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Home , Alexander Pechersky, Einsatzgruppen, Final Solution, Gas van, General Government, Josef Mengele

UNIT four: “”: Murder by Bullets and Death Camps TABLE OF CONTENTS learning objectives 5 SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES 6 classroom activities • Death by Bullets and Mobile Killing Centers 29 • 30 • Killing Centers and 31 iwitness activities (Internet Access Required) • : The Firing Squads of the 34 iwitness activities (downloadable mini lessons) • A Day in Auschwitz 23 • Arrival at Auschwitz 24 • Areyvut 34 • Emunah 34 • Halacha 34 • Prayer 34 • Holidays 34 • Mesorah 34 • Friendship 34 • Chesed 34 text for teachers • Part A: Murder by Bullets – A Historical Overview 8

® Invades the 8

® The Mobile Killers 9

2 ® The Conference 11

® as State Policy 12 • Part B: Death Camps 13

® Death Camps 16

® Chelmno 18

® Belzec 19

® Sobibor 19

® Treblinka 21

® Majdanek 22

® Erntefest 23

® Auschwitz 23 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES • The Einsatzgruppen Eyewitness Testimony – Writings 35 • 38

3 TEACHING DIFFICULT MATERIAL

This lesson contains very difficult and complex subject matter. We teach the “how” of , evoking many emotions and questions in our students. Teachers are encouraged to familiarize their students with this history, and at the same time be sensitive to the students’ reactions, and assure them that experiencing a variety of emotions— anger, sadness, outrage, melancholy, numbness, distancing—are all natural responses. Activities in this unit provide an opportunity for students to express and discuss their feelings with others. They are also designed to be engaging, so that they foster a connection between the students and subject matter.

Care has been used in choosing the resources presented to the students. Some of the material is inevitably graphic in nature, authentically reflecting the horrors of this history. Caution should be exercised in using- and most especially overusing- graphic images and texts.

Later in this unit we offer primary source documents as examples for use in the classroom. It is important that teachers always preview the materials that they will use in their classes.

There is a paradox in implementing graphic material: it is compelling evidence of the deliberate attempt to dehumanize the victims, but it must be used in a way that ensures we do not participate in this ,and in a way that ensures that the students do not become to what there are seeing. Students should be horrified, but not to the point that they turn away or become desensitized to it because it is “another graphic Holocaust image.” Listening to witnesses’ testimonies humanizes this horrific material, so that students can connect to it in a deeper way. Activities are designed to allow teachers to help students through this process.

4 LEARNING OBJECTIVES UNIT 4 LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Through survivor testimonies, students will:

1. Understand how Nazi racial ideology gave rise to the “Final Solution”

2. Learn about – the mass scale transporting of victims to killing centers

3. Comprehend the distinctions between four different types of camps: Transit Camps, Concentration Camps, Slave Labor Camps, Killing Centers

4. Explore survivors’ stories of endurance, resistance, and religious observance in order to deepen the understanding of day-to-day life in the camps

5. Humanize the victims by exploring the role of friendship and community in the camps

5 SURVIVOR BIOGRAPHIES

In this unit, students will have the opportunity to watch testimony from:

• Zvi Michaeli was born on May 15, 1925 in an Orthodox Jewish family in Ejszyszki, . After the by Nazi forces, he describes being rounded up with his father and taken to a massacre site outside of the city. Zvi’s father shielded him from bullets by draping his own arm around his son’s neck and head and as a result bullets only grazed him but left him mostly unharmed. After the shooting, Zvi lay beneath the body of his father and describes the weight of his body, the closeness he felt to his father, before managing to escape from underneath him and running away. He survived the war in hiding, by evading roundups, and by joining Soviet resistance groups. Following the war, he returned to his hometown of Ejszyszki, Poland and encountered unprecedented and violence from his Polish neighbors who were surprised that they’d survived. He retaliated together with the Russian soldiers that had liberated the region and then fled to Germany where he got married. From Germany, he and his wife boarded the Exodus ship and tried to immigrate to but was denied entry by the British government. In 1948, he finally made it to Israel where he and his wife had two kids. In 1966, he and his family moved to the .

• Roman Kent, son of Emanuel and Sonia Kniker, was born in Lodz, Poland, on April 18, 1929. He had two older sisters, Dasza and Renia, and one younger brother, Leon. His father owned a textile factory. Roman attended a private Jewish school. At the end of 1939, the family was imprisoned in the Lodz ; Emanuel died there. In the fall of 1944, the ghetto was liquidated, and the family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Roman survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gross-Rosen, and Flossenberg concentration camps. While Leon, Dasza, and Renia also survived the Holocaust, Dasza and Leon died young. Roman met his future wife Hannah in New York, and they were married in 1957. At the time of Roman’s interview on April 29, 1996 in New York, he and his wife Hannah had two grandchildren, Eryn and Dara, and were expecting a third.

• Itka Zygmuntowicz was born in Ciechanów, Poland on April 15, 1926 to an orthodox Jewish family. At the age of fifteen in October 1941, she and her family were forced into the Ghetto. In 1942, Itka was deported by cattle car to Auschwitz- Birkenau. Later she was forced on a death towards Ravensbrück concentration camp and was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross in April 1945. After the war in 1953 Itka migrated to the United States where she was interviewed in Philadelphia, PA on March 3, 1996.

6 • was born on April 15, 1927 in , , Poland and grew up in a traditional Jewish family. After being sent a ghetto in Stryj, Poland, Thomas was sent to the Sobibor death camp. On October 14, 1943, Thomas participated in the Sobibor uprising. He escaped into the forest and hid on farms. He was liberated in Lublin, Poland by Soviet armed forces. This interview took place on April 4, 1995 in Issaquah, Washington.

• was born on November 25, 1929 in Izbica, Lublin, Poland, and grew up in an Orthodox family. On October 14, 1943, Philip participated in the Sobibor uprising; Philip escaped and lived under a false identity in Tarzymiechy, Poland. He was liberated by Soviet armed forces. This interview took place on August 22, 1997 in Little Neck, New York.

• Chaim Engel was born on January 10, 1916 in Łódź, Poland and grew up in a traditional Jewish household. After surviving the Sobibor uprising, Philip hid in forests and on farms. He was liberated in Lublin, Poland by Soviet armed forces. This interview took place on October 18, 1995 in Branford, Connecticut.

7 TEXT FOR TEACHERS PART A: MURDER BY BULLETS – A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The “Final Solution to the ,” the Nazis’ euphemistic code for the mass murder of European Jewry, was implemented in stages, although the various forms of killing overlapped as primitive methods gave way to what was then considered state-of- the-art technology. Killing by bullets was followed by gassing first in mobile killing vans, which were in turn supplanted by stationary gas chambers of much greater capacity and efficiency.

The “Final Solution” began in practice after German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union in and implemented a policy towards the of murder by bullets; the mobile killing squads that moved with the German army into the Soviet Union and the local units that assisted them in murdering Jews in close proximity to their homes. The effort was consolidated and intensified after the Wannsee Conference was convened in in January 1942, which enlisted top officials in the government, the , the armed and occupation forces push to bring every last Jew from all over Europe to killing centers with the goal of making Europe “Judenrein.”

In 1942, the turned to murder by gassing in order to expedite large-scale killing. Victims from all over German-occupied Europe were deported from such as in occupied Poland and later after April 1944 or from their homes in Western Europe, via transit camps and brought to death and concentration camps, situated mainly in German-occupied Poland.

The death toll from the mobile killing squads and killing centers is staggering; difficult to comprehend in its enormity. Through witness testimony, students will better understand the human faces behind the statistics. They will listen to the voices of those who were teenagers, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers during this time. In doing so, students will hear a range of experiences under the direst of circumstances.

