The 1st of September 1939. After a false accusation that the Poles attacked a German radio
station, Nazi Germany launches a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland triggering World War 2.
After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppress the Poles whom they
consider to be racially inferior and, in the weeks, following the German attack on Poland,
German SS, police, and military units shoot thousands of Polish civilians,
including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.
Approximately 1,8 million Jews remaining within the area occupied by Germany are
imprisoned in ghettos and after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941,
over 3,000,000 Polish Jews are deported to Nazi concentration camps. Among them is Yehuda Lerner.
Yehuda Lerner, one of 4 children of Jewish parents, was born on the 22 July 1926 in Warsaw,
Poland. His father was a baker with his own store, where his mother also worked.
Yehuda’s father was religious enough to have a beard until 1938 when,
as Yehuda later recalled, anti-Semitism became such that the Poles would catch the
Jews who had a beard and then drag them by the beard and tear it out.
Yehuda Lerner was a 13 year old student when the Second World War began on the 1st of September
1939 with the invasion of Poland. Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment and
German troops entered the capital on the 29th of September shortly after its surrender.
The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with Germany and the Soviet Union
dividing and annexing the whole of the country. On the 23rd of November 1939, German civilian
occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands
with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned
property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations.
On the 12th of October 1940 German authorities had decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw.
The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area,
which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940.
One of the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto was Yehuda Lerner and his family.
In December of the same year the Germans called for the death penalty
for Jews who had left the ghetto without permission. The same penalty awaited any
person who knowingly gave shelter to such Jews. The ghetto, which became the largest of all the
Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, was enclosed by a wall that was
over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the
ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move
in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. German authorities forced ghetto
residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per
room. Proper hygiene was almost impossible, as many homes did not have running water.
Extreme overcrowding, minimal rations, and unsanitary conditions led to disease,
starvation, and the death of thousands of Jews each month. An average daily
food ration in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw was limited to 184 calories, compared to 2,613
calories for the Germans. An official German order stated that “the basic provisioning for
the Jewish Residential District must be less than the minimum necessary for preserving life,
regardless of the consequences.” The hunger in the ghetto was so great,
that dying people were laying in the streets and small children were seen begging.
Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.
When a resident from the Warsaw Ghetto passed away, their families would place the body in the
street and it would be picked up in the morning by a funeral cart that made its rounds every day.
From the 22nd of July until the 12th of September 1942,
German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations
from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center, 52 miles away from Warsaw.
Yehuda and his family were rounded up on the first day of the mass deportation on
July 22, 1942. Whilst Yehuda was deported to work in Smolensk working at a military airport,
his family was deported to the Treblinka death camp. Yehuda never saw them again.
After two months of watching people starve to death or be
shot by the Germans as a type of sport, Yehuda decided that he had to escape.
He fled with a friend, sneaking out of the barbed wire fence and
running through the adjacent fields and forests for two days before encountering
anyone. Only then was he recaptured and taken to a different labor camp.
Thanks to Yehuda’s uncanny ability for escape, he fled eight camps in
six months. He later recalled: “I was simply very lucky to survive all of these captures,
being taken to a new camp each time and never getting shot.”
As he said, he simply had nothing to lose and did not want to die of starvation.
Yehuda was beaten often, and bedridden for long periods, yet managed to appear
at roll calls so that he would escape the execution that the sick were subject to.
One of the camps in which Yehuda was imprisoned was the Minsk ghetto. He was far too frail to
work, and thus was put, by his Jewish comrades, into the Russian prisoners of war camp nearby.
All of these Russian prisoners happened to be Jewish. Yehuda contracted typhus and was
bedridden for several weeks. Once healed, he was taken back to Minsk. One night in September 1943,
everyone in the camp was taken by train to Lublin, at what would be the Majdanek
concentration camp. However, after waiting for a day at the camp gates, they were told that there
was no room and they would be taken to Sobibor. When a Polish train worker told them they were
to be cremated there, none believed him. The occupants of Lerner's railcar had even
opened a hole in the bottom of the car to use as a toilet, and they could have escaped through it,
yet nobody did because they could not believe that they would all going
to be killed. When they arrived at the camp labeled Sobibor, it was too late.
German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sobibor between May 1942,
when the regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943.
Most of the Jews brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon
monoxide which had been piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000
victims were murdered in this killing center. Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel
served at the site and they were generally of lower-middle-class backgrounds.
The Germans constructed Sobibor as a rectangle - 1312 by 1969 feet. A
double barbed-wire fence, woven with tree branches, surrounded the perimeter of the
camp. This design was intended to hide the view of what was inside. The SS officers
lived in cottages with colorful names which helped to conceal the
purpose of the camp from new arrivals, who would arrive on the adjacent ramp.
When the transports of 40 to 60 freight cars arrived at the Sobibor railway station,
only 20 cars at a time were taken into the camp,
while the rest of the victims remained locked in the rail cars.
The victims were brought into the so-called arrival area where an SS man would give a speech
welcoming them saying that they had reached a transit camp on their way to the labor camps.
