The Holocaust (88 page)

As the killing of Jews continued, so too did rumours of these killings. On July 11 Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party secretariat, issued a special circular ‘on instructions from the Führer’. Whenever the Jewish question was ‘brought up in public’, the circular warned, ‘there may be no discussion of a future overall solution. It may however be mentioned that the Jews are taken in groups for appropriate labour purposes.’
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Five days later, however, Theophil Wurm, Bishop of the Evangelical Church in Württemberg,
wrote to the German government: ‘In the name of God and for the sake of the German people, we urgently request the responsible leaders of the Reich to stem the persecution and extermination to which many men and women under German rule are being subjected without any indictment by jury.’ The Bishop added: ‘There must be an end to putting to death members of other nations and races who are not even accorded a trial by either civil or military courts. A day will come when we shall have to pay for this.’

Bishop Wurm avoided the dangerous term ‘Jew’. But he did refer to ‘other races’. He also mentioned the children of mixed marriages, and the plight of those married to Jewesses, demanding the Government ‘not to do any further wrong to them’.
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Five months later, on 20 December 1943, Bishop Wurm directed another letter to Dr Hans Lammers, the State Secretary of the Reich Chancellery. This time he made explicit reference to the ‘final solution’. ‘We Christians’, he wrote, ‘consider the policy of exterminating the Jews as a grave injustice and of fatal consequences for the German people. Our people see the suffering imposed on us by the air raids as an act of punishment for what was done to the Jews.’
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In the Vilna ghetto, a resistance organization had been growing, led by Yitzhak Wittenberg. Among its actions was the sabotage of German troop trains in the area around Vilna, using explosives smuggled out of the ghetto to partisans in the neighbourhood. On 8 July 1943, a Jewess, Vitka Kempner, managed to leave the ghetto, together with two colleagues, carrying a landmine. Their objective was to blow up a German military train five miles south-east of the city. They planted the mine, and nobody noticed them.

On the following morning, at dawn, Vitka Kempner returned to the ghetto, her legs torn and bleeding. ‘Her face’, Hava Shurek later recalled, ‘was radiant.’ Hava Shurek’s account continued:

‘It was a happy day for fighters in the ghetto,’ Hava Shurek added. ‘They laughed in the streets. Passers-by shrugged their shoulders thinking that the others had gone crazy.’
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Within a week of this ‘triumph’, one of the members of a Lithuanian Communist group captured by the Gestapo, revealed under torture the name of the resistance commander. On the night of 16
July 1943, Wittenberg and other members of the United Partisan Organization were at a meeting with the head of the Jewish Council, Jacob Gens, when armed Lithuanian policemen burst into the room, and Wittenberg, in fetters, was led away.

As Wittenberg and his escort were about to leave the ghetto, Jewish partisans attacked the escort, and rescued Wittenberg, still in fetters. The SS then announced that if Wittenberg was not handed back to them, they would burn the ghetto to the ground.

One of Wittenberg’s partisan colleagues, Abba Kovner, who had been present when Wittenberg was seized and taken away, later recalled how, at two in the morning, Gens summoned the Jews of the ghetto, telling them ‘that because of this one man, Wittenberg, the ghetto may be destroyed and annihilated’. There was chaos in the ghetto, with Jews attacking the partisans and demanding that they hand Wittenberg over. ‘You cannot endanger the ghetto for one man,’ they insisted.

Wittenberg’s colleagues went to the attic where their commander was in hiding. ‘Give an order and we shall fight,’ they told him: Jew would fight Jew to prevent the partisan leader being handed over.
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Outside, a crowd of Jews, assembled by Gens, was shouting: ‘We want to live.’ Wittenberg agreed to be guided by his Communist colleagues, who urged him to surrender.
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Appointing Abba Kovner as his successor, Wittenberg walked out of his hiding place and turned himself over to the Gestapo. An attempt was made to smuggle cyanide into his prison cell, but it failed. It is thought that he managed to kill himself before he could be tortured.

