Every time I’ve faced what has passed for adversity in my life – and you’ll see why I say “passed for adversity” in a moment, here – I’ve kept the experiences of five people front and center in my mind. \u00a0And then I don’t feel so bad.<\/p>\n
They are:<\/p>\n
———-<\/p>\n
World War 2 is full of incomprehensible numbers. \u00a025 million Russian soldiers and at least 10 million civilians, along with millions more Germans, on the Eastern Front, is an incomprehensible number of human lives; you can not imagine what that many people, eight times the population of Minnesota, are.<\/p>\n
And the numbers in the Holocaust are similarly mind-numbing.\u00a0 Six million Jews.\u00a0 Perhaps five million others; political prisoners, ethnic victims (the Roma, or “Gypsy”, population in particular), gays, and a wide variety of “Untermensch” (Subhumans) that just got in the way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Of course, humans have slaughtered each other ever since the species learned how to try to dominate each other – usually by means that are, at the end of the day, fairly mundane, if horrible on a human scale.\u00a0 From massacre to induced famine to forced relocation to inhospitable places, humans have gotten rid of inconvenient minorities and troublesome subjects by the box lot, clan, fiefdom and nationality since long before Rome salted Carthage’s earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Holocaust started no different; Nazis started out killing Jews, gays, gypsies, political prisoners and whomever else got in the way with boots and knives and clubs, in ones and twos in alleys and back rooms, throughout the thirties.\u00a0 With the onset of war, they graduated to killing them by the village with firearms, and relocating them to ghettoes and labor camps\u00a0– “Concentration Camps” (Konzentrazionslagern<\/em>, or KZ in German) to slowly murder them with famine, disease, overwork, cold, barbaric pseudojudicial punishment,\u00a0and the odd but common sadistic bit of violence.\u00a0\u00a0 Places like Buchenwald, Dachau, Theresienstadt, Ohrdruf, Nordhausen, Bergen-Belsen, and hundreds of smaller camps were places that were not designed to be especially survivable.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the Nazis were unique in history in that they turned murder into an industry – with management, a supply chain, quotas, rewards…like Best Buy, only producing death.\u00a0 Because all the normal means of murdering people by the group just weren’t fast or efficient enough.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so early in the war, the Nazis kicked off their Endl\u00f6sung<\/em>, or “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem”, like any other big industrial project; planning, prototyping possible solutions<\/a>, turning around what they’d learned from the prototyping process<\/a>, and settling on the production system – the Vernichtunslager<\/em>, or “Extermination Camp”\u00a0, abbreviated to VZ in German.\u00a0 These weren’t just places where it was hard to live, or easy to end up dead.\u00a0 Killing was the whole and sole goal.\u00a0 .\u00a0<\/p>\n The VZs were built in godforsaken parts of occupied Poland, usually far from major populations centers, further still from any hint of western media, much less\u00a0any borders to which an escapee might flee.\u00a0<\/p>\n The VZs were were literally factories whose product was dead Jews and other “Untermenschen”, and whose function was utterly similar to any factory you’d see building MP3 players or humidifiers today.\u00a0<\/p>\n Americans have heard of Auschwitz, arguably the biggest of the VZs (and really a complex of labor and concentration camps as well as the extermination camp).\u00a0\u00a0 Majdanek, near Lublin, captured nearly intact by the Soviets in the confusion surrounding their advance into central Poland, is the best-preserved VZ.\u00a0 Treblinka saw a mass escape, of which a few inmates survived the war.\u00a0 Chelmno and Belzec are barely known to exist at all; few if any inmates ever survived either camp.\u00a0<\/p>\n And of course Sobibor, plopped in a pestilential forest by a railroad siding in eastern Poland.\u00a0<\/p>\n The tale of the Vernichtungslagern\u00a0<\/em>is among the most depressing in human history.\u00a0 The notion that humans could do…this<\/em> to other humans, turn human life into a commodity to be scrubbed out with no more thought than pressing vinyl into an Otter Case, has driven more than a few of our less stable species-mates over the edge with grief.\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s given me my moments, too.\u00a0 I read the stories of these camps at a far-too-impressionable age, from a far-too-frank source – the Black Book<\/em>, published by the B’nai B’rith after the war as a complete, almost evidenciary catalog of Nazi war crimes against the Jews and others.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n And it’d be mawkishly pollyannaish to say that anything about the story could give one hope.<\/p>\n And yet seventy years ago today came a tiny bit of proof that humanity can still win out.\u00a0<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n In May of 1942, VZ Sobibor<\/em> became operational.\u00a0 Trainloads of Jews and other Untermensch <\/em>were delivered, gassed, and cremated.\u00a0 The camp was run by German and Austrian SS soldiers, with most of the guard work done by Ukrainian SS.\u00a0They were commanded by SS Oberst\u00fcrmf\u00fchrer<\/em> Fritz Stangl.<\/p>\n Neither the Germans nor the Ukrainians wanted to do the dirtiest work, however – untangling the corpses in the gas chamber, sorting through the belongings they’d left behind, cremating the masses of the dead.\u00a0 These jobs were left to the Sonderkommando, <\/em>“special commands” – Jews that were kept alive as long as they were useful to do the dirty work.\u00a0 This work expanded over time to include maintenance work around the camp, serving both the German and Ukrainian guards, and other incidental jobs.\u00a0 The Germans (or rather a Sonderkommando<\/em> of Jews) built a pair of sub-camps to house roughly 600 Jews selected to do all of these jobs.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was generally only a short reprieve; the food was minimal and awful, the conditions rife with disease, and the punishment for even the most piddling infraction was death – sometimes instant, sometimes protracted and brutal, depending on the sadism at the moment of the guard involved.<\/p>\n Among the Jews selected to work for the Germans in the work camp was Leon Feldhendler<\/a>, a 33-year old son of a rabbi from Zolkiewka, Poland, who worked\u00a0in the kitchen, carpentry shop and, occasionally, the Bahnhofkomando<\/em>, the Jews who herded the other Jews from the railroad platform into line to be selected for either work or, the vast majority of the time, the gas chambers.\u00a0<\/p>\n And it’s generally believed that Feldhendler was the first person to not merely conjure up the idea of a mass escape, but to actively start planning it.\u00a0 He and a few other inmates formed a committee to study ideas to effect a mass escape – including one idea, to poison the guards, which fell apart early and led to the execution of five Jews and very nearly destroyed the entire escape committee.<\/p>\n Among others, Feldhendler was joined by 15 year old Stanislaus Schmajzner, a boy from Pulawy whose experience working with a jeweler’s apprentice got him assigned as a gold and silver worker, making bits of jewelry for the Nazis out of gold stolen from dead Jews; the SS were fond of having gold rings and other gimmick jewelry made for themselves and the various women in their lives.\u00a0 Schmajzner was a natural scrounger with immense mechanical aptitude, who quickly got himself promoted to the group that did the mechanical maintenance around the camp.<\/p>\n Together, the Jews tried to come up with a plan that was more than marginally better than suicide.\u00a0<\/p>\n The problem:\u00a0 the camp was surrounded by not one but two barbed-wire fences (and a single barbed strand ten feet inside the inner fence, a warning line beyond which anyone stepping would get shot).\u00a0 Beyond that, there was a broad, 300-yard clearing that had been sown with land mines.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n In late September of 1943, there were two major changes at Sobibor.\u00a0 A rumor began to circulated that the SS was going to shut the camp down (a rumor which was false, as it happens; Heinrich Himmler actually intended to expand the camp, although in point of fact it would have led to much\u00a0the same result for the Jews at the camp).\u00a0<\/p>\n Around the same time, a group of Russian Army prisoners of war – who happened to be Jewish – were sent to Sobibor along with a trainful of Belarussian Jews.\u00a0 The Russians, useful as a group for hard labor, were kept alive and sent to the Sonderkommando<\/em>…<\/p>\n …where their senior officer, 34-year-old Lieutenant Alexander “Sasha” Petjerski, quickly met Feldhendler.\u00a0<\/p>\n The two men struck up a business relationship; Petjerski saw in Feldhelder the knowledge of the camp and guards that his men would need to effect a successful escape.\u00a0 Feldhendler saw military discipline and training in the Russians.\u00a0 Together, they engineered an escape plan.<\/p>\n The Germans – and especially the Ukrainian guards – had become complacent, Feldhendler noted.\u00a0 Bored, they kept to a pretty static routine.\u00a0 They become casual about searching the various workships where the Sonderkommando <\/em>worked, and the Ukrainians even became blase about storing their firearms, apparently believing the Jews too cowed to do anything with them.<\/p>\n Over the course of – this is incredible – three weeks, the Russians and the committee put together a plan.\u00a0 It was based around the planned absence from the camp of several of its key Germans, including Stangl, the commander.\u00a0<\/p>\n In addition to fashioning clubs, axes and (for lack of a better term) shivs in the carpentry shop, they’d steal rifles from the Ukrainian barracks and smuggle them back to the camp, along with enough ammunition to start the rebellion going.\u00a0<\/p>\n Taking advantage of the guards’ routine, they’d ambush and murder the important German guards as they ran routine errands around the camp – picking up jewelry, or clothing and boots being mended by the various Jewish tradespeople, furniture from the woodshop and so on.\u00a0<\/p>\n At the appointed time – afternoon roll call – they’d inform the rest of the Jews (who’d be kept uninformed to avoid security breaches), and rush the gate as the Russians would use the stolen rifles to try to pick off guards in the towers.\u00a0 The inmates would breach the gate and run for the woods, 300 yards away, through\u00a0the minefield, and thence disperse and either go into hiding, strike out for Russia, or join partisan groups in the forests and carry on the fight.\u00a0<\/p>\n Even with the Russians, and with stolen guns, it was nearly suicide.\u00a0 The inmates knew this – and figured at worst it’d be better to die on their feet.\u00a0<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n 4PM on October 14th came.\u00a0 The plan went ahead; six or seven of the key Germans were murdered in workshops.\u00a0 As the inmates gathered for roll call, the Russians opened fire on the guard towers; the inmates rushed the gate under machine gun fire (the Russians had been unable to kill all the guards), and ran across the clearing to the woods.\u00a0 Of 600 Jews in the camp, maybe 300 made it to the woods; dozens were killed in the minefield, while others, paralyzed by events, stayed put in the camp and were murdered later.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of the 300 who made it to the woods, the SS hunted them mercilessly (along with some Polish civilians, many of whom were deeply anti-semitic).\u00a0 Dozens were caught and killed.\u00a0 Others died fighting in partisan groups.\u00a0 All together, around 50 of the Sobibor inmates, including Petjerski, Feldhendler and Schmajzner, survived the war<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n And they provided the largest coherent group of Extermination Camp survivors of the war.\u00a0 Many of them lived long, productive lives after the war.\u00a0<\/p>\n Not all, unfortunately – Feldhendler was murdered by an anti-semitic gang in Warsaw in 1946.\u00a0 Most of the survivors went to the US, Canada, Australia and Israel.\u00a0<\/p>\n Schmajzner went to Brazil where, in the seventies, he helped in the capture the camp’s old second-in-command, Wagner, who’d also ended up in Sao Paolo.\u00a0 Wagner’s extradition got tangled up in Brazilian red tape, and he lived two more years.\u00a0 He committed suicide in 1980, under circumstances that are still controversial in Brazil, and about which Schmajzner never spoke until his death in 1984.\u00a0<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n