Telling the World About the Nazi Genocide

Los Angeles-based director Lior Geller wasn’t planning on making a Holocaust film.  But when he was researching his own family history, he came across an incredible true story: at the Chelmno death camp, the Nazis pioneered the use of poisoned gas to kill Jews and others.  In three years, about 320,000 Jews were murdered at Chelmno.  Miraculously, a small handful of Jews escaped and went on to warn the world about the horrors taking place there.

“When I first learnt about it I was thinking, ‘How has this not been told before?  There must at least be a book,’” Geller explained. “But there was none.”  Determined to tell this remarkable story, Geller worked with researchers at Yad Vashem for ten years and created a major new film, The World Will Tremble, based on the true story of Michael (Mordechai) Podchlebnik and Solomon Weiner, Jews who escaped from Chelmno and told the world what they’d seen.

As the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Chelmno, it’s time the story of the brave Jews who escaped from this murderous hell was finally known.

Chelmno

After gaining control of Poland in 1939, one of the first acts of the Nazis was to confine Jews to ghettos.  They established about 1,000 ghettos in cities and towns across Europe: the two largest in Poland were in the cities of Warsaw and Lodz, Poland’s largest cities.

Before World War II, the population in Lodz was about a third Jewish. In 1940, all Jews were moved to a small area within the city with no electricity and no running water. 164,000 Jews were crammed into the ghetto, surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by Nazi guards. Soon, tens of thousands more Jews were transported to Lodz from other towns and cities and imprisoned there too, rendering the ghetto even more crowded and wretched.

Non-Jewish residents of Lodz were well aware of what was going on: a major road transverse the ghetto, and Lodz city trams travelled through the ghetto all day long.  From their windows, passengers watched the Jews slowly starve to death and become ravaged by disease.  (A separate area of the ghetto was built later to house approximately 5,000 Roma and Sinti people, who were also targeted for death by the Nazis.)

By 1941, the Nazis were looking for ways to hasten the death of the ghetto’s Jews and others. They chose the small town of Chelmno, nearly 50 miles west of Lodz, as a site to pioneer their evil plans of mass murder.

They took over an old palace in the village.  Nazi guards enjoyed a luxurious life in the palace rooms; prisoners were held in the dungeon.  Three large trucks were parked on the palace grounds and were outfitted to pump exhaust into sealed containers in the back. This was the Nazis’ first experiments with gassing Jews to death.  The Nazis built a second site in the forest two and half miles outside of Chelmno where the bodies of dead Jews and others were burned in massive crematoria and burned in mass graves.

Members of a war crimes commission examine a mobile killing van in which Jews were gassed while being transported to the crematoria at Chelmno extermination camp, Poland. 

Jews arrived at the Chelmno palace on December 7, 1941.  They were held in the dungeon for a night, then taken out and told they had to work.  First the Nazi guards told them they had to go get cleaned up.  The Jewish prisoners were forced to undress; Nazis collected all their belongings and made a show of labelling them with their owners’ names, as if they were going to return the prisoners’ belongings to them.  (In reality, prisoners’ belongings were given to Germans living in the area.)

Jewish prisoners were then forced to walk through a narrow 75-foot long fenced passageway, labeled “to the baths.”  At the end, they were forced into the back of trucks and sealed inside reinforced containers.  A hole in the bottom of the floor was connected to a hose leading to the van’s exhaust pipe.  As the van ran, the Jews inside each truck slowly suffocated as carbon monoxide filled the van.  After about 15 minutes, everyone inside the trucks was dead.  Jewish prisoners were forced to unload and clean the vans, transport the dead through the forest to the crematoria, and burn and bury the remains.

Chelmno operated with incredible efficiency.  Between 1941 and 1945 at least 172,000 Jews and others – including about 5,000 Gypsies – were murdered there.  The village’s rural location made escape difficult.  Throughout the four years that Chelmno was operated as a mass murder site, only eight Jews escaped. Four managed to escape in the confusion of fighting in the last days of the war as Soviet troops closed in on the town.  Five other Jews escaped earlier and told the world about the horrors that were unfolding inside.

Michael Podchlebnik

The World Will Tremble tells the story of Michael Podchlebnik and Solomon Weiner.  In the winter of 1942, they escaped from Chelmno by jumping off a truck transporting Jewish slave laborers to dig mass graves in the forest.

