The Holocaust Read online

  The Holocaust

  The Human Tragedy

  Martin Gilbert

  Copyright

  The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy

  Copyright © 1985, 2014 by Martin Gilbert

  Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Cover jacket design by David Ter-Avanesyan/Ter33Design

  Cover image credit WhiteHaven / Shutterstock.com

  ISBN Mobipocket edition: 9780795337208

  DEDICATED TO

  Professor Alexander Lerner, two of whose daughters, aged five and three, were killed by the Nazis in 1941, and whose own sixteen-year struggle to leave the Soviet Union for Israel is now successfully concluded

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  1 First steps to iniquity

  2 1933: the shadow of the swastika

  3 Towards disinheritance

  4 After the Nuremberg Laws

  5 ‘Hunted like rats’

  6 ‘The seeds of a terrible vengeance’

  7 September 1939: the trapping of Polish Jewry

  8 ‘Blood of innocents’

  9 1940: ‘a wave of evil’

  10 War in the West: terror in the East

  11 January–June 1941: the spreading net

  12 ‘It cannot happen!’

  13 ‘A crime without a name’

  14 ‘Write and record!’

  15 The ‘final solution’

  16 Eye-witness to mass murder

  17 20 January 1942: the Wannsee Conference

  18 ‘Journey into the unknown’

  19 ‘Another journey into the unknown’

  20 ‘If they have enough time, we are lost’

  21 ‘Avenge our tormented people’

  22 From Warsaw to Treblinka: ‘these disastrous and horrible days’

  23 Autumn 1942: ‘at a faster pace’

  24 ‘The most horrible of all horrors’

  25 September–November 1942: the spread of resistance

  26 ‘To save at least someone’

  27 ‘Help me get more trains’

  28 Warsaw, April 1943: hopeless days of revolt

  29 ‘The crashing fires of hell’

  30 ‘To perish, but with honour’

  31 ‘A page of glory… never to be written’

  32 ‘Do not think our spirit is broken’

  33 ‘One should like so much to live a little bit longer’

  34 From the occupation of Hungary to the Normandy landings

  35 ‘May one cry now?’

  36 July–September 1944: the last deportations

  37 September 1944: the Days of Awe

  38 Revolt at Birkenau

  39 Protectors and persecutors

  40 The death marches

  41 The ‘tainted luck’ of survival

  EPILOGUE: ‘I will tell the world’

  Notes and sources

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many people have helped me with advice and encouragement since I began collecting material for this book in 1979. Special thanks are due to a number of survivors who guided me in my researches, spoke to me about their own experiences, or gave me contemporary documents connected with their own fate and that of their families.

  I was particularly helped during my researches by Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who not only told me of his own experiences, but introduced me to many other survivors, and was always ready with thoughtful advice and guidance. For more than a decade, he has encouraged me to seek out, and to set down, the facts of what is, inevitably, a painful story.

  Two other survivors to whom I am grateful are Ben Helfgott, who read the book in typescript, and Dr Shmuel Krakowski, who has always been most generous with his time and expert advice, derived from many years of historical research, first in Warsaw and then in Jerusalem. Other survivors who have spoken to me about their experiences, answered my queries, and given me historical material, and to whom I wish to express my most sincere thanks are Maja Abramowicz (now living in Johannesburg), Harry Balsam (London), Raya Barnea (Hadera), Arieh L. Bauminger (Jerusalem), Judge Moshe Bejski (Jerusalem), Leo Bretholz (Baltimore), Reuven Dafni (Jerusalem), Dr Szymon Datner (Warsaw), Jack Eisner (New York), Vera Elyashiv (London), Michael Etkind (London), Rebecca Fink (Ramat Aviv), Violette Fintz (Cape Town), Leslie Frankel (Johannesburg), Solomon Gisser (Montreal), Roman Halter (London), Kitty Hart (Birmingham), Rabbi Harry M. Jacobi (Zurich), Jack Kagan (London), Lilli Kopecky (Ramat Gan), Dr Luba Krugman Gurdus (New York), Erich Kulka (Jerusalem), Naphtali Lavie (New York), Lea Leibowitz (Johannesburg), Don Levin (Jerusalem), Jakub Lichterman (Cape Town), Eric Lucas (Herzliya), Helena Manaster (Haifa), Czeslaw Mordowicz (Tel Aviv), Maria Osovskaya (Beersheba), Alexander Pechersky (Rostov-on-Don), Leon Pommers (New York), Cantor Martin Rosenblum (Toronto), Dana Schwartz (Los Angeles), Helen Shabbes (Allentown), Bertha Shachovskaya (Moscow), Levi Shalit (Johannesburg), Henry Slamovich (San Francisco), Rudolf Vrba (Vancouver), Jaffa and Norris Wallach (Haifa), Harold Werner (Miami), Freda Wineman (London), and Jack Young (London).

  A special note of thanks is due to my friends in Moscow and Leningrad, among them Yakov Gorodetsky, Boris Kelman, Vladimir Lembrikov and Aba Taratuta, for providing me with historical material relating to the fate of the Jews on Soviet soil during the years of German occupation. I also received important material from Soviet printed sources from Dr Anatol Khazanov, then of Moscow, now of Jerusalem.

  In the course of my researches, many other people have patiently answered my queries, and have sent me documentary material. I should like to thank, in this regard, Ora Alcalay (Head Librarian, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem), Flavio Andreis (Istituto Italiano di Cultura, London), Dr Jean Angel, Dr Yitzhak Arad (Chairman, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem), J. M. Aspden (Library Secretary, the Royal College of Surgeons of England), Baruch Bandet, Arieh Barnea, Professor Yehuda Bauer, Dr Konstantin Bazarov, Solomon Berger, Professor Yehuda Blum, Tom Bower, David Brauner (Jerusalem Post Archives), Teresa Ceglowska (Panstwowe Muzeum w Oswiecimiu), Deena Cohen, Peter Coombs, Francis Cuss, Lonnie Darwin (The Holocaust Library and Research Center, San Francisco), Barbara Distel (KZ-Gedenkstätte, Dachau), Dr Lucjan Dobroszycki (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York), Adina Drechsler, Meira Edelstein, Dr Liliana Picciotto Fargion (Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Milan), Eitan Finkelstein, Joseph Finkelstone, Clement Freud, Henning Gehrs (Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen), Sam Goldsmith, Whitney Harris, Alfred Herzka, Dr Zygmunt Hoffman (Zydowski Instytut Historyczny w Polsce, Warsaw), Celia Hurst (Archivist, Sigmund Freud Copyrights Ltd), Professor Henry R. Huttenbach, Professor Louis de Jong (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Amsterdam), Ida Kadane, Dr Rivka Kauli, Dr Donald Kenrick, Dr J. Kermish, Serge Klarsfeld, Stanislaw Krajewski, Dr Shmuel Krakowski (Archivist, Yad Vashem), Professor Konrad Kwiet, Dr Vera Laska, Naomi Layish, Sinai Leichter, Jack Lennard, Dr M. Lubetzky, Hadassa Modlinger (Custodian of Testimonies, Yad Vashem), Miriam Novitch (Ghetto Fighters’ House, Kibbutz Lohamei Ha-gettaot), Professor Czeslaw Pilichowski (Glowna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, Warsaw), Matthew Rinaldi, Eli M. Rosenbaum (United States Department of Justice, Washington, DC), Rafi Ruppin, Moshe Sakkis, Gustav Schildkraut, Freddie Shaw, Neal M. Sher (United States Department of Justice, Washington, DC), Dr M. R. Sheridan, R. Silbert (Librarian, Jewish Chronicle), Professor Kazimierz Smolen (Panstwowe Muzeum w Oswiecimiu), Dr Shmuel Spector, Rebecca and Edith Spivack, Rabbi Charles W. Steckel, Solomon H. Stekoll, Pro
fessor J. P. Stern, Jennie Tarabulus, Ida Taratuta, Mike Tregenza, Major N. P. Uniake (Central Army Records Office, Australian Army, Melbourne), Victor West, Yigal Zafoni, K. Zeilinger (Director, Service Social Juif, Brussels), Dr Ludmila Zeldowicz and Alexander Zvielli (Archivist, Jerusalem Post).

  Any book that deals with Jewish resistance must mention the pioneering work by Reuben Ainsztein. It was my privilege to have known him, and to have been able to discuss with him many aspects of his researches.

  For their help in translating testimonies, I am grateful to Alexandra Finkelstein, Nan Greifer, Richard Grunberger, Mira Marody, Richard Sakwa, Taffy Sassoon, Michael Sherborne, and the late Halina Willets.

