The Third Reich at War (51 page)

The portrayal of the ghetto-camp’s active cultural life, unlike other aspects of the movie, did not lie. On the same transport as Gerron in October 1944 was the Czech-Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann, a follower of Arnold Schoenberg, who had been taken to Theresienstadt two years previously. Among other things Ullmann composed an opera,
The Emperor of Atlantis
, that was performed successfully in the camp, along with chamber music and piano works. Later on, Ullmann was reduced to writing his compositions on the back of lists of inmates slated for deportation to Auschwitz. Friends somehow managed to preserve many of them until the war was over. Jewish artists in the camp gave drawing and painting lessons to the children among the inmates; many of their drawings too have survived. Despite such cultural activities, conditions in the camp were generally poor and deteriorated as time went on. From July 1942, trainloads of elderly Jews from the Reich began to arrive in the camp. Many were weak, exhausted or sick, and they died in their hundreds. In September 1942 alone, 3,900 people died out of a total of 58,000. The inmates of Theresienstadt also included Jewish veterans from the First World War with their families, and Jewish spouses from ‘mixed marriages’ that had been dissolved. On 8 September 1943, no fewer than 18,000 inmates were taken to Auschwitz. They were allowed to keep their clothes and effects. They were housed there in a specially designed ‘family camp’ with a school and a kindergarten, living in relatively superior accommodation which they were allowed to decorate. The purpose of the ‘family camp’ was to impress visitors and provide material for international propaganda. After six months it was closed down; in two separate actions in March and July 1944, the inmates were almost all taken to the gas chamber, except for 3,000 who were transferred to another camp.
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Then in October 1944 twelve transports alone left Theresienstadt for Auschwitz, leaving a population of just over 11,000 where there had been nearly 30,000 in mid-September. Within a few weeks, however, the numbers had risen to 30,000 again with a fresh influx of deportees from Slovakia, the Czech lands and the Reich, many of them ‘mixed-race’. In February 1945 the camp authorities built a huge hall that could be hermetically sealed, and an enormous covered pit. The remaining inmates could all be exterminated on the spot if it was felt desirable or necessary. In the event this did not happen. Nevertheless, out of just over 140,000 people who had been transported to Theresienstadt in the course of its existence, fewer than 17,000 were left alive by the end of the war.
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If Theresienstadt was a model ghetto, then Auschwitz in many ways was a model German town in the newly conquered east. By March 1941 there were 700 SS guards working in the camp, a number that had grown to more than 2,000 by June 1942; in all, over the period of the camp’s existence, some 7,000 SS men worked there at one time or another. The SS and their families, if they had them, lived in the town, along with secretaries and administrators; there were concert parties, theatrical performances by visiting companies like the Dresden State Theatre, a pub (with an upstairs flat for Himmler, which in fact he never used) and a medical centre. The SS men were supplied with plenty to eat, and were allowed regular periods of leave. If they were unmarried, they could receive visits from their girl-friends, or, if they were married and their families lived elsewhere in the Reich, from their wives, usually during the warmer weather in summer. New houses were built for the camp staff, and nearby there was the gigantic I. G. Farben chemical plant at Monowitz, which made Auschwitz into a major economic centre and employed German managers, scientists, administrators and secretaries. The creation in a single complex of a residential area, a factory, a labour camp and an extermination centre looked forward to the kind of urban community that might have been founded in other parts of the German east, at least until the General Plan for the East was carried out completely. The only cause for complaint on the part of the town’s inhabitants was the unpleasant smell that wafted across to the town and the SS living quarters from the camp crematoria.
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Over the whole period of the camp’s existence, at least 1.1 million and possibly as many as 1.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz; 90 per cent of them, probably about 960,000, were Jews, amounting to between a fifth and a quarter of all Jews killed in the war. They included 300,000 Jews from Poland, 69,000 from France, 60,000 from Holland, 55,000 from Greece, 46,000 from Czechoslovakia (the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), 27,000 from Slovakia, 25,000 from Belgium, 23,000 from Germany (the ‘Old Reich’), 10,000 from Croatia, 6,000 from Italy, the same number from Belarus, 1,600 from Austria and 700 from Norway. At a late stage in the war, as we shall see, some 394,000 Hungarian Jews were taken to the gas chambers and put to death. More than 70,000 non-Jewish Poles were killed, 21,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 people of a whole variety of nationalities, mainly East Europeans. The minority who were ‘selected’ for work on arrival were registered, and a number tattooed on their forearm. There were about 400,000 of these, and about half of them were Jewish. At least half of the registered prisoners died from malnutrition, disease, exhaustion or hypothermia.