A cattle dealer, Michael was 30 years old when he was brought to Chelmno in January of 1942.  He later described his ordeal to the acclaimed documentary maker Claus Landsmann in his landmark documentary Shoah.  Before the war, Michael did business in Chelmno, so he knew exactly when he was when he was brought to the courtyard of the palace.

Michael Podchlebnik

Like other Jews, Michael described hearing rumors that Nazis were killing Jews on a massive scale, but he – like most other Polish Jews – couldn’t believe this was possible. Yet as he stood in front of Schlass Chelmno – the name of the Palace – he realized that the Nazis’ sadism knew no bounds.  The courtyard was filled with clothes and shoes and he immediately realized that the owners of these items were nowhere to be seen.  Michael’s parents had recently been sent to Chelmno, and he understood at once that they were dead.

Instead of being gassed immediately, Michael – along with nearly two dozen other Jews – was assigned to duty as a slave laborer, aiding the Nazis in their killing.  In Landsmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah, Michael’s translator describes conditions in the dungeon where he and four other Jewish slaves lived.  “On the ground, there was some straw where they slept.  On the walls, there were marks, ‘from here no one leaves alive,’ and he thought that it was the (Jewish) people from the little villages around Chelmno, who had arrived before him.  There were many names….  There were inscriptions” of the names of Jews who’d been kept there on the walls.

Michael described the first time he witnessed Nazis gassing a group of Jews at Chelmno:

The people exited the truck and entered the castle’s first floor where there was a ‘bathroom’; the men, women, and children, they were told this.  It wasn’t a bathroom, but the Germans deceived the people and told them that they must go to the ‘bathroom’.

They made them undress: the women, their children, the men together.  They made them cross this room and exit to the other side, where they were put…where they got into trucks.  (Michael) heard the trucks turning (on) and the people crying, and people reciting the Shema Yisrael, and the cries became weaker and weaker.  Then there was total silence.

Afterwards, Nazis forced Michael and other Jewish slave laborers to open the doors to the trucks. Nazi troops from Ukraine then went through all the dead bodies, removing jewelry and gold teeth.  Michael recalls that whenever the soldiers saw a ring on the hand of a dead Jew, they’d cut off the entire finger to remove the ring more easily.

On his third day unloading a truck of murdered Jews, Michael saw the bodies of his wife and children among the dead and broke down in agony.  “He put down his wife in the grave and he asked to be killed,” his translation explained in Shoah. “The Germans told him that he still had energy to work and would not kill him now.”

Michael witnessed other horrors too: German guards forced Jews to balance bottles on their heads, then shot at the bottles for target practice. Nazis regularly pulled young women off of transports to Chelmno to rape before sending them to be gassed along with other Jews.  Guards forced Jewish musicians to play music in a grotesque band while they watched their co-religionists being murdered.

Audacious Escape

Soon after arriving in Chelmno, Michael befriended a fellow Jewish slave laborer named Solomon Weiner.  They wanted to tell the world about the unimaginable horrors going on inside Chelmno.  Together, they planned an audacious escape.

Solomon and Michael depicted in the film The World Will Tremble

About two weeks after he arrived in Chelmno, Michael and Solomon were inside a truck crammed with fellow Jews, heading towards the nearby crematoria and mass graves where they’d have to bury yet another group of murdered Jews. “They were all seated, going to work” Michael’s translator later explained in the film Shoah, “And the SS (guards) pointed their weapons, they were dressed in fur, and at a given moment (Michael) got up and asked if he could have a cigarette and one of the SS gave him a cigarette and a light, and that this moment…he asked the other people who were going with him to work to get up and also ask for cigarettes and during this time he took out his knife (all the prisoners had a knife for mealtimes), he cut the tarp and thought that he had to jump even if he must die….”

Michael and Solomon jumped from the moving truck and ran.  It was snowing and bitter cold and the two Jews were wearing inadequate clothes for the weather. They got separated in the woods but both, miraculously, managed to survive.  Separately, they each made their way to the nearby town of Grabow, whose Jews had not yet been deported to death camps, and warned what awaited them.

