The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (72 page)

On September 4 Rumkowski addressed a crowd of some 1,500 terrified inhabitants assembled on “Fireman’s Square”: “The ghetto has been dealt a grievous blow. They ask that we give them that which is most precious—the children and old people. I was never privileged to have a child of my own and therefore I devoted my best years to children…. In my old age I am compelled to stretch out my hand and beg: ‘My brothers and my sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!’…I must carry out the grim bloody surgery, I must amputate limbs to save the body! I must take away children and if I do not, others too may be taken…. I wanted at least to save one age group—from age nine to ten. But they would not relent…. We have in the ghetto many tuberculosis patients; their days or perhaps weeks are numbered. I do not know—maybe it is a satanic plot, maybe it is not—but I cannot refrain from presenting it: Give me these patients and it may be possible to save healthy people in their stead.”
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“The President cries like a little boy,” Zelkowicz added.
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After describing the deportations, the chroniclers added a highly significant postscript conveying, as Sierakowiak had confessed about himself, the prevailing emotional numbness of the ghetto population: “The populace’s strange reaction to the recent events is noteworthy. There is not the slightest doubt that this was a profound and terrible shock, and yet one must wonder at the indifference shown by those…from whom loved ones had been taken. It would seem that the events of recent days would have immersed the entire population of the ghetto in mourning for a long time to come, and yet, right after the incidents, and even during the resettlement action, the populace was obsessed with everyday concerns—getting bread, rations and so forth—and often went from immediate personal tragedy right back into daily life.
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Zelkowicz, who had written the chronicle entry about emotional numbness, offered some explanation for it in his private diary on September 3; it could have been called “the psychology of starvation.” While mentioning how death had become “a daily event that surprised and frightened no one,” the diarist noted that a distribution of potatoes had been announced on that same day; that had become the real event. “As long as a ghetto inhabitant lives, he wants at least once, if only for the last time, to experience the sense of satisfaction, to gorge himself. Afterward, whatever will be, will be…. So whenever there is talk about handing out potatoes, everything that has happened till now is shunted aside…. Yes, potatoes will be given out; it’s a fact. Starting tomorrow, Friday, September 4…. The crowd is elated…. The people can only wish one another: may we be the privileged to eat these potatoes while we are still alive.”
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Between August 10 and 23, 1942, many of the Jews of Lwov were deported to the Janowska Road slave labor camp and, after a further selection, from there to Belzec. Some 40,000 of the victims arrested during the August roundup were exterminated.
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The remaining Jews of the city were driven into a ghetto, soon surrounded by a wooden fence. The
Judenrat
office was relocated to the ghetto area, but the
Judenrat
officials and among them the chairman, Henryk Landesberg, were not to resume their functions. According to the Germans, Landesberg had been in touch with the Polish underground.
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The chairman and twelve other Jewish officials were to be publicly hanged from the roof of the building and from lampposts.

