The last major deportation from Warsaw to Treblinka took place on Monday, September 21, 1942. Just another day for most of the world, but for us it was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. We believe it’s the day when God decides each person’s fate, and on it, we ask for forgiveness for sins we have committed during the previous year.
The timing of that train journey could not have been more sadistic. The Jews’ fate was decided by the Nazis. All hope was extinguished.
Then they came for us.
My father describes the night before the first of Tomaszów Mazowiecki’s Jews boarded the trains to Treblinka:
All night long these wretched people waited for the train, under strict orders not to move from their places. Jews kept arriving, on foot or in carts — all of them goaded on by the Germans or Ukrainians with truncheons or rifle butts. These vented their rage, too, on the Jewish police, who were trying their best to lessen the suffering of the internees by giving them water or being asked to find the parents of children gone astray in the turmoil.
I know this was my father’s own personal experience. He was beaten with rifle butts for trying to be kind. I remember seeing him coming home that night with dried blood caked on his face and my mother trying to clean him up. The next day, he was obliged to go out again. He writes:
At dawn on Friday, October 30, most of the Jews were crammed into railway wagons. Families were torn apart. Increasing numbers of Jews expelled from their townlets began to arrive.
The station area was, however, too small to absorb all the arrivals, so some of them were sent into town, to be deported together with the Jews of Tomaszów to their unknown destination.
Some of those were shot to death. The others were crammed into empty factory halls. Local Jews wanted to give them food and water but were prevented from doing so by the Ukrainians.
On October 30, the cattle trains from Tomaszów Mazowiecki transported over 7,500 Jewish people to Treblinka. They were all gassed and then cremated on open pyres.
The apocalypse alighted upon the ghetto the next day, our Sabbath. We awoke to a dawn chorus of rifle butts smashing front doors open.
They had come for me. A four-year-old.
We were heading for Selektion.
Selection.
A word as chilling as Treblinka.
Its meaning?
Life or death.
Chapter Four. Caligula’s Thumb
Just in case we didn’t get the message the first time, it was repeated in Polish and Yiddish. The soldiers were bellowing into bullhorns. They were screaming the commands that every Jew dreaded.
“Alle Juden raus. Alle Juden raus”.
The words were full of venom. The guards knew just how brutally the day was going to play out. They had their orders. No matter how many times they had killed before, they were psyching themselves up to spill even more blood. They were creating confusion and panic, breaking down our resistance to make it easier to herd us wherever they wanted.
Mama had time to put a coat on me to protect me against the cold. We stumbled into the courtyard, through an archway and into the street. We were surrounded by soldiers in different-colored uniforms shouting orders at us from all directions. Their eyes bulged from hatred and the exertion of yelling. Some leaned backward, pulling on the choke collars of their attack dogs to rein them in. The dogs breathed in our collective fear. Their slobbering, slavering jaws wanted to know what terror tasted like. They were itching to feast on it. Their claws drummed the cobblestones in frustration. Those awful, terrible dogs. Snarling, growling, baying. Merciless.
Down on the cobbles of Krzyżowa Street, I felt smaller than ever before. The soldiers all towered above me. Through half-closed eyes, I scanned our tormentors. I tried not to twist my head, to avoid attracting attention from the wall of helmeted skulls, baring their teeth, like a pack of wolves, contorting their faces as they spat out their bile.
I didn’t know what kind of weapons the guards were carrying. I only knew that they looked more dangerous than the rifles that cracked and the pistols that popped. All the while, the soldiers swiveled their guns from side to side in a sweeping motion. I was afraid they would open fire at any moment. It felt as though the guns kept coming back to point directly at me. It was terrifying for a four-year-old. And now, having reread my father’s contribution to the Yizkor book, I understand what I was witnessing: “All of the Jews of the ghetto were ousted from their houses into the courtyards, where the Jewish police, and Gestapo, Ukrainians and Blue Police armed with submachine guns as if going into battle, were waiting for them”.
I now know that the Blue Police my father refers to were Polish police officers, or “murderers in uniform”, as they’ve been labeled by historian Jan Grabowski, a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Ottawa.
The only officers who didn’t have guns were the Jewish policemen, like my father. “From the houses more and more Jews arrived, guarded by Jewish policemen. These Jews had been given severe warnings by Commandant Pichler”, he writes.
Pichler’s Reich police unit comprised former soldiers who were members of the Nazi party and affiliated to the SS. They were as brutal as any fanatical Jew-hating storm trooper.
What seems obvious to me from my father’s testimony is that the Jewish policemen were told by Pichler there would be dire consequences if they disobeyed orders to help round up their fellow Jews. Because then my father writes: “And therefore, a Jewish policeman had to escort his own family, lest they be killed on the spot”. It must have been so heartbreaking for him.
Holding their weapons at waist height, the soldiers aimed at us and ordered us to line up. They were organizing us as if we were about to march in a parade. We had to stand still and not move a muscle. I kept quiet and was conscious of the bustle of ill-shod shuffling feet, nervous snatched conversations and all of us breathing heavily with fear and exertion. Suddenly, I was shaken by the jarring rasp of guns being fired.
“Shots rang out nearby, the first victims fell and there were many wounded, crying for help”, writes my father. He goes on:
The Jews threw down their rucksacks and bundles and lined up in rows of five, to form twenty or twenty-five rows, and thus under armed guard, marched toward the former hospital in Wiecznsość Street leaving behind them the dead and the wounded, who fell on the way, unable to keep up with the forced pace.
We filed down Krzyżowa Street and turned right when we reached the bottom. Other children were whimpering. I knew better than to cry. Mama had taught me well. Some were carried in their parents’ arms and had a clear view of the carnage. I was surrounded by people taller than me, but through the gaps, I saw corpses on the ground. Blood trickling along the flagstones. I heard people wailing as they passed bodies they recognized. My father picks up the story: