Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (89 page)
The previously ‘disinfected’ buildings were ignited, and an enormous fire broke out. The arsenal exploded, and many of the camp buildings were set on fire, among them the storerooms for the shoes and clothes of the victims. The chief of the guards, SS Quartermaster Sergeant Kittner, was shot dead, and in the ensuing fighting fifteen other German and Ukrainian guards were killed. Of the seven hundred Jewish workers in the camp, more than one hundred and fifty succeeded in escaping. The rest were killed in the camp.
19
Some of the escaped Jews were hunted down by German and Ukrainian units and shot. Others, reaching the River Bug, were helped by a Pole, Stanislaw Siwek.
20
Acts of revolt and resistance continued throughout August 1943. In the labour camp at Konin the Jews, led by Rabbi Joshua Moshe Aaronson, burned down the huts in the camp, and tried to escape.
Almost all of them were killed.
21
At Bedzin, on August 3, Baruch Graftek was among the Jews who challenged the Nazis on the eve of the deportation. At the age of thirty, he had commanded the Jewish Fighting Organization in the ghetto. But he and his fellow fighters were all killed.
22
In Vilna, on August 6, dozens of Jews who attempted to resist deportation to Vaivara labour camp in Estonia were shot down.
23
In Warsaw, another twenty-seven Jews, all women, who had been seized in the ‘Aryan’ part of the city, were executed on August 10, followed at the end of the month by a further forty-seven women and fifty men, charged with ‘non-Aryan descent’.
24
Inside the labour camps, conditions were savage: on the night of August 15 nearly a thousand French Jews, most of them born in Poland, were taken to a camp on the Channel Island of Alderney. One of the survivors of Alderney camp, Albert Eblagon, later recalled how the Jews, on reaching the port, were forced to run the two kilometres to the camp, ‘while the German guards continuously stabbed into our backs with their bayonets while also kicking us all the time’. Eblagon added:
There were many men among us over seventy years of age but nobody was spared. Work, hard physical work for twelve and fourteen hours a day, every day, building the fortifications. Every day there were beatings and people’s bones were broken, their arms or their legs. People died from overwork. We were starved and worked to death, so many died from total exhaustion.
25
Hundreds of Jews died at Alderney, of exhaustion and ill-treatment: 384 were buried in the camp itself, and many others dumped at sea. Among the names recorded on the few marked graves are Chayim Goldin, Robert Perlestein and Leib Becker, each of whom died in December 1943.
26
Throughout German-occupied France, Jews were active in the various underground groups which had begun to disrupt German communications, and to make plans to assist the Allies to prepare for the cross-Channel invasion. On August 6, a fifty-five-year-old French Jew, Albert Kohan, was smuggled out of France, to Britain. His mission was to make contact between the French underground forces in France and their representatives in London. Kohan remained
in London for only a few weeks, before being parachuted back into France. There, he continued with his resistance activities, but on his second journey to Britain was killed in an air crash.
27
***
In the Bialystok ghetto, thirty thousand Jews lived and worked unmolested since that black February six months earlier when ten thousand Jews had been deported to Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz. In Bialystok itself, it was still thought that work for the German army would prove the ghetto’s protection. A hundred and fifty young Jews, members of the Jewish Fighting Organization, prepared to resist, should deportation come, but they had no means of knowing when the day would arrive.
At four in the morning of August 16, German soldiers entered the ghetto, occupied the factories, and set up their headquarters in the Jewish Council building.
The twenty-one-year-old Bertha Sokolskaya later recalled how there had been an announcement in the ghetto that ‘they will begin to deport us to work and that each of us will be allowed to take a five-kilogrammes parcel of belongings.’ Her account continued:
I went home. At that time I had with me my very sick mother whom I managed to hide with great difficulties during the first raid. I couldn’t tell her anything. She began collecting some clothes and was terribly agitated because the hinge of the cupboard came off and she was worried how she could leave without closing it. The scale of the tragedy did not reach my mother’s consciousness. It was still daytime and she said, ‘Go to the Judenrat, maybe you’ll be able to find out something,’ and suddenly she added, ‘My darling little girl, perhaps you will be saved.’
I went to the Judenrat where the Sonderkommando already were bossing the whole show. Smart, elegant Barasz was trying to ingratiate himself, but I saw for myself that they were no longer speaking to him, they were just ordering him about and kicking him.
I went into the building of the Judenrat where all its members were gathered. Everybody was in a great state of agitation. We all finally understood that the end had come. I left the Judenrat and went—no, it’s more accurate to say—I joined the group of
young people, and we found a bunker where we hid for several days and where preparations were being made for an uprising. We had bottles filled with molten lead.
When we were discovered and turned out, we were put against the wall. We thought that we will be shot, but instead we were driven into the general stream of people on the road heading towards Boyary, the eastern railway station on the outskirts of the town, and to the goods trains. It was horrifying. The stream of people were shepherded by barking dogs and were kicked with rifles by the Germans and by the Ukrainian Gestapo dressed in black uniforms. The Ukrainians, ordered by their masters in white gloves, did all their dirty work.
People who had a right to live walked on the pavement, maybe I am wrong, but I think they were indifferent to us. Our march was long and tortuous. Finally we reached our destination, the large square. After having been sorted out, the goods trains were leaving. I know now that these trains were going towards Lublin-Majdanek, because Treblinka was already destroyed by the Jewish fighters. Panic-stricken, we hung on to each other. We were hit with rifles, we were pushed and shoved like cattle.
I saw my aunts and a cousin. They told me that my mother had already left and that she hoped I managed to hide somewhere. The Ukrainians were beating us and were stealing from us. We were lying on the ground, above us a star-studded sky on a warm August night. Every now and then cries of prayers and screams of ‘Hear! O Israel’ were heard.
In the morning they began to separate families. The Ukrainian women kept on laughing sadistically, saying: ‘Kiss goodbye. You’ll never see each other again.’ The men separated from the women. I cannot describe the horrific heartrending screams of anguish and weeping.
28
A group of Jewish fighters, led by Mordecai Tenenbaum and Daniel Moszkowicz, tried to break out of the ghetto. But the ghetto fence was surrounded by machine guns. For two hours they fought, their principal weapon being two light machine guns. They also had revolvers and hand grenades produced in the ghetto. The Germans attacked the Jews in the bunkers, and, with far superior fire power, drove them out. ‘We were about sixty to seventy people at that
time,’ Abraham Karasick later recalled, ‘and afterwards we could not resist any more’.
The captured fighters were sent to join the forty thousand Jews of the ghetto who were being assembled in a ‘concentration field’ near the city’s railway junction. There, groups of armed Germans were beating any Jew who fell out of line, and from time to time shooting them. All day and all night the Jews were kept in the field. Then, at noon on the second day, August 17, the Germans asked for all children under thirteen ‘under the pretext’, as Abraham Karasick recalled, ‘of giving them lunch’. Some parents hid their children, or tried to hide them. But more than twelve hundred children were rounded up and taken away. ‘I do not know what happened to them,’ Karasick recalled. ‘None of them was ever seen afterwards.’
29
The children deported from Bialystok were taken first to Theresienstadt, where their arrival was noted with concern by the tens of thousands of German, Austrian and Czech Jews being held there. ‘A train arrives at the ghetto,’ recalled Josef Polak, ‘bringing nearly thirteen hundred children aged from six to fifteen years. Nobody is allowed out in the streets, nobody is allowed to talk to the children. Closely guarded by the sentries and the SS, the children walk in a straggling procession, barefoot or in old boots, clad in rags, dirty, nothing but bags of skin and bone, to the delousing station.’ Polak added: ‘They are terrified, none of them utters a word, none of them smiles, but when they see the noticeboard with the word “gas” before the delousing station, they cling to each other, begin to cry, and refuse to enter. They evidently have some experience with gas from the East. But finally they are all bathed and furtively and in secret they tell some of the members of the disinfection group of their fate. At Bialystok the SS ‘Death Commando’ has shot their mothers and fathers before their eyes.’
