“Listen Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and all your might”.
I wonder if they had time to make their peace in that way, as did other Jews heading for the gas chambers in Birkenau. I can picture what happened to them. After struggling to climb down from the truck, along with other Jews condemned to death, they would have heard guttural German voices ordering them to walk toward the pit dug by their son and others. Pearl and Emanuel didn’t speak German; they must have been completely confused. I suspect their last moments were spent agonizing over what the Nazis might do to the rest of their family.
I doubt they would have stared at the muzzles pointing at them. So many were shot in the back. One would have heard the bullets that killed the other, a fraction of a second before he or she fell, too. Sometimes, after a massacre, the ground would heave as those buried alive tried in vain to dig themselves out. More than anything, I hope they weren’t still breathing when the earth was heaped upon them. I pray the soil didn’t move after the shovels were tossed into the back of the truck that had been their hearse, and the slave laborers were driven away to perform that task again another day.
All the while, life was getting harder in the ghetto. Every household was stricken with hunger. Old people collapsed and died in the streets. Children who were allowed out of their homes begged for food on the sidewalks. A soup kitchen set up by community leaders had long ceased operating. A good-hearted young man called David Goldman, who’d prepared meals specifically for children, contracted typhus and passed away. The cramped, unhygienic living conditions meant typhus ripped through the ghetto like wildfire.
And things were about to get worse. For two years, we had lived in darkness after sunset. But on October 23, the ghetto was suddenly brightly illuminated by streetlights that hadn’t operated since 1940. All the lights on the perimeter of our prison were turned on. People were dazzled by the glare and their broken spirits darkened further. If I think back hard enough, I can recall looking out of the window after dusk and thinking the street was brighter than in daytime. The lights made us realize that we had nowhere to hide.
Nazi volunteers from Ukraine materialized, dressed in black uniforms and carrying submachine guns. They were joined by men from Poland and Lithuania.
“They were all wearing steel helmets and armed for battle. Sounds of firing were soon heard and first victims fell”, recalls my father in the Yizkor book. “In the light, the angels of death who surrounded the ghetto had a better view of the living targets they would fire at and could thus relish the horrors they would inflict on the ghetto”.
Reading such descriptions in the Yizkor book helped to rekindle memories buried deep inside me. I always had a vague recollection of hearing shooting, feeling terrified and watching the traumatized faces of the people with whom I lived. It was painful to relive those terrible days. At the same time, thanks to my father’s witness testimony, written after the war, I was able to put that part of my childhood into context and in a historical timeline.
Six days after the ghetto was floodlit, Jewish anxieties reached fever pitch. Ghetto inhabitants were convinced there were going to be deportations to death camps. In a swirling fog of rumor and counter rumor, they gathered outside the headquarters of the Judenrat, demanding answers. The crowd’s agitation was a source of potential trouble for Hans Pichler, the regional commander of the Schutzpolizei, the Nazi Reich police. He wanted to calm the mood and calculated that using his troops would not have the desired effect. So he passed the problem to the Judenrat—in other words, Jewish community leaders — giving them the unenviable task of implementing German decrees.
My father takes up the story in the Yizkor book:
In the evening, the Gestapo, led by Meister Pichler, made their appearance. Pichler told the Jewish police and the sanitation workers to calm the crowd, saying that “everything was quite all right” and assuring it that all the people in the ghetto would remain and none would be deported.
I presume my father was one of the policemen commanded to get the crowd under control on that day, October 29, 1942. If so, he would have had to pass on the Gestapo edict that anyone caught spreading false rumors about deportations would be shot. The crowd had little alternative but to disperse. It goes without saying that the assurances were a lie.
Then my father writes, “But later that evening a group of Jewish policemen, and with them German and Ukrainian police armed with submachine guns, appeared at the station, where hundreds of Jewish men, women, children and even tiny babies born that day or the day before were already assembled”.
It’s important to emphasize that the Jewish police didn’t have guns. They had truncheons for crowd control. The Germans didn’t arm the Jewish police in case they turned on their tormentors and opened fire. As I sat reading the Yizkor book, I could sense the pain my father went through as the noose tightened around the ghetto.
Throughout that day, hundreds of Jews from neighboring towns and villages were funneled at gunpoint into a barbed-wire stockade, hastily erected in a field next to the station, about a mile northeast of the ghetto.
The crowd became increasingly agitated as the hours went by. Day turned into night, and all the while, more Jews were pushed into the field, taunted and prodded with rifle butts. The Gestapo berated the Jewish policemen. Here again, I’m sure my father is talking about orders he received himself: “Mach mal ordnung mit dem Juden-Gesindel”[2].
It’s obvious the Germans wanted the Jewish policemen to use violence against their own people. But I’m certain that when those like my father failed to carry out the Germans’ demands, the Gestapo piled into the stockade and began lashing out. Because my father wrote that the Gestapo “hurled themselves into the crowd to impose order on the babies and their mothers, who were waiting for the train to take them somewhere or other..”.
My father doesn’t identify the train’s destination. Perhaps at that stage, he genuinely didn’t know, because I think it’s highly unlikely the Germans would have revealed that the train was heading to Treblinka.
Treblinka is a name that makes me shudder to this day. It’s a name the world needs to remember, even though it no longer exists. The Germans destroyed the camp in 1943 to try to hide evidence of their war crimes. All that stands in its place is a giant Neolithic-style stone memorial, surrounded by a sea of sharp rocks, shaped like sharks’ teeth, pointing toward the sky. At the foot of the centerpiece is a stone, chiseled into the form of a burned book, inscribed with the words “Never Again”.
Treblinka was hidden in a forest, fifty miles northeast of Warsaw. It contained six gas chambers and was one of six extermination camps built by the Nazis with the sole intention of eradicating Poland’s 2 million Jews. With characteristic German efficiency, the Nazis improved the rail connections to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto and Central Poland, where I lived, to accelerate the mass murder of Jews.
That means that somewhere in an office within the Third Reich, there was a master statistician with a warped mind, who calculated the extra number of railway tracks and switch points and signals required to ensure the death trains ran like clockwork. Psychopaths alone were incapable of implementing the Holocaust. And they were dependent on an army of complicit drones, as well as highly educated professionals to lubricate the mundane logistics of industrial slaughter. I wonder what happened to that little man with his pencil sharpener, his pristine blue-squared math books and his multiplication tables. Did he survive the war? Did he end up in the dock at the Nuremberg trials? Or did he manage to slip away and reinvent himself as a railway administrator after the armistice? The statistician may not have pulled a trigger or popped a Zyklon B canister down a gas-chamber chute, but he surely was a war criminal.