The Holocaust (116 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
In Palmnicken the Jews were lodged in a deserted factory. The manager of the village, hearing of their arrival, ordered each of the marchers to be given a daily ration of three potatoes. ‘We heard that he was a humane man who had objected to us prisoners remaining in his town under inhuman conditions. A few hours later a rumour circulated that the Nazis had shot him.’
One evening the Jews were ordered out of the factory building and lined up in rows of five. They were then marched in the direction of the Baltic Sea. During the march, some three hundred men hurled themselves at the SS guards with bare hands. They were all machine-gunned.
The surviving marchers continued towards the sea. Celina Manielewicz later recalled the sequel, as she marched with her three friends, Pela Lewkowicz, Genia Weinberg and Mania Gleimann:
In addition to rumours of our embarkation for Hamburg and of the approach of the Russians, other rumours also reached us: people marching ahead of us in the front ranks were murdered along the shore and thrown into the sea.
We were so starved, weak and demoralised that death seemed to us a merciful relief—and yet we lacked the courage to stoop down on the way, because of a glimmer of hope that at the last moment our life would be saved by a miracle. Yet in view of the approaching end we four friends said goodbye to each other.
Finally, late at night we came to the coast. We found
ourselves on high ground beyond which cliffs descended steeply to the shore. A fearful vista presented itself. Machine-gunners posted on both sides fired blindly into the advancing columns. Those who had been hit lost their balance and hurtled down the cliffside. When we realized what was happening, we and people in front of us instinctively pushed to the back. The commanding SS man, Quartermaster Sergeant Stock, picked up his rifle and came cursing towards us, shouting, ‘Why don’t you want to go any further? You’re going to be shot like dogs anyway!’ He forced us forward to the precipice saying, ‘A waste of ammunition,’ and fetched each of us a terrible blow round the head with his rifle butt, so that we lost consciousness.
I don’t know what happened to me; suddenly I felt something cold on my back and when I opened my eyes I beheld a mountain slope down which ever more blood-streaked bodies were rolling. I found myself in the foaming, roaring sea in a small, partly frozen bay on a pile of dead or injured, and therefore still living, people.
The whole coast, as far as I could see, was covered with corpses, and I, too, was lying on such a mountain of corpses which slowly sank deeper and deeper. Close beside me lay Genia Weinberg and Mania Gleimann and at my feet Pela Lewkowicz. Badly injured, she suddenly stood up and shouted to a sentry standing a few metres away from us on the shore, ‘Herr Sentry, I’m still alive!’
The sentry aimed and shot her in the head—a few centimetres away from my feet—so that she collapsed. Suddenly my friend Genia, who had also recovered consciousness in the ice-cold water, pinched me and whispered, ‘Don’t move.’
So we lay for some time, I don’t know how long, almost completely frozen. Suddenly SS men appeared and shouted, ‘Raise your heads!’ Some of the injured who were still alive and capable of obeying this order were shot immediately. Then the SS men left. Thereupon Genia said, ‘It is so quiet!’, got up carefully and waded to the shore. She tore some clothes and blankets from the corpses that were lying around and tied them into a rope, with the aid of which she pulled us on shore.
We tried to move our limbs and began climbing the mountain slope with great difficulty. Genia was the one who hadn’t lost courage yet. Half-way up she told us to wait, she wanted to
go down again and see if there were any survivors. But after some time she came back alone. We felt very sick because we had swallowed a lot of sea water; in spite of this Genia kept driving us forward. At last we came to the top of the cliff which had been entirely deserted by the Germans. It was twenty-five degrees below zero. We were covered with a layer of ice and unable to go any further. Genia told us over and over again, ‘We’ve got to go on!’ Then, after an hour’s staggering about in the snow, we suddenly saw smoke.
The three women found refuge with a farmer called Voss. Later, when Voss tried to turn them over to the Germans, they were saved by two other villagers, Albert Harder and his wife, who fed and clothed them, and pretended that they were three Polish girls. One day a German officer asked Frau Harder for permission to take them out. It would have roused too many suspicions to refuse. Celina, now known as Cecilia, later recalled her evening with the officer:
He led me to the spot along the seashore where I had endured the worst night of my life and said: ‘In this place our people murdered ten thousand Jews. It is terrible that Germans were capable of such a thing. I can only tell you that if the Russians march in, which is only a question of days or weeks now, they will do the same to us as we have done to the Jews. A German will dangle from every tree. The forest will be full of German corpses!’