  Important suggestions as to form and content were made by Erica Hunningher. The burden of the typing and retyping was borne by Sue Rampton, assisted in the last stages of the work by Helen Gardiner. The photographic prints [for the print edition] were prepared, often from faded or damaged originals, by Zev Radovan, Gerry Moeran and Jean Hunt. The maps were designed specially for this volume by Terry Bicknell.

  Particular thanks are due to Professor Yehuda Bauer for his scrutiny of the text in its final stage, and for his many valuable comments and suggestions.

  I am also grateful to my publishers, Helen Fraser of Fontana Paperbacks, Philip Ziegler and Carol O’Brien of Collins Publishers, and Richard Seaver of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, for their encouragement at every stage of the work.

  Special thanks must go my wife Susie, who for many years has helped me to tell the story in all its aspects: the suffering, the heroism, the relentless oppression, the struggle for human dignity and—in many ways the most painful of all the tragedies of the Holocaust—the fate of the children. No one can read about those terrible years without being moved, and at times overwhelmed, by the ruthless, diabolical destruction of young life, from the tiniest baby to the teenager on the verge of what ought to have been the years of opportunity and fulfilment.

  MARTIN GILBERT

  Merton College, Oxford

  4 September 1985

  PREFACE

  In the late summer of 1959, accompanied by a Polish friend, a non-Jew, I travelled by car to the River Bug near Malkinia junction, on the Warsaw—Leningrad railway. We had intended, my friend and I, both of us students, to cross the river by the road bridge marked on my pre-war map. But on reaching the river, we found that the bridge was gone: destroyed in the fighting of fifteen years before, when the Red Army had driven the Wehrmacht from eastern Poland.

  It was late afternoon. From the river bank, my friend called to a peasant on the far side, who was loading wood into a small, barge-like boat. Eventually, the peasant rowed over to our side of the river, and took us back with him. We explained our purpose, and he took us to his village, half a mile away. Then he found a cart filled with logs, harnessed his horse to it, and drove us over the rough road, southwards towards the village of Treblinka.

  From Treblinka village we proceeded for another mile or two, along the line of an abandoned railway through a forest of tall trees. Finally we reached an enormous clearing, bounded on all sides by dense woodland. Darkness was falling, and with it, the chill of night and a cold dew. I stepped down from the cart on to the sandy soil: a soil that was grey rather than brown. Driven by I know not what impulse, I ran my hand through that soil, again and again. The earth beneath my feet was coarse and sharp: filled with the fragments of human bone.

  Twenty-two years later I returned to Treblinka. The bridge over the Bug had long been rebuilt. At the entrance to the camp was a museum, placards and explanations. Further on was the clearing, filled now with small stone monuments, each stone inscribed with the name of a town or village whose Jews had been murdered there. The sites of the railway siding and the gas chamber had been identified and marked. The railway itself had been re-created symbolically, with concrete sleepers.

  I could not bend down again to disturb the soil. In the years that had passed I had learned too much of what had happened there, and of what torments had been inflicted on my fellow Jews.

  The systematic attempt to destroy all European Jewry—an attempt now known as the Holocaust—began in the last week of June 1941, within hours of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. This onslaught upon Jewish life in Europe continued without respite for nearly four years. At its most intense moments, during the autumn of 1941, and again during the summer and autumn of 1942, many thousands of Jews were killed every day. By the time Nazi Germany had been defeated, as many as six million of Europe’s eight million Jews had been slaughtered: if the killing had run its course, the horrific figure would have been even higher.

  Jews perished in extermination camps, execution sites, ghettos, slave labour camps, and on the death marches. The testimony of those who survived constitutes the main record of what was done to the Jews during those years. The murderers also kept records, often copious ones. But the victims, the six million who were done to death, could leave no record. A few fragments of diaries, letters and scribbled messages do survive. But in the main, others must bear witness to what was done to the millions who could never tell their own story.

  This book is an attempt to draw on the nearest of the witnesses, those closest to the destruction, and through their testimony to tell something of the suffering of those who perished, and are forever silent.

