#8: War!

From September 1, 1939, the Polish Army fought bravely against far larger and better armed German forces attacking them from the north, west and south. A few weeks after the German invasion the Soviet Union, as part of a secret pact signed a week before the German attack, entered Poland from the east. On September 17, Stalin's forces advanced to an agreed line that cut Poland in half. Ten days later, after a tenacious defense against surrounding German forces, Warsaw surrendered.

The Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland left more than a million Polish Jews on the Soviet side of the partition line. They were joined by a quarter of a million Jews who managed to cross the new border from west to east before it was sealed -- or who were deliberately pushed over the border by the Germans. The Jews who found themselves under Soviet Communist rule were fortunate for the most part. Most of them survived the war, having been sent by Stalin to Soviet Central Asia, or to labor camps in Siberia. While the war was still being fought, many of them enlisted in the Polish forces that were created with Stalin's approval, and which then went, via Iran and Palestine, to fight against the Germans in North Africa and Italy.

In the battle for Poland, more than sixty thousand Polish soldiers were killed in action; among them were six thousand Polish Jews. During the German bombing of Warsaw, three thousand Jewish civilians had been among the fifteen thousand civilian dead. Rella Wizenberg recalled the bombing of Radom on the first day of the war, when many Jews were killed. She later recalled: "I remember an old Jew talking to my father that evening. He said that those killed that day were the very lucky ones. They were the chosen ones. I thought he was crazy, but how right he was!"

Rella survived Auschwitz, as did her sister Mania. Their mother Shaindla, and their brother Jacob, were murdered in Treblinka in 1942. Their father Tobias was killed in Mauthausen in January 1945.

As German troops entered Polish towns, there were those who amused themselves by tormenting individual Jews, kicking them, cutting off the beards of Orthodox Jews, forcing Orthodox Jews to pull at one another's beards. This was often followed by acts of life-threatening brutality, by severe beatings and by executions. These were carried out by special SS "operational groups" who roamed through the towns once the army had captured them.

One example of this among many hundreds in the first week of the war happened on September 3 -- the day Britain and France declared war on Germany -- when one SS group entered Wieruszow just a few hours after it had been captured. The SS seized twenty Jews and lined them up for execution. Among them was sixty-four-year-old Israel Lewi; when his daughter Liebe ran up to him to say goodbye, one of the SS men ordered her to open her mouth -- for her "impudence" -- and shot her through it. She fell dead on the spot, and then the twenty men were executed.

Two days later, the German Army and the SS units entered Piotrkow. After setting fire to the Jewish-owned buildings in the center of the city, including the synagogue, they then shot dead all the Jews who sought desperately to escape the flames. Finding a house that had not been set on fire, they forced six men out of it, ordered them to run, and shot five of them dead. The sixth man later died of his wounds.

Such acts of barbarity signaled a new and terrible era, when Jewish life was held up to ridicule and contempt by the new German rulers of Poland. Two million Jews were suddenly and terrifyingly at risk.

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In Germany and later in the conquered countries as well, Jews were uprooted and subjected to bewildering evacuations and relocations. They were forced from their homes into crowded ghettos or local holding camps. They were packed onto trains and moved to labor camps, where many were worked to death.

In the constant upheaval, families were forever separated. One 19-year-old man was ordered from his Polish town to a labor camp. "I barely managed to say goodbye to my sister," he said. "She gave me her picture with this inscription: 'If you survive, remember, you live to take revenge.'" He never saw her again.

In the fall of 1939, Hitler transformed Nazi occupied Poland into a massive killing ground. He had already ordered Jews from the Reich massed in specific Polish cities having good rail connections. Object: "final solution, which will take some time," as Heydrich explained to SS commanders on September 21. He was talking of the extermination of the Jews, already an open secret among many high-ranking party officials.

These grisly preparations were augmented by a "house cleaning" of Polish intelligentsia, clergy and nobility by five murder squads known as Einsatzgruppen (Special Groups). By mid-autumn 3,500 intelligentsia (whom Hitler considered the "carriers of Polish nationalism") were liquidated. This terror was accompanied by the ruthless expulsion of 1,200,000 ordinary Poles from their ancestral homes so that Germans from the Baltic and outlying portions of Poland could be properly housed. In the ensuing bitter months more Poles lost their lives in the resettlement from exposure to weather than those on the execution list.

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The murder of the Jews did not slacken. Each day saw new executions.

In the city of Czestochowa, where 30,000 Jews lived, 180 were taken from their homes and shot on the first full day of the German occupation, September 4, 1939, known in the annals of Czestochowa Jewry as "Bloody Monday." But far bloodier days were to follow, and in 1942 almost all the surviving Jews of the city were deported to their deaths. Yet by any contemporary standard, the scale of the killing on Bloody Monday was high.

A favorite "sport" for the SS was to lock Jews in a synagogue and set the building on fire, shooting down anyone who tried to get out. In Bezdin, two hundred Jews were killed in this way; in Mielec, twenty were killed. Men, women and children were all considered legitimate targets of these racial murders.

General Franz Halder of the German General Staff, noted in his diary on September 10, that a group of SS men, having ordered fifty Jews to work all day repairing a bridge, had flung them into a synagogue and shot them. The killers had been brought to trial by the Wehrmacht and in the defense of one of them, the army Judge Advocate argued that "as an SS man he was particularly sensitive to the sight of the Jews. He had therefore acted quite thoughtlessly, in a spirit of adventure." Light sentences were imposed, but even they were overruled by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler and the SS men were set free.

