Free The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert Page A

fell on the ground and the Germans shot him, and I could not even save him.’ At the cemetery the slaughter began. ‘They tore children from their mothers’ arms and tore them to bits, shot and murdered mercilessly, so that a thousand victims fell in a single day. And those of us who remained alive had to bury the dead Jews.’ Shortly afterwards, her thirteen-year-old son was seized. ‘To this day we do not know what became of him,’ she recalled in 1946, ‘but we understand that we will never see him, our only child, our eyesight itself.’ 17
    In the regions of the General Government where the deportations were to Treblinka, these too were continuing from day to day without interruption. ‘I seem to lose my reason in this atmosphere of doom and idleness,’ the fifty-three-year-old Gertrude Zeisler, a deportee from Vienna, had written from the Kielce ghetto on August 13. 18 Eleven days later, on August 24, she was almost certainly among the many thousand Jews deported from Kielce to Treblinka. At Kielce station they were loaded on the trains by Ukrainian and German SS, and by the Polish police. The journey, which normally would take little over three hours, took twenty-four: many fainted from the heat and thirst, and hundreds died of suffocation. Others, in desperation, drank their own urine to try to avoid dehydration. When the train reached Treblinka, Izak Helfing later recalled, ‘nearly a third of us were dead’.
    At Treblinka, the women were the first to be sent to the gas-chambers. Then, as Helfing recalled, ‘a certain Friedman’ cut a Ukrainian in his throat with a razor blade. The guards at once opened fire, and many were killed or wounded. The shooting went on for a long time. By the time it was finished, eighty per cent of the men and boys were dead. Helfing was fortunate to be able to hide among the corpses, and then to slip among the labourers. ‘For an entire day I employed myself by dragging the corpses away from the train cars. When nightfall came, I hid myself straightaway among the dead. Thus did I evade the gas oven for four days on end.’ 19
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    In the Lodz ghetto, every patch of waste ground had been given over to cultivation of vegetables. Throughout the summer, the hundred thousand inhabitants of the ghetto waited for the momentwhen the main crop, the cabbages, would be ready to eat. Then, amid a heat wave in August, when the temperature reached 45 degrees centigrade, almost the whole cabbage crop was, as the ghetto chronicle recorded, ‘devoured by an enormous mass of caterpillars’. In this way, the Chronicle added, ‘the work of so many hands, so much energy, and the last ounce of people’s strength were lost with them!’ Those who suffered most were ‘little people without resources’, who had worked alone, or with their families, ‘giving every free minute they had to that tedious back-breaking work’. Now they were helpless for, as the chronicler wrote:
    They had thought that by Sisyphean labour they would be able to set a little something aside for the hard winter months to come, they believed in some better tomorrow, assured them by the labour done in the hours free from the demands of the ghetto, and now, suddenly, disillusionment and despair!
    But a Jew is a fatalist. He believes that if something happened, it was meant to be.
    And, besides, he consoles himself with the knowledge that he has already suffered greater losses and ordeals and somehow survived them too. He must only think of how to protect his remaining vegetables from this plague, since the caterpillars are already moving on to the beets (for lack of anything else to feed on), so those too will soon be under serious attack.
    Perhaps a salt, or even a soda solution will be found so that we can somehow go on living and survive this grievous affliction while we wait for a better tomorrow. Such is our mentality! 20
    Into the Lodz ghetto, at this very moment, were brought the remnants of the Jewish ghettos