EVENTS JULY 29-August 5, 1942. ENTRY AUGUST 5, 1942. N.L. I have here recorded, in the past few days, without recapitulating and so without facing the tendency of the deportations, a number of separate episodes that clearly pointed that tendency—the executions in the Pawiak, the reappearance of “Frankenstein,” the use of whips in the Ceglana-Twarda resettlement actions, the account of brutality in the Umschlagplatz from the man who escaped through the railroad yard, and especially the free and easy use of pistols during house searches to dispose of any hiding, ill, argumentative, or appellant Jews: cases cited from Ceglana, Solna, Orla Streets. It is now time for me to face up to a recapitulation and to the curve of facts:
There has been a crescendo of violence in the resettlement. It makes us wonder: where are these people being taken, and for what?
I see, in looking back over these notes, that I registered, a week ago today, a mystification over hearing widespread shooting for the first time. It now appears to me that that day, July 29, marked the beginning of a second phase in the resettlement action. Up to that time, Jewish police had been managing the selections; since then, the work has been increasingly handled by Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Latvians, with the Jewish Ordnungsdienst men acting more and more as sentinels, messengers, searchers, servants, and onlookers. Before the twenty-ninth, there had been little shooting; since then, there have been many, many deaths. In the first phase, refugees, beggars, incurables, prisoners, and the unemployed were evacuated; in the second, the Germans began entering factories and taking perfectly sound workers. Some smaller shops were entirely evacuated. Before July 29, the selections were for the most part house-to-house affairs; in recent days, entire blocks have been cut off, by barbed wire and human cordons, and searched.
The deportations have also become increasingly haphazard and unpredictable. Wives and children of men with valid Ausweise are supposed to be spared, but I have heard of several cases of workers returning home from their shops at night to find their entire families gone. Ausweise themselves are sometimes not respected. A Jewish policeman witnessed the accosting of one of our ZITOS workers in the street by a German, and when the man produced his Judenrat social-service Ausweis, the German said:
—— If you were really working, you wouldn’t have time to loiter about in the streets.
And he took the ZITOS man off.
According to the regulations, each deportee is supposed to be permitted to take along fifteen kilograms of baggage, but people taken thus in the streets, and even some taken in selections, have been dragged away without any belongings whatsoever.
A result of the increasing violence and uncertainty is that the Jews have become more and more stubborn about the deportations. At first many Jews reported voluntarily. Now almost none. You have to give old Rapaport credit: he got out a superb broadside, called Storm, the other day, warning the ghetto inhabitants that deportations might mean death, and urging them not to go to the Umschlagplatz voluntarily. The Germans, evidently sensing the growing resistance (passive though it has been) pulled their bread-and-marmalade stunt on July 29, 30, and 31, and again on August 2, 3, and 4. They actually kept their promise and handed out the food to those who reported.
Well, they didn’t stop at 70,000, as our optimists wanted us to believe they would. The figures: July 29—5,722; July 30—6,651; July 31—6,894; August 1—6,265; August 2—6,325; August 3—6,357; August 4—6,728. Total for the week, 44,942. Grand total to date, 92,376.
Now we know that the “candidates for resettlement” are loaded into boxcars at the Danzig Station sidings. One hundred Jews per car, approximately.
Destination—unknown.
EVENTS AUGUST 5–8, 1942. ENTRY AUGUST 8, 1942. N.L. FROM M. SCHORR….A discovery that changes everything. That changes nothing, really. Except that it kills hope, and that is nearly everything.
It is ironical that this discovery, which may be of the greatest value to the Jews here, should have been made by one of those men so hated by the entire Jewish community—a Jewish policeman. In general I feel rather sorry for the Jewish police. Originally most of them enlisted with a sincere conviction that the “Order Service” might fulfill the sense of that phrase: might bring order and might be of service; even Berson signed up with this conviction. In spite of themselves, and often without knowing what was happening to them, the Jewish police have been driven into becoming executors of German cruelty. Many would have withdrawn, as Berson did, but they felt that their position protected their families. I have seen a couple of them in agonies over this dilemma. In these two cases (Dickstein, Brotles) the decision to stay at a hated job in order to protect beloved relatives has had two tragic reversals in effect: it has made them openly hate their relatives and it has made them love their jobs, or at least seem to, so that they have become brutal, Gestapo-like policemen. Two years ago, Dickstein and Brotles were both gentle, respected, intelligent lawyers. Now they are monsters.
Anyhow, it was a policeman named Schorr who made the discovery to which I have referred. He came running to the Judenrat, when he was sure of his facts, and I was given the job of questioning him. Schorr told me he had been assigned to the Umschlagplatz, as an underling to the Junaks who do the policing there. His job was to assist in loading Jews into the boxcars on the Danzig Station sidings. He became interested in the cars. They were mostly steel-framed, wooden-walled vans of German, Czech, and French manufacture, and they had various markings on them. Schorr says that he found that reading the numbers on the cars kept his mind off unpleasant thoughts, and soon he had a habit of scanning these numbers rather systematically. Schorr was a journalist before the war: he says he never had the slightest mathematical inclination that he was aware of. At any rate, one day he memorized the serial markings on three German-type cars full of Jews, the doors of which he himself sealed, intending to watch for the cars’ return. He thought he might be able to tell by the number of days or weeks the cars were gone approximately how far into Russia the deportees are being taken; it would, he realized, give only the barest approximation.
The transport with the three cars whose numbers he had memorized left at about ten o’clock on the morning of August 5. All three cars were back the same afternoon, empty.
Schorr thought he had made some mistake. He thought perhaps the cars had been shunted to another siding, without his having noticed it, and had never left the yards (though he had sealed those three cars, and he had not seen any cars evacuated on the sidings during the day). He had read the markings on the new empties that afternoon by sheer chance—or rather, by force of habit, obsessively. He was not willing to believe his own eyes.
Accordingly, next morning, as he sealed Jews into a newly made-up train, he noted that two of the same three cars were in the train. As the train started up, he asked a Junak the time. (The Junaks, it seems, all have nice wristwatches; one wonders how procured.) It was 9:37 a.m. Schorr saw the train all the way out of the yards.
The two cars came back into the yards on a load of empties which halted on Siding Seven at 3:43 p.m.
Schorr timed four cars the next day. All left on the same train at 10:03 a.m. Three came back in at 4:07 p.m. The fourth came in on another train at 4:19.
It then occurred to Schorr that the serial markings might be repeated on all cars of various given types. He therefore procured a piece of chalk from his headquarters next day, and as he locked each door in a transport of fourteen cars, he marked a small x beside the lock; it must have seemed, to anyone who saw him, a perfectly normal, rather conscientious thing to be doing. The transport left at 9:42 a.m. Eleven of his fourteen x‘s were back at 3:51 that afternoon.
So. Though it takes a through train at least twenty hours to the Russian border on the Bialystok-Minsk line, and a load of miserable Jews could hardly be considered “through” cargo, so would take much longer, it actually requires only three hours for our Jews to be “resettled in the East”—to go to “labor duty on the Russian front.” It takes three hours for the trains to come back again. Six hours altogether. Our Jews are being “resettled” somewhere just outside Warsaw. What is this?