"RESETTLEMENT"

On June 2, 1942, the first deportation, or "resettlement," from the Krakow ghetto began. The Germans planted the rumor that the ghetto was too crowded and the Jews not fit for labor had to be removed. It seemed a plausible explanation. The ghetto was overcrowded.

Tadeusz Pankiewicz, the Polish pharmacist in the Krakow ghetto, witnessed the June 1942 deportations. In his book, The Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy, he wrote, "The nightmare began. Like apparitions in a horror novel, they [the Jews] moved with faltering steps, carrying all their possessions on their weary backs, as heavy as the tragic burden of the fate they were facing."

The deportation lasted three days, until the morning of June 4, 1942. The heat was unbearable. "Fire seemed to fall from the skies," Pankiewicz wrote. And the Germans were brutal beyond their usual standards. "Apparently blood exacerbated their bestial and sadistic instincts."

During the first deportation from Krakow, seven thousand Jews were sent by train to the Belzec death camp in eastern Poland. In this early stage of the destruction process, the Jews had no idea what awaited them.

On October 28, 1942, the Nazis struck the Krakow ghetto a second time. Pankiewicz writes, "It was a beautiful, almost spring-like day, the cloudless sky reminded one of the time of the June deportations." The Nazis informed the ghetto that only "essential workers" would be spared deportation. The Jews desperately tried to secure for themselves a "blue card" denoting status as an "essential worker." It held the illusion of survival. Not infrequently, the Jew clasping a "blue card" was also sent to the trains. The Germans operated in a brutal fashion that was both methodical and whimsical.

Like the June deportations, the Nazis removed seven thousand Jews from the ghetto. Pankiewicz wrote, "Everything was done to remove valuable objects, destroy and burn them, so that they would not fall into German hands." Six hundred Jews were shot on the spot. "The Spartan like silence of the victims drove them (the Germans) crazy." The Jews rounded up in the second deportation were also sent to the Belzec death camp.

THE DEATH CAMPS

In the early stages of the destruction process, the Jews did not know that death awaited them. Shrewdly, the Nazis explained that the Jews were being "resettled" further to the east. There were rumors of work camps in Ukraine. This was a deliberate effort by the Germans to hide their murderous intent. German and Polish railroad employees partook of the charade, explaining to apprehensive Jews that comfortable facilities awaited them at the end of the line. "Only the young will have to work," the rumors said.

Today, fifty years later, it is relatively easy to conjure up images of the death camps. We have the Nazi example before us. In 1942, however, who could imagine that "the nation of philosophers and poets" was capable of building an assembly line of death?

News of the death camps reached Krakow in November 1942, after the two waves of deportations were complete. A female relative wrote a letter to a Jewish doctor in Krakow who was "passing" as a Polish Christian outside the ghetto on the so-called Aryan side. She was living in Lvov, the present-day capital of Ukraine. Her train trip to Lvov had taken her by the Belzec death camp, which was located on a main railroad line. This letter was the first confirmation of what hitherto had only been rumored: The Jews were being physically destroyed.

In a 1994 interview, Emilie Schindler said, "At first we knew nothing about the Jews. Eventually everyone in Krakow knew that they were killing Jews. My God, how could we not know?"

Still, the general belief in the ghetto affirmed the possibility of survival: "Whoever endures will live." Miriam Peleg-Marianska, a young Jewish woman "passing" as a Christian in Krakow, has written that "hopeful rumors" were "shared by the Jews like bread by the starving."

MARCH 13, 1943

The final "liquidation" of the Krakow ghetto occurred on March 13, 1943. It was conducted with characteristic Nazi brutality. "The German proclivity for viciousness," Panankiewicz wrote, "was limitless." The last of the Krakow Jews were either deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau or, if deemed "essential workers," they were sent to the Plaszow labor camp outside of Krakow.

The Germans tried to prevent Jewish parents from smuggling their children to Plaszow, but nonetheless three hundred children reached the camp.

Even in this late hour, many of the Jews still "deluded themselves," according to Pankiewicz, "that they might live, that the papers would be needed, reactions similar to the death twitches and convulsive quivering of a hanged man."

The Schindlerjuden who were living in a sub-camp at Schindler's enamel factory were allowed to remain there . . . for the time-being. Schindler had doubtless resorted to the usual means of bribery to prevent the "liquidation" of his camp.

Many German industrialists using Jewish slave labor in Krakow went to great lengths to have these workers excluded from deportation. Panankiewicz writes, "Occasionally there were cases of sincere sympathy and willingness to help individual Jews, as I could judge from the stories of those directly concerned. Usually, each of the Germans acted in his own interests because the loss of workers and first class specialists could cause the liquidation of the shop, resulting in consignment of the manager to the front. Each was interested, therefore, in protecting his Jews from deportation."

At this stage of the destruction process, where did Schindler stand? Was he interested in saving "his" Jews for humanitarian reasons? Or was he interested in saving them for reasons of profit? Or both?

JEWISH RESISTANCE

In the autumn of 1942, the Jewish Fighting Organization, known by its acronym ZOB, emerged. It had secret cells in several Polish cities, including Krakow. The Jewish resistance in Krakow comprised members of the prewar Zionist youth movement Akiba. Its leaders were Adolf Liebeskind, Simon Draenger and his wife Gusta Dawidsohn, Maniek Eisenstein, and Abraham Leibowicz.

Abika purchased a handful of weapons on the black market. They also received weapons from the small Polish communist resistance movement known as the People's Guard. The major Polish resistance movement, the Home Army, or "AK," was largely unfriendly to Jews and, in any event, was weak in the Krakow region.

The first action of the Jewish fighters in Krakow occurred in August 1942 when they derailed a military train between Krakow and Bochnia. Lacking explosives, the Jews simply unscrewed the rails. In September, the Jewish fighters killed a number of lone German soldiers on the streets of Krakow and added to Akiba's fledgling stockpile of weapons. They also assassinated the German director of the Price Control and Price Administration Board in Nazi-occupied Poland. His death caused quite a stir in the Krakow region, although the Germans said he died in a car accident.

The Jewish resistance in Krakow also published two clandestine newspapers, one of which was the "Hekhalutz Halokhem" ("The Fighting Pioneer"). One issue exhorted the Jews to flee from the ghettoes because "each flight from the executioner's hands is today a fighting action. We must make it difficult for him to carry out his work of extermination. Do not lay your own head on the block."

In October 1942, Akiba members dug a tunnel into a German garage and set fire to several military vehicles. On November 2, 1942, the Jewish fighters attempted to assassinate Marcel Gruner, a Jewish informer working for the Gestapo. The attempt failed, but a second attempt did not.

On December 22, 1942, in one of the first and most spectacular guerrilla actions in Poland during the war, Jewish fighters bombed the coffee house Cyganerja and two other cafes which were frequented by German officers. At the Cyganerja, eleven Germans were killed and thirteen others seriously wounded. The Jews also attacked an officers' mess, but apparently the bomb did not explode, and, according to the German account, the Jews "tried to achieve their aims by using firearms."

Hitler was enraged by the Jewish actions in the capital of the General-Gouvernment, and he ordered the high-ranking Gestapo agent, Heinrich Mueller, to Krakow. The Nazi manhunt for the resistance fighters was merciless, and virtually the entire ZOB organization in Krakow was wiped out. As a result of betrayal by two ZOB members, Leibowicz, dressed in the uniform of a German officer, was captured. The Gestapo pounced on Judah Tenenbaum, but the Jewish fighter snatched a German's pistol and killed him before being felled by machine-gun fire. The Abika leader Liebeskind was surrounded by German police. He killed two Germans and wounded two others before being shot himself. The other Jews who were captured later escaped from a truck driving them to the site of their execution at Plaszow. Eventually, they were hunted down and slaughtered.

"We are fighting for three lines in the history books," Liebeskind said a few weeks before his death. His wife, Rivka, escaped from Krakow with several other Jewish fighters, hoping, as she later said, "to set up hideouts, to work in forests, and to enable Jews to hide --because they still hoped that the war would end." The aim, she said, "was to save at least someone to relate our story."

For eight months in 1942-'43, the Jewish resistance waged urban guerrilla warfare against the Germans in the very heart of the Nazi-occupied Poland.

ZEGOTA

In December 1942, the Council for Aid to the Jews, known clandestinely as Zegota, was established in Warsaw. This small, highly unique Polish organization was dedicated to saving the remnant of Polish Jewry. With a handful of courageous and indefatigable workers, Zegota provided funds to Jews in hiding, produced false documents, smuggled food and other goods into the Nazi camps, and rescued an estimated 2,500 Jewish children by hiding them in Catholic orphanages and convents.

Zegota was founded by Zofia Kossack, a prewar novelist and a member of the wartime Catholic organization, "Front for the Rebirth of Poland." In September 1942, Kossack issued an illegal leaflet which decried both the annihilation of the Jews and the silence of the Poles, and which, at the same time, demonstrated that even those who acted to rescue Jews were not without the anti-Semitic sentiments deeply imbedded in the cultural milieu. Kossack wrote:

Our feeling toward the Jews has not changed. We continue to deem them political, economic, and ideological enemies of Poland . . . But we protest from the bottom of our hearts filled with pity, indignation, and horror. This protest is demanded of us by God, who does not allow us to kill. It is demanded by our Christian conscience . . . Who does not support the protest with us, is not a Catholic.

Kossack, who employed her children in Zegota's rescue efforts, was suspected of resistance activities by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz. They did not suspect that her activities included the rescue of Jews, or she would have been executed forthwith. In the end, Kossack was ransomed out of Auschwitz by her friends, whereupon she resumed her efforts on behalf of the relatively few Jews left alive in Poland.

In April 1943, Zegota opened a secret office in Krakow. It was directed by Stanislaw Dobrowolski, a member of the Socialist Party. He helped find sanctuary for Jewish children and was also instrumental in smuggling food and clothing into the Plaszow camp. Later, he helped direct the smuggling of goods into Schindler's factory at Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia.

Dobrowolski's opinion of Schindler was scathing. He described the businessman as "a benefactor out of fear," one of the many war-profiteers in Krakow "who had for long years employed for a token fee the slave labor supplied by the camp commandant and, toward the end of the war, when at last they took alarm, let themselves be terrorized to the point of acting as intermediaries in smuggling whole cart-loads of bread and clogs, purchased by Zegota," into the Plaszow camp.

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