Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews Peter Longerich (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

from Warsaw, near

the railway line to Bialystok, 131 from 22 July deportations began from the Warsaw ghetto to what was the biggest death factory in the General Government. There

were more than 350,000 people in the Warsaw ghetto at this point, more than in

any other ghetto in Eastern Europe. By 12 September the Germans had managed

to deport more than 250,000 from Warsaw to Treblinka, to murder them in the

gas chambers there—an average of 5,000 people every day. How was it possible to

murder a quarter of a million people in only seven weeks without encountering

any notable resistance? Israel Gutman, who as a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto

has made research into the subject his life’s work, has tried to answer this

question by describing the events of the summer of 1942 as a process set in

motion with diabolical skill by the Germans and then continuously radicalized. 132

The original order for the deportation that the Jewish council announced with a

billposting campaign in response to German demands, provided for numerous

exceptions: these applied in particular to those working for the extensive admin-

istration of the Jewish council, who were in employment or even only fit for work,

and they were supposed to apply both to the immediate members of these people’s

families and to people in poor health who were unable to travel. This gave the

majority of ghetto-dwellers the illusion that they could escape deportation. This

illusion must have been fed by the fact that in the previous few months the

German ghetto administration had made considerable efforts to make the ghetto

economy more productive, thus giving the impression that it was banking on the

continuing existence of the ghetto in the medium term. 133 That such considerations 336

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

had by now been replaced by a strategy of the systematic extermination of Jews

living in Europe was not apparent to the inhabitants of the ghetto.

The first actions were carried out by the Jewish ghetto police. The German

forces remained in the background, while the Polish police began the outward

cordoning-off of the ghetto. Gradually individual blocks and streets within the

ghetto were cordoned off, the people from the houses were driven to a central

collecting point, the ‘Umschlagplatz’, where the selection took place. People with

work permits were generally not designated for deportation; the rest were trans-

ported to Treblinka on goods trains. In this way the Germans had managed to set

the deportation process in motion with the help of the authority of the Jewish

council and the Jewish police.

From the beginning of August the method used by the Germans began to

change: German police and their Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliary troops inter-

vened increasingly in events, they became more brutal in their approach, the

selection was performed more and more indiscriminately, identification papers

were ignored more and more often. The only thing that mattered now was to fill

the daily deportation quota. The Jewish council—the chairman, Czerniakow, had

committed suicide on the second day of the deportations—was completely mar-

ginalized, indeed it was forced in August to draw up deportation lists of its

members and their relatives; the Jewish ‘police’ were forced to join in by means

of very severe punitive measures.

It seems that the great majority of ghetto inhabitants, in the face of the plainly

irresistible events and the power of their tormentors, either fell into resignation

and apathy or yielded to mostly illusory hopes of survival. They clung to the hope

that they would not be caught up in the actions or would survive the selection.

Information about the mass murder in Treblinka that was circulating in the ghetto

was overlaid with different-sounding, more optimistic rumours, according to

which the ‘resettlement’ led only to a camp where one could go on living. 134 The generally disastrous living conditions—during the actions no food entered the

ghetto—clearly reinforced the tendency to succumb to an unavoidable fate.

Exhortations from the Germans, to the effect that those who reported voluntarily

for deportation would be rewarded with extra rations, proved successful in this

situation.

Finally, in early September, an extensive selection took place lasting several days

of all those people remaining in the ghetto, in which 35,000 people—10 per cent of

the original population of the ghetto—were selected out as a usable workforce.

They were now, along with 20,000 to 25,000 people who stayed hidden in the

ghetto, to form the population of the Warsaw ghetto. The rest were deported.

Among the last to be deported were the great majority of the approximately 2,000

members of the Jewish police. Apart from the 250,000 people murdered in

Treblinka, 11,000 more were deported to labour camps, and about 10,000 were

murdered during the actions in the ghetto.

Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

337

After the halt to the deportations from Warsaw, the bulk of deportations within

the district of Warsaw shifted to the smaller communities from which tens of

thousands of people had also been deported to Treblinka by the beginning of

October. 135

The Deportations from the Other Districts

in Summer and Autumn 1942

In August the deportations in the district of Lublin were resumed. The purpose

now was the complete murder by the end of the year of those Jews in the district

who were ‘not fit for work’. 136 In August the death transports went above all to Treblinka, in September they were largely interrupted, and in October/November

(after the halt to the deportations from the district of Warsaw) they were brought

to their conclusion with the utmost energy, with the trains travelling to Treblinka,

to Sobibor (which could be reached by rail again after 8 October), and to Belzec

(which was closed in December).

At the beginning of August the deportations to Treblinka began in the district of

Radom as well: first of all there were two actions in the town of Radom itself on

4 and 5 August, and on 16 and 17 August; from 20 August the ghettos in the

administrative district were cleared. These actions reached their climax with the

clearance of the biggest ghetto in the district, Tschenstochau, between 22 September

and 7 October, in which 33,000 people were deported to Treblinka. At the end of

October some transports from this district were also sent to Belzec. At the beginning

of November the clearances in the district of Radom were concluded. In toto, more

than 300,000 people from this district were murdered in less than