The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (52 page)

In exceptional cases some Jews were taken off the deportation list, even at the very last moment: Marianne Ellenbogen (at that time, Strauss) and her parents were among them. It all took place in their hometown, Essen, on October 26, 1941. The house was sealed and, luggage in hand, the family set off for the assembly point. There many of the city’s Jews were already waiting. Boarding of the streetcar that was to take them to the railway station had started when two Gestapo officials arrived and told the Strausses to go back home. “We were sent back home,” Marianne reminisced, “and that was the most dreadful experience anybody had, to hear this animal howl go up [from the crowd of fellow Jews].”

The wealthy Strausses had apparently promised the director of the Deutsche Bank in Essen, Friedrich Wilhelm Hammacher, an old business acquaintance of Strauss senior, to sell him their house at a very advantageous price. Hammacher, it seems, got in touch with high-ranking Abwehr (military intelligence) officers who used some Jews, allowed to emigrate, as agents, mainly in North and South America. The Abwehr was interested in the Strausses; its Bremen headquarters informed the Düsseldorf Gestapo, which in turn instructed the Essen Gestapo to set the family free. Nothing came of the project in the end.
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In 1943 the Strausses were deported to the East and perished with their fellow Jews. Marianne escaped and went into hiding in Germany.
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Other Jews also avoided deportation, but differently. “Nineteen Jews who should have gone with the first transport from Vienna to Lodz on October 15 took their own lives, either by jumping from windows or by gassing themselves, by hanging, with sleeping tablets, by drowning, or by means unknown. Within the space of three weeks, the Gestapo reported 84 suicides and 87 suicide attempts in Vienna.”
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According to statistics of the Berlin police, 243 Jews took their lives during the last three months of 1941 (from the beginning of the deportations to the end of the year).
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The quota was filled with other Jews, of course.

“In the evening,” Goebbels recorded in his diary, on November 7, 1941, “the unpleasant news that the [non-Jewish] actor [Joachim] Gottschalk, who was married to a Jewish wife, committed suicide with wife and child…I take all measures so that this humanly regrettable but concretely almost unavoidable case should not lead to the spreading of alarming rumors.”
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The first transport of Jews from Munich left the Bavarian capital on November 20; its original destination had been Riga but since the Riga ghetto was overfilled, the train was redirected to Kovno. All the deportees were inmates of the barracks camp in Milbertshofen. The young Erwin Weil was ordered to help those unable to board the train on their own: “At the merchandise station stood a long train with the locomotive already under steam. The people were pushed into the wagons under a hail of the wildest curses. At daybreak we were yelled at to throw out the luggage, so that the people would be pushed in faster. Then a bus arrived with armed SS and the (small) children from the Antonienstrasse. We had to put them on the train. We tried to calm their panic; it was horrible.”
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On November 23 the transport arrived in Kovno. There too the ghetto was overfilled; the deportees never even came close to it, as we know. They were directly transported to fort IX. For two days they remained in the ditches surrounding the fort. On November 25 they were murdered.
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During the journey to the East, the transports were guarded by members of the
Schutzpolizei
(SCHUPO). “On the way from the
Schlachthof
[slaughterhouse] to the loading ramp a Jewish male tried to commit suicide by jumping under a tramway,” SCHUPO captain Salitter wrote in his reported about the December 11 transport of 1,007 Jews from Düsseldorf to Riga, for which he was responsible. “Also,” he went on, “an elderly Jewess moved stealthily away from the loading ramp, taking advantage of the fact that it was very dark and rainy. She dashed into a nearby house, where she quickly undressed and went to a public bath. But a cleaning woman spotted her and she was brought back to the transport.”

Salitter then described the journey, via Berlin and eastward. In Konitz he got into a squabble with the stationmaster. For better surveillance Salitter demanded that one of the carriages transporting the Jews be switched with that of the
Schutzpolizei
; the stationmaster refused and offered to move the passengers: “It seems necessary for the train authorities to explain to this employee that members of the German police must be treated differently from Jews. I was under the impression that he was one of those Germans who still thought of them as ‘poor Jews’ and for whom the concept ‘Jew’ was totally unknown.”

