FIRST SPREAD – KRAUT ARMY MARCHING ACROSS RIVER.

The first blitzkrieg

No-one saw the first blitzkrieg coming. And no-one will ever forget it.  The German invasion of Poland, known as ‘The September Campaign,’ began in 1939, as Hitler’s army swept aside Polish resistance. Within the month, the German Army occupied the western half of Poland, whilst their erstwhile allies, the Soviets occupied the eastern half. German police soon forced hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes.

The Jews were driven with their suitcases into ghettos, areas marked off in the cities,  surrounded by high walls and barbed-wire. They were restricted by dehumanizing regulations, policed by Nazi thugs, and subjected to random acts of violence.  Poverty, hunger and overpopulation made the ghettos breeding grounds for diseases such as typhus and typhoid.

Meanwhile, in Germany during the autumn of 1939, Nazi officials selected over 70, 000 Germans with mental illness or disabilities to be gassed in their Euthanasia Program. And while the subsequent religious outcry caused Hitler to put an official end to the Program, the killing continued in secret until 1945. The Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust, and an ultimate answer to Hitler’s question of the Jewish problem.

SECOND SPREAD – LAST TRAIN TO TREBLINKA.

Treblinka was located in the sparsely-populated General Government area on the Warsaw-Białystock line, and was divided into three sections. The first was built for a staff of Germans and Ukrainians, and the Jewish prisoners who worked in the camp workshops. The second catered for the intake and assembly of prisoners. The third was the extermination area, in which the gas chambers, mass graves and woodpiles for the cremations were situated.

The gas chambers were connected to the reception by a narrow broken alley, known as the ‘Schlauch ’ (pipe), along which the prisoners walked to their ends.

This was the journey Halina chose to make on September 12, 1942, the day she died in Treblinka. Doctor Halina was not bound to care for her patients on the journey to their graves; after all, they were marked for death already, and death would surely take them – in one way or another – that day.

But Halina was compelled to forsake the living for the dead, to care for the most vulnerable and the least useful.  These were her companions on that last train, as it rumbled towards the pyres. Theirs were no doubt the screams she heard, and the hands she held as they staggered down the Schlauch.

As to what drove Halina to decide as she did, time will never tell. Instead, time has told of what it cost her to forsake her freedom and to sacrifice her life for her patients’ final hours. For the sake of a bond, as strong as her word.

THIRD SPREAD – DISTANT THUNDER

One day we were just people on the street, and the next, we were Jews and non-Jews

On November 16, 1939, the order for a Jewish badge was first announced in Lodz. And with this visual way of labelling Jews accomplished, the years of random persecution quickly changed to organized subjugation.

A decree was subsequently issued on September 1, 1941 to Jews within Germany and Poland, forcing them to wear a badge with the yellow Star of David and the word ‘Jude’ on the right side of one’s chest. The badge was to be worn at all times.

The badge made a clear distinction between the city’s people, it violated the Jews’ identity and was worn with loathing. Within days of its implementation, the badge came to represent more than humiliation. The badge made plain the Jews in any crowd, and exposed them to various Nazi actions.

If a Jew forgot to wear their badge they’d be beaten, fined or imprisoned, but it could also spell death for its wearer.  The police thought nothing of shooting Jews on the spot, or lining up rows to be shot against a wall. Wearing the badge meant that the wearer became a target for attack by the rabble, and risked being dragged away into a life of forced labour.

The Jews employed various ways to remind themselves to never leave without their badge. Posters in lobbies and apartment doorways warned the Jews; ‘Remember the Badge!’

For weeks the Jewish intelligentsia retired to voluntary house arrest. Nobody dared go out with the stigma on his arm, and if forced to do so, tried to ghost about in shame, eyes fixed upon the street. Many attempted to hide the badge, and would carry objects in such a way as to cover their badge.