They still had a language which was their own and which the Germans could not understand. That was their last and only site of freedom.
The marches continued throughout the winter, through the snow and the blizzards. Their only purpose, despite labour shortages in the Reich, was to kill off the greatest number of prisoners by the most economical means. Stalin had refused to sign the Geneva Convention, so Soviet prisoners did not have even a veneer of official protection.
Soviet POWs were joined on the road by similar columns of Jews. One which I saw consisted exclusively of men, some Litvaks in traditional dress, but mostly assimilated Jews, who from their appearance I guessed to have been city dwellers, middle-class merchants and professional people rather than small shopkeepers and scrap-iron dealers. They still looked reasonably healthy and their clothes, although dirty and torn, had not yet become threadbare. Edek muttered to my grandfather that surely they knew they were all going to be killed, as scores had already been shot along the way.
‘Why don’t they resist, why don’t they fight?’ he asked, hoping for an answer from his father, who had always done business with Jews, which would account for this apparent acceptance of death.
‘They’ve got no chance,’ my grandfather replied. ‘They all know it. Look in their eyes.’
It is true that there was only one guard, armed with a machine gun, for every forty or fifty Jews; it is also true that had they all acted in unison in response to a pre-arranged signal, they could have overpowered their guards, grabbed the guns and turned them on their captors.
Many people have asked the same question as Edek, wondering how millions of Jews could be destroyed in the space of few short years. The answer is that many did fight back when an opportunity presented itself, fighting like cornered tigers in the Warsaw Ghetto. Others took to the forests to sabotage the German war effort. But in a situation like the one Edek and I witnessed, a revolt needs to be planned if it is going to succeed. Any prisoner who stepped out of the column or aroused the faintest suspicion would have been shot on the spot. Anyone who had jumped on an individual guard would have been killed before others could get hold of the guard’s machine gun. It would have been impossible for would-be ring-leaders to communicate with others further down the line to get them to pounce at the same moment. A handful of armed soldiers can always subdue an unarmed crowd.
In my view what is more significant is that each individual still hoped that he alone out of all the others might survive and still harboured the thought that, even if all the rest perished, he would be the one, by some miracle or quirk of fortune, to get away. After repeated beatings and the indignities of a forced march, everyone concentrates on surviving for the next half an hour because everyone thinks that something might just happen in that half-hour which could change everything. This feeling was compounded by a sense that the Germans could not possibly intend to do away with everybody, that there must have been some sort of mistake or that there must be some purpose, other than the unthinkable, to their having been taken away. The Germans always did as much as they could to encourage that sort of thinking and invariably promised the people they herded onto trains and rounded up to march to their deaths that they were going to a work camp or to an industrial plant where they would be looked after and could use their professional skills. They never broadcast their plans to their victims.
To anyone who asks, ‘Why did the Jews let themselves be killed in that way?’ I would reply, ‘Why did the Poles who were led off to concentration camps let themselves be killed? Or the Soviet prisoners of war, who also counted their dead in millions?’
In Hrubieszow the Jewish ghetto consisted of a few streets fenced off with barbed wire, from which, as Hrubieszow had never had its own Jewish quarter, let alone ghetto, Polish families had been evacuated. From Edek’s upstairs window I could peer over the fence and see the hundreds of men, women and children crammed inside. I recognised several of the Ukrainian militia on patrol as some of them used to come to my lodgings to drink with my landlady.
Two of them were drinking one autumn afternoon in 1941 as they played a life-and-death game with the prisoners. Each took turns to aim pot-shots at the petrified human targets who scurried from house to house to avoid the bullets, crouching behind walls and any other structure that could afford them some protection. The rules of the game were simple: if someone scored a direct hit and the other missed, the first won the bet and pocketed the money each had staked on the round. I witnessed these games three or four times that autumn and saw them kill at least thirty Jews in this way, leaving the bodies where they lay. Once it had finished, survivors dragged off the corpses for a makeshift burial. There were up to 8,000 Jews in the ghetto at that time. By the summer of 1943 it had been emptied.
When I passed very early one morning in November 1942 there were no guards to be seen, though the barbed wire was still in place. One of the few remaining Jewish prisoners called to me to ask if I had anything to eat. At first I took him to be an old man of at least seventy, but as I drew closer and looked at his features, I saw that he had aged prematurely and was probably still in his forties. From his accent I knew he came from one of the eastern counties, Volhynia or Podolia. As I always carried a crust of bread in my pocket wrapped in newspaper, I threw the small package to him over the fence. He stuffed it quickly into his coat to eat when the danger of others seeing him with food had passed, then thanked me profusely and indicated that he wanted to repay or reward me with something. As there was an abandoned boot lying nearby, an ankle-high man’s boot with strong elastic instead of shoelaces, he lobbed this over to me. Somewhat baffled, I took it, nodding my thanks in return, and wandered away.
The boot was not in bad condition, and if he had given me a pair it would certainly have been worth a bit of money. It was made of good quality leather. I took it to a boy a couple of years older than me who always seemed to know how to make money from unlikely transactions and asked him how much he could give me for it. He offered me a few groschen, which I accepted. He in turn took it to his cousin who paid him two whole zlotys, ten times more than I had received, because he needed the elastic. As he was preparing to dismantle the shoe, he discovered that the heel turned. When he twisted it, out fell two gold roubles. My friend, who had been pleased with his two zlotys a moment earlier, demanded one of the roubles and, when his demand was refused, he came back to me to ask where I had found it and whether I knew where the other boot was. I saw him later pacing up and down the ghetto fence, his eyes rooted to the ground. Edek called me an idiot for getting rid of it, but I replied, ‘Why didn’t you take it, then? I offered it to you for nothing but you said it was worthless.’
It was either at this time or shortly afterwards that I witnessed an atrocity committed against a group of Jewish children, the only one I saw apart from the columns of marching men, or those in Majdanek where they happened all day and night. A four-wheeled cart passed me in the street, pulled by a single horse and carrying sixteen Jewish children, aged anything from eighteen months to fourteen or fifteen. There were no adults among them and the older ones held the babies in their arms. They were all standing up and looking out from between the uprights of the wooden cart; the life had gone out of their eyes and it was a dull stare that met my gaze. They were skinny but not emaciated, as pale as death but not dropping from exhaustion or cut from beatings. It was their last journey and from the vacant expression on their faces they must have known it. They had been discovered in a bricked-up section of a house, connected to the outside world by a tunnel through which their protectors, who seemed not to have been caught, passed them food and water. They had been there for many months, which meant the people who had looked after them must have been both dedicated to them and well organised – one person acting alone could not have supported them in this way. I watched the SS captain directing the procession, accompanied by his smartly-dressed, adoring Polish girlfriend, who gazed into his eyes with smiles of admiration. A few minutes after they had passed I heard pistol shots and then wandered down to the Jewish cemetery where they had been taken. Someone standing outside told me that three uniformed Germans had fired a couple of dozen shots and killed every single child.
3 Capture and Flight
In the late autumn of 1942 news reached us of the first massacres of Poles in our vicinity. Both had occurred about twenty miles to the south and south-west of Hrubieszow and were carried