Finally, on December 13, around midnight, the train arrived in the vicinity of Riga. The outside temperature had dropped to minus 10 degrees Celsius. The Germans were brought to the city and replaced by Latvian guards; the Jews were left in the unheated train until the following morning. In Riga, Salitter met with Latvians who told him about the attitude of the population: “They especially hate the Jews, this being the reason they took such an intensive part in the annihilation of these parasites since the liberation [from Soviet rule]. Through my contacts…I heard that some of the people wonder why Germany bothers to transport the Jews to Latvia instead of annihilating them right there.”
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A deportee from Berlin, Haim Baram (Heinz Bernhardt at the time), described the arrival of his transport in Minsk. The train had left Berlin on December 14, 1941; it arrived in Minsk on the eighteenth at 10 a.m. Latvian SS auxiliaries chased everybody out of the cars; the elderly and the children were driven away in trucks, while the bulk of the deportees were marched to a neighborhood of wooden huts (without water or electricity) whose inhabitants had disappeared. “The wrecked houses looked as if a pogrom had taken place there. Pillow feathers everywhere. Hanukah lamps and candlesticks laying around in every corner…. Later we were informed that this was the Russian ghetto whose Jewish residents were shot in early November 1941.” An SD officer confirmed what had happened. Most of the inhabitants of the ghetto had been massacred to make space for the transports from Germany. [The officer] “pointed and said: ‘There, in front of you, a heap of bodies.’ And in fact we saw a hillock with parts of human bodies sticking out.”
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Oskar Rosenfeld was deported from Prague to Lodz on November 4, 1941, in the last of the transports that had carried some 5,000 Jews from the Protectorate to Lodz before the end of the year. From then on most Jews from Bohemia and Moravia would be deported to Theresienstadt, a “transit camp” on the way to the killing sites for part of the inmates (but a camp whose function in the general extermination system was a peculiar one, as we shall see).

Born in Moravia, Rosenfeld grew up in Vienna, where he became a journalist and a writer, somewhat in the expressionist vein of his time. His major interest, however, seems to have been theater. In 1909 he established the first Jewish theater in the Austrian capital; later on he encouraged visits to Vienna by Yiddish and Hebrew theater companies. In many ways an intellectual like Klemperer, Rosenfeld was his opposite in terms of Jewish outlook and politics—he was a staunch “anti-assimilationist” and a right-wing (revisionist) Zionist to boot. After the Anschluss, Oskar and his wife, Henriette, fled to Prague. Henriette managed to leave for England in the summer of 1939; he was to follow. The war put an end to his emigration plans.
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In early November 1941, after the usual summons, Rosenfeld had to report to the assembly point at the Messepalast (The Fair Palace).

“The Messepalast was a warehouse,” Rosenfeld recorded in his Notebook A, “where, instead of goods and wares, people were exhibited, closely pressed together in bunks, resting on backpacks and mattresses, with bundles, suitcases, packages, stuffed to bursting, and cots that served as sleeping places. Three days and three nights they lingered here, in this filthy warehouse, slowly consuming their stores of food since the provisions from the Jewish community were inadequate.”
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Rosenfeld went on, describing the days and nights at the Messepalast and the last expropriation measures before departure. The trek to the railway station took place without any secrecy: “Along the way, behind the windows of the houses, the faces of the Czechs were visible, here and there Czech passersby, without exception serious faces, some sad, pensive, disturbed. A train was waiting. Doors were pulled open, they entered the cars by numbers, which each one had to display clearly visible on clothing and luggage.”
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The deportees were not informed of their destination, and it was only in the course of the journey, once they saw “the desolate Polish landscape,” that they guessed it would be Lodz. In a strange improvisation, the officers in charge of the transport ordered, in the middle of the night, that the men shave their faces and polish their shoes: “Hungover, hungry, sleepy, hundreds of men began to polish their shoes in the dark coupé and to shave with a shaver, [using] water from the toilet. From time to time a Gestapo man with a flashlight appeared and had some of them line up, cursing when an evacuee didn’t seem elegant enough for him.”
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The transport stopped on the outskirts of the ghetto, and one thousand Jews were marched to a school building, their temporary quarters. Within days hunger set in, weakness increased, and some died of “enfeeblement” in their temporary abode.

