The Holocaust (14 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
As an added indignity, the Jews of Sierpc, one of the towns in the newly declared Greater East Prussia, were ordered to wear a distinctive mark on their coats. ‘Yes,’ wrote Chaim Kaplan, a leading Warsaw educationalist, ‘with my own eyes I saw the “badge of shame” which the conqueror awarded the exiled Jews of Sierpc. It is a yellow patch on which is written “Jude”, sewn to one of the
coat lapels.’ Kaplan added that all the officials of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Warsaw saw it too, ‘and their faces were filled with shame’. Kaplan advised the Jew to add, next to the word ‘Jude’, the words ‘Mein Stolz’, ‘my pride’. ‘But the Jew answered as one who knows, that the conqueror calls such things “sabotage” and condemns the guilty one to death.’
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Six days after Kaplan had seen and been so shocked by this yellow badge, Hans Frank announced from Cracow that ‘all Jews and Jewesses over the age of nine throughout the General Government must wear a four-inch armband in white, marked with ‘the star of Zion on the right sleeve of their inner and outer clothing’. In Warsaw, the star had to be blue. ‘Transgressors’, Frank warned, would be punished with imprisonment.
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Behaviour which in normal times was of no particular significance had become, in the Nazi perspective, a crime, and crimes, by their nature, have to be punished. Step by step, and by means of ‘rules’, ‘regulations’, ‘laws’—the terminology of civilized life—the conqueror, with the full power of enforcement, created a logical corridor into a bizarre world of cruelty and injustice.
With the coming of war between Britain and Germany, tens of thousands of Jews, would-be refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, now had no chance of leaving. Overnight the mass of applications and requests to leave became mere scraps of paper. ‘We have waited in vain’, Eric Lucas’s mother wrote, from near Aachen, to her son, now safe in Britain. ‘We shall never see you again,’ and she added: ‘Was there no space in the whole wide world for us two, old people?’ Her letter continued: ‘I know we shall not live very long, now there is nothing left to hope for. We are so lonely and forsaken now, was there nobody who could have helped?’
Sophie Lucas could write no more. Her husband Isaac took up the pen. ‘Perhaps there will still be a chance of going to our relations in Denmark,’ he wrote. ‘Write to them, and we shall try the same. We are thinking of you. With the help of God we shall manage.’
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Neither Sophie nor Isaac Lucas was to survive the war. Their place of death, place of execution, some time in 1942 or 1943, was to be recorded only as ‘unknown’ and ‘the East’.
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‘Blood of innocents’
The mass killings of September and October 1939 in German-occupied Poland left five thousand Jewish dead. As German rule was consolidated throughout the General Government, these killings continued, but on a smaller scale, in the form of almost daily punitive actions against Jew and non-Jew alike for every attempt at protest. These reprisal actions were arbitrary and relentless. Among six men and three boys seized at the village of Zielonka, near Warsaw, on 11 November, taken to the nearby woods and shot, were two Jews, Aron Kaufman, the village butcher, and Edward Szweryn, proprietor of the village café.
1
That same day, in Zdunska Wola, after the killing of a policeman, Jews and Poles were taken as hostages, and several were shot.
2
On 12 November 1939 another stage in Heydrich’s September directive was put into effect, less than two months after the Berlin meeting. This was the order for the removal of all Jews, as well as some Poles, from the newly constituted Warthegau province, formerly part of western Poland, and now incorporated into Greater Germany. The areas ‘south of Warsaw and Lublin’ were designated as ‘the quarters for those removed’.
3
But even in the areas in which Jews could live, restrictions were soon imposed. From mid-November Jews were forbidden to work in any government offices, to buy or sell to ‘Aryans’, to travel by train, to bake bread, to go to an ‘Aryan’ doctor or to have an ‘Aryan’ patient. In the first days of the German occupation of Warsaw, Dr Adam Zamenhof, the fifty-two-year-old manager of the Jewish hospital on Czyste Street, was arrested ‘and never seen again’.
4
Zamenhof, the son of the inventor of Esperanto, was himself the inventor of a device for checking blind spots in the field of vision.
Wherever Jews were allowed to live, their homes were liable to
search and looting. David Wdowinski, the chief of the psychiatric department of the Czyste Street hospital, has recalled how, outside an apartment block in Warsaw, in the first weeks of the occupation, a truck arrived with three German officers and two civilians, who then entered one of the apartments:
There they demanded money, jewels, goods and food. They shut the women up in one room and the men in another. They stole everything they could lay their hands on and ordered the men to load it on to the trucks, to the accompaniment of kicks and beatings. The women were searched individually for anything that they might have hidden. But they were still unsatisfied with their loot. At the point of guns they forced the women and young girls to undress and they performed gynaecological examinations on each one of them. And even this was not enough. They forced the women and girls to get up on the tables and jump to the floor with legs straddled. ‘Maybe something will fall out. One never knows how deep the Jewish swindlers can hide their jewels.’
5
Such raids happened every day. Often, a German would arrive in a truck, enter an apartment, demand certain items of furniture, and then force the Jewish owner to carry the furniture down to the truck, ‘under pain of beatings with whips and sticks’.
David Wdowinski has recalled how a Jewish refugee family, who had fled to Warsaw from Polish Silesia, was ‘visited’ one November evening in 1939 by three German officers:
They demanded money and jewellery and threatened the woman at the point of a gun that she give them everything. She gave them all she had. Suddenly one of the officers noticed a small medallion hanging around the neck of the little boy. This child had been ill from birth. He had petit-mal, a form of epilepsy, which forced on as many as forty and sixty seizures a day, lasting one or two seconds. The child was mentally retarded. He could express himself only in inarticulate sounds. The only thing which gave this child any comfort was this very medallion. In the presence of the officers the child was taken with a seizure and the mother pleaded that the medallion be left for her child. One of the officers watching the child said: ‘I see
that the child is ill. I am a doctor, but a Jew-kid is not a human being,’ and he tore the medallion off the neck of the little boy.
6
Not only pillaging, accompanied by physical and mental violence, but also executions, continued almost daily. On November 16, among seven Poles executed in Warsaw was one Jew, Leib Michel Hochman, killed, according to the official German notification, ‘for refusal to perform a job’ and ‘for flight’.
7
Three days later, among fifteen Poles executed in Warsaw, the German notification of the execution included, curtly, ‘Knecht, Majer, Jew, born Zelechow, 1890, resident Warsaw, 29 Franciszkanska Street’.
8
In the exultation of their military victory, the Nazi conquerors acted without restraint. Hundreds of synagogues were destroyed during the first months of the occupation. ‘The synagogue on Kosciuszko Alley went up in flames yesterday morning,’ the official German newspaper in Lodz reported on November 16, adding that ‘the first and third fire brigades prevented the flames from spreading to adjoining buildings’.
9
The destruction of the books in the Talmudic Academy in Lublin gave so much pleasure to the conquerors that it was recalled with glee more than a year later. ‘For us’, a German eye-witness later reported, ‘it was a matter of special pride to destroy the Talmudic Academy, which was known as the greatest in Poland’, and he went on to describe how:
We threw the huge Talmudic library out of the building and carried the books to the market place, where we set fire to them. The fire lasted twenty hours. The Lublin Jews assembled around and wept bitterly, almost silencing us with their cries. We summoned the military band, and with joyful shouts the soldiers drowned out the sounds of the Jewish cries.
10
Throughout November 1939, the Germans continued to demand Jewish labour and to receive a daily quota of work brigades. One task assigned to Jews was the clearing of rubble in towns which had been the scene of fighting or bombardment. Conditions were deliberately made severe. ‘Truly we are cattle in the eyes of the Nazis,’ Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary on November 18. ‘When they supervise Jewish workers they hold a whip in their hands. All are beaten unmercifully.’ The details of Nazi cruelty, Kaplan added, ‘are enough to drive you crazy. Sometimes we are ashamed to look
at one another. And worse than this, we have begun to look upon ourselves as “inferior beings”, lacking God’s image.’