I felt faint and lost consciousness. When I had recovered we walked back to the Harders’ in silence. On the way back the officer also told me that two hundred Jews had survived the night massacre, but had been handed over to the Gestapo by the population of the surrounding villages among whom they had sought asylum. They had all been killed.
He continued to pay court to me, assured me that I looked like his sister, and made a few attempts to go out with me. The night before the entry of the Russians, I remember him coming to Frau Harder with a suitcase at 11 p.m. in a state of great excitement. He had to speak to me at all costs—it could not wait till next morning. When I stood before him in my nightdress and dressing gown he opened the case and produced a
mass of tinned preserves he had procured for family Harder from the officers’ mess.
The German officer tried to persuade Celina to leave with him, ‘for woe betide you if the barbaric Russians get hold of you here’, but she persuaded him that she had to stay. Celina, for her part, urged the German to desert, and to throw away his uniform. ‘I cannot do that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to play out this bad game to the bitter end.’
The German left. The Russians arrived. Celina and her two friends were saved. But none of the Russians, even a Yiddish-speaking Red Army officer, a Jew, could believe that they were Jews. ‘The Jews have all perished over there,’ they said, pointing to the sea. Only the emergence from hiding of ten other survivors of the massacre gave credence to the story of their survival. Of nine thousand and more marchers brought to the sea at Palmnicken, only thirteen had survived.
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Freedom brought many hazards; among those who had set out from Auschwitz immediately after the liberation of the camp on January 27 was Ernest Spiegel, together with thirty-three of the surviving boy twins. Spiegel had been making plans to leave Auschwitz with another prisoner when the children had come to him and said: ‘Uncle, you promised to take us home.’ On the first stage of their journey, a Russian soldier driving a truck saw the children, and agreed to drive them to Cracow. During the journey, the truck was hit by another vehicle, and one of the twins was killed.
For seven weeks Spiegel led the twins southwards towards his home town, Munkacs. During the journey, Soviet officers asked him to take care of a further 120 survivors who had been found wandering in the Tatra mountains.
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For the liberated Jews, the dangers were far from over. On February 2 a woman from Russian-liberated Rokitno, in the Volhynia, wrote to her relatives in Palestine of the family’s sufferings in the war. ‘And now’, she added, ‘my Yechielke went off to take part in a committee meeting and fell victim to the Ukrainian nationalists.’
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On February 17, the Jewish Sabbath, Szymon Datner, head of the
Jewish regional committee which had been set up in Bialystok after the liberation, was summoned to the nearby village of Sokoly. There he found seven murdered Jews. The story he learned was as follows: earlier that day, all twenty survivors of the Jews of Sokoly had assembled in a room when a Pole had entered, and opened fire. Among the dead was a prominent local engineer, David Zholti, two brothers, Yankele Litwak, aged fifteen, and Shaikele, aged twelve, two other members of the Litwak family, Chaim and Shammai, a young woman, the twenty-year-old Batya Weinstein, and a man, David Kostshevski. Also murdered in that burst of fire was another woman, the twenty-two-year-old Shaine Olshak, and Tokele, the four-year-old orphan daughter of her sister.
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Not only the enmity of the local population, but the weakness brought about by such long privation, often gave the first days of freedom a bitter twist. Esther Epsztejn, from Lodz, whose parents and two brothers had both been murdered during the war, recalled how, in February 1945, after she and a large number of women had been liberated by the Red Army while being evacuated from Stutthof, ‘Russian doctors did everything they could for us, but the mortality rate did not diminish. Eighty-five people died in five days, after we were liberated.’
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‘For the time being I go on living,’ a survivor wrote, from Kovno, on February 18. ‘How hard it is to walk about on earth that is so saturated with Jewish blood.’
