Exile and Destruction: The Fate of Austrian Jews, 1938-1945 by Gertrude Schneider

Author:Gertrude Schneider
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2008-05-29T17:51:00+00:00

Transports to Minsk

The first transport bound for Minsk left Vienna on November 28, 1941, only five days after a transport meant for Riga had gone instead to Kovno. It was to be the only transport from Vienna to reach the Minsk ghetto itself; all subsequent Minsk transports from Vienna ended up at the killing grounds of Maly Trostinec, several kilometers distant from the ghetto. This first transport contained 999 Jews and upon their arrival in Minsk they were immediately initiated into the brutal treatment so typical for the behavior of the SS in the East in general, and for Minsk in particular.

Theirs had been a long journey; the Viennese had been en route for eight days according to Heinz Rosenberg, the author of Jahre des Schreckens (Years of Terror), who had come to Minsk from Hamburg a few weeks earlier. Upon arrival, it was found that there were large amounts of edibles in their luggage. The SS guards walking next to the straggling Jews forced them to carry their luggage into the ghetto and then commanded the administration to confiscate everything. The Viennese, most of whom were older people, were devastated. Realizing their desperate straits, Rosenberg felt that the Jewish administrators should have given back the food rather than add it to the entire ghetto's rations. He was dismissed by his fellow Hamburgers for insubordination and was sent to work outside the ghetto in the city of Minsk. This judgment against him was to actually save his life, since at least three of the German Jewish administrations, including that first one, were summarily executed.

The newly arrived Jews from Vienna found Jews from various cities of the Reich already living in the ghetto and among them, curiously enough, a number of Viennese Jews who had come with a transport from Bruenn (Brno), Czechoslovakia. According to the records of the Juedische Kultusgemeinde Bruenn (Office for Jewish Affairs at Bruenn), cited by Miroslav Karny in the previously mentioned Judaica Bohemiac XXIV, the transport contained mainly the poor Jews from Bruenn, supported solely by the local Kultusgenteinde. Austrian Jews, who had fled to Bruenn after Hitler entered their country, were in that same miserable economic state and had therefore been made part of that particular transport.

The German ghetto was made up of two parts connected by a corridor that was located in the Russian Jews' ghetto. The two ghettos of the Reich were called Sonderghetto (special ghetto) I and II. Sonderghetto I contained the Hamburg, Frankfurt, Duesseldorf, and Berlin camps, and Sonderghetto II contained the Bremen, Bruenn, and Vienna camps. Altogether, these two special ghettos held nearly 7,500 Jews from the Reich. Their meager sustenance was prepared in a communal kitchen that was located in the Hamburg camp. From there it was delivered to the other camps in large containers.

Hunger in the Minsk ghetto was a terrible scourge. According to Karl Loewenstein in Minsk: Im Lager der Deutschen Juden (Minsk: In the Camp of the German Jews), at first only 1,425 of the foreign Jews went to work outside the ghetto, and it was only they who could augment the communal food.

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