The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (71 page)

Czerniaków tried to negotiate some exemptions (he was particularly worried about the fate of many orphans) but received no assurances whatsoever. On the twenty-third, he noted in his diary: “In the morning at the Community. SS 1st Leut. [Lt.] Worthoff from the deportation staff came and we discussed several problems. He exempted the vocational school students from deportation. The husbands of working women as well. He told me to take up the matter of the orphans with Höfle. The same about craftsmen. When I asked for the number of days per week in which the operation would be carried on, the answer was seven days a week. Throughout the town a great rush to start new workshops. A sewing machine can save a life. It is 3 o’clock. So far 4,000 are ready to go. The orders are that there must be 9,000 [at the
Umschlagplatz
, the assembly square] by 4 o’clock.”
¹²⁴
In the afternoon of the twenty-third, as the Jewish police were unable to fill the quota, the auxiliary police units launched their own roundup without taking any exemptions into account. Czerniaków’s “negotiations” had been in vain.

That same evening the SS called Czerniaków back from home; he was told that the next day 10,000 Jews had to be sent to the
Umschlagplatz
. The chairman returned to his office, closed the door, wrote one farewell note to the council informing it of the new German demands, another to his wife, and took poison.
¹²⁵
Kaplan, no friend of Czerniaków, noted on July 26: “The first victim of the deportation decree was the President, Adam Czerniaków, who committed suicide by poison in the Judenrat building…. There are those who earn immortality in a single hour. The President, Adam Czerniaków, earned his immortality in a single instant.”
¹²⁶

On July 22 Treblinka had opened its gates. Every day thousands of terrified ghetto inhabitants were driven to the assembly point and from there, a freight train carried five thousand of them to Treblinka.
¹²⁷
At first most of the Jews of Warsaw did not know what fate awaited them. On July 30 Kaplan mentioned “expulsion” and “exile”: “The seventh day of the expulsion. Living funerals pass before the windows of my apartment—cattle trucks or coal wagons full of candidates for expulsion and exile, carrying small bundles under their arms…rosters promising 3 kgs of bread and 1 kg of marmalade drew many a famished Jew to the assembly square.”
¹²⁸

On August 5 the deportations engulfed all institutions for children, including all orphanages. Since May of that year, Korczak had been keeping his “ghetto diary”—a record of thoughts, reminiscences, even dreams, more than actual events. Yet every line reflected, to varying degrees, the anxiety that the “old doctor” felt about the fate of his charges and that of the ghetto. His imprisonment by the Gestapo in the dreaded Pawiak jail, at the end of 1940 and in early 1941 (following his insistence on transporting potatoes for his orphanage during the transfer to the ghetto, his wearing a Polish officer’s uniform—he had been an officer in the Polish army, but such a display was of course forbidden—and his steady refusal to wear the mandatory armband with the Jewish star), left him shaken and ill. Vodka soothed his anxiety but not sufficiently to keep his mind off macabre ruminations, even when he joked.
¹²⁹
Thus sometime in late May or early June of 1942, he wrote:

“All is fine, I say, and it’s my wish to be merry. An amusing reminiscence: Five decagrams of so-called smoked sausage now costs 1 zloty 20. It used to cost only 80 grosze (and bread a bit more). I said to a saleswoman: ‘Tell me, dear lady, isn’t that sausage by chance made of human flesh? It’s rather too cheap for horsemeat.’ And she replied: ‘How should I know? I wasn’t there when it was being made.’” Leaving his peculiar sense of humor at that, Korczak turned again to his single overwhelming concern: the orphans. “The day began with weighing the children,” he noted in the same entry. “The month of May has brought a marked decline [in their weight]. The previous months of this year were not too bad and even May is not yet alarming. But we still have two months or more before the harvest. No getting away from that. And the restrictions imposed by official regulations, new additional interpretations and overcrowding are expected to make the situation still worse.”
¹³⁰

During these same days, Korczak noted a street scene: “The body of a dead boy lies on the sidewalk. Nearby, three boys are playing horses and drivers. At one point they notice the body, move a few steps to the side, go on playing.”
¹³¹

