I Am Human

PREFACE

DEAR READER:

For your sake, I continue my miserable life which for me has lost all meaning. Constantly, awake or asleep, I see terrible visions of thousands of corpses calling for help, begging for life and mercy. These nightmares do not give me any peace of mind or rest. Phantoms of the dead are constantly hunting me. I see children, children and again children. I have lost all my family, I myself led them to death, and I myself have built the death-chambers in which they were murdered.

Today I am a lonely old man, without family, without friends, without a roof over my head. I talk to myself, I am afraid of everything. I am overcome with fear when I have to meet new people. I fear that what I have seen is marked on my face. When mirroring myself in a stream or pool of water, the appearance of my face is disfigured. Do I look like a human being? No, a hundred times no. Bearded, disheveled, sloppy, broken... I who witnessed the annihilation of three generations must live for the future. Let the world take cognizance of the German crimes and barbarism that the generations to come may know and remember...

I will do my utmost to convey to you all these facts... Let millions of human beings awaken to the sufferings of other millions tortured to death. That is my purpose of my life...

It was in Warsaw, August 23. We could hear firing going on and suddenly the voice of a German policeman calling: Alle raus! I was in the home of a neighbor. We were all forced to go into the street where many other Jews, men and women of all ages and children were already gathered. Scharfuehrer Franz with a sadistic smile on his face and his dog, Bary, at his feet, was already busy sorting out people, one here, one there. I'll never forget his face. I was standing in line opposite my own house in Wolyriska Street.

Around us were German and Ukrainian guards, already dividing and quarreling over loot taken from Jewish homes. We were ordered to proceed to Zamenhofa Street while German photographers photographed the scene. None of us realized where we were being sent. When we came to the station, there were empty wagons waiting. We were ordered to enter them, eighty in each. I had left all my things at home, all I had on was trousers, shirt and slippers. The doors were slammed, and then we realized that there was no return.

We left Warsaw that day and under most terrible conditions we came to Malkinia. Here Ukrainians entered, demanding that we should surrender everything to save our lives. Many gave rings and all other articles they had, I had nothing to give. In the morning, the train went on and we came to Treblinka.

When I arrived at the camp, three gas chambers were already in operation; another ten were added while I was there. A gas chamber measured 5 x 5 meters and was about 1.90 meters high. The outlet on the roof had a hermetic cap. The chamber was equipped with a gas pipe inlet and a baked tile floor slanting towards the platform. The brick building which housed the gas chambers was separated from Camp No. 1 by a wooden wall. This wooden wall and the brick wall of the building together formed a corridor which was 80 centimeters taller than the building. The chambers were connected with the corridor by a hermetically fitted iron door leading into each of the chambers. On the side of Camp No. 2, the chambers were connected by a platform four meters wide, which-ran alongside all three chambers. The platform was about 80 centimeters above ground level. There was also a hermetically fitted wooden door on this side.

Each chamber had a door facing Camp No. 2 (1.80 by 2.50 meters), which could be opened only from the outside by lifting it with iron supports and was closed by iron hooks set into the sash frames, and by wooden bolts. The victims were led into the chambers through the doors leading from the corridor, while the remains of the gassed victims were dragged out through the doors facing Camp No. 2. The power plant operated alongside these chambers, supplying Camps 1 and 2 with electric current. A motor taken from a dismantled Soviet tank stood in the power plant. This motor was used to pump the gas, which was let into the chambers by connecting the motor with the inflow pipes. The speed with which death overcame the helpless victims depended on the quantity of combustion gas admitted into the chamber at one time.

The machinery of the gas chambers was operated by two Ukrainians. One of them, Ivan, was tall, and though his eyes seemed kind and gentle, he was a sadist. He enjoyed torturing his victims. He would often pounce upon us while we were working; he would nail our ears to the walls or make us lie down on the floor and whip us brutally. While he did this, his face showed sadistic satisfaction and he laughed and joked. He finished off the victims according to his mood at the moment. The other Ukrainian was called Nicholas. He had a pale face and the same mentality as Ivan.

