The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (87 page)

In Lodz, Kovno, Vilna, and most probably all throughout occupied Eastern Europe, people knew. Rosenfeld wrote of it in his diary;
²⁰⁵
so did Tory, who reported that the news had spread among the Lithuanian population, throughout Kovno.
²⁰⁶

By April 22 the news had reached Herman Kruk in Vilna and, so it seems, the entire population of the ghetto.
²⁰⁷
On April 30, under the title “Warszawskie Getto Kona!” [The Warsaw Ghetto Is Dying], Kruk returned to the uprising: “Yesterday
Swit
[British broadcasts camouflaged as originating in Poland] once again sounded the alarm to the world, and once again the radio announcer repeated, as if he wanted the world to remember, the Warsaw Ghetto is bleeding to death. The Warsaw Ghetto is dying! Warsaw Jews are defending themselves like heroes. For thirteen days now, the Germans have had to fight with the ghetto for every threshold. Jews do not let themselves be taken and are fighting like lions…. The Warsaw Ghetto is dying!…My brother-in-law has a wife and two children there—he is silent. My neighbor has a mother and a sister—she is silent. And my own sister and children?…I am ashamed of my silence.”
²⁰⁸

In October 1942 the well-known Yiddish novelist Yehoshua Perle completed his chronicle of the deportation of the Warsaw Jews for the “Oneg Shabbat” archive; he called it
Khurbm Varshe
(the destruction of Warsaw.) Three sentences in this record “shocked the surviving Yiddish world,” in the words of historian David Roskies: “Three times 100,000 people,” wrote Perle, “lacked the courage to say: No. Each one of them was out to save his own skin. Each one was ready to sacrifice even his own father, his own mother, his own wife and children.”
²⁰⁹
These harsh words were written several months before the uprising.

The events of April 1943 introduced a new perspective. Of course the Warsaw fighters did not seek even a minimal success in military terms. Whether they wanted to redeem the image of Jews facing death, and to erase, so to speak, Perle’s terrible verdict, is not certain, either. They knew that most of a leaderless, hungry, and utterly desperate mass could not but submit passively to unbridled violence, before the uprising and no less so in its wake. Not all of them meant to send a message to their own political movements in Eretz Israel or to the socialist community: For a long time already, many had given up on the active solidarity of their comrades outside Europe. They just wanted, as they had proclaimed, to die with dignity.

In June 1943, one Herbert Habermalz, a sergeant in the Luftwaffe who belonged to a flight crew, wrote to his former colleagues at the Rudolf Sack machine engineering firm, where he had been employed as a clerk in the sales department. He described a flight from Kraków to Warsaw: “We flew several circles about the city [Warsaw]. And with great satisfaction we could recognize the complete extermination of the Jewish ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job. There is no house that has not been totally destroyed. This we saw the day before yesterday. And yesterday we took off for Odessa. We received special food, extra cookies, additional milk and butter, and, above all, a very big bar of bittersweet chocolate.”
²¹⁰

IX

The life of Jews in former Poland was coming to an end. On March 31, 1943, the Kraków ghetto was liquidated and those of its inhabitants who were selected for work were sent to the Plaszow slave labor camp, commanded by the notoriously sadistic Austrian Amon Goeth; their liquidation was to follow later on. And so it went, from ghetto to ghetto, then from work camp to work camp.

Yet in some ghettos, the situation appeared different at times, for a short while of course. Thus, the 40,000 Jews who, in the fall of 1942, were still alive in Bialystok, had good reasons for hope. Like in Lodz, the ghetto was particularly active in manufacturing goods and performing services for the Wehrmacht. Barash’s relations with the military and even with some of the civilian authorities seemed good. A local resistance movement was getting organized under the leadership of Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, although the German threat did not appear immediate.
²¹¹

The first warning signals came in late 1942–early 1943 with the deportation of all Jews from the Bialystok district to Treblinka. During the first days of February 1943, the Germans struck again, but as had previously happened in Lodz, only part of the population (10,000 Jews) was deported and approximately 30,000 inhabitants remained. Moreover, in a meeting on February 19, a representative of the Bialystok security police commander promised Barash that no further resettlement of Jews was expected for the time being. The continued presence of 30,000 Jews in the ghetto was likely to last until “the end of the war.”
²¹²

