Annette and Michel were taken to another holding center for foreign Jews in a house not far from Drancy—a former asylum on the rue Lamarck in Montmartre. They did not know it yet, but this was their first step towards liberation. Their father had received the letter his wife had written from Beaune-la-Rolande. As a result he had made a series of payments—first to an influential French Jew, and through him to the French authorities. This meant that Annette and Michel had been, despite their age, reclassified as “fur workers” and so transferred out of Drancy. Once they arrived at the new holding center their father arranged for the children to be taken away by representatives of a Catholic orphanage, where they were hidden for the duration of the war.
The vast majority of the thousands of children sent to Drancy in the summer of 1942 were not so lucky. Between August 17 and the end of that month, seven trains were dispatched from the camp to Auschwitz, carrying the children who had been separated from their parents at Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. “The morning before the departure we dressed the children as best we could,” says Odette Daltroff-Baticle.
Most of them couldn’t even carry their little suitcase—and their suitcases were mixed up, we didn’t know what belonged to whom. They didn’t want to go downstairs to the bus and we had to take them. After thousands of them left I remember there were about eighty or so in the infirmary that we thought we were going to be able to save—but not at all. One day they told us that even these eighty were going to leave. And the morning of the deportation when we tried to take them downstairs they screamed and kicked—they absolutely didn’t want to go down. The gendarmes came upstairs and with a lot of difficulty they made them. One or two of the gendarmes seemed a little bit sad to see this horrible show.
Jo Nisenman,18 then eighteen years old, left Drancy on a transport for Auschwitz on August 26. On the train were 700 adults and 400 children, including his ten-year-old sister who was “blonde and very pretty.” Of the 90 or so people in his wagon about 30 of them were children being deported without their parents. Jo remembers how the children “stoically” endured life in the freight train during the lengthy journey to Auschwitz.
We arrived after two or three days—I can’t tell you exactly how long—at the station before Auschwitz. And they needed some men who were in good health because there was a work camp nearby. So they stopped the train and took out 250 people.
Jo was one of the adults selected to leave the train.
They forced us to get out with sticks—they wouldn’t have let us stay. I left my sister there.... But in spite of everything we couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.... I don’t remember them crying. I saw these little ones, some of them very cute, and they were exterminated. It was atrocious.
Sixty years later, Jo Nisenman recalls daily the suffering of his sister and the rest of the children from Drancy:Behind where I live there’s a nursery school where I see the mothers waiting in line for their kids with little chocolate croissants for them. But these children didn’t have their mothers. They didn’t have the chocolate croissant. ...
Of all the many terrible incidents from the history of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, the story of the murder of the Jewish children sent from France is one of the most profoundly affecting. At the heart of the story, of course, is the shocking image of the separation of children from their parents. But it is not just the horrific idea of children being ripped from their mothers’ arms at camps like Beaune-la-Rolande that is so upsetting. It is rather that some parents, like the mothers who told their sons to run away during the initial round-up, had to act against instinct and abandon their own children so that they might survive. The emotional trauma involved in such actions must have been devastating.
Even Höss observed how families in Auschwitz wanted to stay together at all costs. And though the selection process separated men from women, husbands from wives, the Nazis soon learned that it was almost always counter to their own interests to separate mothers forcibly from their children. Even though the Nazis lost valuable labor by sending some young, healthy women to the gas chambers with their offspring, they realized that to wrench boys and girls from their mothers against their will at the initial selection would result in such horrendous scenes that efficient management of the killing process would be almost impossible. Moreover, the upset involved in such separation would be so great as to rival the emotional disturbance caused to the killing squads by shooting women and children at close range—the very trauma that the gas chambers had been designed to diminish.
After the transports of children in the summer of 1942, the French authorities came to the same conclusion. So disturbing was the image of small children fending for themselves, deprived of their mothers, that after the last train containing parentless children left Drancy on August 31 an order was given that such transports were not to be repeated. Never again, as far as the French deportations were concerned, would children be snatched from their mothers; instead, whole families would be sent to Auschwitz together. It is important, however, to draw from this decision the right conclusion, which is not that the French authorities had suddenly developed a sense of compassion but rather that they had realized, just as much as Höss did at Auschwitz, that it would be easier for them—in pursuit of their own interests—if they avoided separating mothers from their children.
There is another reason that this story sticks in the gullet so badly—the complicity at every stage of the French authorities. As the Nazis knew from the first, it would be impossible to deport the Jews without the collaboration of the French. And the French decision to hand over “foreign” Jews rather than their “own” Jews betrays a level of cynicism that is breathtaking even at this distance of time (though this was a decision which, as later chapters will reveal, was to be repeated by several other countries in the years to come). Altogether just under 80,000 Jews were killed as a result of deportation from France during the war, which represents about 20–25 percent of the total Jewish population in France at the time. That figure—which means that roughly four out of five Jews in France survived the war—is sometimes quoted by apologists as a “healthy” statistic showing that the French authorities behaved with relative honor in the face of Nazi occupation. On the contrary, it demonstrates precisely the reverse because, almost certainly, little would have happened had the French refused to cooperate in handing over their “foreign” Jews. Even after the occupation of the whole of France in November 1942, the Nazis did not enforce violent reprisals when the French authorities dragged their feet and the German targets for deportations were subsequently not met.
