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From Institute News
No. 6 June 2005 by Dr. David Silberklang |
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In January 1942, according to Nazi estimates, there were nearly 2,300,000 Jews in the German Generalgouvernement (GG) in Poland. A year later, the Nazis estimated that fewer than 298,000 remained. Nearly 2,000,000 Jews had been murdered in less than a year. The data are similar proportionally for the Lublin District of the GG, or perhaps even more staggering. Whereas there were more than 300,000 Jews there in early 1942, there were only 20,000 (6.7%) still alive officially at the end of the year. These statistics are even more astonishing when the fact that the murder operation began only in mid-March of that year is taken into consideration. Nearly two million Polish Jews had been murdered in nine-and-a-half months within the framework of “Operation Reinhard,” arguably the largest murder operation of the Holocaust. From mid-August to mid-December 1942, more than 9,000 Jews were murdered daily in this operation. Approximately one million Jews were killed in the Lublin District itself in 1942-1943, including 99% of the local Jews, in Bełżec, Sobibór, in mass shootings, and in Majdanek. This reflects the centrality of Lublin and its SS chief, Odilo Globocnik, to this operation to murder all the Jews of the GG, as well as to a variety of earlier German anti-Jewish and demographic policies. This was “Operation Reinhard,” and it was based in Lublin. Several of the topics addressed in this research are reflected in the story of one family – Therese Borger in Lublin, and her mother, Bertha Langer. In February 1942, Bertha Langer, a sixty-five-year-old Jewish woman living alone in Brünn (Brno), Moravia (the “Protectorate”), took ill. When her daughter, Therese Borger, in the Lublin ghetto, learned of this, she decided to bring her mother to Lublin in order to care for her. Ms. Borger wrote to the Judenrat requesting a letter of reference for the German authorities affirming that she had the financial means to support her mother. Then, on February 23, Ms. Borger submitted a written request, together with the Judenrat’s reference, to the district Population and Welfare Department (Bevölkerugswesen und Fürsorge; BuF) to bring her mother to Lublin. The next day, BuF-head Richard Türk forwarded the request to the mayor of Brünn for his approval. The mayor’s March 10 affirmative response reached Türk’s office ten days later. However, since Türk and the BuF department were then very busy with the mass deportations of Jews to Bełżec, which had begun on March 17, and with the deportations of Reich and other Jews into the district, Türk did not act on this matter for another six days. On March 26, in the midst of the deportations and murder, he informed Therese Borger that the resettlement of her mother to Lublin had been approved. On March 31, Bertha Langer was sent to Theresienstadt, where she was included in a deportation train bearing 1,000 Jews to Lublin. Upon arrival the next day in Lublin, the train was met at the station by Türk and SS- Obersturmführer Helmut Pohl, of the “Operation Reinhard” staff, or their respective subordinates. From there Bertha Langer was indeed resettled, in the fullest Nazi sense of the term. The story of Therese Borger and Bertha Langer points to a number issues relating to the deportations in the Lublin District in 1942. The first point is that Jews under Nazi rule could communicate with each other, albeit within very strict limitations. That is how Therese Borger learned of her mother’s illness. The second point is that forced population movements were consistently an integral part of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. Therese Borger and tens of thousands of other Jews from outside the Lublin District had been forcibly moved to the district between fall 1939 and summer 1941, while Bertha Langer’s deportation was one of many hundreds of deportations during 1942. The third point is that Jews in general – Therese Borger, the Lublin Judenrat, and Bertha Langer in this case – had no knowledge or premonition of what the Germans were planning for them. In addition, we see evidence of German deception of the Jews (and not merely a case of bureaucrats doing their job), as well as active German civilian participation in the murder of the Jews.
The Research Approach The research looks at the events as they unfolded, until the German retreat from the district in 1944, with an emphasis on the deportation and post-deportation period (1942-1944). Two main foci and connecting threads are forced population movements and forced labor. This book seeks to integrate German and Jewish sources to tell the story of the Holocaust in the Lublin District. Extensive use has been made herein of the hitherto largely untapped archive of the Judenrat in Lublin. This is, of course, in addition to much other Jewish and German source material. The two perspectives, German and Jewish, are used not only as mutual corroboration and to tell a fuller story, but also to reflect on each other through each other’s eyes. The result, it is hoped, is a richer and more thorough story than might be gathered from either body of material alone. Although this research approach seems self-evident, it has generally not been undertaken in connection with this district.
