The Holocaust (119 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
On the way into the town stood a German with a white band on his arm: an orderly. ‘Where are you going, sir?’
Hm! So it was ‘sir’ now. But the Germans were still maintaining ‘order’.
‘To the town.’
‘That’s prohibited, sir. The Americans have prohibited it, sir; the refugees must remain in their camp, sir.’
So, the Americans have prohibited it, and you are carrying out their prohibition—as long as it’s ‘order’, as long as it’s a command.
There were many streets in that little town at the foot of the Tyrolean Alps. How lovely everything was. How quietly dreamed the little red-tiled houses with their little green gardens. There were the outlying houses.
Four days before, the inhabitants had rushed out at us with axes and blades. Now they were invisible. Now and again one of them slunk past with a band on his arm and wearing the short, greasy leather Tyrolean pants—slunk along with
stealthy steps to take his turn at guard duty at the town entrance.
How quickly they had organized themselves! Not a sign of their defeat, of their world-destroying end.
In only one building, in the schoolhouse, there was hubbub. Food was being distributed to refugees, Germans who had fled from their homes and had been overtaken by the Americans.
I pushed my head into the open doorway. The smell of bread and milk met my nostrils.
‘Please, sir, do you want something to eat?’ One of them tried this approach carefully, fawning like a dog.
The main street of the town was quiet. No one was to be seen—as if they all had died out. They kept within their houses, which bore not the slightest trace of war damage.
Here and there American soldiers were on patrol. One came up to me, a short fellow with a cheeky face, little more than a child.
‘A Jew?’
‘A Jew!’ I stuttered.
Our arms intertwined and we burbled crazily, ‘A Jew, a Jew’.
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Joy and tragedy both came in unexpected forms. Sarah Friedmann, who had been deported to Birkenau from Hungary in June 1944, and had survived the death marches, reached Allach, near Munich in April 1945. Later she recalled the arrival of American forces on April 29. ‘They distributed food and oil. Many of us perished that day as a result of overeating, because they were not used to such fat and nourishing food in their stomachs.’ But the tins of food proved irresistible to the starving, emaciated survivors, and so they died. ‘We called them “canned-goods victims”.’
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Many survivors died because they were beyond the reaches of life. ‘If their weight was thirty kilogrammes,’ recalled Aharon Hoter-Yishai, ‘they had no contact with life any more. They had no strength, no will to survive left in them, no resistance.’ Hoter-Yishai, a member of the Jewish Brigade of the Eighth Army, visited Belsen, Dachau and other camps in the weeks and months following liberation.
In the camps, where Jews still lived in the huts which had once held them prisoner, as many as twenty-seven thousand died after liberation because they were too weak to respond to medical
treatment. They looked, Hoter-Yishai recalled sixteen years later, ‘like forests where only amputated trunks remained standing. A man with amputated limbs: his children had been taken, his wife had been taken, and what remained was a severed trunk, wounded and bleeding, and these wounds were only reopened after the liberation. He could not forget, and his inner life hardly made it possible to find any contact with others.’
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‘We were in a daze,’ Maria Rebhun later recalled, of the moment when the Red Army reached Lauenburg camp in Pomerania. ‘Barely moving, supporting the ones that were not able to make a step, and pushing the ones that were already written off in a wheelbarrow, we went to face new reality. Our minds were like a vacuum, our hearts empty of any desires.’ Maria Rebhun’s parents had perished in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, each of her brothers and sisters had been killed. She was alone. ‘On the streets’, she recalled, ‘ecstatic Russian soldiers offered us sweets and cigarettes amidst laughter and songs, but we were mute. Who are we? Where are we to go? Whom to turn to?’
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In hiding, in fields and ditches, barns and attics, Jews who had survived ghetto and deportation, Birkenau and the death marches, peeped out at the retreating Germans, and gazed into the distance to see the first Allied tanks and soldiers. Samuel Pisar has recalled how hiding with other teenage boys in a hayloft at Peiting in Bavaria:
I suddenly became aware of a hum, like a swarm of bees, growing in volume. A machine gun opened fire alongside our barn and, when it stopped, there was that hum again, only louder, unearthly metallic.
I peeped through a crack in the wooden slats. Straight ahead, on the other side of the field, a huge tank was coming toward the barn. It stopped, and the humming ceased. From somewhere to one side, machine guns crackled and the sounds of mortar explosions carried across the field. The tank’s long cannon lifted its round head, as though peering at me, then turned slowly aside and let loose a tremendous belch. The firing stopped. The tank resumed its advance, lumbering cautiously toward me. I looked for the hateful swastika, but there wasn’t one. On the tank’s sides, instead, I made out an unfamiliar emblem. It was a five-pointed white star. In an instant, the
realization flooded me; I was looking at the insignia of the United States army.
My skull seemed to burst. With a wild roar, I broke through the thatched roof, leaped to the ground, and ran toward the tank. The German machine guns opened up again. The tank fired twice. Then all was quiet. I was still running. I was in front of the tank, waving my arms. The hatch opened. A big black man climbed out, swearing unintelligibly at me. Recalling the only English I knew, those words my mother had sighed while dreaming of our deliverance, I fell at the black man’s feet, threw my arms around his legs and yelled at the top of my lungs:
‘God bless America!’
With an unmistakable gesture, the American motioned me to get up and lifted me in through the hatch. In a few minutes, all of us were free.
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In another Bavarian village, Seeshaupt, in the railway station, the SS were guarding a train of men and boys brought from Dachau, on what had been intended as yet another journey away from the advancing Allies. Moshe Sandberg, who had survived deportation to Birkenau, and the death marches, later recalled the scene at the station:
A group of SS soldiers standing there pointed towards the village and said that the tanks parked there were American. I don’t think that any of us believed them. It seemed a joke at our expense. Somebody asked if we could get out of the train and in a voice very different from the usual a soldier replied, ‘Of course.’
Some of us got out, without any particular joy, unable to understand the meaning of that fateful moment. Some ran to the grass and began devouring it as if it was the most natural of foods. The Germans stood silent, only looking towards the tanks.
I and my friends decided to escape. We did not have strength enough to run or even to walk fast. Our movement was much more like that of two old men than of prisoners escaping from their cell.
We reckoned that we had nothing to lose. Either we would be killed by bullets or we would die of starvation. Slowly we
crossed the railway line and left the station. At the first house we came to we asked for food. Apparently the German did not know that his village had been captured. He drove us away, saying that he had no food. We saw that his wife was peeling potatoes and carrots. We begged for the peelings, which we gobbled down with all the dirt on them. We then got to a second house, but the woman made us wait outside, no doubt because of our filthy condition and our terrible, unhuman appearance. She asked us to wait and then reappeared with two hard-boiled eggs. We tried to remove the shells, but our hands were palsied. It was months, perhaps a year, that we had not seen an egg! Finally, unable to wait longer, I swallowed the egg, shell and all.
We were free, but we did not know it, did not believe it, could not believe it. We had waited for this such long days and nights that now when the dream had come true it seemed still a dream. We wanted to go to a third house to beg something, but just then an American tank approached from which the soldiers motioned us to come nearer. Only then did we understand that it was not a dream. We were free! We were really free! We broke into weeping. We kissed the tank. A Negro soldier gave us a tin of meat, bread and chocolate, and pointed to us the way to the village centre. We sat down on the ground and ate up all the food together—bread, chocolate and meat. The Negro watched us, tears in his eyes.
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In the regions still under German control, Jews struggled to survive the final days and hours of incarceration. At Mauthausen, Rudolf Fahn, one of those who had escaped from Slovakia in May 1940, only to be caught again four years later in Rhodes, and sent to Auschwitz, found a scrap of clean cloth which he took into the wash-room in order to dry himself. To take the cloth was, in the rules of the camp, punishable by death; the guard, seeing Fahn commit this ‘offence’, beat him to death on the spot. Now, of the five Fahns deported from Rhodes to Birkenau nine months earlier, only Sidney Fahn was still alive.
