The Holocaust (86 page)

By the summer of 1943, the four new gas-chambers at Birkenau, as well as those at Majdanek and Sobibor, were in daily operation. In Sobibor, Eliezer Karstatt was a witness to the arrival of a transport of Jews from somewhere in the Lublin region:

The SS ordered a group of twenty Jews, among them Eliezer Karstatt, to undress the corpses of the Jews in the courtyard, and to carry them to small wagons about 150 yards away:

Enemies of the Jews were everywhere. On May 6 the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who was then in Europe, protested to the Bulgarian Foreign Minister about allowing Jewish children to leave Bulgaria for Palestine. They should be sent, he suggested, to Poland, ‘under strong and energetic guard’.
³⁰
In Tunisia, the German occupation on May 7 led to widespread plunder of Jewish homes, and confiscations of Jewish property, in Djerba, Sfax, Sousse and Tunis. These Jews were oriental Sephardi Jews who had been living under Arab and Muslim rule for many centuries, until the French conquest of 1881. From the moment of the German occupation in November 1942 their lives had been at risk, and in May 1943 more than four thousand were sent as forced labourers to construction sites near the front line. A considerable
number were killed during Allied air bombardments of the airfields on which they were forced to work. Others died as a result of malnutrition and ill-treatment.
³¹

The Gestapo chief of Tunis was Walter Rauff, who had supervised the construction and use of gas-vans in the Eastern Territories from October 1941 to July 1942. In Tunis, Rauff ‘harassed, persecuted and killed Jews, winning rewards from Berlin, and condemnation to death in absentia after the German evacuation’.
³²

***

In German-occupied White Russia, the five hundred surviving Jews of the five thousand Jews of Nowogrodek remained alive in the ghetto labour camp, at the whim of their overseers. ‘They didn’t care if you didn’t work,’ Idel Kagan later recalled. ‘If you didn’t work, you will starve, and that’s that.’ But on May 7 there was a roll call. Kagan, having lost his toes after his unsuccessful escape bid four months earlier, watched the roll-call from his bed. ‘Suddenly I saw German and White Russian police. My mother came to the window. “Don’t fear. It’s nothing.” I couldn’t bear the shouting of the people. I covered my ears with the pillow.’

During this unexpected ‘action’, half of the five hundred surviving Jews of Nowogrodek were killed, among them Idel Kagan’s mother Dvora, and his sixteen-year-old sister Nehama. He and his father survived. ‘You will remain until the end of the war,’ the Germans told them. ‘The Reich needs you.’

The Nowogrodek survivors formed an escape committee, and began to try to work out some means of escape from their labour camp.
³³
In Eastern Galicia, likewise, the surviving Jews in the ghettos and labour camps were, despite hunger and isolation, still searching for means of survival. In Rohatyn, Jewish ghetto police in secret session decided on May 15 to acquire weapons and to despatch armed groups to the forest. The decision was acted upon. But the Germans, learning of it, executed many of the policemen. Three weeks later, all one thousand surviving Jews in Rohatyn were killed.
³⁴

At nearby Brody, once the Austro-Hungarian frontier town for Jews fleeing from Tsarist Russia, German and Ukrainian units, having killed thirty Jewish partisans in the nearby woods, and paraded six more captives through the streets of the town, entered
the ghetto in the early hours of May 21. Almost all the two and a half thousand surviving Jews of Brody were driven to a waiting train. But in their attempts to resist deportation, the Jews killed four Ukrainians and several Germans. Even on the train, many tried to break out. The walls of several of the cattle trucks were broken, and several hundred escaped. But many more died under the wheels, or were machine-gunned by the Ukrainian guards travelling on top of the wagons.
³⁵

To the anger of the Germans, some of the Jews of Brody had acquired arms from Italian troops stationed in the town. So also had Jews in Lvov. Nor had they hesitated to use them. Reporting on these efforts by Lvov Jews to avoid deportation, SS General Katzmann told his superiors five weeks later:

