The Holocaust (35 page)

The story Grabowski told was about Ponar. ‘For the first time,’ Zivia Lubetkin recalled, ‘we heard that Jews of Vilna are being deported by the thousands and tens of thousands, and being killed, children and women.’
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Yitzhak Zuckerman had also been summoned to hear Grabowski’s report. ‘I am from Vilna myself,’ he later recalled. ‘I was born in Vilna. In Vilna I left behind all my parents and relatives. And here he brought this tragic news from Vilna. While still a child, I had played among the trees in Ponar, and here he spoke about Ponar. My Vilna, the Jews of Vilna, were being killed in Ponar, my playground.’

Zuckerman and his friends realized at once the truth of Grabowski’s report. They realized also that it was now a question of the ‘total destruction’ of the Jews of Europe.
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Forty miles north-east of Warsaw, a labour camp had been set up in the gravel pits near the tiny rural station of Treblinka. The Jewish and Polish prisoners living there were employed loading slag,
cleaning drains and levelling the ground in and around the engine sheds at Malkinia junction, on the main Warsaw—Bialystok line. Later, they were put to work repairing and strengthening the embankment along the River Bug. The staff of the camp consisted of twenty SS men and a hundred Ukrainians. The commandant was Captain Theo von Euppen. Franciszek Zabecki, a Polish railway worker at Treblinka station, later recalled that von Euppen was ‘a sadist who ill-treated the Poles and Jews working there, particularly the Jews, taking shots at them as if they were partridges’.
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The Eastern murders continued throughout November 1941. At Liepaja, however, all such shootings had been forbidden by direct orders of the Reich Commissar for the ‘Ostland’ region of the Baltic, Hinrich Lohse. Asked by his superiors in Berlin to explain why he had halted the executions, Lohse replied on November 15 that ‘the manner in which they were performed could not be justified’. Not moral, but economic reasons, were his complaint: the destruction of much manpower that could be of use to the war economy. Was it intended, Lohse asked, that Jews were to be killed, ‘irrespective of age, sex or economic factors’.
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A month later Lohse was informed, by the Ministry of Occupied Eastern Territories, that ‘as a matter of principle, no economic factors are to be taken into consideration in the solution of the Jewish question’.
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Only a fragment of Eastern Jewry had been kept alive for work purposes. On December 1, the chief of Einsatzkommando 3, SS Colonel Karl Jaeger, reported to Berlin that only fifteen per cent of Lithuanian Jewry remained alive. All of them, he explained, were
Arbeitsjuden
, working Jews. ‘Today’, Jaeger added, ‘I can confirm that Einsatzkommando 3 has reached the goal of solving the Jewish problem in Lithuania.’ The only ‘remaining’ Jews were labourers and their families: about four and a half thousand in Siauliai, fifteen thousand in Kovno and fifteen thousand in Vilna.

In his report of 1 December 1941, Jaeger set out what he called the ‘Organizational problem’ which had confronted his Einsatzkommando, a problem which had only been surmounted because SS First Lieutenant Hamann ‘shared my views in full’ and knew how to ‘cooperate’ with the Lithuanians. As Jaeger explained:

In Kovno itself, Jaeger reported, ‘trained’ Lithuanians were available ‘in sufficient number’. As a result, the city was, as he expressed it, ‘comparatively speaking a shooting paradise’.

Jaeger added that in his view ‘the male work-Jews should be sterilized immediately to prevent any procreation’. A Jewess who, ‘nevertheless’, was pregnant ‘is to be liquidated’.
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In Lithuania, Einsatzkommando 3 had succeeded, as Jaeger phrased it in his report of December 1, in ‘solving the Jewish problem’. In the other eastern regions—in White Russia, the Volhynia and the Ukraine—that same solution continued to be the policy of the other Einsatzkommando units, inhibited only momentarily in December when the extreme cold made the ground too hard in many places to dig death pits in.
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But no such inhibition prevented the ‘action’ in Nowogrodek which began on December 5,
when seven thousand Jews were collected in the yard of the municipal courthouse. ‘It was already very, very cold,’ Idel Kagan later recalled, of the weather in a region which had long been known as ‘the Polish Siberia’.

Throughout December 5, the seven thousand Jews of Nowogrodek were kept in the yard. In the evening, they were taken into the courthouse building. So crowded were they, that most had to remain standing all night. In the morning, the courthouse gates were opened, and German officers came in. They then proceeded to ask each Jew his profession, and how many children he had. On hearing the answer, the German indicated either to the right, or to the left.

No logic dictated who went in which direction. Moshe Kagan was a saddlemaker, and had two children: they were sent to the left. Moshe’s brother Yankel, who was also a saddlemaker with two children, was sent to the right. ‘And so’, Idel Kagan later recalled, ‘my father went to life, my uncle to death.’

Of the seven thousand Jews assembled, five thousand were taken away. The Jewish Council members were also sent to the left. ‘The Germans didn’t need any cooperation from anybody,’ Idel Kagan reflected, and he added: ‘We did not have any idea what happened to the five thousand. When people said, “They have been killed,” we answered, “They took them away to work. Why should they kill them?” But they had been taken to Skridlewe, three miles away, and shot in the ravine. There were no survivors.’

