Free Masters of Death by Richard Rhodes Page B

nobody intervened.”
    From the prison, the victims were marched to a secure facility where their systematic murder could be concealed. Kaunas was ringed with massive forts built by the Czar on the hills above the city prior to World War I and subsequently converted to warehouses or jails. Mishell describes these numbered forts as having “heavy masonry walls . . . topped with barbed wire and observation towers.” Bunkered underground barracks and protective earthen berms made the interior compound of a fort “an artificial valley.” Into one such valley of death, the Seventh Fort, located in the northeastern suburbs, the auxiliaries drove the crowds of Jewish civilians they had arrested, separating the men from the women and children. “Under heavy blows with the butts of the rifles, we [men] were chased down the slopes into the large hole,” a survivor of these early atrocities told Mishell soon after he escaped:
    The entire area was full of humanity. The women and small children, we found out, were locked up in the underground barracks. Here we were now kept for days without even a piece of bread or a drink of water. On top of the slopes were hundreds of Lithuanian partisans with machine guns. Escape was totally impossible. We received strict orders to sit on the ground and not to talk. When somebody moved or was caught talking, the partisans would open automatic fire into the crowd. Not everyone was lucky enough to be killed outright. . . . Many of the wounded were twisting in agony and asking the bandits to kill them, but the bastards would laugh and say, “You were told to keep quiet,” but would not shoot, and instead let them die in pain.
    There was an artesian well within the Seventh Fort compound, the survivor told Mishell, but they were forbidden to drink from it; people who approached it were shot. Finally, desperate after several days without water, “a group got up and tried to attack the guards. But without guns, weakened by hunger and thirst, they were no match and were mercilessly gunned down by the bandits.” The guards gave the survivors some water and bread then, to prevent further mass revolts. After several more days, the stench of the corpses forced the guards to organize a Jewish burial team; when the dead had been removed and buried behind the artesian well, the guards shot the gravediggers.
    Later that week, on 4 July 1941, the women and children were led out from the barracks and out of the fort. “They looked terrible,” the survivor remembered: “bloody, torn clothes, pale, shaky, barely walking.” As soon as the high iron gates closed behind the women and children, “without any warning the guards suddenly opened a murderous fire into the valley [where the men were confined] completely at random, just blanketing the area with bullets, covering the site with dead and injured.” Abruptly the shooting stopped. A party of high-ranking Lithuanian army officers had arrived. Their representatives ordered Jewish men who had served in the Lithuanian army to assemble at the gate. The veterans, Mishell’s informant among them, were taken to the Kaunas central prison to have their army records checked and to be set free. On 6 July 1941, the men left behind at the Seventh Fort, including Mishell’s father, were murdered. About fifteen hundred people died at the Seventh Fort during the first week of July 1941.
    What became of the women and children? The survivor’s wife described their ordeal at the fort:
    The women were immediately taken to the underground barracks, where we all lay down on the bare concrete, one on top of the other. For several days we had no food and no water. They would not even let us out. The children were crying and sobbing and were asking their mothers why they were not taking them back home. The weaker women fainted from the thirst and the horrible air. But the nights were even worse than the days. Partisans with flashlights would come in and rob the women of their