The day I first saw men, women and children being led into the house of death I almost went insane. I tore at my hair and shed bitter tears of despair. I suffered most when I looked at the children, accompanied by their mothers or walking alone, entirely ignorant of the fact that within a few minutes their lives would be snuffed out amidst horrible tortures. Their eyes glittered with fear and still more, perhaps, with amazement. It seemed as if the question, What is this? What's it all about? was frozen on their lips. But seeing the stony expressions on the faces of their elders, they matched their behavior to the occasion. They either stood motionless or pressed tightly against each other or against their parents, and tensely awaited their horrible end.

Suddenly, the entrance door flew open and out came Ivan, holding a heavy gas pipe, and Nicholas, brandishing a saber. At a given signal, they would begin admitting the victims, beating them savagely as they moved into the chamber. The screams of the women, the weeping of the children, cries of despair and misery, the pleas for mercy, for God's vengeance ring in my ears to this day, making it impossible for me to forget the misery I saw.

Between 450 and 500 persons were crowded into a chamber measuring 25 square meters. Parents carried their children in their arms in the vain hope that this would save their children from death. On the way to their doom, they were pushed and beaten with rifle butts and with Ivan's gas pipe. Dogs were set upon them, barking, biting and tearing at them. To escape the blows and the dogs, the crowd rushed to its death, pushing into the chamber, the stronger ones shoving the weaker ones ahead of them. The bedlam lasted only a short while, for soon the doors were slammed shut. The chamber was filled, the motor turned on and connected with the inflow pipes and, within 25 minutes at the most, all lay stretched out dead or, to be more accurate, were standing up dead. Since there was not an inch of free space, they just leaned against each other.

They no longer shouted, because the thread of their lives had been cut off. They had no more needs or desires. Even in death, mothers held their children tightly in their arms. There were no more friends or foes. There was no more jealousy. All were equal. There was no longer any beauty or ugliness, for they all were yellow from the gas. There were no longer any rich or poor, for they all were equal before God's throne. And why all this? I keep asking myself that question. My life is hard, very hard. But I must live on to tell the world about all this barbarism.

As soon as the gassing was over, Ivan and Nicholas inspected the results, moved over to the other side, opened the door leading to the platform, and proceeded to heave out the corpses. It was our task to carry the corpses to the ditches. We were dead tired from working all day at the construction site, but we had no recourse and had no choice but to obey. We could have refused, but that would have meant a whipping or death in the same manner or even worse; so, we obeyed without grumbling.

We worked under the supervision of a Hauptmann [captain], a medium-sized, bespectacled man whose name I do not know. He whipped us and shouted at us. He beat me, too, without a stop. When I gave him a questioning look, he stopped beating me for a moment and said, If you weren't the carpenter around here, you would be killed. I looked around and saw that almost all the other workers were sharing my fate. A pack of dogs, along with Germans and Ukrainians, had been let loose on us. Almost one-fourth of the workers was killed. The rest of us tossed their bodies into the ditches without further ado. Fortunately for me, when the Hauptmann left, the Unterscharfuhrer relieved me from this work.

Between ten and twelve thousand people were gassed each day. We built a narrow-gauge track and drove the corpses to the ditches on the rolling platform.

While I was working in Camp No. 1, many transports arrived. Each time a new transport came, the women and children were herded into the barracks at once, while the men were kept in the yard. The men were ordered to undress, while the women, naively anticipating a chance to take a shower, unpacked towels and soap. The brutal guards, however, shouted orders for quiet, and kicked and dealt out blows. The children cried, while the grown-ups moaned and screamed. This made things even worse; the whipping only became crueler.

The women and girls were then taken to the barber shop to have their hair clipped. By now they felt sure that they would be taken to have a shower. Then they were escorted, through another exit, to Camp No. 2 where, in freezing weather, they had to stand in the nude, waiting their turn to enter the gas chamber, which had not yet been cleared of the last batch of victims.

All through that winter, small children, stark naked and barefooted, had to stand out in the open for hours on end, awaiting their turn in the increasingly busy gas chambers. The soles of their feet froze and stuck to the icy ground. They stood and cried; some of them froze to death. In the meantime, Germans and Ukrainians walked up and down the ranks, beating and kicking the victims.

Often people were kept in the gas chambers overnight with the motor not turned on at all. Overcrowding and lack of air killed many of them in a very painful way. However, many survived the ordeal of such nights; particularly the children showed a remarkable degree of resistance. They were still alive when they were dragged out of the chambers in the morning, but revolvers used by the Germans made short work of them....

ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, the German army invaded Poland where the Jewish community had existed for many centuries and where three million Jews were living at the time of the invasion. Ruthless extermination of the Jews began at once and eventually reached dreadful proportions never before known in human history. To accomplish this mass annihilation more efficiently, the Nazi occupants established segregated areas, or ghettos, in many Polish cities, where the Jews were forced to live. The largest ghetto was in Warsaw, where half a million human beings were herded together in a very small area in which physical and moral conditions made life a trying experience.

Although they faced inevitable deportation to death camps and gas chambers, the spirit of these free human beings was not daunted. The Jewish inhabitants of Warsaw, though eventually reduced to one-tenth of their original strength by the Nazis, were determined not to surrender; they made up their minds to exact a heavy toll from their oppressors and murderers. The Jewish insurrection in the Polish capital was a bold challenge to the Nazi tyrants—a historic manifestation of faith in freedom and in the innate rights of man against slavery, oppression and degradation of the human spirit.

Wiernik was deported to Treblinka on August 23, 1942 and there was assigned to the brigade handling the corpses of the murdered Jews. He participated in the revolt of the camp prisoners on August 2, 1943 and managed to escape. He got in touch with his friends in Warsaw and was provided a temporary shelter in the woods where he wrote down his ghastly reminiscences.

... The book about the is Jankiel Wiernik. He was held prisoner there for a full year. Together with others, he organized a successful uprising there, set fire to and destroyed the camp, killed the German and Ukrainian jailers and escaped with a large group of other Treblinka victims.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

TACBLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Copyrighted © 2017

INTRODUCTION

BEFORE WORLD WAR II, Warsaw was the home of the largest Jewish community in Europe and the center of Jewish cultural, social and political life in Poland. It was a source of renewal and revival not only for Polish Jewry but for Jewry the world over. In 1939, this gigantic reservoir of Jewish strength was occupied by the Nazis. They created in Warsaw the largest ghetto in history. Into its overcrowded area, they jammed the three hundred fifty thousand Jews of Warsaw and thousands of Jewish expellees and refugees from various Polish provinces, and even from Western and Central Europe, until the Warsaw ghetto overflowed with more than five hundred thousand inhabitants.

The story of the Warsaw ghetto is, therefore, more than a mere local phenomenon. In its sufferings and its desperate struggle, almost all the important features of Nazi anti-Jewish policy are reflected. To study the stirring accounts of the Warsaw ghetto is to become acquainted with the horrible mechanism of totalitarian methods of degradation, de-humanization, depersonalization and, in the last stage, with the techniques of genocide.

Moreover, the Jewish revolt in Warsaw is almost unique in its historical significance. Probably, it had no more military effect on the course of the war against the Germans than did the heroic resistance of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae in halting the march of the Persian hordes into Greece. But both events had a deep moral impact. Both testify that, in the final test, moral factors prove stronger than brute force and terror.

Ten years have elapsed since the Warsaw ghetto uprising; yet the great historical issue symbolized by this heroic battle is still real. More than ever the world needs a warning reminder of the ruthless and coldly calculated crimes, including genocide, of which the totalitarian regimes are capable. Whatever their color—black or brown, red or white —they inevitably bring havoc and destruction when they run rampant in our troubled, twisted world and when they are unchecked by the vigorous will of free men.