In the wake of the Paris round-up of July 1942 and the expulsion of the children, there was considerable protest from Church leaders about the actions of the French political leadership. The archbishop of Toulouse ordered a pastoral letter of protest to be read out in his diocese on August 23, and the archbishop of Lyons told Laval when he met him on September 1, that he supported both protest action and the hiding of Jewish children by Catholics. But all this was too late to affect those taken in the Paris sweep that July.
Michel and Annette Muller’s mother, snatched from her children at Beaune-la-Rolande, died at Auschwitz. And while it was the Nazis who wished her dead, it was the French who put her in harm’s way. “What struck me most,” says Michel, “was that it was completely gratuitous. People were arrested simply because they were born Jewish. And it was the French who did that—that’s still beyond me. Sixty years later, it’s still unbelievable to me.”
Every single one of the more than 4,000 children deported without their parents from France in the summer of 1942 died at Auschwitz. Recalls Annette,When my two brothers escaped [from the initial round-up], there was one of their friends from school whose mother pushed him to escape. And this boy, when he found himself in the street, he didn’t want to stay alone—he really wanted to go back and join his mother. So he begged a police officer to [be allowed to] go back to where his mother was, so he was sent off to
the gas chambers. These were children with lots of plans. They were full of joy—the joy of life. But because they were Jewish they were condemned like that. And how many of these children had skills, talents, qualities?
There are witnesses to the separation of the French children from their parents, to their suffering at the various holding camps, even to their “stoic” attitude on the transports, but until now, once they entered the gates of Auschwitz there was only silence. Trying to imagine this or other similar scenes of selection—still more trying to imagine what it must have been like to participate in the process as a perpetrator—has been almost impossible. The only way to penetrate that darkness would be to find a credible witness who had belonged to the SS and worked at Auschwitz. Exceptionally, and only after many months of research, we obtained an interview with just such a person—Oskar Groening.
In 1942, when he was twenty-one years old, Groening was posted to Auschwitz. He arrived just weeks after the French children, and almost immediately witnessed a transport arriving at “the ramp”—the platform where the Jews disembarked. “I was standing at the ramp,” he says,19 “and my task was to be part of the group supervising the luggage from an incoming transport.” He watched while SS doctors first separated men from women and children, and then selected who was fit to work and who should be gassed immediately. “Sick people were lifted on to lorries,” says Groening. “Red Cross lorries—they always tried to create the impression that people had nothing to fear.”
He estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of those on the first transport he witnessed in September 1942 were selected to be murdered at once.This process [of selection] proceeded in a relatively orderly fashion but when it was over it was just like a fairground. There was a load of rubbish, and next to this rubbish were ill people, unable to walk, perhaps a child that had lost its mother, or perhaps during searching the train somebody had hidden—and these people were simply killed with a shot through the head. And the kind of way in which these people were treated brought me doubt and outrage. A child was simply pulled on the leg and thrown on a lorry ... then when it cried like a sick chicken, they chucked it against the edge of the lorry. I couldn’t understand that an SS man would take a child and throw its head against the side of a lorry ... or kill them by shooting them and then throw them on a lorry like a sack of wheat.
Groening, according to his story, was so filled by “doubt and outrage” that he went to his superior officer and told him: “‘It’s impossible, I can’t work here any more. If it is necessary to exterminate the Jews, then at least it should be done within a certain framework.’ I told him this and said, ‘I want to go away from here.’” His superior officer calmly listened to Groening’s complaints, reminded him of the SS oath of allegiance he had sworn and said that he should “forget” any idea of leaving Auschwitz. But he also offered hope—of a kind. He told Groening that the “excesses” he saw that night were an “exception,” and that he himself agreed that members of the SS should not participate in such “sadistic” events. Documents confirm that Groening subsequently put in for a transfer to the front, which was refused. So he carried on working at Auschwitz.
Significantly, Groening did not complain to his boss about the principle of murdering the Jews, merely its practical implementation. When he saw people in front of him who he knew were going to die within hours in the gas chambers, he says his feelings were “very ambiguous.” He says,How do you feel when you’re in Russia, here’s a machine gun in front of you, and there’s a battalion of Russians coming running towards you and you have to pull the trigger and shoot as many as possible? I’m saying it on purpose like this because there’s always behind you the fact that the Jews are enemies who come from the inside of Germany. The propaganda had for us such an effect that you assumed that to exterminate them was basically something that happened in war. And to that extent a feeling of sympathy or empathy didn’t come up.
