The Holocaust (84 page)
Authors: Martin Gilbert
Some civilians and fighters managed to get through the cellars and sewers of the ghetto to the relative safety of ‘Aryan’ Warsaw. But the aim of the insurgents, to fight the Germans house by house and cellar by cellar, was foiled by the German decision to bombard the ghetto from afar, and to set it ablaze, avoiding hand-to-hand combat. ‘We had not expected this,’ Zivia Lubetkin later recalled. ‘All our plans had been for nothing,’ and she added, recalling the scene on May 1:
We sat in the dark, scores of Jewish fighters, still carrying our weapons, surrounded by thousands of eager and expectant Jews. Was it not May Day? The feeling of responsibility lay heavy on our hearts, on our conscience, and gave no respite.
The crowded, cowering masses of Jews huddled around us waiting for a word of hope from the fighters’ lips. We were bewildered and lost. What should we say to them? What could we say to ourselves? How terrible was this feeling of helplessness! How grave the responsibility we felt as the last desperate Hebrew warriors! We could not hold out against the Germans’ consuming fire for long without water or food or weapons.
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Even those who had managed to escape to ‘Aryan’ Warsaw were not secure. On May 3 the Germans arrested twenty-one women of Jewish, or suspected Jewish, origin, in the streets. All were killed. ‘Their names are not known,’ records one of the historians of those years. Nine days later there was a second such round-up and execution.
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The Jewish fighters made attempts to contact their fellow fighters on the ‘Aryan’ side: but when, on May 7, Pawel Bruskin, a unit commander, led a group of fighters through the sewers to try to reach the ‘Aryan’ sector, he fell into a German ambush, was captured and killed.
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Others were caught in the bunkers without any chance of escape. From Warsaw to London the message came: ‘We fight like animals for naked life.’
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‘When they took me out,’ Hadassa Talmon later recalled, ‘I was like a wounded animal. There were lots of stones there, and I started to throw stones at the Germans. They hit me with their rifle butts. I was beaten and injured all over. I was covered with blood’.
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Among those wounded by the German shelling was Abraham Krzepicki, the young man who had escaped from Treblinka the previous September, after eighteen days in the camp, and had brought his story to Warsaw. Wounded in the leg during the shelling, he could not move; nor were his colleagues able to drag him from the burning building in which he and other wounded men were trapped.
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Another of those who probably perished in the Warsaw ghetto uprising was Yakov Grojanowski, the man who, in January 1942, had brought the news of the Chelmno death camp to Warsaw.
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By the end of the first week of May the last main focus of Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto was a bunker at 18 Mila Street, in which 120 fighters were gathered. This too was attacked by the Germans, on May 8. For two hours the entrance was bombarded, but in vain. Then the Germans began to send gas into the bunker. Four years later Zivia Lubetkin recalled:
Aryeh Wilner was the first to cry out: ‘Come, let us destroy ourselves. Let’s not fall into their hands alive.’ The suicides began. Pistols jammed and the owners begged their friends to kill them. But no one dared to take the life of a comrade. Lutek Rotblatt fired four shots at his mother but, wounded and
bleeding, she still moved. Then someone discovered a hidden exit, but only a few succeeded in getting out this way. The others slowly suffocated in the gas.
Among the hundred Jewish fighters who were killed in the battle for the bunker under 18 Mila Street was Mordechai Anielewicz, ‘our handsome commander’, Zivia Lubetkin wrote, ‘whom we all loved’.
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‘We fought back,’ she later reflected, ‘and it made our lot easier and made it easier to die.’
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Also killed was Berl Broyde, a leading member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, who, deported to Treblinka in January 1943, had managed to jump from the train and return to the ghetto.
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The Germans combed the ghetto for any surviving Jews. In all, according to Jurgen Stroop’s calculations, 7,000 Jews had been killed in the fighting, and 30,000 had been deported to Treblinka. Five to six hundred Jews, he added, ‘were destroyed by being blown up or by perishing in the flames’. A total of 631 bunkers had been destroyed.
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Many Jews chose suicide rather than execution or deportation: among them the seventeen-year-old Frania Beatus, who had helped to smuggle Jewish fighters out of the ghetto through the sewers, and who, from the ‘Aryan’ side, was able to maintain a certain contact by telephone with the fighters inside the ghetto: she committed suicide on May 12.
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Also on May 12, in London, a leading member of the pre-war Jewish Social Democrat Party, the Bund, Shmuel Zygielbojm, committed suicide. A member of the pre-war Municipal Council in Lodz, and briefly a member of the Jewish Council in Warsaw, he had been sent out of Poland in January 1940 at the request of the Bund. In London he had become a leading speaker and broadcaster on the fate of the Jews under Nazi rule.
