Read Online Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust by James M. Glass - Free Book Online

children for transport) hid her in the hospital mortuary, in a room bordering a street where Jews were being loaded in a waiting truck. Naomi could hear the screams and the gunfire; but she also heard her sister scream: ‘Mother, help me, you saved Naomi, why don’t you save me? Mother, you don’t love me …’ 31 The next thing Naomi heard was a gunshot and then her sister fell silent. She waited several hours; and during this time German guards threw corpses into the room where she was hiding. Then she saw the body of her sister, tossed onto a pile of corpses. When her mother came to tell her that the Germans had left, she found her dead child lying next to an unconscious Naomi. It was not until they got outside into the light that she noticed her daughter’s hair had turned gray. Eventually Naomi and her mother were transported to the Lodz ghetto; within a few weeks Naomi’s mother had died. No record is left of her daughter.
    Children in the ghetto played games like ‘deportation,’ ‘Führer,’ ‘Gestapo,’ ‘shoot the Jew,’ and so on. They beg and come home to find that their parents have been victims of the day’s roundup and deportations. Husbands and wives are powerless to save each other. After he witnesses his wife being picked up during a roundup, Abraham Lewin records in his diary, ‘I have no words to describe my desolation. I ought to go after her, to die. But I have no strength to take such a step … total chaos … terror and blackness.’ 32
    Weakening of the body, weakening of the spirit, happened simul taneously. Calorie intake in Warsaw, for example, was around 184 a day. Between January 1941 and July 1942, nearly 61,000 people died from malnutrition. Eighty percent of the food entering the ghetto came from smuggling. German soldiers look at this devastated humanity and witness the embodiment of their racial theories. In the town of Komarno, Sergeant Gaststeiger of the 67th mountain rifle section sees ‘a city of Jews [whose denizens were] similar to the creatures often pictured in Der Sturmer .’ Another German soldier describes Poland as the ‘land of the Jews, in which whoever travels will be visited by lice… a land, this Poland, that any pioneer will remember, stating, “Ah Poland, it reeks.”’ Corporal Mathias Strehn notes that on pushing deeper into Poland, ‘the stench of the Jews and their beastliness became oppressive.’ 33
    Germans saw what they wanted to see; however, ghetto condi tions reinforced racial stereotypes. Refugees in the ghettos, whether transported by the Germans or fleeing from action in the country side, rarely survived more than a few weeks. In the first year and a half of ghettoization, refugees suffered a higher mortality rate than Jews indigenous to the areas surrounding the ghettos. Wealthy German Jews transported to the Lodz ghetto found themselves reduced to begging within three months of their arrival. Away from home, unfamiliar with the new surroundings, refugees suffered not only the brutalization of the Germans, but the indifference of the ghetto itself. Refugees received the worst jobs; the Judenrate discrim inated against refugee Jews. Most had no family in the ghetto. Often bands of Jews wandering from village to village would find their ways into the ghettos to escape the beatings, killings, extortion and forced labor.
    Early in the occupation of Poland, German commanders had complete authority over what to do with Jews. Nothing prevented the commanders from killing them according to personal whim or giving soldiers the authority to kill. No country offered Jews asylum (although Jews could find some safety in the Soviet Union). A few were admitted to Switzerland, but many more were refused by the Swiss government; those managing the difficult escape to Spain were not returned. Roads were heavily patrolled; help could not be expected from the peasants. Judenrate were over burdened with caring for the Jews indigenous to their own