Auschwitz (35 page)

One of the most disturbing aspects of this analysis is, in my experience, that it is one shared by many perpetrators. I remember one former dedicated member of the Nazi party saying to me in an exasperated manner, after I pressed him on why so many went along with the horrors of the regime, “The trouble with the world today is that people who have never been tested go around making judgments about people who have.” A view that Toivi Blatt would no doubt echo.

This is not to imply, of course, that the significant change in character that could occur in the camps is necessarily a negative one choice exists in all circumstances and it was possible for people to behave admirably, as Toivi Blatt witnessed when he was told to rake the sandy path that led from the lower camp to the gas chambers.

In contemplating acts of greater resistance—actually fighting back against the Germans—Toivi Blatt had to overcome a feeling of what he calls “reverse” racism. For when he first saw German soldiers dressed in steel helmets and smart uniforms he felt they were “better” people; “And at the other side of the spectrum I've seen Jews or Poles afraid, running and hiding.” This attitude, of course, is precisely the one the Germans hoped to create among those they wanted to oppress. It is one of the reasons Dr. Mengele appeared on the ramp at Auschwitz immaculately dressed in his SS uniform, his boots shining like mirrors. For, just as the Germans wanted to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that those whom they fought were inferior,
so by dressing and acting as if they were members of a master race they wanted to force their enemies to subscribe to the belief that the Nazis were indeed their superiors.

In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that the catalyst for radical change at Sobibór came with the arrival of people who had been less exposed to the kind of “reverse racism” Toivi Blatt describes—Jews who were former Red Army soldiers. “We arrived at Sobibór on 21 or 22 September 1943,” says Arkadiy Vajspapir,
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one of the Soviet prisoners of war who came to the camp on a transport from Minsk. “We'd been trapped for three days in locked carriages—carriages for cattle. Three days without food or light.” As luck would have it, the Nazis decided to select slave labor from this particular transport. “They asked whether there are carpenters or builders,” says Vajspapir, “and we were asked whether there are any people who can lift seventy-five kilos.” At the moment of their selection, the Soviet POWs had no idea of the function of the camp. “We didn't know what was going on—we thought it was a labor camp. But in the evening the old prisoners came to us and said, ‘Your friends are burning'—then we understood what kind of a camp this was.”

Among the eighty or so Soviet POWs selected to act as laborers was a charismatic Red Army lieutenant called Alexander (“Sasha”) Pechersky. “He was a very handsome, good-looking man,” says Vajspapir, “tall and solidly built. He was respected—his every word was law for us.” Pechersky made an immediate impact on the camp, and soon became the focal point of an underground resistance movement.

Before the arrival of the Soviet POWs there had been several attempts by prisoners to escape—mostly by running from work details that operated outside the wire. But the vast majority of such attempts failed. “Where will you go when you escape finally in the forest?” asks Toivi Blatt. “Practically every day, farmers who lived nearby came with Jews they caught hiding some place in the fields” and handed them in for “five pounds of sugar and a bottle of vodka.” But Pechersky and his comrades managed to change the fatalistic attitude that prevailed in the camp. They worked with Leon Feldhendler, who had led the small Sobibór underground before the arrival of the Soviet POWs, and tried to think of ways of organizing a mass escape.

Just two weeks after their arrival at Sobibór, an attempt was made to dig
an escape tunnel—a project that was abandoned a few days later when the tunnel became flooded. In any case, as Pechersky knew, it would scarcely be possible to enable all the inmates of Sobibór—more than 600 of them—to crawl out during one night without incident. He quickly realized that if there were to be a successful mass escape it would have to come through armed resistance. Pechersky also recognized that the prisoners had better act quickly. The first snowfalls, expected in only a few weeks, would make it easy for the Germans to track any escapees through the forest. So over a few days, and with the cooperation of some of the key Kapos, a plan began to take shape.

“The first phase,” says Toivi Blatt, “was to collect weapons—knives and axes—because a lot of carpenters had tools in their workshops.” The second phase was to “lure” the Germans to secluded places in the camp, kill them and steal their firearms. The third, and final, phase was open revolt.

In the second week of October, the underground learned that several of the most important Germans at Sobibór—including Wagner, one of the leading NCOs—had gone on leave to Germany. The German presence in the camp was thus weaker than it had been for some time. The remaining Germans were to be enticed to the tailors' or cobblers' workshop by the promise of personal gain—the success of the revolt thus depended upon the corruptibility of the guards.

Vajspapir was ordered by Pechersky to hide in the cobblers' shop in the camp and use an axe to kill a German guard when he arrived for a fitting for his new shoes. “I was very excited,” says Vajspapir. “We understood that our destiny was at stake.” Elsewhere, other Germans would be lured by the promise of a new leather coat to the tailors' shop, where they too would be killed. The next stage was for the inmates to escape through the main gate, gambling that the Ukrainian guards—who were very much dominated by the Germans—lacked both the ammunition and the will to offer much resistance.

