Free The Holocaust by Martin Gilbert Page B

from a dozen small towns around Lodz, among them those from Lask and Zdunska Wola. ‘Pale shadows trudge through the ghetto,’ the ghetto chronicler noted on August 28, ‘with endemic swellings on their legs and faces, people deformed and disfigured, whose only dream is to endure, survive—to live to see a better tomorrow without new disturbances, even if the price is a small and inadequate ration’. 21
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    In the Volhynia, August 1942 saw the massacre of more than sixty thousand Jews. It also saw the escape of tens of thousands to the woods. At Kostopol, on August 24, a Jew, Gedalia Braier, called upon his fellow Jews to run. All seven hundred ran. But less than ten survived the war. At Rokitno, where sixteen hundred Jews were assembled on August 26, surrounded by armed Ukrainians, a Jewish woman called out, ‘Jews! We are done for! Run! Save yourselves!’ and more than seven hundred managed to reach the woods. At Sarny, where fourteen thousand Volhynian Jews were assembled on August 28, two Jews, one a carpenter with his axe, the other, Josef Gendelman, a tinsmith with his tin-cutters, broke through the fence surrounding the ghetto and led a mass escape. Three thousand Jews reached the gap in the fence, and sought to push their way through it. But the Ukrainians were armed with machine guns, and two and a half thousand Jews were shot down at the fence. Five hundred escaped, but many of these were killed on their way to the woods, and only a hundred survived the war and its two more years of privation, manhunts, and frequent local hostility.
    On August 25, when a group of Jews was taken from the town of Zofjowka, under guard, to dig burial pits, one of their number, Moshe-Yossel Schwartz, realising what was intended, urged his fellow Jews to attack their guards. They did so, using their spades to crush the heads of one of the German policemen and two of the Ukrainians. They then fled. But on the way to the woods, Schwartz was shot and killed.
    Elsewhere in the Volhynia, individual Jews sought to challenge the German power. In Szumsk, two young women attacked the chief of the police, ‘choking him and biting him until they were shot to death’. In Turzysk, a young man, Berish Segal, stole a gun, hit a German policeman in the face with it, but was shot by other policemen.
    The Jews who reached the Volhynian woods and formed small partisan bands did so six months before the arrival of Soviet partisans from White Russia. When the Soviet partisans came, Jews helped them, and were protected by them. But in the interval, the death toll was high. Of a group of a hundred Jewish partisans and escaped Soviet prisoners-of-war near Radziwillow, only one, the platoon commander, Yechiel Prochownik, survived. Another of the Jewish partisan leaders, Moshe Gildenmann, began hisanti-German activities with ten men and a single knife. A year later, in the marshes north of Zhitomir, Gildenmann’s group was to guide to safety a Russian division surrounded by the Germans. 22
    The deportations from France had continued throughout August. Individual Catholics protested. At the same time, on August 28, the Germans ordered all Catholic priests who sheltered Jews to be arrested. 23 One priest, a Jesuit, had hidden eighty Jewish children destined for deportation. He too was arrested. 24
    On August 26 more than four hundred children under the age of twelve had been deported from Paris to Auschwitz and gassed. 25 On August 28 the deportees included 280 children of sixteen and younger, among them Michel Rozes, who was only one and a half years old, deported with his mother and his five-year-old sister Sarah.
    The journey from Paris to Auschwitz took three days. Albert Hollender, one of only eight survivors of the convoy, later recalled:
    Piled up in freight cars, unable to bend or to budge, sticking one to the other, breathless, crushed by one’s neighbour’s every move, this was already hell. During the day, a torrid heat, with a pestilential