The Holocaust (19 page)

Both Poles and Jews obeyed the fierce decree. Both, Chaim Kaplan noted in his diary on October 22, ‘curse the murderer with the wish that his world darken in his lifetime, just as he darkened their world by ordering them to do something against their will’.
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October 22 was also a day of woe elsewhere, for on that day a total of 6,500 German Jews from Baden, the Saar and the Palatinate were sent by train across France to internment camps in the French Pyrenees.
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All the property of the deported Jews, their homes, businesses and belongings, was seized by the local German authorities. They came, these new deportees, from some of the oldest Jewish communities in Germany, two thousand of them from Mannheim, where the first synagogue was built in 1664, and thirty-four from Alt Briesach, where the first Jews settled in 1301. Some of the Jews sent to the camps in the Pyrenees, the largest of which was in the village of Gurs, had been born outside Germany, in Warsaw, Budapest and Zagreb. One deportee, Lieba Lust, had been born in 1875 in the then Austro-Hungarian frontier town of Auschwitz: she died at Gurs, six weeks after deportation, three weeks before her sixty-fifth birthday.
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‘From this camp Gurs,’ Pastor Heinrich Grüber later recalled, ‘we had—in Berlin—very bad news, even worse news than reached us from Poland. They did not have any medicaments or any sanitary arrangements whatsoever.’
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Grüber had tried to go to Gurs, to do what he could to ameliorate the situation, but instead he was arrested, and sent as a prisoner first to Sachsenhausen and then to Dachau.

In Warsaw, the creation of the ghetto continued, marked by scenes of chaos and fear as predominantly Jewish streets, into which Jews had moved from elsewhere, were suddenly and arbitrarily excluded. ‘People are walking around crazy with anxiety,’ Ringelblum noted, ‘because they don’t know where to move to. Not a
single street is sure of being assigned to the ghetto.’ There were some Jews, Ringelblum added, ‘who said they’d rather be poisoned with gas than tortured so’.

Two lawyers, Ringelblum noted, Koral and Tykoczynski—Koral having been the legal counsel of the French Embassy before the war—‘have committed suicide because of the resettlement decree’. Ringelblum also learned that day that, nine months earlier, in Praga, a Jew called Friedman ‘stood up for the rabbi when the latter was being impressed for work and beaten. Friedman was shot on the spot.’
⁴⁰

The main Jewish hospital in Warsaw, the Czyste hospital, was among one of many Jewish institutions forced to leave its buildings and move to the ghetto, although no suitable premises existed for it there.

On October 24, as the uprooting continued, the Jewish calendar reached the night of Simchat Torah, the Rejoicing of the Law. ‘An additional doubt’, wrote Chaim Kaplan, ‘is gnawing at us: Will it be a closed ghetto?’ There were signs, he noted, ‘in both directions, and we hope for a miracle—which doesn’t always happen in time of need. A closed ghetto means gradual death. An open ghetto is only a halfway catastrophe.’
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The uncertainty was deliberate, its effect bewildering. ‘Everyone bites his lip’, Kaplan noted two weeks later, ‘in anger born of helplessness. Everyone is choked up with his own anxieties. When friends meet, each one hastens to ask the standard question: what do you think? Will we be able to hold out?’
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On October 25, in a directive issued from the capital of the General Government, Cracow, any further granting of exit visas to Polish Jews was forbidden, on the grounds that Jewish emigration would lead to a ‘renewal’ of Jewry in the United States, its growth and concentration. If Eastern European Jews were to be allowed to go to America, J. A. Eckhardt explained in a General Government memorandum, it would enable American Jewry to fulfil its plan ‘to create a new platform from which it contemplates to continue its battle most forcibly against Germany’.
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Outside German control, a new phase of the war began with the Italian invasion of Greece on 28 October 1940. Mussolini, too, was eager to extend his empire. But the Greek forces fought fiercely, and the Italian advance was halted. In the fighting, more than twelve thousand Greek Jews served with distinction: 613 Jews from Salonica
were killed in action, and 1,412 became total invalids. Among the Jews who fought was the Greek national hero Mordechai Fraggi, who was killed in action.
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***

On 15 November 1940 the Warsaw ghetto was officially declared to be in existence. ‘Jews are forbidden’, noted Mary Berg, ‘to move outside the boundaries formed by certain streets. There is considerable commotion.’ Work had already begun on walls to encircle the ghetto area. These walls were three yards high. ‘Jewish masons,’ Mary Berg wrote, ‘supervised by Nazi soldiers, are laying bricks upon bricks. Those who do not work fast enough are lashed by the overseers.’
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With only twenty-seven thousand apartments available in the area of the ghetto, six or seven people were forced to live in each room.
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Writing in his diary four days later, Ringelblum noted that Jewish women in the ghetto were surprised to discover that the markets outside the ghetto were closed to them. Many items had suddenly disappeared from the ghetto shops. On the first day after the ghetto wall was completed, and the ghetto closed, ‘many Christians brought bread for their Jewish acquaintances and friends’. This, Ringelblum added, ‘was a mass phenomenon. Meanwhile, Christian friends are helping Jews bring produce into the ghetto.’ But that day, November 19, a Christian was killed by the Germans, ‘throwing a sack of bread over the wall’.

At one ghetto street corner, Ringelblum noted, German soldiers were tearing up paper into small pieces, scattering the pieces in the mud, ordering Jews to pick the pieces up, and then ‘beating them as they stoop over’. On another street, a German soldier ‘stopped to beat a Jewish pedestrian. Ordered him to lie down and kiss the pavement.’ A ‘wave of evil’, Ringelblum commented, ‘rolled over the whole city….’
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The four hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw were in a trap, their means of contact with the outside world, and even with the rest of Warsaw, being systematically cut off. ‘Extraordinary meetings are taking place in every house,’ Mary Berg wrote in her diary. ‘The tension is terrific. Some people demand that a protest be organized. This is the voice of the youth; our elders consider this is a dangerous idea. We are cut off from the world. There are no radios, no
telephones, no newspapers.’
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With the closing of the Warsaw ghetto, another new feature of Nazi rule was introduced, the Jewish policeman: at German insistence, his was to be the responsibility for maintaining order in the ghetto. At first the Jewish policeman was a welcome, even a prized figure. As Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary a few weeks later:

For Mary Berg, there was a similar sense of relief, and indeed of pleasure, at the sight of policemen wearing a white armband with the blue Star of David. Their duties, she wrote, included guarding the gates of the ghetto with German and Polish policemen, directing traffic in the ghetto streets, guarding post offices, soup kitchens and community offices, detecting ‘and suppressing’ smugglers, and driving the growing number of beggars from street to street. ‘I experience’, she wrote, ‘a strange and utterly illogical feeling of satisfaction when I see a Jewish policeman at a crossing—such policemen were completely unknown in pre-war Poland.’ From time to time, she added, ‘Gestapo cars rush by, paying no attention whatsoever to the Jewish policeman’s directions….’
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***

The four hundred thousand Jews of Warsaw, and the two million and more Jews under German rule in November 1940, had no means of escape. But Jewish refugees from central Europe who had reached Slovakia some months earlier had been able to go by ship down the Danube and, once at the Black Sea, to sail to Palestine. In the third week of November, as Warsaw Jewry contemplated the grim reality of the ghetto, 1,771 refugees, most of them from
Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, reached Haifa, on board two tramp steamers, the
Milos
and the
Pacific
. A few days later, a further 1,783 refugees arrived on board a third boat, the
Atlantic
.

None of these refugees had valid certificates for Palestine. The British authorities therefore ordered them to transfer to another boat, the
Patria
, for deportation to the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. On November 25, as the refugees were being transferred, some of the Jews, determined to remain in Palestine, blew up the
Patria.
Their aim had been only to disable the ship, to prevent it from sailing, but it sank, and 250 of the refugees were drowned.
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On November 28, as Palestine Jewry mourned the
Patria
dead, a second anti-Jewish film was given its premiere in Berlin.
Der Ewige Jude
, ‘The Eternal Jew’, was to be shown in cinemas throughout Germany and German-occupied Europe. The film sought to explain the part played by the Jews in world history. Scenes of rats and Jews were juxtaposed. The Jews, like the rats, were carriers of diseases, ‘money-mad bits of filth devoid of all higher values, corrupters of the world’.
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These images fanned the vicious racism of German propaganda, as they were designed to do. When German soldiers entered the Warsaw ghetto, they treated the Jews as vermin, entering houses at will to steal whatever they could find. ‘A Jew does not dare make a sound of protest,’ Chaim Kaplan noted on December 6. ‘There have been cases when courageous Jews were shot in full view of their entire family, and the murderers were not held responsible, because their excuse was that the filthy Jew cursed the Führer and it was their duty to avenge his honour.’
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Four days later Ringelblum recorded how, on December 9, ‘a soldier sprang out of a passing automobile and hit a boy on the head with an iron bar. The boy died.’
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As 1940 drew to a close, Richard Lichtheim, the head of the Geneva office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, reported to Palestine, London and New York what he had heard of the plight of the Jews of Europe. From Rumania, he wrote, there were reports of ‘killings and lootings’. From the camp at Gurs came details of barracks with neither floors nor beds: ‘The people are lying on the ground and many of them have not even blankets.’ In Belgium and Holland the German authorities wanted ‘to eliminate the Jews from public life’. In Switzerland there were six thousand Jewish
refugees, ‘of whom 2,600 are destitute’. In Poland, the situation of the Jews was ‘even worse than in Germany itself’.

In his letter, Lichtheim wrote of the hundreds of thousands of European Jews ‘who tried to escape but did not go fast or far enough’: Jews who had earlier fled from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and even Poland, who were now caught in France, Belgium, Holland, Norway and Denmark.
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Others, while still in Europe, had found refuge in neutral countries, six thousand in Switzerland, ten thousand in Portugal, several thousand interned while trying to pass through Spain, several thousand finding havens in Sweden and Finland, others in Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy.

From Varna, in Bulgaria, a tiny craft of some 130 tons, the
Salvador
, had set out in mid-November with more than three hundred and fifty Jewish refugees crammed on board. The British government, seeking to prevent their entry in Palestine, urged the Turkish and Greek governments not to allow the ship through the Dardanelles, or into the Aegean Sea. These urgings were unnecessary, however, for on December 12, while still in the Sea of Marmora, the
Salvador
sank: two hundred of the refugees were drowned, including seventy children. Five days later two British officials responsible for refugee policy for central Europe exchanged notes. ‘If anything can deter these poor devils from setting out for Zion, that story should,’ wrote one, to which the other replied: ‘I agree. There could have been no more opportune disaster from the point of view of stopping this traffic….
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The ‘traffic’ did not stop. But with every passing month, escape became more difficult. Wherever German rule was established, the Jews were deprived of their passports and travel documents, or denied them, while in the streets and concentration camps they continued to be singled out for particular abuse. When the Berlin pastor, Heinrich Grüber, was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp on December 17, he was a witness to one such episode. As he later recalled, it was ‘one of the first impressions’ of his imprisonment:

‘Of course,’ Gruber added, ‘these people contracted pneumonia, and some of them died of pneumonia.’
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