The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (53 page)

Immediately after the war some of the surviving deportees to Lodz confirmed the unexpected effects of their arrival upon business transactions within the ghetto—and with the Germans: “I had a new suit of clothes,” Jacob M. recalled, “for which I had paid 350 marks in Hamburg…I got 1 kilo [2.2 pounds] of flour for it. You could purchase a pair of shoes for 100 grams of margarine…. Germans who would at times come into the ghetto with 1 pound of bread or margarine would leave with a trunkful of new things.”
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X

As transports of deportees were arriving in Lodz from the Reich and Protectorate, the Germans started murdering part of the ghetto’s inhabitants. On December 6 the Chelmno gas vans had become operational and that same day Rumkowski was ordered to have 20,000 of “his” Jews [the local Jews] ready for “labor deployment outside the ghetto.” The number was finally reduced to 10,000. Shortly afterward the
Chronicle
recorded a sudden interruption of all mail services between the ghetto and the outside world. On the face of it the chroniclers could not make any sense of the order: “There have been various stories concerning the suspension of mail service, and a question of fundamental interest has been whether this was a purely local event or whether there have been nationwide restrictions. There are, in addition, conjectures about the reasons behind this latest restriction.”
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Obviously the chroniclers could not write that these conjectures pointed to the forthcoming deportation.
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As rumors continued to spread, Rumkowski decided to address the issue in a speech at the House of Culture on January 3, 1942: “I don’t like to waste words,” the Elder began that part of the speech, according to the “Chronicle” record: “The stories circulating today are one hundred percent false. I have recently agreed to accept twenty thousand Jews from the smaller centers, setting as a condition that the territory of the ghetto must be enlarged. At the present time, only those who are in my opinion deserving of such fate will be resettled elsewhere. The authorities are full of admiration for the work which has been performed in the ghetto and it is due to that work that they have confidence in me. Their approval of my motion to reduce the number of deportees from 20,000 to 10,000 is a sign of that confidence. I have complete confidence in the Resettlement Commission. Obviously it too is capable of making mistakes from time to time…. Bear in mind that at the center of all my projects is the aspiration that honest people may sleep in peace. Nothing bad will happen to people of goodwill.” (Thunderous applause.)
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We do not have Sierakowiak’s notes for the period of the January deportations, but Rosenfeld described some of the ghetto scenes of these same days, albeit not in precisely dated entries: “The [Jewish] police stormed the lodgings of the Jews marked for evacuation. Not infrequently they found the corpses of children who had starved to death or of old people who had frozen to death…. Only 12
¹
/
₂
kg of luggage and 10 marks of money were allowed to be taken away…. The bundles of the evacuees contained slices of bread, potatoes, margarine…. They had better not be sick. No doctor accompanied them, no medications.”
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From Rosenfeld’s notes it appears that he did not yet know where the transports were headed. Between January 12 and 29, 10,103 Jews were deported from Lodz to Chelmno and gassed.

The deportations continued in February and March: By April 2, a further 34,073 ghetto Jews had been deported and murdered. “Nobody was safe anymore from being deported,” Rosenfeld noted; “at least eight hundred people had to be delivered every day. Some thought they would be able to save themselves: chronically ill old people and those with frozen limbs—not even that helped. The surgeons in the hospital were very busy. They amputated hands and feet of the poor ‘patients’ and discharged them as cripples. The cripples too were taken away. On March 7 nine people froze to death at the railway station where they had to wait nine hours for the departure of the train.”
²¹⁷

