Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (52 page)

A considerable number of the mortal victims of Auschwitz, more than 200,000, were not Jews. Some 74,000 non-Jewish Poles and some 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war also died at Auschwitz: either executed or worked to death. With the exception of the Soviet prisoners of war who were experimentally gassed, these people were not sent to the gas chambers. But Roma and Sinti were.

Though never pursued with the same energy as the Jews, the Roma and Sinti (“gypsies”) were subjected to a killing policy wherever German power extended. They were shot by Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet Union (about 8,000 documented cases); included in the killing orders for reprisal actions in Belarus; shot by police in occupied Poland; shot in reprisal actions along with Jews in Serbia; killed in a concentration camp of Germany’s puppet ally Croatia (about 15,000); ethnically cleansed from territories conquered by Germany’s ally Romania; and gassed at Chełmno in January 1942 (about 4,400) and then at Auschwitz in May 1943 (about 1,700) and August 1944 (about 2,900, after many more had died of hunger, disease, or mistreatment). At least a hundred thousand Roma and Sinti, and more likely two or three times that number, were killed by the Germans.
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Although no one survived the gas chambers of Auschwitz, more than a hundred thousand people survived the concentration camp known by the same name. That name would be remembered after the war, a dark shadow behind an iron curtain, a hint of the greater darkness to the east. Fewer than one hundred Jewish laborers saw the inside of a Reinhard death factory and survived. Yet even Treblinka left a few traces in the air.

Prisoners sang at Treblinka, at German orders, but also for themselves. “El male rachamim” was chanted for the Jews killed each day. SS men would stand outside and listen. Trawniki men brought with them from the east, as one of the Jewish laborers recognized, a “strange gift” for “wonderful song.” It was less elevated music, popular Polish songs, that reminded Treblinka laborers of life outside the camp, and helped give them the courage to prepare their escape. Those songs recalled love and foolishness, and so life and freedom. A few weddings were celebrated at Treblinka, between laborers and the women who handled domestic chores for the Germans.
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The Jewish barbers, who cut the hair of thousands of women, remembered the beautiful ones.

CHAPTER 9

RESISTANCE AND INCINERATION

The night of 21 June 1944 belonged to the Soviet partisans of Belarus. Three years earlier the Wehrmacht had quickly overrun Belarus on its way to Moscow—which it never quite reached. The Soviets were now advancing toward the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, and onward toward Warsaw and Berlin. Army Group Center of the Wehrmacht was back in Belarus, but in retreat. Red Army commanders had planned a massive summer offensive, beginning on the third anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, timed to remind the Germans of their own disastrous ambitions. The Soviet partisans had laid thousands of explosive charges on rail lines in Belarus. When Soviet soldiers attacked, German troops could not be reinforced, nor could they quickly retreat. So the day of 22 June 1944 belonged to the soldiers of the First, Second, and Third Belarusian Fronts of the Red Army. They and two other army groups assembled well over a million troops, more than twice as many as the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center could muster. The offensive, Operation Bagration, delivered one of the most important Soviet victories in the war.
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Two weeks earlier, the Americans had joined the battle for Europe. Having gained mastery over the Japanese fleet in the Pacific, the United States opened a major European front in the war on 6 June 1944. The US Army landed (along with the British and other western Allies) 160,000 men on the beaches of Normandy. Yet American power was also on display in the depths of Belarus, where motorized Soviet units, equipped with American trucks and jeeps, encircled hapless German forces. German encirclement tactics had been mastered, accelerated, and turned against the Germans themselves. The Soviet breakthrough in Belarus was more dramatic than the American advance through France. German soldiers were outnumbered and its officers outsmarted. German commanders had expected the Soviet offensive to pass through Ukraine rather than Belarus. The Germans lost some four hundred thousand missing, wounded, or killed. Army Group Center was smashed. The way to Poland was open.
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Quickly the Red Army crossed the Molotov-Ribbentrop line and entered the region that had been the Lublin district of the General Government. Vasily Grossman, a Soviet writer following the Red Army as a journalist, contemplated what the Germans had left behind. The Red Army discovered the camp at Majdanek on 24 July 1944. In early August, Grossman found a still greater horror, one that might have defied a poorer imagination. Coming upon Treblinka, he realized quickly just what had happened: the Jews of Poland had been murdered in gas chambers, their bodies burned, their ashes and bones buried in fields. He walked upon “earth that is as unsteady as the sea,” and found the remnants: photographs of children in Warsaw and Vienna; a bit of Ukrainian embroidery; a sack of hair, blonde and black.
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By this time, Polish lands had been under German occupation for nearly four years. For the Jews of Warsaw, or almost all of them, Operation Bagration was the liberation that never came. The remains of more than a quarter-million Warsaw Jews were among the ashes and bones that Grossman found at Treblinka.

