On August 30, 1944, I left Ghetto Lodz together with my whole family. They had somehow succeeded in surviving the most horrible times in the ghetto: my father, my mother, my older brother, and my younger sister. By this time there was only a handful of Jews left in the ghetto. We were sure that we were the last to leave. This conviction was confirmed when we saw, waiting on the same platform, Rumkowski, Rosenblatt, and all the other Judenrat elite. We were gathered at the railroad station outside the city, the one used for freight, not the station in the center of town, which was for passengers. Nevertheless, the mere presence of these “invincibles” gave us courage, a little hope that maybe the situation wasn’t as bad as we suspected in our hearts.
Much has been written about Chaim Rumkowski, most notably Adolf Rudnicki’s study, Kupiec Lodzki (“The Lodz Merchant,” Warsaw, 1963). Rosenblatt has received less attention. He was a Germanized Polish Jew who, along with all the other Jews without German citizenship, was evicted from the Reich in 1938. In Ghetto Lodz he became Chief of Police, not just of the ordinary police, whose function was merely to maintain law and order, but of the most horrible group of police, the Sonderabteilung, who cooperated with the Germans in the evacuation of the Jews from the ghetto to the camps. One story will suffice to indicate the extent of the hatred that existed in the ghetto toward Rosenblatt.
Some criminals from the Jewish underworld, which was very well established in Lodz even before the war, joined the ghetto Jewish police force. They were needed for their strength, ruthlessness, and lack of moral scruples. Not all criminals chose to collaborate, however. One such was Moishe Hussid. A tough, heavy-set, gorilla-like man, Moishe had once been a Yeshivah bocher, hence his sobriquet “Hussid.” After leaving the yeshivah, for whatever reason, he went on to become one of the most celebrated figures in the Jewish underworld of thieves and criminals. One day early in 1943, the German Kripo (criminal police) visited Ghetto Lodz, as they did every week, confiscating any gold, silver, diamonds, or money which their network of informers led them to, and incidentally beating and even killing the unfortunate “hoarders” along the way. This particular day, they collected a whole suitcase of valuables, locked it in their car, and left it for a short time. When they returned, the suitcase was gone! The Kripo gave Rumkowski and Rosenblatt exactly twenty-four hours to find the suitcase and the thief. If the piece of luggage was not found, one hundred Jews would be publicly hanged. Special wall posters were quickly plastered all over the ghetto, imploring the burglar to come forward and save the lives of one hundred Jews. Unbelievably, he came. It was Moishe Hussid.
Moishe Hussid was brought before Rosenblatt, and as the story (which spread like wildfire through the ghetto) is told, said to him, “I am a Jew with a Jewish heart. Jewish lives are worth more to me than gold and silver. You, you send thousands of Jews every month to Chelmno to die in gas chambers, and you do this to save your own skin. To me, the lives of one hundred Jews are more important than my own life.” Naturally, he was arrested and deported.
And now, on August 30, 1944, this all-powerful Rosenblatt stood on the platform with the rest of us, waiting to enter the cattle cars, just like the many thousands he had sent before him. Our journey to Auschwitz, which normally should have taken six or seven hours, took about fifteen hours. Our train was stopped many, many times, in order to let “more important” traffic pass. We left in the evening and arrived in the late morning of the next day. As soon as we arrived at our destination, the doors were opened and everyone was immediately divided into two groups, men and women. Then came the selection: to the right and to the left.
It is almost impossible for anyone who was not there to appreciate the depth and persistence of our ignorance. In retrospect it is clear where we were being taken, what “Arbeit Macht Frei” stood for, what it meant to go to the left or to the right. The reader will probably be incredulous when I insist that even I, a sophisticated resistance leader, did not understand where I was and what was happening around me. We all knew in a vague way that there were death camps, but where we stood in the process at any given moment, we had no idea. I was clutching my father so tightly that I did not even see which way the SS man was directing me with his baton. I wanted very badly to stay with my father, but at the last second, I don’t know why, I went to the left, where my brother had gone, and not with my father to the right. I never saw my parents again.
Those of us on the left were ordered to march five abreast, flanked by a double column of German guards with dogs. Suddenly we saw a most amazing sight. There, to our left, was a special platform, a reviewing stand, like a small amphitheater, with three or four steps leading up to the dais. In the center sat Rumkowski, surrounded by Rosenblatt and their entourage, looking for all the world like heads of state reviewing their troops, while we, their “troops,” marched past, a most bedraggled military parade. Thus did the Germans cynically keep up the charade of Judenrat power until the bitter end.
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We were marched to a place in Auschwitz called “Canada.” Canada, even more than the United States, had been the symbol in Eastern Europe for a land flowing with milk and honey, and indeed, those prisoners who lived in “Canada” led a very good life. They were the primary helpers of the Germans. They served in the disinfection process, in the gas chambers, removing the bodies, and so forth. Every half year or so, they were themselves killed and replaced by others. The Germans wanted no witnesses. But while they lived there, they lived “well,” if one can use such a term under the circumstances. At least they never went hungry. A few of them, possibly because they had proved their worth to the Germans, managed to establish very strong positions for themselves within “Canada” and survived the periodic turnovers. Such a one was Moishe Hussid.
