|
...The
liquidation of the Jews in the Government-General began at
Passover 1942. The first victims were the Jews of the city of
Lublin, and shortly after that the Jews of the whole District
of Lublin. They were evacuated to Belzec, and there they were
killed in new gas-chambers that had been built specially for
this purpose. The Jewish Underground newspapers gave detailed
descriptions of this mass slaughter. But [the Jews of] Warsaw
did not believe it! Common human sense could not understand
that it was possible to exterminate tens and hundreds of
thousands of Jews. They decided that the Jews were being
transported for agricultural work in the parts of Russia
occupied by the Germans. Theories were heard that the Germans
had begun on the productivization of the Jewish lower-level
bourgeoisie! The Jewish press was denounced and charged with
causing panic, although the descriptions of the
"rooting out" of the population corresponded
accurately to the reality. Not only abroad were the crimes of
the Germans received with disbelief, but even here, close by
Ponary, Chelmno, Belzec and Treblinka, did this information
get no hearing! This unjustified optimism developed together
with the lack of information, which was the result of total
isolation from the outside world and the experience of the
past. Had not the Germans for two and a half years carried out
many deportations of Jews from Cracow, from Lublin, from the
Warsaw District and from the "Reich?" Certainly
there had been not a few victims and blood had been shed
during these deportations, but total extermination?
There
were some people who believed it, however. The events at
Ponary and Chelmno were a fact, but it was said "that was
just a capricious act of the local authorities." For,
after all, the German authorities in the Government-General
did not have the same attitude to the ghettoes in the cities
and the small towns, not until death brought an equal fate to
all. More than once, in various places, the reaction to the
information we had about the liquidation of the Jews was:
"That cannot happen to us here."
It
was of course the Germans themselves who created these
optimistic attitudes. Through two and a half years they
prepared the work of exterminating the three and a half
million Jews of Poland with German thoroughness. They rendered
the Jewish masses helpless with the aid of individual
killings, oppression and starvation, with the aid of ghettos
and deportations. In years of unceasing experiments the
Germans perfected their extermination methods. In Vilna they
had needed several days to murder a thousand Jews, in Chelmno
half an hour was enough to kill a hundred, and at Treblinka
ten thousand were murdered every day!...
Yad
Vashem Archives, O-25/96.
*
From a report by Yitzhak Cukierman in Warsaw in March 1944,
and sent to London on May 24, 1944, through the Polish
Underground. |
