32: Liberation

As the Soviet Army moved closer to the slave labor camps that the Germans had set up on Polish soil, the slave laborers were evacuated westward, to factories and concentrations camps on German soil. The largest slave labor camp in the region to be evacuated was the factory zone around Auschwitz. More than 30,000 Jewish men and women were being employed there at the time of the evacuation.

The evacuations started in mid-1944 and accelerated in January 1945. Many began on foot. After several days, most of the evacuees were put on trains. Some marches continued on foot for many days, even weeks. An estimated 100,000 Jews died in these "death marches."

Thousands who were too weak to march away were shot on the eve of evacuation. On the marches, those who were too weak to continue were also shot. "Anybody who was weak," recalled Israel Gutman -- a survivor of Majdanek and Auschwitz, "anybody who had to sit down for a few minutes, was shot at."

On the marches in the region of Blechhammer, fifteen hundred Jews were shot. "We heard shooting all the time," recalled Alfred Oppenheimer of his own march to Blechhammher from Gleiwitz. "We were not allowed to turn our heads, but we knew what the shooting meant. All those lagging behind were shot dead."

As the death marches continued, the bodies of the murdered Jews were thrown into the nearest roadside ditches. At the village of Leszczyny, 250 prisoners were shot as they jumped from an evacuation train and tried to flee into the nearby forests.

By the end of February 1945, the factories to which the Jews from Birkenau had been evacuated two months earlier were themselves within a few days of being overrun by the Soviet forces. On February 23, the Jews in Schwarzheide, on the Dresden to Berlin autobahn, were evacuated. The three hundred weakest were sent in open trucks to Belsen where all but one of them perished.

Many of the death marches were to slave labor camps on German soil. One of the largest was Dora-Nordhausen, where Jews were among tens of thousands of slave laborers forced to work in factories built underground, assisting Germany's V-1 and V-2 rocket production.

Belsen and Dachau, Buchenwald and Mauthhausen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrueck, and their many sub-camps, became the destinations of hundreds of evacuation trains and marches. Throughout February and March, columns of men and women, and crowded railway trucks, converged on the long-existing concentration camps, which now had a new task. These camps had been transformed into holding camps for the remnant of a destroyed people, whose labor was still of some last-minute utility for a dying Reich, or whose emaciated bodies were to be left to languish unattended, and in agony.

For the death marchers, there was no respite. On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. That same day 2,775 Jews from Rehmsdorf, near Buchenwald, were being marched towards Theresienstadt. A thousand of them, fleeing from the march during an Allied air raid, were caught by their guards and shot. The remaining fifteen hundred continued on the march. Only 500 reached Theresienstadt alive.

---

The Allied Soldiers who entered the concentration camps did so as liberators. But in every camp that they reached in April and May 1945, they found as many dead prisoners as living ones. Sometimes they reached a camp while killings were still taking place. Even on the death marches, the moment of liberation could come suddenly and unexpectedly.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet forces entered Auschwitz. The gassing had ceased there more than two months earlier. Most surviving inmates had been sent westward on death marches. Those whom the Soviet Army liberated were the fortunate few -- among them was Otto Frank, the father of diarist Anne Frank. Before they fled, the SS had burned down twenty-nine of the thirty-five stores filled with the clothing of the victims. In the six stores that remained intact, the Soviet troops found 836,255 women's dresses, 348,000 men's suits and 38,000 pairs of men's shoes.

In April 1945, during their advance into Germany, British and American troops, among them many Jewish soldiers, reached the camps to which more than a hundred thousand Jews had earlier been sent, on a series of death marches that had often crossed and recrossed Germany.

On April 4, U.S. forces reached the village of Ohrdurf. Just outside the village they found a deserted labor camp in which 4,000 inmates had died or been murdered in the previous three months. Hundreds had been shot on the eve of the American arrival. Some of the victims were Jews, others were Polish and Russian prisoners of war. They had been forced to build a vast underground radio and telephone center, intended for the German army in the event of a retreat from Berlin.

The sight of the emaciated corpses at Ohrdurf created a wave of revulsion that spread back to Britain and the United States. General Eisenhower, who visited the camp, was so shocked that he at once telephoned Churchill to describe what he had seen. He then sent photographs of the scene to the Prime Minister, who circulated them to each member of the British Cabinet, and arranged for an all-Party delegation of British Members of Parliament to be flown to Germany to witness the sight at first hand.