No sooner did we arrive in “Canada,” than our hero from Ghetto Lodz appeared. For the first time we realized that the Germans had not killed him after the “suitcase” affair. Prisoners weren’t allowed to speak, but a ripple went through the crowd, whispering his identity to those who didn’t recognize him. The first words he growled were, “Where is Rosenblatt?” To my surprise, Rosenblatt was standing a few rows behind me, to my left. Sic transit gloria. The massive bear-like Moishe Hussid gently took hold of Rosenblatt by the wrist and delicately, like a cat relishing its captured mouse, led him to the front row. In a voice dripping with mock politeness, Moishe Hussid cooed in Yiddish so that all could hear:
“Aaah, Rosenblatt, finally you are here. I have been waiting for you a long, long time. I was sure that you would come. I was determined not to die until I saw you again. Now I have a proposal for you.”
Here, he stooped down and picked up a shaving razor from the ground. Handing it to Rosenblatt, he continued:
“You are such an important Jew. You are such a hero. You had so much courage when it came to killing thousands and thousands of Jews. Now, please, have the courage to kill yourself.”
Rosenblatt took the razor and stared at it, frozen, in a state of shock.
“I am doing you a big favor, Rosenblatt, by giving you this chance to kill yourself. Because if you don’t do it, I will do it for you; but I warn you, it will be a horrible, horrible death.”
Rosenblatt could not make a move.
Then Moishe Hussid started in on him. He began by making him jump up and down, froglike, with knees bent and arms outstretched, I don’t know how many times. This was followed by some relatively mild tortures, clearly the hors d’oeuvres. Meanwhile, the rest of us were herded inside a huge barrack for disinfection. Our heads, our armpits, our pubic hair, were all crudely shaven and into our painfully raw skin was rubbed benzol, a harshly irritating fluid. All our clothing was taken away. We were left standing naked, except for our belts, which we were allowed to keep. I happened to have a special belt, the kind without holes that closes automatically. At that moment, Moishe Hussid came into the barracks, dragging the by now bloody and beaten Rosenblatt. Moishe Hussid had the look of a half-crazed animal. He was in a virtual ecstasy of violence. He looked wildly around for a belt. His eyes lit on me—he took my belt! (For a long time after I had no belt—in Auschwitz, no easy thing.) He made a noose of my belt around Rosenblatt’s neck and swung him around and around, until his eyes bulged and he was blue in the face. He stopped at the brink of death, threw cold water on him to revive him, saying, “No, no, you cannot die yet,” and proceeded to put his barely conscious victim into a steaming hot shower. Rosenblatt’s screams were horrible. When he was taken out, he looked like a scalded chicken, his skin red and broken. He was unconscious but somehow still alive. Moishe Hussid began to jump and dance on him, breaking his bones with his heavy wooden shoes. Finally, a German in civilian clothes entered, tapped Moishe in a comradely way on the shoulder, and calmly said, “Moishe, genug. Enough. Finish with him.”
There were two places in Auschwitz where the Germans disposed of Jewish bodies. One was the crematorium. The other was a huge open pit in which a fire permanently blazed twenty-four hours a day. Into this pit were thrown “surplus” Jews, for whom there was no room in the gas chambers when the daily transport was too large. (Toward the end, eight such huge pits were dug.) They also threw children, old people, and invalids, from whom they feared no resistance, into the pit. This also saved on expensive gas. The pit was about thirty or forty meters from the barracks where we were disinfected. When, that night, they took us to see the pit, in order to break our spirit, its fiery flames against the sky made me absolutely sure I was in Hell. Not in a place that metaphorically resembled Hell, but really in Hell itself. And it was into this pit that Moishe Hussid threw the unconscious Rosenblatt.
Earlier, during the torture of Rosenblatt in the hot shower, there was an interruption, and Moishe Hussid was seen carrying an old man with a shock of white hair, also unconscious, on his back. It was Rumkowski! Moishe Hussid took him out the same door which led to the pit. When he came back, he said to us with great satisfaction, “Now I have finished with the two of them.” Describing with a mixture of glee and contempt the last minutes of the former “dictator,” Moishe Hussid added that Rumkowski had been so terrified that he was “bekakt un hot geshtinken.” In other words, fear had made him lose control of his bowels. “Der Alter, the Elder—he stunk something awful.”
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After the war, I sent my testimony to the Institute of Jewish History in Warsaw and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. However, I never could find out what happened to Moishe Hussid. Twenty years passed and I emigrated to Israel. Nine more years passed. One night I happened to be on neighborhood patrol duty. My partner was my downstairs neighbor, also a Jew from Ghetto Lodz, who had relatives in Munich. To pass the time I started telling the story about Rumkowski. As soon as I mentioned the name Moishe Hussid, he interrupted me excitedly, “What? Moishe Hussid? I know him! I talked with him two years ago in Munich!”
“He is in Munich? I am ready to fly there immediately!”
“You are too late. He died eight months ago.”
Discreet inquiries to his widow in Munich revealed that not even she knew anything about Rumkowski and Rosenblatt. So Moishe Hussid died without telling a single soul about how he killed Rumkowski and Rosenblatt in Auschwitz.
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Lodz was the first and the last Jewish ghetto in Nazi Europe. Established in April 1940, six months earlier than the Warsaw ghetto, it endured four years and four months, until its final liquidation in July-August 1944. Although it had a population half the size of the Warsaw ghetto, the Lodz ghetto was famous for having the most dictatorial Jewish Council, the most notorious Elder, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, and an especially hated Chief of Police, Leon Rosenblatt.
Rumkowski and Rosenblatt were included in the last transport of Jews to leave the Lodz ghetto for the death camp at Auschwitz in August 1944. The manner of their end there has been the subject of various and conflicting reports, virtually all of them based on hearsay, in the years since the end of World War II. We present here a new account by one who was on the same deportation from Lodz as the ghetto elite, and who believes himself to be the sole surviving witness of their deaths.