Life returned to “normal” for the remaining population of the ghetto: Barash was confident that the new stability would last; Tenenbaum, however, was convinced that the liquidation of the ghetto was approaching.
²¹³
As we saw, in May Himmler had restated his full extermination policy, with the exception of essential workers who for the time being would be transferred to the slave labor camps in the Lublin area; the remaining Jews of Bialystok would be sent to Treblinka.
²¹⁴

Under Globocnik’s personal command, the Germans prepared the liquidation in utter secrecy to avoid a repeat performance of the Warsaw events. On August 16, 1943, when the operation started, Barash and Tenenbaum (who had broken off all relations by that time) were both taken completely by surprise. While the mass of the population followed the orders and moved helplessly to the assembly sites, sporadic fighting flared up in various parts of the ghetto, with only minimal impact on the “evacuation” operation. Within days the ghetto was emptied and the fighters had either been killed or had committed suicide. Barash was deported to Treblinka; Tenenbaum probably took his life.
²¹⁵

In July 1943 the Germans massacred 26,000 inhabitants of the Minsk ghetto; some 9,000 Jewish laborers remained alive for a few months but, at the end of 1943, no Jews were mentioned any longer in the Reichskommissar’s report about the capital of Belorussia.
²¹⁶
One after the other, the ghettos of “Weissruthenien” were liquidated, like those of the General Government. Small groups of Jews fled to nearby forests to join partisan units. A number of armed rebellions took place but were easily quelled as the Germans now expected some sporadic resistance. In some ghettos, on the other hand, where determined resistance could have been expected, as in Vilna, events took an unexpected turn.

“Here in the ghetto, the mood is cheerful,” Kruk recorded on June 16, 1943. “All rumors about liquidation have disappeared for the time being. A rapid building and expansion of the ghetto industry has been going on in recent weeks…. Yesterday, District Commissar Hingst and [Hingst’s deputy] Murer visited the ghetto. Both left very satisfied and “amused” themselves with the ghetto representatives. The ghetto breathed in relief. We ask—for how long?”
²¹⁷

At the beginning of 1943 the situation in Vilna had indeed been relatively peaceful. On January 15 Gens gave an indirect expression to this state of things in an address celebrating the first anniversary of the ghetto theater: “How did the idea come up?” Gens said, “Simply to give people the opportunity to escape from the reality of the ghetto for a few hours. This we achieved. These are dark and hard days. Our body is in the ghetto but our spirit has not been enslaved…. Before the first concert they said that a concert must not be held in a graveyard. That is true, but the whole of life is now a graveyard. Heaven forbid that we should let our spirit collapse. We must be strong in spirit and in body…. I am convinced that the Jewish [life] that is developing here and the Jewish [faith] that burns in our hearts will be our reward. I am certain that the day of the phrase. ‘Why hast Thou deserted us?’ will pass and that we shall still live to see better days. I would like to hope that those days will come soon and in our lifetime.”
²¹⁸

In April, though, Gens’s optimism and that of the ghetto population were sharply challenged. During the first days of the month, the Germans assembled several thousands of Jews from the smaller ghettos of the Vilna district under the pretext of sending them to Kovno. Instead of Kovno they were dispatched to Ponar and massacred. The killings instilled terror in the ghetto. “Today,” Rudashevski recorded on April 5, “the terrible news reached us: 85 railroad cars of Jews, around 5,000 persons, were not taken to Kovno as promised but transported by train to Ponar where they were shot to death. 5,000 new bloody victims. The ghetto was deeply shaken, as though struck by thunder. The atmosphere of slaughter has gripped the people. It has begun again…. People sit caged as in a box. On the other side lurks the enemy, which is preparing to destroy us in a sophisticated manner according to a plan, as today’s slaughter has proved.”
²¹⁹
Yet, like so often beforehand, the fear was soon dispelled as nothing seemed to happen in Vilna as such; the cheerfulness that Kruk had noted returned.

