Between Giants (21 page)

One … was a German soldier named Berger who had been assigned to our automobile repair worshop and with whom I became friendly. Berger exclaimed while watching the Jews being driven to their deaths: ‘What this scum perpetrate here in the name of the German nation – centuries will not suffice for us to cleanse ourselves!’ Upon returning from home leave Berger related an occurrence which demonstrated that the Nazi government hid the truth from the broad masses of their population. Hearing about the horrors committed by her fellow Germans in Lithuania, Berger’s wife at first decided that he must have lost his mind – the tales seemed so monstrous and improbable.
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Those that remained in the ghettos after each ‘action’ struggled to find enough food to survive. Rolnikaite’s family was lucky. Her mother and elder sister worked as seamstresses, earning a pittance but enough to augment their hopelessly inadequate rations, and Hendrikas Jonaitis continued to risk his own life to give them food whenever he could, either through the barbed wire or if he encountered family members being marched to or from their place of work.

Many of the shootings of Jews from Vilnius occurred in the town of Paneriai, about six miles south-west of the centre of the city. Following their strategy in Poland, the Germans moved first to decapitate Jewish society, not least because it was believed that these leading individuals might form the centre of any resistance movement. Accordingly, on 9 July,
Einsatzkommando 9
instructed its subordinate Lithuanian police units to draw up a list of the most prominent Jews in Vilnius, particularly the intelligentsia, those involved in politics, and the wealthy.
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Three days later, Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Pole who recorded many of the events at Paneriai, saw about 300 well-dressed male Jews brought to the killing ground, and recognised some of them as prominent Jewish commercial figures.
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At first, the killings were mainly Jewish men. It was only in August that the range of victims was extended to include women and children.

A German soldier who worked in a transport column witnessed some of the killings:

I positioned myself about 6–8 metres from the entrance to the pit. An armed civilian stood on either side of the entrance. The watch detail brought the people in small groups to the gravel pit. At the edge of the pit was a grave, where the Jews had to go. The grave was in the shape of a cross … as it was a dry sandy area, the grave was reinforced with planks. In groups, the Jews were brought to the pit. We could clearly see members of the watch detail who were at the edges of the pit striking down with whips … a firing squad of 10 men stood about 6–8 metres from the pit … the shots were fired in salvos, so that the people fell into the grave behind them together.
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One of those taken to Paneriai for execution was the 19-year-old Ita Straż. She was dragged to a pit that was already full of bodies, and when a salvo of shots rang out, she fell forward onto the dead, even though she had not been hit by any bullets. More bodies fell on her as further executions followed, and shots were then fired into the pit to kill any who had survived. One such shot passed through her hand, but she managed to remain silent. She waited until dark, and then escaped, walking barefoot over what seemed like an endless sea of dead.
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Lithuanians involved in the shootings at Paneriai were mainly from the
Ypatingasis būrys
(‘special squads’), recruited from local volunteers. They were commanded by Hauptscharführer (equivalent to an army rank of
Oberfeldwebel
or staff sergeant) Martin Weiss, an officer in the German security police. He had a reputation for cruelty; when he supervised the executions at Paneriai, he frequently made victims lie for hours – in some cases, for more than a day – on the bodies of those executed before them, before they were shot themselves. He often beat Jews at the ghetto gate if they were not displaying their six-pointed stars in the approved fashion, and personally conducted beatings of anyone caught trying to smuggle extra food into the ghetto. On one occasion, he shot a would-be food smuggler – the man had a few potatoes and a small piece of fish – on the spot. Even by the standards of the SS, he had a bad reputation. There was an incident in which a Jew had been imprisoned in the Lukiškės Prison in Vilnius, and was due to be released back to the ghetto; his jailors waited until Weiss was on leave before they released the man, knowing that Weiss would have simply shot the prisoner instead. The jailors also warned the man to make sure that he didn’t run into Weiss again.
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The personnel of
Einsatzkommando 3
reported in January 1942 that the shootings had been conducted in such a manner that they had barely been noticed, and that the general population, including the remaining Jews, believed that those taken to Paneriai had been resettled.
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The testimony of locals, particularly from Paneriai, suggests that they were all too aware of the killings, but were careful not to speak out. Within the Vilnius ghetto, Jews only became aware of the true nature of Paneriai towards the end of 1941, due to the activities of the local resistance movement. In the Vilnius ghetto, the resistance group used a cellar under the so-called hospital. The
Judenrat
played no part in the resistance – its members believed that by cooperating with the Germans and providing labour, they would be able to save at least some of those in the ghetto. Active resistance came mainly from younger members of the Jewish community, particularly those who were Zionists before the arrival of the Germans. Some of these had succeeded in avoiding internment in the ghetto by having documentation that disguised their Jewish background, and, at first in isolation, they began to develop networks. A Jewish girl, Tamara Katz, survived the shootings at Paneriai and, after digging her way out of a mass grave, reached Vilnius where she was sheltered by the underground. She told them about the events at Paneriai, and not long after, the group was able to get a message into the ghetto:

All of the Gestapo’s roads lead to Paneriai. And Paneriai is death. You doubters, shed your illusions! Your children, husbands and wives are no longer living. Paneriai is not a camp. 15,000 have been shot to death there … It is true, we are weak and helpless, but the only answer to the enemy is: Resistance! Brothers! Better to fall as free fighters than live by the grace of murderers! Resist! Resist to your last breath!
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The Germans did all they could to crush any attempt at resistance. If a member of a work detail ran away and escaped, the other workers in the detail were held as hostages, and if the escapee did not return, they were executed. Nevertheless, there was a steady trickle of young Jews from the ghetto to the nearby forests, where they joined the burgeoning groups of partisans.

