28: Revolt
On August 2, 1943, the Jewish slave laborers at Treblinka managed to break into the arsenal. Gasoline was then put into the camp disinfector, used for the daily disinfecting procedure, and operated by the Jewish slave laborers. Gasoline instead of disinfectant was then sprayed on the camp buildings. The next afternoon, the "disinfected" buildings were ignited, and many of the camp buildings set on fire. The chief of the SS guards was shot dead, and fifteen other German and Ukrainian guards were killed. Of the seven hundred Jewish workers in the camp, 150 escaped. Half of them were hunted down by German and Ukrainian units and shot.
At Sobibor, several Jewish girls who worked in the SS quarters polishing shoes and cleaning floors managed to steal a few hand grenades, pistols, a rifle and a submachine gun. On the night of October 13, 1943, Alexander Pechersky, a Soviet prisoner of war who had been brought to the camp three weeks earlier, and Leon Feldhendler, a Polish Jew, distributed knives and hatchets, as well as warm clothing.
On the afternoon of October 14, as individual German and Ukranian guards entered the huts on their regular inspection tours, they were attacked. Nine SS men and two Ukranians were killed. Then, as another of the conspirators, Yaakov Biskowitz recalled, the signal was given for the revolt to begin: the password "Hurrah." In the ensuing struggle, the Jews killed eleven or twelve SS men.
There had been six hundred prisoners in the slave labor section of the camp at Sobibor. Three hundred of them broke out. The rest were killed inside the camp with the arrival of the military and police reinforcements from nearby Chelm. Most of the hundred prisoners who succeeded in evading the German Army searches joined partisan units. Some were later killed in action against the Germans, others by anti-Semitic Poles. Only thirty survived the war.
Four girls among the Sobibor escapees, Eda Lichtman from Poland, Ula Stern from Germany, and Kaethe and Ruth (the surnames are unknown) from Holland, joined Jewish partisans in the Parczew forest, thirty miles east of Sobibor. Another of the escapees, Semyon Rozenfeld, from Baranowicze in eastern Poland, later joined the Soviet Army. In Berlin on the day of victory, he chalked on the Reichstag wall the words: "Baranowicze-Sobibor-Berlin."
On the night of January 17, 1945, the SS entered the barracks at Chelmno. One of them, waving his flashlight, demanded, "Five men follow me!" Five people were taken out, recalled one of the prisoners, Mordechai Zurawski, "and we heard five shots." Then someone else came in and shouted, "Five more -- out!" There were more shots. Then a third group of five were taken out. After still more shots, a fourth groups was called, among them Zurawski. "The SS man came in," he recalled. "I hid behind the door -- I had my knife in my hand; I jumped on the SS man and stabbed him. I broke his flashlight and stabbed right and left, and I escaped."
Running from the camp, Zurawski was shot in the foot, but he still managed to reach the safety of the dense woods. A second Jew, Shimon Srebnik, also survived. "I was the youngest," he later recalled. "I also ran. I didn't even put on my trousers. I just had my pants and a singlet." As he fled, Srebnik was hit by a bullet, which entered through the nape of his neck and came out through his mouth. At the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the court was shown the scar. Srebnik's account of the shooting continued:
"There was one soldier who was just guarding the groups of dead people and finishing off those who still showed signs of life. . . . I ran away when this gaze was not fixed on me, and I was hiding in the hut of a Gentile up to the liberation."
Srebnik was one of only two survivors of the Chelmno revolt.
At Crematorium II at Aushchwitz-Birkenau -- one of four in the camp -- three hundred Greek Jews were among the Sonderkommando preparing for revolt in early October 1944. Across the railway line, in the Union explosives factory, a group of Jewish girls had collected small amounts of explosives and smuggled them to the plotters. Among the girls were Giza Weissblum and Raizl Kibel, both of whom survived the war.
Three other girls in the Union factory, Ella Garnter, and two girls known only by their first names, Toszka and Regina, also managed to smuggle explosives to Roza Robota, who was working inside Birkenau. She passed them to a member of the Sonderkommando.
The revolt broke out at Crematorium IV on October 7. That morning a member of the Sonderkommando was ordered to draw up lists for "evacuation" at noon of three hundred men. Fearing this was a prelude to destruction, he refused. The SS ordered a roll-call, insisting that the Sonderkommando be sent to work in another camp. As the SS staff sergeant called out their numbers, only a few men answered. Then, after repeated SS calls and threats, Chaim Neuhof from Sosnowiec, approached the sergeant who reached for his gun. Neuhof called out the password, "Hurrah," and struck the SS man on the head with his hammer. The sergeant fell to the ground as the other prisoners echoed Neuhof's "Hurrah" and threw stones at the SS.
Reporting these events, Salmen Lewental noted of his fellow Sonderkommando (in notes which he managed to hide near the crematorium): "They showed an immense courage refusing to budge." After the Jews had stoned the SS guards, they set fire to the wooden roof of Crematorium IV. Lewental commented in his notes: "Few moments had passed when a whole detachment of SS men drove in, armed with machine guns and grenades. There were so many of them that each had two machine guns for one prisoner. Even such an army was mobilized against them."
At Crematorium II the Jews hoped to escape through the nearby barracks of the "Cleaning Installation" Commando. They were joined there by Sol Schindel, a Polish Jew from Rzeszow, who was working in the Cleaning Installations Commando. Schindel survived the revolt and later recalled: "As we ran past the watchtower, I saw the SS men shooting with machine guns. I saw many dead already lying on the ground. I threw myself to the ground and crept through a hole in the barbed wire fence into the women's camp." Other Sonderkommando continued to flee beyond the wire, in search of hiding places in nearby fields and farmsteads.
