Читать книгу Warsaw 1944: Hitler, Himmler and the Crushing of a City - Alexandra Richie - Страница 23

What followed was to become one of the most brutal occupations in all of Europe. In the next five years the Germans systematically rounded up and murdered millions of Poles, and Warsaw suffered terrible losses. The litany of crimes against the people of the city is overwhelming. By far the single greatest atrocity was the extermination of almost all of the capital’s Jews, a crime so complete that by the time of the Warsaw Uprising there were only 28,000 left alive in the city, all of them, with the ghetto an utter ruin, in hiding on the ‘Aryan’ side.³ Over 11,000 were able to leave Warsaw with the Gentile population after the uprising, most of them using false papers. Of the five hundred who remained behind, only two hundred would survive until January 1945, when Russians liberated the frightened and starving people struggling in the embers and rubble of the once great city.

The Jews of Warsaw had made the city their home for five hundred years, creating a rich cultural heritage which had become part of the very fabric of urban life. The old tombstones of the Jewish cemetery, which as in Berlin Hitler decided to spare, bear the names of thousands of people who, through literature or science or music, contributed in some way to the richness of one of the great European capitals. This old and dynamic community was targeted by the Nazis for complete annihilation.

The process began gradually. In October 1939 spiteful and humiliating attacks began against the Jews of Warsaw. The Germans themselves documented these attacks, which at first took place primarily against Orthodox Jewish men – thousands of ‘tourist’ photographs show innocent people being forced to dance by Nazi soldiers, or having their beards roughly cut off. The oppression increased. Jews were forced to move the rubble from bomb sites. There followed widespread organized theft of Jewish property, often by the Wehrmacht. By the end of November 1939 Jews were being forced to wear Star of David armbands, which in Warsaw were blue and white. In April 1940 a high red-brick wall began to rise around the newly created ghetto, and between mid-October and mid-November of that year the city was turned on its head as 113,000 Catholic Poles and 130,000 Jewish Poles were forced to leave their homes and move to either the new ‘Aryan’ or ‘Jewish’ districts of Warsaw. None of them had a choice, although many thousands of Jews chose to hide on the ‘Aryan’ side. On 16 November the Germans closed all the gates in the ten-foot-high brick wall and topped it with barbed wire, penning Warsaw’s Jews in a thousand-acre prison in the centre of their own city. The Nazis had effectively created the largest ghetto in Europe. For the Jewish prisoners, communication with the outside world virtually ceased. As weeks turned to months, most of those trapped inside were reduced from the prosperity of their former lives as doctors and actors, tradesmen and journalists, to a basic struggle for survival, selling whatever they could to make a little money to get through another few hours. By 1942 the majority of Jews in the ghetto were existing on less than two hundred calories a day. Eighty thousand people – 10,000 of them children – died of starvation, disease or brutal treatment on the streets. Films and photographs, some taken by German ‘tourist’ soldiers, show the lonely deaths of emaciated children too weak even to move from the middle of the street. Their bodies were collected daily by handcart and thrown into mass graves along with the rest of the victims. It was pitiless cruelty.

For those strong enough to carry on, life was a ritual of humiliation, degradation and fear; people were pushed off high balconies, or beaten with rifle butts, or herded and whipped like animals for no reason. The Nazis and their henchmen, the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst ghetto police, had absolute power over life and death, and a person could be stopped, interrogated, beaten or killed on a whim. Piotr Dembowski, who grew up in the ghetto, remembered guards forcing Jewish workers to ‘fight each other or to sing (in Polish) the song praising the “golden Hitler, who taught us how to work”. I remember the German Polish-language propaganda posters: “Jew=Louse=Typhus”.’⁴

In ‘Grossaktion Warschau’, which lasted only from 22 July until 21 September 1942 – a period of less than two months – a staggering 310,322 men, women and children were gathered at the Umschlagplatz and herded onto trains destined for Treblinka. This terrifying place was perhaps the most chilling and efficient of all the extermination camps.