This anthology—which depicts the Warsaw Jewish community from the beginning of World War II to the liberation of Warsaw (1939-45)—is not composed, as is usually the case, of selected essays or excerpts from monographs. All secondary accounts have been eliminated, as well as scholarly or literary elaborations upon the momentous experience of the Warsaw Jews. It is, rather, based on original sources, records of human sufferings, as well as documents of revolt against slavery and oppression. Here the reader will find eye-witness accounts, memoirs, diaries, minutes and protocols, official reports and battle bulletins, statements, proclamations, ordinances, letters, contemporary folksongs and poetry, and children's songs and stories. Thus, the editor has tried to plunge the reader directly into the day-by-day life and strife of the ghetto, into the whirlpool of feelings and emotions, into the maze of various, sometimes contradictory, currents and problems which moved and stirred the inhabitants of the ghetto.

The selections were chosen from among more than eight hundred pertinent books, pamphlets, articles, etc., as well as various unpublished archival sources. A more extensive characterization of the sources is included in the bibliographical notes. The documents are interwoven with running editorial comments and notes. Where events and issues are controversial, several documents are quoted illustrating the various viewpoints.

Most of the texts used in this book were not available in English and were translated from the Polish, Yiddish, German and French originals by Dr. David Chazen. Wherever original English texts or printed translations had been used the genuine style and other linguistic particularities of the pertinent source material have been left unchanged. The revision of the typescript was undertaken by Mrs. Joanne Benton-Rudnytsky. My wife, Dr. Ada Eber-Friedman, has assisted me in all stages of the preparation of this book. To all of them, and especially to my wife, I wish to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude.

The Editor

CHAPTER ONE

The German Polish War, September 1939

OUR BOOK STARTS WITH the first day of World War II. On September 1, 1939, Poland was suddenly attacked by German bombers. Warsaw was one of the first and main targets of this surprise attack. A stampede of panic seized the population of the capital, particularly its three hundred and fifty thousand Jews, who had more reason than the others to fear a Hitlerite invasion. On the other hand, a strong will to resist the brazen aggression was manifested by all parts of the population. In this spontaneous reaction and in the fight against the enemy the Jews took an equal share. However, their share in the sufferings, during the Nazi attack and after, was far from equal.

The first day... and the first Jewish victims.

... On September 1, at six o'clock in the morning, the inhabitants of Warsaw were awakened by a terrible cannonade. The radio loudspeaker kept calling:

Hello, Warsaw! This is an air raid! Don't think that these are only military exercises! The enemy is over our city!

From all the factories sirens burst out in a wailing roar. This time they did not call us to work and toil, but announced that the time of ruin and annihilation had started. Along with the shouting of the radio and the wailing of the sirens was mixed the crying of the children who were torn from their beds to be rushed to the cellars.

The first air raid on Warsaw did not last long; it was mainly aimed at the airfield...

On the very first day of the war the first ten innocent victims fell—Jewish children in Otwock near Warsaw. The murderous bombs demolished the Children's Home of the Jewish society Centos and killed ten little Jewish children and seriously injured their educator, the well-known Jewish poet, Kalman Liss...

(Weingarten, pp. 13-14)

Jews among the defenders of Warsaw...

... Among the defenders of Warsaw—among the regular soldiers, in the ranks of the volunteer workers' battalions, and among the tens of thousands of civilian heroes, the Jewish masses of Warsaw found their place. On the eve of Rosh-Hashanah, which fell on the eighth day of the defense of Warsaw, the German air force decided on the greatest air raid on the city till then, and they deliberately chose the Jewish quarters for this onslaught. Hundreds of airplanes flew very low over the Jewish section of Warsaw, and bombed heavily Nalewki Street and Smocza, Dzika, Niska, Mila, Wolyriska, Krochmalna, Nowolipie, Mylna and other Jewish streets of Warsaw.

Thousands of people were torn to pieces, hundreds of buildings were demolished and hundreds more set aflame. Jews filled a considerable number of the thousands of graves which were dug in the streets of Warsaw during the weeks of its defense.

(Zygelboim, pp. 111-112)

... and building barricades...