Within minutes of the break-out at Crematorium II, the alarm sounded, whereupon SS men with dogs arrived in trucks and surrounded the whole area. Most of the escapees were shot. The rest found brief sanctuary in a barn. The SS set fire to the barn, then shot the surviving escapees as they ran out. About two hundred and fifty escapees were killed outside the wire, among them a leader of the revolt at Crematorium II, Jozef Dorebus. Later that day, a further two hundred men of the Sonderkommando were shot inside Birkenau.
At Crematorium III the revolt was led by Greek Jews, former officers in the Greek Army. Having blown up the crematorium, they were killed by the SS guards. They died singing the Greek national anthem.
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In October 1943, more than 4,000 Czech, Austrian and German Jews were deported to Auschwitz where they were kept alive at Birkenau as a group -- known as the Czech Family Camp. On March 7, 1944, the group was sent to the gas chambers. A second group was then brought in from Theresienstadt, and likewise kept together. Seeing this, a young Slovak Jew named Rudolf Vrba, a nineteen-year-old who worked in first in the "Canada Commando" sorting Jewish belongings and then as a registrar, was determined to alert the world to the imminent fate of the second Family Camp. He was convinced that if there were an international outcry, the second Family Camp would not be destroyed.
Vrba made plans to escape, together with a fellow-Slovak Jew, Alfred Wetzler -- twenty-six-years old -- who had personally witnessed the destruction of the Czech Family Group. Watching the plans that were being made to prepare Birkenau for a considerable number of new arrivals, the two men also wanted to alert Hungarian Jews to their impending fate. The office in which Vrba worked was only a hundered yards from the rail spur being built into Birkenau from the Auschwitz railway line. "The purpose of this ramp was no secret in Birkenau," he later recalled. "The SS were talking about 'Hungarian salami!' and 'a million units.'" Additionally, several dozen new barracks were being constructed just outside the perimeter fence.
On April 7, 1944, Vrba and Wetzler hid in a pile of wooden planks being used for the construction of the new barracks. Two days later they escaped from Auschwitz, making their way southward into Slovakia. There they told the story of the deportations and the gas chambers to the surviving leaders of Slovak Jewry. Vrba had memorized precise details about the incoming deportations and the tattoo numbers allocated to those sent to the barracks. From his information it was clear that the place to which so many hundreds of thousands of French, Dutch, Belgian and Italian Jews had been deported, hitherto known only as "somewhere in the east," was Auschwitz and its gas chambers.
Vrba and Wetzler were soon joined by two more escapees, Arnost Rosin, a Czech Jew, and Czeslaw Mordowicz, a Polish Jew. Rosin and Mordowicz had witnessed the first few days of the arrival and destruction of the Hungarian Jewry. The Vrba-Wetzler Report was combined with the details brought by Rosin and Mordowicz into what later became known as the "Auschwitz Report."
On June 24, 1944, the Auschwitz Report, having been smuggled by a courier from Bratislava to Budapest, and then by rail through Vienna to Geneva, in Switzerland, was taken to Berne, from where it was telegraphed to London and Washington. It was then broadcast by the Allies and widely reported in the Allied newspapers. Pressure on the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, to stop the deportations was intense. Three neutral states -- Sweden, Spain and Turkey -- protested immediately. They were joined by the International Red Cross, with its headquarters in Geneva, and by the Vatican representative in Budapest, Angelo Rotta.
On June 26, Clifford Norton, a British diplomat in the Swiss capital, Berne, sent a three-part telegram to London. Prepared by one of the Jewish Agency representatives in Geneva, Richard Lichtheim, the first and second parts set out the full details of the Auschwitz Report, and the mass murder of the Hungarian deportees. The third part called for the "widest publicity," and also for bombing, in an attempt to halt the deportations. The bombing request had been turned down two days earlier in Washington, by the Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, who subsequently turned it down three more times. But as soon as this same bombing request reached Churchill, he wrote to the Foreign Secretary: "Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and invoke me if necessary."
Lichtheim suggested three possible bombing objectives: the railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz, the death camp installations at Aushwitz and "all government buildings in Budapest." On July 2 -- as part of the Allied air campaign against German railway marshaling yards -- American bombs fell on Budapest (most likely from Fifteenth Air Force planes based in Italy). Several Hungarian government buildings were hit -- in error. Horthy, who had been shown intercepted copies of the three-part telegram from Berne, was convinced that the American bombers had hit these government targets deliberately, and had done so in direct response to the Auschwitz Report.
Four days earlier, on June 28, as soon as he was shown the Auschwitz Report, Roosevelt had issued a public warning to Horthy to halt the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Horthy did not want his capital destroyed, so on July 7, five days after the American bombing raid on Budapest, he ordered the deportations from Hungary to stop. The German authorities, who did not have the power to carry them out without Hungarian help, had no alternative but to accept.
Between May 15 and July 7, 1944, more than 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz. Of them, 365,000 had been murdered there. The rest had been tattooed and sent to the barracks. There, many died of starvation and the brutality of the SS guards. Others had been sent as slave laborers to Buna-Monowitz, less than four miles from the gas chambers. Just over 170,000 remained alive in Budapest, saved by the four escapees from Auschwitz.
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