The first section focuses on the experience of those extremely rare few who witnessed, but somehow escaped the “murder by bullets.” The second section explores the experiences of those who endured death camps. The third section highlights the survivors who were in slave labor camps.

GERMANY INVADES THE SOVIET UNION: “” BEGINS

On June 22, 1941, in the offensive known by the “Operation Barbarossa,” the German army invaded the Soviet Union along a 2,000-mile-long front. Twenty months earlier Germany and the Soviet Union had signed Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that pledged

8 peace and divided Poland. Soviet leader was taken aback by the betrayal from his former ally Hitler and all Soviets were shocked by the ferocity of the attack. Three million German soldiers went into battle against the ’s former ally. The invasion force, which included Finnish, Romanian, and Hungarian troops, totaled more than one hundred infantry divisions and 3,550 tanks. Despite advance warnings that an attack was coming, Soviet troops were overwhelmed. The Germans moved swiftly. In a month, the Baltic states of , , and were captured.

The aim of the invasion of the Soviet Union went beyond military conquest. It was, in the words of SS head , “an ideological battle and a struggle of races.” In an address designed for German troops, Himmler summed up the Nazi racial demonology in which and Jews were seen as barely human:

Here in this struggle stands National : an ideology based on the value of our Germanic, Nordic blood. Here stands a world as we have conceived it: beautiful, decent, socially equal . . . a happy beautiful world full of culture. That is what our Germany is like.

On the other side stands a population of 180 million, a mixture of races whose very names are unpronounceable, and whose physique is such that one can shoot them down without pity and compassion . . . These people have been welded by the Jews into one religion, one ideology that is called Bolshevism.

When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle against the same subhumanity, the same inferior races that at one time appeared under the name Huns, another time . . . under the name Magyars, another time under the name Tartars, and still another time under the name Genghis Khan and the Mongols.

Once we understand Himmler’s words, it was only logical that killing these “inferior peoples” to ensure “‘Aryan’ racial supremacy” was permissible, if not essential.

THE MOBILE KILLERS

The German invasion of the Soviet Union marked a turning point in the Holocaust. In Soviet territory, became operational policy. Accompanying the army were small units of SS and police called Special Deployment Groups, or Einsatzgruppen. During the invasion of Poland twenty months earlier, the Einsatzgruppen followed the army and later rounded up Jews, who were then forced into ghettos. In the Soviet Union, their assignment was simply to kill any Jew, Communist, Roma, and/or local members of the intelligentsia they could find in the territory taken by the army. Jews they could find in the territory taken by the army. The Einsatzgruppen did not operate alone. Over time, and reserve battalions, Waffen SS units, the Higher SS and Police leaders, and stationary Order Police

9 also carried out mass executions. As we shall see in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, local militia were successfully used to murder their local Jews. And in some cases, such as Jedwabne in occupied Poland, neighbors simply murdered their Jewish neighbors. No German instruction or participation was needed. The presence of German troops in the vicinity was seen as license to murder local Jews and thereby take over their homes, businesses, lands, and possessions.

Jews were only too easy to find. Almost nine out of ten lived in large cities in the path of the German army’s rapid advance. The mobile killing units moved swiftly, taking the Jewish population by surprise and leaving communities paralyzed and unable to act. The mass murders were well organized. As soon as an area was invaded, the Einsatzgruppen, Order Police battalions, and German army units rounded up Jews, Communist Party officials, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), and members of the intelligentsia. Jewish women and children were included in the roundups: the orders called for “total extermination” of the Jewish population. Those rounded up – Jews and Communists, Roma and Sinti as well as the local intelligentsia together with the Jews – were then marched to the outskirts of the city or town and shot. Their bodies were buried in mass graves—hastily dug ditches filled with bodies piled layer upon layer.

Local residents could see what was happening, could hear the shots and the cries of the victims. Most of them did nothing to intervene, but it is important to remember that in some rare but precious cases, local residents helped save their Jewish neighbors. They, too, were terrified: what happened to these victims might one day be done to them the next. Some helped themselves to Jewish property suddenly ownerless and apartments now vacant without their inhabitants. The German army and the SS often encouraged the local population to conduct , particularly in Lithuania and Latvia, taking advantage of indigenous antisemitism and anti-Communism, which also was manifestly directed at Jews. units had so much to do that auxiliary police comprised of natives were indispensable. Local pro-Nazi collaborators volunteered for this work.

Three thousand men participated in the Einsatzgruppen. The officers of the units that rounded up and murdered Jews were not German criminals but ordinary citizens. According to , the “Dean” of Holocaust scholars, the officers were not hoodlums, perverts, or psychopaths. The great majority were university-educated professional men, lawyers, opera singers, professors, even ministers. They used their skills and training to carry out their assignments in what they believed was a professional manner. In doing so, they became efficient killers. Each killer, however, had a choice. Those few who refused to cooperate were given other assignments; none were punished. They were considered not tough enough to do the job that was required. Even those who acted out of conscience were reluctant to say so because they felt they were shirking their duties to their country or judging their comrades- in-arms. They often internalized the critique: they were not tough enough. They sensed themselves as cowards, not moral men repulsed by murderous actions. Despite the efforts of the killers, the method of individualized mass murder was problematic; the Germans needed large numbers of murderers; it was difficult to conceal the massacres from the surrounding townspeople; and the incessant murdering began to take its psychological toll on the killers.

10 They needed alcohol afterwards and after a time before and during the “actions.” Some broke down under the strain. Therefore, the Nazi leadership decided that they needed to develop a different way to continue killing their victims: they would bring the victims to centralized killing centers where they would use gas to murder them. This reduced the number of killers needed as well as their contact with the victims, which made their task less burdensome emotionally for the murderers.

ANIMATED MAP: Einsatzgruppen

THE WANNSEE CONFERENCE

At the Wannsee Conference of , 1942, a meeting of the officials responsible for coordinating the systematic murder operation, the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was formally enunciated. Even though “Murder by Bullets,” was already underway, Wannsee sought to intensify and speedily complete .

The conference was called by , head of the SS Reich Security Main Office. He invited the state secretaries of the most important government ministries to a villa in Wannsee, the affluent lakeside section of Berlin in order to “coordinate without regard to geographic boundaries a “Final Solution” to the Jewish Question.”

Among the agencies represented were the Ministry of Justice, the Foreign Ministry, the SS Reich Security Main Office (including the ), the SS, the Race and Resettlement Office, and the office in charge of distributing Jewish property. Also at the meeting was a representative of the General-Government, the German occupation administration in Poland, whose territory included more than two million Jews. The head of Heydrich’s Jewish Office, , prepared the conference protocols [minutes].

The men at the table needed little explanation. They understood that “evacuation to the East” was a for killing centers, and that the “Final Solution” was systematic murder. The prototypes had already been tested. For months, the Einsatzgruppen had been hard at work killing hundreds of thousands of Jews in the East. Gas vans had been operating for more than forty days at the Chełmno death camp. A farmhouse at Auschwitz-Birkenau was being converted into a . Gas chambers using carbon monoxide from engine exhaust were under construction at the Bełżec death camp. Experimentation with , a poisonous gas used as a pesticide, had begun as early as at Auschwitz.

During the conversation at Wannsee there was no evasion. “They spoke about methods of killing, about liquidation, about extermination,” Eichmann reported. As they talked, butlers served brandy. The course was set and the goal announced. Implementation of the “Final Solution” would soon take place.

11 There was no opposition, nor were there qualms of conscience. On the contrary, the members of the coordinating committee were enthusiastic about doing their part. The representative of the General-Government, the occupation authority in occupied Poland, Dr. Josef Bühler, welcomed the start of the “Final Solution” in its territory. Transportation would present some difficulty. According to the protocol, Bühler said:

Jews should be removed . . . as fast as possible, because it is precisely here that the Jew constitutes a substantial danger as carrier of epidemics . . . Moreover, the majority of the two-and-one-half million Jews involved were not capable of work.