Friday, September 8, 1939

... All of us were building barricades, all of us were helping the soldiers. We took the last bit of our day's food and, standing on the street corner, waited for the soldiers who came marching by to give it to them. They grew so near and dear to our hearts, they were our darlings. Had they not come to protect us against Hitler? The fate of our husbands and sons was linked to that of every soldier.

... The shrapnel is exploding over our heads, but it does not deter us from erecting our barricades. One of us falls dead, another is wounded, and our work stops for a few minutes. Death has crept into our midst. The first fallen are in our street, and the people pause a moment, stunned. But almost immediately they come back to their work to finish the barricades. This very night they must be ready.

The artist Abraham Wolfstat comes to see me, exhausted from his work. Everybody works and the work makes you so tired you cannot stand on your feet any longer. But the work means so much to everyone that they do it whole-heartedly. Here you see a shriveled old woman dragging a plush-covered chair. This is her contribution to the barricade.

Everyone wants to help her. I try to take the chair away from her, but she clings to it firmly. No... let me do it,... let me do it by myself... maybe my grandchild will be saved through it.... And the old grandmother drags the chair with love and pride.

It is getting very dark. A few scattered flash-lights throw their sparse light upon our work. But the old woman keeps crawling over the stones in the darkness and puts her chair on the barricade. Her lips are muttering something inaudible, the sound is stifled by the shrapnel...

(Shoshana, pp. 25-26)

... and undergoing savage German bombing on Jewish Holidays.

Saturday, Yom-Kipur, September 23 (1939)

... The bombardment has halted for a while, and the people are catching their breath, thinking that there will be a pause now.

As it quiets down, the Jews prepare themselves for the prayers. Now they are standing in the court-yard, dressed in their talesim [prayer shawls], and praying to God. Soon they are joined by the women. The lamentations are so loud and pitiable that it is heart-breaking. All those around, down to the smallest children who are not yet able to say their prayers, join in the common lamentations and supplications to God, imploring Him to protect us and to stop the bombardment.

But suddenly the shelling flares up with new violence, raging furiously and without respite. Now it is even hard to guess from which direction the gun fire is coming...

(ibid. pp. 46-47)

Refugees streaming into the city with bad tidings...... and young men leaving the city on order of the military authorities, with evil forebodings.

... The Warsaw streets, especially in the Jewish section of the city, soon became crowded with tens of thousands of refugees from various larger and smaller towns. These refugees told their stories of the horrible bombardments and the inhuman bestialities of the Germans. They related ghastly facts: Jews beaten to death, shot in the middle of the square, drowned in the rivers; Jews who were forced to dig their own graves, and then to bury one another alive...

Death, torture and rape accompany the enemy wherever he sets foot... The enemy is approaching the gates of Warsaw, murmur the refugees, scared to death...

On September 6th, the Polish Government broadcast a new appeal to dig trenches. At the same time the broadcast implored all young men able to continue the fight for Poland to leave the city.

... In hundreds of thousands of Warsaw homes human hearts were throbbing painfully that night of September 6. The women, dread and turmoil in their eyes, implored their husbands to set out on a long and dangerous journey, to avoid meeting the German murderer face to face...

... During the whole night, my telephone kept ringing.

Friends wanted to know my decision, or they proposed to set out on the long trek on foot, since trains, nacres and cars were no longer available...

... Again, the telephone is ringing—friends let know that they are determined to meet in certain places, they all indicate streets and squares on the other side of the bridge...

But hurry, hurry...

The streets are swarming with people, hurrying to leave. One sees only a few young women who have decided to accompany their husbands, fathers and brothers on their long and unknown road...

Thousands and thousands of people are all moving in one direction—to the bridge to Praga. The streets are overcast with the disturbing quietness of a stifled sobbing coming up from the depth of the crowd. You hear only the sounds of the heavy steps of the wanderers, who are plodding forward with utmost determination...

(Weingarten, pp. 19-26)

CHAPTER TWO

When Warsaw Surrendered

The Nazis take over