Abstract
This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe.
The article addresses sources for understanding the complexion of the Shoah in Poland, through a focus on the Lublin District and Jewish forced labor there. From the opening story of the wedding of Shamai Grajer and Mina Fiszman in Lublin on April 17, 1942, the article extrapolates several central themes: two constants in Nazi policies and Jewish experience—forced population movements and forced labor, the behavior of the various actors involved in the story, and sources. The main individuals involved in the opening story highlight these subjects. Fiszman was a refugee deported in February 1940 from Stettin. Grajer, Fiszman, and Rabbi Zvi Elimelech Talmud, who performed the wedding, had all been selected as forced laborers when the majority of the Jewish community was murdered during the previous month, and they hoped that their labor would help them survive. The behavior of the main German actors in the story, Harry Sturm and Hermann Worthoff, was not uniformly evil, and the behavior of the Jewish actors was not uniformly “heroic.” The Bełżec forced labor complex in 1940 highlights the brutality and murderousness of much of the early forced labor in Poland. Yet, during the deportations to death in 1942 the Jews needed to “unlearn” the lessons of avoiding such labor if they were now to have a hope of surviving. Among the varied sources for this and the subsequent subjects addressed in the article, the Jewish sources provide a sense of what actually happened in these camps and situations.
What did Jews experience during the Holocaust? What did they see, feel, think, hear, etc.? How did their German and Austrian guards and murderers behave? Were measures against Jews implemented unemotionally, as per Nazi ideals, or was much sadism and anger displayed? How did Jews perceive what they were experiencing, and what can they tell us about perpetrator behavior? What did the people on these two sides of the story say to each other? What were the day-to-day, moment-to-moment events and experiences that comprise the Holocaust?
This article addresses questions such as these through a synthesis of a variety of sources, while arguing for the centrality of Jewish documentation and oral history in general to our efforts to gain deeper understanding of the event and of the behavior of all actors involved. Whereas German documents contemporary to the events—decrees, correspondence, requisitions, reports, etc.—provide the framework for relating the main events and actors, they often do not tell us what actually happened, what the events were like or how they felt to those involved. In the words of Walter Laqueur, “Documents cannot possibly tell the full story; they do not smell, they do not starve or freeze, they are not afraid.” 1 To approach a fuller understanding of the events of the Holocaust, we need to attempt to answer questions such as those above. The answers to these questions can paint the scenes and experiences that comprise the Holocaust; they can show us some of its different colors and shades. They can open a window onto the Holocaust and lend an insight into what people saw, thought, heard, felt, etc. It is these experiences taken together that we might call the complexion of the Holocaust, and that is the subject of this article.
As an entry into this subject we might begin with a bizarre scene in Lublin on 17 April 1942. Shamai Grajer and Mina Fiszman stood under the wedding canopy, with Rabbi Zvi Elimelekh Talmud officiating. It was also Grajer’s thirty-first birthday. Dr. Harry Sturm sent a large bouquet of white roses on behalf of himself and his superior, Hermann Worthoff. It was a festive event.
Only three days earlier, the extremely violent four-week deportation of some thirty thousand Jews from the Lublin ghetto to the Bełżec death camp had ended. During the operation, some two thousand Jews had been shot dead in the streets and numerous others injured on their way to the deportation trains. None of the deportees is known to have survived, and there were now only seven to eight thousand Jews remaining in Lublin, more than half of them “illegal.” 2
Grajer was a barber and prewar petty criminal who had turned informer to the German police and Gestapo during the occupation and hence wielded much power among the Jews. In return for becoming an informer, the Germans awarded him with a café, from which he turned a handsome profit. His café and its telephone served as a hub for the deportation commanders in March–April 1942. Messengers ran in and out, while commanders stopped in for tea and cake served by Grajer’s waitresses and used his telephone to receive updates and issue commands as the deportation operation progressed.