On October 1941, a limited number of ‘yellow certificates’ was distributed to Jews in the Vilnius ghetto. Only those most capable of physical work received the certificates, and all those without certificates were rounded up and taken to Paneriai for execution. Esterowicz was able to obtain a precious certificate from his Polish employer, but many of his family were not so lucky. Perella Esterowicz left the ghetto with her parents during the ‘action’, and was taken in by a non-Jewish family. Her parents returned to the ghetto without her, consoling themselves that at least she was now comparatively safe. They must have had very mixed feelings when Perella decided that she wished to stay with her family, and returned to the ghetto a few days later by tagging onto a work party marching back for the night.
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Sometimes, resistance and help came from the most surprising individuals. Anton Schmid was an Austrian who had already helped a small number of Jewish neighbours escape in 1938. He was conscripted in 1939, but aged 39 was assigned to a rear area unit. In Vilnius, Feldwebel Schmid was tasked with helping troops who had become separated from their units to return to their parent formations. He was a man who kept very much to himself, as a friend later described:

He was a simple, true-hearted man, in thoughts and deeds an awkward man of few words, not religious, he wasn’t philosophical, read no newspaper, nor any books, he was not a great thinker, his outstanding characteristic was his humanity.
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Schmid discovered that his military role allowed him to issue work permits to Jews in the Vilnius ghetto, and he started to do so. The Jews regarded work permits as ‘death holiday passes’, as the bearer of such a permit was far less likely to fall victim to an ‘action’. As a result, many people were saved from execution. But Schmid did not stop there. He regularly provided food for Jews in the ghetto, and he arranged for a birth certificate to be produced for a Jewish girl, stating that she was actually an Aryan; in other cases he arranged documents that allowed a small number of Jews to travel across Lithuania. Most of these took the opportunity to disappear. On some occasions, when Jews to whom he had issued work permits were arrested, he went to the Lukiškės Prison and had them released. Perhaps his most important contribution was a fairly regular journey that he made from Vilnius to Belarus with his truck, usually carrying timber. On most journeys, he took between 20 and 30 Jews, concealed behind the timber, with him. At the time, the repression of Jews in Belarus was far less severe than in Lithuania, and consequently he saved perhaps 300 people from imminent death. Some took advantage of the less strict regime in Belarus to run off to join the partisans.

Partly as a result of these journeys, and partly due to other clandestine movements of Jews, the notion of armed Jewish resistance – something that originated in Vilnius – spread to other centres, such as Warsaw, Białystok and Grodno. Members of the underground movement frequently stayed in Schmid’s accommodation during their travels, and on occasion he made journeys specifically to help them reach their destinations.

Schmid was a solitary figure, and for obvious reasons he could not confide in his fellow Germans about his activities. It is therefore a matter of speculation as to why he acted as he did. It seems that this devout Christian acted purely on the dictates of his conscience. In late January 1942, he was arrested when a ghetto was established in Lida, in Belarus. Some of the Jews in the new ghetto were originally from Vilnius, and a few told the Gestapo how they had travelled to Lida. At his court martial, his defence lawyer stated that Schmid had tried to save Jews so that they would be available as labour for the Wehrmacht, but Schmid himself rejected this line of argument, stating clearly that he had transported Jews away from Vilnius to save their lives. He was convicted and executed by firing squad on 13 April 1942. Shortly before his death, he wrote a final letter to his wife and daughter, which he handed to the Catholic priest who attended him on his last day. The letter gives the best insight available into his motives:

When word of his conviction and execution spread through his family’s neighbourhood, many people openly referred to Schmid in conversations with his family as a ‘traitor to the nation’. On one occasion, the family home was attacked, and windows were broken.

Of about 40,000 Jews in Kaunas in June 1941, only a small number managed to escape before the arrival of the Germans. After the initial wave of killings immediately after the arrival of the Wehrmacht, most of the shootings took place at Fort VII, one of a ring of 19th-century fortifications around the city. From mid-August, the surviving Jews were confined to the ghetto in Vilijampolė, an area of poor housing where previously about 15,000 had crowded together. Joheved Inčiūrienė was 17 when the Germans arrived; she had attempted to flee with her family, but they had travelled only 30 miles before they were overtaken by the Wehrmacht and forced to turn back.