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***
In Berlin, on April 29, Adolf Hitler dictated his political testament. The Second World War, he wrote, had been ‘provoked exclusively’
by those international statesmen ‘who either were of Jewish origin or worked for Jewish interests’. The Jews were ‘the real guilty party in this murderous struggle’ and would be ‘saddled’ with the responsibility of it. Hitler added:
I left no one in doubt that this time not only would millions of children of European Aryan races starve, not only would millions of grown men meet their death, and not only would hundreds of thousands of women and children be burned and bombed to death in cities, but this time the real culprits would have to pay for their guilt even though by more humane means than war.
The ‘more humane means’ had been the gas-chambers.
He had decided, Hitler declared, to die in Berlin so as not to ‘fall into the hands of the enemy, who requires a new spectacle, presented by the Jews, to divert their hysterical masses’.
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On April 30 Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. The news of his death, broadcast over Berlin radio, spread rapidly throughout the dwindling Reich. At a small farm in the Sudetenland, a column of Jews, from a labour camp at Sonnenberg, had been ordered to spend the night in a barn. One of the Jews, Michael Etkind, who had earlier been in the Lodz ghetto, recalled:
Again, there was no food. We crowded in and lay down on the straw. The guards, posted at the open doorway, sat on stools with their guns resting on their knees. They were talking quietly in their alien, Germanic tongue when someone close by overheard the words: ‘Hitler is dead.’
Those three words were like a match thrown into the barn: in seconds the fire had spread from mouth to ear, from ear to mouth. And then there was a moment of silence. Suddenly, the ‘Joker’—the man who’d kept the rest of us going with his humour and jokes—the man from my hut in Sonnenberg, jumped up. Like a man possessed, like a lunatic, he began to dance about waving his arms in the air; his high-pitched voice chanted with frenzy:
‘I have outlived the fiend,
my life-long wish fulfilled,
what more need I achieve—
my heart is full of joy’
he sang in a transport of ecstasy. We watched him in horror, speechless. His lanky frame was swirling round until it reached the open door. No one could move. He’d run into the field outside.
One of the German guards lifted his gun, took aim.
We saw the ‘Joker’ lift his arms again, stand up, turn around, surprised (didn’t they understand, hadn’t they heard, that the Monster was dead?) and, like a puppet when its strings are cut, collapse into a heap.
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On the day of Hitler’s death, 2,775 Jews from Rehmsdorf, near Buchenwald, were being marched to Theresienstadt. A thousand of them, fleeing from the march during an Allied air raid, were caught and shot. The remaining fifteen hundred continued on the march. Only five hundred reached Theresienstadt alive.
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That same day, April 30, the Red Army entered Ravensbruck, where twenty-three thousand women, Jews and non-Jews, were alive, and saved.
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In that one camp alone ninety-two thousand Jews and non-Jews, most of them women and children, had been murdered in just over two years. As Soviet troops overtook the ‘death marchers’, who had been driven westward from Ravensbruck a few days earlier, several thousand were still alive.
Soviet and American forces had linked up in the middle of Germany, but in the dwindling pockets of territory still under German control, Jews still suffered for being Jews. At noon on May 1, Alfred Kantor, survivor of Birkenau and Schwarzheide, noted, as their death march continued: ‘Last revenge of the guard’s chief. Hanging for escape. Prisoners have to look on. Anybody turning face to the ground is whipped by SS führer.’
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On May 2 Berlin surrendered to the Red Army. At the end of 1942 there had been thirty-three thousand Jews in the city. Following the round-ups and deportations of 1943, only 238 full Jews remained. By May 1945 this figure had been reduced to 162, all of them in hiding. There were also about 800 half-Jews and Jewish refugees, hiding in the cellars of the Jewish hospital. Also still in the city, undeported throughout the war, were 4,790 Jews married to non-Jews, 992 people of mixed parentage who admitted to being Jews by religion, and 46 Jews with citizenship of countries which were not at war with Germany.
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In the previous three years, fifty thousand Jews had been deported from Berlin to the East, to
Auschwitz, and to Theresienstadt, of whom fewer than three and a half thousand survived.
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