The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (64 page)

X

After most of the Jewish population of Vilna had been murdered in the summer and fall of 1941, a “quiet” period (that was to last for some eighteen months) set in at the beginning of 1942. Now more than ever, Kruk and Rudashevski tried to record the “everyday.” And the everyday offered its ordinary lot of misery but also quite unexpected dilemmas: For example, should one allow a theater in the ghetto? Kruk, a moralist in the Bundist-socialist tradition, was appalled: “Today,” he recorded on January 17, “I received a formal invitation from a founding group of Jewish artists in the ghetto announcing that the first evening of the local artistic circle will be held on Sunday, January 18, in the auditorium of the Real Gymnasium at Rudnicka 6…. I felt offended, personally offended about the whole thing, let alone the festive evening. In every ghetto you can amuse yourself, cultivating art is certainly a good deed. But here, in the doleful situation of the Vilna Ghetto, in the shadow of Ponar, where of the 76,000 Vilna Jews, only 15,000 remain—here, at this moment, this is a disgrace. An offense to all our feelings. But, as we know, the real initiators of the evening are the Jewish police. Furthermore, important guests, Germans, will come to the concert. Lyuba Bewicka, the brilliant German singer, is even trying to have some Jewish songs ‘on hand.’ In case, God forbid, a German will ask for them!…You don’t make a theater in a graveyard.

“The organized Jewish labor movement [the Bund] has decided to respond to the invitation with a boycott. Not one of them will go to the ‘crows’ concert.’ But the streets of the ghetto are to be strewn with leaflets: ‘About today’s concert. You don’t make theater in a graveyard!’ The police and the artists will amuse themselves, and the Vilna ghetto will mourn.”
¹⁹⁶

Notwithstanding the Bund’s initial qualms, intense cultural activity developed in the ghetto throughout 1942 and early 1943: “The number of cultural events in March [1942],” a contemporary record indicated, “was exceptionally high, because all existing suitable premises in the ghetto, like the theater, gymnasium, youth club and school quarters, were used. Every Sunday, six to seven events took place with over two thousand participants.” However, lack of space soon became a problem: “At the end of the month the Culture Department had to give up to the incoming outof-town Jews a number of premises like the gymnasium, School No. 2, Kindergarten No. 2, and a part of School No. 1. This will greatly affect the work of the schools, the sports division, and also the theater, which had to take into its building the sports division and the workers’ assemblies.” The section of the report dealing with the activity of the lending library indicated that as of April 1 the library had 2,592 [subscribing] readers. “An average of 206 persons visited the reading room daily (155 in February)…. During the month the Archives collected 101 documents. Besides that, 124 folklore items were assembled.
¹⁹⁷

In Kovno, the German presence was more direct than in Vilna, even during the respite period. On January 13, 1942, a German Ghetto Guard was established inside the Jewish area.
¹⁹⁸
Moreover, the local Germans seem to have been more inventive: “An order,” Tory noted on January 14, “to bring all dogs and cats to the small synagogue in Veliounos Street, where they were shot [the bodies of the cats and dogs remained in the synagogue for several months; the Jews were forbidden to remove them].”
¹⁹⁹
On February 28 Tory recorded: “Today is the deadline for handing over all the books in the ghetto, without exception, as ordered by the representative of the Rosenberg organization, Dr. Benker.” (Benker had threatened anybody failing to hand in books with the death penalty.)
²⁰⁰

XI

From the beginning of 1942 mass killings of Jews were spreading throughout the Warthegau and the General Government, as the days of total annihilation were rapidly approaching. One may wonder whether the exceptional and exceptionally visible German bestiality had any impact upon the traditional attitudes of the majority of Poles toward their Jewish countrymen. The answer seems negative. “Only in Poland,” Alexander Smolar wrote in the 1980s, “was anti-Semitism compatible with patriotism (a correlation considerably strengthened under the Soviet occupation in 1939–1941) and also with democracy. The anti-Semitic National Democratic Party was represented both in the Polish government in London and in the structures of the underground within Poland. Precisely because Polish anti-Semitism was not tainted by any trace of collaboration with the Germans, it could prosper—not only in the street but also in the underground press, in political parties, and in the armed forces.”
²⁰¹

