20: Deportation and Annihilation

The eighteenth century Austro-Hungarian town of Theresienstadt, part of Czechoslovakia since 1918, was known as Terezin in Czech. In October 1941, the 3,700 Czech inhabitants of the town were ordered to leave by the Germans, who turned it into a ghetto. More than 96,000 Jews were brought there from all over Europe. Conditions were harsh, dominated by overcrowding and hunger. More than 33,000 Jews died in the ghetto, mostly of starvation.

Among those deported to Theresienstadt were artists, writers, musicians, scholars and teachers. Under Jewish leadership, several orchestras were founded there, as well as an operatic and theatrical troupe. Lectures were organized, and a library of 60,000 volumes opened. Jewish studies played a major part in cultural activities. Classes were held for the children, who had to carry their benches into the classroom under the protective eye of Jewish guardians, who, like all adults in the ghetto, were obliged to wear the yellow star.

From January 1942, the Germans began to deport Jews from Theresienstadt to death camps in the east, including Auschwitz and Maly Trostinets. In all, 88,000 were deported from Theresienstadt to their deaths.

From 1942 to 1944, a group of thirteen- to fifteen-year-old-boys in Theresienstadt produced, in the greatest secrecy, a weekly magazine called Vedem (In the Lead). Each issue was copied out by hand in the attic of the building used for for their equally secret schooling. The editor was fourteen-year-old Petr Ginz, who was later deported to Auschwitz and killed.

One of the survivors of those who produced Vedem, Kurt Kotouc, later recalled Petr Ginz at work: "I can still see him, sitting cross-legged on his lower bunk, surrounded by pens, pencils, engravers, brushes and paints, and sheets of paper of all sizes, along with what was left of a parcel from his parents. 'Well, here you are, Petr, Vedem is coming out again. But it took us a long time, didn't it?' Petr is smiling. . . . 'Well, get on with it,' he'd say. 'Go round to all the boys so we get it out on time'. . . ."

Alfred (known as Fredy) Kantor, who was eighteen, and an art student, when he was deported from Prague to Theresienstadt in December 1941, later recalled: "There were times when life even assumed a deceptive normalcy. Many Jews still believed Terezin to be a work camp where they would be safe until the end of the war. There were moments that seemed strangely magnified by a feeling of blissful make-believe amidst an otherwise cold reality. I remembered how overjoyed we were one day by the music of an accordion that someone had smuggled into the barracks. Everyone huddled together in the poorly lit, freezing room; and for a while we forgot our hurt as we listened to the tunes. Or I remember how we gathered at night in a cramped cellar to watch Karel Svenk's Cheers to Life, Terezin's first underground production. This was a stinging political cabaret, and one of our own men stood guard at the door in case any SS appeared."

On March 15, 1943, a fifty-two-year-old woman, Trude Neumann, died of hunger in Theresienstadt. She was the daughter of Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, and from 1918 she had been a patient in a mental institution in Vienna -- in 1942, all the patients were deported to Theresienstadt.

On August 17, 1943, 1,260 children under thirteen were rounded up in the Bialystok ghetto and deported to Theresienstadt. After a month, volunteers were asked to accompany them to neutral Switzerland -- another rumor said to Palestine. Fifty-three doctors and nurses offered to accompany them. There real destination was Auschwitz, where all the children and most of their helpers were killed.

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The German technique of deportation from the occupied countries of Western Europe was to take Jews from their homes in the cities and town in which they lived, and to confine them in an internment camp. There, they would be forced to remain, cut off from contact with the outside world, deprived of their possessions, without access to all that had been homely and familiar to them, until they were taken away by train -- normally in groups of about a thousand -- across Europe to what they were told was a new camp, somewhere to help with the harvest of 1942 (or 1943), a place of permanent resettlement, even a "Jewish State" set aside for them in the East -- but which was in fact death for all but a very few.

During 1941, the Jews of Holland had been relatively unmolested. On February 12, 1941, the German occupation authorities had set up a Jewish Council, headed by two Jewish "Presidents," to supervise all Jewish institutions. By the autumn of 1941, all Jewish children had been forced by German order to leave school and to study only at special schools under the supervision of the Jewish Council. That August, the Germans confiscated all Jewish funds and property: 20% of their value was given to the Council, 80% was kept by the Germans. At the same time all Jewish businesses were seized, and more than 5,000 men were sent to forced labor camps throughout Holland. On May 2, 1942, every Dutch Jew was forced to wear the yellow Star of David.