Contradictions and Continuity The Jews faced a measure of continuity in both the German personnel and their anti-Jewish policies. From the first moment of the German occupation until the last, they faced constant upheaval and forced relocation of large numbers of people, and they were confronted with forced labor. The research traces the development of these two constants in German anti-Jewish policy and analyzes them both as independent phenomena and as what became a prelude to what the Jews experienced in the deportations to death in 1942-1943.
Forced Labor Camps The civilian authorities and Globocnik’s SS men fought constantly for pre-eminence over Jewish forced labor. Ultimately, although both civilian and SS projects exploited many thousands of Jewish forced laborers, it was the SS that emerged dominant. During the course of the summer of 1940, especially in mid-August, SS troops swooped down on the Jews in Lublin and on Jewish communities across the district and in other districts in late-night raids that netted thousands of Jewish forced laborers. Globocnik’s main labor project in the summer and fall of 1940 was the “Grenzgraben” – digging defensive trenches between the San and Bug Rivers, along the southern border with the Soviet-held territories of Poland. The project was based around Bełżec and was run by SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Dolp, one of the most vicious and brutal SS officers in Globocnik’s command. The Bełżec complex consisted of eight camps spread over a 145 square kilometer expanse. Jews were brought to these camps from 57 communities, both in the Lublin District and from outside it (e.g., from Warsaw, Radom, and Częstochowa). Approximately 11,000 Jews (as well as 1,000 German Gypsies) worked at the camps at any given moment. The Lublin Judenrat appointed a Lagerrat for Bełżec, led by Dr. Wolf Fajgeles and Leon Zylberajch, whom the Jewish forced laborers accused of corruption and graft. The Lublin Judenrat sent food and supplies to the forced laborers, as did several other Judenräte and many family members. But all of this did not suffice. The living and working conditions in the camps were extremely harsh, and many died or emerged from the camps permanently maimed. The meager food rations and very poor living conditions led to outbreaks of dysentery and other diseases. In most of the Bełżec camps, the Jews slept on the bare ground, in broken, dark, damp, drafty and filthy or unfinished buildings, in haylofts, and in other unsuitable accommodations. They had no beds or blankets, and of course no sheets or pillows. Rooms that measured 30 square meters housed 75 men, less than half of a square meter per person. The Jews worked seven days a week, long hours, with brief breaks. Medical care was also limited, and even after several of the Judenräte sent doctors to the camps, the need for medical attention was so great and the resources so limited, that they were unable to help many forced laborers. The Bełżec labor camp complex was the largest group of a widespread network of dozens of forced labor camps across the district in 1940 and early 1941, with perhaps as many as 70,000 forced laborers. The Jewish forced laborers were gradually released form the Bełżec camp complex beginning in mid-October 1940, but here, too, the bickering and animosity between Globocnik’s SS men and Zörner’s civilian authorities resulted in more suffering for the Jews. They were shunted all over the GG, often to destinations far from their homes. Their trains were stalled or rushed ahead unexpectedly alternately by the SS or the civilians; some of them were re-kidnapped by the SS in order to be used in additional forced labor. By mid-December, the Bełżec camps were closed for all intents and purposes, save a small group of forced laborers left behind to clean up and perform various odd jobs. Less than a year later, Dolp was back at Bełżec, this time to construct a death camp. Some of the trenches dug by Jewish forced laborers in 1940 now formed the northern perimeter of the death camp. These trenches subsequently served as burial and burning pits for the corpses of the murdered Jews. The story of Jewish forced labor in the Lublin District in 1939-41 reflects the ideological and political centrality of Jews to the German authorities in the GG in general and in Lublin in particular. Whichever German authority controlled Jewish policy and forced labor also accrued power and influence. Thus, for ideological and power reasons many figures and offices in the various German bureaucracies in the Lublin District sought to control Jewish forced labor. The rivalry and animosity that resulted between Globocnik’s SS and the German civilian officials was so intense that the civilian authorities became unwilling to cooperate with the SS, and each side denigrated and tried to undermine the other at every turn. The ones who suffered terribly from this rivalry were the Jews, who, in addition to being treated so brutally also became pawns in an internal German power struggle. In this struggle, the Jews lost to both sides. Still, in 1940-41 the forced labor was also work with a German purpose, such as defense, improving the district’s infrastructure, production, harvesting crops, and so on. The Jews vividly remembered their bitter experience in these forced labor projects even many years later. These two points – SS-civilian rivalry and mutual animosity, and bitter Jewish memories of the forced labor – were factors that had an important role to play in the way deportations to death were conducted in 1942 and how the Jews reacted to these.
Deportations Many thousands of Jews tried to hide or flee when the deportations got underway in spring 1942, but this does not mean that they understood that the Nazis had begun an operation to kill every Jew. Their memories of round-ups, expulsions, and forced labor in 1939-1941 were sufficient for many to seek all ways to avoid being included among the deportees. The extreme brutality and mass murder in the streets that accompanied the 1942 deportations probably convinced even more Jews to hide or flee. But what they tried to evade was an extreme version of a now familiar phenomenon, and not the “Final Solution.” In a sense, they hid or fled for the wrong reasons, based on a misunderstanding, and this is what saved some of them.
Communications What did the Jews perceive as the deportations got underway? What did they do? It is clear that the Jews of Lublin had no premonitions of their fate and were taken by surprise by the deportations. Less than three days before the deportations began the Judenrat was still looking ahead to communal matzah baking for the upcoming Pesach holiday. At the same time, there is much evidence indicating that some Jews in Lublin and elsewhere began to discover the fate of the deportees very soon after the deportations began. As information spread, so, too, did attempts to evade the deportations. Those who managed to survive the initial deportations also informed friends and relatives in other places of what was happening in Lublin. They sent both pleas for help and warnings. Both the letters sent via the official post within the GG and to the outside world, and those sent clandestinely included cryptic messages, such as “Malach Hamowes is in die gass” (the Angel of Death is in the street), or “Uncle Gerush” (expulsion) has visited, or the destination of the trains was the “bajs olem” (cemetery). One of the most detailed and moving cryptic warnings was dated June 1, 1942, sent from Włodawa to Warsaw, probably by courier. Using Biblical and other traditional Jewish terms as codes, it reported on the deportation operation in Włodawa several days earlier and warned that the same was headed to Warsaw. The recipient(s) was urged to hide out of town, for “we are all holy and that which is left for morning, etc.” This last reference, to the first Pesach sacrifice by the Israelites in ancient Egypt, was not completed: “shall be burned by fire,” is the end of the verse. To what extent did information affect reactions? Did warnings help the endangered communities? The correspondence between Lublin and Warsaw, for example, reveals that the knowledge of murder in one place generally did not help the Jewish community in another, nor did such information seriously affect communal behavior, even if there were warning signs. Individuals often drew conclusions from the reports of deportations that led them to act to evade the roundup when it reached their home town, but this often did not affect the actions or fate of the community at large. Perhaps the following story can illustrate this.
Resistance and Flight The Jewish prisoners reacted quickly. Local Jews, who knew the area, prepared to flee to Polish friends. Others began taking supplies from the storerooms to sustain themselves. It is not clear exactly how many Jews fled and how many remained, but all the sources agree that all those who escaped, including the Jewish-led partisans themselves, were killed within a few months, most of them within days. They were hunted by German police and SS and by local Poles. When the latter found them they either killed them or turned them in to the Germans. The reward for turning in a Jewish escapee dead or alive was several kilograms of sugar according to some survivors. People fled in panic in the middle of the night, but many did not know where to go or what to do. Those prisoners who did not flee the camp were mostly non-local Jews. Not knowing what to do, and finding themselves alone and unguarded in the camp yet still trapped by their surroundings, they decided to report the incident to the nearest police station and hope for the best. The police told the delegation sent to report the incident to return to the camp and wait there. Meanwhile, during the night, a number of escapees returned to the camp, bringing the number of prisoners there to approximately 160. Some Jews, at a loss for where to go or to whom to turn, tried to hide in other forced-labor camps. Twenty arrived early in the morning of November 7 at the Gościeradów camp in the hope that the 100 Jewish forced-laborers there would be able to hide them. But those Jews had nowhere to conceal a 20% increase of the camp prisoner population, so the twenty Janiszów escapees soon made their way to the forest. That same morning, at 7:00 a.m., the SS, firefighters, and Ukrainian auxiliaries surrounded the camp. They took a roll call in the afternoon and then drove the Jews by foot to Annopol. Some fifty Jews who stumbled along the way were shot and their bodies were loaded onto a cart. From Annopol the remaining Jews were loaded onto freight cars and sent to the Budzyn forced-labor camp. Among those who fled Janiszów that night was Leibl Muzykant. He and some thirty other people hid in an underground bunker in the woods. Muzykant left one night on an errand for the group. When he returned the next day, he found them all dead, stripped, and hacked to pieces. They had been murdered by local Poles. Having nowhere to go, he found his way to Budzyn and turned himself in there, finding the other Janiszów survivors there as well. In the end, Muzykant survived, not because he escaped and became a partisan fighting in the forests, but because he gave himself up at a Nazi forced-labor camp and worked in the hope of surviving. As one survivor commented, reflecting on the arrival in Budzyn of two other Janiszów escapees, “In their eyes we were free and they were imprisoned.” Jewish existence at this time was extremely precarious, and the outcome of any action Jews might take in an effort to survive was completely unpredictable. Thus, 600 Jews took action of one sort or another, but the handful that survived were the ones who stayed, not the ones who tried to join the partisans.
Working for Their Lives: The Last
Jews One of the important discussions in this research revolves around an examination of these last camps in the Lublin District, with a particular focus on Budzyn and Kraśnik. Neither camp has merited much attention in the research to date. Local German self-interest in Budzyn, and a widespread local avaricious German conspiracy in connection to Kraśnik, kept these camps in operation until mid-1944, even though they contributed almost nothing to the German war effort. In Kraśnik, the skilled Jewish laborers and craftsmen in the camp manufactured a wide variety of goods, which were sold by Globocnik’s office to Germans all over the district. During the 1943 Christmas shopping period the camp turned a huge profit on gift orders from SS personnel in and outside the Lublin District. The camp continued to function profitably until mid-1944. Did forced labor affect Jewish survival in the Lublin District? Based on the evidence from the camps, there seems to have been no pattern. Far more Jews survived brutal and unproductive Budzyn than relatively calm and productive Poniatowa. Most of the 10,000 Jews left working in the camps after the “Erntefest” were not local. By the end of 1943, the Jews still officially alive in the district represented only 3%-4% of the Jewish population before the deportations. However, most of these people were not local Jews; only approximately 1% of the original Jewish population was still alive. Survival in these camps was not necessarily based on productivity, or on the temperament of the Germans who ran a given camp.
Some Concluding Thoughts Knowing what the Germans were doing to the Jews did not help, and not knowing did not help. Attempting to flee did not help, and not fleeing did not help. Communicating with other Jews and warning them offered little solace and no survival. Indeed, their chances for survival were as slim as the answers that Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Talmud in Majdan Tatarski, the remnant ghetto in Lublin in fall 1942, received from the God in whom he still believed. [God] make known among the nations and before our eyes your revenge for your servants’ spilt blood. Let a savior arise for Israel and extricate us from the depths, for if not now, when? If not at this moment when we have reached 49 gates of destruction – when will the savior save and the rescuer rescue! Indeed all has come to an end and we are not saved ... I would wish that at least someone will remain to remember us ... I would wish that there would remain some memory of my name and that of my forefathers, of my only son whom I have loved as all the world, and from whom I had high hopes and anticipated great things. I would wish that at least this letter should remain as an everlasting memory – and in that I would be consoled, but that, too, is denied us ... Only the gates of tears have not been locked before us, and we are able and entitled to bemoan the destruction of our nation, to eulogize the rupture in our destroyed people, and to lead the river of our tears with us to the grave. This they cannot take from us. And He who sits on high in heaven hid His face, and hidden will His soul weep depressed and downtrodden. Rabbi Talmud’s assessment was accurate. For nearly all the Jews in the Lublin District, the only things of which they could be certain were that death sought them everywhere, and their tears were all that was left to them. In the final analysis, it was not their initiative, flight, or communicated warnings that could save the Jewish people of the Lublin District, but luck. What remain are their memory, and a few records like Rabbi Talmud’s letters. But luck was a scarce and very precious commodity.
David Silberklang is the Editor of Yad Vashem Studies and a lecturer in Jewish History in the Rothberg International School and in the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also the Series Editor for the English-language memoir series published jointly by Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Survivors’ Memoirs Project. He has published scholarly articles and reviews on various aspects of the Holocaust, and his book on the Holocaust in the Lublin District of Poland will be published next year in Hebrew by Yad Vashem. He received his PhD in 2003 from the Hebrew University for a dissertation relating to the Holocaust in the Lublin District of Poland. His MA is also from the Hebrew University, and his BA is from Columbia University. David is married with four children. |
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