Three decades later, at his trial in for his role in the “Final Solution”, Eichmann recalled: “At the end, Heydrich was smoking and drinking brandy in a corner near a stove. We all sat together like comrades . . . not to talk shop, but to rest after long hours of work.”

The fifteen men gathered around the table at Wannsee were among the “best and the brightest” of German leadership. Most were young; only two were over fifty. Most were university graduates, eight had doctorates. They had risen far and quickly in their professional lives and they and the institutions they represented were made complicit in the killing process, complicit yet subordinate to the SS, which was now taking charge.

See additional resources for a chart of Wannsee Conference Attendees and their Roles in Additional Reading at Resources at the end of this unit.

GENOCIDE AS STATE POLICY

Once the decision to kill all the Jews was made and the policy announced to the bureaucracy, the program of systematic slaughter that has become known as the Holocaust reached its maturity.

IWitness Watch Page – Nazi Ideology

In the spring and summer of 1942, the Germans began in earnest to complete the destruction, which they called liquidation of the ghettos of . At the same time, they massacred small Jewish communities in towns that had not been ghettoized. Within eighteen months almost all of the ghettos of occupied Poland were emptied, and the death camps of Sobibór, Treblinka, and Belzec could be closed. By late summer of 1944, three million Jews had been transported to concentration camps and killing centers. Most had been murdered; there were no ghettos remaining in Eastern Europe.

12 At the same time that ghettos were being emptied, masses of Jews were transported from the many distant countries and regions occupied or controlled by Germany, including , , the , Norway, Hungary, , , North Africa, and . The deportations required the help of many people and all branches of the German government. The victims in occupied Poland were already imprisoned in ghettos and totally under German control. The deportation of Jews from these other areas however, was a far more complex problem. The German Foreign Ministry succeeded in pressuring most governments of occupied and Axis-allied nations to assist the Germans in the deportation of Jews living in their countries.

PART B: DEATH CAMPS

Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

The Germans began the first deportations in late 1941 when they removed Jews from the ghettos and sent them to concentration and death camps. Deportations and mass murder intensified in the summer of 1942. Railroads were the essential link to the killing process. Between late 1941 and late 1944, trains carrying human cargo from every corner of German- controlled Europe rolled into killing centers carefully situated along rail lines in occupied Poland. The Reichsbahn, the German railroad, was one of the largest organizations in the Third Reich. It had 1.4 million workers, of whom 500,000 were civil servants, who kept the system in operation. During the Holocaust, their job was to allocate personnel, obtain freight cars, coordinate train schedules, keep the tracks open, drive locomotives, and clean cars.

13 Copyright © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

As the supply lines needed for a two-front war – Germany was fighting the Soviet Union in the East and the Allies, primarily the US and Britain in North Africa and later, after June 1944 in Western Europe – lengthened, there was a chronic shortage of trains. The railroad system was stretched thin even in its efforts to provision the army. Allied bombing raids on the major European rail lines disrupted traffic, but the trains carrying Jews continued to roll. Transports were given additional cars, more Jews were crammed into fewer trains, indirect routes were taken so the human traffic could keep moving.

The transport of Jews, and their destination, was no secret to the Reichsbahn workers. At Auschwitz alone, there were forty-four parallel tracks at the train station, more than twice the number of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. In the winter of 1944, a special railroad spur was built inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to run directly to an exit ramp—the site of selections—a short distance from the gas chambers. The chimneys were clearly visible to the arriving Jews as they got off the train. No railway man resigned or is known to have protested. Raul Hilberg commented that they did their work well: no Jew was left alive for lack of transport.

Jews were ticketed as people, although they were transported to the death camps as cattle, mainly in freight cars. The SS used travel agents to book one-way passage to the camp at a rate of four pfennig (pennies) per kilometer of track they would travel. Children under ten rode for half fare; those under four rode free. A group rate of half the usual third-class charge was introduced for deportations of more than 400 people. The Reichsbahn did not charge for the trains that returned empty. Indeed, the SS was offered a credit for one-way passenger transport.

14 Tickets for the guards had to be paid in advance. Reichsbahn employees used the same forms and procedures to book tourists going on vacation as they did to send Jews to Auschwitz.

There were, in general, three forms of deportation.

First, Jews were deported from towns and cities to transit camps or ghettos. Then they were deported from smaller ghettos to larger ones. From 1942 on, they were deported to one of the six major killing centers: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chełmno, Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór.

Deportations were sometimes complex mass operations involving elaborate logistics. During the summer of 1942, approximately 300,000 Jews from the were transported to Treblinka in a six-week period between Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary, the vast majority to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. More than four in five Hungarian Jews who arrived at Birkenau were gassed soon after they arrived. The railway system was stretched to its limits to keep up with the demand of the camp, where as many as 10,000 people a day were being gassed.

In some areas, deportations were gradual. First the elderly were taken from the ghetto, then those who could not work or had no work permits. Later, children and those without influence or family connections were removed. Selections were made in the ghetto by the German- controlled Jewish Councils. In the end, however, all Jews – except those who hid, fled to the forests, or were needed for cleanup – were deported from the ghettos.

The Germans made a disciplined effort to disguise their intentions from their victims. They often employed euphemism and doublespeak to avoid speaking directly about murder. Deportation was called “resettlement in the East.” Anxious victims were told that they were being sent to labor camps. They were encouraged to pack their belongings and take them along. The ruse often worked. Even as late as the spring of 1944, many Hungarian Jews had not heard of Auschwitz.

The train trip was often long. From Hungary, the trip took days; from Greece, more than a week. In the summer, the sealed cattle cars were unbearably hot; unheated, they were freezing cold in winter. The SS made few provisions for food or water; the most they provided was a bucket for bodily needs and another for water. Passengers were so crowded that they often had to stand or sit in feces and urine. The stench was overwhelming. When the doors were open upon arrival, grateful passengers thought that the worst of the ordeal was behind them. They were disoriented and exhausted.

Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor from Italy and author, recalls that train trip to hell: We suffered from thirst and cold: at every stop we clamored for water, or even a handful of snow, but we were rarely heard; the soldiers of the escort drove off anybody who tried to approach the convoy. Two young mothers, nursing their children, groaned and day, begging for water...The hours of darkness were nightmares without end...

15 Next to me, crushed against me for the whole journey, there had been a woman. We had known each other for many years, and the misfortune had struck us together, but we knew little of each other. Now, in this hour of decision, we said to each other things that are never said among the living... Everybody said farewell to life through his neighbor...

The climax came suddenly. The door opened with a crash, and the dark echoed with outlandish orders in that curt, barbaric barking of Germans in command…

A vast platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors. A little beyond it, a row of lorries . . . A dozen SS men... began to interrogate us... “How old? Healthy or ill?” And on the basis of the reply they pointed in two different directions.

Rudolf Vrba (Walter Rosenberg), a Slovakian Jew who escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, and brought vital and accurate information to the attention of the West, recalls the arrival of prisoners at the ramp almost poetically:

There was a place called the ramp where the trains with the Jews were coming in. They were coming in day and night, sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day, from all sorts of places in the world. I worked there from August 18, 1942, to June 7, 1943. I saw those transports rolling one after another, and I have seen at least two hundred of them in this position. I have seen it so many times that it became a routine. Constantly, people from the heart of Europe were disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place with the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. And the people in this mass . . . I knew that within a couple of hours after they arrived there, ninety percent would be gassed.

