The Holocaust (75 page)

At Karczew, outside Warsaw, four hundred Jewish forced labourers were killed on December 1.
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On December 3, three young girls who had escaped from a labour camp in Poznan were brought to the Lodz ghetto and shot. The oldest of the girls, Sure Jamniak, had been born in Lodz twenty-eight years earlier. Matla Rozensztajn had been born in Radom: she was shot twelve days before her twenty-first birthday. Gitla Hadasa Aronowicz was only seventeen.
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The news of the labour camp executions, reaching Warsaw, stimulated the plans for resistance. ‘The community wants the enemy to pay dearly,’ Ringelblum noted on December 5. ‘They will attack them with knives, sticks, carbolic acid; they will not allow themselves to be seized in the streets, because now they know that labour camp these days mean death.’
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In the labour camp at Kruszyna, near Radom, the Jews were told of ‘evacuation plans’. Suspecting the worst, they decided to resist with knives and fists. On December 17, when they were ordered to assemble, they attacked the guards. In the fight that ensued, six prisoners were killed, but four escaped. The Germans summoned reinforcements: four machine guns and twenty-five armed Ukrainians. The Jews were then, on the following day, forced into trucks. But still they resisted deportation, and more than a hundred were shot refusing to board the trucks.
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Three weeks later it was the turn of the four hundred Jews imprisoned in the Kopernik camp in Minsk Mazowiecki to be destroyed. But as the SS and police unit approached, they barricaded themselves into the building and resisted with whatever implements they could lay their hands on: sticks, stones and bricks. After three Germans had been wounded in the first clash, the Germans gave up the idea of forcing the Jews out of the building. Instead, they opened fire on it with machine guns, and then set it on fire. All four hundred Jews died in the flames.

According to the testimony of the Polish doctor, Stanislaw Eugeniusz Wisniewski, a resident of Minsk Mazowiecki, this rebellion
was headed by a tailor named Greenberg, whose entire family had been killed during the liquidation of the ghetto.
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To cut off whatever chance of haven might exist for any Jews who did escape from labour camps, the Germans published reiterated warnings to Poles not to help Jews. In Debica, on November 19, a public announcement had stated that, as from December 1, any Pole ‘helping to lodge, feed or hide a Jew will be punished by death’.
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On December 6, at Stary Ciepielow, the SS locked twenty-three Poles—men, women and children into a barn and then burned them alive on suspicion of harbouring Jews.
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That same day, in the Parczew forest, the Germans launched a four-day manhunt against more than a thousand Jews in hiding. ‘We fled round and round in terror,’ Arieh Koren later recalled, as Germans with machine guns, four small cannon and armoured vehicles penetrated the forest. ‘We thought we had run twenty kilometres, but actually we circled an area of half a kilometre.’
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In the nearby village of Bialka, Jews found refuge with the villagers. But on the second day of the hunt, December 7, the Germans entered the village and shot ninety-six men for helping Jews.
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The hunt intensified. As it did so, the unarmed Jews lost control, running, Arieh Koren wrote, ‘like a herd of rabbits from a hunter straight into the hands of the Germans. They died easily, and lost one another. Afterwards, children without parents, husbands without wives, and vice versa, wandered about the forest.’
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On December 24, in a second manhunt in the Parczew forest, several hundred more Jews were slaughtered. The survivors, unarmed, freezing, and without food, were fortunate: that winter they found a protector, the twenty-four-year-old Yekhiel Grynszpan. Their saviour was from a family of local horse-traders. He entered the Parczew forest at the end of 1942, built up a partisan unit of thirty or forty Jews, foraged for food, acquired arms from the peasants whom his family had known before the war, and when German raiders entered the forest, he fought them off.
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Another Jewish group had begun to operate in White Russia, led by Tobias Belsky. By the end of 1942 it numbered 150 men, with eighteen rifles, two machine guns and one automatic rifle between them. Belsky encouraged Jews still trapped in the ghettos to escape and to join him. Among those who did so was Chaim Joffe, who came with a group of eleven young Jews from Nowogrodek. The
Belsky group attacked German vehicles, and took revenge against the families of German policemen. In an ambush at the end of the year, nineteen members of the group, fifteen men and four women, were killed, including Belsky’s wife and his nephew, Gershon, one of the machine-gunners. The second machine-gunner, Wolkin, was captured and tortured until he died. Belsky’s brother Asael, who was also captured, managed to escape.
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On December 4, in Warsaw, a group of non-Jewish Poles set up a Council for Assistance to the Jews. The originators of this Council were two women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz.
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They knew full well that any Pole who helped a Jew, and was caught, could expect no mercy. On December 10, a few miles west of the Parczew forest, at Wola Przybyslawska, seven Poles were shot for concealing Jews.
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It was not only the Poles who helped Jews. On December 13 Goebbels wrote bitterly in his diary:

In Cracow, the Jewish Fighting Organization, although much weakened by earlier arrests and executions, decided to act. On December 22 its members, led by Adolf Liebeskind, attacked a café frequented by the SS and the Gestapo. Yitzhak Zuckerman, who had come from Warsaw that day, took part in a second attack, in order, he later recalled, ‘to save what could be saved, at least honour’.
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Wounded in the leg, Zuckerman succeeded in returning to Warsaw. The Germans moved rapidly against the other members of the group, tracking them down to their hiding place. Judah Tenenbaum, snatching a pistol from a German, killed one German before he was shot by bursts of machine-gun fire. Liebeskind was also killed. His sister-in-law, Miriam, managed to reach Radom, where she hoped to organize a ghetto uprising. But she was captured there, tortured, and shot.
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‘We are fighting’, Liebeskind had remarked
bitterly a few weeks before his death, ‘for three lines in the history books.’
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Decimated, Liebeskind’s group nevertheless survived his death. Some of them managed to escape altogether from ‘Aryan’ Cracow, intending, as Liebeskind’s wife Rivka later recalled, ‘to set up hide-outs, to work in forests, and to enable Jews to hide—because they still hoped that the war would end’. Their aim, she added, ‘was to save at least someone to relate our story’.
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By December 1942, Volhynia was almost totally cleared of Jews. But in the town of Luck, a labour camp had been established for some five hundred young Jews allocated tasks by the German civilian administration in the town. On December 11, a Christian woman informed the head of the Jewish workers, a man by the name of Sawicki, that she had heard from the son of the Ukrainian mayor that the camp was about to be liquidated. Sawicki immediately organized plans for revolt. The centre of these preparations was the carpentry shop where two carpenters, Guz and Shulman, and a tinsmith, Moshe, equipped with a single pistol, put together a small pile of knives, acid, iron bars and bricks which they removed from the walls of their building.

On the morning of Saturday, December 12, the Germans approached the camp. Another carpenter, Bronstein, opened fire with the pistol. Others scattered acid, burning the face of the German commander. The Germans withdrew from the camp and began to shoot.

Later that day, the Germans entered the camp once more, and the Jews gave battle. By evening the revolt was over. Some of the defenders had been killed and some were shot afterwards.
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Because of the growing Jewish resistance, many different deceptions were devised. On 15 December 1942 the Jews of Holland learned that eighty-three letters and eighteen postcards had been received from the deportees at Birkenau, and another thirty-seven from those deported to Theresienstadt and Monowitz. According to the information bulletin of the Jewish Council, in Birkenau work was said to be rather hard but supplies and living conditions not unsatisfactory. In Monowitz, the postcards reported, ‘The food is good, with hot lunches, cheese and jam sandwiches in the evenings….
We have central heating and sleep under two blankets. There are magnificent shower arrangements with hot and cold water.’

In the information bulletin of December 16 it was admitted that only two postcards had come from Theresienstadt. But on that same day a further twenty-nine letters and twenty-four postcards arrived, describing Theresienstadt as ‘a friendly town with broad streets and lovely gardens, and single-storey houses. The women and children seem to be very well looked after.’ The letters also suggested that it was possible to get help with rough work, ‘and that those who wished could take a nap in the afternoon….’
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Also on December 16, a Jewess with the first name Laja, who was in a train of deportees being taken from Plonsk to Auschwitz, managed to throw a postcard out of the train as it passed through the Warsaw suburb of Praga. The postcard was addressed to a friend of hers who lived in the Warsaw ghetto. ‘Being at Praga station’, she wrote, ‘I am writing a couple of words to you. We are going nobody knows where. Be well! Laja.’
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On the following day, December 17, this same deportation train was passing through Czestochowa. There, another Jewess, her first name was Gitla, also managed to throw out a postcard, likewise addressed to a friend of hers in the Warsaw ghetto. ‘We are going to work,’ she wrote. ‘Be of good heart. I don’t give you our new address, because up to now I don’t know what it will be.’
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The Jews deported from Plonsk on December 16 were taken to Birkenau, where, on December 17, 523 men and 247 women were sent to the barracks, and all the other deportees, including all children, and all mothers with children, were gassed.
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In the many slave labour camps through German-occupied Poland, selections and deportations were frequent. In one such camp, Zaslaw, as many as twenty-five thousand Jews were being held behind barbed wire; they came from the beautiful mountain towns of Sanok and Lesko, near Poland’s southern frontier, and from more than a hundred surrounding villages. One Jewish couple, Jaffa and Norris Wallach, managed to escape from Zaslaw on December 17, leaving behind, as they later recalled, ‘our parents and the major part of our families’.

Jaffa Wallach and her husband Norris found refuge in the house of a Polish mechanical engineer, Jozef Zwonarz, who lived in Lesko. ‘He was the only link we had with the external world,’ Norris
Wallach later wrote. ‘His wife and their five children knew nothing about our hiding in that house.’

Zwonarz also hid Jaffa Wallach’s brother Pinkas and her sister Anna. He had already, in September, taken their four-year-old daughter Rena out of Lesko, on the eve of the deportation to Zaslaw, and found the child a home with a Polish ‘uncle’, Jan Kakol, who lived in the forest. ‘It is important to emphasise’, Norris Wallach later wrote, ‘that Zwonarz, and the Kakols as well, endangered their lives for pure human motives without any financial gain nor expectations.’

Those whom Zwonarz saved were to honour his memory for the rest of their lives; and to remember, too, how he would use his knowledge as a mechanical engineer, while ‘repairing’ German vehicles, to sabotage these vehicles, especially, Norris Wallach later recalled, before those vehicles set out ‘for hunting Jews’.
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Since October 21, in Piotrkow, the Germans had carried out a series of systematic searches for the two thousand Jews who had escaped deportation. Group by group, those who were found in cellars and hiding places were brought to the synagogue, held under armed guard, and sent to nearby Tomaszow Mazowiecki, where they were deported to Treblinka together with the Jews of Tomaszow. On November 19, a further hundred Jews, most of them old people, were found in Piotrkow and brought to the synagogue. These were also led away, but not to Tomaszow. They were taken instead to the Rakow forest, just outside Piotrkow, and shot.

On November 25 the remaining ‘illegals’ in hiding in Piotrkow had been offered the chance of staying in the ghetto legally, provided they came out of their hiding places. Many did so. They too were taken to the synagogue. The building was then surrounded by Ukrainians, who shot into the building at random.

The Jews being held in the synagogue had no food, no water and no light. They had to relieve themselves where they could on the synagogue floor. From time to time, men with skills, such as carpenters or watchmakers, would be called for, and allowed to return ‘legally’ to the ghetto.

For three weeks the torment continued. In an act of selflessness remembered to this day by the surviving Jews of Piotrkow, a Jewish
couple still in hiding, Yeshayahu and Tova Weinstock, gave themselves up and entered the synagogue to change places with their children, thus saving their children’s lives at the expense of their own. Inside the synagogue, the wife of Moshe Niechcicki, who had the chance of being ‘ransomed’, refused to abandon her three children to their fate.