When pressed for the reason why children were murdered, Groening replies: “The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew who could be dangerous. And because of that the children were also affected.”
Clues as to how it was possible that Oskar Groening felt helpless women and children were “enemies” who had to face “extermination” can be found in his life before he was posted to Auschwitz. He was born in 1921 in Lower Saxony, son of a skilled textile worker. Groening’s father was a traditional conservative, “proud of what Germany had achieved.” One of Groening’s earliest memories is of looking at photographs of his grandfather, who served in an elite regiment of soldiers from the Duchy of Brunswick: “His position impressed me terribly when I was a boy—he was sitting on his horse and playing his trumpet. It was fascinating.”
After Germany’s defeat in World War I Groening’s father joined the right-wing Stahlhelm (Steel Helmet), one of the many ultra-nationalist organizations that flourished in the wake of what they proclaimed was the humiliating peace of Versailles. His father’s anger at the way Germany had been treated grew more intense as his personal circumstances became more strained—lacking capital, his textile business went bankrupt in 1929. In the early 1930s young Oskar joined the Stahlhelm’s youth organization, the Scharnhorst: “I wore a military gray cap, shirt and trousers. We looked rather odd, but we were proud of it. And we also wore black, white, and red, the colors of the former flag of Emperor Wilhelm.”
Nothing felt more natural for Oskar Groening, who was only eleven years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933, than to ease from the Stahlhelm’s Scharnhorst into the Hitler Youth. He adopted the values of his parents and judged that the Nazis “were the people who wanted the best for Germany and who did something about it.” As a member of the Hitler Youth he took part in the burning of books written by “Jews or others who were degenerate.” And he believed that, by doing so, he was helping rid Germany of an inappropriate, alien culture. At the same time, he thought National Socialism was demonstrably working on the economic front:Within six months [of the Nazis coming to power] the 5 million unemployed had vanished from the streets and so everybody had work. Then [in 1936] Hitler marched into the Rhineland [demilitarized under the terms of the Versailles treaty] and simply occupied it—nobody tried to stop him. We were terribly happy about this—my father opened a bottle of wine.
In the meantime, young Oskar went to school, and though feeling he was at times “rather lazy and perhaps a little bit stupid” he eventually finished high in his final class and, at seventeen, began a traineeship as a bank clerk. Just a few months after he started work in the bank war was declared; eight out of the twenty clerks were immediately conscripted into the army and their places taken by young women. This meant that the remaining trainees such as Groening could “get jobs they would have never normally reached. For example, I had to take over the cash till.”
Despite this unexpected advance in their banking careers, as they heard news of Germany’s quick victories in Poland and France the trainees were filled with “euphoria” and a feeling that “you wanted to be part of it” and “you wanted to help.” Oskar Groening wanted to join an “elite” unit of the German army, just as his grandfather had done. And for this young man only one unit fulfilled his dream.
The Waffen SS was formed from units of the SA [the Nazi storm troopers] when it was important to have a unit that you could absolutely rely on. At the party meetings the last unit to walk by was the black uniform [of the SS] and nobody was less than one meter ninety—it was so uplifting.
So, without telling his father, Oskar went along to a hotel where the Waffen SS were recruiting and joined up. “And when I came home my father said, ‘I was hoping that because you were wearing glasses you wouldn’t be accepted.’ And then he said, ‘I’m sorry, but you’ll see what you’ll get out of this.’”
What Oskar Groening got out of his membership of this elite corps was, initially, a job in SS administration as a bookkeeper. He w
as not at all displeased by this posting: “I’m a desk person. I wanted to work in a job that had both the soldier’s life and also the bureaucratic aspect.” He worked as a bookkeeper for a year until September 1942, when the order came through that fit, healthy members of the SS working in salary administration centers were to be transferred to more challenging duties, with the administrative jobs reserved for returning veterans disabled at the front: “So, under the assumption that we would now enter a fighting unit, about twenty-two of us went with our luggage and got on a train to Berlin. It was very strange, because generally an order would have come for us to go to a troop-mustering place–but that didn’t happen.”
Groening and his comrades reported to one of the SS economic offices, located in a “beautiful building” in the capital. They were then directed to a conference room where they were addressed by several high-ranking SS officers.
We had to listen to a lecture where we were told we had to fulfil orders that were given in trust—a task that wouldn’t be without difficulties. We were reminded that we had sworn an oath with the motto “My loyalty is my honor,” and that we could prove this loyalty by doing this task which was now given to us—the details of which we would find out later. Then a subordinate SS leader said we were to keep absolutely silent about this task. It was top-secret, so that neither our relatives or friends or comrades or people who were not in the unit were to be told anything about it. So we had to march forward individually and sign a statement to this effect.
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