In order to encourage people to go to the trains, the Germans cynically promised loaves of bread and free marmalade to the starving, and spread rumours of ‘resettlement’ to allay their fears. Many desperately hoped that their lives would be spared; others suspected the truth. Władysław Szpilman remembered the terrible conditions at the Umschlagplatz, where those awaiting transportation were forced to wait sometimes for days for space on a train. It was hot, and there was no shade, food or water: ‘People got lost in the crush and called to one another in vain. We heard the shots and shouting which meant raids were going on in the nearby streets. Agitation grew as the hour approached at which the train was supposed to come.’⁵ Szpilman was pulled out of the crowd at the last possible moment and his life was spared, but he watched as his mother, father and siblings were crammed into the wagon that would take them to their deaths. As it rolled away he heard a Jewish policeman say to an SS man, ‘Well, off they go for meltdown!’ Szpilman remembered, ‘I looked the way he was pointing. The doors of the trucks had been closed, and the train was starting off, slowly and laboriously. I turned away and staggered down the empty street, weeping out loud, pursued by the fading cries of the people shut up in those trucks.’⁶

Stanisław Aronson, the scion of a sophisticated and wealthy Jewish industrial family, managed to escape from the train taking him and the rest of his family to Treblinka. ‘When the train stopped in the field I approached a small window in the top of our wagon. I was very thin and managed to squeeze through.’ He made his way back to Warsaw, where he joined the elite AK unit ‘Kedyw’, and eventually fought in the 1944 uprising. As it happened, the first place he was ordered to attack was the school in Stawki Street, the very place from which he had been sent to Treblinka.

For those who did not escape from the trains, their fate was almost certain death. The horror of Treblinka is simply impossible to imagine. A glimpse of its depravity can be gleaned in a book, published by the Polish Underground Press in 1944, by Yankel Wiernik, who managed to escape after working in the camp as a carpenter. Wiernik witnessed the sufferings of the Warsaw Jews who were not, as was the custom, sent directly to the gas chambers, but were treated with particular cruelty. Many were burned alive on the huge pyres lit to destroy the tens of thousands of bodies: ‘Women with children were separated from the others, led up to the fires and, after the murderers had had their fill of watching the terror-stricken women and children, they killed them right by the pyre and threw them into the flames. This happened quite frequently. The women fainted from fear and the brutes dragged them to the fire half dead. Panic-stricken, the children clung to their mothers. The women begged for mercy, with eyes closed so as to shut out the grisly scene, but their tormentors only leered at them and kept their victims in agonizing suspense for minutes on end. While one batch of women and children were being killed, others were left standing around, waiting their turn. Time and time again children were snatched from their mothers’ arms and tossed into the flames alive, while their tormentors laughed, urging the mothers to be brave and jump into the fire after their children and mocking the women for being cowards.’⁷ The Nazis’ desire to keep the horror of Treblinka secret meant that anyone who went inside as a prisoner had to die. Wiernik saw a German woman and her two sons, who had been put on the transport by mistake, sent to the gas chambers despite having identity papers proving that they were ‘Aryan’. Of the 850,000 people sent to this terrible place, only forty to seventy Jews survived the war.

News of the fate of those who boarded the trains was, however, beginning to leak out. The Polish-Jewish politician and historian Emanuel Ringelblum and others had collected evidence of life in the doomed ghetto, and also of the mass murders in Treblinka and Chełmno. The Catholic Pole Jan Karski was smuggled into the ghetto, and later managed, dressed as a Ukrainian guard, to witness conditions in one of the transit camps. He and others in the AK tried to alert the world about what was happening. Their warnings were ignored. Nevertheless, as evidence mounted of the true destination of the Jews taken for ‘resettlement’, a resistance movement grew. It was to lead to the most tragic of all the uprisings in Warsaw’s long history.

Comparisons between the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 are inevitable, but it is virtually impossible to equate the two. Both were enormous and terrible tragedies, but in terms of motivation, hopelessness and desperation there is absolutely no equivalence between the tragic fighters of 1943 and those who decided to take up arms in 1944. The latter uprising was started largely for political reasons, to demonstrate to the world that the Poles had helped liberate their capital from the Germans and to prove that they deserved an independent state, free from German or Soviet control. The participants in the 1943 Ghetto Uprising had no such grandiose aims. Their choice had been made for them. They had been condemned to death because they were Jewish, and their struggle was not even one for survival. They were not interested in the kind of political or military objectives that preoccupied so many in the AK, nor did they entertain thoughts of any kind of victory. They had only two choices: to be murdered in Treblinka or to be killed, fighting with weapon in hand, in the tiny area remaining to them. Rarely in history has such a desperately tragic choice been forced on any group of human beings.