Rosenfeld’s comments about the deporation of cripples find a poignant echo in a diary fragment written by an anonymous young girl from the ghetto, covering merely three weeks, from the end of February to mid-March 1942. The diarist tells about her friend, Hania Huberman [mostly HH in the diary], “extremely intelligent and wise. She knows life. A third-year gymnasium student, a very good girl.” The diarist and HH herself were both convinced that HH would not be deported because she had a crippled father who could not walk. Then, on March 3 the news arrived: “Hania H. was leaving.” The diarist could not imagine how her friend and her father would face the future: “Where will she go with her sick, helpless father, without a shirt for him and with nothing for herself? Hungry, exhausted, without money and food. My mom immediately found some shirts for her and her father. My sister and I ran upstairs. When I came back, I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stay there longer because I had to finish the laundry…. I promised to visit her.”
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Rumors spread among some of the Germans working in the Chelmno area—and probably among the local Poles. Heinz May was forest inspector (
Forstmeister
) in Kolo County, near Lodz. In the fall of 1941 May was informed by Forest Constable Stagemeir that some commandos had arrived in the vicinity. In reporting this “Stagemeier was strangely serious,” a detail to which May did not pay attention at the moment. Somewhat later, as May was traveling through the forest with
Kreisleiter
Becht, the district chief pointed to Precinct 77 and declared: “The trees will be growing better soon”; by way of explanation, Becht added: “Jews make good fertilizer.” Nothing else.

Strange events occurred in May’s precinct over the following weeks: A closed truck about four meters in length and two meters high, with iron bolt and padlock in the rear, was being pulled out of a ditch by another truck among a group of policemen: “A definitely unpleasant smell came from the truck and from the men standing around it.” May and his son, who arrived on the scene, were quickly chased away. A succession of further incidents and some rumors induced May to drive to Stagemeier’s home for more information.

“Stagemeier explained to me,” May reported in 1945 testimony, “that a large detachment of military police was stationed in Chelmno. The palace [castle] on the western side of Chelmno had been enclosed by a high wooden fence. Military police sentries armed with rifles were standing by the entrance…. I passed by there on the way back to my forest district and confirmed that what Stagemeier had said concerning the wooden fence and the sentries was true. There were row upon row of trucks with improvised canvas tops in Chelmno. Women, men, and even children had been crammed into those trucks…. During the short time I was there I saw the first truck drive up to the wooden fence. The sentries opened the gates. The truck vanished into the palace courtyard and immediately afterwards another closed truck came out of the courtyard and headed for the forest. And then both sentries closed the gates. There was no longer the slightest doubt that terrible things, things never before known in human history, were being played out there.”
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The killing capacity of Chelmno was approximately 1,000 people a day (around fifty people could be crammed into each of the three vans). The first victims were the Jews from villages and small towns in the Lodz area. Then, before the deportation of the Jews from the Lodz ghetto started, came the turn of the Gypsies herded into a special area of the ghetto (the Gypsy camp). “For the last ten days the Gypsies have been taken away in trucks, according to people who live in the immediate vicinity of the [Gypsy] camp,”
²²⁰
the entry for the first week of January 1942 in the ghetto “Chronicle” indicates. Approximately 4,400 Gypsies were killed in Chelmno but there were few witnesses. After the war some Poles who lived in the area mentioned the Gypsies, as did both the driver of one of the gas vans and another SS member of Lange’s unit. None of the Gypsies survived.
²²¹

As mentioned, the vast majority of the Lodz ghetto inhabitants remained unaware of Chelmno, although over the weeks and months information reached them in diverse ways. Strangely enough some information was even sent by mail. Thus on December 31, 1941, three weeks after the beginning of the exterminations, an unknown Jew sent a card later forwarded to Lodz to an acquaintance in Posbebice: “Dear cousin Mote Altszul, as you know from Kolo, Dabie, and other places Jews have been sent to Chelmno to a castle. Two weeks have already passed and it is not known how several thousands have perished. They are gone and you should know, there will be no addresses for them. They were sent to the forest and they were buried…. Do not look upon this as a small matter, they have decided to wipe out, to kill, to destroy. Pass this letter on to learned people to read.”
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Two weeks later a letter based on an eyewitness account was sent by the rabbi of Grabów to his brother-in-law in Lodz: “Until now I have not replied to your letters because I did not know exactly about all the things people have been talking about. Unfortunately, for our great tragedy, now we know it all. I have been visited by an eyewitness who survived only by accident, he managed to escape from hell…. I found out about everything from him. The place where all perish is called Chelmno, not far from Dabie, and all are hidden in the neighboring forest of Lochów. People are killed in two different ways: By firing squad or by poison gas. This is what happened to the cities Dabie, Isbicza, Kujawska, Klodawa, and others. Lately thousands of Gypsies have been brought there from the so-called Gypsy camps of Lodz, and for the past several days, Jews have been brought there from Lodz and the same is done to them. Do not think that I am mad. Alas, this is the tragic cruel truth…. O Creator of the world, help us! Jakob Schulman.”
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The eyewitness was probably the man called the “gravedigger from Chelmno,” Yakov Groyanowski from Izbica, a member of the Jewish commando that dug the pits into which the corpses were thrown in the forest. The gravedigger’s story reached both Ringelblum and Yitzhak Zuckerman, a Zionist youth leader in Warsaw.
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He told of people undressing in the castle for showering and disinfection, then being pushed into the vans and suffocated by the exhaust gas pumped in during the ride to the forest, some sixteen kilometers away. “Many of the people they [the gravediggers] dealt with had suffocated to death in the truck. But there were a few exceptions, including babies who were still alive; this was because mothers held the children in blankets and covered them with their hands so the gas would not get to them. In these cases, the Germans would split the heads of the babies on trees, killing them on the spot.” Groyanowski managed to flee, and hid in small communities (probably also in Grabów) until he reached Warsaw, in early January 1942.

XI

In Western Europe, in the meantime, life—a kind of life—was going on. In Paris the bombing of the synagogues didn’t cause any panic among the Jewish population. Although the round-ups of hostages, the executions, and the sending of thousands of Jews to Compiègne and Drancy signaled a worsening situation, Biélinky’s diary entries did not indicate a sense of upheaval.
²²⁵
On October 9 it was registration time again, and Biélinky noted the long line of “‘B’s…. It is interesting to notice,” he added, “that in this crowd of Jews, thoroughly Jewish types are rare; all look physically like ordinary Parisians…no trace of a ghetto.”
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Most of his entries in these days dealt with the ongoing difficulties in getting enough food.

For Lambert, in October, the new German victories in the East did not mean the end of the war. “But, what will become of France and what will become of us, the Jews, in the meantime?”
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Lambert’s question was somewhat rhetorical as he immediately added in the same October 12 entry: “Of course, in this immense blaze, Jewish worry is but one element of the universal anxiety and expectation. This quietens me, at least in regard to the future of my sons, as a Pole, a Belgian or a Dutch are not more assured of the next day than I am myself.”
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A few weeks later, at the end of December, one thing at least had become clear: The outcome of the war was no longer in question. “Victory is certain; it could even take place in 1942.”
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In Bucharest in these same days, Sebastian certainly did not feel that his fate as a Jew was like that of other Romanians. He wanted to flee: “Never have I thought so intensely about leaving,” he wrote on October 16. “I know it’s absurd, I know it’s impossible, I know it’s pointless, I know it’s too late—but I can’t help it…. In the last few days I have read a number of American magazines…and I suddenly saw in detail another world, another milieu, other cities, another time.”
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He wished to sail on the
Struma
that was taking some seven hundred “illegal” emigrants to Palestine.
²³¹
Maybe he could join.

Sebastian, like most Jews in Romania, knew what was happening to the Jews in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and—Transnistria. “It is an anti-Jewish delirium that nothing can stop,” he wrote on October 20. “There are no brakes, no rhyme or reason. It would be something if there were an anti-Semitic program; you’d know the limits to which it might go. But this is sheer uncontrolled bestiality, without shame or conscience, without goal or purpose. Anything, absolutely anything, is possible. I see the pallor of fear on Jewish faces.”
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In the diary entries that followed from mid-October to mid-December, Sebastian reacted to the daily indignities and threats that targeted Romanian Jewry (before and after Antonescu’s public letter to Filderman) which, in Sebastian’s eyes, was an intentional call for violence.
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Well-intentioned Romanian friends tried to convince the Jewish writer to convert to Catholicism: “The Pope will defend you!” they argued.
²³⁴
“I don’t need arguments to answer them, nor do I search for any,” he noted on December 17…. Even if it were not so stupid and pointless, I would still need no arguments. Somewhere on an island with sun and shade, in the midst of peace, security, and happiness, I would in the end be indifferent to whether I was or was not Jewish. But here and now, I cannot be anything else. Nor do I think I want to be.”
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