The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (54 page)

In the Reich the Jews not included in the first wave of deportations desperately attempted to understand the new measures and their personal fate. “Even more shocking reports about deportations of Jews to Poland,” Klemperer noted on October 25. “They have to leave almost literally naked and penniless. Thousands from Berlin to Lodz…. Will Dresden be affected and when? It hangs over us all the time.”
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November 1: “Today urgent warning card from Sussman, he must have read something alarming about the deportations, I should immediately renew my USA application…. I wrote back immediately, every route was now blocked. In fact, we heard from several sources that a complete ban on all emigration has just been decreed on the German side.”
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November 28: “The alarm abroad about the deportations must be very great: Without having asked for them, Lissy Meyerhof and Caroli Stern received, by telegram, from relatives in the USA visa and passage to Cuba. But it doesn’t help them; the German side is not issuing any passports…cf. also Sussman’s card to me. We weighed matters up again. Result as always: stay. If we go, then we save our lives and are dependents and beggars for the rest of our lives. If we remain, then our lives are in danger, but we retain the possibility of afterward leading a life worth living. Consolation in spite of it all: going hardly depends on us anymore. Everything is fate, one could be rushing to one’s doom. If, e.g., we had moved to Berlin in the spring, then by now I would probably be in Poland.”
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Klemperer’s rationalizations (ultimately borne out in his case, albeit by pure chance), were common among those who did not immediately board the trains. Hertha Feiner assumed that her status as former wife of an Aryan would save her: “We have serious worries and are living through a very grave time,” she wrote to her daughters on October 16. “I can’t and won’t burden you with details; I am fortunate in being better off than many others. You don’t have to worry about me. Because of my special status, I hope to be able to go on living here as before. Should there be any change, I would notify you immediately, but I don’t think there will be.”
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The only aspects of everyday life shared in various degrees by most Jews living throughout the German-dominated continent at the end of 1941 were the daily struggles for material survival, the sense of complete lack of any control over their own fate, and the passionate hope that, somehow, liberation was on its way. Even in Rubinowicz’s remote hamlet, in the Kielce district, the total uncertainty about the fate of Jews, day in, day out, was inescapable in those winter days. “Yesterday afternoon I went to Bodzentyn to get my tooth filled,” young Dawid noted on December 12. “Early this morning the militia came. As they were driving along the highway, they met a Jew who was going out of town, and they immediately shot him for no reason, then they drove on and shot a Jewess, again for no reason. So two victims have perished for absolutely no reason. All the way home I was frightened I might run across them but didn’t run across anybody.”
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The next day, another Jew was killed, again for no reason.
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A few days later the order came, as in most occupied countries and in the Reich, that the Jews had to deliver all furs to the authorities: “Father said,” Dawid noted on December 26, “an order had come that Jews were to hand over all furs, down to the smallest scrap. And 5 Jews were to be made responsible for those who didn’t hand them over. And whoever they found with any furs would receive the death-penalty—that’s how harsh the regulation was. The militia men gave till 4 p.m. for all furs to be handed over. After a short while the Jews began bringing in small remnants and whole furs. Mother unpicked three furs right away and took the fur collars off all the coats. At 4 o’clock the militia man himself came to our house for the furs and ordered the Polish policeman to make out a list of the furs that the Jews had handed over. Then we put them into 2 sacks, and 2 Jews took them to a peasant who was to take them to the local police at Bieliny.”
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Dawid knew little about the course of the war and about the immediate reasons for the fur collection. But elsewhere, East and West, the portents were not missed. In Stanislawów, the town in eastern Galicia where, on October 12, 1941, Hans Krüger had presided over the massacre in the local cemetery, a young woman in her early twenties, Elisheva (Elsa Binder), whom we already briefly met, had started recording her observations in the newly set-up ghetto.
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“Yesterday’s newspaper,” Elisheva noted on December 24, “said that the Great Leader [Hitler] assumed command of the army. Jews are therefore drawing the most optimistic and far-reaching conclusions…. The Reds are marching ahead, slowly but steadily. It is rumored that they took Kharkov (where they didn’t see a single Jew), Kiev and Zhitomir. Some people claim to have ‘heard’ our radio broadcast from Kiev. I wish I could believe it, although I am trying to look into the future with hope and optimism.”
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The lines that follow in the same entry are indicative of the intense doubts that nonetheless assailed some Jews when it came to portents of liberation: “I have to admit,” Elisheva went on, “that I personally don’t believe in early liberation. I want it and I fear it. From today’s perspective a free tomorrow seems to be extremely bright. In my dreams I expect so much from it. But in reality? I am young, I have a right to fight and to demand everything from life. But desiring it so much, I fear it. I realize that under the circumstances such thoughts are irrational, but…. Never mind. What really matters is liberation.”
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“When death strikes,” Kaplan noted in Warsaw on October 9, “the mourner turns the ‘merchandise’ over to the burial office, which then attends to everything. So the black wagon proceeds—sometimes drawn by a horse and sometimes pulled rickshe fashion by the employees of the burial office—from corpse to corpse, loading as many bodies as it can hold and transporting them wholesale to the cemetery. Usually the expedition to ‘the other world’ begins at noon. A long line of horse-drawn and rickshe-drawn wagons then stretches along the length of Gesia Street. This death traffic makes no impression on anyone. Death has become a tangible matter, like the Joint’s Soup Kitchen, the bread card, or the raising of one’s hat to the Germans. At times it is difficult to distinguish who is pushing whom, the living the dead or vice versa. The dead have lost their traditional importance and sanctity. The sanctity of the cemetery is also being profaned; it has been turned into a marketplace. It now resembles a ‘fair’ of the dead.”
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Yet the shift in the war situation sufficed to dispel the gloom, at least for a while. “A firm conviction burns within us,” Kaplan recorded on December 19, “that the beginning of the end has begun for the Nazis. What basis have I for such optimism? A ‘communiqué’ from the battlefield was published yesterday, December 18, which reads as follows: ‘Because of the approach of the Russian winter…the front line must be shortened….’ This is disaster veiled in rhetoric.” News secretly heard on the BBC confirmed the conclusion reached from the German announcement. The ghetto was abuzz with rumors eagerly peddled and amplified: “A wit comes along and reports bona fide information to the effect that Churchill sent a cable to the ghetto saying, ‘let the Jews not run after the Nazis so fast because he has not the strength to follow them.’” And in part melancholy, part hopeful tone, as was his wont, Kaplan added: “This is the way our people are—the bitter reality does not constrain their glowing imaginations: ‘On the very day the Temple was destroyed, Messiah was born.’”
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In Lublin, during these same weeks, the ghetto in the General Government targeted by the worst German brutality and one that, a few months later, would be the first destined for total extermination, the council debated mundane issues, including the sloppy and downright dishonest management of the hospital and various plans for its reorganization.
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Farther north, in Bialystok, the council under Barash’s leadership could even claim some “achievements” at its meeting of November 2, 1941: “As much as possible, mitigation of the [German] demands was achieved; instead of 25 kg of gold—6 kg, instead of 5 million [rubles]—2.5 million. Instead of a ghetto in the quarter of Chanajkes—today’s ghetto. The order for 10 million was annulled. No more than 4,500 persons were evacuated to Pružana. The order to submit lists of the intelligentsia was revoked. All this succeeded after much effort, thanks to our good relations with the authorities.” However, the Germans were demanding ransom money once again: “The Judenrat must pay 700,000–800,000 rubles every three days, starting Thursday the 6th of this month. If a deadline is missed, we will be liable to the ‘ruthless means of the Gestapo…’ If we comply with the demands for work and taxes,” Barash concluded, “we will be sure of our life—otherwise, we are not responsible for the life of the ghetto. God grant that we will meet again and that none of us will be missing.”
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In the Ostland, as we saw, mass killings had followed one another throughout October and November 1941, to make space for the deportees from the Reich. In Kovno in early October, some sporadic
Aktions
targeted the hospital and the orphanage, which the Germans burned with their inmates.
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Then, on October 25, the council was informed by SS Master Sgt. Helmut Rauca, the man in charge of the Jewish desk at the Kovno Gestapo, that all the inhabitants—that is all 27,000 of them, had to assemble on October 28 at six a.m. at Demokratu Square—“to allow a reallocation of food rations to those who did labor for the Germans as one category and to the nonworkers on the other; the nonworkers would be transferred to the “small ghetto.” The council was ordered to announce the general roll call to the inhabitants.
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Unable to get any information about the Germans’ real intentions, the members of the council asked for another meeting with Rauca; he agreed. Dr. Elkes attempted, in vain, to persuade him to offer some explanation, even implying that if the war turned badly for the Reich, the council would vouch for the Gestapo man’s readiness to help.
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At a loss about whether they should publish the decree or not, the ghetto leaders turned for advice to the old chief rabbi, Abraham Shapiro. After several postponements the rabbi finally told them to publish the decree in the hope that it would eventually save at least part of the population. Thus, on October 27, the decree was posted, in both Yiddish and in German.
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On the morning of the twenty-eighth, the whole population assembled at the square; each and every adult Jew who did not possess a working permit carried some document—a “school certificate,” a “commendation from the Lithuanian army,” and the like: Maybe these would help. At the square Rauca was in charge of the selection: The good side was the left. Those sent to the right were counted and pushed to an assembly point in the small ghetto. From time to time Rauca was informed of the number of Jews that had been moved to the right. After nightfall the quota of 10,000 people had been reached: The selection was over; 17,000 Jews were returning home.
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Throughout the entire day Elkes had been at the square; in some rare cases he could appeal to Rauca and achieve a change of decision. When he reached home that evening of the twenty-eighth, a crowd besieged him, and each Jew implored him to save somebody. The next day, as the first column of Jews started the trek from the small ghetto to Fort IX, Elkes, with a list of names in hand, tried once more to intervene. Rauca granted him 100 people. But when Elkes tried to remove these 100 from the columns, he was hit by the Lithuanian guards and collapsed. According to Tory, who was among those who carried the chairman away, days went by before Elkes’s wounds healed and he could stand on his feet again. In the meantime, from dawn to noon on the twenty-ninth, the 10,000 Jews from the small ghetto marched to Fort IX where, batch after batch, they were shot.
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Days beforehand, pits had been dug behind the fort: They were not for the Lithuanian Jews, however, but as we saw, for the Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate who arrived in November and disappeared without ever reaching the ghetto.

In a longer-than-usual description of several weeks in the life of the Vilna ghetto, probably written sometime in December 1941 (as it mentions, at the end, the Soviet counterattack before Moscow), Rudashevski noted at some point: “I feel we are like sheep. We are being slaughtered in the thousands and we are helpless. The enemy is strong, crafty, he is exterminating us according to a plan and we are discouraged.”
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For the fourteen-year-old diarist there was little that the ghetto inhabitants could do other than hope for quick liberation from the outside: “The only consolation has now become the latest news at the front. We suffer here, but there, far in the East, the Red Army has started an offensive. The Soviets have occupied Rostov, have dealt a blow from Moscow and are marching forward. And it always seems that any moment freedom will follow it.”
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Other Vilna Jews also drew conclusions from the events, yet without any such hopefulness. In the eyes of some members of the Zionist youth movements, the systematic manner in which the Germans carried out the killings indicated the existence of a plan, of an extermination project that would ultimately extend to all the Jews of the Continent. It was a chance intuition and could not be anything else; it was the right intuition.

One of the first to grasp the significance of the Vilna massacres was the twenty-three-year-old poet and member of Hashomer Hatzair, Abba Kovner, who was hiding in a monastery close to the city. He found the words and the arguments that convinced an increasing number of his fellow youth movement members.
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And, if his interpretation was correct, if sooner or later death was unavoidable, only one conclusion remained possible: The Jews had to “die with dignity”; the only path was armed resistance.