On June 21, 1943, Himmler ordered the liquidation of all ghettos in the Ostland. Working Jews were to be kept in concentration camps and “the unnecessary inhabitants of the Jewish ghettos were to be evacuated to the East.”
²²⁰

Of course the members of the FPO were not aware of the liquidation decision but, nonetheless, perceived the April killings as an omen. For them the question now arose: Should armed resistance be organized in the ghetto, or should the FPO leave for the forests and eventually join Soviet partisan units before the Germans struck? Gens himself, aware of the debate, was determined to have the FPO stay in the ghetto, together with the population that it would help to defend and, eventually, allow to flee.
²²¹
Yet by the end of June, as the Germans were systematically liquidating the remaining small communities in the Vilna region, an increasing number of FPO members moved to the forests against Gens’s will: A confrontation within the ghetto was barely avoided.
²²²

It seems that at this point (June–July 1943), the communist members of the FPO were hiding from Kovner and his left-wing Zionist comrades (Hashomer Hatzair) that they were actually under the orders of a far larger communist organization and that their “delegate,” Itzik Wittenberg, had been elected head of the FPO without Kovner and his people being aware of the dimension and secretive nature of the communist penetration.
²²³

Gens had apparently decided that Wittenberg represented a danger to his own plans, and on July 15, late at night, as the communist leader was conferring with the ghetto chief (at Gens’s invitation), police forces (probably Lithuanians) arrested him. Freed by FPO members, Wittenberg went into hiding. The German reaction was foreseeable: If Wittenberg was not delivered, the ghetto population would be exterminated. Whether under pressure from his underground comrades (his communist fellow militants were the first to suggest that the step be taken) or because he sensed the fear of the ghetto populace and its increasingly threatening attitude toward the FPO, Wittenberg agreed to give himself up; once in German hands, instead of submitting to torture and certain death, he committed suicide.
²²⁴

Kruk’s Vilna diary was interrupted on the eve of “Wittenberg Day.” It is not unlikely that the pages dealing with it were hidden or destroyed when Soviet forces reentered the city: “Wittenberg’s betrayal” by his comrades could have been of interest to the NKVD. That part of the chronicle never resurfaced.
²²⁵
Kalmanovitch described the events in some detail in his own diary, apparently on the basis of rumors rather than precise knowledge. Throughout, the YIVO scholar was hostile to the FPO and to attempts at armed resistance that endangered the population. In this particular case he (wrongly) attributed all responsibility to the Revisionists, whereas he praised the communist Wittenberg for giving himself up and committing suicide.
²²⁶

On September 14 the Germans ordered Gens to report to the headquarters of the Security Police. Although he had been warned of danger and told to flee, the ghetto chief went nonetheless, to avoid reprisals against the population. At six o’clock that same afternoon the Germans shot him.
²²⁷
Part of the remaining 20,000 inhabitants were murdered in Ponar, part were deported to Sobibor, while able-bodied men (including Kruk and Kalmanovitch) were shipped to labor camps in Estonia. The Jews left in the ghetto were murdered just before the arrival of the Red Army.
²²⁸

The FPO was unable to organize any significant resistance inside the ghetto, possibly due to Gens’s hostility, mainly because the majority of the population was opposed to an armed uprising and believed that the labor camps in Estonia offered a safer option, and possibly also as a result of Kovner’s hesitant leadership. Thus, after some minor skirmishes with the Germans, some eighty members of the FPO slipped out of the city in several groups and joined the partisans.
²²⁹

On April 6, 1943, on the day he had recorded the massacre in Ponar, Rudashevski’s diary ended. The last line read: “We may be fated for the worst.”
²³⁰
Itzhok and his family were murdered in Ponar a few months later.
²³¹
In Lodz, Sierakowiak broke off his own diary entries a week or so after Rudashevski; the last line was recorded on April 15: “There is really no way out of this for us.”
²³²
In the summer he died of tuberculosis and starvation.
²³³

X

Just before the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, a merry-go-round was set up on Krasínski Square, on the Aryan side, close to the ghetto walls. As the desperate struggle unfolded, the merry-go-round did not stop, and joyful crowds besieged it day in, day out, while the Jews were dying on the other side of the wall: