After the Devil's Dance

The day after the “Wild Action,” the shtetl was a shambles. Houses were ravaged and in ruins. Corpses of murdered Jews lay in the streets in every part of town. Jews, by now experienced in survival, were afraid to leave their hiding places. The first of those who had hidden, did not appear until just before noon. Only a handful from among the 3,000 victims of the 'action' had managed to escape. Those who survived had been hidden in bunkers and other places or had been able to find refuge in the fields and forests outside the ghetto.

Hesitantly, people began to search for others. Wives sought their husbands; brothers their sisters; a mother her child. The small number of survivors were now a group of newly made orphans, widows and other lonely and broken souls. All of the 153 corpses found in the streets had been shot. As they were being buried, the survivors stood about as though frozen. Everyone knew that the catastrophe was not yet over: “We will return in four weeks,” the murderers had said as they left and there was no reason to doubt their word.

In the bunkers of Skalat where the Jews had hidden, events took place that were beyond imagining. People told of seeing mothers suffocate their own children, to prevent them from crying and thus betraying dozens of others hidden there. And, in fact, many hiding places were discovered because of the sobbing of children. Some mothers used sleeping potions such as veronal to quiet their thirsty and starving children. Sometimes it happened that the dose was too strong and the children were silenced forever. There were more than twenty such incidents. People had been jammed into the bunkers like herring in a barrel, without air, without water and without food. When the 'action' was over, they emerged dazed and exhausted. Their loved ones were gone, their houses pillaged, and they found themselves at a loss as to what to do next.

The Judenrat and others who worked with the Germans during the Devil's Dance were still dazed by their experiences and for days were unable to gain their equilibrium. The bloody scenes of the gruesome 'action' continued to play out before their eyes and their deeds gnawed at their consciences. They tried to bury their guilt in a flurry of diversions. Duty called daily business matters needed attention and the Judenrat began to function as before. It was simple reckoning: the fact that the Germans had spared the members of the Judenrat during the 'action' was the clearest indication they intended some kind of Jewish settlement to remain in Skalat and that something would yet be required of them. With these ideas they consoled themselves and others and turned to their work with renewed vigor “for the sake of the community.”

Meanwhile, some of the Jews who had jumped off the train began to filter back. They reported that many people had jumped to escape. The transport guards shot down most of the escapees firing on both sides of the railroad tracks which led toward Lwow. Those who had succeeded in escaping spent the following weeks wandering in the fields and on the roads, in rain and cold. Peasants with no conscience or pity robbed many of them and then turned them over to the Schupo or the Ukrainian militia, from whose hands no one emerged alive. Some fifty of these skotchkes ^[49] made it back to town.

It was reported that the Skalat transport had stopped in Lwow, where the Germans performed a selection. Two hundred young men and women were sent, as laborers, to the Lwow forced-labor, extermination camp on Janowska Road. All the others were ordered to undress (to keep them from escaping) and taken in sealed boxcars to Belzec, the notorious extermination camp for Galician Jews.

At that time, I myself was in the Lwow Ghetto. By 12 December 1942, when I was dragged to the Janowska Camp, I found two of my townsfolk still there: Mordechai Tennenbaum and Yekele Berger. They told me that all the others from Skalat had perished during the “cleansing” that Wilhaus had

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conducted there. The “cleansings” were carried out via the so-called 'death races' which were marches around the large mustering square. The Jewish inmates were forced to run around the square at top speed. Whoever tripped or fell behind was dragged aside by the SS-men and, in camp terminology, were used as “fuel” for the crematory ovens in Belzec. These selections took place every few weeks. At times the Germans would vary the game by shooting into the running crowd. Scores would drop like flies. For the Germans this was a favorite diversion.

And that was the sum total of the “Wild Action” in Skalat, and its 3,153 victims. But this was not yet the end of the near-Biblical punishment awaiting Skalat.

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