On July 14, 1942, several thousand Jews were arrested in Amsterdam and sent to a camp near the north-eastern town of Westerbork. The next day, one thousand were sent to Auschwitz. A new German slogan then burst upon the harassed, bewildered Jewish community: "Work in the East." The aim, it was declared by the German occupation authorities, was to make all Holland Judenrein -- rid of Jews.

On October 2, 1942, in a single round-up throughout Holland, 13,000 Jews were seized and taken to Westerbork. Thousands had to sleep on the floors with neither mattresses nor blankets. But despite the deprivations, concerts were given by the inmates, some by famous German musicians who had fled to Holland from Germany before 1940. There was a camp orchestra, a hospital with 120 surgeons -- themselves internees about to be deported -- a pharmacy, workshops for the repair of clothes and shoes, a bathhouse, a post office, schools and a playground. These activities were continuous. So too were the deportations. Within two years, 93 trains, each made up of precisely twenty wagons, took between one and two thousand Jews from Westerbork to Auschwitz: of the 60,000 deported to Auschwitz, only 500 survived.

A total of 1,700 letters and postcards was received in Amsterdam from Auschwitz between July 1942 and the autumn of 1943, a thousand of which arrived in the spring of 1943. So small a total from so large a number of deportees began to worry the remaining Jews, forced to live only in Amsterdam, and themselves continually rounded up and dispatched to Westerbork for the rail journey east.

In the autumn of 1943, the Dutch Government-in-Exile in London received a report from a Dutch Jew still in Holland, in which the writer asked: "But what are 1,000 letters when there are 60,000 deportees? Where are the letters from the rest? And why, above all, is there no sign from all the children, the old and the sick?"

There was another destination in addition to Auschwitz. Thirty-four thousand Dutch Jews were deported to Sobibor. Only nineteen survived.

The railways from Holland transported 106,000 Jews to the east. Some of them were already refugees from Germany and Austria. More than 100,000 of those deported were never to return. At the end of the war, there were on 900 Jews in Westerbork. Twenty-four thousand Dutch Jews were hidden during the German occupation. Of those, 8,000 were betrayed and deported. Those Dutch Jews who survived the war, mostly in hiding, were saved by Dutch citizens who, at great personal risk, gave them food and shelter.

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In France it was Frenchmen, members of the Milice francaise, who took the main part in the round-up of Jews. Between 1941 and 1944, a total of 73,853 Jews were seized in France, taken to holding camps -- principally Drancy, a suburb of Paris -- and then deported, mostly to Auschwitz. There were only 2,500 survivors.

Of the deportees from France who were murdered at Auschwitz, 11,400 were under the age of sixteen. Many of these children were deported without their parents.

A French law of October 4, 1940, made it legal for the French police to arrest "any foreigner of the Jewish race." In France at that time there were about 12,000 German Jews and 5,000 Austrian Jews, who had found refuge there before the outbreak of the Second World War. There were also tens of thousands of Polish-born Jews, who had emigrated to France between the two world wars, and had worked, married and raised families in France.

The first round-up of foreign-born Jews -- 3,700 in all -- took place in Paris on May 14, 1941. They were taken by train from Austerlitz station to two specially created internment camps, at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Most had born in Poland, a few in Czechoslovakia and Austria. Later they were deported to Auschwitz.

The first deportation from Paris to Auschwitz had taken place on March 27, 1942. These deportations were accelerated after a special request on June 11 from Berlin to the Vichy French authorities. In a two-day round-up that started on July 16, 13,000 Jews were seized in Paris and its suburbs, among them more than 4,000 children, some arrested in the apartments where they were living, others seized in the streets. Between July 17, and the end of September 1942, more than 33,000 Jews were deported from Paris -- in 34 trains. The deportations continued even after the Allied forces had landed in Normandy in June 1944.

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From the earliest days of Nazi rule in Germany, 2,000 German Jews had found refuge in Belgium. When Hitler acquired the Saar in 1935 as a result of a plebiscite, all 5,000 Jews chose Belgian or French citizenship, and left the enlarged confines of the Reich. Belgium also took in a quarter of the refugees from the St. Louis.

Germany invaded Belgium on May 10, 1940, despite that nation's attempts to remain neutral in the European war begun the previous September. Eighteen days after the invasion, Belgium capitulated. German military rule was imposed and remained in force until liberation in September 1944.

