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World War Two: On 7 January 1943, the Germans hunt down the last Jewish communities of Poland with tricks and deception.
Although this day-by-day series has been preoccupied covering the turning of the tide of war around the globe over the past months, the war against humanity has raged on unabated, as you will have seen in our biweekly YouTube series.
In occupied Poland, only skeletal remains of once-proud Jewish communities remain. The city of Lwów is no exception. Thousands more have been deported during the past three days, leaving just 12,000 laborers from an original of 160,000 Jewish inhabitants and refugees.
In the town of Opoczno, the Germans turn to tricks instead of force to find new victims. Ghetto inhabitants with relatives in Palestine are asked to register for a special exchange program. Some 500 show up and are put aboard trains. The deportees wait for the carriage to kick into motion and take them west towards a neutral country, but their hopes are soon dashed; the train turns east towards Treblinka.
Knowing that nobody returns from the east, panic soon erupts in the carriages. Twenty-two-year-old Aaron Carmi describes: ‘It was as though there was an explosion and a collapse in the carriage. People shrieked to the high heavens. The little children in the carriage could not understand what it all meant, but they also began to cry at the tops of their voices.’
‘I looked at my own family members and it seemed to me as though they had all grown old in a single moment. My little sister Malkale […] understood what it all meant and was weeping bitterly […]. My sister Rochele […] clung to me and said, “Aaron, I am terribly afraid. Look after me…” […] Looking at them I could no longer restrain myself, and also began weeping; but did my best to weep silently, so that my voice should not be heard.’
Together with some other young men, Aaron makes the gut-wrenching decision to leave his family and jump from the train when the opportunity presents itself. The guards shoot down some of the escapees, but Aaron lives to tell the tale.
Photo: An unidentified man in the Opoczno Ghetto looking at the German photographer.
Source: Yad Vashem, 6835/1