Polonsky, who quoted Smolar, rephrased the argument by pointing out that “whereas the socialist and democratic organizations continued to advocate full equality for the Jews in a future liberated Poland, pre-war antisemitic parties did not abandon their hostility to the Jews merely because the Nazis were also anti-semites.”
²⁰²
The socialist and democratic organizations represented a minority in relation to the anti-Semitic camp. And among the anti-Semites themselves there were nuances. Thus in January 1942,
Narod
, the paper of the Christian Democratic Party of Labor, a party that belonged to the government-in-exile coalition, phrased its stance as clearly as could be: “The Jewish question is now a burning issue. We insist that the Jews cannot regain their political rights and the property they have lost. Moreover, in the future they must entirely leave the territories of our country. The matter is complicated by the fact that once we demand that the Jews leave Poland, we will not be able to tolerate them on the territories of the future federation of Slavic nations [which the journal advocated.] This means that we will have to cleanse all of Central and Southern Europe of the Jewish element, which amounts to removing some 8 to 9 million Jews.”
²⁰³

Is there much difference between the views expressed in
Narod
, considered moderately anti-Semitic, and those carried in these same days of January 1942 by
Szaniec
, the organ of prewar Polish fascists?
Szaniec
put it thus: “Jews were, are and will be against us, always and everywhere…. And now the question arises, how are the Poles to treat the Jews…. We, and certainly 90 percent of Poles, have only one answer to this question: like enemies.”
²⁰⁴

Szaniec
’s emphatic statement seems indeed to have expressed widely held views. Even German anti-Jewish propaganda was manifestly well accepted and internalized by many Poles. On January 16, 1942, Dawid Rubinowicz, the young diarist from the Kielce area, noted that on that evening the mayor of nearby Bieliny visited his family’s home: “Father fetched some vodka and they finished it off together because he [the mayor] was a bit chilled…. The mayor said all Jews would have to be shot because they were enemies. If I could only write down just a part of all he said at our house, but I simply can’t.”
²⁰⁵
German anti-Jewish posters adorned the walls of the smallest villages and the populace enjoyed it. On February 12 Dawid described one of the posters put up by the “village constable”: “A Jew is shown mincing meat and putting a rat into the mincer. Another is pouring water from a bucket into milk. In the third picture a Jew is shown stamping dough with his feet and worms are crawling over him and the dough. The heading of the notice reads: ‘The Jew is a Cheat, Your only Enemy.’ A ditty followed commenting on each caricature; The last two lines rendered the tone of the entire ‘poem’: ‘Worms infest their home-made bread/Because the dough with feet they tread.’ When the village constable had put it up,” Dawid added, “some people came along, and their laughter gave me a headache from the shame that the Jews suffer nowadays.”
²⁰⁶

During the weeks and months that followed, Dawid’s diary repeatedly evoked the killing spree that engulfed his region. On June 1, the diary entry started untypically: “A happy day.” Dawid’s father, who had been arrested, was back. Then, however, the tone changed: “I have forgotten to write down the most important and most terrible news of all. This morning, a mother and a daughter had gone out into the country. Unfortunately the Germans were driving from Rudki to Bodzentyn…. When the two women caught sight of the Germans they began to flee, but were overtaken and arrested. They intended shooting them on the spot in the village, but the mayor wouldn’t allow it. They then went into the woods and shot them there. The Jewish police immediately went there to bury them in the cemetery. When the cart returned it was full of blood. Who—”
²⁰⁷
There, in midsentence, Dawid Rubinowicz’s diary ended.

In his straightforward way Dawid described events as they happened before his eyes. Some of the other Jewish diarists in the Polish provinces, more “sophisticated” and older by a few years, were more reflective. But for most of them, be they in the neighborhood of Kielce or a few hundred miles away, the writing would also suddenly end, in the same month of June 1942. In the early spring Elisheva from Stanislawów had inserted the notes of an anonymous friend in her own chronicle: “We are utterly exhausted,” the “guest diarist” recorded on March 13, 1942. “We only have illusions that something will change; this hope keeps us alive. But how long can we live on the power of the spirit that is also fading? Sometimes there are rumors in the ghetto that graves are being dug. Seemingly strong people, both young and old, submit to the gossip. It is a terrible feeling. You feel that you have a halter on your neck and the guards are watching you very carefully, and on the other hand you are aware that you could live longer since you are healthy and strong but without any human rights…. Yesterday, Elsa [Elisheva] told me that a man who had died of starvation couldn’t fit into the coffin, so his legs had to be broken. Unbelievable!”
²⁰⁸

