In the Spring of 1942, American journalists stranded in Germany when the United States entered the war were exchanged for Axis nationals stranded in the United States and they described what had happened to Jews in Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania as an “open hunt.”
The Lvov Ghetto (German: Ghetto Lemberg) was a World War II Jewish ghetto in the city of Lvov (now Lviv, Ukraine) in the territory of Nazi-administered General Government in German-occupied Poland. It was one of the largest Jewish ghettos and was a home to over 110,000 Jews before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. By the time the Nazis occupied the city in 1941 that number had increased to over 220,000 Jews as result of Jew fleeing for their lives from Nazi-occupied western Poland into the then relative safety of Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.
The ghetto, set up in the second half of 1941 after the Germans arrived, was liquidated in June 1943 with all its inhabitants who survived prior killings sent to their deaths in cattle trucks in extermination camps at either Belzec or Janowska.
After the beginning of German invasion of the Soviet Union tens of thousands of refugees, including many Jews, came to Rostov-on-Don. In September-November 1941 the Soviet authorities organized a large-scale evacuation from Rostov-on-Don. About 10,000 Jews succeeded in leaving the city during this period.
The Germans occupied Rostov-on-Don on November 21, 1941. This occupation lasted only about a week before the Red Army counterattacked and the city was retaken.
In the short period of their rule in Rostov-on-Don the Germans ordered the establishment of a Jewish council, the registration of all the Jews, and the forcing of Jews to wear yellow Stars of David. About 1,000 Jews were murdered in Rostov-on-Don and the surrounding area during this time.
After the liberation of the city many of the Jews who left the city in autumn 1941 returned, but in the summer of 1942, he Germans approached the city for the second time and another evacuation began, but not many Jews succeeded in escaping before the city was reoccupied by the Germans on July 24, 1942.
Soon after the start of the second German occupation Jew were identified and the resettlement of Jews in a separate quarter was ordered. On August 11, 1942 all the Jews who appeared, supposedly for resettlement in the ghetto, were taken by truck northwest of the city and either shot or murdered in gas vans in a several day massacre which claimed the lives of at least 2,000 people, but Soviet sources put the number at more than 10,000.
It is difficult to establish the number of Jews murdered in Rostov-on-Don during the German occupation, but it is estimated to be between 15,000 and 30,000. The city was recaptured again by the Red Army on February 14, 1943.
Somewhere in all that slaughter was a victim named Eduard Gerstenfeld, a Polish master who by the age of 22 had twice won the Polish championship. He was born into a Jewish family in Lvov, then Austria-Hungary.
In the period between 1935 and 1939, he lived in Lodz and was active in many Polish tournaments. In summer 1939, before World War II broke out, he returned to Lvov.
According to the secret agreement between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact), Lvov was captured by the Soviets and then incorporated to the Ukraine in 1939 and he then began playing in Soviet tournaments.
He was last heard from in June 1941, when he was in 3rd place in Rostov-on-Don (the 13th USSR Championship Semi-final) when Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, interrupted the event. After that nobody knows what happened to him.
Some reports say he became a victim of Nazi atrocities in Autumn 1942 in either in the Lemberg Ghetto or the Belzec extermination camp. Other reports have him being shot by Nazis during the mass killing of Jewish people in Rostov-on-Don in December 1943 just before it was liberated by the Soviet Army on February 14, 1943. Thus, Gerstenfeld's promising career was cut short and he joined the list of more than 40 prominent chess players who perished in World War II.
No comments:
Post a Comment