Special bunkers and dug-outs had been built, Katzmann wrote. ‘We were compelled therefore to act brutally from the beginning in order to avoid sustaining greater casualties among our men. We had to blast and burn many houses.’
³⁶

In Riga, several dozen Jews had continued to find shelter in the cave which had been dug by Yanis Lipke underneath his henhouse. Lipke himself continued to smuggle bread and potatoes into the ghetto on his daily journey to collect Jewish workers for work in the German air force storehouse. Lipke also cast about for men to help him save the ‘doomed’ Jews of the nearby village of Dobele, asking three Lithuanian friends of his, Yanis Undulis and the brothers Fritz and Yan Rosenthal, to help him.

On May 10, the first two Jews of Dobele were driven to Yan Rosenthal’s farmhouse ten kilometres away, in the hamlet of Annasnuizha. Both Jews were hidden in a haystack on the farm. A second shelter was already being prepared at a farm belonging to Fritz Rosenthal’s aunt, Wilhelmina Putrinia, and within a short
time, several more Jews from Dobele were hidden there as well.
³⁷

***

The killing and deportation of Jews had continued to enrich the German Reich. On May 13 Hans Frank sent Himmler a list of the ‘utilization of Jewish concealed and stolen goods’ in the General Government. Up to April 30, Frank reported, 94,000 men’s watches, 33,000 women’s watches, 25,000 fountain pens, and 14,000 propelling pencils had been delivered to Germany. So had 14,000 scissors, most of them sold to the German Equipment Works Limited ‘for technical purposes’. Men’s watches were being distributed to the combat troops, to the submarine service, and to concentration camp guards. The 5,000 watches ‘of most expensive Swiss make’, those in gold or platinum cases, or partly fitted with precious stones, were either to go to the Reichsbank ‘for melting down’, or were to be retained ‘for special use’.
³⁸

The Germans were confident that even their enemies would one day share their hatred of the Jews. On May 19 Himmler had written to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, sending him copies of a special edition of the book
The Jewish Ritual Murder
, about the alleged Jewish use of Christian blood in the baking of Passover bread. Himmler suggested that all those ‘dealing in the Jewish problem’ should see the book, and that extracts from it should be broadcast to Britain and America to increase ‘anti-Jewish feelings’ in those two countries. The book should also be distributed, he wrote, in Rumania, Hungary and Bulgaria.
³⁹
But still, von Thadden reported on June 3, the Hungarian government was unwilling to adopt anti-Jewish measures.
⁴⁰

***

On May 24 a new SS doctor reached Auschwitz. His name was Josef Mengele, and he had just celebrated his thirty-second birthday. His SS rank was that of Captain. Driven by the desire to advance his medical career by scientific publications, Dr Mengele began to conduct medical experiments on living Jews whom he took from the barracks, and brought to his hospital block. In many instances, amounting over a year and a half to several thousand, Mengele used the pretext of medical treatment to kill prisoners, personally
injecting them with phenol, petrol, chloroform or air, or by ordering SS medical orderlies to do so.

From the moment of his arrival at Auschwitz, Mengele joined the other SS officers and SS doctors, among them Dr Clauberg, and later Dr Kremer, in the ‘selection’ of Jews reaching the railway junction from all over Europe, with a movement of the hand or the wave of a stick indicating as ‘unfit for work’, and thus destined for immediate death in the gas-chambers all children, old people, sick, crippled and weak Jews, and all pregnant women.