In the first fifty-five days of the German conquest and occupation of Poland, five thousand Jews were murdered. At the same time, the Germans killed more than twice that number of non-Jewish Poles, likewise at random, singly and in groups, with the utmost savagery.

The random killings of the first two months of the German occupation of Poland were paralleled by administrative arrangements. Germany annexed parts of western Poland and transformed the rest into what was called the Generalgouvernment, ruled from Cracow. At the same time, Jews were obliged to carry out forced labor, and camps were set up to which they were deported.

Forced labor quickly became slave labor. Beatings were frequent and laborers could be killed at the whim of the camp commandants, or even of the guards. Any hope the Jews might have had that once Poland was being administered without the pressures of fighting, calm would return -- and with it decent behavior -- was in vain. The slave labor camp system was continually extended, with great severity.

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All the unfortunates on the Nazis' long list of enemies and "subhuman" Untermenschen were stunned by the violence that erupted with the arrival of victorious German armies in Eastern Europe. But the Jews suffered the worst horrors. They were beaten and humiliated by German soldiers, by local anti-Semites and -- most often and most viciously -- by the SS.

SS men ripped clumps of hair from the Jews' beards and sometimes set the beards on fire. Terrified Jews in the Polish town of Turck were driven into their synagogue by SS men; they were forced to drop their pants and were lashed with horsewhips. Jewish women and girls were routinely raped in the streets and town squares.

At times, the Jews' Gentile neighbors of only a short time before tried to outdo the Nazis in savagery. Under the prod of the SS, latent anti-Semitism exploded into pogroms in which Jews were robbed, beaten and murdered in the most barbaric fashion.

In an occupied town in the Ukraine -- following Hitler's June 1941 invasion of Soviet Russia -- a mob of Gentiles tied a Jewish woman's hair to the tail of a horse and drove the animal off. The horse dragged the woman until -- said a Jew who watched from a distance -- "her whole face was completely disfigured and there wasn't the slightest sign of life from her body. Most of the crowd was hysterical with laughter."

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"[The] zeal with which the invading Germans, taking their cue from these centrally directed policies, acted on their own initiative, often going far beyond them in the sadistic brutality of their implementation, still required some explanation.

"Popular hatred and contempt for Poles, as for Ukrainians, Belrussians and Russians, and even more for 'Eastern Jews,' were deeply rooted in Germany. Even before the First World War, the doctrines of human equality and emancipation inculcated into large parts of the working class by the Social Democratic labor movement had not stretched as far as including minorities such as these. The great mass of ordinary working people regarding Poles and Russians as backward, primitive and uneducated; indeed, the frequent occurrence of antisemitic pogroms in Tsarist Russia was often cited by workers as evidence in support of this view.

"Fear of invasion from the barbaric east played a major role in persuading the Social Democrats to vote for war credits in 1914. The advent of Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union had only strengthened and deepened these beliefs. To most Germans, including, ironically, many educated and acculturated Jews, the "Eastern Jews' of Poland appeared even more backward and primitive. In the early 1920s they caused resentment out of all proportions to their numbers when a few of them found refuge from the violence of the Russian civil war. Nazi propaganda, ceaselessly reinforcing such stereotypes, deepened prejudice against the Slavs and Eastern Jews during the 1930s until they appeared to many Germans, particularly in the younger generation, as less than human.

"Toughness, hardness, brutality, the use of force, the virtues of violence had been inculcated into a whole generation of young Germans from 1933 onwards, and, even if Nazi education and propaganda in these areas had met with varied success, it had clearly not been wholly without effect. Nazism taught that might was right, winners took all, and the racially inferior were free game. Not surprisingly, it was the younger generation of German soldiers who behavior was the most brutal and violent towards the Jews.

"What the invading and occupying Germans did in Poland from September 1939 was not so much the product of war as of longer-term processes of indoctrination, building on a deep-rooted feeling that the Slavs and Eastern Jews were subhumans and that political enemies had no rights of any kind. . . . Thus when the German forces took what they conceived of as retaliatory actions against the Polish resistance to the invasion, taking hostages, shooting civilians, burning people alive, razing farms to the ground, and much more, they were not acting out of military necessity, but in the service of an ideology of racial hatred and contempt that was to be largely absent in their invasion of other countries father to the west.

"Violence against racial and political enemies, real or imagined, had become commonplace in the Third Reich well before the outbreak of the war. The violence meted out to Poles and especially Jews from the beginning of September 1939 continued and intensified this line of action established by the Third Reich, as did the looting and expropriation to which they were subjected. The ultimate rationale for such policies in the minds of Hitler and the leading Nazis was to make Germany fit for war by removing the supposed threat of a Jewish presence and thus forestalling the possibility of a 'stab-in-the-back" from subversive elements on the Home Front such as they believed had lost Germany the First World War.

"Similar considerations were evident, among others, in the Nazi treatment of occupied Poland, which was designed from the start to be the springboard for the long-envisioned invasion of Soviet Russia. And they were obvious, too, in the mass murder of the mentally ill and handicapped begun in the summer of 1939. This too was no mere product of war. . . . On the contrary, it too was long planned, foreshadowed by the mass sterilization of nearly 400,000 'unfit' Germans before the war broke out, adumbrated by Hitler ten years before, and in preparation since the mid-1930s.

"The violence meted out by German forces in Poland was also pre-programmed. It followed logically on from the peacetime policies of the Nazis, extending them and intensifying them in new and terrifying ways. In less than two years they were to be carried even further and implemented on an even larger scale."

-- Richard J. Evans, in his book The Third Reich at War