They were also told that before embarking on the next part of their journey, they were to
take showers, have their clothes disinfected and get a meal. About 450-550 Jews were forced into
the chambers at a time. The gas chambers were then sealed once the maximum number of victims
were inside. Poisonous gas was then piped in. Within 20-30 minutes, all those inside were dead.
When Yehuda’s transport arrived in Sobibor in September 1943, everyone was herded off the train.
The Germans demanded sixty strong people, and reasoning that food would be needed
to do hard labor, Lerner volunteered. He was given good clothes and blankets,
obviously from the previous convoy, and allowed to eat all he wanted. They would do hard work digging
underground munitions warehouses. In talking with other prisoners, he learned that there was no
escape from Sobibor and during the year and a half that Sobibor was operational, several attempts
were made by the prisoners to escape. On one such occasion when 72 Dutch Jews were organizing
an escape and were betrayed by the kapo, they were executed on the order of Johann Niemann,
the camp’s deputy commander. On another occasion, a group of fifty conspirators were burned alive.
Already in summer 1943, shortly before Yehuda’s transport arrived in Sobibor,
rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease operations and the prisoners understood
that this meant certain death for all of them. The Sobibor prisoners knew this since the Belzec
prisoners, who did the same work as they did, had sewn messages into their clothing before they were
killed by Sobibor guards who had shot them the same day they arrived in the camp. The next day
the Sobibor prisoners found all their clothes full of blood. Chaim Engel, a Polish Jewish prisoner,
found a note in a pocket which said: “We worked at Belzec for one year and did
not know where we would be sent next. They said it would be Germany. Now we are in Sobibor and
know what to expect. Be aware that you will be killed also! Avenge us! “ And they did!
In September 1943 next to Yehuda Lerner, twenty Jewish Red Army prisoners of war, the soldiers
who had the necessary expertise to pull off an escape, arrived at Sobibor on a transport from
the Minsk Ghetto and were selected for labor. One of them, Alexander Pechersky, would become
a leader of the revolt which began late in the afternoon on the 14th of October 1943.
If they were to succeed, everything had to be kept secret. Yehuda Lerner, knowing that they would all
die like lambs if they did not act, considered it an honor to be chosen to kill a German.
The Germans were extremely punctual, and that is how they were able to plan this revolt.
The targets were carefully selected and the first person to be assassinated by the prisoners was
deputy commander of Sobibor Johann Niemann who was the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day.
Another man executed was Siegfried Graetschus, commander of the Trawniki guards. Yehuda Lerner
and other camp prisoner Arkady Wajspapir, a former sergeant in the Red Army, had been instructed by
the military head of the underground committee, Alexander Pechersky, to eliminate Graetschus.
On the 14th of October 1943, the conspirators lured Graetschus to the tailor's workshop. When
he entered the workshop, he stopped at the door and tried on a coat that the tailors had made
for him. Arkady Wajspapir stepped out from behind the curtain, walked past Graetschus to the door,
turned around and hit him on the head with the sharp edge of an axe. Graetschus let out
a scream but because the blow was obviously not forceful enough, he did not immediately
fall to the ground. Then Lerner came at him and buried the axe into his scull splitting it in
two. Graetschus was dead before he hit the floor. Wajspapir then took the gun from his holster and
pocketed his papers. The tailors dragged the body away from the door and covered it with
clothes. At that moment the Ukrainian guard Rai Klatt entered the workshop. He bumped into the
pile of clothes under which Graetschus was lying, bent down and asked what that was.
The tailors panicked but Lerner and Wajspapir kept their cool and killed
the guard with their axes as well. Lerner then took his pistol and they
reported to military leader Alexander Pechersky that they had completed their assignments.
One hour after the uprising began, a total of 11 SS officers were killed by the rebels.
Chaos then took over. The prisoners had to escape by climbing over a barbed wire fence
or by running out the main gate through a mine field under heavy machine gun fire.
Some stepped on mines. Some gave up and did not run at all.
Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most of those were chased down
and killed. Those prisoners who had not joined the escape were killed, as well. But some 50 of
the escapees did survive the war. Among them were Arkady Wajspapir and Yehuda Lerner who managed to
reach the forests and when all the emotion had finally gotten to him, he fell and passed out.
Yehuda soon joined the partisans who called him "Athlete" because of his physical strength.
From January 1945 until the summer of the same year he was deputy
commander of the police in Polish Radom. After the war Yehuda fled to West Germany,
settled in Bayreuthut and married Manja Helfman, the mother of his daughters Mina and Yehudith.
In 1949 the family moved to Israel and from 1951 Yehuda worked for the police in Haifa.
He then became a sports instructor at the police school, chief of the Ramallah city police force,
and upon his retirement, Yehuda devoted himself to his family and to lecture students about the
Holocaust and that particular hour in Sobibor, when the uprising took place, during which "a
handful of Jews succeeded to paralyze the Nazi war machine and throw it off balance."
Yehuda was 80 years old when he died on the 14th of July 2007.
There were many tears shed for Yehuda Lerner.
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