Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (17 page)

Revenge was committed by men, women and even children. For example, after the liberation of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, Ben Helfgott saw two Jewish girls on the road to Leibnitz attacking a German woman with a pram. He told them to stop, but they refused to do so until he physically intervened. Later, inside the camp, he witnessed a mob beating an SS man to death. ‘I watched this and I felt sick,’ he said decades later. ‘I don’t hate anything, but I hate mobs. When people turn into mobs they are no longer human beings.’
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Chaskiel Rosenblum, who was also liberated at Theresienstadt, did not kill any Germans – not out of any particular moral scruples, but simply because he could not bring himself to do it. However, he knew a ten-year-old boy who had seen his parents murdered, ‘and he was killing one Nazi after another’.
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Pinkus Kurnedz saw one of the former kapos at Theresienstadt murdered by a mob of his friends when they discovered the man lying low in a nearby village. ‘He was hiding in a barn and we dragged him out. And there were a couple of Russian tanks there in the little square. The Russians helped as well. And we literally beat him to death.’
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For obvious reasons it is extremely difficult to find accounts by Jews who admit to committing acts of revenge, but a few brave souls have spoken openly about the things they did – either out of a wish to ensure that the historical record is as accurate as possible, or because they remain unashamed of acts which they believe were justified. In 1988, for example, a Polish Jew named Szmulek Gontarz recorded an interview for the Imperial War Museum in London in which he admitted that he and his friends had taken revenge on Germans during the liberation, and had continued to do so for a long time afterwards.

We all participated. It was sweet. The only thing I’m sorry about is that I didn’t do more. Anything: throw them off trains. Wherever I thought I could take advantage, by beating them, we would. There was one particular instance in Austria. We stayed in stables, and there was a German officer hiding there. We found him, and we did exactly the same as they did to us: we tied him to a tree and we shot him. If you say to me now to do it, no way – but at that time it was sweet. I enjoyed it. There was no other satisfaction at that time that any of us could have had. And I’ll tell you now: I challenge any person in a similar situation who would not have enjoyed it … It was perhaps the only thing that it might have been worth to survive the war, to be able to do that. And the satisfaction was great.
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Alfred Knoller, an Austrian Jew who was liberated at Belsen, remembers raiding local farms for food with the explicit permission of the British soldiers. On one occasion he and his friends found a picture of Hitler hidden behind some sacks in the yard beside a barn. Inside the barn they also found some guns. Incensed, they smashed the picture of Hitler and then, despite the somewhat unbelievable protestations of the farmer and his wife that they were anti-Nazis, they shot the pair of them.

I know it was something quite inhuman that we’d done. But I’m afraid to us it was something that maybe subconsciously we had wanted to do for a long time. We wanted to fight the Germans. We did not fight them, but somehow we did what the next best thing was … We wanted revenge. All the time. It was absolutely an act of revenge. It had to come out.

Far from making them feel guilty about what they had done, the event seemed to provide Knoller and his friends with a much-needed emotional release. ‘We were quite open about it. We told everybody. When we came back to the camp, we were triumphant about it.’
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At first many such attacks were ignored or even encouraged by the Allied soldiers. There is a general feeling amongst camp survivors that they were given carte blanche to act however they liked for a limited period, but that for the sake of law and order, attacks on Germans were eventually forbidden. Arek Hersh, for example, claims that ‘The Russians gave us twenty-four hours to do whatever we wanted to the Germans.’
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Harry Spiro, another survivor liberated at Theresienstadt, also remembers the Russians telling them that they had twenty-four hours ‘to do whatever we wanted, even kill Germans’.
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According to Max Dessau, a Polish Jew liberated at Belsen, the British too ‘let you do it for a certain time, to get out your revenge’ but ‘after a time they said enough is enough’.
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The Americans were equally willing to let the prisoners have their way. Kurt Klappholz, a Polish Jew who was liberated while on a forced march, was presented with an SS soldier by an American lieutenant who had already beaten the man black and blue. ‘What the American roughly said to me was, “Here is one of your torturers, you can take your revenge.”’
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None of these people took advantage of the opportunity offered them, but it is quite clear that plenty of others did.

With time, naturally, the feelings of most of these ex-prisoners began to soften. The desire for revenge often dissolved when they saw the pathetic nature of some of the supposed ‘master race’ in whose name they had been incarcerated. For example Peter Frank, who was liberated at Nordhausen, ended the war weighing just over four stone. His only wish was ‘to exterminate the whole German nation, so this sort of thing couldn’t happen again’. But when he was given a German prisoner of war to act as his ‘horse’ because he was too weak to move about on his own, his anger seems to have turned first to contempt, and eventually to pity. ‘He was assigned to me, and he was my property, so to speak. He used to complain to me about how badly he had been done by the war – but he got wise fairly quickly. I mean, he was a poor sod, and there was no point taking revenge on him … Once you started dealing with individuals, who were in many ways victims as well, you left it.’
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Alfred Huberman, a survivor of Buchenwald and Rehmsdorf, agrees. ‘When I was first liberated, I thought Germany should be wiped off the map completely. As time went on if I met a German I thought, What could I say to him? Other than feel sorry for him, to have to live with that on his conscience.’
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There were, however, some whose anger did not quickly subside, and who believed that the Jews could never rest easy until some monumental revenge was enacted upon the German people. One such group was the so-called ‘Avengers’, founded by the former Jewish partisan Abba Kovner. This group appears to have arranged the assassination of more than a hundred suspected war criminals, as well as the placement of a bomb inside a prison camp for SS men that killed eighty of its inmates. Their philosophy involved deliberately indiscriminate attacks on large numbers of Germans, and the impersonal nature of their revenge was designed to mirror the impersonal way that Jews had been killed during the Holocaust. Their slogan was ‘a German for every Jew’, and their express intention, according to one of the group’s members, Gabik Sedlis, was that ‘six million Germans will be killed’. To achieve this aim they hatched a plot to poison the water supply of five German cities, but were foiled when Kovner himself was arrested trying to smuggle the poison from Palestine back to Europe.
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An alternative plan to poison the bread of 15,000 SS men in an internment camp near Nuremberg was more successful. At least 2,000 German prisoners indeed fell sick with arsenic poisoning, although it is not clear how many, if any, died.
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Such plans relied on the chaos that reigned during the immediate postwar period. The massive movements of refugees provided an excellent cover for those seeking revenge (just as it provided cover for escaping war criminals), and the lack of any form of law and order meant that murders went unreported, uninvestigated and often unnoticed. Eventually, however, conditions changed, and even the ‘Avengers’ themselves gave up their dreams of reprisal, choosing instead to fight for the future of an independent state for the Jews in Palestine.
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Here, perhaps, is a clue that might explain why Jewish vengeance was not more widespread. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust most surviving Jews were either too sick or too weak to consider any form of active retribution – to have survived at all was enough of an act of defiance. But more importantly, vengeance is an act committed by those who have an interest in restoring some kind of moral balance. For many Jews, perhaps the majority, there was no such interest. They had decided to turn their backs on Europe altogether and escape to alternative lands where the moral balance had not been compromised: America, Britain and, most importantly, Palestine. Thus their vengeful feelings were expressed symbolically by leaving Europe en masse, as one Jewish writer explained at the end of 1945:

We sought to take revenge on our enemies through disparagement, rejection, banning and keeping our distance … Only by setting ourselves apart from these murderers completely … will we be able to satisfy our desire for vengeance which in essence means: doing away with the European exile and building our homeland in the Land of Israel.
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Palestine gave them the hope of a Jewish state in which they could not be persecuted, because they themselves were the masters. Accordingly they did whatever they could to smuggle themselves out of mainland Europe and join their brethren in the attempt to found the new land of Israel. It was not in the long-term Jewish interest to seek vengeance on Germany, or to cause trouble with the Allies who had, in the end, saved them from complete extinction. Often, therefore, vengeance was left to other former prisoners whom the Nazis had persecuted. There was certainly no shortage of groups who also had an axe to grind.

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Vengeance Restrained: Slave Labourers

Given their own particularly gruesome history, it is understandable that the Jews tend to take centre stage in the painful drama of the liberation of the camps. But, as many historians have pointed out, the ‘Holocaust’ as we understand it today is largely a retrospective construction.
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At the time, amongst the Allies at least, there was much less distinction between racial groups – indeed, the Allies often deliberately did not differentiate between them, choosing instead to group Hitler’s victims by nationality. Confronted by the vast array of horror stories, relief organizations like UNRRA did not at first recognize the Jewish story as a special case, but lumped Polish Jews together with other Poles, Hungarian Jews with other Hungarians, and so on. It was not until September 1945 that Jews won the right to be housed separately, and looked after by specifically Jewish relief agencies.
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For many Allied soldiers and relief workers on the ground, it was not immediately apparent that Jews had suffered any more than many of the other groups they came across. Suffering was everywhere. Concentration camps were only one kind of camp in a vast network of exploitation and extermination that covered the whole of the Reich. Prisoner-of-war camps, in which Soviet prisoners had been left to starve in their millions, dotted eastern Europe. Slave-labour camps were attached to every major factory, mine, farm and construction site. (For example Dachau might have hit the headlines in British, French and American newspapers, but it was merely the hub of a system that had supplied prisoners of all nationalities to 240 sub-camps throughout southern Bavaria.) In addition there were scores of transit camps that were only supposed to process prisoners as they moved from one area to the next, but which by the end of the war had become dumping grounds for internees who were effectively abandoned behind barbed wire without food or care. There were also special camps for orphans and juvenile delinquents, and penal camps for criminals and political prisoners. When taken together these thousands of barbed-wire encampments made up what one historian has described as a ‘landscape of error’.
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3. Archipelago of German concentration camps

It should be mentioned here that the treatment of people in these camps varied wildly. While British and American prisoners of war often received Red Cross packages, were fed reasonably well and were allowed to engage in cultural activities, Italians and Soviets were routinely beaten, overworked and starved to death. Similarly, while French labourers on ‘obligatory work service’ were occasionally paid and fed adequately, Polish
Ostarbeiters
were more often worked to the bone, literally. Even within the concentration camps there were gradations of hardship, with Aryan prisoners being mistreated far less regularly than the supposedly ‘inferior’ races such as Jews and Gypsies.