Grajer’s new wife, Mina, was a German Jewish deportee from Stettin (Szczecin) who arrived with her parents in February 1940, when she was seventeen years old. Grajer was married to Bella when he began his affair with the teenaged Mina, who was five months pregnant on that April day. In order to marry Mina, Grajer needed first to divorce his wife, and he apparently coerced Rabbi Talmud, one of two known surviving rabbis in Lublin, to grant him a divorce according to Jewish law, despite Bella’s refusal. 3
Rabbi Talmud himself was married and had a son. According to his clandestine letter to his friend, Rabbi Haim Arieh Berglas, on 28 July 1942, he and his family had been left alive during the spring deportations and murders because an SD officer wanted to use him as a resource for an antisemitic book the officer was writing. 4 There seems to have been an additional reason for their being left alive—a deal that he struck with Grajer with the approval of the Lublin Gestapo. He granted the divorce and officiated at the wedding, while the newly divorced Bella was put on the list of Jews permitted to remain alive in the remnant ghetto created in the Majdan-Tatarski neighborhood, as were Talmud and his family, Mina Fiszman’s parents, and Grajer and Mina themselves, of course. 5
Harry Sturm was the deputy commander of the Gestapo in the Lublin District and had been the deputy field commander for the deportation operation that had just ended. Grajer and his new wife threw a party at his café, to which he invited Sturm and his commander, Hermann Worthoff, among others. Following the wedding celebration, the remaining Jews in Lublin were moved to Majdan-Tatarski, and on 20 April approximately four thousand of them were shot in the Krępiec Woods south of Lublin, several kilometers from the town of Piaski.
This strange story points to several central subjects and related subthemes in the Holocaust, and especially in the Lublin District. Forced population movements and forced labor were two of the constants that Jews faced in Nazi policy toward them from the beginning of the occupation until the end of the war. Mina Fiszman and her parents were part of one of the early forced mass relocations of Jews—the deportation of 1,200 German Jews from Stettin to the Lublin District on 12 February 1940. Shamai Grajer, Mina Fiszman, Rabbi Talmud, and the other Jews still alive in Lublin after 20 April 1942 were given new labor identification cards, and it was their status as forced laborers under the Germans that they hoped would keep them alive.
This story also points to some of the variety of people involved in the Holocaust in one capacity or another. The Germans and Austrians involved were not only ideologically motivated SS men, and persecution and murder were not all that they did, as reflected in the bouquet of white roses and the plan to write an antisemitic book about Jews. And the Jews, of course, were generally ordinary, normal people, with normal human strengths and weaknesses. Thus, not all Jewish efforts at survival were necessarily “heroic.” Neither Rabbi Talmud’s activities in this story nor Mina Fiszman’s and Shamai Grajer’s would fall under such a simplistic heading.
This story also reflects the remaining Jews’ lack of understanding of the Nazis’ plans at this point. A divorce and a marriage and all the efforts at getting onto lists of “legal” Jews do not point to an understanding that the Germans planned to kill all the Jews soon. Of course, it is not surprising that ordinary, normal people did not understand something that seemed so impossible and outlandish, but here we see an illustration of how these mechanisms of coping and struggling for life worked.
The wedding story might also reflect German deception. Allowing the wedding to take place, sending a large bouquet of roses, and leaving a few thousand Jews alive for “work” might have been some of these Germans’ methods for deluding the Jews.
Among the wide variety of sources on which this story is based, the roles of oral history and Jewish documentation in piecing it together are crucial. The personal sources enable us to get a glimpse and insight into what Jews thought and experienced at that time, the desperate grasping at straws and bending of rules that people held dear. These sources shed light on the complexion of the event.
This article will address the complexion of the Holocaust through a brief examination of the Bełżec forced labor camp complex in 1940, along with the continuation of the story of the last Jews of Lublin in 1942. The collective experience of the Bełżec forced labor camps and similar camps had an influence on Jews’ reactions to the deportations from Lublin in 1942, including the reactions of Rabbi Talmud.
The Bełżec Camps 6
The Bełżec camp complex was created at SS initiative in 1940 primarily as a border fortification project along the land border between the German and Soviet occupation zones in Poland. Odilo Globocnik, the SSPF (SS- und Polizeiführer) for the Lublin District, offered to dig anti-tank trenches and fortifications for the Wehrmacht at a discounted rate, planning to use an endless supply of Jewish forced laborers for the job. Initially, the SS envisioned hundreds of thousands of Jewish forced laborers working in a variety of projects, but by April 1940, Globocnik sought to set aside only five thousand Jewish forced laborers in his district for the border trenches. The project soon grew again significantly to plans for thirty thousand. 7
Eight camps, spread over a 145-square-kilometer expanse, were created in the Bełżec area in the southern part of the Lublin District for the border trenches project in spring and summer 1940. Four camps were at Bełżec, 8 and the others were at Cieszanów, Dzików, Lipsko-Narol, and Płazów. The overall commander was SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Dolp, who had recently been court-martialed for a drunken altercation with a German official and his Polish girlfriend. Dolp was demoted by two ranks, put on a two-year alcohol ban, removed from his command position in Kalisz, transferred to Lublin to serve under Globocnik in February 1940, and given a stern warning by Himmler not to repeat any of his offenses. By the time Dolp was sent to Bełżec to set up the forced labor camps, he had already earned a reputation among the Jews for extreme cruelty and brutality. He went on to distinguish himself as one of the most brutal men on Globocnik’s staff. 9
The first one hundred Jewish forced laborers from Lublin were sent to Bełżec on 29 May 1940, followed shortly thereafter by an additional ninety from Piaski. The SS made the Lublin Judenrat responsible for provisioning and caring for the Jewish forced laborers, whether through the labor camp department that it created or through the Association for Bełżec Camp Affairs (Gremium dla obozu Bełżeckiego) that Globocnik ordered them to establish. The Jews had to deal with administration, health, and sanitation; all care for the laborers; preparing additional camps; and financing the digging of six kilometers of border trenches. The Judenrat’s two controversial appointments to head the camp Lagerrat (camp council), Dr. Wolf Fajgeles and Lejb Zylberajch, were sent to Bełżec on 13 June, together with a cook. Until their arrival, there was no camp kitchen whatsoever. 10
Several hundred Jews from Lublin and nearby Piaski were seized and sent to Bełżec in the first half of July, 11 and thousands from other districts reached Bełżec in August. Whereas the families and the Lublin Judenrat provided the Lublin Jews with some supplies, many Jewish forced laborers from other communities generally suffered from a lack of food and supplies.
For the Germans, the Bełżec forced labor complex quickly became a source of intense, acrimonious rivalry between the German civilian government under District Governor Ernst Zörner and Globocnik and his men. The rivalry and power struggles involved General Governor Hans Frank and Höhere SS- und Polizeiführer (HSSPF) Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger as well. Globocnik’s men kidnapped thousands of Jewish men from their homes in the middle of the night in July and August. Although the exact number of men conscripted from dozens of communities is not clear, there were eleven thousand or more Jewish forced laborers in the eight Bełżec camps at any given moment in August and September 1940 and a constant influx of newly conscripted forced laborers as others fell ill, died, or were transferred. 12
Whereas the German documents, such as civilian government correspondence, memos, phone calls, etc., provide a rich, detailed account of events and shed light on the SS–civilian rivalry in the Generalgouvernement, especially in Lublin, which had a terrible impact on the Jews, they actually tell us very little about the camps themselves and how they operated. For this, different documentary sources are needed.
In what conditions were Jews transported to Bełżec? How were they treated at the various stations on the way and upon their arrival? How were the Bełżec camps run? What were the housing, work, food, and health conditions? A variety of Jewish sources can provide answers to some of these questions, such as the reports written by the Bełżec Lagerrat, the Association, and the Warsaw Judenrat, as well as Lublin Judenrat minutes of meetings and correspondence, contemporary Jewish accounts deposited in the Oneg Shabbat archive, survivor accounts, and more.
Forced laborers arrived at the camps in various states of unpreparedness. Many had been surprised by the night raids and arrived without any clothing, provisions, or even shoes, while others were given a few moments to gather some basic supplies and food before departing. According to the Warsaw Judenrat’s report, quite a few Warsaw Jews “volunteered” in advance for the first transport, but once word got back to Warsaw about conditions in the camps, few volunteered and the SS had to seize large numbers. 13
Jewish men of practically all ages, family status, and states of health were seized without warning. Often, more than one working member of a family was taken, leaving no breadwinner at home.
Jews from outside the Lublin District were transported in cattle cars first to Lublin, where an SS detail met them with violence before transporting them onward to their forced labor destination. Transports were generally divided among a number of camps, according to the SS’s needs, which made it difficult for the Judenrat in the home community to keep track of their laborers to send them aid. The 5,253 deportees from Warsaw and its environs, for example, were distributed among some thirty camps in the district, including the Bełżec complex. 14 Jews arriving in Bełżec following this initial sorting were greeted by beatings and immediate hardships.
