Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
DAY 1
LONDON–BERLIN
'Powerless against evil people'
6 a.m.
We assemble at Waterloo Station. Two taxis that began their respective journeys an hour ago (in East Finchley and Stanmore) have collected seven of us between them. The remaining five come under their own steam. The last to arrive is Ben Helfgott; born in Poland in 1929, he was nearly ten years old on the outbreak of war. He will be our Polish speaker, having never forgotten the language of his youth.
6.55 a.m.
The train draws out of Waterloo Station. The first link with the war comes almost immediately, as we pass (on our left) a church with brick bands around its spire. It is at the corner of Westminster Bridge Road and Kennington Road. The spire is all that remains of the pre-war Christ Church. The buildings in this area were systematically destroyed during the London Blitz, but this distinctive spire remained standing. Although the church was bombed, the spire remained, defiant and alone. Travellers coming into Waterloo by rail from the South of England would see it, and could feel reassured that all was well — just about.
The journey to the coast takes us through 'Bomb Alley' in Kent, above which the German VI flying bombs (the doodlebugs) flew towards London, and where some of them were shot down.
8.05 a.m.
We enter the Channel Tunnel. I study the Berlin guide books that I have brought with me. The Baedeker for 1912, Berlin and Its Environs, captures one of the eras which we will explore, before the First World War and before the Holocaust. The Wannsee, where the Endlösung (the euphemistically named 'Final Solution') of the Jewish Question, received its bureaucratic endorsement, is described in the guide book as 'a fashionable villa-colony, the handsome houses of which are grouped in a wide curve on the high banks of the picturesque Wannsee'. We should be there forty-eight hours from now.
8.30 a.m./9.30 a.m. (French time)
We come out on French soil. To the south, Calais is clearly visible. We are travelling through a countryside from which the Germans deported Jews to their deaths. They did so from the spring of 1942 until the summer of 1944. The Jews in the region we are going through now lived so close to the English Channel, yet they were totally vulnerable. From this moment of our journey, each town and many of the villages through which we will pass — today, and every day during the next two weeks — from northern France to eastern Poland, had Jews living in them. These were Jewish communities that often dated back five hundred years and more. Each of them was to be uprooted and destroyed in the course of those two years.
10.40 a.m.
We cross the line of the Western Front; a small British war cemetery in the corner of a field is the only visible sign of where the fighting had been. There is hardly much chance of seeing more, given the speed we are going, which is 300 kilometres per hour, as the announcer told us shortly after we emerged from the tunnel.
10.42 a.m.
The train speeds through the area of north-western France which was occupied by Germany in both world wars. I report to the group whenever there seems a point of interest from our historical perspective.
10.45 a.m.
Lille. As the train stops in the station, I stand in front of the group — who look at me from their seats on both sides of the aisle — and tell them a story involving this city. Among the 6,000,000 Jews murdered during the Holocaust was Mozes Hirschsprung. He was born in Auschwitz in 1901 when it was an Austro-Hungarian border town. His wife Helene was also born in Auschwitz, in 1909. Between the wars they emigrated to Holland, where their two children were born (in 1933 and 1938). When war came, the family fled from Amsterdam to Lille. And from Lille they were deported back to Auschwitz — their home town — and murdered there, within two miles of where they had been born.
The Hirschsprungs were among 1,000 Jews deported from Lille to Auschwitz on a single day, 15 September 1942. Also deported that day was Fanny Yerkowski. Forty-eight years old, she had been born in London on the eve of the First World War. Having married a Frenchman before the Second World War, she went to live in Lille, and shared the fate of the Lille deportees. Adolf Eichmann's department in Berlin, which was responsible for the deportations, was not interested in nationality, but in race. Another of the Lille deportees, twenty-one-year-old Bernice Winer, had been born in Switzerland. In the eyes of the Gestapo, the neutrality of Switzerland was irrelevant to her fate.
More than seven weeks after the Normandy landings of June 1944, there was a deportation from Paris which included 300 young orphans, all of whom were gassed in Auschwitz concentration camp. Among the orphans were two brothers from Lille, Marcel and Gaston Leibovicz, aged fourteen and thirteen.
11.00 a.m.
As I follow on the map the train's rapid movement, it crosses the French border into Belgium.
11.10 a.m.
We reach Brussels, and leave the train for an hour, before our connection. We pass the time in a small station café.
Reaching the platform from which we will leave for Berlin, I speak of another of the orphans deported from Paris on 31 July 1944, and gassed in Auschwitz: the seven-year-old Alain Jurkovitch, born in Brussels. He was born in 1936, as I was. Our birthdays were only a few months apart.
A Jewish community already existed here in the mid-thirteenth century. The Jews of Brussels, like Jews throughout Europe, were massacred at the hands of the local mob at the time of the Black Death, in 1348 and 1349, when Jews were held responsible for the spread of the plague. There was a further massacre in 1370 when the Jews of Brussels were accused of 'desecrating the Host', another frequent medieval charge. To this day, the allegedly desecrated wafers — which became an object of worship here in Brussels — are commemorated in annual prayers on the third Sunday of July, and in the stained-glass windows of St Gudule Cathedral (which alas, in changing trains for Berlin, we do not have time to visit).
12.07 p.m.
Leave Brussels, on the Berlin express.
1.17 p.m.
Liège. We are travelling through a part of Belgium where many young Jewish children were hidden by Christian families, and brought up as Christians. This saved their lives.
The train goes through Verviers, Herbesthal and Welkenraedt. From Welkenraedt, a branch line and a road leads three kilometres south to Eupen, the main town of the small border region which was transferred to Belgium after the defeat of Germany in 1918.
Ben recalls how, as a young boy in Poland, he learned about history from the stamps that he collected before the war. One prized set was the German stamps from the First World War overprinted 'Lupen-Malmedy'. Germany again annexed the area on conquering Belgium in May 1940. Ben recalled: 'When we were ordered to move into the ghetto, a German gendarme took my stamp album. I asked him, "May I have it back?" He gave a swipe at me and kicked me away. I never saw my stamp collection again.'
After Germany's defeat in 1945, Eupen and Malmedy were returned to Belgium.
Six kilometres after Welkenraedt, we cross into Germany. After emerging from a tunnel, we see, to the north, the spires of Aachen cathedral.
1.55 p.m.
Aachen. As we stop briefly in the station, I have time to give a short survey, in this case courtesy of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, whose very first entry Aachen is. This particular entry was written by Ernst Roth, the Chief Rabbi of the State of Hesse, in Frankfurt-on-Main.
Jews were living here in Aachen when it was the capital of the Carolingian Empire. Among a delegation sent by Charlemagne to the Caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad in 797 AD was a Jew, by the name of Isaac, who later wrote an account of the journey to Baghdad and back. Isaac was probably the delegation's interpreter or guide. Jewish settlement was virtually continuous at Aachen for more than a thousand years. An expulsion in 1629 was effective only for a decade. Those expelled were not sent very far: just a mile or two out of the city, to the village of Burtscheid, now an eastern suburb.
The modern Jewish community here in Aachen was organised in 1847 under the Prussian Jewish Community Statute. Two years earlier it had established a Jewish elementary school. The synagogue was built in 1862. On the portal was a Hebrew inscription from Isaiah: 'For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.' The synagogue was destroyed on the night of 9–10 November 1938, Kristallnacht — the Night of Breaking Glass — when at the instigation of the Nazi leaders, synagogues throughout Germany were set on fire.
On the outbreak of war in September 1939 there were 1,700 Jews living in Aachen and 3,500 in the towns and villages around it. Seven hundred were deported at the end of 1941 and during 1942 to the eastern death camps — most of them to Belzec, which we will visit on this journey. A further 250 were deported to Theresienstadt, which we will also visit. Of those deported to Theresienstadt, twenty-five returned after the war.
In 1957 the German government paid for the building of a synagogue and a Jewish community centre here. The community today numbers about two hundred. With the exception of the war years, and the brief expulsion in the seventeenth century, there have been Jews in Aachen for at least 1,200 years.
The year 1997 will mark the 1,200th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in Aachen. Hitler's self-proclaimed 'Thousand Year Reich' lasted for twelve years.
Ben tells us of a German girl from Aachen, a non-Jew, who was working with other German women in the same hut as he in the slave labour camp at Schlieben, south of Berlin. These woman were forcibly evacuated from Aachen with thousands of other Germans just before the Allied forces took the town: 'It was a whole family from Aachen, the parents and two teenage daughters. It was from them that we learned of the Allied bombing of Aachen. The conditions for the Jews at Schlieben were atrocious, and my physical state was fast deteriorating. One day I asked the girl to let me have a ride on her bicycle. I wanted to see whether I still had some strength left in me. I hadn't ridden a bicycle for over two years. There was a boy in the Hitler Youth, he was keen on her but she detested him. As I was riding on the bike, overjoyed at the thought that my strength and confidence had not entirely gone, he suddenly appeared and ordered me to stop riding. When the next soup distribution came — it was not really soup, just putrid, lukewarm water — and I held out my rusty tin, the Hitler Youth took the ladle from the cauldron and threw the soup in my face. Luckily for me the soup was never really hot. But it was a terrible humiliation.'
1.59 p.m.
The train leaves Aachen and continues eastward.
2.02 p.m.
We pass through Burtscheid, the village — now suburb — to which the Jews of Aachen were expelled in the seventeenth century.
