Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Holocaust (91 page)
The penalty for any theft from this mass of shoe leather brought into the ghetto was execution. In each of the ghetto factories a notice stated: ‘Every act of theft will be punishable by death’.
54
Icek Bekerman, a thirty-four-year-old shoeworker, had already been hanged in the Lodz ghetto in September 13, for taking a few scraps of leather in order to make himself a pair of shoe laces.
55
The ghetto carpentry shop had been ordered to build the gallows, and the entire personnel of the leather and saddlery workshop, and the shoe workshop, were ordered to be present at the execution, together with representatives of each of the other workshops in the ghetto.
56
Bekerman’s wife and two children were not allowed to the place of execution to witness the death sentence. Instead, forced to remain at home, their cries could be heard by all those on the way to the execution. Those cries, recalled the twelve-year-old Ben Edelbaum, ‘were the most terrifying lamentations I had ever heard’.
57
‘A page of glory… never to be written’
Almost everywhere within their control, the Germans sought to destroy the remnants of long-since decimated Jewish communities. On 18 September 1943, two thousand Minsk Jews were deported to Sobibor, where all but a dozen, chosen for the labour camp, were gassed.
1
On September 20, at Szebnie camp in southern Poland, the thousand Jewish inmates were driven in trucks to a field outside the camp. The road to the field was cordoned off by German and Ukrainian police. An eye-witness, who escaped and reached England at the beginning of 1945, recalled how:
Half-naked and without shoes, Jewish men, women and children were pushed along by Ukrainian guards with rifles to the place of execution near the woods. As soon as one party arrived, it was mowed down by SS men with tommy-guns. Thus party after party was slaughtered. First one heard a burst of shot, then later single shots killing those who had not fallen in the first instance.
Most of the victims walked to death calm and resigned. The children were mostly unaware of what was to happen to them and waved their hands in goodbye. One beautiful girl begged the Ukrainian policeman to let her escape. He let her go but the next one shot her dead.
Clothing was removed from the bodies which were left unburied until the next day when Jews brought from another camp were ordered to pile them and set fire to them. When they had done so, they themselves were shot and thrown on to the pyres.
These bodies burned for forty eight hours. Later the bones were collected and thrown into the River Jasiolka.
2
The destruction of the evidence of mass murder now followed in the wake of the murders themselves, or at the sites of earlier killings. To Ponar, the death pits near Vilna, was brought a group of seventy Jews, nine Russian prisoners-of-war, and a young Polish peasant who had given refuge to a Jewish child. All eighty had been held in prison in Vilna. For four months, from September 1943, they worked at Ponar, as another ‘Special Commando 1005’, under the direct orders of Blobel, building massive log pyres, digging up corpses, placing the corpses on the pyres, igniting them, and scattering the ashes. Each pyre could hold 3,500 bodies, and burnt for up to ten days.
The first grave opened by the ‘Blobel Commando’ at Ponar contained the corpses of eight thousand Jews, five hundred Soviet prisoners-of-war and several hundred Catholic priests and seminarists. Most of the corpses were blindfolded and had their hands tied behind their backs. The second grave contained the corpses of 9,500 Jewish children, women and men. In the third grave the prisoners counted 10,400 corpses. Hardly any of the children’s remains showed marks of bullets, but their tongues were protruding. In the fourth pit the prisoners found twenty-four thousand corpses, among them many Soviet prisoners-of-war, a number of Poles, Catholic priests and nuns, and one German soldier. In the fifth grave they found 3,500 women, children and men, all naked, and all shot in the back of the head. In the sixth grave they counted five thousand naked corpses. In the seventh grave they found several hundred political prisoners, and in the eighth and ninth graves they found five thousand naked corpses of Jews from the rural ghettos in the Vilna region; these were the Jewish deportees who had earlier received assurances that they were being taken to the Kovno ghetto, and had found themselves, on 5 April 1943, at Ponar.
3
Since August 18, a third ‘Blobel Commando’ had been at work at Babi Yar, in the suburbs of Kiev. Blobel himself had visited the site to see the work being done. After the earth on top of the grave had been removed, he later recalled, ‘the bodies were covered with inflammable material and ignited. It took about two days until the grave burnt to the bottom.’ Blobel added: ‘I myself observed that the fire had glowed down to the bottom. After that the grave was filled in and the traces practically obliterated.’