The Bełżec Lagerrat was often surprised when new transports of Jews arrived at the Bełżec complex. Many thousands of forced laborers arrived in July and August without any advance notice. The Lagerrat saw food provision as the highest initial priority, and therefore addressed lodging only later. Thus, the already inadequate quarters could not be expanded before the new laborers arrived.
The five-man Lagerrat was small, ill-equipped, and had no appreciable structure or resources to cope with the many thousands of conscripted Jews who arrived in mid-August. Therefore, Lublin Judenrat Chairman Henryk Bekker expanded the Bełżec Lagerrat and visited the camp personally. The new Lagerrat structure as of 21 August had a central Lagerrat in Bełżec that also served the other three camps at Bełżec, headed by the current Lagerrat leaders, Zylberajch and Fajgeles. This central council oversaw the activities of the new councils in the other four camps. 15
The central Lagerrat staff was small (nineteen), as were the staffs of the subordinate councils. The Bełżec Lagerrat created four departments that served all the camps—post, supplies, cash, and bookkeeping—as well as storerooms and a health department with four doctors, who also oversaw an infirmary, a pharmacy (one employee), and a laundry (one employee). One pharmacist and one launderer served more than eleven thousand people. 16
The German refusal to provide any supplies caused an enormous financial burden for the Lublin Judenrat and intense suffering for the forced laborers. In order to defray some of the cost, the Lublin Judenrat contacted the fifty-seven other Judenräte whose Jews had been sent to Bełżec, requesting that they contribute to the laborers’ maintenance and care. A conference of Judenräte met in Warsaw on 7 September to discuss this. Only nine Judenräte responded to the Lublin Judenrat’s appeals; some sent aid directly to their forced laborers, but most simply did not respond. The Judenrat was also forced by the SS and the civilians to pay for the laborers’ transport to and from the camps and for any care they received, such as delousing. 17
The central Lagerrat’s relations with the Lublin Judenrat and other Judenräte were uneasy, which, along with the terrible camp conditions and the Judenrat’s wavering faith in the Lagerrat, led the Lublin Judenrat to increase its direct involvement in camp affairs from 31 August. But their increased involvement and additional supplies and money had little effect. The central Lagerrat was in fact responsible only to the Germans in Bełżec. Its report of its “generally satisfactory” relations with Dolp and his staff actually benefited only certain council members, and its claim that these relations with the Germans enabled it to overcome many camp hardships for the benefit of the forced laborers was dubious. 18
Food distribution was consistently wholly inadequate. Daily rations at first consisted of 500 grams of bread, half a liter of an unsweetened coffee substitute, and half a liter of thin soup. In time the Bełżec camp council was able to supplement these rations with a few vegetables, but, by 1 November, the SS had reduced the bread ration to 350 grams. Some 40 percent of the laborers managed to supplement the meager rations with packages from home. The rest were in constant danger of contracting diseases or dying of starvation or exhaustion. 19
Even the Bełżec Lagerrat, widely accused of corruption and callousness, addressed the inadequacy of the Jews’ housing at length in its self-serving summary report for the Lublin Judenrat. The forced laborers lived in dark, damp, drafty, and filthy ruins into which they were crammed to triple capacity. Rooms that measured 30 square meters slept seventy-five men—less than half a square meter of space per person, with no room to sleep or undress. People slept on the bare ground, head to foot, wall to wall. 20
At the four camps at Bełżec, the three thousand laborers were housed in stables, a hayloft, an unfinished mill, and an engine house. Approximately one thousand Roma from Hamburg were also housed in the mill, treated better than the Jews in all regards. They were given the larger and intact ground floor of the mill and lighter work, while the Jews were housed in the much smaller and unfinished upper story and worked to exhaustion. This of course created friction between the two groups. 21
At Lipsko, more than two thousand people slept in thirteen small, partially destroyed, formerly Jewish houses and two large stables. The holes where doors and windows should have been were covered with boards. At Płazów, the 1,250 Jews from Warsaw slept more than one hundred to a room. There was no housing at all for the three thousand Jews from Radom, Częstochowa, and Warsaw who arrived at Cieszanów on 20 August. They were eventually housed in two synagogues and several nearby houses, but they had no functioning kitchen, food, water source, or supplies for days. Whatever meager food the inmates ate was cold. The only well, which served all the laborers, was first dug several weeks after they arrived. The additional forced laborers brought in several weeks later were forced to sleep in an open field, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. Similar conditions prevailed at Dzików, to which one thousand forced laborers were sent in October. 22
The workday at the Bełżec camps began with wake-up at 5:30
The cumulative deleterious effects of the inadequate housing, filthy conditions, and lack of hygiene were even more serious than the food shortage, as they could not be mitigated by packages from home, connections, or money. Most of the laborers never had time to wash themselves. They could not change their underpants or clothing for months, nor were they given any work clothing. The work conditions and long hikes to and from the very hard physical labor, under rough conditions, caused their clothing and shoes quickly to wear out completely. The central camp council estimated that 20–30 percent of the laborers—some three thousand people—went to work barefoot and in rags within a short time of their arrival in Bełżec. Yet mending or replacing tattered clothing and shoes was almost impossible. Three shoemakers in the central camp repaired a mere 269 pairs of shoes during a four-week period, while a shoemaker shop in Lipsko repaired 237 pairs of shoes. Most of the shoemakers’ and tailors’ time was spent working for the camps’ German staff. If we add these repairs to the clothing and shoes received from several Judenräte and kept in the storerooms of the central Lagerrat, we find that 567 pairs of shoes were repaired or received by mid-October to provide for the three thousand people who had been barefoot for a month already. 25
The Jewish forced laborers had no beds, blankets were rare, sheets and pillows unknown. They slept on the floor or the bare ground; if straw was strewn on the floor as bedding, the laborers were quickly covered with lice and worms. When the straw wore out, it was not replaced, leaving the laborers with nothing at all. 26
Dr. Fajgeles was the only physician until the end of August. Additional physicians were then sent from Częstochowa, Lublin, Warsaw, and Kraków, until there were eleven physicians serving eleven thousand forced laborers. The new doctors immediately opened infirmaries in the camps, but these were chilly, drafty, overcrowded, and practically devoid of medicines. Those who were seriously ill or had contagious diseases could theoretically be sent to the hospital in Tomaszów-Lubelski, but this rarely happened. According to the Lagerrat’s report, the doctors saw approximately four hundred people daily and were able to get twenty—less than 1 percent—relieved from work each week due to illness. All the reports and survivor accounts agree that disease was rampant—dysentery, typhus, gastroenteritis, and many other ailments. 27 There was little the doctors could do to alleviate the situation.
Many charged the central Lagerrat, especially Dr. Fajgeles (an “exemplary bribe-taker” and “immoral degenerate”), with corruption. Fajgeles would examine only those who paid him an “honorarium,” and only a bribe could win an inmate the desired work-exemption note. The camp council was accused of taking bribes, withholding food rations and other supplies from the laborers, and serving the Germans, while thousands of people had no beds, clothing, or shoes. Taken together with the Lagerrat’s good relations with Dolp and his men and bad relations with the Judenräte, this absence of public responsibility seems to corroborate the suspicions and charges against the Lagerrat by its contemporaries. 28
Many Jews from outside Lublin felt abandoned by their own Judenräte and discriminated against by the Lublin-dominated camp councils and the presence of many Lublin officials. Forced laborers also accused the Judenräte of sending the most helpless Jews to the camps—refugees and the poor—with promises of salaries and conditions that were never kept. 29
In light of the lack of nutrition, brutal work conditions, and absence of medical care, it is remarkable that the Lagerrat reported only some three hundred deaths in the Bełżec camp complex in less than four months. Whereas it is impossible to ascertain the true number of deaths, it is clear that these official statistics do not fully reflect the effects of the camp conditions on the Jews. 30
The debilitating effect of the conditions in these camps on the Jewish forced laborers is also reflected in the Lublin District Governor’s Labor Department’s recommendation that the Bełżec laborers be sent home rather than to new work for the Waterworks Department. After the SS in Bełżec was through with them, they were no longer able-bodied. One Warsaw Judenrat official expected 15 percent of the laborers to contract incurable diseases. The Warsaw Judenrat reported that 88 percent of the returnees from the Lublin camps required extensive medical care upon their return. Many patients died within days of their return. 31 The total number of Jews who died in the Bełżec camps or shortly afterward was certainly much higher than three hundred.
The first trainloads of Jews began to be released from the Bełżec camps on 14 October, and the excavation work was largely halted by November. By mid-December, the camps were closed, save for a small group of forced-laborers left behind to clean up and perform various odd jobs. Less than a year later, Dolp was back at Bełżec, this time to construct a death camp. Some of the original trenches dug in 1940 subsequently served as burial and burning pits for the corpses of the murdered Jews. 32
Forced labor was ubiquitous to Jewish experience during the Shoah in Poland, and early experiences with forced labor left their marks on Jews’ memories both individually and collectively. In the case of Bełżec, many Jews were permanently maimed or even died as a result of their brutal experience, and this made them suspicious of transports to forced labor and of large forced labor projects. The brutality of early forced labor was hardly unique to Bełżec. For example, Jews working in German civilian government water regulation projects in the Chełm area in 1940 also suffered extreme brutality, much death, and enduring injuries and maiming. 33 For many Jews, forced labor seemed to be a bridge to death. Thus, when selections for forced labor were conducted before deportations to death camps in 1942, many Jews recalled the brutal conditions of the earlier forced labor, especially of Bełżec, and tried to evade these new deportations.
An understanding of the Jews’ experience and memory of this earlier forced labor is crucial to our understanding of their perceptions and reactions to deportations in 1942. Those reactions in 1942 impacted on the Germans as well. As Germans who were involved in the March–April deportations from Lublin to Bełżec recalled in interrogations and court testimonies in West Germany years later, following the two-day pause in deportations that the Germans took for logistic reasons on March 29–30, 1942, they found when they returned that “all” the remaining Jews “had gone into hiding.” 34 Jews in other parts of the Generalgouvernement reacted similarly. For example, when the Germans came to round up and deport eight thousand of the remaining Jews in the Warsaw ghetto in January 1943, they found that most of them hid and would not emerge on German command. 35 In both Lublin and Warsaw, this made the Germans’ work more difficult, and even dangerous in their eyes, and they remembered this.
Why did these Jewish people in Lublin and elsewhere hide en masse as soon as they had a moment to consider what was happening around them? Two indelible memories from earlier in the war seem to have played an important role—the memory of the suffering of the masses of Jews who were uprooted from their homes in Poland and outside of it in 1939–1941 and became refugees 36 ; and the experience of brutal forced labor that affected nearly every Jewish family in occupied Poland in general and in the Lublin District in particular. Those experiences taught many Jews important lessons: “resettlements” can be destructive for Jews, and forced labor can destroy the lives of individuals and families. As the deportations progressed, rumors that their destination was Bełżec gradually began to circulate in the Lublin ghetto and outside it, and these rumors raised terrible fears. 37 Jews in Lublin went into hiding in order to avoid the extreme, murderous brutality of the deportation operation, and for many of those who went into hiding, they also sought to avoid Bełżec. Our access to that 1940 experience and the 1942 perceptions and reactions is largely dependent on Jewish documentation, including oral history. As rumors of the fate of the Jews deported to Bełżec began to circulate, Jews who were still alive were faced with a new circumstance that was, in a sense, counterintuitive to their previous experience. Forced labor now had become a possible ticket to life, what historian Bella Gutterman has called “a narrow bridge to life.” 38 In a sense we can say that Jews needed to unlearn their 1940 forced labor experience if they were to have a hope for a temporary stay of execution via forced labor for the Germans from 1942 onward.
