Posts tagged Treblinka

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943): Part III

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“God, why do we have to suffer all this?” Diary of Mary Berg, June 15, 1943

Warsaw Ghetto burning.

I have previously written about the Warsaw Ghetto several times already—primarily as seen through the eyes of teenage diarist Mary Berg.

Part I described the establishment of the Ghetto in September 1940; the lethal living conditions which consigned thousands of inhabitants to death by disease or slow starvation; the start of Grossaktion Warschau on July 25, 1942, sending many inhabitants to their death at Treblinka, a Vernichtungslager (death camp), a process that murdered 250,000 to 300,000 Jews within the space of 60 days.

The deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto were suspended for a brief time (September 21, 1942 – January 18, 1943).

Part II explained how the resumption of deportations was met for the first time with concerted resistance on the part of the Ghetto’s remaining inhabitants, now numbering approximately 63,000 men, women, and children.  Unlike the initial wave of deportations, where the Germans promised—and the inhabitants believed—”resettlement” to labor camps “in the East,” by 1943 the existence, and purpose, of Treblinka was well known.  According to Berg, “Many Jews barricaded themselves in their houses and fired at the manhunters.”  Others deliberately infiltrated columns of rounded-up Jews, and, at a signal, stepped out and attacked the Nazis.  After a few days, the Germans had only been able to collect 5,000—6,000 Ghetto dwellers for transport, at considerable cost to their own forces, and the Germans elected to withdraw from the Ghetto.

The Ghetto’s remaining population now engaged in feverish activity in anticipation of renewed German efforts to collect and deport the remaining inhabitants.  These survivors had no illusions.  According to Berg, “They knew that their fate was sealed, that the Nazis had decided to exterminate the Jewish population completely.”  Water, food, and medicines were stockpiled; bunkers prepared; arms smuggled in from the outside.  It was only a question of time before the Germans would return, more determined than ever.

That day arrived 80 years ago today, April 19, 1943, a date chosen by the Nazis because it was the eve of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

The Germans came with tanks, heavy artillery, flamethrowers.  They employed members of the police, Wehrmacht, Gestapo, and Waffen-SS, among others.  When the defenders refused to surrender, the German’s commander, Jürgen Stroop* ordered all structures in the Ghetto to be systematically burned and/or destroyed, block by block.  Berg observes that, “For many nights, the fire of the ghetto could be seen for miles around Warsaw.”  The suppression of the uprising officially ended May 16, 1943, although sporadic skirmishes with holdouts continued as late as June 5, 1943.  In the end, all but eight buildings in the Warsaw Ghetto were destroyed.  Approximately 7,000 Jews were killed during the uprising, many via suffocation from smoke inhalation or from being burned alive.  The remaining population (50,000) were captured and deported to the death camps of Treblinka and Majdanek.

In this iconic photo, women and children evacuate their bunker and surrender to German authorities

Today, with the memory of Yom HaShoah fresh in our minds, it is fitting to reflect on those who fought and died for the honor of the Jewish people.  As eloquently commemorated by Mary Berg:

“The Battle of the Ghetto lasted for five weeks.  Its starved, exhausted defenders fought heroically against the powerful Nazi war machine.  They did not wear uniforms, they had no ranks, they received no medals for their superhuman exploits.  There only distinction was death in the flames.  All of them are Unknown Soldiers, heroes who have no equals.  How horrible it is to think of all this—so many relatives and friends among them. . . . I have been standing at my window for the last few days [in an internment camp in France] talking with the newly arrived internees [from the Ghetto].  I drank in their words avidly, and my thoughts carried me over there, to the burning houses of the ghetto where I had lived for three years with all these heroes.  Every now and then I felt faint, as if my very heart had withered. . . . “

Diary of Mary Berg, June 15, 1943

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest single revolt by Jews during World War II.

TO BE CONTINUED

* Stroop was hanged for his crimes in Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison on March 6, 1952.