The executions took some time, as the ropes used for the hangings broke; the victims who fell to the pavement were compelled to climb the stairs leading to the roof and were hanged again. The highest spot was kept for Landesberg, as chairman. He fell to the pavement three times and three times was brought back to his balcony. The bodies were left on display for two days. A survivor from the ghetto described the scene. “I went with my mother to the office of the Jewish community regarding an apartment and there in the light breeze, dangled the corpses of the hanged, their faces blue, their heads tilted backward, their tongues blackened and stretched out. Luxury cars raced in from the center of the city, German civilians with their wives and children came to see the sensational spectacle, and, as was their custom, the visitors enthusiastically photographed the scene. Afterward the Ukrainians and Poles arrived by with greater modesty.”
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The Germans sent the bill for the ropes to the new
Judenrat
.
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As for the Jews of the Lwov ghetto, they did not survive long: Most were liquidated in sporadic
Aktionen
and the remnant transferred to the Janowski camp in early 1943. When Lwov was liberated at the end of July 1944, out of a community of some 160,000 Jews in June 1941, some 3,400 were still alive.
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In nearby Drohobycz, the writer Bruno Schulz, who, as will be remembered, was painting the walls of SS Felix Landau’s mansion and of the local Gestapo offices, was still alive in the autumn of 1942, protected by his “patron.” In the meantime he had had to move into the ghetto and was by then mainly employed in cataloging the approximately 100,000 books seized by the Germans in the town and assembled at the old-age home.
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Schulz sensed that his end was near. “They are supposed to liquidate us by November [1942],” he told a Polish ex–fellow teacher of the local gymnasium.
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And indeed on November 19 a shooting incident in the ghetto triggered wild reprisals against the population. Landau was away; the Gestapo man’s personal enemy, SS Scharführer Karl Günther, seized the occasion of the “wild action,” tracked Schulz on one of the ghetto streets, and killed him. About one hundred Jews were murdered in the action: On the next day their bodies were still lying on the streets.
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In July 1942 the chief of the Vilna Jewish police, Jacob Gens, became the sole head of the Vilna ghetto. Among community leaders he was in many ways atypical. Born in Kovno, he fought as a volunteer in the Lithuanian war of independence in the aftermath of World War I and was promoted to officer rank. He married a Christian and was well regarded by Lithuanian nationalists (he himself was a right-wing Zionist, a member of Wladimir Jabotinski’s Revisionist Party). In Philip Friedman’s words “it remains something of a mystery why Gens had accepted the position [of chief of the ghetto police].”
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His wife and daughter remained on the Aryan side of the city. He possibly felt a moral obligation to take the position offered by the Germans. In the first letter Gens sent his wife from the ghetto, he wrote. “This is the first time in my life that I have to engage in such duties. My heart is broken. But I shall always do what is necessary for the sake of the Jews in the ghetto.”
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During the selections of late November 1941, Gens succeeded in saving some lives in particularly difficult circumstances; his standing among the inhabitants grew and the Germans also kept adding to his tasks. But in mid-October 1942 the almost legendary “kommandant” was confronted with a grim challenge: the order to kill Jews.

Gens and his policemen were sent to a nearby town, Oszmiana, where about 1,400 Jews had been assembled for extermination. The police chief negotiated with the Germans, who finally agreed that only 400 Jews were to be murdered. Gens’s men and some Lithuanians carried out the executions. Somehow news of the approaching operation had spread in the ghetto as the policemen got on their way. Rudashevski was outraged by the very idea of such participation: “…Jews will dip their hands in the dirtiest and bloodiest work. They wish simply to replace the Lithuanians…. The entire ghetto is in uproar about this departure [of the Jewish policemen to Oszmiana],” he recorded on October 19. “How great is our shame, our humiliation! Jews help the Germans in their organized, terrible work of extermination.”
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In fact the ghetto was not in an uproar, contrary to what Rudashevski intensely hoped for and reported. It seems rather that the inhabitants accepted Gens’s reasoning and his justifications: Saving some by sacrificing others. “The tragedy is that the…public mostly approves of Gens’s attitude,” Kruk wrote on October 28. “The public figures that perhaps this may really help.”
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It was not only the ordinary population of the ghetto that supported Gens’s decision; on October 27 the highly respected YIVO founder and linguist Zelig Kalmanovitch noted in his diary. “The rabbi [of Oszmiana] ruled that the old ones should be handed over. Old ones who asked that they should be taken…. If outsiders [the Lithuanians or the Germans] had done the job—there would have been more victims and all the property would have been stolen.”
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These lines do not reveal if Kalmanovitch was merely recording Gens’s arguments or expressing his own agreement. But he did so at length a few days later when Gens was again ordered to participate with his policemen in an
Aktion
in ´

