During the months between September 1942 until December 1942, the transports continued to roll into Belzec daily and the slaughter continued unabated. From Galicia, the Lublin District, Krakow, and a number of other cities, towns, and villages, the Jews were rounded up and shipped to Belzec. In the month of September, major deportations took place from Bilgoraj, Kolomea, Stanislawow, Stryj, and Sanok, and on October 28, 1942, 7,000 Jews were deported from Krakow, with further deportations from Kolomea, Stryj, and Sandomierz. In November, the last major deportation from Lvov took place over three days from November 18–21, 1942, where between 8,000 to 10,000 Jews were taken to Belzec.
Rudolf Reder witnessed the particularly brutal killing of Azriel Szeps, the vice president of the Zamosc Judenrat, during November 1942:
It was around November 15, when the weather had already turned cold and snow and mud covered the ground. A large transport from Zamosc arrived like many others in the middle of a blizzard. The transport contained the whole Judenrat (Jewish Council).[115]
Everyone was standing there naked and, in the normal course of events, the men were driven to the chambers and the women to the barracks where hair was shaved off. But the President of the Judenrat[116] was ordered to remain in the yard. As the Askars herded the transport to be killed, a whole parade of SS men stood around the President of the Judenrat. I do not know his name, I saw a middle-aged man as white as a corpse and completely calm.[117]
The SS-men ordered the orchestra to move into the yard and await orders. The orchestra made up of six musicians usually played in the space between the gas chambers and the graves. They played without a break, on instruments gotten from the murdered. I was working then on some masonry work and saw them all. The SS-men ordered the orchestra to play the tune, ‘Es geht alles vorbei’ and ‘Drei Lilien, kommt ein Reiter gefahren, bricht der Lilien.’ They played on violins, flutes and an accordion.
This went on for some time. Afterwards they stood the President of the Zamosc Judenrat against a wall and beat him with lead-tipped canes, mostly about the head and face, until the blood flowed. Jirmann, the fat Gestapo man Schwarz, Schmidt, and several Askars carried out the torture. They ordered their victim to dance and jump to their blows and the music.
After several hours, they brought him a quarter-loaf of bread and forced him with beatings to eat it. He stood there with the blood trickling down, indifferent, serious and I didn’t hear a single moan. This man’s tribulations continued for seven hours. The SS-men stood laughing: “Das ist eine hohere Person, Prasident des Judenrates’ (This is a dignitary, the head of the Judenrat), they called out with loud, cruel bravado. Not until six p.m. did the Gestapo-man Schmidt push him along to the edge of the grave, shoot him in the head, and kick him onto the heap of gassed corpses.[118]
Reder, at the end of November 1942, was sent under escort to Lvov to collect sheet metal by Fritz Jirmann. Reder recounted what happened next:
I went there, loaded into a truck with four Gestapo-men and a sentry. In Lemberg (Lvov), after a whole day loading sheet metal I was left alone in the truck with one hoodlum guarding me. The rest went off to have a little fun. I sat there for a few hours without thinking or moving. Then I chanced to notice that my guard had dozed off and was snoring. By reflex, without a moments thought, I slipped out of the truck; the thug was still asleep.
I stood on the sidewalk, for a while longer, I pretended to be fussing with something near the sheet metal, and then I moved slowly away. Legionow Street was very busy. I pulled my cap down. The street was dark and no-one saw me. I remembered where my landlady lived, a Polish woman, and made my way there. She hid me.[119]
Right to the end of its operational life the horrors of Belzec continued, and Mieczyslaw Nieduzak testified in Belzec on October 17, 1945, about several instances of brutality:
During the time of the death camp in Belzec was being built and then in operation, I lived in Rawa Ruska. Towards the end of 1942 I travelled through Belzec station and while waiting there for a train, I began a conversation with the ‘Blacks’ as I know the Russian language well; the ‘Blacks’ began to tell me certain things about the death camp.
One of these ‘Blacks’ boasted to me how he had torn a young Jewish girl from her mother—a young girl who had clung tightly to her mother—seized her by the hair and with all his strength beaten her against a post so that her spine was broken and the girl was killed instantly.
The other told me of the following occurrence; as he drove the Jews into the gas chambers, one of them hit him on the head with a piece of wood; he was forced to shoot this Jew. A third ‘Black’ told the following story; A Jew who had knocked a ‘Black’ to the ground was punished in the following way—by being tied to a post and rubbed so hard with a goosefeather floor polisher that his naked bones showed. They only stopped when he lost consciousness. This happened before the eyes of the Jews who were employed in the death camp and had been forced to watch.
When I began to ask questions about how the Jews were killed in the gas chambers, they broke off the conversation with the advice that I should not ask that.[120]
The last transports to arrive at the Belzec death camp came from Rohatyn on December 8, 1942, and Rawa Ruska between December 7–11, 1942, where between 2,000 and 2,500 were murdered.
With these final transports Belzec ceased its mass murder function, and for the rest of its existence the death camp staff and prisoners exhumed and burned the Jewish victims that had crossed its threshold. The next chapter will cover in greater detail what happened between November 1942 until March 1943.