  The preparations for mass murder were made possible by Germany’s military successes in the months following the invasion of Poland in 1939. But from the moment that Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany in 1933, the devastating process had begun. It was a process which depended upon the rousing of historic hatreds and ancient prejudice, and upon the cooperation or acquiescence of many different forces: of industry, science and medicine, of the Civil Service and bureaucracy, and of the most modern mechanisms and channels of communication. It depended also upon collaborators from countries far beyond the German border; and it depended most of all, one survivor has remarked, ‘upon the indifference of bystanders in every land’.1

  1

  * * *

  First steps to iniquity

  For many centuries, primitive Christian Europe had regarded the Jew as the ‘Christ-killer’: an enemy and a threat to be converted and so be ‘saved’, or to be killed; to be expelled, or to be put to death with sword and fire. In 1543, Martin Luther set out his ‘honest advice’ as to how Jews should be treated. ‘First,’ he wrote, ‘their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it.’ Jewish homes, he urged, should likewise be ‘broken down or destroyed’. Jews should then be ‘put under one roof, or in a stable, like Gypsies, in order that they may realize that they are not masters in our land.’ They should be put to work, to earn their living ‘by the sweat of their noses’, or, if regarded even then as too dangerous, these ‘poisonous bitter worms’ should be stripped of their belongings ‘which they have extorted usuriously from us’ and driven out of the country ‘for all time’.1

  Luther’s advice was typical of the anti-Jewish venom of his time. Mass expulsion was a commonplace of medieval policy. Indeed, Jews had already been driven out of almost every European country including England, France, Spain, Portugal and Bohemia. Further expulsions were to follow: in Italy Jews were to be confined to a special part of the towns, the ghetto, and, in Tsarist Russia, to a special region of the country, the ‘Pale’. Expulsion and oppression continued until the nineteenth century. Even when Jews were allowed growing participation in national life, however, no decade passed without Jews in one European state or another being accused of murdering Christian children, in order to use their blood in the baking of Passover bread. This ‘blood libel’, coming as it did with outbursts of popular violence against Jews, reflected deep prejudices which no amount of modernity or liberal education seemed able to overcome. Jew-hatred, with its two-thousand-year-old history, could arise both as a spontaneous outburst of popular instin
cts, and as a deliberately fanned instrument of scapegoat politics.

  The Jews of Europe reacted in different ways to such moments of hatred and peril. Some sought complete assimilation. Some fought to be accepted as Jews by local communities and national structures. Others struggled to maintain an entirely separate Jewish style of life and observance, with their own communities and religious practice.

  The nineteenth century seemed to offer the Jews a change for the better: emancipation spread throughout Western Europe, Jews entered politics and parliaments, and became integrated into the cultural, scientific and medical life of every land. Aristocratic Jews moved freely among the aristocracy; middle-class Jews were active in every profession; and Jewish workers lived with their fellow workers in extreme poverty, struggling for better conditions. But in Eastern Europe, and especially in the Polish and, even more, the Ukrainian provinces of the Tsarist Europe, anti-Jewish violence often burst out into physical conflict, popular persecution, and murderous pogrom. Here, in the poorest regions of Tsarist Russia, church and state both found it expedient, from their different standpoints, to set the Jew aside in the popular mind as an enemy of Christianity and an intruder in the life of the citizen. Jealousies were fermented. Jewish ‘characteristics’ were mocked and turned into caricatures. The Jew, who sought only to lead a quiet, productive and if possible a reasonably comfortable life, was seen as a leech on society, even when his own struggle to survive was made more difficult by that society’s rules and prejudices.

  These eastern lands where prejudice was most deeply rooted spread from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Their most densely populated regions were White Russia, the Volhynia, Podolia and the Ukraine. In these regions there had existed throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth a four-tiered social structure, from which was to emerge the most savage of all wartime hatreds. At the top of this structure was the Pole: the ‘Pan’, the landowner, Roman Catholic, Polish-speaking. Next was the Ukrainian peasant: the ‘Chlop’, adherent to the Russian Orthodox faith, Ukrainian-speaking. Next was the Volksdeutsch, or Ethnic German: descendant of German settlers who had been brought to these regions in the eighteenth century, farmer, Protestant, German-speaking. Fourth, and, in the eyes of each of the other three, last, was the Jew: resident in those regions for just as long, if not longer, eking out an existence as a pedlar or merchant, Jewish by religion, and with Yiddish as his own language, ‘Jewish’ also by speech.