From the Memoir of Danek Gerthner About German Extortion of the Jews

On Thursday, October 16, 1941, at 7:00 a.m., the German gendarmerie in Kosow informed us that the Gestapo wished to conscript sixty to seventy young men for forced labor. Soon after that, German military police and Ukrainian police occupied all the streets. Gestapo trucks rumbled by and stopped, discharging nimble crewmen from the rear. The Germans shouted, “Jews get on the vehicles!” No Jew was allowed to leave the town. The Nazi henchmen went from house to house gathering up men, women, and children. No house was overlooked. They soon amassed some 400 people. The convoy with its cargo of brutally arrested Jews came to a halt in the middle of the market place, right across from the rabbi’s house. Gestapo officer Hubert entered the office of our committee and shouted: “All Jews out!” They dragged us violently into the square and to the trucks. At this moment, the German police commander entered town. He said he needed several Jews for a certain “operation” and asked the Gestapo man to fill his order. The two argued about this for some time, but Hubert finally agreed and handed sixteen persons to the police. I was one of hem. We were kept behind and escorted back into the committee office, followed by a Gestapo man who asked us to turn over some textiles, rugs, and other possessions. Even then, as before, many Germans were still busy attacking Jewish homes, stealing what they could, and savagely beating the Jews inside. For this reason, the committee had temporarily amassed all sorts of items for safekeeping. We now offered these as a bribe to the Germans to stop their brutal spree of looting. We also provided this Gestapo man more than an ample quantity of goods. Concurrently, however, we asked him to spare the Jews from the constant deportations. In exchange, we said, we would procure furs, textiles, rugs, and other valuables. He said that something could certainly be worked out but that he was not authorized to decide. “The key man is Gestapo officer Goja,” he said, offering to ask him. A short time later, Goja did actually turn up, accompanied by Hertl, head of the Security Service (SD) in the Kolomyja district. “Write down twenty fur

______1/3 Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies coats!” Goja ordered. The chairman wrote fifty. Goja: “Thirty rugs!” The chairman wrote down a hundred. The Gestapo man noticed this and asked, “Why are you writing down much more than I told you to?” The chairman replied: “Because we’d give you much more if you’d release our people.” The two men responded, in a commanding tone, “Everything will be OK, just get the things to us by five o’clock this afternoon.” Then they left. Each of us brought what he could. Then we went into the houses and gathered up the difference. Hertl showed up every thirty minutes and took the items we had stacked up. While this was going on, we heard repetitive gunfire from the mountain at the edge of town, across from the committee’s offices. Warily we asked Hertl, “Those are certainly warning shots, aren’t they?” He confirmed this and our hopes as well: “Just give us enough stuff, then everything will be fine. Those are just harmless warning shots, that’s all.” In the meantime, the Gestapo had put together another deportation transport with 300 people. Many Ukrainians and their children milled in the streets. The children had been given the day off from school to personally witness this “sacred national action.” Ukrainian gangs smashed their way into Jews’ homes, dragged the occupants out, and handed them to the Gestapo. In the meantime, Hertl, unfazed, continued to have valuables loaded onto trucks and carted off reiterating, “everything will be all right as long as you give us plenty of goods.” I came across a Pole whom I knew quite well. He said, “Many Jews were shot today.” I did not believe him. It was totally inconceivable that innocent people could be slaughtered en masse. We had no idea that the Germans’ “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” was already in high gear. Soon, however, the kind of “labor” for which we were being “conscripted” became perfectly clear. Individuals who had gone into hiding now began to appear again in the streets, anxious about the fate of their relatives. We took them to the committee office, since if the Ukrainians caught sight of them they would have handed them to the Gestapo at once. Evening fell, and we were still waiting for the return of those who had been marched off to. We heard more shooting. At some time it finally dawned on us that Goja had pulled the wool over our eyes in the bitterest of ways: he had

______2/3 Shoah Resource Center, The International School for Holocaust Studies tricked us not only out of our possessions but also out of the lives of so many fellow Jews. Again Hertl and other Gestapo officers turned up, asking for more loot. Confidently they reassured us: “It’ll all work out OK!” We figured that even if they had really kept the men for “conscript labor,” they might at least have been able to send the women and children home... The Gestapo officer allayed our fears: “Your women and children are safe.” Only later did we learn that these monsters had already murdered all the women by this time and had hurled the children into the pits, still alive and breathing into the pits, judging them not to be worth the gunpowder.

Source: J. Gerthner, D. Gerthner, Home is no More, the Destruction of the Jews of Kosow and Zabie, Jerusalem 2000, p.79-82.

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