On August 4 Korczak described another minute episode: In the early-morning light he was watering the flowers on his windowsill while in the street an armed German soldier stood watching him. “I am watering the flowers. My bald head in the window—What a splendid target. He has a rifle. Why is he standing and looking on calmly? He has no orders to shoot. And perhaps he was a village teacher in civilian life, or a notary, a street sweeper in Leipzig, a waiter in Cologne? What would he do if I nodded to him? Waved my hand in a friendly gesture? Perhaps he doesn’t even know that things are as they are? He may have arrived only yesterday, from far away.”
¹³²

The following day the whole orphanage, like all Jewish orphanages in the ghetto, was ordered to proceed to the
Umschlagplatz
. Korczak walked at the head of the column of children marching to their death. On August 6 Lewin noted: “They emptied Dr. Korczak’s orphanage with the doctor at the head. Two hundred orphans.”
¹³³
Kaplan was no longer alive to describe the deportation of Korczak’s children. His ultimate diary entry had been written on August 4; the last line read: “If my life ends—what will become of my diary.”
¹³⁴

By September 21 the great
Aktion
was over: 10,380 Jews had been killed in the ghetto during the deportations; 265,040 had been deported to Treblinka and gassed.
¹³⁵

Capt. Wilm Hosenfeld, head of sports facilities for Wehrmacht officers in Warsaw, knew quite a lot about what was happening to the Jews—although he refused to believe in systematic murder—as his diary throughout the
Aktion
indicates. “If what they are saying in the city is true,” he noted on July 25, 1942, “and it does come from reliable sources—then it is no honor to be a German officer, and no one could go along with what is happening. But I can’t believe it. The rumors say that thirty thousand Jews are to be taken from the ghetto this week and sent east somewhere. In spite of all the secrecy people say they know what happens then: Somewhere near Lublin, buildings have been constructed with rooms that can be electrically heated with strong current, like the electricity in a crematorium. Unfortunate people are driven into these heated rooms and burned alive, and thousands can be killed like that in a day, saving all the trouble of shooting them, digging mass graves and then filling them in. The guillotine of the French revolution can’t compete, and even in the cellars of the Russian secret police they hadn’t devised such virtuoso methods of mass slaughter. But surely this is madness. It can’t be possible. You wonder why the Jews don’t defend themselves. However, many, indeed most of them, are so weak from starvation and misery that they couldn’t offer any resistance.”
¹³⁶

In brief notes jotted down at the end of 1942, Ringelblum established a clear distinction between the previous period and the one that had started during the last few months: “The latest period. The time of atrocities. Impossible to write a monographic study because—the shadows of Ponar, 9,000 from Slonim, expulsions—the tragedy of Lublin…Chelmno—gas. Treblinki [
sic
]…. Time of persecutions, and now the time of atrocities.”
¹³⁷

Treblinka, the last and deadliest of the “Aktion Reinhardt” camps, had been built to the northeast of Warsaw, close to the Warsaw-Bialystok railway line, on sandy terrain stretching to a bend in the river Bug. The closest station was Malkinia, from which a single-track line led to the camp. The “lower” or first camp extended over the larger area; it included the assembly and undressing squares and, farther on, workshops and barracks. The second or “upper” camp was isolated from the first by barbed wire and thick foliage fences that hindered unwelcome observation. A heavy brick building concealed the three gas chambers linked to a diesel engine by a system of pipes (a larger building with ten gas chambers would be added in October 1942). As in Chelmno, Belzec, or Sobibor, on arrival the deportees had to undress and leave all clothes or valuables for the sorting squads. From the “undressing square” the victims were driven to the gas chambers along “the road to heaven” (
Himmelstrasse
), a narrow corridor also hidden from the surroundings by thick branches. A sign pointed “to the showers.”
¹³⁸

SS Obersturmführer Richard Thomalla had been in charge of the construction of the camp. Euthanasia physician Dr. Irmfried Eberl was appointed first commandant, and on July 23, 1942, the exterminations began. According to SS Unterscharführer Hans Hingst’s testimony, “Dr. Eberl’s ambition was to reach the highest possible numbers and exceed all the other camps. So many transports arrived that the disembarkation and gassing of the people could no longer be handled.”
¹³⁹
Within days Eberl completely lost control of the situation. By the end of August some 312,000 Jews, mainly from Warsaw but also from the districts of Radom and Lublin, had been gassed at the new camp.
¹⁴⁰