Between May 1943 and November 1944 Mengele took part in at least seventy-four such selections. He also took an equally decisive part in at least thirty-one selections in the camp infirmary, pointing out for death by shooting, injection or gassing Jews whose strength had been sapped by hunger, forced labour, untreated illness or ill-treatment by the guards.
⁴¹

Azriel Ne’eman, a Jew who worked in the hospital block as a male nurse, later recalled how one of the men in his ward, a middle-aged Polish Jew with six fingers on each hand, was singled out for special attention by Mengele. Later, when Mengele made his rounds, and found that the man had died, he flew into a rage, his ‘scientific’ interest having been frustrated. Shortly thereafter he held a selection, in which every patient who was too weak to stand to attention at the foot of his bed was sent to the gas-chambers.
⁴²

One of the few people to speak to Mengele in Auschwitz about his attitude to the Jews was a Christian woman, Dr Ella Lingens. She had been deported to Auschwitz from Vienna three months before Mengele’s own arrival in the camp, having been denounced for sheltering Jews, and for helping them escape across the Austrian border into Switzerland. She later recalled how, in Auschwitz, ‘I was in a triply privileged position, as a German, as a non-Jew and as a doctor.’ During one of his conversations with her, Mengele ‘said that there were only two gifted nations in the world’—the Germans and the Jews.’ ‘The question is,’ he asked her, ‘which one will dominate?’

Ella Lingens later recalled an example of Mengele’s ‘ruthlessness’. After all efforts to contain spotted fever had failed, he ordered an entire block cleared by sending all its six or seven hundred inmates to the gas-chambers. Then he had the barracks disinfected and populated by the thoroughly deloused prisoners of another
block. This process, delousing and gassing, was repeated many times, until the spotted fever was brought under control.
⁴³

The ‘elimination of Jews’, SS Lieutenant-General Krüger noted on May 31, at a meeting of General Government ministers in Cracow, was ‘the most difficult and unpleasant task for the police’. Yet it ‘had to be done’, Kruger added, ‘on the Führer’s orders, because it is necessary from the standpoint of European interests.’
⁴⁴
The reports of German administrators made clear what the methods of ‘elimination’ were. The prison administrator in Minsk reported on May 31 that ‘516 German and Russian Jews’ had been ‘finished off’ in Minsk in the previous two weeks, but not before all of them had ‘had their gold bridgework, crowns and fillings pulled or broken out’. This always took place, the administrator added, ‘one to two hours before the respective action’.
⁴⁵

Poles also recorded the fate of Jews. On June 3, during a deportation from Michalowice, three Jews had hidden in a barn, opening fire as the Germans approached. Tadeusz Seweryn, a Pole, later recalled how one of the Jews was killed, one escaped, and the third fought to the end, being burnt to death when the barn was set on fire. Enraged at the resistance, the Germans then killed two Polish farmers, Stefan Kaczmarski and Stanislaw Stojka, for hiding the three Jews.
⁴⁶
In ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, Feigele Peltel, in hiding, learned of the murder of an entire Polish family who had sheltered Jews: the family had been burnt alive in their house ‘as a sort of object lesson’.
⁴⁷

For the Jews still alive in certain ghettos, among them the ghettos of Lodz, Vilna, Bialystok and Czestochowa, the future was a terrifying uncertainty. To the heads of these ghettos, the only hope of survival seemed to be if the ghetto could continued to serve as a productive one. ‘The ghetto’s food supply depends entirely on productivity here,’ noted the Lodz Ghetto Chronicle on May 21. ‘If the orders from the German authorities are not filled, on time and in the desired quantity, the ghetto faces enormous danger.’
⁴⁸
In Vilna, the head of the Jewish Council, Jacob Gens, argued on June 6 that if the Jews continued to show that they were ‘very useful and irreplaceable’ as workers, especially for the German army, they would ‘enhance the justification for our existence’.
⁴⁹

At Auschwitz, Dr Clauberg reported on June 7 a sterilization rate of a thousand women a day.
⁵⁰
Many of these women were Jewesses from Greece. On June 8 a Greek Jewish doctor, Albert Menasche, reached Birkenau from Salonica in a transport of 880 Greek Jews. He was the only one of a family of more than thirty to survive, first as a member of the camp orchestra, then as a doctor. His daughter Lillian, aged eleven, had also been sent to play in the orchestra, as a drummer, but was later gassed.
⁵¹
These ‘musicians of Auschwitz’, as they have been called, had to amuse the Germans by playing when new arrivals reached the camp, and at special concerts for the SS.
⁵²