Mordechaj Anielewicz, organizer of the Ghetto Uprising, did not believe any of the German promises of ‘resettlement’. By September 1942 all but 60,000 of Warsaw’s Jews had been murdered in Treblinka, and despite the measures taken by the Germans to hide the truth, some now knew for certain what awaited them if they boarded the trains. The Jewish Combat Organization under Anielewicz began to gather weapons as best it could, and to organize to fight.

On 19 April 1943 the Germans descended on the ghetto with a force of 2,000 men. They had expected simply to terrorize their victims into getting on the trains, as they had in the past, but this time they were taken by surprise. The Jewish fighters, vastly outnumbered and with far fewer weapons than the thugs sent in to eject or kill them, had an intimate knowledge of the geography of the ghetto, including the sewer system, on their side. The battle raged for three weeks, with the desperate resisters first being hounded by German troops, and then forced from place to place as the ghetto was systematically burned. On 8 May Mordechaj Anielewicz and his girlfriend Mira Fuchrer, along with his staff, were surrounded at the ŻOB command bunker at 18 Miła Street. A monument now marks the site where they committed mass suicide in front of the SS troops who had been sent to kill them. As the Germans took over the ghetto a handful of fighters escaped through the sewers and were hidden on the ‘Aryan’ side of the city; a number went on to fight in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising as the ‘ŻOB Group’.

Having defeated the resisters, the Nazis began to clear the ghetto. Anyone left alive was either killed on the spot or taken to Treblinka. On 16 May SS Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop announced that the fighting was over. ‘The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more,’ he crowed. Himmler had the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, a beautiful and imposing Leandro Marconi landmark, blown up to celebrate this great success. ‘What a wonderful sight!’ Stroop wrote. ‘I called out “Heil Hitler” and pressed the button. A terrific explosion brought flames right up to the clouds. The colours were unbelievable. An unforgettable allegory of the triumph over Jewry.’⁸ The rest of the ghetto was systematically destroyed. Photographs show a sea of rubble where homes and synagogues and shops had once stood. An entire history had been wiped from the map.

The destruction of the Warsaw ghetto was of importance to the genesis of the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, not least because it was a grave warning of the depths to which the Nazis could sink. The AK had not contributed a great deal to the heroic fight at the beginning of the Ghetto Uprising, but in reality there was little it could have done. At that point the AK had few weapons to spare; some of its members also subscribed to the stereotype that the Jews were unable or unwilling to fight. By the end, however, the sheer heroism of the combatants had greatly impressed many in the AK, who were amazed that a small group of poorly armed Jews had managed to hold off the Germans for weeks under near-impossible conditions, with almost no help. Thirteen thousand Jews had died in the fighting, around half of them burned to death. The Germans had lost seventeen men killed and around two hundred wounded. ŻOB had been so effective in part because they had abandoned street fighting, with its high casualty rate, in favour of partisan-style warfare, with each burned-out building and the sewer network being used to the utmost advantage. At the same time, Warsaw’s citizens had watched in horror from Świętojerska Street and Krasiński Square as Jews trapped by flames had jumped from the upper storeys of burning buildings. All Warsaw could hear the explosions and the sound of gunfire inside the ghetto, and stories of acts of bravery and self-sacrifice spread throughout the city. The uprising won the respect of the non-Jewish Warsawians, many of whom were deeply disturbed by what was being done to the Jewish population just beyond their reach.