Michael Podchlebnik testifying in Jerusalem at the Eichmann trial

Michael later made his way to the Polish town of Rzeszow (Reichshof in German) where he had family.  He was interred in the ghetto there and survived until the end of the war.  Afterwards, Michael appeared as a witness in trials of Nazis, recounting the crimes he’d seen.  In 1961 in Israel he appeared as a witness at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the murder of Europe’s Jews and the highest-ranking Nazi to be brought to trial.  Michael’s testimony – along with others – helped convict Eichmann.

The Grojanowski Report

The same winter that Michael Podchlebnik and Solomon Weiner escaped from a work duty in Chelmno, another slave laborer did so as well. Yakov Grojanowski – who also used the pseudonyms Szalamek Bajler and Szlama Ber Winer – was forced to dig mass graves in Chelmno along with Michael and Solomon. Over the course of just a few weeks, he witnessed the murder of nearly all of the 1,600 Jews from his hometown of Izbica Kujawska, and was forced to burn and bury their corpses.

Yakov Grojanowski

In January 1942, after learning that he and other slave laborers were about to be murdered, Yakov escaped through the tiny window in the back of a truck that brought him and other Jews to Chelmno’s forest location. Yakov also made his way to Grabow and told the town’s Jews what he’d seen in Chelmno.  After speaking with Yakov, Rabbi Jakub Szulman wrote a letter to his relatives who were imprisoned in the Jewish Ghetto in Lodz, describing what was happening to Polish Jews:

My Dearest Ones,

I have not yet replied to your letters since I had not known exactly what (was occurring).  Now, to our great misfortune, we know everything.  An eyewitness who by chance was able to escape from hell has been to see me…  I learned everything from him.  The place where everyone is being put to death is called Chelmno, not far from Dabie; people are kept in the nearby forest of Lochow.  People are killed in one of two ways: either by shooting or by poison gas….  Do not think that a madman is writing; unfortunately, it is the cruel and tragic truth….

Yakov later made his way to the Warsaw Ghetto, where he warned Jews about the fate of those sent to Chelmno.  There, a group of Jews ran what they called the “Oneg Shabbos” group, recording daily life in the ghetto and providing a written document about what Polish Jews were enduring. Yakov dictated a formal testimony about what he’d seen in Chelmno to Hersz and Bluma Wasser, two members of the Oneg Shabbos group.  They titled their report “The Events in Chelmno,” translated it into Polish and German, and sent it to the Delegatura, an underground Polish group which transferred information to Poland’s Government in Exile in London. Today, this landmark document is known as the Grojanowski Report.

In it, Yakov described the horrors he and Michel Podchlebnik had witnessed.  Here is one excerpt, describing waiting for Jews near the crematoria and mass graves just outside of Chelmno:

At ten o’clock the first victims arrived….  One van waited in line after the next.  At midday I received the sad news that my brother and parents had just been buried.  I tried to get closer to the corpses to take a last look at my nearest and dearest.  Once I had a clod of frozen earth tossed at me, thrown by the benign German with the pipe.  The second time ‘Big Whip’ (one Nazi guard’s nickname) shot at me….  Out of my entire family, which comprised sixty people, I am the only one who survived.  Towards evening, as we helped to cover the corpses, I put my shovel down.  Michael Podklebnik followed my example and we said the prayer of the mourners together.  Before leaving the ditch five of the eight (Jewish slave laborers who’d buried the dead) were shot….

The World Did Not Tremble

The testimonies of the few Jews who managed to escape from Chelmno about the torture and mass killings there made it to the West. Filmmaker Lior Geller titled his powerful new movie The World Will Tremble after the line that one of the Jewish prisoners says in his film: those who escape want to warn the world about what was taking place so that people become shocked and do all they can to put a stop to the Nazis’ activities in Chelmno and elsewhere.

Filmmaker Lior Geller

Yet in reality, despite the wrenching testimony of Michael Podchlebnik, Solomon Weiner, Yakov Grojanowski and others, the world just shrugged.  The BBC did air a special report on June 26, 1943 about the new intelligence on Chelmno, describing Jews being killed en masse by poisonous gas then buried in mass graves.  A couple week later, on July 6, 1942, the New York Times carried an item about the mass murders in Chelmno, but it was hardly front-page news; the paper carried it on page 6.

Given the world’s disinterest, it’s more important than ever to remember our people’s history and the incredible bravery of the men who escaped from Chelmno and warned the world about what was taking place.

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