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Rudolf Ḧss later confessed he had found his duties as commandant of the biggest murder factory in the history of the world difficult to carry out with equanimity.

I had to see everything. I had to watch hour after hour, by day and by night, the removal and burning of the bodies, the extraction of the teeth, the cutting of the hair, the whole grisly, interminable business . . . I had to look through the peephole of the gas-chambers and watch the process of death itself, because the doctors wanted me to see it. I had to do all this because I was the one to whom everyone looked, because I had to show them all that I did not merely issue the orders and make the regulations but was also prepared myself to be present at whatever task I had assigned to my subordinates.
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His subordinates often asked him ‘is it necessary that we do all this? Is it necessary that hundreds of thousands of women and children be destroyed?’ Ḧss felt that he ‘had to tell them that this extermination of Jewry had to be, so that Germany and our posterity might be freed for ever from their relentless adversaries’.
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Antisemitic to the end, Ḧss reflected after the war that antisemitism had ‘only come into the limelight when the Jews have pushed themselves forward too much in their quest for power, and when their evil machinations have become too obvious for the general public to stomach’.
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Bound by these beliefs to his job, Ḧss felt he had to suppress any doubts in carrying out what he believed to be Hitler’s orders. He owed it to his subordinates not to show any sign of weakness. ‘Hardness’ was after all a core value of the SS. ‘I had to appear cold and indifferent to events that must have wrung the heart of anyone possessed of human feelings,’ he later recalled. ‘I had to watch coldly, while the mothers with laughing or crying children went into the gas-chambers.’
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Particularly after an evening’s drinking with Adolf Eichmann, who ‘showed that he was completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew that he could lay his hands on’, Ḧss felt he had to suppress his human feelings: ‘after these conversations with Eichmann I almost came to regard such emotions as a betrayal of the Leader’.
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Ḧss could not help thinking of his own wife and children as he watched Jewish families go into the gas chamber. At home, he was haunted by memories of such scenes. But he also felt beleaguered in Auschwitz. The constant demands for expansion, the incompetence and deceitfulness of his subordinates and the ever-increasing number of prisoners to manage drove him into himself and he turned to drink. His wife, who lived in a house just outside the camp perimeter with him and their four children (a fifth was born in 1943), tried to organize parties and excursions to improve his quality of life, but Ḧss quickly became known for his bad temper, despite the fact that he was able to requisition whatever he wanted (illegally) from the camp stores. ‘My wife’s garden,’ he wrote later, ‘was a paradise of flowers . . . The children were perpetually begging me for cigarettes for the prisoners. They were particularly fond of the ones who worked in the garden.’ Ḧss’s children kept many animals in the garden, including tortoises and lizards; on Sundays he walked the family across the fields to visit their horses and foals, or, in summer, went swimming in the river that formed the eastern boundary of the camp complex.
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V

Many of the Jews who arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, especially in the later phases of the camp’s existence, were taken there directly from their home countries. But many others went through the transitional stage of confinement in a ghetto, as did all the Jews who were killed in the Reinhard Action camps. There they might survive for months or even years. The largest of the ghettos, as we have seen, were founded shortly after the conquest of Poland in 1939. Some of them lasted well into the second half of the war. In practice, of course, the conditions in the ghettos were so terrible that they already meant a slow death for many of their inhabitants. Starved of supplies, even for those in them who worked for the German war economy, they were desperately overcrowded, deprived of proper sanitation and rife with disease. Throughout the winter of 1941-2, Adam Czerniak’w, the Jewish Elder of the Warsaw ghetto, continued to do his best to combat the rapid deterioration of the situation under the impact of hunger and disease. ‘In the public assistance shelters,’ he noted on 19 November 1941, ‘mothers are hiding dead children under the beds for 8 days in order to receive a larger food ration.’ Meeting a group of children on 14 June 1942, Czerniak’w noted despairingly that they were ‘living skeletons . . . I am ashamed to admit it,’ he wrote, ‘but I wept as I have not wept for a long time.’ As large contingents of Jews deported from Germany began to arrive and stay in the ghetto for a few days before being transported to Treblinka, and rumours of the death camps began to spread, Czerniak’w did his best to try to halt the mounting panic. He even organized play activities for the ghetto children, comparing himself to the captain of the
Titanic
(‘a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I had made up my mind to emulate the captain’).
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Assured repeatedly by the German authorities that the ‘terrifying rumours’ of imminent deportations were untrue, he toured the ghetto, trying to ‘calm the population’ (‘what it costs me they do not see’). But on 21 July 1942 the German Security Police began arresting members of the Jewish Council and other officials in his presence in order to hold them hostage for the collaboration of the rest. The next morning, the deportation specialist of the regional SS, Hermann Ḧfle, called Czerniak’w and the remaining leading Jewish officials in the ghetto to a meeting. While his young Jewish interpreter, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, typed the minutes, the sound of Johann Strauss’s
Blue Danube
waltz, played by the SS on a portable gramophone in the street outside, drifted in through the open window. Czerniak’w was officially told that all the Jews would be deported, in consignments of 6,000 a day, starting immediately. Anyone who tried to stop the action would be shot. Throughout his time as Elder, Czerniak’w had kept a cyanide tablet ready to use if he received any orders he could not reconcile with his conscience. One of the SS officers in charge of the deportations had told him that children were included, and Czerniak’w could not agree to hand them over to be killed. ‘I am powerless,’ he wrote in a final letter, ‘my heart trembles in sorrow and compassion. I can no longer bear all this. My act will show everyone the right thing to do.’ Refusing to sign the deportation order, he swallowed the tablet and died instantly. Doubts about him in the ghetto community were immediately quelled. ‘His end justifies his beginning,’ wrote Chaim Kaplan. ‘Czerniak’w earned eternity in one moment.’
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The Catholic German army officer Wilm Hosenfeld, stationed in Warsaw and charged with organizing sporting activities for the troops, became aware of the deportations to Treblinka almost as soon as they began. ‘That a whole people, men, women, children, are simply being slaughtered, in the twentieth century, by us, us of all people, who are fighting a crusade against Bolshevism: this is such a dreadful blood-guilt that one wants to sink into the ground with the shame of it.’
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30,000 Jews were transported for mass extermination in the last week of July 1942 alone, he reported. Even in the days of the guillotine and the French Revolutionary Terror, he noted caustically, ‘such virtuosity in mass murder was never achieved’.
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The Jews, he told his son in August 1942, ‘are to be exterminated, and it’s already being done. What immeasurable quantities of human suffering are coming to light on the one hand, of human malice and bestiality on the other. How many innocent people have to die, who is demanding justice and legality? Does this all have to happen?’
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‘Death paces the streets of the ghetto,’ Chaim Kaplan reported in his diary in June 1942. ‘Every day Polish Jewry is being brought to slaughter. It is estimated, and there is some basis for the figures, that three-quarters of a million Polish Jews have already passed from this earth.’ Kaplan recorded terrible scenes as people were rounded up and taken off to Treblinka every day in the repeated deportations of the summer of 1942. On 5 August 1942 it was the turn of the children living in orphanages and other children’s homes. These actions were neither orderly nor peaceful. German troops, SS men and auxiliaries used unbridled force in rounding up the Jews and forcing them on to the trains. Over 10,000 Jews were shot in the ghetto during the round-ups; some of them must have tried to resist. In early August 1942, visiting Warsaw, Zygmunt Klukowski was kept awake by the sound of machine-gun fire coming from the ghetto. ‘I was told that about 5,000 people a day were being killed.’
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By the time the round-ups came to an end on 12 September 1942, more than 253,000 inhabitants of the ghetto had been taken to Treblinka and gassed. Already in August 1942, fearing the worst for himself, Kaplan gave his diary to a friend. His friend smuggled it out of the ghetto and passed it on to a member of the Polish underground, who took it with him when he emigrated to New York in 1962, after which it was finally published. Kaplan’s own fears had been more than justified: he was rounded up not long after he passed the diary on, and perished with his wife in the gas chambers of Treblinka in December 1942 or January 1943.
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