In 1939, the occupiers of Poland had been two, German and Soviet. For the non-Jewish Poles in Warsaw who were conspiring to resist German rule, Operation Bagration portended the arrival of a very questionable ally. It meant the second incursion of the Red Army into Polish territory during the Second World War.

This was the difference between Polish and Polish-Jewish experiences of the war. Non-Jewish Poles suffered horribly from both German and Soviet occupations, but comparably from each. Non-Jewish Poles who wished to resist could sometimes make choices: about which occupier to resist, and in what circumstances.

Surviving Polish Jews had every reason to prefer the Soviets to the Germans, and to see the Red Army as liberators. Many of those sixty thousand or so Jews who were still alive in the Warsaw ghetto after the Large Action of summer 1942 did choose to resist. But they could not choose the time and the place of their resistance. All they could do was fight.

Warsaw was the center of urban resistance to Nazi rule in occupied Europe. In the two years between September 1942, by which time Treblinka had taken the lives of most of the Jews of Warsaw, and September 1944, when its workings were described by Grossman in his article “Treblinka Hell,” both Poles and Jews led uprisings against the German occupation, separately but also together, in uprisings of April 1943 and August 1944.

The consequences of Jewish and Polish resistance in Warsaw were much the same: destruction. By the time the Red Army (and Grossman) arrived in the city in January 1945, it was rubble and ash. Half of the population was dead, and the survivors were gone. Grossman reached for a literary reference that his readers would have known: the last remaining people, Jews and Poles he found living together in the remains of one building, were Warsaw “Robinsons”: like Robinson Crusoe, the hero of the novel by Daniel Defoe, left on an island by himself for years, lost to civilization. The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who lived during the war in Warsaw, spent some of his time writing literary criticism of the same novel. For him,
Robinson Crusoe
was the “legend of the island,” the idea that moral flaws come from experience, that if we were left alone we might be good. In this essay, and in his poetry about Poles and Jews in Warsaw, he suggested the contrary, that the only hope for ethics was that each remember the solitude of the other.
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In Warsaw during the Second World War, Poles and Jews were alone in some of the same ways, beyond help from the outside world, even from those whom they regarded as friends and allies. They were also alone in different ways, confronting different fates in the same war. They shared a city that had been the center of both Polish and Jewish civilizations. That city is now gone; what remains of it is legend, or rather two legends, one Polish, one Jewish, between solidarity and solitude, each aware of the other but alone in the postwar world.

Polish and Jewish conspiracies against German rule, distinct but connected, had begun much earlier, with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

On 7 September 1939, in the basement of a bank, eight men and women, most of them Free Masons, began the conspiracy that would become the Polish underground army. Known at first as the Servants of the Victory of Poland, it was led by a general with orders to organize a national underground. By 1940, when the Polish government had established itself in exile in France, the armed underground at home was given the name Union of Armed Struggle. In 1940 and 1941, its main task was to unify the hundreds of smaller resistance groups that had formed in Poland, and to collect intelligence for the Polish government and its allies. The Union of Armed Struggle was active in the German zone of occupation; attempts to create a network under Soviet occupation were thwarted by the NKVD. After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Polish resistance was able to operate in all of the territories of occupied Poland.
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