While in Theresienstadt, the Bialystok children were lodged in houses surrounded by barbed wire, and ‘several score’, as Polak noted, died of disease. Those who were taken ill, he added, were taken to the Small Fortress section of the ghetto by the SS men ‘and beaten to death’.
30
Four weeks later, the surviving children were deported again, this time to Birkenau, where all of them were murdered, together with the fifty-three adults who had volunteered to accompany them.
31
During the Bialystok ghetto deportations, several hundred Jews managed to hide from the German search parties, thirty of them in an underground bunker in which, among others, the young Samuel Pisar and his mother found refuge. Later Pisar recalled:
By the glow of a candle I made out the features of my teacher of Latin and History; Professor Bergman, a fragile and kindly man, was rocking his infant son, trying to stop his coughing. On the other side of the trapdoor above us came the shouts of German search parties and the barking of their dogs.
We all fell silent; only the baby’s coughing continued. ‘Shhh’, hissed a burly man near the door. The coughing did not stop. The man crawled over and placed a hand over the baby’s mouth. The coughing ceased. Minutes passed. The child sank limply to the ground.
All the while, Professor Bergman sat petrified. I knew he was not a coward. Even then, I understood that if he could think or feel anything at all, he was weighing one life against thirty, even if that life was his own son’s.
On the following day, Samuel Pisar and his mother found refuge in a hospital. ‘Another night passed. At dawn, an announcement was made that the SS would evacuate the hospital compound. We were to be taken elsewhere. The men, we were told, would go separately from the women, the children, and the sick.’
32
On the third day, August 18, the Jews still confined to the field outside Bialystok were deported to Treblinka. Their train was the last to be sent there. About seventy men were not sent to Treblinka, but kept in prison in Bialystok. Some were locksmiths, some carpenters. ‘When we came to the gaol,’ Karasick recalled, ‘the Germans told us that we should take off the badge “because the Jews in Europe are no more”, and we were marked with a cross on the back….’
Each morning, the seventy Jews were taken from prison to work for the Germans. For several months they saw how the Germans continued to round up Jews who had managed to hide during the action of August 16, and deport them. ‘At the beginning,’ Karasick recalled, ‘they were liquidating every three or four days.’
33
The last Jews to reach Treblinka, on August 18, had been Jews from Bialystok. All were gassed. Four days later, a wagon laden
with the clothing of the dead left Treblinka for Germany. The camp was ready to be closed down. Parts of demolished huts, large numbers of wooden planks, and quantities of chlorinated lime were taken away, followed by the excavator.
The Jews who were made to dismantle the camp realized that once their work was done they too would be killed. But within the camp, they were always outnumbered by the armed guards. On September 2, however, a group of thirteen Jews killed their Ukrainian SS guard with a crowbar while working just outside the camp wire. The leader, an eighteen-year-old Polish Jew, Seweryn Klajnman from Falenica, put on the dead guard’s uniform, took his rifle, and ‘marched off’ his fellow prisoners as if to a new work detail further off, cursing and bellowing at them as they went, as befitted an SS guard. Guided by one of their number, Shlomo Mokka, a carter and horse-trader from Wegrow who knew the area well, they escaped their pursuers and evaded capture.
34
Later in September the gas-chambers at Treblinka were demolished and the barbed-wire fencing was removed. Then the remaining Jews who had carried out these tasks were deported to Sobibor. The shunting-engines and the armoured cars were then sent elsewhere; and the SS men were transferred to other camps. In all, a hundred goods wagons full of equipment had been seen to leave. Treblinka was no more.
The last of the camp personnel to leave Treblinka for other camps were the Ukrainian guards. Then the site of the killings was ploughed up, a house and farm buildings were built, seed was sown, and Strebel, a German from the Ukraine, himself a former member of the camp staff, moved into the farm, bringing his family to join him from the Ukraine.
35
They were the first true ‘settlers’, in a camp where the overriding deception had been that it was for ‘resettlement’.
***
Among the Jews deported from Bialystok was the twenty-one-year-old Bertha Sokolskaya. Later she recalled: