A Writer at War (52 page)

Genicksschuss
– bullet in the back of the head.
¹³

Religious belief at the ghetto had decreased dramatically; in fact, Jewish workers aren’t religious in general. Biebow used to send a lot of vitamins to the ghetto. Rumkowsky’s assistant, the Jew Gertler, was connected with the Gestapo, but did a lot of good. He was a very kind man, and people loved him a lot.

When Gertler came to power and the Germans began to show him a lot of respect, Rumkowsky began to hate him terribly.

The hospital in the ghetto produced awe in doctors from Europe. A professor once said: ‘I haven’t seen such a clinic even in Berlin.’
Heroic death of Doctor Weisskopf at the
ód
ghetto – he had tried to bite through Bibach’s throat.

The uprising at the
ód
; ghetto was headed by Kloppfisch, an engineer from
ód
.

ód
and Pozna
were the two major cities of the Warthegau, the Nazi annexation of western Poland named after the River Warthe. Hitler appointed Arthur Greiser as the gauleiter. More than 70,000 Poles were killed during the process of ethnic cleansing to make way for ethnic German settlers. Hundreds of thousands more went to labour and concentration camps. After the Jews, the Poles lost the highest proportion of their population during the Second World War, even more than the Soviet Union.

The Germans had forced all Polish peasants to leave their houses, took away their land, livestock, household utensils, made them live in huts and forced them to work as farm labourers. The Germans were mostly local, but some of them (160,000) had come from the Ukraine. The children of Polish peasants did not go to school. Children had to work from the age of twelve. Churches were closed. Only one was left out of twenty. The others were turned into warehouses. Farmhands were paid twenty marks per week and given food. Children were paid six marks per month. A German peasant had the right to keep for himself enough produce to feed his family.

One Polish peasant was sent to Dachau because he had said to his German neighbour even before the Germans arrived [in September 1939]: ‘Why do you speak German? You aren’t in Berlin.’ Before the war, Nazis used to get together for [Nazi] Party meetings, under the pretext of praying.

German [settlers] came in two waves – one in 1941, the other in 1944. Germans sold bread to the Poles illicitly, five marks for a kilo, wheat flour at twenty-five marks per kilo, and a kilo of pork fat cost two hundred marks. Thousands of Polish teachers, doctors, lawyers and Catholic priests were taken to Dachau and killed.

‘The Germans called our region the “Warthegau”. They forbade farmhands to move anywhere. They were slaves.’

Poles were forbidden to enter shops, parks and gardens. They could not travel by tram on Sundays, and by motor vehicle all week.

Bauerführer
¹⁴
Schwandt had three male farmhands and three female. He was a huge fat man, and paid his farmhands nothing. Before the war, he had a bar and a grocer’s store. He had four
Morgens
[acres] before the war, and now he has fifty.

There was a commission that checked the fulfilment of obligatory supplies of produce by German [farmers]. Poles weren’t given vodka, but Germans were allowed it on holidays. Poles would be sentenced to three months in prison for using a lighter fuelled with petrol.

Some Germans didn’t believe that the Russians would come, and they made fun of those who made big carts to take away their belongings. They didn’t believe it until the last day.

The [Red Army] infantry is travelling in carriages, coaches, cabriolets, shining with polish and glass. The guys are smoking
makhorka
, eating and drinking, playing cards. Carts in supply trains are decorated with carpets, cart drivers are sitting on feather beds. Soldiers don’t eat army food any more. There’s pork, turkey, chicken. There are some rounded faces with pink cheeks in the infantry now, this has had never happened before.
¹⁵

German civilians caught out by our tanks are now going back. They get beaten up [on the way]. People unharness their horses. Poles are robbing them. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked. They answered in Russian: ‘To Russia.’ Here, there are five kinds of Germans: those from the Black Sea, from the Balkans, from the Baltic countries,
Volksdeutsche
and
Reichsdeutsche
.
¹⁶

Grossman soon found that the behaviour of Red Army troops changed on foreign soil. He still tried to idealise front-line troops, while putting all the blame on rear units, such as supply and transport. In fact, the tank troops whom he so idealised were often the worst looters and rapists.

The front-line soldiers advance by day and night in fire, holy and pure. The rear soldiers who follow them rape, drink, loot and rob.
Two hundred and fifty of our girls were working at the Focke-Wulf plant. Germans had brought them from Voroshilovgrad, Kharkov and Kiev. According to the chief of the army political department, these girls have no clothes, are lice-infested and swollen from hunger. And according to what a man from the army newspaper said, these girls had been clean and well dressed, until our soldiers came and robbed them blind and took their watches. Liberated Soviet girls often complain about being raped by our soldiers. One girl said to me, crying: ‘He was an old man, older than my father.’

1
The
Panzerfaust
was a shoulder-launched rocket propelled grenade produced in huge quantities at the end of the war by the Nazi war industry as a cheap anti-tank weapon.