Allied troops reached several dozen other camps in rapid succession. In each of them were hundreds of starving and emaciated prisoners, Jews and non-Jews, many of them far too weak and sick to survive more than a day or two beyond their liberation.

Most of the Jews in Buchenwald had been evacuated on April 8, before the American troops could reach the camp. But a few remained.

On April 29, American troops entered Dachau. Amid the corpses of those who had died during the previous week they found 33,000 survivors. On the roads south of Dachau, many hundreds of Jewish prisoners had been marched during the previous days towards the mountains, under guard, and repeatedly victimized. On April 29, those same Jews wandered free but bewildered. They did not know what they would encounter in liberated Europe, or whether any of their relatives were still alive.

In most cases, each survivor of the concentration camps liberated at the end of the war was the sole member of his or her immediate family to have lived to see the day of liberation. In many cases, fathers who had managed to stay with their sons almost to the end, died a few days before liberation, or were among those tens of thousands of camp inmates who were not able to regain sufficient strength to live more than a few days after the arrival of the Allies.

---

Many concentration camp survivors made their way back eastward to their homes, for the most part in Poland. Some found homes destroyed. Most found them inhabited by others -- by Poles who had moved in either during the war or immediately after it.

Survivors who returned to Poland in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War were astounded by the violence against them. Within a year, more than a thousand Jews had been murdered on Polish soil -- by Poles. The killings took place in a hundred towns to which Jews had returned after liberation. Ten Jews were killed when they went back to Kosow-Lacki -- a mere six miles from Treblinka. Four Jews were killed when they went back to Parczew, whose forests had seen so much Jewish heroism and suffering.

One of the leaders of the Sobibor revolt, Leon Feldhendler, was killed by Poles after liberation. Yaakov Waldman, one of the very few people who had managed to escape from a deportation of Chelmno, was killed by Poles immediately after the war in the nearby town of Turek. One of only two survivors of Belzec, Chaim Hirszman, was killed in Lublin on the day he gave evidence to a Polish war crimes tribunal about what he had witnessed at Belzec.

When a husband and wife returned to Skarzysko in January 1946, they received an anonymous letter promising that soon "the Jews here will be slaughtered" and advising them to leave. They did. A few other survivors of Skarzysko returned and decided to stay, and two of them, Icchak Warszauer and Eliezer Lewin, began to look into the possibility of regaining their property, which was being held by Poles. Warszauer succeeded in getting back one apartment in his former house. Four Jews moved in with him. One night in February 1946, they were attacked, and all five were killed.

There were 2,200 Jews living in Skarzysko in 1939. In October 1942, more than 2,000 of them were deported by train to Treblinka and killed. No Jews were living in Skarzysko a decde after the Second World War. Such was true of 90% of the localities in which Jews lived in Poland, Lithuania and western Russia before 1939.

The climax of the post-war killings in Poland came on July 4, 1946, when a group of Jews, all of them survivors, who had gathered in the town of Kielce -- most of them on their way to Palestine -- were set upon by a local mob. Other survivors in Kielce were attacked in their homes. Forty-two Jews were killed that day. One of them had no identity papers or anything that might reveal his name. The only indication of his past was a tattoo number on his arm, B 2969. The numbers B 2903 to B 3449 had been given to Jews deported from the Radom ghetto to Auschwitz on August 2, 1944. No more precise identification was possible. Radom and Kielce were only fifty miles apart.

As a result of the killings in Kielce, within twenty-four hours more than 5,000 survivors left Poland in search of a haven elsewhere. Those who reached the Slovak capital of Bratislava, on the Danube, were confronted by anti-Jewish demonstrations. They continued westward.

In search of new homes, the Displaced Persons were helped by many international aid agencies, in particular by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA). In the years following the war, the Displaced Persons camps were slowly emptied, and those who had been forced to make them their home -- some for as long as five years and more -- were found havens in Western Europe and beyond, often far beyond. Survivors groups can be found in several cities on the Pacific coast of the United States and Canada, in Mexico, Latin America, South Africa and Australia.

The majority of survivors tried to make their way to Palestine. On their way there -- before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 -- several thousand were intercepted by the British and interned in Cyprus. Some were even sent back to detention camps in Germany. By 1950, more than half the survivors, as many as 100,000 in all, were living in Israel. In 1968, after an upsurge of anti-Semitism in Poland, most of the survivors who had stayed in Poland after the war also made their way to Israel. After 1988, with the relaxation of Communist controls in the Soviet Union, several thousand Soviet Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, emigrated to Israel, the United States, and even to Germany.