THE FORGOTTEN DEATH MARCH OF CHELM

The story of how the Nazis rounded up the Jewish men and boys of Chelm, Poland, and marched them miles in the dead of winter, only to shoot most of them, has been lost. The descendants of the few survivors have made it the mission to make sure that people know what happened

By Hanan Greenwood

Israel Hayom
May 1, 2019

On Dec. 1, 1939, thousands of Jews were led out of the Polish town of Chelm in what would become the first death march of the Holocaust, and which has been almost totally forgotten.

Most researchers have not defined the Chelm event as a “death march” because people generally think of the death marches as having taken place toward the end of the war, out of the major concentration camps. The Chelm march was a sort of trial by the Nazis to test – among other things – whether the mass murder of Jews would be acceptable to the local population and international opinion.

But the people of Chelm, whose Jewish community once numbered 18,000, have not forgotten. The families pass on the story of what took place – how thousands of Chelm’s Jews were murdered in the space of a few days. Nearly all of those who survived the march are now dead, and the only survivors were children at the time. It’s the second and third generation who continue to keep the story that was nearly lost alive.

It was three months after the start of the war. Chelm, then a town of 30,000, was caught in the middle. First the Russians invaded, but they retreated following the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Nazis took their place, but even then the Jews couldn’t foresee what was about to happen.

“The first few months were characterized by confusion,” says Hila Blatt-Arad, whose grandfather Zvi Hirsch Blatt, was brutally murdered on the march.

Actually, some people were already warning the Jews about what was about to happen, including Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who said that the ground was burning and they should flee. But most of the town’s residents chose to believe everything would be all right.

“I don’t know if they ignored [the warnings], kept quiet, or didn’t want to believe them. They thought it would pass,” says Blatt-Arad. Her father, Yehoshua, recorded his story about what took place that day in Chelm before his death in 2011. Yehoshua’s older brother Efraim, who saved himself by following the Russian army, died a few weeks ago at age 100.

At first, the German invasion of Chelm was not orderly and the Russians, who were supposed to stop their retreat at the nearby Bug River, would retake the town from time to time.

“There was fear and uncertainty, but even when the Germans were in charge there wasn’t any killing or humiliating treatment. There was a foreign occupation, but all in all, life was normal,” Blatt-Arad explains.

One day in November, everything changed.

“I wasn’t yet eight years old,” recalls Ben Zion Drutin, 87, who now lives in Netanya. “They hung huge notices that said that all Jewish men aged 16-60 had to come to the town square one morning. My father, who was a tradesman, said at first he would go, but my mother blocked the doorway and argued with him. In the end, he gave in and decided to go to my grandfather’s village.”

Anyone who tried to help was shot

In the recording he made before his death, Yehoshua Blatt says that “it was the last time I saw my father.” At the time, Blatt’s father was working for the Germans in their nearby warehouses. He saw the notices going up. He ran home and encountered his father, Zvi Hirsch, who was in the middle of the morning prayer.

“Grandpa took his time, finished his prayer, and said, that he would share in everyone else’s fate,” Blatt-Arad says. Zvi Hirsch told Yehoshua to go to work, which saved the latter’s life because the Nazis didn’t want to lose cheap labor and ordered the workers to stay in the factory. They “missed” the march.

The death march set out from Chelm on a Friday afternoon, and Nechama Netali-Gonen, now 82, watched them go by. Even now, she remembers how as a three-year-old child she was horrified. “In a single moment, I grew up – from age three to 30,” she recalls.

“I saw them bury the chief rabbi alive in the square and force the other Jews to watch. When he shouted that he was thirsty, someone went to help him and was shot. A baby was crying, so a German grabbed him and impaled him on a fence. Imagine what that does to a child. I clung to my mother. I thought I would be next,” Nechama says.

The Nazis marched the Jews on, and anyone who lagged behind was shot. In a forest clearing some 15 km. from the town, the Germans separated the community leaders and strong men, stood them in rows, and shot them. Yehoshua Blatt heard the shots from the factory where he was working, but he didn’t know what hell was taking place only a few miles away.