Poland had been conquered. Britain and France, at war with Germany, had as yet taken no offensive action. The United States remained staunchly neutral. And yet, Kaplan wrote, the defeat of the Nazis ‘will surely come. We have only one doubt, whether we shall live to see that day. And I say: Yes, we will live; we will reach that day! No power endures for ever.’
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On 13 November 1939, a twenty-year-old former convict, Pinkus Zylberryng, a Jew, had shot and killed a Polish policeman at 9 Nalewki Street, in the centre of Warsaw’s Jewish district. Although Zylberryng was identified, the Germans arrested all fifty-three male inhabitants of no. 9. On November 22, all fifty-three were executed.
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But before announcing the execution, the Germans demanded 300,000 zlotys from the Jewish Council. ‘The levy was to be a ransom for the lives of the men under arrest,’ a member of the Council, Ludwik Landau, noted, ‘but when the representatives of the Council arrived, the money was taken from them, but they were told that the prisoners had already been shot.’
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Among those shot in this reprisal action was one of Warsaw’s leading gynaecologists, the forty-five-year-old Samuel Zamkowy.
14
‘This was the first mass arrest and murder,’ David Wdowinski later recalled, ‘and it threw the Jewish population into panic.’
15
On November 28 Hans Frank formally ordered the setting up of Jewish Councils in every Jewish community in the General Government. The Councils were to have twenty-four members in communities of over ten thousand Jews, and twelve members in smaller communities. It was the German intention, as Heydrich had laid down in September, to issue all orders to the Jews through these Councils. It would then be the responsibility of Council members to ensure that these orders were obeyed. But the Germans retained the power of arbitrary action, in matters large and small. Walking through a Warsaw street in December 1939, David Wdowinski ‘saw a German officer take a fur coat off the back of a Jewish woman and give it to his female companion’.
16
In Lodz, Mary Berg noted in her diary how their German neighbours, railway workers, were constantly calling on them. ‘Every time they come, they ask for
something, but their requests are really orders. Last week, for instance, they asked for pillows, pretending they had nothing to sleep on.’
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Against such pilferings there was no redress.
Typical of the work which the Jewish Councils were forced to do, and part of the Nazi plan to isolate and impoverish the Jewish communities of Poland, on the morning of November 29 the German Civil Commissar in Piotrkow, Hans Drexel, presented the Council with a decree, signed by Hans Frank, for the delivery of 350,000 zlotys ‘to my office by 11 a.m. today’. If this request were not complied with, Drexel added, ‘punitive measures will be taken as ordered by the Governor-General’.
This enormous sum had somehow to be paid. While the Jews searched for the money, the Germans held three hostages. As the search for the money continued, the hostages were so savagely beaten that one of them, Leib Dessau, died.
As soon as the sum of money was collected, it was taken in a sack to the German Commissar. Later the Germans demanded more money, as well as 12,000 eggs, 500 sacks of flour, 300 kilogrammes of butter and 100 sacks of sugar. The payment of these sums and commodities bankrupted Piotrkow’s Jews, as it was intended to do. All over Poland, the wealth accumulated by generations of hard work and enterprise was seized by the conqueror, leaving the Jews with none of the basic strengths that money can so often provide.
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On the German-Soviet demarcation line, the border had now been effectively sealed, halting further escapes eastward. The expulsion of Jews across the border was also ending. One last deportation was announced on December 1, in the city of Hrubieszow. There, all men between the ages of fifty and sixty, together with men from the nearby city of Chelm, were ordered to assemble in the central square on the following day. The Jews were told that they would be going out to work. Many women and children tried to join their menfolk, not wishing to be separated from them, but were ordered to return home. Craftsmen, shoemakers and carpenters were ordered to lead the march.
‘We started marching,’ recalled Hirsch Pachter. ‘One girl succeeded in following the marchers, shouting “Father” all the way. At the first village, they took this girl away. We do not know what happened to her, but we heard a shot.’
The marchers were divided into about ten groups of two hundred
men each. At the end of the first day’s march, on the evening of December 2, twenty Jews were taken out of Hirsch Pachter’s group: two rabbis, two synagogue beadles, ‘and other people with long beards’. They were never seen again. From the other groups, a further two hundred men were taken away.
