“Ausg. 10.3.42 Tr. 35” is written after the name of the porter Idel Rozenberg, who lives in apartment number 25 at 51 Sulzfelderstrasse (Brzezińska) and was born on 1.1.1897. Ausg. means ausgeliefert, dispatched for delivery, and Transport 35, like all the other transports of 1942, goes to the gas vans, the mobile gas chambers in Chełmno.
The list doesn’t include this detail, but I know it’s so.
On March 15, 1942, weaver Majer Hersz Rozenberg, who lives in apartment number 3 at 4 Kranichweg (Żurawia), is dispatched on Transport 31.
On March 25, 1942, schoolboy Mordela Rozenberg, who lives in apartment 10 at 1 Fischstrasse (Rybna), is dispatched on Transport 36.
On September 1 and 2, 1942, the ghetto’s hospitals are emptied and the patients dumped into military trucks. Some are dumped out of the windows. Some try to run away.
Between September 5 and 12, an Allgemeine Gehsperre or general curfew is proclaimed: everyone is ordered to stay at home and no one is permitted to have guests and one block of apartments after another is forced to give up the old, the sick, and the children. Within two weeks, sixteen thousand people are dispatched from the ghetto, never to be heard from again.
On September 4, 1942, Chaim Rumkowski makes a speech.
I hope you don’t hear it.
I hope nobody at 18 Franciszkańska hears it.
I don’t know what anyone can hope for after hearing it.
But at the same time, I want everyone to know what Chaim Rumkowski said in his speech of September 4, 1942. So that everyone will know what sort of place it is that you’re leaving behind when you board the train to Auschwitz in August 1944 and your world is liquidated.
Or is it already liquidated now?
It’s a quarter to five in the afternoon and the sunshine is glaring and the day is still hot and loudspeakers have been set up in the square outside the fire station at 13 Lutomierska Street, and Chaim Rumkowski makes a biblical speech, without euphemisms. Or perhaps a speech with biblical euphemisms.
At any rate, a speech that cannot be misunderstood.
Or a speech that must be misunderstood if your world is not to collapse at once under the weight of its monumental futility and be liquidated on the spot.
“Fathers and mothers, give me your children!” says Chaim Rumkowski.
His white hair is tousled, his movements slow, his voice broken, but his words cannot be misunderstood, so they must be misunderstood.
He has received an order from the Germans to dispatch all the underage children of the ghetto.
And he is also to dispatch the old and the sick.
At least 20,000 Jews are to be dispatched.
He has come to inform the ghetto that he has decided to give the Germans what they demand. To “bring the sacrifice to the altar in his own arms.” To “cut off the limbs to save the body,” with his own hands.
Yes, those are the words he uses.
And says that if he doesn’t offer up the sacrifice, the Germans will destroy them all.
But that if he does, some people will be saved.
What is there to misunderstand?
Chaim Rumkowski doesn’t want to be misunderstood. Not this time. This is what he says:
I come to you like a bandit to take from you that which you hold most dear. I have tried by every means to have this order revoked, and when that proved impossible, to have it made less harsh. Just yesterday, I requested a list of all nine-year-olds. I wanted to try to at least save that year group, the nine-to-ten-year-olds. But I could secure no such concession. The only thing I successfully achieved was to save those aged ten and above. Let that be a consolation in our deep sorrow. There are in the ghetto many patients who can only be expected to live for a few days, perhaps a few weeks. I do not know if this is a diabolical idea or not, but I have to say it: Give me the sick. We can save the well in their place. I know how dear the sick are to each family, and especially for Jews, but when cruel demands are made, one has to weigh and calculate: who ought to be, can be, and may be saved? And common sense tells us that those who are to be saved must be those who can be saved and those who have a chance of being rescued, not those who in no circumstances can be saved.… Bear in mind that we live in the ghetto. We are subject to such great restrictions that we do not have enough for the well, let alone the sick. We give them our meager rations of sugar, our little piece of meat. And what is the result? Not enough to cure the sick, but enough to make ourselves sick. Naturally sacrifices of this kind are the most beautiful, the most noble. But there are times when choices have to be made: sacrifice those among the sick who have the least chance of getting well, and who can also make others ill, or save the well. I could not devote very long to thinking this over; I had to decide in favor of the well. In that spirit, I have issued instructions to the doctors: they have the task of delivering up all incurable patients, so that the well, those who want to live and can live, may be saved in their place. I understand you, mothers, I see the tears in your eyes; I feel what you feel in your hearts, you fathers who are obliged to go to your work even on the morning after your children have been taken from you, your darling little ones whom you were playing with only yesterday. All this I know and feel. Since four o’clock yesterday, when the order was first conveyed to me, I have been prostrate; I share your pain, I suffer your anguish, and I do not know how I shall survive this — where I shall find the strength to do it. I must let you into a secret: they demanded 24,000 sacrifices, 3,000 a day for eight days. I was able to reduce that to 20,000, but only on condition that all children under ten be included. Children of ten and older are safe. Since the children and old people together amount to only 13,000 souls, the gap must be filled with the sick.
I can hardly speak, I am exhausted, and will speak only of what I ask of you: you must help me carry through this Aktion.… A broken Jew stands before you. Do not envy me. This is the hardest order I have ever faced. I extend my broken, trembling hands to you and implore you: give me the sacrifices! So we can avert the need for even more sacrifices, and a population of 100,000 Jews can be saved! This is what they have promised me: that if we hand over the sacrifices ourselves, all will remain calm.
What more is there to say? Only a misunderstanding can maintain the world in which such a speech can be made. Chaim Rumkowski misunderstands nothing. The children, the sick, and the old are to be delivered up in order to be killed. This you must all understand. It cannot be misunderstood.
Nor can it be understood. The world in which something like this can be understood is a world no one in your world can imagine. Between your world and the world where parents are exhorted to sacrifice their children, children their parents, and the healthy the sick, there is a chasm that reason cannot bridge.
Only misunderstanding and lack of imagination — this is how I see it — can keep your world together after September 1942.
The inability to imagine a place like Chełmno. At one end of a manorlike building, “the castle,” the entrance to the changing room and showers, at the other end the way out to the trucks that are docked to the outside wall, their airtight compartments snugly fit to the door openings. The biggest is a Magirus truck, made by Deutz AG in Cologne, which in 1942 has been declared a National Socialist model company, and which can load 150 living human beings. The two smaller vehicles, an Opel Blitz and a Diamond Reo, can load from eighty to one hundred each. Once the compartment has been fully packed, the smallest children sometimes packed on top of the adults, and the airtight doors bolted, the driver turns on the ignition and attaches an exhaust pipe from the diesel engine to the cargo area/gas chamber, and within five to ten minutes the cargo has been asphyxiated. Then the truck is driven to a camp in the Rzuchowski Forest, four kilometers away, where the dead bodies are unloaded, stripped of jewelry and gold teeth, and burned to ashes. After ten minutes of airing, the truck is driven back to “the castle” to get ready for the next load. Between September 3 and 12, 1942, a total of 15,859 people, young, sick, and old, are dispatched from the ghetto in Łódź and delivered to the gas vans in Chełmno.