The chilling fact was that in the space of a few months the Germans had succeeded in murdering a huge number of Warsawians in the centre of their city, or deporting them to be murdered elsewhere. Despite the efforts of some individuals in organizations like Żegota, a code-name for the secret Council to Aid Jews set up by Władysław Bartoszewski, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and others, few outside Warsaw believed the reports of what was happening, and precious little was done to help. In a moving speech at Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery on the fortieth anniversary of the Ghetto Uprising, Józef Rybicki, commander of ‘Kedyw’, who later recruited Stanisław Aronson, described his feelings of helplessness at the time. ‘There behind a wall, burning ghetto houses, detonations, shots, executions, murders. And from our side the pain and despair of powerlessness. It is like a mother who knows her child is dying and she can only suffer and despair that she can’t help him. This feeling of despair and powerlessness stays with us forever as remorse.’⁹ The Ghetto Uprising taught Rybicki just how badly armed the AK was. ‘We couldn’t give proper help, necessary help. In places that needed divisions we could only send groups or give some weapons. The Warsaw Uprising showed us later how weakly equipped we were.’

The treatment of the Jews and Roma in Nazi-occupied Europe was unique. No other peoples suffered the systematic hunting down, the remorseless quest for every last individual, the utterly pitiless extermination of each human being, and the knowledge that once they had been identified and caught there would be no mercy and no escape. Non-Jewish Poles did not suffer the extreme, unrelenting terror that led to the murder of so many Polish Jews. Piotr Dembowski, who was arrested in Warsaw on 7 April 1944 in a round-up in the district of Żoliborz, witnessed the different treatment meted out to Jews and Catholics at such a moment. Around sixty people were arrested, among whom were eight Jewish men and women who had been in hiding and who did not have the correct papers. ‘We stayed together for a few hours in a transit cell in the Pawiak prison,’ he recalled. ‘We whispered. Later, “we” [the Poles] were turned into the Registrar’s office and entered the regular prison, while “they” [the Jews] were led outside to the already destroyed ghetto. They knew and we knew that they would be shot that very day. That particular memory, the memory of my “automatic” reaction – “Thank God that I am not …” – has prevented me from ever forgetting the absolute distinction that existed in those terrible days between Jews and non-Jews.’¹⁰

Ethnic Poles also endured great discrimination and violence at the hands of the Nazis, albeit on a vastly different scale from the Jews and Roma. From the moment the Germans invaded the country, ethnic Poles were treated as Untermenschen – sub-humans – who were to be killed, deported or turned into slaves of the German master race. Hitler had made it very clear from the beginning that his troops were to send to death ‘mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish race and language’. The Poles, and Warsawians in particular, were despised by both Hitler and Himmler, and from 1939 SS and police Einsatzgruppen arrested and killed anyone who stood in the way of Generalplan Ost – the Nazi plan to Germanize the east.

In June 1939 Hitler was invited to visit an architectural office in the Bavarian city of Würzburg. By chance his attention was caught by the designs for a new town planned to replace the current city of Warsaw. He gave his permission for the project to be pursued. The design, which became known as the Pabst Plan after one of its authors, envisaged the callous reduction of the city from 1.5 million inhabitants to a small German population of 130,000 people, with room for 80,000 Poles to be kept as slave labour on the left bank of the river. The Jews were to disappear altogether. Warsaw, with the exception of a few areas such as the Old Town, was to be flattened and replaced by a ‘New German City’ which had been designed to resemble a medieval German settlement, complete with picturesque narrow streets and pretty timber-framed houses. The population was dispensable. The city was to become a symbol of the new Germany of the east.

Generalplan Ost was not reserved for Warsaw alone; indeed, the entire pre-war Polish population of thirty-five million was to be reduced to a mere three to four million uneducated ‘peasants’ who would be put to work in industry or agriculture. To this end the Germans swept through Poland in 1939, arresting the country’s elite – tens of thousands of doctors and teachers, bureaucrats and landowners, clergymen and professors, journalists and businessmen, actors and priests. Many were murdered at killing grounds such as the Palmiry forest near Warsaw, or in the Pawiak prison in the city itself. The earliest such massacres were small – the first in Warsaw was in the suburb of Zielonka in September 1939, when nine people were executed because someone had put up a poster quoting an anti-Prussian song, but the numbers increased rapidly. In Wawer, another suburb of Warsaw, 107 civilians were shot in reprisal for the killing of two German NCOs. As it happened, Zielonka and Wawer would be the first two suburbs of Warsaw to be taken by the Red Army in July 1944. The sounds of battle from those districts would prompt the AK to start the uprising.

One of the Germans to take to the killing of the Poles with gusto was none other than Hermann Fegelein, whose 1st SS Cavalry Division carried out a number of mass shootings in the autumn of 1944. Fegelein had shown his disdain for the Poles early on, personally taking part in the execution of nearly 2,000 people in the Kampinos forest near Palmiry. The first of these, on 7 and 8 December 1939, saw eighty people killed. Later victims included the speaker of the Polish Parliament, the Olympic gold medal-winning athlete Janusz Kusociński, and the Vice-President of Warsaw Jan Pohoski. Pictures taken on the first day show the victims being led to their deaths in dressing gowns and pyjamas, as they had not been given time to get dressed.¹¹ Fegelein also shot a number of eminent Poles in the gardens of the Parliament Buildings in Warsaw.

This brutality only increased with time, and by the end of the war ethnic Poles were to be found in nearly every camp in the Reich. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski called for the creation of Auschwitz in order to hold ethnic Polish prisoners; only later would it evolve into the factory of death for Jewish victims. The numbers of ethnic Poles killed are dwarfed by the sheer scale of the murder of Jews in the camps; even so, of the estimated 140,000 non-Jewish Poles imprisoned at Auschwitz, around 70,000 died, some as the result of barbaric medical experiments but most through disease, starvation and ill-treatment. Around 20,000 Poles were killed in Sachsenhausen and 20,000 in Gross-Rosen, 17,000 in both Ravensbrück and Neuengamme, and 10,000 in Dachau. Tens of thousands of the 100,000 Poles sent to Majdanek were killed there, and 30,000 died at Mauthausen. Few people today have heard of the sub-camp at Gusen, a place designed specifically to erase the intelligentsia of Poland through hard labour in the granite mines. Many died after being thrown into the Mauthausen quarry, the SS and kapos laughing as the ‘parachutists without parachutes’ writhed and twisted before hitting the ground.

As with any list of numbers, it is sometimes easy to forget that each figure represents an individual, a single person who was wrongfully imprisoned, brutally abused, and killed. Stanisław Nogaj, Gusen prisoner no. 43322, wrote that there were about eighty kinds of violent death in the sub-camp, where the guards were particularly cruel and sadistic, as if to heap humiliation on the ‘effete’ intellectuals and professionals who ended up as prisoners there. They included ‘bullets, clubs, ropes, gas, poison, electrical current, hunger, being buried alive, burned alive, stoned to death, falling under trains, thrown from cliffs …’ Sketches that survive from the camp show prisoners being crushed by stones, hung up by their hands and whipped, or chained by the neck like animals. Ludwik Bielerzewski, Gusen prisoner no. 48705, recalled the death of Father Laskowski, Director of Economy at the Seminary in Poznań. When the hated Oberkapo Kastenhofen Gustav Krutzky, known as ‘Tygrys’ by the inmates, asked Father Laskowski who he was, he answered that he was a priest. ‘This answer was sufficient. They ordered him to lift a huge, hundred-kilo stone. When he was not able to lift it, “Tygrys” – one of the kapos who should be avoided at all costs, since a mere encounter with him heralded an inevitable death – together with his colleague, placed this stone on the back of the unfortunate prisoner. The stone fell, Father Laskowski was knocked down. The torturers beat and kicked the prostrated victim. When he got up with difficulty they weighed him down again. Another fall.’ The kapos eventually killed him.¹² In another form of murder people were forced to strip naked and, in freezing winter weather, stand in the ‘baths’, where they were doused with cold water. Zbigniew Wlazłowski, Gusen prisoner no. 49943, risked his life to witness such an execution from Block 29: ‘Unterscharführer Jentsch ran around with a riding crop in his hand, urged on the block leaders and encouraged the kapos to beat the resisters. Even he cut the naked bodies with a whip or shoved the prisoners with his leg under the ice-cold showers. The people froze, and the water unable to drain to the blocked sewers kept on rising … Most of them became weak, fell down, and drowned in the water then above their knees.’¹³

The Germans had other punishments for the Poles. Between 1939 and 1945 over 1.5 million were sent as forced labourers to the Reich. In another agonizing chapter, children deemed ‘racially acceptable’ were taken from their parents and given to childless couples in Germany. As Himmler wrote in his official report on the subject, ‘racially valuable children [are to be raised] in the old Reich in proper educational facilities or in German family care. The children must not be older than eight or ten years, because only till this age can we truly change their national identification, that is “final Germanization”. A condition for this is complete separation from any Polish relatives. Children will be given German names, their ancestry will be created by a special office.’¹⁴ Twenty thousand children were taken in this way; one witness remembered ‘the agony of the mothers and fathers, the beating by the Germans, and the crying of the children’ as they were taken from their homes.¹⁵

Nowhere in all Nazi-occupied Europe was the ‘extensive machinery of repression’ as great as it was in Poland.¹⁶ There were always at least 50,000 SS and police on hand to control the despised inhabitants, and as a result nowhere was safe. Local officials in tiny villages and towns could be targeted, or held hostage to be killed later, if a German was attacked. Life in Warsaw became particularly dangerous after September 1943, when Governor Hans Frank decided to hold random round-ups and public executions on the streets. His sole aim was to increase the terror in the hope of intimidating the ‘bandits’ of the Home Army.

When one walks the streets of Warsaw today, particularly the lovely area around Nowy Świat, with its charming buildings and luxury shops, one comes across grey concrete plaques every few hundred metres or so. Each commemorates thirty or forty people killed by the Germans. In photographs of these random round-ups one can see groups of well-dressed men and women, on their way home from work or off to see friends, cordoned off from the rest of the crowd. They would be put up against a nearby wall, and shot. At first the victims were simply executed, but as the Poles had the annoying habit of yelling patriotic phrases as they died, the Germans took to sealing their mouths with plaster of Paris, or pushing narcotic-soaked rags down their throats to keep them quiet.¹⁷ As the war dragged on and clothing became more scarce, the condemned were forced to strip before they were killed; their bodies were then burned in the ghetto ruins. After evening curfew the names of those who had died were read out over the tinny loudspeakers that hung from posts throughout the city; people listened from their homes, dreading to hear the name of a friend or a loved one.

The Italian journalist Alceo Valcini, who lived in Warsaw for most of the war, remembered round-ups as late as July 1944. ‘I met an old lady on a street who said, “Go away quickly! Round-ups!” With a beating heart and with my Polish friends I found shelter in the nearest gate. We walked upstairs and strangers opened doors, offering us hospitality for a few hours. Another time after one hour of waiting the concierge came and said that the Germans had gone. I was very touched by the solidarity.’¹⁸ In total the Germans rounded up and killed 40,000 ethnic Poles in Warsaw in this way between June 1941 and September 1944. Erich von dem Bach admitted at Nuremberg that any officer with the rank of captain or higher had the authority to kill fifty to a hundred Poles for every German killed without referring the matter to a higher authority.¹⁹

The ethnic Poles and the Jews of Warsaw were targeted by the Germans in different ways and at different times, but it gives the Nazis a kind of victory to describe the deaths of the two groups as if they were entirely removed from one another. The murder of the Jews was unique in its extent and barbarism, but the whole of Warsaw was terrorized and destroyed, and its people murdered, throughout the war, albeit to different degrees. Five hundred years of Jewish culture were simply erased from the city centre in an enormous ‘Grossaktion’ that is hard to fathom in its sheer scale. The total death toll in Warsaw, including Jews and non-Jewish Poles, amounted to 685,000 human beings. In 1939 Warsaw had had the second-largest Jewish population in the world after New York. Only 11,500 of them survived the war. What was done in the Polish capital was, as the historian Gunnar Paulsson has put it, ‘the greatest slaughter of a single city in history’. For Warsaw, the deaths of so many of its citizens was a tragedy from which it will never truly recover; the end of so much life and the elimination of an entire culture completely and forever changed the character of the metropolis on the Vistula.²⁰

It was precisely this rule of terror that instilled such deep longing for freedom in Warsaw, which is why, in the summer of 1944, the atmosphere in the city changed so radically. The citizens could hear the echo of Soviet guns in the distant suburbs of Wawer, Otwock and Zielonka. They knew that a German officer had very nearly succeeded in killing Hitler on 20 July; they knew about the Normandy landings, and were excitedly following the progress of the Allied troops in France via illegal radio broadcasts and underground newspapers. And above all, everywhere they could see the physical evidence of a defeated German army for themselves.