The surrender of Wittenberg, Abba Kovner later declared, was ‘one of the greatest acts of heroism of the Jewish fighting underground in the ghetto’: the avoiding of conflict between Jew and Jew.
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It was followed, within six weeks, by the deportation of five thousand Vilna Jews to camp Vayvari, in Estonia. The deportation was supervised by Gens, while the Jewish police were brutal in enforcing the German order.
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Also deported to Vaivara were several thousand Kovno Jews. As they were being sent to a labour camp, they were told that families could apply to join their menfolk. Assurances were given that, once at the labour camp, families would be kept together. Leah Klompul was among those wives who decided to join her husband, together
with her five-year-old son Michael, and her mother-in-law. Forty-one years later she recalled how ‘We decided, for better or for worse, we will be together.’

The Jews who volunteered to join their menfolk were brought to the train siding. But there, the children and old people were separated from the rest. ‘We were told, it’s only for the train journey.’ But when Vaivara was reached, Leah Klompul’s little son, and her mother-in-law, were nowhere to be found. They had been deported to Birkenau, and to their deaths.
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At Vaivara, too, death came to many, among them an old lady, Mrs Ruttenberg, who had emigrated before the war to Canada, with her husband. The couple’s son, a Hebrew actor, had remained in Kovno. It was while visiting him in 1939 that the couple had been caught in Europe by the outbreak of war, and were unable to return. Mrs Ruttenberg’s husband, and her son, had been taken away during one of the Kovno ‘actions’ and were never seen again. She, in Vayvari, was protected by Leah Klompul, until Leah got sick and was taken to the camp hospital. ‘As soon as I left’, Leah later recalled, ‘there was no one to look after her. She was taken out to work. She was old and sick. She was lying in the snow.’ After a while, a male nurse, a Croat, came and took the sick away in a sledge, to the nearby wood. ‘There, he shot them all.’ But Mrs. Ruttenberg was not killed. ‘Shoot me again,’ she pleaded, ‘I am still alive.’ Later, telling the story to Leah Klompul, the male nurse boasted, with the tone of one who has done a great favour, ‘I was sorry for her. So I did fire her another shot.’

While at Vaivara, Leah Klompul witnessed an unusual act of defiance. A girl from Kovno, Miriam Ksanskiewicz, aged sixteen or seventeen, had just received her ladle of soup. It had been ladled from the top of the cauldron, and was thin. Miriam decided to protest. ‘She overturned the bowl. It was such a gesture. She was so annoyed. That soup, it could have been her life. But she survived.’