4
More than four hundred Jews and Soviet prisoners-of-war were
working at this gruesome task, knowing that when their work was finished they would be killed. They worked with shackles around their ankles, guarded by sixty SS men armed with submachine guns, and accompanied by Alsatian dogs trained to kill. Within a month, seventy of the prisoners had been killed in random executions, staged each night by the guards for their amusement.
Throughout their work, the SS would address the Jews working in the pits at Babi Yar as
Leichen
, ‘corpses’. But, as the historian Reuben Ainsztein has written, ‘in those half-naked men who reeked of putrefying flesh, whose bodies were eaten by scabies and covered with a layer of mud and soot, and of whose physical strength so little remained, there survived a spirit that defied everything that the Nazis’ New Order had done or could do to them. In the men whom the SS men saw only as walking corpses, there matured a determination that at least one of them must survive to tell the world about what they had seen in Babi Yar.’
Plans were made to break out. Among those who coordinated these plans was a Jewish soldier of the Red Army, Vladimir Davydov. Independent of these plans, a non-Jewish Red Army man, Fyodor Zavertanny, managed one day to loosen his shackles, and to escape. In retaliation, the Germans shot twelve of the prisoners. They also shot the SS man in charge of the guards who had been watching Zavertanny’s group.
The scale of the reprisal seemed to rule out individual escapes, and make a mass break-out the only possible course. The method was to search for any keys that remained among the thousands of rotting corpses and decaying garments, in the hope that one of these keys might fit the padlock of the bunker in which the prisoners were locked at night.
Miraculously, on September 20, one of the prisoners, Jacob Kapler, discovered a key that fitted the padlock. Nine days later, on the third anniversary of the first mass slaughter at Babi Yar, the escape plans were put into effect. In all, 325 Jews and Soviet prisoners-of-war made the break-out. A total of 311 were shot down as they ran; 14 reached hiding places, 5 of whom hid for twenty days in the chimney of a disused factory. Two were hidden by the Ukrainian sisters Natalya and Antonina Petrenko, underneath their henhouse.
Five weeks after the escape, on November 6, the fourteen
survivors welcomed the victorious Red Armyinto Kiev, and then joined its ranks. Four of them, Filip Vilkis, Leonid Kharash, I. Brodskiy and Leonid Kadomskiy, all Jews, were later killed in action against the Germans. Two of them, David Budnik and Vladimir Davydov, also Jews, gave evidence about the mass murders of Babi Yar in 1946, when they were both witnesses at the Nuremberg Tribunal.
5
The fourteen survivors of the Babi Yar revolt had found temporary safety in flight; ten of them were to survive the war. There was also a miraculous escape, at the end of September 1943, for more than seven thousand Danish Jews. During the previous three years, following the occupation of Denmark in the spring of 1940, the Germans had embarked on a policy of cooperation and negotiation with the Danish authorities. As a result, the Jews had been left unmolested. But growing Danish resistance to the German occupation had slowly undermined any chance of continued cooperation, and on 28 August 1943 the Germans had declared martial law.
The SS hoped to use the opportunity of martial law to deport all of Denmark’s Jews and half-Jews. Forewarned of the planned deportation, however, Danes and Jews plotted to ensure that, on the eve of the deportation, Danish sea captains and fishermen ferried 5,919 Jews, 1,301 part-Jews—designated Jews by the Nazis—and 686 Christians married to Jews, to neutral Sweden.
On 1 October 1943, the second day of the Jewish New Year, the Germans found only 500 Jews still in Denmark. All were sent to Theresienstadt; 423 survived the war.
6
The Danish Jews who had been ferried to Sweden also survived, unmolested, as did a further 3,000 Jewish refugees who had reached Sweden before the outbreak of war, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
The escape of more than seven thousand Danish Jews at the end of September 1943 was a setback for German plans. But those plans had continued without respite throughout September. From Holland, Belgium and France more than five thousand Jews had been deported to Birkenau and gassed during that same September. Even those sent to the barracks at Birkenau were in daily danger: on October 3 an SS doctor, as part of a regular inspection, selected 139 Jews from the barracks whom he judged too sick to work: they were taken away and gassed.