On May 14 Elisheva reminisced that the situation in Stanislawów had suddenly changed at the end of March: “It started in March. All the handicapped on the Aryan side were killed. It was a signal that something ominous was coming. And it was a disaster. On March 31, they started searching for the handicapped and old people, and later several thousand young and healthy people were taken. We were hiding in the attic and through the window I saw the transports of Hungarian Jews [who had been expelled from Hungary to Galicia in the late summer of 1941] leaving Rudolfsmühle [an improvised German prison]. I saw children from the orphanage wrapped in bed sheets. The houses around the ghetto were on fire. I heard some shooting, children crying, mothers calling, and Germans breaking into the neighboring houses. We survived.”
²⁰⁹

On June 9 Elisheva recognized that her own survival had been but a short reprieve: “Well, this whole scribbling does not make any sense. It is a fact we are not going to survive. The world will know about everything even without my wise notes. The members of the Jewish Council have been imprisoned. The hell with them, the thieves. But what does it mean to us? Rudolfsmühle has finally been liquidated. Eight hundred people have been taken to the cemetery [the killing site of Stanislawów]…. The situation is hopeless but some people say it is going to be better. Let us hope so! Is being alive after the war worth so much suffering and pain? I doubt it. But I don’t want to die like an animal.”
²¹⁰
Ten days later Elisheva’s diary ended. The circumstances of Elisheva’s death are not known. Her diary was discovered in a ditch along the road leading to the Stanislawów cemetery.
²¹¹

In Lodz, Sierakowiak’s chronicling resumed in mid-March. In his saddler’s workshop, the food, it seems, was sufficient for “workshop workers” like him (category A). “The deportations are in progress, while the workshops are receiving huge orders, and there is enough work for several months,” he noted on March 26.
²¹²
The deportations were temporarily halted on April 3. On that day the diarist recorded: “The deportations have been halted again, but nobody knows for how long. Meanwhile winter has returned with thick snow. Rumkowski has posted an announcement that there will be a cleaning of the ghetto on Monday. From eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, all inhabitants from the ages of fifteen to fifty will have to clean apartments and courtyards. There won’t be any other work anywhere. All I care about, however, is that there is soup in my workshop.”
²¹³

By mid-May 1942 the number of deportees from Lodz had reached 55,000.
²¹⁴
The last wave, between May 4 and 15, included exclusively 10,600 “Western Jews” from a total of 17,000 of these Jews still alive in the ghetto at that time.
²¹⁵
It remains unclear why none of the “Western Jews” were included in the earlier deportations and why at the beginning of May they were the only deportees. After considering various possibilities, historian Avraham Barkai interpreted the earlier reprieve as the probable result of German orders: To secure the orderly pace of deportations from the Reich, it was imperative to avoid the spreading of any rumors about Lodz.
²¹⁶
As we saw, Hitler’s new judicial powers could also offer an explanation, as the German Jews deported to Chelmno from Lodz were still German subjects who were deported to an extermination site located within the borders of the Greater Reich. In any case, once the impediments were dealt with, it is probable that the Germans decided to dispose of Jews who were elderly, the majority of whom could not be integrated into the work force. Whether Rumkowski was involved in the decision is not known, although he did not hide his growing hostility to the “newcomers.”
²¹⁷

The forthcoming “resettlement” of the “Western Jews” had been announced during the last days of April. Immediately frantic attempts began to trade whatever remaining possessions could not be taken along, all the more so since luggage was forbidden. The deportees were a particularly pitiful crowd in the eyes of the chroniclers: “Schooled by the experience of recent days, some people have struck on the old idea of putting on a few suits, a few changes of underwear and, quite frequently, two overcoats. They tie the first coat with a belt from which they hang an extra pair of shoes and other small items. And so their faces, cadaverously white or waxy yellow, swollen, and despairing, sway disjointedly on top of disproportionately wide bodies that bend and droop under their own weight. They are possessed by a single thought: To save the little that remains of what they own, even at the expense of the last of their strength. Some people have been overcome by utter helplessness, whereas some still believe in something.”
²¹⁸