The Warsaw Ghetto (Part I)

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“Today I attended a concert by Vera Gran. . . .  She sings classical songs and modern songs by the young composer Kuba Kohn, a product of the ghetto.  His music expresses all the sadness and resistance of the ghetto.  It has a new and original note that could only be born in this atmosphere of suffering, torture, and dogged endurance.” (Diary of Mary Berg, December 14, 1941)

Today marks the 82nd anniversary of the official establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto, the largest Jewish ghetto created by the Nazis during World War II.  Over 400,000 Jews (equal to approximately 30% of the total prewar population of Warsaw) were confined to an area of roughly 1.3 sq.mi., representing about 2.4% of the total prewar area of metropolitan Warsaw.

Warsaw Ghetto

Before it was all over, and the Ghetto finally destroyed by the Nazis in retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising (April—May, 1943), virtually all of the Ghetto’s inhabitants—noncombatants all—would be dead.

To put the scale of this tragedy into some perspective, the Jewish death toll in the Warsaw Ghetto alone is equivalent to:

  • 100 times the number of Allied troops killed on D-Day;
  • Over 20 times the number of Americans killed during the entire Battle of the Bulge, America’s deadliest battle in World War II;
  • All American soldiers killed during World War II.

One of the reasons so little has been written about the Warsaw Ghetto is that so few survived the experience—less than 1% of the initial inhabitants.  As one historian observes: “The heroic struggle and suffering of the Jews in the Polish ghettos constitute one of the most tragic and least known chapters of the war.”

Fortunately, a diary written by 15 year-old Mary Berg (born Miriam Wattenberg), spanning the period October 10, 1939 to March 5, 1944, offers a detailed and poignant, picture of life inside the Warsaw Ghetto. Mary’s family had been living comfortably in Lodz, Poland (her father was a successful art and antique dealer) when the war began on September 1, 1939.  When Lodz came under attack the family fled to Warsaw, which soon also came under German bombardment.  After 27 days of increasing punishment, Warsaw surrendered, and Poland became an occupied country.  By the following July, Mary writes that a de-facto Jewish Quarter has developed in part of Warsaw, beyond which one dares not go, on pain of being “hunted by the Germans or attacked by Polish hooligans.”

Five months later, in November 1940, rumors began to circulate that the Jewish Quarter would soon be isolated and its residents locked in.  Even then—more than a year of living under Nazi rule, many Jews did not fully realize the extent of their predicament:

“Some people say that this will be better for us, because the Germans will not dare to commit their crimes so openly and because we will be protected from attacks by Polish hooligans. But others, especially those among us who escaped from the Lodz Ghetto, are aghast: they have already tasted life in a secluded Jewish quarter under German domination.” (November 2, 1940)

At the time the Warsaw Ghetto was established, the Wannsee Conference—which would coordinate and implement the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”—was still more than a year in the future.  Moreover, the major killing centers, such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, had not yet been built.  Nevertheless, life in the Ghetto became a constant struggle for survival, and the Nazis seemed more than willing to let starvation and disease take its toll.

The official per capita food ration was set below subsistence levels.  Those with some financial resources—like Mary’s family—could resort to the black market.  A well-established smuggling operation began almost as soon as the nine-foot-high, barbed-wire-topped, brick walls enclosing the Ghetto went up.

On the other hand, those without such resources simply starved:

“On Leszno Street in front of the court building, many mothers often sit with children wrapped in rags from which protrude red frost-bitten little feet.  Sometimes a mother cuddles a child frozen to death, and tries to warm the inanimate little body.  Sometimes a child huddles against his mother, thinking she is asleep and trying to awaken her, while, in fact, she is dead.  The number of these homeless mothers and children is growing from day to day.” (November 22, 1941)

Even those with some resources found the ever-increasing price of smuggled goods put most food items beyond their reach:

“Only a few people in the ghetto are still eating normally: the managers of public kitchens, the very wealthy, and the food smugglers.” (February 2, 1942)

In such a weakened state, in such crowded conditions, and without all but the most rudimentary medical supplies, disease festered in the Ghetto.  As Mary observes on the first anniversary of the enclosure:

“Of the former one hundred students in our class,* only about twenty-five remain.  Many are unable to pay the tuition fees and a great number have perished of typhus.” (November 15, 1941)

By mid-1942, 83,000 Jews would be dead, victims of disease and starvation.