7
At Poznan, on October 4, Heinrich Himmler addressed his senior SS officers. At one point in his remarks he said that he wished to
speak ‘quite frankly’ on ‘a very grave matter’. ‘Among ourselves,’ he added, ‘it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly’. Himmler went on to explain:
I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It’s one of those things it is easy to talk about. ‘The Jewish race is being exterminated’, says one Party member, ‘that’s quite clear, it’s in our programme—elimination of the Jews and we’re doing it, exterminating them.’ And then they come, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are vermin, but this one is an A-1 Jew.
Not one of all those who talk this way has watched it, not one of them has gone through it. Most of you must know what it means when one hundred corpses are lying side by side, or five hundred, or one thousand. To have stuck it out and at the same time—apart from exceptions caused by human weakness—to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never to be written and is never to be written, for we know how difficult we should have made it for ourselves, if with the bombing raids, the burdens and the deprivations of war, we still had Jews today in every town as secret saboteurs, agitators, and trouble-mongers. We would now probably have reached the 1916–17 stage when the Jews were still in the German national body.
Himmler then spoke of the belongings of the murdered Jews, and of the penalties for individual looting:
We have taken from them what wealth they had. I have issued a strict order, which SS Lieutenant-General Pohl has carried out, that this wealth should, as a matter of course, be handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves. Individual men who have lapsed will be punished in accordance with an order I issued at the beginning which gave this warning; whoever takes so much as a mark of it is a dead man. A number of SS men—there are not very many of them—have fallen short, and they will die without mercy.
We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette, or anything else.
Because we have exterminated a germ, we do not want in the end to be infected by the germ and die of it. I will not see so much as a small area of sepsis appear here or gain a hold. Wherever it may form, we will cauterize it. Altogether, however, we can say that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it.
8
These proud boastings of ‘spirit’, ‘soul’ and ‘character’ reflected a state of mind which made possible unimaginable horrors. On the day after Himmler’s speech in Poznan, the 1,260 children deported from the Bialystok ghetto in August, together with the 53 doctors and nurses who had accompanied them, left Theresienstadt for Birkenau. They had been told that their destination was Palestine, or Switzerland. There were no survivors.
9
Four days later, on October 9, during the opening evening hours of the Day of Atonement, the holiest moment in the Jewish year, a thousand men and women in the barracks at Birkenau, all of whom were judged too sick to work, were sent to the gas-chambers.
10
Among those Jews in captivity who tried, despite adversity, to celebrate that night according to their faith, were several hundred Jews being held prisoner in Warsaw in the Pawiak prison. Most of them had been caught while in hiding, following the destruction of the ghetto and crushing of the uprising six months earlier.
One of those who was imprisoned in Pawiak that night was Julien Hirshaut, who later recalled:
In a cell in the Pawiak prison, ruled by barbarians bent on exterminating world Jewry, stood a group of Jews deep in prayer.
Atlasowicz was standing by the greenish-brown prison table which served as a makeshift lectern. His broad back swayed reverently in a constant motion as he recited the ancient prayer. Atlasowicz intoned the psalm in a muffled voice, not quite his own.
‘Light will shine on the righteous.’
‘And joy upon the upright of heart.’
For a moment he was silent. Then he turned to the others, and in a hushed voice, as though talking to himself, he continued.
‘Our Kol Nidre in this place is unique and symbolic. It is our continuation. Here we take up the golden tradition of sanctity handed down to us by generations of Jews before us. We are human beings and will not yield our souls to the barbarians; we defy our enemies by remaining true to our people and traditions. Therein lies the true meaning of our services here today. God will hear our prayers although I may not be the proper person to address Him in the name of this congregation. Some of you may not derive as much pleasure from my praying as you were accustomed to on these High Holy Days….’
As the prayers continued Atlasowicz began to cry. His son too in prison with his father wept, repeating over and over again, ‘Mother… mother… mother….’