2.12 p.m.
Eschweiler. In the nineteenth century the Jewish community here was proud of its distinguished rabbi. Five kilometres across the fields to the north is the village of Hoengen. As in many hundreds of German villages, half a dozen Jewish families lived here before the war. In Hoengen, most of the Jews were farmers; one, Michael Lucas, was the local butcher. The Jews of Hoengen built their first synagogue in 1926. Twelve years later came Kristallnacht. What happened to the synagogue was witnessed by Michael Lucas's nephew Eric, who, a few weeks later, was sent to Britain on one of the Kindertransport trains that took ten thousand German-Jewish children to safety in those tumultuous months. Forty-five years later, Eric Lucas recalled how, at first, the Nazi Stormtroopers — the Sturm Abteilung (known as the SA) — stood on guard outside the small synagogue:
'After a while, the Stormtroopers were joined by people who were not in uniform; and suddenly, with one loud cry of, "Down with the Jews", the gathering outside produced axes and heavy sledgehammers. They advanced towards the little synagogue which stood in Michael's own meadow, opposite his house. They burst the door open, and the whole crowd, by now shouting and laughing, stormed into the little House of God.
'Michael, standing behind the tightly drawn curtains, saw how the crowd tore the Holy Ark wide open; and three men who had smashed the Ark, threw the Scrolls of the Law of Moses out. They threw them — these Scrolls, which had stood in their quiet dignity, draped in blue or wine-red velvet, with their little crowns of silver covering the tops of the shafts by which the Scroll was held during the service — to the screaming and shouting mass of people which had filled the little synagogue.
'The people caught the Scrolls as if they were amusing themselves with a ball-game — tossing them up into the air again, while other people flung them further back until they reached the street outside. Women tore away the red and blue velvet and everybody tried to snatch some of the silver adorning the Scrolls.
'Naked and open, the Scrolls lay in the muddy autumn lane; children stepped on them and others tore pieces from the fine parchment on which the Law was written — the same Law which the people who tore it apart had, in vain, tried to absorb for over a thousand years.
'When the first Scroll was thrown out of the synagogue, Michael made a dash for the door. His heart beat violently and his senses became blurred and hazy. Unknown fury built up within him, and his clenched fists pressed against his temples. Michael forgot that to take one step outside the house amongst the crowds would mean his death.
'The Stormtroopers who still stood outside the house watching with stern faces over the tumultuous crowd which obeyed their commands without really knowing it, would have shot the man, quietly, in an almost matter-of-fact way. Michael's wife, sensing the deadly danger, ran after her husband, and clung to him, imploring him and begging him not to go outside. Michael tried to fling her aside, but only her tenacious resistance brought him back to his senses.
'He stood there, in the small hall behind the front door, looking around him for a second, as if he did not know where he was. Suddenly he leaned against the wall, tears streaming from his eyes, like those of a little child.
'After a while, he heard the sound of many heavy hammers outside. With trembling legs he got up from his chair and looked outside once more. Men had climbed on to the roof of the synagogue, and were hurling the tiles down, others were cutting the cross beams as soon as they were bare of cover. It did not take long before the first heavy grey stones came tumbling down, and the children of the village amused themselves as they flung stones into the many-coloured windows.
'When the first rays of a cold and pale November sun penetrated the heavy dark clouds, the little synagogue was but a heap of stones, broken glass and smashed-up woodwork.
'Where the two well-cared-for flowerbeds had flanked both sides of the gravel path leading to the door of the synagogue, the children had lit a bonfire and the parchment of the Scrolls gave enough food for the flames to eat up the smashed-up benches and doors, and the wood, which only the day before had been the Holy Ark for the Law of Moses.'
The Germans were burying the Scrolls of their own Old Testament: the Holy Bible of more than a thousand years of German Christianity.
2.42 p.m.
Cologne. Under the enormous arched roof of the station there is a great air of bustle. The station announcer is calling out the next trains. In twelve minutes, an express leaves for Nuremberg and Munich.
We have time to leave the train, go into the cathedral square, walk down to the Rhine, and return to the train. In the shadow of the cathedral, where Paul photographs the flag of the European Union flying next to the German flag, I recount a brief history of the Jews of Cologne. Theirs was one of the oldest Jewish communities in Germany. Jews first came here in Roman times, several hundred years before Christianity. When Christianity came to Cologne, the Jews were at once affected by it. Two edicts of the Emperor Constantine, dated 321 AD and 331 AD imposed heavy taxes on the Jewish community, but exempted the community officials from some of these obligations. The first of these edicts, which survives to this day in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome, is precisely dated 11 December 321 AD.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Holocaust Journey"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Martin Gilbert.
Excerpted by permission of RosettaBooks.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
