The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (95 page)

In July, when it became obvious to Eichmann that the Red Cross commission, led by Dr. Maurice Rossel, which had visited Theresienstadt on June 23, would not ask to see Auschwitz, the entire “family camp,” with a few exceptions (such as Ruth Kluger and her mother) was sent to the gas chambers.
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The extermination of the first batch of Jews from the “family camp,” on March 7, was secretly chronicled in the diary of one of the
Sonderkommando
members. Three such diaries were found after the war, buried near the Birkenau crematoriums: those of Zalman Gradowski, Zalman Leventhal, and Leyb Langfus.
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Gradowski had been deported to Auschwitz in November 1942 from Lona, near Bialystok, together with his entire family: “mother, wife, two sisters, brother-in-law, and father-inlaw.” The entire family was gassed on December 8, except for Gradowski himself, who was sent to the
Sonderkommando
.
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Of the four notebooks hidden by Gradowski, the second includes the story of “The Czech Transport”:

After the defiant but helpless first load of these Czech Jews had been driven into the gas chamber and suffocated, Gradowski and his companions unbolted the doors: “They lay as they had fallen, contorted, knotted together like a ball of yarn, as though the devil had played a special game with them before their deaths, arranging them in such poses. Here one lay stretched out full length on top of the pile of corpses. Here one held his arms around another as they sat against the wall. Here part of a shoulder emerged, the head and feet intertwined with the other bodies. And here only a hand and a foot protruded into the air, the rest of the body buried in the deep sea of corpses…. Here and there heads broke through this sea, clinging to the surface of the naked waves. It seemed that while the bodies were submerged only the heads could peer out from the abyss.”
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Dealing with the corpses was the
Sonderkommando’
s main task: They dragged them out of the gas chamber into the
Leichenkeller
, where anything of value was put away: “Three prisoners prepare the body of a woman,” Gradowski went on with his chronicle. “One probes her mouth with pliers, looking for gold teeth, which, when found, are ripped out together with the flesh. Another cuts the hair, while the third quickly tears off earrings, often drawing blood in the process. And, the rings, which do not come off the fingers easily, must be removed with pliers. Then she is given to the pulley. Two men throw on the bodies like blocks of wood; when the count reaches seven or eight, a signal is given with a stick and the pulley begins its ascent.”
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The
Sonderkommando
diarists knew of course that they could not be allowed to survive as witnesses nor could they hope to survive the uprising they were preparing. On the eve of the rebellion, in early October 1944, Gradowski, one of its organizers, buried his notebooks. Throughout it seems that he remained a religious Jew: After each of the gassings, he would say Kaddish for the dead.
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The last part of the process began once the pulley was sent on its way to the upper floor: “On the upper level, by the pulley, stand four men,” the chronicle continued. “The two on one side of the pulley drag corpses to the ‘storeroom’; the other two pull them directly to the ovens, where they are laid in pairs at each opening [“mouth” is used in the translation]. The slaughtered children are heaped in a big stack, they are added, thrown onto the pairs of adults. Each corpse is laid out on an iron “burial board”; then the door to the inferno is opened and the board shoved in…. The hair is the first to catch fire. The skin, immersed in flames, catches in a few seconds. Now the arms and legs begin to rise—expanding blood vessels cause this movement of the limbs. The entire body is now burning fiercely; the skin has been consumed and fat drips and hisses in the flames…. The belly goes. Bowels and entrails are quickly consumed, and within minutes there is no trace of them. The head takes the longest to burn; two little blue flames flicker from the eyeholes—these are burning with the brain…. The entire process lasts twenty minutes—and a human being, a world, has been turned to ashes.”
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Why the Red Cross delegate, Maurice Rossel, did not demand to proceed to Birkenau after the visit to Theresienstadt is not clear. He was told by his SS hosts that the Czech ghetto was the “final camp”; yet Rossel could hardly have believed, in June 1944, that Theresienstadt was all there was to see regarding the deportation of the Jews of Europe. Be that as it may, on July 1, the ICRC representative sent an effusive thank-you note to Thadden, the senior official at the Wilhelmstrasse he dealt with. He even enclosed photos taken by the delegation during the visit of the camp as mementos of the pleasant excursion, and asked Thadden to forward a set to his colleagues in Prague. After expressing his gratitude, also in the name of the ICRC, for all the help extended to the delegation during its visit, Rossel added: “The trip to Prague will remain an excellent memory for us and it pleases us to assure you, once again, that the report about our visit in Theresienstadt will be reassuring for many, as the living conditions [in the camp] are satisfactory.”
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The German concentration and extermination camp system was geared to send its Jewish victims either to immediate extermination or to slave labor that would end in extermination after a short time. Yet some of the smaller labor camps attached to enterprises working for the armaments industry, whether under control of the SS or not, sometimes kept their Jewish slaves alive for longer stretches of time, either due to essential production imperatives or (and) for the personal benefit of local commanders.
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There was also Theresienstadt, of course, antechamber to extermination and holding pen for international propaganda. Then, in the course of 1943, another (very limited) series of camps was added to the overall landscape of destruction—and deception: camps for Jews who could be used as trading objects.

The very notion of keeping some Jews either as hostages or as exchange material for Germans in enemy hands, or else as sources of large sums of foreign currency, was nothing new from a Nazi perspective. Both the hostage idea and that of selling Jews predated the war and reappeared, as we saw, from late 1941 onward: it grew in importance as the war became increasingly difficult for the Reich. Some Palestinian Jews who had remained in Poland were exchanged for German nationals living in Palestine in the late fall of 1942, and at the same time a few Dutch Jews managed to bankroll their way to freedom. In December 1942 Hitler allowed Himmler to release individual Jews for hefty sums in foreign currency.

In early 1943 on the initiative of the Wilhelmstrasse, the same ideas became a larger-scale project. On March 2 a memorandum addressed to the RSHA suggested keeping some 30,000 Jews, first and foremost of British and American nationality, but also Belgian, Dutch, French, Norwegian, and Soviet nationals and to barter them for appropriate groups of Germans.
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Himmler agreed, and in April 1943 a partly empty POW camp, Bergen-Belsen, was transferred by the Wehrmacht to the WVHA. As historian Eberhard Kolb has noted, Himmler’s decision not to establish a civilian internees’ camp but to include the new setup within the framework of the concentration camps section of the WVHA was in line with his notion that “the ‘exchange Jews’ could at any time still be transported to extermination camps.”
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And indeed the earliest groups of “exchange Jews,” mainly Polish Jews with Latin American “promesas” (promises to receive passports), who were assembled in Warsaw at the Hotel Polski, arrived in Bergen-Belsen in July 1943; by October of that same year, however, they had been transported to Auschwitz under the pretext that the Latin American papers were not valid.
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Further categories of Jews arrived in Bergen-Belsen throughout 1944, and although very few of these were exchanged for Germans, their fate has to be considered within wider exchange schemes tossed around by German and Jewish operatives during the last two years of the war. These projects, as we shall see, would take on their momentary significance in late 1944 and early 1945.

VII

At the end of October 1943, the Kovno ghetto became a concentration camp. A few days beforehand, batches of young Jews had been deported to the Estonian labor camps, while the children and the elderly were sent to Auschwitz.
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In late December the pits at the ninth fort were opened and tens of thousands of corpses, undug: These remnants of most of the Kovno community and of the transports of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate were then burned on a number of huge pyres, restacked day after day.
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Abraham Tory, the Kovno diarist, escaped from the city at the end of March 1944 and survived the war. Three months later, as the Soviet army was approaching, the remaining 8,000 inhabitants of the ghetto-camp were deported (including the members of the council and its chairman, Elchanan Elkes). The men were sent to Dachau, the women to Stutthof, near Danzig. By the end of the war three-quarters of these last Kovno Jews had perished. Elkes himself died in Dachau shortly after his arrival.
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On October 19, 1943, Elkes had written a “last testament.” It was a letter to his son and daughter who lived in London; it was given to Tory and retrieved with the diary, after the liberation of Kovno. The very last words of the letter were filled with fatherly love, but they could not erase the sense of utter despair carried by the lines that just preceded: “I am writing this in an hour when many desperate souls—widows and orphans, threadbare and hungry—are camping on my doorstep, imploring us [the council] for help. My strength is ebbing. There is a desert inside me. My soul is scorched. I am naked and empty. There are no words in my mouth.”
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In the fall of 1943 Lodz remained the last large-scale ghetto in German-dominated Europe (except for Theresienstadt). Throughout the preceding months Himmler had reached the decision to turn the Warthegau ghetto into a concentration camp, not on its location, however, but in the Lublin district, within the still existing framework of OSTI, the SS East Industries Company. The advance of the Red Army toward the former Polish borders put an end to the Lublin project, but Himmler continued to cling to his plans, albeit in some other location.
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Neither Greiser nor Biebow, nor anybody else in the Warthegau administration, had been consulted. When Himmler’s project became known, it triggered fierce opposition at all levels of the
Gau
, and from the Wehrmacht’s armaments inspectorate. In February 1944 the Reichsführer visited Posen and, atypically, gave in to Greiser’s objections. The
Gauleiter
did not waste any time in informing Pohl of the new agreement. On February 14, 1944, Greiser wrote a rather abrupt letter to the chief of the WVHA:

“The ghetto in Litzmannstadt is not to be transformed into a concentration camp…. The decree issued by the Reichsführer on June 11, 1943, will therefore not be carried out. I have arranged the following with the Reichsführer.” Greiser went on to inform Pohl that (a) the ghetto’s manpower would be reduced to a minimum; (b) the ghetto would not be moved out of the Wartheland; (c) its population would be gradually reduced by Bothmann’s
Kommando
[Hans Bothmann was Lange’s successor in Chelmno]; (d) the administration of the ghetto would remain in the hands of the officials of the Wartheland; and (e) “After all Jews are removed from the ghetto and it is liquidated, the entire grounds of the ghetto are to go to the town of Litzmannstadt.”
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As their fate was being sealed, the unsuspecting inhabitants of the ghetto went on with the misery of their daily life plagued by hunger, cold, endless hours spent in workshops, exhaustion, and ongoing despair. And yet the mood also changed on occasion, as on December 25, 1943, for example, the first day of Hanukkah: “There are gatherings in larger apartments. Everyone brings a small appropriate gift: a toy, a piece of
babka
(cake), a hair ribbon, a couple of brightly coloured empty cigarette packages, a plate with a flower pattern, a pair of stockings, a warm cap. Then comes the drawing of lots; and chance decides. After the candles are lighted, the presents are handed out. Ghetto presents are not valuable, but they are received with deep gratitude. Finally, songs are sung in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish, as long as they are suitable for enhancing the holiday mood. A few hours of merrymaking, a few hours of forgetting, a few hours of reverie.”
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A few weeks before Hanukkah the chroniclers noted the same urge for some spiritual or cultural sustenance in its wider expression: “Though life weighs heavily upon people in the ghetto,” they recorded on November 24, “they refuse to do without cultural life altogether. The closing of the House of Culture has deprived the ghetto of the last vestiges of public cultural life. But with his tenacity and vitality, the ghetto dweller, hardened by countless misfortunes, always seeks new ways to sate his hunger for something of cultural value. The need for music is especially intense, and small centers for the cultivation of music have sprung up over time; to be sure, only for a certain upper stratum. Sometimes it is professional musicians, sometimes amateurs who perform for an intimate group of invited guests. Chamber music is played, and there is singing. Likewise, small, family-like circles form in order to provide spiritual nourishment on a modest level.
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Poets and prose writers read from their own works. The classics and more recent works of world literature are recited. Thus does the ghetto salvage something of its former spiritual life.”
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On March 8, 1944, “by order of the authorities,” all musical instruments were confiscated; they would be distributed to the Litzmannstadt municipal orchestra, to the mayor, and to the music school of the Hitler Youth.
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