The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (59 page)

Saving children from the transports soon became impossible; when Redlich spoke of “death,” he actually did not know what the fate of deportees “to the East” would be. The “counselors” debated whether they should volunteer for the transports, to continue providing assistance and education to their charges. But, in historian Ruth Bondy’s words, “The arguments remained theoretical: in the end, family considerations, and the will to cling to Theresienstadt for as long as possible, prevailed.”
⁷²
On January 10 Redlich noted: “Yesterday we read in the orders of the day that another ten transports will go. There is reason to believe that an additional four will also depart.” He added: “An order of the day: nine men were hanged. The reason for the order: they insulted German honor.”
⁷³

As the summer of 1942 began, tens of transports of elderly Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were sent on their way to the Czech “ghetto.” “In June,” Redlich recorded, “twenty-four transports arrived and four left. Of those entering, fifteen thousand came from Germany proper [
Altreich
], most of them very old.”
⁷⁴
On June 30: “I helped Viennese Jews yesterday. They are old, lice-ridden, and they have a few insane people among them.”
⁷⁵

Among its “insane” passengers the transport from Vienna included Trude Herzl-Neumann, the younger daughter of the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl.
⁷⁶
Edelstein was not impressed and refused to come and greet the new inmate. But Trude Herzl was not to be dismissed so easily: “I, the younger daughter of the deceased Zionist leader, Dr. Theodor Herzl,” she wrote to the ghetto leaders and to the “Zionist branch” in Theresienstadt, “take the liberty of informing the local Zionists of my arrival and asking them for help and support during the present difficult times. With Zionist and faithful greetings, T. Neumann-Herzl.”
⁷⁷
Her many messages reflected her mental state, and six months after her arrival, she died.

A small ceremony took place at the camp’s mortuary, after which, as usual, the corpse was carried on a farm cart to the crematorium, outside the walls. There the ashes of all the dead were kept in numbered cardboard boxes. The residents hoped that once the ordeal was over, they would find the ashes of their loved ones and bury them in a decent grave. In late 1944, to erase evidence, the Germans ordered all the ashes to be thrown into the nearby Eger River.
⁷⁸

The number of incoming transports kept growing throughout July. “People arrive by the thousands,” Redlich wrote on August 1, “the aged that do not have the strength to get the food. Fifty die daily.”
⁷⁹
Indeed the mortality rate in the “old people’s ghetto” shot up, and in September 1942 alone, some 3,900 people from a total population of 58,000 died. At approximately the same time transports of the elderly inmates from Theresienstadt to Treblinka started. By then, as we shall see, the waves of deportations from Warsaw were subsiding and the gas chambers of Treblinka could take in the 18,000 new arrivals from the Protectorate ghetto.

It was in one of the September transports from Vienna, the “hospital transport,” that Ruth Kluger (the young girl who had received an orange in the subway after the star was introduced in the Reich) and her mother arrived in Theresienstadt. Ruth was sent to one of the youth barracks that were under Redlich and Hirsch’s supervision. There, as she writes, she became a Jew: The lectures, the all-pervading Zionist atmosphere, the sense of belonging to a community of
haverim
and
haveroth
(male and female comrades, in Hebrew) where one didn’t say
gute Nacht
but
Laila tov
(“good night,” in Hebrew), gave the young girl a new feeling of belonging. And yet, even in Theresienstadt, even among the young, some of the inmates kept feeling superior to the other and showed it: “The Czechs in L410 [the children’s barracks] looked down on us because we spoke the enemy’s language. Besides, they really were the elite, because they were in their own country…. So even here we were disdained for something that wasn’t in our power to change: our mother tongue.”
⁸⁰

Throughout its existence Theresienstadt offered a dual face: On the one hand, transports were departing to Auschwitz and Treblinka, on the other, the Germans set up a “Potemkin village” meant to fool the world. “Will money be introduced?” Redlich asked in an entry on November 7, 1942. “Of course it could be. The thing could be an interesting experiment in national economics. Anyway, a coffee house has been opened (they say there will even be music there, a bank, a reading room). Two days later: “They are making a film. Jewish actors, satisfied, happy faces in the film, only in the film.” This was to be the first of two Nazi films about Theresienstadt.
⁸¹

Whereas Theresienstadt, designated a ghetto, was part assembly camp and part concentration camp, the nondescript Izbica, in the Lublin district, was in fact a ghetto without walls. Two-thirds of Izbica’s initial Jewish population had been deported to Belzec and, from March 1942 on, transports of Jews from the Protectorate, then from any deportation center in the Reich, filled the town with its new inhabitants. A remarkable “report from Izbica,” offers a detailed description of daily life in this waiting room to Belzec or Sobibor.
⁸²
This eighteen-page letter was written in August 1942 by a deportee from Essen, Ernst Krombach, to his fiancée, Marianne Ellenbogen, whom we encountered in the previous chapter, and delivered to her by an SS employee from Essen whom the couple knew.

Krombach’s letter, studded with all the prejudices against Polish and Czech Jews common among German Jews, is one more expression of the absence of overall solidarity, the tensions among inmates, and the
sauve qui peut
mentality (his own words) that prevailed in Izbica, as everywhere else.
⁸³
Whether Izbica’s Jews knew the destination of the outgoing transports is unclear from the letter, as he certainly wished to shield Ellenbogen from further anguish. “In the meantime [since his arrival in April],” he writes, “many transports have left here. Of the approximately 14,000 Jews who arrived, only 2–3,000 are still here. They go off in cattle trucks, subject to the most brutal treatment, with even fewer possessions, i.e. only the clothes they are wearing. That is one rung farther down the ladder. We have heard nothing more of these people (Austerlitz, Bärs, etc.). After the last transport, the men who were working outside the village returned to find neither their wives, nor children, nor their possessions.
⁸⁴

After indicating that in the recent transports the men had been taken off the trains in Lublin—which confirms what we know of the selection process introduced there—Krombach admits that, although he refused to join the Jewish police, he was compelled to take part in the deportation of “Polish Jews”: “You have to suppress every human feeling and, under the supervision of the SS, drive the people out with a whip, just as they are—barefoot, with infants in their arms. There are scenes which I cannot and will not describe but which will take me long to forget.”
⁸⁵
It remains puzzling that somebody who did not belong to the Jewish police would have been compelled to chase the Polish Jews “with a whip” out of their homes and into the cattle cars.

In a second part of his report, Krombach seems to know more or be ready to tell more: “Recently on one morning alone more than 20 Polish Jews were shot for baking bread…. Our lives consist of uncertainty and insecurity. There could be another evacuation tomorrow, even though the officials concerned say that there won’t be any more. It becomes more and more difficult to hide given how few people are here now—particularly as there is always a given target [a quota of deportees] to be met.”
⁸⁶
Then, almost paradoxically, he uses a metaphor from his youthful readings: “The Wild West was nothing compared to this!”
⁸⁷
Could it be that, after all, he had no clear understanding of his situation?

In the fall of 1942 all contact with Ernst Krombach was lost. According to some reports, at about that time he had been blinded either in an accident or by the SS. In April 1943 the last Jews of Izbica were shipped to Sobibor.
⁸⁸

V

While the killings in Chelmno ran smoothly on, the building of Belzec, which had started on November 1, 1941, progressed apace, and in early March, the first transports of Jews reached the Lublin district, close to the camp. Assistance from the local authorities was necessary at first. On March 16, 1942, an official from the Population and Social Welfare Bureau of the district, Fritz Rauter, discussed the situation with Hauptsturmführer Hermann Höfle, Globocnik’s main deportations expert, who volunteered some explanations. A camp was being built in Belzec, along the railway line Deblin-Trawniki; Höfle was ready to take in four or five transports daily. These Jews, he explained to Rauter, “were crossing the border [of the General Government] and would never return.” The next day the gassings started.
⁸⁹

At first, some 30,000 out of the 37,000 Jews of the Lublin ghetto were exterminated. Simultaneously another 13,500 Jews arrived from various areas of the district (Zamóść, Piaski, and Izbica), and from the Lwov area; in early June deportees from Krakow followed. Within four weeks some 75,000 Jews had been murdered in this first of the three “Aktion Reinhardt” camps (named in Heydrich’s memory),
⁹⁰
by the end of 1942 about 434,000 Jews would be exterminated in Belzec alone.
⁹¹
Two survived the war.

