On June 22, 1941, Nazi troops invaded the Soviet Union in what came to be called Operation Barbarossa, after the medieval king Frederick I, who was nicknamed Barbarossa (red beard). This assault represented what Holocaust historian Martin Gilbert described as “a tragic turning-point in German policy towards the Jews.”1
Soviet troops gave way under the onslaught, and thousands of Russian Jews fell into enemy hands. In the cities, the Nazis set up ghettos as they had done in Poland: Minsk, Bialystok, Vilna, Kiev. In the countryside, they did not bother deporting Jews; they rounded them up and killed them on the spot. During the first five weeks of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazis killed more Jews than they had killed in the previous eight years.2
Behind the tanks and troops and cannons of war came the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units). Formed by Reinhard Heydrich, whose order had created the ghettos, these rear-guard units had one purpose: to kill Jews. Four squads, designated A through D, followed a set procedure when they swept through a newly conquered area. Once the sweep began, the unit would enter a town and order all Jews to assemble for resettlement: “They were requested to hand over their valuables . . . and shortly before the execution to surrender their outer clothing,” said Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D. “The men, women, and children were led to a place of execution which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated anti-tank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses were thrown into the ditch.”3
When asked how many Jews his group had killed in this manner, Ohlendorf answered promptly, “Ninety thousand!” This was one squad, over a single twelve-month period. The Einsatzgruppen lasted for almost two years; no one knows exactly how many Jews they killed, but estimates run as high as 2 million.4
In cities with large Jewish populations, the Nazis turned killing into a science. Wherever possible, they found a site that could be specially adapted to their murderous purposes. Ponar, Babi Yar, Ninth Fort—these were some of the killing places, each one near enough to a major city to be accessible, but far enough away to be “discreet.”
Vilna was a main target for the Einsatzgruppen, perhaps because Jews accounted for one third of the city’s population. When the Germans took the city, fifty-seven thousand Jews lived there. Six months later, only twenty thousand remained alive.5 The rest were killed in the woods of Ponar, twelve kilometers outside the city.
The Germans sent people to Ponar by the truckload, claiming they were bound for a concentration camp. Abba Kovner, who later became a leader in the Jewish underground, was among the first to realize that the “concentration camp” was a ruse. On December 31, 1941, he issued a proclamation to an assembly of Jewish youth: “Ponar is not a concentration camp. [The deported Jews] have all been shot there. Hitler plans to destroy all the Jews of Europe, and the Jews of Lithuania have been chosen as the first in line.”6 Kovner called upon the Jews of Vilna to fight; but only a few were willing to believe he was right about the mass murders. Such a thing would be too terrible, even for Nazis.
The Jews of Kiev in the Ukraine faced similar horror at a ravine called Babi Yar. Over two days at the end of September 1941, it became the site of the largest single shooting massacre of the Holocaust.7 On September 29 and 30, posters all over the city called Jews to assemble for “resettlement.” More than thirty-three thousand obeyed the order, and were promptly taken to Babi Yar to be killed and cast into the ravine.
In Kovno, the place of death was Ninth Fort, one of a series of forts ringing the city. The forts protected Kovno from invasion during war, and in times of peace served as maximum-security prisons. Ninth Fort was close to the Kovno ghetto, so the Germans used it for imprisoning and killing thousands of Jews.
The Kovno ghetto was divided into two sections, known simply as the “big ghetto” and the “small ghetto.” In October 1941, German policemen and Lithuanian collaborators broke into the small ghetto and began driving Jews out of their homes. Assemble in the street and line up in marching columns, the policemen yelled. The Jews did as they were told, too stunned to do otherwise. Avraham Tory called it “a procession of mourners grieving over themselves.”8
In their quest for more “efficient” methods of killing, the Einsatzgruppen began using poison gas instead of machine guns to kill their victims. Engineers trans-formed ordinary covered trucks into portable gas chambers. Unsuspecting prisoners boarded the trucks for a journey to a “new location.” What they found was death. The driver simply started the engine and floored the accelerator, pumping lethal exhaust into the sealed truck. Fifteen minutes later, everyone inside was dead.
While Soviet Jews died in vast massacres, Polish Jews were still trying to survive in their ghettos. They did not realize yet that the threat that had hung over them for so long was actually a death sentence from which there was no appeal. They remained trapped between their own inability to believe the unbelievable and the Nazi talent for deception. Chaim Rumkowski told the people of Lodz that work had made them safe. Never mind the rumors, he said. So long as the Nazis needed what the ghetto could produce, Jewish workers would survive. He, Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, would see to that.
Adam Czerniakow of Warsaw was neither so trusting nor so confident of his own ability to “save” anyone. Although a growing sense of doom weighed on him as conditions worsened, he could not bring himself to believe that Jews chosen for “resettlement” were in fact going to their deaths. Such a thing seemed too monstrous to be true.
Adolf Hitler was a master of big, monstrous lies: “The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed,” he once said.
The vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one.9
Again and again in the short, bloody history of the ghettos, the Nazis tricked Jews into acting against their own best interests. Mark Gotfried, the teacher whose selections for the Tarnopol ghetto council were executed on the spot, was not the only person victimized by this ruse. By the summer and early autumn of 1942, the Nazis had used this deception in one ghetto after another and one situation after another.
For many desperate people, suicide became the ultimate act of defiance. Though Jewish tradition affirms the sanctity of life, Jewish history acknowledges times when suicide is acceptable, as a form of kiddush hashem.
In A.D. 70 at the mountain fortress of Masada in Palestine, one thousand Jewish freedom fighters killed themselves rather than surrender to Roman troops. During the Crusades of the Middle Ages, entire Jewish communities committed suicide rather than renounce their faith and accept Christian baptism. In the doomed ghettos of the Holocaust, the only way many Jews could take back their lives was by choosing the time and manner of their deaths.
There were many ways to die in the ghetto. People jumped out of windows, swallowed poison, or hanged themselves. Those with patience simply quit eating and let nature take its course. “Probably the most modern way of [committing suicide],” observed Oskar Singer of Lodz, “is to let oneself be shot by someone duty-bound to do so. . . . In the first days of the ghetto this was very simple. All you had to do was approach the barbed wire and look as if you were about to cross it—and immediately, the liberating shot was fired.”10 This happened so often that people of the ghetto had a name for it: “suicide at the barbed wire.”
Some people committed suicide to escape the pain of living. Others did it to escape the pain of dying under Nazi torture. Adam Czerniakow, leader of the Warsaw ghetto, took his own life because he could not bear to take the lives of others.
For two long years, Czerniakow walked a tightrope between cooperation and collaboration. He fully expected to lose his balance one day. That was the reason he kept the cyanide capsules in his desk; to be ready for the order he could not and would not obey. It came on July 22, 1942.
SS Major Hermann Hofle marched into Czerniakow’s office and announced that all the Jews of Warsaw were to be deported to the East. Thousands would leave every day; packed into cattle cars, bound for an unnamed destination. Hofle demanded six thousand people that afternoon, assembled at the railroad siding and ready for transport. The next day he wanted more, and that was just the beginning.
This was the “great deportation” Czerniakow had feared for so long. In the past, he had managed to believe that deportees from Warsaw were simply resettled in a new location. He could not believe that any longer. These men, women, and children were not going to work camps; they were going to extermination centers.
Late in the afternoon on July 23, Adam Czerniakow made what was to be his final diary entry: “It is three o’clock. So far, four thousand are ready to go. The orders are that there must be nine thousand by four o’clock.”11
At four o’clock, he took the cyanide. He died at his desk, leaving nothing but his diary and a note to his wife, containing two short sentences: “[They want] me to kill children with my own hands. There is no other way out and I must die.”12
Calel Perechodnik, the young Jewish policeman who only wanted to “live normally” in spite of the war, saw his life destroyed in a single afternoon. It began on a Wednesday in August 1942, when the SS came to the Otwock ghetto. The officers rode in a limousine; behind them came a troop truck. Soon the sound of gunfire was everywhere in the streets, and the Jews had no place to run.
The survivors were ordered to assemble in the town square on the morning of August 19, 1942. The Jews of Otwock knew what that meant: Hundreds, even thousands, of them would be loaded into cattle cars and shipped to some unknown destination. Most would never return.
Desperate to save his wife and child, Perechodnik sought advice from Commander Kronenberg of the Jewish police. There was nothing to worry about, the commander assured him; policemen’s families would be safe. Bring them to the square, and they will be freed after a brief inspection.
Anka Perechodnik did not want to go. There was something suspicious about this amnesty for policemen’s families; exactly what she could not say, but something. Perechodnik trusted Kronenberg’s assurances and brought his family to the town square.