Apparently, even this murder rate was not sufficient for the Nazis—things needed to be speeded up.  But as bad as conditions were, even Mary, despite all she had witnessed, could not conceive that the ultimate aim of the Nazis was to wipe out the Ghetto entirely:

“[M]ost people think that a pogrom like the one in Lublin cannot happen in Warsaw, because there are too many people here.**  According to official figures, there are 450,000 inhabitants in the ghetto, but actually there are many more, because this number does not include the unregistered fugitives from provincial towns and the loads of Jews from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Austria.  It is estimated that the total is really more like 500,000.  To exterminate such a number of people seems impossible, inconceivable.” (May 8, 1942)

Inconceivable, so Mary thought.  But then again, Mary had not—could not—conceive of a Vernichtungslager—an extermination camp.  A place like Treblinka.

On July 22, 1942, the Grossaktion Warschau (Great Action Warsaw) began.

Umschlagplatz

Each day, Ghetto inhabitants were rounded up, marched through the Ghetto, assembled at the Umschlagplatz station square, and crammed into boxcars—5-6,000 victims per day, for 60 days (July 23—September 21), all ostensibly for “resettlement in the East.”  In reality, the victims were transported 50 miles to Treblinka, recently completed and equipped with gas chambers disguised as showers, and capable of murdering entire transports at a time.  Adam Czerniaków, head of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council charged with operating the Ghetto, chose to die by suicide at the inception of the Grossaktion rather than be party to such deportations.

In the space of 60 days, somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 men, women, and children were sent to Treblinka and gassed.

Fortunately, Mary possessed one advantage that few others in the Ghetto had.  Her mother, Lena, had been born in the United States, and thus was an American citizen, a status which gave the entire Wattenberg family protection and privileges.

Accordingly, on July 19, 1942, Mary, along with other American citizens and foreign nationals, was moved to the Pawiak prison, also located within the Ghetto.  Conditions there were rough—overcrowding, poor food, etc., but at least the inhabitants of Pawiak were excluded from the Grossaktion. Nevertheless, from her vantage point Mary could witness the daily scenes of terror as the deportations continued, involving many of her closest friends.

The deportations ceased after September 21, leaving approximately 63,000 Jewish inhabitants remaining in the Ghetto. The respite was short-lived, however, for on January 18, 1943, the Aktion commenced once again.  On that same date Mary, her family and other foreign internees were transported from Pawiak to an internment camp in Vittel, France. More than a year later, she and her group were finally exchanged for German prisoners being held in the United States.  She arrived safely in New York City on March 16, 1944, where her diary ends.

And yet, much like Tom Buergenthal, Mary Berg remained haunted by the past:

“After four years of that nightmare I found it hard to enjoy my freedom at first.  I constantly imagined that it was only a dream, that at any moment I would awaken in the Pawiak and once again see the aged men with gray beards, the blooming young girls and proud young men, driven like cattle to the Umschlagplatz on Stawiki Street to their deaths.” (March 5, 1944).

Mary Berg

TO BE CONTINUED.

*A number of informal—and illegal—schools were established in the Ghetto, where “every subject is included in the curriculum.”

** Approximately 30,000 of the 34,000 Polish Jews in the Lublin Ghetto were sent to their deaths at the Belzec extermination camp between March 17, 1942 and April 11, 1942.  A few individuals managed to escape the liquidation, and made their way to the Warsaw Ghetto.  This undoubtedly explains why Mary mentions the issue in her diary one month later.

