The Shadow of Death: The Holocaust in Lithuania

25. Deportation to the Concentration Camps

25. Deportation to the Concentration Camps After they brought us into the ghetto, the Gennan leader took us out onto the big field next to the Gennan commandant's headquarters, where I had worked earlier. Already on the field were many Jews from the ghetto or from other working camps outside the ghetto. We had to wait until they had the right number ofpeople for the carloads so they could start deporting us to Gennany. Every little while the Gennans would bring in moles, people they had found hiding in the ghetto. While we waited, I wandered around to see if I could find my uncles or aunts or anyone who might know what had happened to them. I asked some friends and neighbors I saw, but they said they hadn't seen them, and that if they were not on the field they might have been deported the day before by barge downriver to the Baltic Sea. I could not be satisfied with that. Werethey really taken or were they hiding in the ghetto? I had to escape from the field, even though it was surrounded by Gennan, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian guards, and even though on every other block in the ghetto were Gennan guards tearing up houses and blowing them up with dynamite. As night came I took the darkness as a cover andescaped from the field to search for my relatives. First I ran to Uncle Abraham 's to see what had happened to him. Ijumped overfences and crawled on all fours to avoid the searchlights ofthe Gennans. I found myself crawling over dead bodies. I touched their faces with my hands; sometimes I even lifted their heads to see ifthey were still alive. When I heard guards marching by with flash- 140 The Shadow of Death lights, I got between the bodies and pretended I was dead. As I heard them walk by, I began crawling on all fours again. When I came to the place where my uncle's house had been, there was nothing. Not just his house was gone; the whole block was nothing but rubble. The Germans had blown up the houses to get those hiding in the cellars. I sank to the ground, sobbing quietly. I was near hysterics. Why were we being punished like this? As I began to calm down, I looked about me and lost my will to go on. I didn't want to go look for my other uncles and aunts. If I had stayed there, I might have been able to survive until the Russians came, but I didn't think ofthat. I went back to the field hoping to find out something about my family. When I returned to the field, I saw that 90 percent of the people were already gone. Someone told me they had taken a big transport ofJews out already. "Why are the rest ofyou here?" I asked. ''They just found us. We were hiding in the ghetto." The next morning the Germans brought in a special demolition squad and bloodhounds. They began to work more quickly. They went back to the same houses they had already tom down and went over them. They didn't trust yesterday's dynamite; they wanted to make sure that everyone was either caught or dead. Each minute they brought in more Jews they had found hiding. Half-naked, half-dead, some ofthem still had babies in their arms as they came to the field. We were waiting for orders to march from the ghetto, but some-the old, the sick, the feeble-minded, the cripples and invalids and children-couldn't walk and couldn't be deported. Mr. Goecke ordered that they all be taken to the Jewish hospital and that it be set on fire. He ordered the rest ofus to get in lines offour. Germans with machine guns guarded us as we marched; there seemed to be almost a guard for every Jew. They didn't take us through the middle oftown but led us through the side streets so fewer people would see us. Some Jews tried to run from the lines to the Lithuanians, and the guards shot them down immediately. Very few succeeded in running away. It began to pour down rain, and when we arrived at the train station we were soaked. To the Concentration Camps 141 Forty empty cattle cars were waiting for us...