dying, because they were closely clinging to each other and it was very difficult to separate them.
5
On January 22 more than four thousand Jews were seized in Marseilles under ‘Action Tiger’. Two years earlier the Germans had mocked Marseilles as ‘the new Jerusalem of the Mediterranean’, where the Jews ‘reigned as lords of the cafés and restaurants, waiting for the victory of the Americans’. Now these Jews, many of
them refugee children, were held in detention camps, awaiting deportation, among the orphan refugees and the women who looked after them. At La Rose, four miles east of Marseilles, thirty Jewish orphans were seized, together with their guardian Alice Salomon, who insisted on sharing their fate.
6
On March 23 they were deported to Sobibor and gassed.
7
The Germans also sought to round up all Jews living in the zone of France under Italian control. But on January 23 the Italians refused to ‘cooperate’.
8
Five weeks later Italian troops prevented the Germans from deporting them.
9
From the region under direct German control there was however no pause. Of two thousand Jews deported from Theresienstadt to Birkenau on January 23, eighteen hundred were gassed on arrival, and of the two hundred ‘spared’, and sent to the Buna works at Monowitz, only three survived the war.
10
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For almost exactly a year, the mass deportation of Jews to an ‘unknown destination’, and their murder there by gas, had proceeded amid tight secrecy, and to the growing alarm of those in the yet untouched communities. Day by day, the inexorable round-up spread to every hamlet, however remote, of that vast population which had once been known, in its years of glory, as the ‘Jewish Nation in Poland’. Nor was the truth about the final destination any longer easy to hide, especially from those remaining communities which were situated in the same regions as the death camps.
On January 24, all thousand Jews from Jasionowka, near Bialystok, were rounded up for deportation to Treblinka, and put on sledges for the journey to the nearest railway station. ‘They knew what is “Treblinka”,’ Szymon Datner later recalled. ‘They knew their fate,’ and he added:
There was one man, a very big man physically, a carter, who was accustomed to such terrible things as winter and cold and rain. He had lived outside in the winter, and he could have escaped. He could have run off into the woods.
But he had in his arms a six-month-old baby—the youngest of his children. And he was together on the sledge with his wife and other children. His wife, who knew also all the truth, she
said, ‘Get away, jump, you will survive. What is the use of dying together?’ But he said, ‘No. I will not leave you.’
The carter’s decision, Datner later reflected, ‘was also an act of heroism:
not
to escape. It was a passive act of heroism,’ and he went on: ‘I have my full respect before such an act of a simple man. I bow my head in respect before him.’
11
Those who sheltered Jews were also taking a mortal risk. On January 29, in the village of Wierzbica, the Germans executed fifteen Poles: three families who were accused of sheltering three Jews. Among the fifteen Poles executed that day was a two-year-old girl.
12
Even independent states came under continual German pressure. In February 1943 the German government pressed the Hungarian government to send ten thousand Hungarian Jews as forced labourers in the copper mines at Bor, in Yugoslavia. For several months the Hungarian government refused; then it yielded. While three quarters of a million Hungarian Jews remained unmolested, ten thousand were sent to a camp in whose harsh conditions several thousand perished.
13
Disobedience to German orders, difficult for an independent state such as Hungary, was impossible for the Jews. On February 4, in Lvov, the Germans summoned the surviving twelve members of the Jewish Council to appear before them. Ten appeared. Refusing to comply with the German wishes, they suffered the supreme penalty. Four were murdered: Eberson, the Chairman, Marceli Buber, Oswald Kimmelman and Jacob Chigier. The other six were sent to the concentration camp at Janowska. The two Council members who hid, Dr Schertzer and Leib Landau, were discovered by the Germans in their hiding place in ‘Aryan’ Lvov, and shot.
14
In Buczacz, most of the thirteen hundred surviving Jews not deported to Belzec were murdered on February 1. One of the few who survived, fourteen-year-old Netka Goldberg, lost her three sisters, her two brothers and her mother on that day of killing. Her father, who also survived the massacres, was killed seven months later.
15
At Birkenau, on February 5, a roll-call was held from three-thirty in the early hours of the morning until five in the evening. All day the Jews stood there, for nearly fourteen hours, in the snow, and
without any food. Three years later, Claude Vaillant Couturier recalled how, at five o’clock that evening:
We had to go through the door one by one, and we were struck in the back with a cudgel, each one of us, in order to make us run. Those who could not run, either because they were too old or too ill, were caught by a hook and taken to Block 25, the ‘waiting block’, for the gas-chamber.
On that day ten of the French women of our convoy were thus caught and taken to the waiting block.
When all the internees were back in the camp, a party to which I belonged was organised to go and pick up the bodies of the dead which were scattered over the plain as on a battlefield. We carried to the yard of Block 25 the dead and the dying without distinction, and they remained there stacked in the courtyard.
This Block 25, which was the ante-room of the gas-chamber, if one may so call it, is well known to me because at that time we had been transferred to Block 26 and our windows opened on the yard of Block 25. One saw stacks of corpses piled up in the courtyard, and from time to time a hand or a head would stir amongst the bodies, trying to free itself; it was a dying woman attempting to get free and live.
The rate of mortality in that Block was even more terrible than elsewhere because, having been condemned to death, they received food or drink only if there was something left in the cans in the kitchen; which means that very often they went for several days without a drop of water.
Madame Vaillant Couturier added that in the courtyard of Block 25 ‘there were rats as big as cats running about and gnawing the corpses, and even attacking the dying, who had not enough strength left to chase them away.’ Her account continued:
One of our companions, Annette Epaux, a fine young woman of thirty, passing the Block one day, was overcome with pity for those women who moaned from morning till night in all languages, ‘Drink, drink, water!’ She came back to our Block to get a little herbal tea, but as she was passing it through the bars of the window she was seen by the Supervisor, who took her by the neck and threw her into Block 25.
All my life I will remember Annette Epaux. Two days later I saw her on the truck which was taking the internees to the gas-chamber. She had her arms round another French woman, old Celina Forcher, and when the truck started moving, she cried, ‘Think of my little boy, if you ever get back to France,’ then they started singing the ‘Marseillaise’.
16
During February, fifteen trains reached Birkenau: from Westerbork camp in Holland, from Drancy near Paris, from Berlin, and from Bialystok. At least five thousand of the deportees were gassed.
17
The deportees from Berlin were mostly Jewish factory workers, seized in the factories in which they were working, and not allowed to go home even to collect personal belongings.
Eight of the deportees from Berlin had been brought from Finland. They were the first of more than two thousand Finnish Jews, and Jews who had found refuge in Finland, whom the Germans wished to deport.
The only survivor of those deported from Finland was the Viennese-born Dr Georg Kollman. He, with the other seven, had been brought from Helsinki by boat across the Gulf of Finland to Reval, then by train to Berlin, and then on the Berlin train to Auschwitz, a journey of more than twelve hundred miles.
The seven Jews from Finland who were deported included the thirty-six-year-old Hans Eduard Szubilski, who had come to Finland as a refugee from Germany in 1938, and two children, Kurt Huppert, aged eleven, whose father Heinrich Huppert, an Austrian Jew who had reached Finland as a refugee in 1938, also perished, and George Kollman’s son, the twenty-two-month-old Frans Olof Kollman, who was gassed together with his mother. Szubilski, taken to the barracks at Birkenau, was later ‘shot while attempting to escape’.
No further Jews were deported from Finland after this first transport. Following protests by the minority Social Democratic Party, several Lutheran ministers, and the Archbishop, the Finnish Cabinet which in August 1942 had deferred to Himmler’s pressure while on a ‘private unofficial holiday visit’ to deport the Jews from Finland to Germany, refused to agree to any further deportations.
18
At Auschwitz, those not gassed immediately, but sent to the barracks, also died in considerable numbers. In February 1943 there
were 3,049 deaths in the barracks at Birkenau, of whom 1,690 were men and women judged too weak to work, and gassed.
19
Some were so weak, from hunger or disease, that they died in the barracks, or on the parade ground. Many were killed by the guards.
The Bialystok deportation on February 5 was accompanied by an act of defiance. A dyer, the forty-year-old Yitzhak Maimed, whose wife, two children and parents had been murdered by the Germans in Slonim in June 1941, on finding his apartment block surrounded, threw sulphuric acid into the face of the first German to enter it, a police officer by the name of Muenter. Blinded and in pain, Muenter started shooting, and, by mistake, shot a Gestapo officer, Wilhelm Fritsch, in the head. Fritsch died instantly. As a reprisal, the Germans seized and shot a hundred Jews, most of them from the apartment block where Maimed lived. Maimed managed to escape, whereupon the Germans then announced that unless he were found, five thousand Jews would be shot. This threat was brought to Maimed, who, according to several Jewish survivors, gave himself up.
20
He was hanged by the Germans at the entrance to the ghetto, ‘suspended’, Abraham Karasick recalled, ‘for three days at the gate’.
21
A wall plaque, in Yiddish, records to this day Yitzhak Malmed’s desperate act.
22
After learning that the Jewish Council had prepared a list of candidates for deportation, Zvi Wider, a member of the Council, and former Chairman of one of the leading Jewish charitable organizations in Bialystok, committed suicide.
23
A ladies’ tailor, the forty-three-year-old Nochum Babikier, was one of those deported, in a train escorted by Ukrainian guards, and surrounded at each station where it stopped by yet more Ukrainians. Three years later Babikier, who was deported with his father, his son, and his sister Niomke, recalled:
The train left at about 3 p.m. The people were anxious, they hardly spoke, buried in their thoughts, waiting anxiously to see which direction the train will take. The train went past Starosielce. After a while those watching by the little window called out in despair: ‘We are lost, we are going to Malkinia, that means to our deaths in Treblinka.’
Panic broke out in the carriage, people wringing their hands.
The young decided to force open the door and jump from the train. With a piece of iron a hole was made in the door and a few people jumped. From Starosielce onwards the sound of gunfire filled the train. Young people from all the carriages were jumping, and the Ukrainians were shooting at them. Most of those who jumped were killed on the spot.
In my carriage people stopped jumping. In the carriage the thirty-year-old owner of a cosmetics shop on Gieldowa Street cut his throat with a razor. No one came to his assistance. Suddenly the train stopped in the middle of a field. The Germans walked from carriage to carriage and where they found the door had been opened, fired into the carriage. In my carriage the passengers themselves bolted the door.
The train started. A refugee doctor gave himself an injection. The injection did not work. There was a hook in the middle of the ceiling; he put his belt through it and then, not molested by anyone, hanged himself. But the belt did not hold him, he fell down, and remained alive. Another doctor gave his thirteen-year-old son poison, then took it himself. They talked: ‘My child, what will your mother, in heaven, say about me, for killing you?’ The child: ‘I don’t want to die, but I prefer death from you than from the Germans.’
After a while a bullet from a rifle went through the wall of the carriage and hit one person in the stomach. He suffered for half an hour, shouted for help, then died.