In his suicide letter, Zygielbojm stated that he could not live ‘when the remnant of the Jewish people in Poland, whom I represent, is being steadily annihilated’. He had not been ‘fortunate’ to die, as had his comrades in the Warsaw ghetto, ‘with weapons in their hands’, but he ‘belonged’ to them, and to their mass graves. ‘By my death,’ Zygielbojm’s letter ended, ‘I wish to express my vigorous protest against the apathy with which the world regards and resigns itself to the slaughter of the Jewish people.’
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On May 16 Jurgen Stroop reported to his superiors that the
Warsaw ghetto ‘is no longer in existence’. The ‘large-scale action’ had ended at 8.15 that evening ‘by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue’.
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Systematically, street by street, the buildings of the ghetto were now destroyed. But small groups of Jews continued to live in the bunkers, and to fight. Leon Najberg was still in hiding on May 19: he and forty-four others, still undetected in what they called their ‘den’. That Sunday he wrote in his diary:
We are on the third floor and we have done away with stairs. We go upstairs with the help of rope-ladder. We are in burnt rooms, i.e. the Lidzbarski brother and sister, the Szarmans, the Koplows and so-called group of Klonski—it is ours. One floor lower there is the apartment of Tojst, quite saved and with complete furnishings. I am looking at that apartment and see an analogy to present life of Jews. From among families there are—
for the present
—only individuals who saved their lives, from the whole streets which were occupied by Jews—individuals. From Jewish towns—individuals. From the whole Poland, from the millions—the thousands. And that life of ours is for the present saved by a miracle and overshadowed by the ruins of Polish Jewry. It is useless and incapable of anything and for ever unfit for normal life. Though our hearts are still beating, there will never be a joy of life in them. After months of darkness and stuffiness we can again bask in the sun, fresh air and light of day. We are once again people who see sky and sun though sun does not shine for everybody.
At 4 Walowa Street two bodies of new female victims lie and sun speeds up their decay and cats and crows eat up pieces of flesh from faces. There was a quiet at noon.
The murderers arrived only at 1 p.m. and uncovered the bunker at 38 Swietojerska Street. After having bored holes, the Huns have let in ‘foreign’, that is, poison gas, and smoked out people. Then, after preliminary work, searching the captives and robbery of the properties, they have been forcing victims to confess where are Jews still hidden.
From among sixty persons they found Moniek K. with a gangrenous leg who was rather like a dead man (eighteen years old). They demanded Moniek to tell them where the other bunkers with Jews are. Moniek categorically stated that he did not know. The murderers were waiting only for that. Riding-whips
and lead cables were used. Moniek clenched his teeth so as not to betray his brothers. But the Germans contrived everything. One of the SS men shot down Moniek’s arm threatening: ‘Wenn du zeigst nicht juden-bunker schiese ich dich tot’, ‘If you don’t show us the Jewish bunker, I’ll shoot you dead.’ Writhing with agony, brave brave Moniek was shouting: ‘Murderers, I don’t betray! You can kill me!’
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Moniek was killed. Two weeks later, on June 3, the Germans destroyed a bunker on Walowa Street containing 150 people. ‘Those living in the shelters’, Leon Najberg later recalled, ‘became harrowingly thin and looked like skeletons. After six weeks in these graves, they looked like ghosts frightened of living.’
Najberg’s group lived on among the ruins. But starvation, exhaustion and sickness took their toll. Only four of them were still alive by September 1943, when they managed to cross into ‘Aryan’ Warsaw.
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That September, the Germans sent a Polish labour battalion to the site of the ghetto, to demolish any walls and structures still undestroyed. ‘Those who still remained in hiding’, one of the ghetto’s most recent historians has written, ‘evidently met their deaths during these demolition activities, although a few individuals continued to live in dug-outs, totally cut off from nature, light and human company.’
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‘The crashing fires of hell’
On 1 May 1943, while the battle still raged in the Warsaw ghetto, a group of Jewish writers and poets had gathered in the Vilna ghetto for an evening on the theme, ‘Spring in Yiddish literature’. Every speaker, and every poem, was permeated with the spirit of the fighting in the Warsaw ghetto. At the meeting, the poet Shmerl Kaczerginski saw his fellow poet, the twenty-three-year-old Hirsh Glik. ‘Well, what’s new with you, Hirsh?’ he asked. ‘I wrote a new poem,’ Glik replied. ‘Want to hear it?’