The revolt began on October 14. At half past three in the afternoon, Vajspapir together with Yehuda Lerner, a fellow Jew from the Minsk transport, concealed himself at the back of the cobblers' hut:

Lerner and Wajspapier had killed two Germans in the cobblers' workshop. Three more SS men were murdered in the tailors' shop, and others who could not be enticed out were murdered in their offices. By five o'clock in the afternoon, most of the SS men in the camp, a total of nine, had been killed; but, worryingly, the commandant still remained alive. The prisoners began to assemble for roll-call as usual. Toivi Blatt recalls,

Next, as planned, the prisoners began marching toward the main gate, but suddenly they came under fire from the watchtowers and from the commandant, Frenzel, who emerged from a barrack and started shooting. It was immediately clear that escape through the main gate was impossible. An attempt was now made to breach the barbed wire at the back of the camp—even though the area beyond was mined. As Toivi Blatt wrestled with the wire, under fire from the guards in the watchtowers, he felt the whole weight of the fence collapse, pinning him down.

In front of him, as he ran, Toivi Blatt saw “flying bodies” torn apart by the exploding mines, and so came to realize that it was his “luck” to have been one of the last to leave the camp.

Altogether about half of the 600 prisoners at Sobibór managed to escape from the camp that day. As Toivi Blatt sees it, this success was made possible by one major factor, “They [the Germans] didn't consider us as people, being capable of doing something. They considered us trash. They didn't expect that Jews were going to [be prepared to] die, because they had seen thousands going to die for nothing.”

As far as Arkadiy Vajspapir is concerned, another necessary precondition for the escape was the arrival of the Soviet POWs, who faced every privation in the camp with solidarity. Significantly, these POWs had been in the camp for less than a month before making their move. Although they had suffered in previous German camps, they had experienced nothing like the horror of Sobibór before and they therefore had the opportunity to react quickly against the appalling sights they saw. Their military discipline and the singular personality of Sasha Pechersky were crucial to the success of the revolt.

The majority of the 300 Sobibór prisoners who escaped from the camp did not survive the war. Many wandered around, lost in the woods, and were captured within hours; others were later betrayed by Poles and handed over to the Germans. Sasha Pechersky and a handful of his comrades managed to reach partisans sympathetic to the Red Army, and eventually met up with the advancing Soviet forces. Toivi Blatt had a series of adventures and narrow escapes, helped by some Poles, hindered to the point of betrayal by others. After the war he decided to make a new life for himself in America.

Himmler was acutely concerned by the revolt at Sobibór and in its wake he ordered the murder of Jews at the Trawniki, Poniatowa, and Majdanek camps. These reprisals, carried out from November 3, were among the bloodiest of the Nazis' “Final Solution.” Some 43,000 people were killed in the action, code named by the Nazis “Harvest Festival.” In a telling reminder that technologically advanced methods are not ultimately necessary to kill people in large numbers, 17,000 Jews were shot at Majdanek in just one day.

The “Harvest Festival” killings of November 1943 came at a time when the raison d'être behind the Nazis' “Final Solution” had shifted. During autumn
1941 and spring 1942, the extermination program had been at least in part motivated by a desire to create “space” for a new German empire in the East. By the winter of 1943, however, it was clear that the Nazis were losing the war, and another motivation came to the fore—vengeance.

The Nazi murder of the Jews would now be primarily driven by the desire to ensure that their greatest enemies would not profit from the war—no matter how it ended. Of course, the desire to murder Jews for ideological reasons had always been present behind the planning and implementation of the Nazis' “Final Solution.” The inclusion of the Jews of western Europe in the Nazis' plan for mass extermination showed that economic measures and the creation of “space” were never exclusively the motivation for the crime. But not until now, with the dream of the new “Nazi Order” in the East collapsing around them, had the leaders of the Third Reich sought solace in the mass murder of Jews out of pure, unadulterated hatred.

The Germans, however, faced increasing difficulty enforcing the “Final Solution” outside their area of direct rule. While the Bulgarian authorities had previously given up 11,000 Jews from occupied Thrace and Macedonia who had then been murdered in Treblinka, there had been protests in 1943 at proposals to deport Jews from Bulgaria itself. And the Romanian leader Ion Antonescu, having participated in the destruction of Jewish communities in Bessarabia, Transnistria, and Bukovina, was now refusing to send the remainder of the Jewish population of Romania to the gas chambers of Bełźec. In Italy, too, although Mussolini had implemented various anti-Semitic measures, he had so far refused to hand over Italian Jews.
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Many allies of the Nazis were no longer of the opinion that they were backing the winning side. They had helped the Nazis persecute Jews when they felt it was in their own interests—now that it was not, they started to distance themselves from the whole policy. Their change of heart was motivated less by moral awakening and more by cynical pragmatism.

Of the European countries occupied by the Germans, only one emerges untainted by the moral corrosiveness of the “Final Solution”—Denmark. A concerted effort by the Danish population enabled 95 percent of the Jews in the country to be spirited away from the Germans. And the story of how the Danes saved their Jews is not just an inspiring and an intriguing one, it is also laced with a complexity that, at first sight, it seems to lack.

Germany occupied Denmark on April 9, 1940, and from the very beginning it was clear that the Danes would experience a very different kind of occupation from that endured by other European countries. The major Danish institutions—including the monarchy, parliament, and police—remained largely untouched; and the Danes were not asked by the Nazis to enforce any of the anti-Semitic legislation that was commonplace elsewhere in the Nazi State. As far as the Danish authorities were concerned, the 8,000 Danish Jews were full citizens of the country and would remain so.