Swi¸eciany: “In truth,” Kalmanovitch wrote in November 1942, “we are in any case not innocent…. We have bought our lives and our future with the death of tens of thousands. If we have decided that we must continue with this life despite everything, then we must go on to the end. May the merciful Lord forgive us…. That is the situation and it is not in our hands to change it. Of course delicate souls cannot bear such acts, but the protest of the soul has no more than psychological value, and there is no moral value to it. Everybody is guilty or, more correctly, all are innocent and holy, and most of all those who take real action, who must overcome their spirit, who must overcome the torture of the soul, who free others of this task, and save their souls from pain.”
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A few weeks later a briefly oblivious community celebrated a significant achievement: “100,000 books in the ghetto.” Kruk was in charge: “In November the ghetto library went beyond the figure of a hundred thousand books distributed to readers. Because of this, the library is organizing a big cultural morning event, which will take place in the Ghetto Theater on Sunday, the 13
^th
of this month [December], at noon. On the program: Opening by G. Yashunski, welcome from the ghetto chief [Gens], writers, scientific circles, teachers and the Youth Club. Dr. Ts. Feldstein will speak on “The Book and Martyrdom,” then a lecture by H. Kruk “100,000 Books in the Ghetto.” The second part will be a concert of words and music. The finale: distribution of gift books to the first reader in the ghetto and the youngest reader of the library.”
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VII

During the last months of 1942 a small minority of European Jews understood their common fate; the vast majority remained tossed to and fro among momentary insight, disbelief, despair, and, as we saw, ever new hope.

Hidden in her Amsterdam attic, Anne Frank seemed to know what was happening to the Jews of the outside world. “Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves,” she noted on October 9, 1942. “The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle cars to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they are sending all the Jews.” After adding some horrible details about Westerbork, apparently based on rumors that had reached Miep Gies, Anne went on. “If it’s that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilized places to which the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they’re being gassed. Perhaps that’s the quickest way to die.”
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A few weeks later Anne described the arrests in Amsterdam as reported to the inhabitants of the attic by a new tenant, Mr. Dussel, and again she seemed to reach the same conclusion: “Countless friends and acquaintances have been taken off to a dreadful fate. Night after night, green and gray military vehicles cruise the streets. They knock on every door, asking whether any Jews live there…. No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children and babies and pregnant women—all are marched to their death.”
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During those very same days Rudashevski was recording events and incidents of everyday life in the ghetto. In Vilna, as we saw, the end of 1942 was a relatively quiet period. On October 7, 1942, Rudashevski’s voice was almost that of a happy and carefree youngster. “The club work has begun. We have groups for literature and natural science. After leaving class at 7:30, I go immediately to the club. It is gay there, we have a good time and return home evenings in a large crowd. The days are short, it is dark in the street when our bunch leaves the club. [Jewish] policemen shout at us but we do not listen to them.”
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Did Anne, in her faraway hiding place, understand the situation more thoroughly than Rudashevski in his decimated Vilna ghetto? It is doubtful. At times both recorded the most ominous information, then appeared to forget about it while turning their minds to the more immediate issues of their teenage lives.

Etty Hillesum, as an employee of the Jewish Council, had already stayed briefly in Westerbork. On her return to Amsterdam in December 1942, she tried to describe the camp and the ultimate fate of the deportees in a letter to two Dutch friends: “Finding something to say about Westerbork is difficult…it is a camp for a people in transit…to be deported a few days later to their unknown destiny…deep within Europe, from where only a few indistinct sounds have come back to the rest of us. But the quota must be filled; so must the train, which comes to fetch its load with mathematical regularity.”
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How could Etty have known the exact meaning of the deportations when Gonda Redlich in Theresienstadt, so intent on saving children and youngsters from the transports to the East, and so often alluding to the fact that the deportees were being carried to their death, was making plans for the postwar years? In one and the same diary entry, on June 14–15, 1942, for example, Redlich recorded both his fears about the transports and his plans for the future: “I fear that the transports will not stay in one place in the East. What will happen when we go to our land after the war? What will our position be toward the others? I already feel that for me Aliyah [emigration to the land of Israel] will be an escape, an escape from people here in Europe, an escape because of life here in the Goluth [exile], an escape when you compare the old life to the new.”
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