The Jews who had been sent to the right were taken out of Nowogrodek to the tiny suburb of Pereshike, whose twenty-two houses had now to accommodate two thousand people. First, the Germans drove out the Polish and White Russian inhabitants of the houses. Then they built a fence around the area. More than eighteen Jewish families were forced into each room, and two labour groups created, one skilled and one unskilled. The skilled were put in workshops where they made gloves, boots and other items of clothing for the German army.
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In the General Government of Poland, and in Western Europe, it was not the massacres in a nearby ravine, as at Nowogrodek, but deportation to distant sites, as far as a thousand miles away, that
was emerging as the plan: with gassing, not shooting, as the method of death.

The authorities in Berlin had begun the process needed to implement this ‘final solution’. On November 19, when the German Foreign Ministry raised with Eichmann the request of Flora Bucher to leave Germany, in order to join her mother at Gurs camp in the French Pyrenees, Eichmann replied, as he had done in a similar case three weeks earlier, using the same words as before: ‘In view of the forthcoming final solution of the problem of European Jewry, one
has to prevent the immigration of this Jewess into the unoccupied zone of France.’
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THE NOWOGRODEK REGION

On November 24, five days after Eichmann wrote this letter, a ghetto was set up in the eighteenth-century fortress of the Bohemian town of Theresienstadt, to which Jews were to be sent from throughout the Old Reich, and in particular from Vienna, Prague and Berlin. Uprooted from their homes, penniless, deprived of their belongings, ill-fed, overcrowded, thirty-two thousand were to die there of hunger and disease.
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Many of the deportees to Theresienstadt were to be old people. But that November morning it was 342 young men who were brought, from Prague, to work at a construction camp, preparing Theresienstadt for its new occupants.
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The first deportees reached Theresienstadt on November 30, from Prague. They consisted mostly of women, children and old people. A second train arrived on December 2, from Brno.
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Neither deportation to the eastern ghettos nor deportation to Theresienstadt was the ‘final solution’. That was still being prepared, brought one step nearer that October, at Buchenwald, when twelve hundred Jews had been medically examined by Dr Fritz Mennecke, a euthanasia expert, and then subjected to ‘Action 14 f 13’ in a clinic at Bernburg, one hundred miles away.
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‘Action 14 f 13’ was death by gassing: a method in use since 1939 in the mass murder of tens of thousands of mentally defective Germans in more than a dozen special institutions.

The origin of the euthanasia killings of 1939, as of these subsequent killings, was an order issued by Hitler, backdated to 1 September 1939, the day of the German invasion of Poland. In this order, Hitler empowered the chief of his Chancellery, as well as his own personal physician, ‘to widen the authority of individual doctors with a view to enabling them, after the most critical examination, in the realm of human knowledge, to administer incurably sick persons to a mercy death’.
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The qualifying phrases had quickly been abandoned. In Germany, the chief of the Criminal Police Office in Stuttgart, Christian Wirth, an expert in tracking down criminals—took charge of the technical side of a more ‘humane’ method of killing, constructing gas-chambers in which the victim was exposed to carbon monoxide gas, ‘a device’, one SS officer later explained, ‘which overwhelmed its victims without their apprehension and which caused them no pain’.
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Between January 1940 and August 1941, more than seventy thousand Germans had been killed by gas in five separate euthanasia institutions, by what was called
sonderbehandlung
, ‘special treatment’. The principal victims were the chronically sick, gypsies, people judged ‘unworthy of life’ because of mental disorders, and, after June 1941, Soviet prisoners-of-war.

On 3 September 1941, at Auschwitz Main Camp, hitherto used principally for the imprisonment and torture of Polish opponents of Nazism, an experiment had been carried out against six hundred Soviet prisoners-of-war, and three hundred Jews, brought specially to the camp. There, in the cellar of Block II, a gas called Cyclon B, prussic acid initially in crystal form, was used to murder the chosen victims. The experiment was judged a success.
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At Buchenwald, Dr Mennecke had continued with his own experiments. ‘Our second batch’, he wrote to his wife Mathilde on November 25 from the Zum Elefant hotel in nearby Weimar, ‘consisted of 1,200 Jews who do not have to be “examined”; for them it was enough to pull from their files the reasons for their arrest and write them down on the questionnaires.’
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Five days after Dr Mennecke’s second experimental selection at Buchenwald, Reinhard Heydrich decided that, considering ‘the enormous importance which had to be given to these questions’, and in the interest ‘of achieving the same point of view by the central agencies concerned with the remaining work connected with the final solution’, that a ‘joint conversation’ should be held by all concerned. Such a discussion was especially needed, he wrote on November 29, ‘since Jews have been undergoing evacuation in continuous transports from the Reich territory, including Bohemia and Moravia, to the East, since 15 October 1941’.
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Heydrich’s conference was called for 2 January 1942. Before it met, one further experiment was to be tried, near the remote Polish village of Chelmno. There, on the evening of 7 December 1941, seven hundred Jews arrived in lorries. They had come from the nearby town of Kolo, having been told that they were being taken to a railway station at Barlogi, ten kilometres from Kolo, and thence to work in ‘the East’.

Michael Podklebnik, one of the Jews assembled by the SS at the Jewish Council building in Kolo, but himself registered as a resident of nearby Bugaj, later recalled how ‘I brought to the lorry my own
father, my mother, sister with five children, my brother and his wife and three children. I volunteered to go with them, but was not allowed.’ Podklebnik also saw how a Jew by the name of Goldberg, the owner of a saw-mill, ‘approached the Germans with a request to be appointed manager of a Jewish camp in the East. His application was accepted and he was promised the requested position.
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