and Deportation
2. THE SEPTEMBER 1939 CAMPAIGN IN THE KLECZEW VICINITY
Poland declared a general mobilization immediately before the war broke out. Michel Prost of Kleczew, hearing the order, headed for his draft station at once. It was too late; he could not reach the center. Call-up order or not, he had no uniform and could not be considered a soldier even though as an army veteran he was prepared for war and had taken defense training (przysposobienie obronne) at school. He returned to Kleczew several days later.13
The weather in September 1939 was fantastic: no rain, sunshine all the time. Unfortunately, all this did was help the invading Wehrmacht to advance swiftly and the Luftwaffe to attack Polish towns and roads from the air. Kleczew was bombarded, though not heavily.14
A witness recalled that “The Germans entered [Grodziec, 50 kilo-meters from Kleczew] on September 5, 1939. From the beginning, they stole whatever property the Jews still had; shortly afterward, they began to arrest Jews and force them to wash cars.”15
Another witness described how matters proceeded in Rychwał (43 kilometers from Kleczew):
The Germans arrived on September 3, 1939. The first orders were that all Jews had to give up their weapons. The Jews were gathered in the marketplace with their hands up and an order to shoot anyone who moved was announced. A 74-year-old man could not stand. The SS approached him and beat him for a long time; [after that] the old man could not get out of bed. On September 12, 1939, they assembled all adult [Jewish men] in the street, shoved them to the ground, forced them to wear prayer-shawls and then cut them with knives. There were pogroms every day. Jews were beaten on the ground because someone thought they did not want to work. One time, Germans wanted to shoot all the Jews, but the rabbi collected gold for [the Jews’] survival.
In spite of this, as punishment, they forced the Jews to walk ten miles every day to work without food.16
During the first days of September 1939, masses of Polish troops crossed towns in the Kleczew area. “We watched the Polish army, tanks and cavalry, pass through Wilczyn,” one witness reported. The witness went on to state that after the Polish troops departed, the Germans came. German tanks rumbled into Wilczyn, 16 kilometers north of Kleczew and closer to the German border than Kleczew. The Jews in Wilczyn were fright-ened but had no idea of what awaited them. The Germans requisitioned a beautiful Jewish-owned home as their headquarters and announced that they were occupying the town.17 Several additional towns in the vicinity,
which would soon become the Reichsgau Wartheland, often called the Warthegau, were occupied by German troops in mid-month after heavy fighting along the River Bzura on September 9–18, 1939, mainly around the town of Łowicz, impeded their invasion significantly.
When Kleczew’s turn came, according to one witness, German soldiers entered the town and gathered in the marketplace. Intrigued children ran to them and handed out bread and candies; some brought soup. Some time later, SS and SA personnel in black and green uniforms arrived.18 Several witnesses referred to the incoming Germans more generally, without identifying them with particular units or corps.
The Germans did not establish a ghetto in Kleczew; Jews continued to live in their houses. Soon, however, the new occupiers began to arrest Jews for forced labor. Having confiscated all privately held radios (a common German practice in Poland), the authorities presented their demands and other communications over loudspeakers or on broad-sheets. Jews were assigned to various jobs, mainly road repair and stone
24. Polish troops on the battlefield in defensive war, September 1939.
Note abandoned equipment and weapons. (NAC, sign. 37-85-8)
work to be used for roads or as construction material. The Germans knew about the Jewish festivals and forced Jews to work specifically on these days. On Rosh Hashana, for example, Jews were taken straight from their synagogues to work.
The Germans destroyed sacramental Jewish objects, but generally left the buildings that housed them intact because they could be adapted to other purposes. In Kleczew, Torah scrolls were removed from synagogues and the buildings themselves were transformed into cinemas. Several months after their arrival, the German authorities also destroyed the Jewish cemetery. For this purpose, Polish residents were forced into forced labor.
The ground was leveled; bones found were tossed into a nearby pit that had been excavated for the mining of peat. As they supervised the work, the Nazis, noticing that the corpse of a recently deceased haberdasher, one Pacanowski, was in good shape, decided to put on a show: the corpse, lying on a wooden board, was stood up so that it could “watch” the work. Grave-stones in good condition were taken away for use in building sidewalks and curbs; those in poor condition were dropped into a nearby swamp.
When the work was all over, as mentioned, a sports facility (Sportplatz) was built at the site.19 The witness Leon Brener describes these events:
In January 1940, all 2000 Jews from the area were deported to our town [Grodziec]. Every month, fifty Jews were taken from the town and were sent to Kleczew, Konin County, in order to destroy the Jewish cemetery and to create a sports ground, which was covered with asphalt, in its place.20
Similar testimony was given by a survivor from Rychwał:
In September 1940, an order was given saying that all Jews should stand in the marketplace. Forty healthy Jews were chosen and sent to Kleczew near Konin. There was a cemetery there and the Jews had to turn over the cemetery grounds, dead bodies and all, and then pave the grounds with asphalt as is used for a parking lot. The dead were thrown into the river; their bodies floated to the surface.21
According to Gembicki, dozens of Jews were summoned to the Kommandantur (German headquarters) for labor. Some were put to work pulling weeds and pruning bushes.22
In Wilczyn, as in Kleczew, there was no ghetto and Jews lived in their own homes. However, Germans often ordered them out of their homes to perform sundry jobs for them, e.g., tailoring, repairing, cleaning, and mending leather jackets. Payment was made in food, never in coin. In the mornings, the Germans would deliver various items that had to be fixed or otherwise dealt with by the afternoon. It was a frightening time month and a half. A curfew was in effect from 8 p.m. onward; German soldiers looted houses.23
The German authorities dabbled in criminality from the beginning of the occupation. Some of their misdeeds are reflected in video testimonies given by Jews many years later. Abram Landau gave two examples. In one, the Germans arrested Prince Taczanowski (a local nobleman) together with his children, a priest, and seven nuns, and shot them to death in the woods. The murderers were probably members of an Einsatzgruppe (Einsatzgruppe der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, mobile killing unit, pl. Einsatzgruppen) that operated on the basis of a list of wanted persons prepared before the war. Such lists contained the names of Polish patriots, intellectuals, patriotic clergy, and anti-German militants in Silesia and Greater Poland following World War I. According to Abram Landau, the assailants wished to instill fear in all hearts. Poles had to take the bodies and bury them. In the second example, Germans came in the middle of the night in quest of Jewish boys for labor. They rounded up some twenty boys and ordered them to go to a chapel where a sculpture of the Madonna had been placed in a wagon. They then announced the nature of the labor: the boys were to wheel the wagon around the square and hurl the Madonna sculpture through the window of the home of a wealthy Jew.
After spending the rest of the night elsewhere, the Germans returned in the morning, alleged that the wealthy Jew was hiding someone important, and ordered the Jewish boys to bury the Madonna in the Jewish cemetery.
It was all a game; few people were shot. Polish townspeople blamed the Jews for the desecration, although they were aware that the Jews had acted under duress.24 (See also Document 8, Annex 1.)
Food was in short supply during the occupation of Kleczew. The Jewish townspeople were either unemployed or put to unpaid forced labor. A few enterprising Jews who had good relations with Poles managed to obtain food. Bert Gembicki’s parents lost everything, making him the family provider. He had a bicycle and visited farmers to buy cattle, which he butchered, and then he sold the meat to others. He even went to Łódź by truck to do business.25 He obtained chickens, flour, peas, and bread from the farmers in that area, who were not afraid because he was a member of the respected Gembicki family.26 Bert Gembicki went about his cattle business so cleverly that he was able to “organize” (arrange clandestinely) food not only for his family but for others as well. Thanks to his friends in the cattle business, he obtained a special permit from the Kommandantur stating that he worked for the army as a meat supplier.27
Jews owned several large farms near Kleczew.28 One of these land-owners, named Piekarski, denied being Jewish when visited by the SS.
The SS men led him away and asked the cooks and cleaners, “Where is your boss? Who is he?” All along, the man insisted that he was not Jewish.
Then the SS men ordered the servants to procure a herring and wash it.
Once the servants complied, an SS man seized the herring, hurled it in Piekarski’s face, and then smacked him repeatedly with the fish. “You may wash it, but it’s still herring.” Then the SS men tied Piekarski’s feet together and made a horse drag him around. Bert Gembicki witnessed this incident from his bicycle; Piekarski’s neighbors’ reports agree with what Gembicki heard.29 Although the victim’s first name is not mentioned in the testimony, he may have been related to Leopold Piekarski, the man who had severed all ties with the kehilla, held the official status of “irre-ligionist,” and was the father of a convert to Catholicism (see Chapter 3).
Another witness, Hieronim Malarek, was away from Kleczew at the beginning of the war. He and his family attempted to escape from the war zone, but were unsuccessful because his father was mobilized. When some officers noticed that he was a Jew, they moved Malarek’s father to another division. Later, when his unit was evacuated, Malarek’s father remained at home instead of following the troops.30 When the Germans approached, the father was very cautious. Wishing to flee to Russia—by this time, anybody who could flee was doing so—he appropriated a bicycle, loaded
it with various possessions, and went with his entire family to Kleczew, where his parents lived. On the way, he bought a horse and wagon. As they traveled, however, the Polish army closed all the roads, forcing thousands of refugees to hide in the fields31 and exposing them to strafing by German Messerschmidt aircraft. The Malareks survived the attack and continued to Kleczew.32
The Occupation of Kleczew
German troops marched into Kleczew on September 15, 1939, two weeks after the beginning of the war. After gathering all the Jews in the market-place, they established a Judenrat (known there as the Ältestenrat, the council of elders) and installed Hersz Falc as the Judenälteste (elder of the Jews). Each day, a specified number of Jews had to be delivered for forced labor. All Jews, women and men, had to clean or repair streets, serve Wehrmacht soldiers, or perform other tasks. Men were tasked with rebuilding bridges, repairing roads, etc. Several days later, the Germans took hostages and released them only after the Judenälteste remitted a
“contribution.” This was repeated several times, the contribution set successively at 5,000 złoty, then 12,000, then 4,000, and finally at 20,000.
By now, the Jews were totally dispossessed. Most of the persecution of Jews in Kleczew was perpetrated by police officers by the names of Fritz and Reich.
Several weeks later, the Jews were ordered to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David as an identifying mark. They were forbidden to walk on sidewalks. They were stalked in the streets for beatings and shearing of beards.33 Those doing forced labor were similarly abused. Before 1939 was out, the Jews were ordered to hand over a quantity of gold.34 To ensure compliance, Jewish hostages were once again taken.35
The Germans destroyed all Jewish institutions. As noted, they seized the synagogue, desecrated it, and turned it into a cinema (or, according to another testimony, a dance hall).36 The fate of the cemetery was described above.
Abuse of Jews in Kleczew
Survivors recall a number of instances of the abuse of Jews in Kleczew and separation imposed between them and their non-Jewish erstwhile
friends. Before the deportation, there was an incident in which two Jews, a father and son, were shot dead by a German after curfew. The German coveted their house, to which the father and son had said the German had no right.37 Soon after the occupation of the town, one of Michel Prost’s German friends, Arthur Thenne, told him, “We aren’t friends anymore;
we cannot be friends. I am a German and you are a Jew.”38 Arthur Thenne was killed during the war.39 Two other friends of Prost’s received important postings—one as the municipal secretary and one with the police—but suddenly they weren’t his friends anymore.40 The Germans persecuted Poles as well as Jews, e.g., by proposing to shoot a Pole because he wore an old uniform with buttons that bore the likeness of an eagle, the Polish national emblem.
German authorities quickly renamed the town Lehmstädt. They installed a police force at once, relying on ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) who were willing to serve the Fatherland. The Volksdeutsche were well- organized and had been active before the war in the underground. The Jews knew that they would be victims but did not know how severely.
From the first days of the occupation, Jews were put to forced labor in tasks such as widening and repairing roads. At first they thought their tasks made no sense. Later, however, they realized what it was for: to improve communication with the East.
The Ältestenrat was organized apace. It urged Jews to report for forced labor, as was its responsibility. A Polish Meister (overseer) supervised the works. At the beginning of the occupation, German troops on their way to the conquest of Warsaw stopped over to rule the town. Later, they were replaced by police.41 German soldiers abused the local population, among other ways, by their buying habits. For example, they would tender ten Reichsmarks for an item worth much more, skirting the charge of shop-lifting because, after all, they had paid something.42 “Contributions” from Jews succeeded each other every few days, at about 2,000 Reichsmarks each time.43
Much the same happened in other towns in the area. Golina (about 100 kilometers from the German border, 22 kilometers from Kleczew) was heavily bombarded in September 1939. A Sperre (curfew) was imposed after the Germans came in. Jews were not permitted to walk on
sidewalks, and Germans hacked the sidelocks of the Orthodox. The occu-piers indulged in lawlessness.
However, if these problematic soldiers displayed hatred toward the Jews, the SS and Gestapo forces that came later were far worse.44