While they waited to be processed and released, the Jewish police received orders to assemble outside the station. Standing in orderly rows on that hot August day, they listened in dumbfounded misery to the instructions of the Gestapo. They would go through the ghetto, confiscating “abandoned” personal property and disposing of corpses. When the job was completed to the satisfaction of the SS, all policemen would go to the Karczew labor camp to work until the end of the war. The ghetto at Otwock would be no more.
As for wives, the commander’s wife and four others who had remained at the station would accompany their husbands to Karczew. Those who went to the square would have to “go away” with the other residents of the ghetto. Too late, Perechodnik realized how skillfully he had been manipulated into betraying his wife and child. Anka Perechodnik and her daughter Athalie were loaded into a cattle car on a train bound for the death camp at Treblinka. Calel would never see them again.
From that terrible day onward, Calel Perechodnik saw his life in a whole new way: “Even if I should survive . . . I cannot live a normal life and look at happy people. I will not remain in Poland, I will not build a new hearth, and I will never be a useful member of society. So what can happen to me? Neither Jew nor Catholic nor a decent man, not even a thief—simply a nobody.”13
While Perechodnik had watched in helpless horror, another Jewish policeman made a different choice. After the announcement, Abram Willendorf had walked quietly from the police station to the town square. Without a word, he threw aside his policeman’s armband, sat down beside his wife and son, and calmly waited for the transport that would take them all to Treblinka.
In the same group with the Willendorfs and his own family, Perechodnik saw the Jew Schussler and his German wife. Although she was Volksdeutsch (of pure German blood), she willingly followed her husband of forty years to the ghetto. Now she would follow him to the death camp. Seeing the loyalty of Frau Schussler and Abram Willendorf made Perechodnik feel even worse about his own failure.
Chaim Rumkowski of Lodz and Jacob Gens of Vilna kept going by convincing themselves that their duty was to ensure that the Jews would survive as a people. This belief led both of them to participate in actions that would horrify most people.
“King Chaim” Rumkowski, the “Eldest of the Jews,” began the year 1942 with his usual blustering confidence. Against all evidence to the contrary, he believed that he had great influence with the German commander and that even in Berlin he was well regarded.
When rumors of mass deportations swept through the ghetto, Rumkowski was quick to reassure the people that he was in full control of the ghetto’s destiny, and therefore they had nothing to fear: “I don’t like to waste words. The stories circulating today are one hundred percent false . . . only those who are, in my opinion, deserving of such a fate will be resettled elsewhere.”14
After slipping that veiled threat into his monologue, Rumkowski proceeded to brag about his rescue-through-work program, and his own high status with the Germans: “The authorities are full of admiration for the work which has been performed in the ghetto and it is due to that work that they have confidence in me.” As proof of this claim, he cited the recent “approval of my motion to reduce the number of deportees from 20,000 to 10,000.”15 If he gave any indication of the grim irony in this “achievement,” no one left a record of it.
Nine months later, Rumkowski faced another deportation order, calling for children under ten and adults over sixty-five. This time, he could not talk the Nazis out of their plan.
On September 4, 1942, a stunned Chaim Rumkowski stood before the people of Lodz and told them the news: “We have to accept the evil order. I have to perform this bloody operation myself; I simply must cut off limbs to save the body! I have to take away the children, because otherwise others will also be taken.”16 Rumkowski performed this selection, still convinced in his own mind that he was “saving” Jewish life.
Jacob Gens was less proud and self-important than Rumkowski, though equally “realistic” in his decisions: “It is true that our hands are smeared with the blood of our brethren, but we had to accept this horrible task,” he once told the Jews of Vilna. “It is our duty to save the strong and the young and not let sentiment overcome us. . . . I personally take responsibility for all that has happened. I don’t want any discussion. I have called you to explain why a Jew dips his hands in blood . . .”17
Gens made this speech a few days after deporting four hundred elderly Jews in order to save six hundred younger ones. By this time, he surely knew the fate of the deportees. He could not hide behind the convenient fiction of “resettlement” to ease his conscience or justify himself to the Jewish community. Still, he made the selections, and still he sent Jewish police to track down those who failed to appear.
Militant young Jews began to realize something that the older generations could not bring themselves to believe: The Nazis actually meant to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth. It was time to fight, they said; but the councils believed that resistance would lead to the utter destruction of the ghettos.
Many younger Jews fled the ghettos to organize an underground, a secret fighting unit. Some slipped out under cover of darkness; others bribed their way past checkpoints or used false identification papers. Many of them linked up with Jews who had taken refuge in the forests of central Europe and the Soviet Union.