“They marched through the night, through the Polish mud, with a lot of them losing their shoes along the way. They walked miles and miles to the next town over, Hrubieszów, where they added another 2,000 Jews,” Blatt-Arad says.

After two days of marching, the Jews were already exhausted. Zvi Hirsch Blatt was having trouble keeping up. The Nazis were on horseback while the Jews were shoeless, starving, and thirsty, wading through flooded fields. At one point, Blatt slipped and fell. He was shot on the spot. Anyone who dared to help those who fell was brutally shot. The rest continued marching until they reached the border between Nazi Poland and the Russians – the Bug River, which was half frozen.

“The Nazis forced the survivors of the march to jump into the river, saying that anyone who made it to the Russian side would be saved,” Blatt-Arad says. “The problem was that they were shooting at them from one side, and on the other were the Russians, who suspected the Jews of being spies, and also opened fire,” she says. In total, the Jews were marched a distance of 52 to 60 km (32 to 37 miles) in unimaginable conditions, an ongoing nightmare that would end in death.

The community that was obliterated

Only a few dozen people survived the terrible march, most of whom managed to cross the river and then remained in Soviet territory until the end of the war. Only a few went back to Chelm, which was how the town’s Jewish residents learned what had happened to their loved ones and friends. Others had heard about it from Polish villagers who lived nearby.

“I’ll never forget the huge notices and the hesitation about whether or not to arrive, and the people running to the square. People left normal and returned as fragments. They were tortured the whole way. We heard the stories of the few who returned. They were stunned by the march, which had been terrible,” Drutin says.

Over a few days, some 2,000 of the Jewish men and boys from Chelm had been murdered, and that was only the beginning. Most of the Jews of Chelm were later murdered in ghettoes and deported to the Sobibor death camp. Netali-Gonen and Drutin somehow managed to survive. Nechama was hidden in a bunker, while Drutin was secreted in a small apartment.

“Just before the third deportation we were warned, so we ran away and hid at the home of a Gentile man who had promised my father that if we were in trouble, he would help. For two years we didn’t see the light of day. We were hidden in the basement and we heard the Nazis flirting with the girls in the shop next door,” Drutin says.

Meanwhile, Yehoshua Blatt and his family fled, taking an unusual route that brought them almost as far as Iran.

After the Holocaust, only a handful of Jews remained in Chelm. Drutin, then a teenager, was one.

“We were only about 23 people,” he says.

Nechama spent the period immediately after the war in four different DP camps and was eventually allowed to leave for either the U.S. or Israel, which had just been founded. She made her choice without hesitation: “We arrived in Israel on board the ship Galila, which docked at Atlit exactly two days after [David] Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the state.” She served in the army and a few years later moved to the U.S., where she still lives. She works as a docent in the Holocaust Museum in New York and shares her memories with anyone who will listen.

Drutin calls himself a relative newcomer, having arrived in Israel “only” in 1947.

Back to the square

Decades have passed, and the survivors of the Chelm death march passed away one after the other. The youngest people in the march would now be 96 had they survived. Their children and grandchildren have taken on the mission of keeping the memory of the atrocities alive. They founded the Chelmer Organization of Israel, whose chairman, Ben-Zion Levkovitz, learned of the horrors from his mother.

“The descendants of the communities that were destroyed set up organizations to commemorate their families and friends. People were left orphaned and had a burning need to commemorate their relatives. For years, they grew old, and now there are almost none left. So there was a need for the second and third generations to take charge,” Levkovitz says.

On Dec. 1, 2019, the descendants of the Jews of Chelm plan to set off on a commemorative march that will follow the path their murdered family members were forced to take. The idea came from Shlomit Beck.

“I don’t’ know how, but this death march was forgotten, died on the pages of history, and we have made it our goal to make people aware of it,” Levkovitz explains. Members of his group reached out to the Chelm city authorities and received approval to hold a series of ceremonies in the same square where the Chelm Jews were gathered and at five sites of mass graves, as well as in Hrubieszów.

“Only a handful of us were left, and it took a long time for people to come back from labor camps and death camps. That handful pledged its word to not forget and to tell the story. It’s a shame that the first deportation isn’t remembered. Anyone who survived it went through so many things. Five years passed before we were freed from the nightmare,” Drutin says.