Sometime in late March or April 1942, the former Austrian police officer and euthanasia expert Franz Stangl traveled to Belzec to meet its commandant, SS Hauptsturmführer Christian Wirth. Forty years later, in his Düsseldorf jail, Stangl described his arrival in Belzec: “I went there by car,” he told the British journalist Gitta Sereny. “‘As one arrived, one first reached Belzec railway station, on the left side of the road. It was a one-story building. The smell…’ he said. ‘Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn’t in his office. I remember, they took me to him…. He was standing on a hill, next to the pits…the pits…full…they were full. I can’t tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses…. Oh God. That’s where Wirth told me—he said that was what Sobibor was for. And that he was putting me officially in charge.’”
⁹²
Some two months later Sobibor—whose construction began at the end of March 1942—was in operation and Stangl, its attentive commandant, usually toured the camp in white riding attire.
⁹³

About 90,000 to 100,000 Jews were murdered in Sobibor during its first three months of operation; they came from the Lublin district and, either directly or via ghettos of the Lublin area, from Austria, the Protectorate, and the
Altreich
.
⁹⁴
And, while the exterminations were launched in Sobibor, the construction of Treblinka began.

Extermination in the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps followed standard procedures. Ukrainian auxiliaries, usually armed with whips, chased the Jews out of the trains. As in Chelmno, the next step was “disinfection”; the victims had to undress and leave all their belongings in the assembly room. Then the throng of naked and terrified people was pushed through a narrow hallway or passage into one of the gas chambers. The doors were hermetically sealed; the gassing started. At the beginning bottles of carbon monoxide were still used in Belzec; later they were replaced by various engines. Death was slow to come in these early gas chambers (ten minutes or more): Sometimes the agony of the victims could be watched through peepholes. When all was finished, the emptying of the gas chambers was left, again as in Chelmno, to Jewish “special commandos,” who would themselves be liquidated later on.

Around Belzec and throughout the Lublin district, rumors spread. On April 8, 1942, Klukowski, the Polish hospital director, noted: “The Jews are upset [probably “in despair” in the original]. We know for sure that every day two trains, consisting of twenty cars each, come to Belzec, one from Lublin, the other from Lwow. After being unloaded on separate tracks, all Jews are forced behind the barbed-wire enclosure. Some are killed with electricity, some with poison gases, and the bodies are burned.” Klukowski went on: “On the way to Belzec the Jews experience many terrible things. They are aware of what will happen to them. Some try to fight back. At the railroad station in Szczebrzeszyn a young woman gave away a gold ring in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. In Lublin, people witnessed small children being thrown through the windows of speeding trains. Many people are shot before reaching Belzec.”
⁹⁵

On April 12, having mentioned on the previous day that the deportation of Jews from Zamóść was about to start, Klukowski noted: “The information from Zamóść is horrifying. Almost 2,500 Jews were evacuated. A few hundred were shot on the streets. Some men fought back. I do not have any details. Here in Szczebrzeszyn there is panic. Old Jewish women spent the night in the Jewish cemetery, saying they would rather die here among the graves of their own families than be killed and buried in the concentration camps.” And the following day: “Many Jews have left town already or hidden…. In town a mob started assembling, waiting for the right moment to start removing everything from the Jewish homes. I have information that some people are already stealing whatever can be carried out from homes where the owners have been forced to move out.”
⁹⁶

By April 1942 gassings had reached their full scale in Chelmno, Belzec, and Sobibor; they were just starting in Auschwitz, and would soon begin in Treblinka. Simultaneously, within a few weeks, huge extermination operations by shooting or in gas vans would engulf further hundreds of thousands of Jews in Belorussia and in the Ukraine (the second sweep), while “standard” on-the-spot killings remained common fare throughout the winter in the occupied areas of the USSR, in Galicia, in the Lublin district, and several areas of eastern Poland. At the same time again, slave labor camps were operating throughout the East and in Upper Silesia; some camps in this last category were a mix of transit areas, slave labor, and killing centers: Majdanek near Lublin or Janowska Road, on the outskirts of Lwov, for example. And, next to this jumble of slave labor and extermination operations, tens of thousands of Jews toiled in ordinary factories and workshops, in work camps, ghettos, or towns, and hundreds of thousands were still alive in former Poland, in the Baltic countries, and further eastward. While the Jewish population in the Reich was rapidly declining as deportations had resumed in full force, in the West, most Jews were leading their restricted lives without a sense of immediate danger. Yet the German vise was closing rapidly, and within two or three months, even minimal everyday normality would have disappeared for most Jews in occupied Europe.