Lublin Summer–Fall 1942
In Lublin, the contracted and now informer-ridden and SS-controlled Judenrat had managed in spring and summer 1942 to clear the status of many Jews who were in hiding, until approximately 4,600 Jewish forced laborers held the much-desired J-Ausweis that granted them the right to continue living and working in the Majdan-Tatarski ghetto. Did these Jews believe that as forced laborers who now had proper worker identification cards stamped by the German authorities they had a good chance to survive? The answer seems mixed, which is not surprising. The documentation reveals both anxious fear and cautious hope. These mixed feelings endured even after close to one thousand were murdered on 2 September 1942, as reflected in Rabbi Talmud’s last letter of 4 or 5 October. 39
Rabbi Talmud’s letters and other material that he left in the Lublin Judenrat archive open a window onto those last moments of Jewish Lublin. The entire Lublin Judenrat archive was preserved by Dr. Roland von Seeberg Elverfeldt, the chief archivist for the Lublin District German civilian government. As the Soviet army approached, Elverfeldt packed the Lublin Judenrat archive in 1944, including Talmud’s material, and moved it together with the Lublin District Governor’s archive to Kraków. Elverfeldt may be the SD person who wanted to write a book about Jews to whom Talmud was referring in his July letter to Rabbi Berglas. Among the things that survived in this archive are calendars for the Jewish year 5703 (1942–1943) and Talmud’s last letter to his friend. Written in sophisticated Rabbinic Hebrew, the letter expresses anger at God and confusion at His ways, mixed with Jewish solidarity among the remnant community during the High Holidays; despair alongside hope. For example, in anger at God for what was happening to the Jews, he wrote: “And He who is enthroned by the praises of Israel what was it that His best deserved such as this, and woe to the children whose father tortures them so harshly. Has the end indeed come for the existence of the Eternal One of Israel [Nezah Yisrael]! …” Yet, before ending the letter he added: “And now I will inform you that with God’s help the holidays passed restfully for us. We prayed in a few places. And even the radicals in the camp, who never whiffed the smell of public prayer, all diligently came to the prayer house . . . for the entire service.” On the one hand, God has abandoned His people, yet, on the other hand, with God’s help they held High Holiday services that all the Jews attended.
The multiple copies of a Jewish calendar for the year 5703 prepared by Talmud that survived in the archive, complete with candle-lighting times for Friday evenings and holiday eves, as well as the portions of the Torah to be read each Sabbath, are striking. In a community that had lost all hope, the calendar for the coming year struck the opposite tone—there will be a next year for the remaining Jews of Lublin. These Jews’ forced labor probably had something to do with this limited, cautious optimism.
Approximately one thousand Jews were murdered in Lublin on 22 October, and the Majdan-Tatarski ghetto was liquidated on 9 November, when some were sent to Majdanek for forced labor and the rest were shot. Rabbi Talmud was sent to Majdanek, where he died in May 1943. Shamai Grajer’s friend, Dr. Harry Sturm, gave Grajer, his wife, and their new baby the privilege of his personal attention. On 9 November 1942 he shot each of them in the head. 40
The Holocaust was an event that is far away from the experience of most people and hence very difficult to understand, some might say impossible. Yet, at the same time, the Holocaust was an event of and by human beings and hence very close to us and by definition accessible to our comprehension. A central aspect of the Holocaust is that very humanity, and one of our important access points to the event is through the people who experienced it. As we read and analyze Jewish documentation and oral history from the Holocaust, we can gain an insight not only into the Jews’ fears and pain but also into the Germans’ behavior as persecutors and murderers. We can get a sense of the total control the Germans exercised over Jews’ lives from very early in the occupation, even controlling their ability to relieve themselves in a toilet. We can also gain an insight into how victims might compromise their moral standards from normal times in a desperate struggle to find a way to survive, and how the illusion of power in the hands of a victim can elicit rank corruption. From this documentation, we can almost feel the anxious heartbeats of the victims and the careless, cruel brutality of German officials who used up and discarded Jewish lives like scrap, and later chose a Jewish café as their hub for murdering tens of thousands of Jews. We can almost watch up close as Jews struggled to grasp their tormentors’ plan, so that they might discern a way to survive. And, while on the one hand we can gain an insight into how a man can send his friend and his new bride a bouquet of white roses one day and shoot them and their newborn baby in the head on another, we can also perhaps grasp the clarity of the apparent contradiction between Jews taking their God to task for His inaction while at the same time finding hope in communal holiday prayer and the meticulous preparation of Jewish calendars for the coming year.
Those who were not there cannot truly know what it was like, but our study of the event and of the people who experienced it attempts to help us approach some understanding, to the extent that we can. In short, it is through this documentation of the Jews who lived it that we might get some inkling or insight into what it was like; a glimpse of the complexion of the Holocaust.