Almost seven hundred years earlier, in 1261, the Jews of Belgium had faced a deathbed order by Duke Henry III of Brabant, to be "totally extirpated until not one remains." They managed to replace this by manual labor. With the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 (the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue), the Jewish communities in Belgium were revitalized. Antwerp became a center for Jewish life and prosperity, centering around the diamond trade. With the German occupation in 1940, all prosperity ended.

From October 1940, Jews were forbidden to practice in their professions. On May 10, 1941, all Jews had to give up their radios. On August 29, they had to be indoors from eight in the evening to seven in the morning. On May 27, 1942, all Jews were ordered to wear the yellow Star of David.

At the beginning of July 1942, all Jewish unemployed were ordered to report to Dossin de Saint-Georges camp, at Malines (Mechelen) -- halfway between Brussels and Antwerp -- for what they were told would be "work in the east." Insufficient numbers of volunteers having presented themselves, on July 22, the Germans instituted the first of a series of mass round-ups, known as razzias. On August 2, 1942, the first train left Malines for the east, with a thousand Jews. Its destination was unknown to those on board. It turned out to be Auschwitz.

At first, only foreign born Jews were deported. As many as 70% of Belgian Jews had emigrated to Belgium from Poland between the wars. The Queen Mother, Elisabeth, and the Roman Catholic Cardinal, van Roey, persuaded the Germans to exempt the Jews of Belgian nationality from deportation. This exemption lasted a year. On September 3, 1943, those Jews with Belgian nationality were rounded up and deported. One train to Auschwitz had Belgian gypsies on board. They, too, were murdered.

On January 15, 1944, among the Jews deported from Belgium to Auschwitz were the Polish-born Meir Tabakman and his wife Raizl. Tabakman had already been deported some months earlier, but had jumped off the train. Later he had been caught. Branded as a flitzer -- one who had tried to flee -- he was locked into a special goods wagon with many other former escapees. At Auschwitz, his wife later recalled, "not one of them entered the camp." All were taken direct to the gas chamber.

Even as the Allies were advancing towards Belgium after D-Day, the deportations to Auschwitz continued. From the last deportation train, which left Belgium on July 31, 1944, 564 Jews were murdered on arrival at the camp eight days later. Among them was Felix Nussbaum, a German-born painter who had lived in hiding in Brussels from 1940 to 1944. He and his wife were arrested while trying to change their attic hiding place; it is believed that they were betrayed. Both were killed upon reaching Auschwitz.

By July 31, 1944, thirty-one trains had left Malines for Auschwitz. In all, 25,257 Jews were deported. Of them, only 1,207 survived. Among those murdered were 5,000 children under the age of 16, and 150 infants less than two years old. The youngest of the deportees was thirty-nine days old, the oldest ninety-one.

In 1996, the Museum of Deportation and Resistance was opened at Malines, situated in Dossin camp. In the museum's underground remembrance hall, a voice recites the names and ages of the five thousand murdered children.

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Perhaps the most diabolical innovation of the Final Solution was the establishment of Jewish Councils to administer their own deportation and destruction. This organization, comprising those leaders of the community who believed that cooperation with the Germans was the best policy, discouraged resistance. "I will not be afraid to sacrifice 50,000 of our community," reasoned a typical leader, Moses Merin, "in order to save the other 50,000."

By early summer, the mass exterminations had begun under the authority of a written order from Himmler. Adolf Eichmann showed this authorization to one of his assistants, Dieter Wisliceny, with the explanation that Final Solution meant the biological extermination of the Jewish race. "May God forbid," exclaimed the appalled Wisliceny, "that our enemies should ever do anything similar to the German people!"

"Don't be sentimental," said Eichmann. "This is a Fuehrer order." This was corroborated by Himmler in a letter to the chief of the SS Main Office at the end of July 1942: "The occupied Eastern territories will be cleared of Jews. The implementation of this very hard order had been placed on my shoulders by the Fuehrer. No one can release me from this responsibility in any case. So I forbid all interference."

What Kurt Gerstein learned as head of the Technical Disinfection Service of the Waffen SS, had already driven him to despair. "He was so appalled by the satanic practices of the Nazis," recalled a friend, "that their eventual victory did not seem to him impossible."

During a tour that summer of the four extermination camps in the Generalgouvernement, Gerstein saw with his own eyes what he had read about. At the first camp he and his two companions -- Eichmann's deputy and a professor of hygiene named Pfannenstiel -- were informed that Hitler and Himmler had just ordered "all action speeded up." At Belzec, as previously discussed, he saw those words translated into reality.