DEATH CAMPS

This mass murder of Jews by gassing was new to the genocide. The techniques, however, were not. The use of gas had previously been employed for carrying out Hitler’s order for involuntary “Euthanasia” of the institutionalized disabled population in Germany and in 1939, also known as the T-4 program because of the headquarters’ Berlin address, Tiergartenstrasse 4. “Euthanasia” victims included those with physical disabilities such as deaf people and those with epilepsy, or others with a mental illness. The Nazis spoke of them in much less polite terms: mentally retarded, congenitally ill, cripples, and handicapped. Those murdered by the Germans

16 were “Aryans.” Although fellow Germans, they were considered “Life unworthy of living,” “useless eaters,” and embarrassments to the Nazi myth of Aryan supremacy. And those who staffed the “euthanasia camps” later lent their expertise to the killing centers.

IWitness Watch Page – Selection

The killing centers were created when the plan to annihilate the Jews grew increasingly radical and far-reaching. Under the codename, Operation Reinhard, three camps were built and served as killing centers where the victims were gassed. By mid-1942 they included Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, which joined Chełmno. Auschwitz-Birkenau was created a bit later and the slave labor camp of Majdanek became a killing center in 1943.

The death camps had one primary purpose: the murder of European Jews with maximum efficiency and minimum staff. They operated in relative isolation leaving little trace of the . The death camps were horrifyingly successful. There were four known survivors of Chelmno where some 150,000 Jews were killed, two from Belzec where 500,000 were killed. Less than 100 Jews survived Treblinka and Sobibór where 900,000 and 250,000 respectively were murdered. Despite- or perhaps provoked by-these devastatingly high murder rates, prisoners managed to revolt against their captors in Treblinka, Sobibór, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Death camps differed from concentration camps, which served as prisons and as places of slave labor, where inmates were deliberately worked to death. Some were both. Auschwitz served also as a slave-labor and penal camp; Majdanek served for a time as a killing center when Bełżec was closed down in the late autumn of 1942.

The six annihilation camps were located in occupied Poland. There were several important reasons for this: Poland had the largest population of Jews before the war, and Poland was considered a location where the Nazis could do as they pleased, without any concern for the , whom they considered inferior. In addition, Poland was far from the eyes of the Western Allies, yet it had a well-developed system of trains that made transporting Jews from all over Europe to Poland feasible. Even though these camps were on Polish soil, the Poles were neither responsible for initiating the camps nor for the policies carried out in them. These were Nazi German death camps in German-occupied Poland.

17 CHELMNO (KULMHOF)

Mobile gas vans preceded gas chambers. Chełmno, a Nazi killing center 37 miles west of Łódź, was the first site that used mobile gas vans for the murder of Jews as part of the German plan for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Chelmno functioned regionally, murdering Jews in the vicinity, most especially the Jews of Lodz. The gassing of Jews began there on December 8, 1941, and continued through March 1943. Unlike the other death camps, Chelmno did not have stationary gas chambers and was not on a major rail line. Jews were deported from ghettos by rail and then moved to smaller gauge tracks; the last three miles were by truck.

Prisoners were sent to a walled-in Schlosslager, manor house compound, where SS officials, often in doctor’s white coats, ordered them to undress and surrender valuables so they could be disinfected before being sent to work in Germany. Naked, they were forced down to the basement, where they were loaded unto sealed trucks, fifty to seventy prisoners at a time and driven slowly for the 2.5 miles to the Waldlager, the forest camp. Mechanics attached the truck’s exhaust to the sealed rear compartment; by the time they arrived, almost all were dead by gas; those who were still alive were shot immediately.

The camp personnel consisted of less than twenty SS men and about 120 German regular police for auxiliary functions. The killing was conducted by the SS. When the trucks stopped, prisoners, special units of prisoners forced to work in the vicinity of the killing centers, unloaded the dead, buried them and then cleaned the soiled trucks that were sent back to the manner house. People living in the vicinity immediately understood what was happening. The smell permeated the air so in the summer of 1942 bodies were burned rather than buried.

Chelmno was closed from March 1943 until it was reopened and staffed again in June – July 1944 for the murder of 7,000 Jews and several thousand Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) from Łódź. After this, the remaining Jews from Łódź were sent to Auschwitz. All told, more than 150,000 Jews were murdered at Chełmno. Seven Jews are known to have escaped from Chelmno; only four survived the war.

Despite the low survival rate, Chelmno had its drawbacks for fulfilling the “Final Solution.” In the first place, the gas vans had limited capacity. They could not handle large numbers of victims. They were also not on main rail lines. And they were slow. The excruciating suffering of the victims, who died by asphyxiation, was of little concern to the SS, but the task of unloading the vans after each use was time-consuming and “unpleasant.”

These stumbling blocks to the Nazi goal of wider and more efficient mass murder needed to be addressed. Beginning in March 1942, therefore, stationary gas chambers started operating. The gas chambers had a much larger capacity than the vans and could handle hundreds of victims at a time. Within a few months they were established at all the killing centers except Chełmno, which continued to operate with what was by then obsolete technology. The killing centers— Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibór, Bełżec, and Treblinka—were generally located near

18 major railroad lines in German-occupied Poland. In each of them, killing was by gas, either carbon monoxide or the insecticide Zyklon B, the latter after German scientists discovered that Zyklon B gas could kill two thousand people in less than thirty minutes. Killing centers were multipurpose factories of death. They were assembly lines for confiscating valuables, murdering the people, and then using whatever was usable from the corpses before they were burned or buried. Even the ashes of the dead were used for fertilizer.

BELZEC

Situated in a small town between Lublin and Lvov, on the Chelm-Wlodawa railway line in a rural area of the of the , Belzec was the first of three Aktion Reinhard killing centers designed solely to kill Jews of . There were no selektions at Belzec; all but a handful of those who arrived were sent to their death. Opened in February 1942, it operated for only ten months. Five hundred thousand Jews were murdered; there was a staff of only 104, 14 Germans and 90 .

One intercepted German document, the only document to speak of the numbers of dead at Bełżec, notes that between March and December 1942, at least 434,508 Jews were killed at Bełżec. These were the Jews of the districts of Galicia, Lublin, and Cracow. There were also a very small unknown number of Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war murdered there. Some Jews were murdered upon arrival without any record being made of their death. The true number of dead, therefore, may actually be larger. Only two persons were known to have survived Bełżec, one was killed in Poland in 1945. The other, , was the only one to give an account of what he had seen.

Reder reports on the toll that these terrible tasks took on the Sondercommando:

“We moved like automated figures just one large mass of them. We just mechanically worked through our horrible existence.

“Every day we died a little bit together with the transports of people, who for a small moment lived and suffering with delusions.

“Only when I heard children calling: “Mommy. Haven’t I been good? It’s dark.” My heart would break. Later we stopped having feelings.”

SOBIBÓR

Sobibór was the second Aktion Reinhard camp, building on the success of Belzec and correcting its flaws. Its function was regional; to murder Jews in the Lublin District of occupied Poland. However, Jews from Germany, Austria, France, The Netherlands, , and were also murdered there along with Jews from the German occupied Soviet Union.

19 The killing center operated from the spring of 1942 until . Jews were murdered by its small staff of between 20 and 30 SS and between 90 and 120 Ukrainians, many of them former Soviet POWs.

IWitness Watch Page – Resistance

Some 250,000 Jews were murdered in carbon monoxide gas chambers during the sixteen months of Sobibór’s existence. In October 1943, a revolt was staged by some of the last prisoners in the camp. During the battle, some three hundred escaped. At the end of the war, there were only fifty known survivors of Sobibór. The murder was almost total. Even after the Uprising and the escape that followed less than 100 Jews survived Sobibór.

THE PROCESS OF KILLING

Some 40 to 60 freight cars, each carrying some 100 Jews would arrive at the Sobibór station, a station that appeared like any other rural railway station. Twenty freights cars would be sent at a time to the reception area. Prisoners were unloaded, forced to undress, their valuables confiscated, as they were told they could shower. They would then be herded down a narrow entrance from the reception area to the gas chamber called the “tube.”