THE Book Tour (Part V): Treblinka Uprising

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Following my June 7 presentation at the new Nordic Museum in Seattle—on the occasion of the 23rd annual Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Dinner—I met with and spoke to many in the audience while signing books.  Often these people had their own important connections to World War II, and equally fascinating stories to tell.  I only wish I could remember, and relate, them all.

Nothing, however, prepared me for the meeting with Shlomo Goldberg and his wife Karen Treiger.  Shlomo, who was one of the first in line, revealed to me that his father, Sam Goldberg, had been one of the handful of prisoners ever to have escaped from Treblinka, and even more miraculously, survived to tell the story.  Treblinka (which, as I have written about here, was initially run by a psychiatrist, Irmfried Eberl), was a Vernichtungslager.  Unlike Dachau, or Buchenwald, or Sachsenhausen, it was an extermination camp, whose sole purpose, like the other so-called Operation Reinhard camps (Belzec and Sobibór) was to kill as many Jews as quickly and as ruthlessly as possible.

Located in northeast Poland, Treblinka began operating on July 23, 1942, and during its approximately 15-month existence, killed somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews. That’s more than any other camp save Auschwitz.

It was constructed using Jewish slave labor, some of whom continued to make up the 300-person squad that kept the camp operating.  Sam Goldberg was captured in June 1942, forced to join in the construction of the camp, and was kept on as a member of the Sonderkommando, the operators of the death machinery.

In early 1943 an underground resistance group formed with the goal of seizing control of the camp, destroying it and escaping to freedom.  After months of careful planning, the prisoners captured some weapons, set fire to several buildings, and attacked the guards.  Many prisoners were killed in the ensuing battle, but approximately 300 men made good on their escape, of which only approximately 72 avoided death in the massive manhunt that subsequently followed.

Treblinka Uprising

Sam Goldberg was one of those lucky few.  In fact, according to Karen Treiger, he, along with one other prisoner, may have been the only two survivors who were involved in both the original construction and subsequent running of the camp to have successfully escaped.

Sam squeezed through the barbed wire fence, dived into the Bug River, and then kept running until he reached the nearby forest.  There he stumbled upon Esther Wzsnia, a Jewish refugee who was already hiding in the forest, aided by a nearby Polish family headed by Aleksander and Helene Stys.  Sam elected to stay with Esther and a third refugee, Chaim Kwiatak.  Together they dug a pit in the forest, and, with the assistance of the Stys family, remained in hiding for another year, until the area was liberated by Soviet troops in August 1944.

Karen Treiger has just written the story of Sam and Esther (they both survived the war, eventually married each other, and emigrated to America), in her forthcoming book, My Soul is Filled with Joy: A Holocaust Story.*

Karen Treiger’s forthcoming book

Karen was not only the moving force in bringing the Goldberg story to print, she and Shlomo traveled to Poland, revisited Treblinka and the nearby pit, and met the descendants of the Stys family. Thereafter, she was instrumental in obtaining the honored designation of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem for Aleksander and Helene (described as Esther’s and Sam’s angel) as well as their children Antoni, Leokadia and Janina.  Mazel tov Karen!

I am very much looking forward to reading Karen’s fascinating tale of a rare escape, a fortuitous forest meeting, survival against incredible odds, and a happy ending in America.

By the way, the date of the Treblinka uprising: August 2, 1943, or exactly seventy-five years ago today.

[*Karen’s book will be available for pre-order from Amazon on September 1, and release on October 1.  Karen has also written several blogs about Odd Nansen’s From Day to Day on her website:  https://soyouwanttowriteaholocaustbook.wordpress.com/2018/07/17/odd-nansen-a-war-time-diary/, as well as a very positive review on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2GJNQI1OZGNM3/ref=cm_cr_othr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0826521002.  Thank you so much Karen.]

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