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The ‘tainted luck’ of survival
By the end of February 1945, the factories to which the Jews from Birkenau had been evacuated in November and December 1944 were themselves within a few days of being overrun by the Red Army. On February 23 the Jews in Schwarzheide, on the Dresden to Berlin autobahn, were evacuated. The three hundred weakest were sent in open goods wagons to Belsen. There, all but one of them perished.
1
A month earlier, from a camp at Neusalz, on the Oder, a thousand Jewish women, many of them survivors of Auschwitz, had been marched westward and south, away from the advancing Soviet forces. As with so many of the death marches, they passed through many German towns and villages: on February 28 they were at Bautzen. One of those on the march, Gisela Teumann, later recalled how, ‘We passed through some German town. We asked for food. At first they thought that we were German refugees. The SS man who accompanied us shouted: “Don’t give them anything to eat, it’s Jews they are.” And so I got no food. German children began to throw stones at us.’
2
Of the thousand women who set off from Neusalz, only two hundred reached Flossenburg alive, forty-two days after they had been sent on their tragic way. From there, they too were sent on by train to Belsen.
Belsen and Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck, and their many sub-camps, were now the destination of hundreds of evacuation trains and marches. Jews who had already survived the ‘selections’ in Birkenau, and work as slave labourers in factories, had now to survive the death marches. Throughout February and March columns of men, and crowded cattle trucks, converged on the long-existing concentration camps,
now given a new task. These camps had been transformed into holding camps for the remnant of a destroyed people, men and women whose labour was still of some last-minute utility for a dying Reich, or whose emaciated bodies were to be left to languish in agony in one final camp.
It was in Dachau that Violette Fintz, the Jewess from Rhodes, found her brother Leon. ‘I took him in my arms,’ she later recalled. “‘You must have the courage to go on,” I said. He said, “No.” He showed me where hot soup had been spilled down his leg. It had gone gangrenous.’ Violette Fintz was transferred to Belsen. Her brother remained in Dachau, and there, shortly after her own evacuation, he died.
Violette Fintz was moved to Belsen. Forty years later she recalled how, among the masses of earlier evacuees, she found her sister Miriam. ‘She put her arms around me, saying, “Never will I be separated from you again.”’ Violette Fintz’s account continued:
Belsen was in the beginning bearable and we had bunks to sleep on and a small ration of soup and bread. But as the camp got fuller, our group and many others were given a barracks to hold about seven hundred lying on the floor without blankets and without food or anything.
It was a pitiful scene as the camp was attacked by lice and most of the people had typhus and cholera.
Many girls died and we were all thinking that these were our last days. My sister Miriam had a very high temperature and she told me that if she did not get a little water she would die there and then.
I took a tin and went out of the block to try and find some water. A woman pointed out to me that a block further away where there were children there was water.
It is impossible for me to express the scene that was before me: piles of bodies already decomposing, in fact about a mile of bodies. Shivering at what I had seen, I still managed to go and find some water which I hid inside my dress so no one could see. This relieved my sister a bit.
Many people talk about Auschwitz, it was a horrible camp; but Belsen, no words can describe it. There was no need to work as we were just put there with no food, no water, no anything, eaten by the lice.
From my experience and my suffering Belsen was the worst. I came to the point where everyone was saying, ‘Violette is dying.’
3
On March 3 a train of evacuees from Gross Rosen reached Ebensee, a sub-camp of Mauthausen. These 2,059 Jews had mostly been sent to Gross Rosen from Birkenau, or from the labour camps in central Poland. On the train journey to Ebensee, 49 had died. On the first day in Ebensee, 182 died during the disinfection procedure. They had become too weak to withstand any further effort.
4
There was also a continual danger in the intensified Allied bombing raids. On March 20 many Jewish women in a camp at Tiefstack, near Hamburg, were killed when the camp was hit in an air raid, and burnt to the ground.
5
The accidents of bombing affected both the eastern and western fronts: on March 26 a Russian bomb hit the Jewish hospital in Stutthof. ‘My sister was one of the victims of that bomb,’ a Kovno Jewess wrote. ‘All in all twenty-eight people were killed and thirty-five were wounded.’ The Jewess added: ‘It was fated that I should know where she was buried.’
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