Women would be forced into a special barracks inside the “tube” where their hair was shaved and they then joined the men in the gas chambers, which were sealed; the engine was started and Jews were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. Sobibór did not have crematoria, therefore Sonderkommando, prisoners forced to work near the gas chambers, unloaded the bodies and buried them in mass graves. Other prisoners handled and sorted the valuables and the clothing; everything, including hair was recycled into the Reich economy.

The process was repeated with each arriving train. As elsewhere, in the fall of 1942 the mass graves were opened and the bodies were burned.

THE SOBIBÓR UPRISING

As killing operations at Sobibór slowed down because the Jews in the region had already been murdered and as information that the death camp of Belzec had been destroyed and its remaining prisoners killed, prisoners of Sobibór organized a resistance group led by Soviet- Jewish POW . A strategy was chosen: prisoners would break into the storeroom and take weapons, kill key camp personnel quietly, one by one, and then set the gas

20 chamber on fire and storm the gates. On October 14, 1943, the resistance fighters killed some dozen key officials and then stormed the gates. About 300 succeeded in breeching the camp; one in three were soon captured and executed and some 100 survived the war. After the revolt, the Germans and their guards dismantled the killing center and executed the remaining Jews who had not managed to escape.

TREBLINKA

Treblinka was the last of the three Aktion Reinhard Death Camps to be established. Situated on the main railway lines between Warsaw and Bialystok, two of Poland’s largest Jewish communities, it was strategically located. Although the majority of the victims came from these two areas, Jews from other communities were deported to Treblinka, as well. This included those from the District, the , Lublin, and the Jews of Thrace and Macedonia.

Treblinka began operating in July, 1942 and continued until August, 1943. Its first killings were on July 23, 1942, fittingly on Tisha B’av. the Jewish fast day commemorating the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem in the years 586 BCE and 70 CE and the expulsion of Spanish Jewry in 1492. Some thirty SS personnel, including veterans of the “euthanasia” program in Germany ran the camp. In fact, the first commandant of Treblinka, Irmfield Eberl, MD was a physician who had previously developed gassing techniques for Germany’s T-4 program. Eberl and his SS men were assisted by some 120 former Soviet prisoners of war. Between 870,000 and 925,000 Jews were killed there.

On July 23, 1942, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka began. Within the next eight weeks – between Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur -- until September 21, 1942, 265,000, Jews were transported from Warsaw to Treblinka where they were killed upon arrival.

THE PROCESS

Fifty or 60 cars bound for the killing center first stopped at the Malkinia station, the reception area for Treblinka. Twenty cars at a time were detached from the train and brought into the killing center so that arrival could be paced for complete annihilation. Arriving Jews were forced off the trains. Attempting to deceive them to the end, German SS and police told the newly arrived victims that they had arrived in a transit area and must hand over their valuables. “Deportation square” contained two barracks: men and women were separated; young children went with their mothers to undress. Storerooms were used to hold the valuables.

A fenced-in path, known as the “tube,” – Himmelstrasse, “the highway to heaven” – led from the reception area to the gas chamber entrance, located in the killing area. Victims were whipped, running naked along this path to the gas chambers, which were labeled as showers.

21 Once inside, the doors were sealed and an engine was started, which forced carbon monoxide into the gas chamber. Members of the Sonderkommando, special group of Jewish prisoners worked in the killing area. They removed bodies from the gas chambers and initially buried them in mass graves. Later, as the mass graves reached their saturation point, and when it appeared as if the camp might be overrun by advancing Soviet troops, they were forced to exhume and burn corpses in pyres, open air ovens. From time to time, the Sonderkommando were killed and new prisoners were chosen to take their place. These Sonderkommando, among the few Jews who lived for a time at Treblinka, conceived of and executed the resistance at Treblinka.

ARMED UPRISING

Jewish inmates organized a resistance group in Treblinka in early 1943. Inspired by the of , they too only undertook resistance when the end was near and they feared that the killing would end and with it, they would also be put to death. In late spring and early summer, they decided to revolt. On August 2nd the group seized arms from the Camp Armory, but the theft was discovered before they had time to seize the camp. They stormed the main gate seeking to overpower their guards and get to the adjacent forests.

Hundreds of prisoners stormed the main gate in an attempt to escape. Many were killed by machine-gun fire. More than 300 did escape – though two thirds of those who escaped were eventually tracked down and killed by German SS and police as well as military units. Surviving prisoners were ordered to dismantle the camp and burn or bury its remains. Upon completion of their work, they were executed by camp personnel. There were fewer than one hundred known survivors of Treblinka after the war.

MAJDANEK

Majdanek was located in a suburb of Lublin along the main highway linking Lublin, Zamość, and Chełm. Nearly 360,000 people from twenty-eight countries and representing fifty-four ethnic groups passed through Majdanek. According to recent Polish research, by Tomaz Kranz, a noted historian of the camp, the official estimate was 78,000 victims, of those 59,000 were Jews.

Originally termed a Camp of the Waffen SS, Majdanek was established early under the leadership of Odilio Globotnik, who played a pivotal role in Aktion Reinhard.

Aktion Reinhard warehouses were located at Majdanek, where the clothing and valuables taken from the prisoners were delivered, sorted, and stored, then shipped to Germany.

22 Majdanek was also the headquarters for the destruction of regional ghettos and the place of supervision for the Aktion Reinhard camps Sobibór, Belzec, and Treblinka.

Part prison camp, part transit camp, it became a killing center though that was not its primary purpose. Jews were a minority of those incarcerated in Majdanek though they were the overwhelming majority of those murdered there.

Jews were sent to Majdanek from diverse places including the Theresienstadt camp-ghetto, Slovakia, and Germany in 1942, and later from the Lublin and Warsaw Districts of Poland and from the Bialystok ghetto upon its destruction.

Between October 1942 and September 1943, the SS built two and possibly three gas chambers at Majdanek, modeled on the unused gas chambers at Dachau, could operate either on Carbon Monoxide or Zyklon B which was in use at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Some 74,000 Jews were deported to Majdanek and 15,000 Jews were deported from Majdanek to other death camps, leaving some 59,000 who were killed at Majdanek. Though the figures may be taken merely as a minimum since after 1942 camp officials ceased to record Jewish murders and in 1944 the records of the Majdanek camps were burnt just before its liberation.

ERNTEFEST – HARVEST FESTIVAL

Half of the Jews killed in Majdanek were killed in 1942 and almost one in three during the so called Erntefest (Harvest Festival) of November 3, 1943 when Heinrich Himmler issued orders to murder the surviving Jews in Lublin District, including the remaining Jewish prisoners at Majdanek. SS and police units concentrated 18,000 Jews from various camps and prisons in Lublin, including at least 8,000 Jewish prisoners in Majdanek, and then shot them in large prepared ditches outside the camp fence near the crematorium.

The killing at Majdanek on November 3, 1943, was the largest single-day, single-location massacre during the Holocaust.

Auschwitz

IWitness Activity – A Day in Auschwitz

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of all the Nazi killing centers. More people were killed there than at any other camp. And unlike other camps, which primarily served specific regions,

23 Auschwitz with its 44 parallel railroad tracks, received arriving prisoners from throughout Europe.

Situated in the Polish town of Oświęcim, Auschwitz was actually three camps in one: a concentration camp (Auschwitz I), a killing center (Auschwitz II or Birkenau) where Zyklon B gas was introduced, and a complex of slave-labor camps (Auschwitz III or Buna-Monowitz). Because Auschwitz was also a slave-labor camp, one could hope for a reprieve unlike at other killing centers. Still, the vast majority were killed shortly after arrival.

At the peak of its operations, as many as 10,000 Jews were gassed per day there. In all, more than 1,100,000 people were murdered at the Auschwitz Camp complex, the vast majority in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Seventy thousand to 83,000 Poles, 21,000 Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), and 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war were among those murdered at Auschwitz; about one million Jews were murdered there.

MAP: Europe 1943-1944, Auschwitz Indicated

MAP: Auschwitz Environs, Summer 1944

Auschwitz I was opened in June 1940 with a transport of 728 Polish prisoners. Its purpose was the incarceration of political prisoners, and that remained the primary role of Auschwitz I throughout the war. As the “Final Solution” solidified, the camp grew in scope and purpose. Auschwitz II (Birkenau) opened in October 1941 and became the camp’s main killing center. Auschwitz III began operating in October 1942. By 1944, the SS had established forty-four at Auschwitz.

Auschwitz and its satellite camps were in a closed zone of some nineteen square miles guarded by up to 4,500 men and women serving on the camp staff in up to twelve companies of SS Death’s Head units. (Death’s Head personnel, who had been in charge of concentration camps since 1934, wore a skull-and-bones insignia on their uniforms.)

ARRIVING IN AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

SELEKTIONS: WHO SHALL LIVE AND WHO SHALL DIE

IWitness Activity Arrival at Auschwitz – Images and Individual Experiences

24 At the entrance to each of the death camps—the reception area—the dead were removed from the trains and the living divided according to their ability to walk. Those able to walk were sent on; people unable to walk were taken away. Those who could walk then faced the first Selektion. An SS officer, pointed to the left or to the right, to the gas chamber or to slave labor, which often meant a slow death. The arriving prisoners did not know which direction signaled life. Old people, pregnant women, women with children, young children, and the infirm were immediately condemned to death. Segregated by sex before marching forth to selektion the prisoners were forced to leave behind their valuables and remove their clothes before entering the gas chambers, which included men and women. Children were put in last to fill the empty spaces in the crowded chamber. The Germans tried to deceive arriving prisoners until the end: the gas chambers were labeled “showers.”

Those selected for work at Auschwitz were registered, branded and sheared. Their hair was shaved and their arms tattooed with a number. Auschwitz was the only camp where most - but not all - inmates were tattooed. Uniforms and shoes were issued randomly without regard to size. Tall people might get pants that did not fit. Sizes were too big or too small, too trim or too stout, without regard for season, as well. Their ordeal as inmates was just beginning. They would face additional Selektions in the future. The officer in charge of the Selektion was a physician. His “expert opinion” was required to determine who would live and who would die. Physicians were also present near the gas chamber. They alone pronounced the dead, dead. The most infamous of all of them, Dr. , was both an MD and a Ph. D, a physician and scientist, who oversaw some of the cruelest “medical experiments” conducted on inmates, was often to be found at the ramp in Birkenau.

Those who survived the first Selektion lived in constant fear of future selections. Fritzie Fritshall recounted her experience:

Selektion. We needed to get undressed every day. And we needed to run—not walk—in front of SS officers. We needed to show that we still had strength left... I recall some women, as the hair grew back, they were beginning to get gray hair. And they would take a little piece of coal from one of the pot-bellied stoves that was in a barrack. And they would use coal to color their hair with, so that they would look a little younger. One grayed at the age of maybe eighteen or nineteen under those conditions... If one had a scar, a pimple, if one didn’t run fast enough, if one didn’t look right for whatever reason to the particular person that was doing the selection... They would stand there with a stick . . . [to the right or to the left] as you ran by them. One never knew if they were in the good line or the bad line. One line would go to the gas chambers. The other line would go back to the camp and to the barracks, to live another day. We knew the trains were coming in. . . . And we knew many of the barracks were being emptied out, day in and day out, to make room for the new people that were coming in. We never knew when our turn would come next. So one always lived in fear and one always tried to get through these selections for one more day.

25 UPRISING

As gassing slowed down in Auschwitz in the fall of 1944, On October 7, the Sonderkommado, those prisoners who were compelled to work in the vicinity of the gas chambers set fire to Cremetoria II and began their Uprising against the guards. Most were killed within minutes and only a few survived. On January 6, 1945 but ten days before Auschwitz was evacuated, four women were hanged for smuggling dynamite to the resisters. These women had worked in an Auschwitz munitions factory and therefore had access to explosive material. The last words of Roza Robota, were Hazak V’amatz, be strong and of good courage, the very words that Moses said to Joshua as he was to lead the Biblical Israelites.

IWitness Watch Page – Forced Labor

SLAVE LABOR

In 1942, the concentration camps, which had been established initially to carry out Nazi policies, became an indispensable part of the war economy.

In mid-1942, German officials realized that they would not defeat the Soviet Union in a few weeks or months, as they had Poland and the countries of Western Europe, and that the war against the Allies would be a protracted struggle that demanded the mobilization of all available sources of personnel. Estimates vary as to the number of foreign workers pressed into service by the Reich. The number of forced laborers certainly exceeded seven million. Some earned substandard salaries. Those considered to be from “lesser races” were paid less and fed less. More than one and one-half million foreign workers were also concentration camp inmates.

In the camps, working conditions were brutal. Prisoners often worked eleven-hour shifts, with a minimum amount of sleep and almost no provision of food or warmth. Some of the most respected German corporations had no scruples about using concentration camp slave labor. The well-known companies that lined up to receive workers included Flick, I.G. Farben, BMW, , Messerschmitt, Daimler-Benz, and . The decision to use slave labor was entirely voluntary. It was made for economic rather than ideological reasons.

Growing labor shortages in Germany placed some restraints on the way the SS treated prisoners. Beginning in the summer of 1942 onwards, Soviet POWs, almost all of whom were young military men captured during the early days of war, were put to work rather than starved to death. There were some efforts to hold down the mortality rate. For a while, Himmler even considered the idea of using rather than destroying Jewish labor. But nothing, not even the

26 consideration of economic utility, could impede the “Final Solution.” No Jewish laborer was indispensable.

Treatment that was “considerate” according to SS standards still led to a mortality rate that reveals the reality of life in the labor camps: in 1943, 8,491 deaths were recorded in the Mauthausen concentration camp system among an average population of 21,100. The Nazis viewed the forced laborer not as a capital investment, but as a dispensable commodity, a replaceable waste product.

The decision to utilize forced labor from concentration camps in state and private enterprises was made by state and SS officials both in Berlin and locally. After 1938, and increasingly after 1941, SS and police officials offered forced labor to private corporations at an exceedingly competitive cost. Many corporate executives sitting in their home offices seized the opportunity to deploy such inexpensive labor. In a vast chemical complex at Auschwitz III, human slavery was brought to its ultimate perfection. Slaves were literally worked to death. In the periodic process of Selektion, those who could no longer work were eliminated in the gas chambers nearby at Birkenau.

At Auschwitz, some work was useless, but the ability to work was essential to survival.

Slave laborers clearly understood their situation. Michael Vogel recalled his experience:

Another thing was to see when you went to work, when you went to slave labor, who was no longer there. Who’s left. And it became like an animal. Oh, I’m living another day, or he’s no longer. And you know the worst part, that you couldn’t cry for it. You couldn’t cry in Auschwitz. You cried, you died. If you showed even more weakness than you already had, you didn’t survive the day.

At concentration camp, death was a bi-product of horrific conditions. Imprisonment, containment, punishment and exploitation of slave labor for economic gain were the primary purposes of the concentration camp. Murder was the essential function of the death camp, murder and then the recycling of all that was valuable in the remains of those gassed.

PRISONERS OF THE CAMPS

The majority of those enslaved in the killing centers were Jews. But others were also prisoners. The mosaic of victims who were incarcerated in the concentration camps includes Soviet prisoners of war, political prisoners, common criminals, Roma and Sinti (Gypsies), and homosexuals.