Glik brought the poem to Kaczerginski’s room on the morning of May 2. ‘Now listen carefully,’ he told his friend. ‘I’ll sing it for you.’ Then, as Kaczerginski later recalled: ‘He began to sing it softly, but full of excitement. His eyes glowed with little sparks. “The hour for which we yearned will come anew.” Where did he get his faith? His voice became firmer. He tapped out the rhythm with his foot, as if he were marching.’
The song which Hirsh Glik sang to his friend in Vilna on that May morning was to spread like wildfire in the ghettos and camps, and among the Jewish partisans, becoming the song of hope, and battle hymn of oppressed Jewry. Itself inspired by the struggle in the Warsaw ghetto, the song was to inspire tens of thousands of Jews to fight if they could, and if they could not fight, to survive:
Never say that you have reached the very end,
Though leaden skies a bitter future may portend;
And the hour for which we’ve yearned will yet arrive,
And our marching step will thunder: ‘We survive!’
From green palm trees to the land of distant snow,
We are here with our sorrow, our woe,
And wherever our blood was shed in pain,
Our fighting spirits now will resurrect again.
The golden rays of morning sun will dry our tears,
Dispelling bitter agony of yesteryears,
But if the sun and dawn with us will be delayed,
Then let this song ring out to you the call, instead.
Not lead, but blood inscribed this mighty song we sing,
It’s not a carolling of birds upon the wing
But a people midst the crashing fires of hell,
Sang this song with guns in hands, until it fell.
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Most of the Jews seized in the Warsaw ghetto as the revolt was crushed were deported to Treblinka and gassed. Others were sent to Majdanek, or to labour camps in the Lublin region, principally those at Trawniki and Poniatowa. Several thousand Jews found refuge in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw.
About seventy of the surviving ghetto fighters managed to reach the forests east of Warsaw. There, many were betrayed, among them Zygmunt Frydrych, who had been active during the revolt smuggling arms and men from ‘Aryan’ Warsaw into the ghetto, and who was betrayed while leading a group of fighters to shelter. He was thirty-two-years old. Others, seeking safety further afield, went towards the forests near Hrubieszow, among them the twenty-three-year-old Pesia Furmanowicz. She and her comrades were murdered before they reached their destination.
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The Jews who were deported from Warsaw to Majdanek went through torments which few survived. Lena Berg later recalled the repeated selections:
Every roll call was a selection: women were sent to the gas-chamber because they had swollen legs, scratches on their bodies, because they wore eye-glasses or head kerchiefs, or because they stood roll call without head kerchiefs. Young SS men prowled among the inmates and took down their numbers and during the evening roll call the women were ordered to step forward, and we never saw them again. Maria Keiler, a childhood friend and schoolmate, died that way. She had a scratch on her leg and an SS man took her number. When they singled her out at roll call, she simply walked away without even nodding goodbye. She knew quite well where she was going, and I knew it, too; I was surprised at how little upset I was.
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Alexander Donat, who was also at Majdanek, recalled how SS Lieutenant Anton Thumann would ride his motorcycle into a group of prisoners, then single out two of them for ‘punishment’, roping their hands to the motorcycle and dragging them after him, ‘gradually speeding up until they were no more than torn flesh and crumpled bones and the barrack square was crisscrossed with blood’.
One of the most ‘notorious’ of the murderers in Majdanek was an SS man by the name of Dziobaty, as Alexander Donat later recalled:
One of the men working near me was a weak-looking individual who—while the more experienced prisoners picked out huge flat stones that looked impressive, but weighed little—picked up only small stones, ignoring his neighbours’ advice. Eventually the foreman noticed him and made him pick up an enormous rock. The man bent under its weight and said apologetically, ‘I can’t carry anything heavy, I have a hernia.’
‘What’s he saying?’ Dziobaty was suddenly next to the foreman.
The foreman told him.
‘Oh, a hernia, rupture,’ the SS man said sympathetically. To the prisoner he said, ‘Show me, I’ve never seen one.’
Flattered by the SS man’s interest, the prisoner complied and lowered his trousers. The SS man bent forward, then swung his
foot back and with all his might kicked the man in the genitals with his hobnailed boot. The animal shriek that resounded froze the whole column, and faces of curious camp officials appeared in front of every barrack. Blood poured from the body of the prisoner, who now lay writhing on the ground, howling like a dog.
Dziobaty, overcome with rage, began to kick him over and over again, roaring, ‘Du dreckiges Arschloch, verfluchter Judenschmarotzer…. Ruptur hat er!’ ‘You shitty asshole, you goddam Jew parasite…. He’s got a rupture!’ The body finally lay still.
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