At the beginning of December the deportees from the Reich and the Protectorate to Lodz were still living in separate encampments, although they could move around in the ghetto in search of some work, of possible deals to enhance the weekly ration of bread (a single loaf) or of the daily cabbage soup (whose very odor usually brought nausea): “At the beginning of winter, the price of a loaf of bread on the bread exchange, on the black market, is already 20 marks. From autumn to the beginning of winter it rose from 8 to 20. But the selling prices for textiles, clothing, shoes, leather bags, did not keep up with the bread prices, so the owners of the wares they had brought along sank daily into greater poverty.”
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On September 23, Rumkowski had been informed by the Germans of coming deportations into the ghetto. Statistics gathered by the “Elder” regarding overcrowding obviously had no effect whatsoever. For the 143,000 inhabitants of the ghetto in the fall of 1941, first the arrivals of Jews from the surrounding small towns and then of the 20,000 Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate and of 5,000 Gypsies meant a sudden 20 percent increase in the population. Seen from the perspective of the new arrivals it meant sleeping in evacuated school buildings and halls of all types, often on the floor and without heating or running water; for most, toilets were located a few buildings away. For the ghetto inhabitants it meant greater overcrowding, less food, and other unpleasant consequences, as we shall see. Tension between the newcomers and the ghetto population became unavoidable.
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During the first two weeks of October 1941, everyday life in the ghetto had followed its “normal” course, notwithstanding the arrival of the approximately 2,000 Jews from Wloclawek and the surrounding small towns. The chroniclers reported “beautiful” autumn weather, 277 deaths, and eighteen births (“October 9 marked the lowest daily death rate since the inception of the ghetto: scarcely 11 people died that day”). They also counted five suicide attempts and one murder.
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Then came the dumping of the 20,000 new deportees.

The “Chronicle” entries for the second half of October are lost and with them the first semi-official reactions to the new situation. Sierakowiak, however, kept his own recordings of the events. “October 16: The first transport of deportees from Vienna arrived…in the afternoon. There are thousands of them, pastors and doctors among them, and some have sons on the front. They have brought a carload of bread with them and excellent luggage, and are dressed splendidly. Every day the same number is supposed to arrive, up to 20,000. They will probably overwhelm us completely.”
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The next day Sierakowiak witnessed the arrival of a transport from Prague; again he noticed the cartloads of bread, the luggage, the clothes: “I have heard,” he added, “that they have been inquiring whether it’s possible to get a two-room apartment with running water. Interesting types.”
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On October 18 the young diarist brought up the same theme again. On October 19, however, the first practical consequences of the influx of the new deportees were recorded: “More Luxembourg Jews arrived today. They are beginning to crowd the ghetto. They have only one patch on the left breast with the inscription
Jude
. They are dressed splendidly (you can tell they haven’t lived in Poland). They are buying up all they can in the ghetto, and all the prices have doubled. Bread is 12 to 13RM; socks which cost 70pf. before, are now 2RM. Although they have been here only a few days, they already complain about hunger. So what can we say, we who haven’t had our stomach full for more than a year? You can apparently get used to everything.”
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The economic disruption soon worsened: “Since the transports arrived from Germany,” the “Chronicle” reported in November 1941, “all the restaurants and pastry shops in the ghetto, half-empty until then, have truly been besieged by newcomers…. From the moment they arrived the newcomers began selling their personal property and, with the cash they received, began to buy up literally everything available on the private food market. In the course of time, this caused a shortage in the food supply, and prices rose horrendously with indescribable speed. On the other hand, the availability of all sorts of items which had been lacking in the ghetto for quite a while has caused trade to become brisk, and a few of the ghetto’s stores have shelves filled with goods that have not been seen in the ghetto for a long time. Because of the newcomers who are popularly known as
Yekes
, stores never really closed their doors in the month of November. They sold their clothing, shoes, linen, cosmetics, traveling accessories, and so forth. For a short while this caused a decline in prices for the most varied items; however, to match the price increase on the food market, the newcomers began to raise the prices of the items they were selling. From the point of view of the ghetto’s previous inhabitants, this relatively large increase in private commerce has caused undesired disturbances and difficulties and, what is worse, the newcomers have, in a short span of time, caused a devaluation of the [ghetto] currency. That phenomenon is particularly painful for the mass of working people, the most important segment of ghetto society, who only possess the money they draw from the coffers of the Elder of the Jews.”
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