When Auschwitz was liberated by the on January 27, 1945, the soldiers found 7,500 survivors. Most had arrived in Auschwitz in 1944, predominantly Jews, but also a significant number of Poles, as well as Belarusians and Russians. At the time of liberation, there were almost 500 children in the camp, of whom over 60 had actually been born there.

27 The majority of Auschwitz been removed prior to the camp’s liberation. Beginning in late 1944, the SS authorities had decided to evacuate most of its prisoners- some 65,000 people- on what infamously became known as Death Marches, the topic that opens the next Unit.

28 CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES DEATH BY BULLETS AND MOBILE KILLING CENTERS

In this activity students will learn about mobile killing centers and the Einsatzgruppen in the context of the Nazis “Final Solution” during the Holocaust. They will respond to testimony of people that survived mobile killing squads and process their own responses in a big paper activity.

WARNING to TEACHERS: This is especially difficult subject matter. It is recommended that teachers familiarize themselves with “The Mobile Killers” section of this unit and please preview all content before showing your students. This activity is recommended for students in 11th and 12th grades.

Consider

Read the following as a class:

The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” the Nazis’ euphemistic code word for the mass murder of European Jewry was implemented in stages, although the various forms of killing overlapped as primitive methods gave way to what was considered state-of-the- art technology. Killing by bullets was followed by gassing first in mobile killing vans, which were in turn supplanted by stationary gas chambers at death camps.

The “Final Solution” began in practice after German soldiers invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and implemented a policy towards the Jews of murder by bullets; the mobile killing squads that moved with the German army into the Soviet Union. The effort was consolidated and intensified after the Wannsee Conference was convened in Berlin in January 1942, which enlisted top officials in the Nazis’ push to bring every last Jew from all over Europe to killing centers with the goal of making Europe “Judenrein.”

In 1942, the Germans turned to murder by gassing in order to expedite large-scale killing. Victims from all over German-occupied Europe were deported from ghettos such as in occupied Poland and later after April 1944 Hungary or from their homes in western Europe, via transit camps and brought to death and concentration camps, situated mainly in German-occupied Poland.

Watch the film for background on Einsatzgruppen.

Collect

Because of the nature of the mobile vans and stationary killing centers whose only function was mass murder, there are few survivors. Thus, testimonies are limited. A few, however, do exist.

29 Watch Zvi Michaeli’s clip of testimony. Have your students read his biography (provided at the beginning of this unit).

Construct

Find a quote from Zvi’s testimony, and write that quote on a large sheet of paper and post the sheets on walls in your classroom. Ask students to read each quote and respond in writing. Encourage them to write responses to their classmates’ responses. Allow 10 minutes for students to write.

Communicate

Invite students to come back together as a class and share what they did in their activity.

DEPORTATION

Consider

The Germans began the first deportations in late 1941 when they removed Jews from the ghettos and sent them to concentration and death camps. As mass murder intensified in the summer of 1942 so did deportations. Railroads were the essential link to the killing process. Between late 1941 and late 1944, trains carrying human cargo from every corner of German- controlled Europe rolled into killing centers carefully situated along rail lines in occupied Poland. The Reichsbahn, the German railroad, was one of the largest organizations in the Third Reich. It had 1.4 million workers who kept the system in operation.

Share the following maps with your students:

MAP: European Rail System, 1939

MAP: Major Deportations to Killing Centers, 1942-1944

There were, in general, three forms of deportation. First, Jews were deported from towns and cities to transit camps or ghettos. Then they were deported from smaller ghettos to larger ones. From 1942 on, they were deported to one of the six major killing centers: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chełmno, Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór. During the summer of 1942, approximately 300,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto were transported to Treblinka in a six-week period between Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, 437,402 Jews were deported from Hungary, the vast majority to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Four out of give were gassed at Birkenau soon after they arrived. The railway system was stretched to its limits to keep up with the demand of the camp, where as many as 10,000 people a day were being gassed.

In some areas, deportations were gradual. First the elderly were taken from the ghetto, then those who could not work or had no work permits. Later, children and those without influence

30 or family connections were removed. In some ghettos selections were made in the ghetto by the German-controlled Jewish Councils. In all ghettos the Germans gave the orders to deport Jews. In the end, however, all Jews were deported from the ghettos.

The Germans made a disciplined effort to disguise their intentions from their victims.

Deportation was called “resettlement in the East.” Anxious victims were told that they were being sent to labor camps. They were encouraged to pack their belongings and take them along. The ruse often worked. Even as late as the spring of 1944, many Hungarian Jews had not heard of Auschwitz. The train trip was often long. From Hungary, the trip took days; from Greece, more than a week. In the summer, the sealed cattle cars were suffocatingly hot; unheated, they were freezing cold in winter. The SS made few provisions for food or water; the most they provided was a bucket for bodily needs. The stench was overwhelming. When the doors were open upon arrival, grateful passengers thought that the worst of the ordeal was behind them. They were disoriented and exhausted. They had no idea what awaited them in the concentration camps and killing centers.

Collect

Watch the following clips of testimony:

• Roman Kent

• Itka Zygmuntowicz

Construct

After listening, revisit the map on major deportations to the killing centers. Can you find routes of the survivors?

The Nazis often used deception with their victims. Do the survivors seem aware of their destination?

After listening and discussing as a class, pair up and with a partner make a list of words that describe deportation.

Communicate

Debrief each pair’s word selection with the class as a whole. Are there similarities between your lists? Differences?

KILLING CENTERS AND OPERATION REINHARD

The killing centers were created when the plan to murder the Jews grew increasingly radical and far-reaching. Under the codename, Operation Reinhard, three camps were built that served

31 as killing centers where the victims were gassed. By mid-1942 they included Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec. Three other camps also functioned as killing centers Chełmno, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek.

The death camps had one primary purpose: the murder of European Jews with maximum efficiency and minimum staff. They operated in relative isolation leaving little trace of the crime. The death camps were horrifyingly successful. There were four known survivors of Chelmno where some 150,000 Jews were killed, two from Belzec where 500,000 killed. Less than 100 Jews survived Treblinka and Sobibór where 900,000 and 250,000 respectively were murdered.

At concentration camp, death was a bi-product of horrific conditions. Imprisonment, containment, punishment and exploitation of slave labor for economic gain were the primary purposes of the concentration camp. Murder was the essential function of the death camp, murder and then the recycling of all that was valuable in the remains of those gassed.

Auschwitz and Majdanek were both death camps and concentration camps. Auschwitz served also as a slave-labor and penal camp; Majdanek served for a time as a killing center when Bełżec was closed down in the late autumn of 1942.

The six annihilation camps were located in occupied Poland. There were several important reasons for this: Poland had the largest population of Jews before the war, and Poland was considered a location where the Nazis could do as they pleased, without any concern for the Poles, whom they considered inferior. In addition, Poland was far from the eyes of the Western Allies, yet it had a well-developed system of trains that made transporting Jews from all over Europe to Poland feasible. Even though these camps were on Polish soil, the Poles did not staff them. They were neither responsible for initiating the camps nor for the policies carried out in them. These were Nazi German death camps in German-occupied Poland.

The Sobibór Uprising:

Despite- or perhaps because of- these devastatingly high murder rates in the killing centers, prisoners managed to revolt against their captors in Treblinka, Sobibór, and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The uprising in Sobibór took place in autumn 1943. Prisoners organized a resistance group led by Soviet-Jewish POWs with military training. A strategy was chosen: prisoners would break into the storeroom and take weapons, kill key camp personnel quietly, one by one, and then set the gas chamber on fire and storm the gates. On October 14, 1943, the resistance fighters killed some dozen key officials and then stormed the gates. About 300 succeeded in breeching the camp; one in three were soon captured and executed and some 100 survived the war. After the revolt, the Germans and their guards dismantled the killing center and executed the remaining Jews who had not managed to escape.

32 KILLING CENTER TESTIMONY:

• Thomas Blatt

• Philip Bialowitz

• Chaim Engel

After watching the clips of testimony, and discuss the following questions with students:

1. Define the term Uprising. What do you think is the main goal of an Uprising?

2. What were these survivors’ roles in the Uprising at Sobibór? What motivated them?

3. Were there some who did not want to participate? Why?

4. Do these survivors agree with your definition? After listening to the testimonies would you want to change your definition of an Uprising?

5. Discuss the pros and cons of an uprising when the participants know the outcome.

33 IWITNESS ACTIVITIES MINI LESSONS ON JEWISH TOPICS

This collection of activities offer powerful lessons about the ways our ancestors maintained and exercised Jewish values during the Holocaust, challenge our existing assumptions and perspectives, and pushed us to adopt new paradigms that are richer in their complexity and honest in their composition.

Each activity can be used in conjunction with this curriculum and/or as a stand-alone lesson. The following testimony-based activities focus on eye witness accounts of life in concentration camps and provide insight into the way Jewish victims relied on their traditions to sustain them in the most challenging of times.

• Areyvut • Emunah • Halacha • Prayer • Holidays

• Mesorah • Friendship • Chesed

34 ADDITIONAL READING AND RESOURCES

For Teachers: Use these quotes to supplement survivors’ testimonies or extend the discussion by having students respond in writing to the quotes:

The Einsatzgruppen

A perpetrator’s perspective:

At the Nuremberg trial of war criminals in 1946, one of the Einsatzgruppen commanders described a typical massacre:

The Einsatz unit would enter a village or town and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of “resettlement.” They were requested to hand over their valuables and shortly before execution to surrender their outer clothing. They were transported to the place of executions, usually an antitank ditch, in trucks—always only as many as could be executed immediately... Then they were shot, kneeling or standing . . . and the corpses thrown into the ditch.

A survivor’s perspective:

In Piryatin, a small city in the Oblast in , the Germans murdered sixteen hundred Jews on April 6, 1942, the second day of . They were all old men, women, and children who had not been able to flee eastward when the army invaded. The Jews were led out of town on the Greben road to Pirogovskaya Levada, where large pits had been dug. The Jews were stripped of all their clothing and belongings, which were sorted on the spot by the Germans and the local police. They were then forced into five at a time and shot with submachine guns. A survivor remembers:

I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, “Fill in the pits.” Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil... His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: “Finish me off!” . . . A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately, “Mommy!” That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.

35 Eyewitness Testimony - Writings

A Chelmno Eyewitness:

The back door of the van would be open. The Jews were made to get inside the van. This job was done by three Poles, who I believe were sentenced to death. The Poles hit the Jews with whips if they did not get into the gas-van fast enough... The driver then switched on the engine, crawled under the van and connected a pipe from the exhaust to the inside of the van. The exhaust fumes now poured into the inside of the truck so that the people inside were suffocated. After about ten minutes, when there were no further signs of life from the Jews, the van set off toward the camp in the woods where the bodies were then burned.

Toby Stern describes arriving at Auschwitz with her baby:

We were so happy they opened the cars. We came down. They started to hit us. Go there, go there, go there. Everybody wanted to be with the families, we shouldn’t lose each other. We should be together. And a man ran . . . to me. He said, “Give away the child [to] an older lady.” So I asked him why. I told my brother, “Booda, go and ask why should I give away the baby” ... He disappeared.

. . Then a second guy came. And he said, “Give away the baby” ... I used to live with my mother, so I gave the baby to my mother. And I hear right now how he cried, “Mommy, I want to go with you. I don’t want to stay with Bubby.”

Read Rudolf Reder’s testimony:

About noon the train arrived in Bełżec. It was a very small station surrounded by small houses… At the Bełżec station the train moving from the main line and onto a siding about one-kilometer long lead straight into the gate of the death camp…

The area between Bełżec and the camp was surrounded by SS men. No one was allowed in. Civilian people were shot at if they happened to wonder in…

A moment later “the receiving of the train” began. Dozens of SS men would open the wagons yelling “Los!” [Get out]. With whips and their rifle butts they pushed people out. The doors of the wagon were a meter or more above the ground.

Driven out by whips the people had to jump down: everybody, old and young; many broke their arms and legs falling down. They had to jump down to the ground. The children were mangled in the bedlam. Everybody pouring out—dirty, exhausted, terrified…

The sick, the old and the tiny children—those who could not walk on their own— were put on stretchers and dumped at the edge of huge dug out pits—their graves.

36 Immediately after the victims were unloaded they were gathered in the courtyard surrounded by armed askars for Irrman to give a speech. The silence was deadly. He stood close to the crowd. Everyone wanted to hear. Suddenly there was hope— “If they talk to us...maybe they want us to live... Maybe there will be work...maybe?”

Irrman talked loud and clear: “You are going now to bathe. Later you will be sent to work. That’s all.”

Everybody was glad, happy that, after all, they will be working. They even applauded.

The men went straight ahead to a building with a sign “Bath and inhalation rooms”. The women proceeded twenty meters more to a large barrack about thirty by fifteen meters [97 x 48.5 feet] to have their head shaved. They entered quietly not knowing what to expect. Silence was everywhere.

After a few minutes they were made to line up and made to sit on wooden stools, eight at a time. When eight Jewish barbers entered and silently like automated figures started to shave off hair completely to the skin with shaving machines, that’s when they realized the truth. They had no doubts then.

Everybody—young and old, children and women—everybody went to certain death. Little girls with long hair were herded into the shaving barracks. Those with short hairs went to the barracks with the men.

The transition came suddenly:

Suddenly, without even a transition from hope to despair—came the realization that there was no hope. People began to screen—women became hysterical, crazed . . .

I was chosen to be one of the workers. I would stand on the side of the courtyard with my group of gravediggers and looked at my brothers, sister, friends and acquaintances herded toward death.

While the women were rounded up naked and shaved, whipped like cattle into a slaughterhouse, the men were already dying in the gas chambers. It took two hours to shave the women and two hours to murder them. Many SS men using whips and sharp bayonets pushed the women toward the building with the chambers.

Then the askars counted out 750 persons per chamber . . .

I heard the noise of sliding doors, moaning and screaming, desperate calls in Polish, —blood curdling screams.

Screams of children, women and finally one common continuous horrible scream.

All that lasted fifteen minutes.

37 The machine ran for twenty minutes and after twenty minutes there was silence.

The askars pulled open the doors on the opposite sides of the chambers, which led to the outdoors.

We began our assignment.

We dragged bodies of people who minutes ago were alive. We dragged them— using leather straps, to huge prepared mass graves. And the orchestra played— played from morning til night.

The Jews were arriving from everywhere and only Jews.

At Bełżec, all property was confiscated, sorted and stored:

The storeroom for hair, underwear and clothing of the victims of the gas chamber was located in a separate rather small barracks. Hair was collected for ten days.

Baskets filled with gold teeth.

“When the barrack were locked for the night and the lights were out one could hear a whisper of prayers for the dead, the , and then there was silence. We did not complain. We were completely resigned.

Wannsee Conference

Students: You are historians researching high-ranking perpetrators of the Holocaust who participated in the implementation of the “Final Solution” from a distance. Using this article on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, carefully examine each individual. For each one, list what strikes you about their backgrounds (age? education? etc.) What are their commonalities? Differences? How did they see the goals of the conference? Can you draw any conclusions about a “profile” of high-ranking Nazi party members? What was their postwar fate? Do you think justice was served?

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