To turn over a bowl of soup; such, in the nightmare world of a Nazi labour camp, was an act of courage to be remembered by those who saw it for forty years.
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Even as some Jews from Kovno were being sent to Vaivara for slave labour, and others to Birkenau to be gassed, Jews already in the barracks at Birkenau were being sent away. The reason for their
departure was that the Germans had decided to comb the deserted ruins of the Warsaw ghetto for anything of value, such as bricks, steel, iron and other metals, as well as any jewellery, gold, silver or currency that might have been hidden before the destruction of the ghetto. To carry out the search, 3,500 Jews were brought from Birkenau to the Gesiowka camp, on the ruins of the ghetto. These Jews were former deportees from France, Belgium, Holland, Slovakia, Greece and Poland, who had been sent to the barracks at the time of the selection, and were now brought north, the first group on July 19, for this massive task. A year later, they were still at work.
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As the Jewish prisoners cleared and sifted the rubble, German soldiers watched and searched for any surviving Jews in hiding, shooting all whom they caught: the first sixteen were shot on July 27, as well as a seventeenth person ‘suspected’ of Jewish birth.
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On July 23, four days after the first deportation from Auschwitz to the new labour camp in Warsaw, a Jew who had been born in Auschwitz town forty years earlier, Mandel Langer, was executed in Toulouse. For more than seven months, he and a group of other Jews had blown up railway lines, bridges and electric pylons in the Toulouse region. Langer, a Communist, had migrated from Poland to Palestine as a young man. Imprisoned in Palestine by the British, he had left Palestine for France in 1933: and there, ten years later, he was shot.
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Escape and rescue continued, but the threat of reprisals was never an idle one. When twenty-one young Jews escaped from the Vilna ghetto on July 24, the Germans seized and shot thirty-two of their relations. It was then decreed that if even a single Jew were to escape from one of the ten-man labour gangs that worked outside the ghetto, the remaining nine in the gang would be shot.
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Also on July 24, the Spanish government acted, successfully, to save 367 Sephardi Jews in Salonica. More than 48,000 Greek Jews had already been deported from Salonica to Birkenau: the remnant, as Spanish subjects, were about to be deported when the Spanish government intervened. Instead of being sent to Birkenau, all 367 Spanish subjects were transferred by train to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. There, they were exempted from forced labour, and six months later, were sent to Spain, and to safety.
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On July 25, Mussolini was deposed as ruler of Italy. Although he
had not allowed Jews under Italian rule to be deported to Germany, his downfall was greeted by Jews under Nazi rule with rejoicing. The end had come for one of Hitler’s allies. In Janowska camp, in Lvov, a Gestapo man accused a young Jew who crossed his path of greeting him with veiled mockery, in celebration of Mussolini’s downfall. The youth was sentenced to death. Two SS men carried out the execution: ‘They hung the youth upside down,’ the historian Philip Friedman has recorded, ‘cut off his male organ and placed it in his mouth, and kicked him ceaselessly in the stomach to make the blood flow to his head. The youth died in terrible agony.’
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At Treblinka, a group of forced labourers had continued to plan their revolt, despite the cruel killing of Dr Julian Chorazycki the previous April. New leaders had emerged, among them Israel Sudowicz, an agronomist, who before the war had been head of ‘Toporol’, an organization that had encouraged farming among Polish Jews. In the Warsaw ghetto, Sudowicz had organized the growing of vegetables on every vacant plot of land.
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Other leaders of the Treblinka plotters included Engineer Alfred Galewski, Zelo Bloch and Dr Leichert, a Jewish physician from Wegrow, who had been an officer in the Polish army.

Shortly after Leichert’s arrival, in May 1943, the number of labourers in Treblinka had grown to seven hundred, as the Germans not only continued to gas new arrivals, but to dig up and burn the tens of thousands of corpses which had earlier been buried, after gassing, in enormous ditches. A special machine or ‘excavator’, with an enormous metal grab, picked up these corpses and then dumped them on vast pyres.

One of the corpse-burning squad at Treblinka, Izak Helfing, later recalled how, as the old corpses were being burned, and the new ones also consigned to the flames, ‘people began to think they would not be able to hold out any longer and they concluded that everyone would be exterminated. That thought created the strength to resist: to perish, but with honour, and to take revenge for our sufferings.’ Another survivor later recalled how ‘the days and nights dragged on in the most terrible vale of tears ever conceived by man. Death stalked Treblinka without respite. People fell like flies, from sickness, from bullets, from the axe,’ and he added: ‘Everyone knew that if not today then tomorrow would be his turn. A majority of the prisoners became so depressed that their will to escape became
paralysed. But there were a few who maintained hope and made plans to save themselves.’
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One attempt at revolt had taken place in Treblinka in June 1943, when forty hand grenades had been stolen from the arsenal. But the grenades were without either explosives or pins, and could not be used.
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Then, on August 2, the conspirators found their opportunity. Managing once more to break into the arsenal, they hid one of their members inside it. From the arsenal, this conspirator had pushed twenty primed hand grenades, twenty rifles and several revolvers with ammunition through a window, from which he had cut out a pane of glass. The weapons were then hidden, briefly, under a pile of debris; soon a cart was pulled to the debris, the arms taken away and distributed. Petrol was then put into the camp disinfector, operated by one of a group of Jews in the plot, and petrol instead of disinfectant was sprayed on buildings throughout the camp, as part of the daily disinfecting procedure.
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The signal for revolt was to have been given at 3.45 in the afternoon. But about half an hour earlier two of the conspirators, entering the living quarters, were searched and undressed. Money was found on them, and they were whipped. Fearing that they had been betrayed, the others in the plot decided to act at once. The SS man who was whipping the two prisoners was shot by another of the conspirators, and a hand grenade was thrown. This was understood to be the signal.
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