Eberl’s “incompetence” was compounded by widespread corruption: The money and valuables carried by the victims found their way into the camp staff ’s pockets and also into those of the commandant’s euthanasia colleagues in Berlin.
¹⁴¹
When Globocnik became aware of the situation in Treblinka in August, he traveled to the camp with Wirth and Josef Oberhauser. Eberl was relieved of his position then and there, and Wirth was ordered to move in and tidy up the chaos so that Stangl, the Sobibor commandant, could take over, which he did in early September.
¹⁴²

In his prison interviews with Sereny, Stangl described his first visit to Treblinka while Eberl was still in charge: “I drove there, with an SS driver…. We could smell it kilometers away. The road ran alongside the railway. When we were about fifteen, twenty minutes’ drive from Treblinka we began to see corpses by the [railway] line, first just two or three, then more, and as we drove into Treblinka station, there were what looked hundreds of them—just lying there—they’d obviously been there for days, in the heat. In the station was a train full of Jews, some dead, some still alive…that too, looked as if it had been there for days…. When I entered the camp and got out of the car on the square I stepped knee-deep into money; I didn’t know which way to turn, where to go. I waded in notes, currency, precious stones, jewelry, clothes…. The smell was indescribable; the hundreds, no, the thousands of bodies everywhere, decomposing, putrefying. Across the square, in the woods, just a few hundred yards away on the other side of the barbed-wire fence and all around the perimeter of the camp, there were tents and open fires with groups of Ukrainian guards and girls—whores, I found out later, from all over the countryside—weaving drunk, dancing, singing, playing music.”
¹⁴³

VI

In Lodz in the fall of 1942, as had been the case in Warsaw, the Germans established priority rules of their own. On September 1 the deportations started. The patients of the ghetto’s five hospitals were “evacuated” within two hours; whoever protested was shot on the spot. In all 2,000 patients, including 400 children, were carted away. Once the Germans had arrested most of the patients, they checked the hospital registry, and if anybody was missing, most of the time family members were taken instead.

According to Josef Zelkowicz, one of the ghetto chroniclers and a Yiddish writer of some renown, who apart from his “official” contributions to the “Chronicle” also kept a private diary, the procedure was in fact more tortuous: “The authorities insisted that all patients who escaped from the hospitals be turned in,” he recorded on September 3. “However, since some were missing and many others could not be handed over because they had ‘backing’ and connections in the ghetto, it was agreed with the authorities that the
kehilla
would transfer two hundred other people in their stead. Those to be sacrificed would be sought not only among the escapees but among people who had been hospitalized at some other time, for any illness and had long since been discharged but lacked [protectors]. Even those who had never been hospitalized but who had applied for hospitalization on the basis of a doctor’s recommendation would be included.”
¹⁴⁴

The deportation of the sick was immediately followed by an order to evacuate some further 20,000 Jews, including all children under ten and all the elderly above sixty-five. As these categories totaled only 17,000 people, 3,000 unemployed or unemployable inhabitants were added.
¹⁴⁵
“In the evening,” Sierakowiak recorded on September 3, “disturbing news spread that the Germans had allegedly demanded that all children up to the age of ten must be delivered for deportation and, supposedly, extermination.”
¹⁴⁶

On September 5 Sierakowiak’s mother was taken away. “My most sacred, beloved, worn-out, blessed, cherished Mother has fallen victim to the bloodthirsty German Nazi beast!!! Two doctors, Czech Jews, suddenly arrived in the Sierakowiaks’ apartment and declared the mother unfit for work; throughout the doctors’ visit, the father continued to eat the soup left by relatives in hiding and was also “taking sugar out of their bag.” The mother left, with some bread in her bag and some potatoes. “I couldn’t muster the willpower to look through the windows after her or to cry,” Sierakowiak went on. “I walked around, talked and finally sat as though I had turned to stone…. I thought my heart was breaking…. It didn’t break, though, and it let me eat, think, speak and go to sleep.”
¹⁴⁷