Terrible as the raping of former camp inmates by soldiers of the Red Army undoubtedly was, there remains a special quality to the suffering they inflicted on their own compatriots as they “liberated” the camps. Stalin had said that there were no Soviet prisoners of war held by the Germans—only “betrayers of the motherland.” This attitude also could not have been expressed with more clarity than when units of the Red Army arrived at the concentration camp in southern Poland in which Tatiana Nanieva13 was held.
Captured by the Germans in 1942 when the hospital in which she worked as a nurse had been encircled, she had endured two and a half years of imprisonment and in the process had to witness fellow Soviet women prisoners being raped by the Germans. Then, in January 1945, she heard the soldiers of the Red Army arriving with great “pomp,” singing patriotic songs with their heads held high: “Our feelings were joyful, elated. We believed that victory was at hand and that a normal life would begin again. I was yearning for my motherland, for my family.” Then, as joy flooded through her at the moment of liberation, two Red Army officers approached her. One of them was drunk and he shouted, “So how did you live it up here? You whores!” Tatiana felt her world collapse as he stood swaying, reaching for his pistol. She ran and managed to hide until these front-line troops who had liberated the camp had sobered up. Whether they were drunk or sober, however, the charge against her was still clear: “Betrayal of the motherland.” For the “crime” of allowing herself to be captured by the Germans she was sentenced to six years in a Gulag and lifetime exile in Siberia.
Pavel Stenkin,14 who had already beaten the odds and survived Auschwitz, had to endure similar treatment at the hands of his fellow countrymen. He had been one of the original 10,000 Soviet prisoners who had been sent in October 1941 to Auschwitz to construct the camp at Birkenau. By the following spring, with only a few hundred of them left alive, he had escaped into the forest and eventually managed to join the advancing Red Army. Instead of being welcomed back and allowed to fight the rest of the war against the Germans as he wished, however, he was interrogated for weeks. The standard question of the SMERSH investigators was “When did you join the German army?” He was sent into internal exile in the closed city of Perm in the Urals, where the questioning did not stop. “I was called up every second night: ‘Admit this, agree to that, we know everything—you are a spy.’ They were tormenting and tormenting me.” After some months of working in the day and being interrogated at night, Stenkin was prosecuted on a trumped-up charge and sentenced to several years’ imprisonment. Demonstrating the level of cynicism that operated in the Soviet legal system, the judges rushed through his case because they had tickets to the theatre that night. Only in 1953, with the death of Stalin, was Stenkin released. He was one of more than a million Soviet soldiers who were imprisoned twice—once by the Germans and once by their fellow countrymen.
Pavel Stenkin’s and Tatiana Nanieva’s experiences are particularly important because they so conspicuously lack the redemptive quality that many in the West have come to expect from the history of World War II. For generations of British and Americans, this war has attained the near mythic quality of a fight of “good” against “evil.” And, of course, it is true that Nazism was defeated, and there can be no argument that the world benefited immeasurably from the removal of that scourge. The history of the aftermath, however, is not as simplistic as the popular myth would have us believe. There were certainly few “happy endings” for the Soviet prisoners liberated by the Red Army—or indeed for many others in the East.
As the war came to an end, Stalin too committed crimes which, at least in part, are reminiscent of aspects of the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” Like Hitler, Stalin persecuted whole ethnic groups. Nearly 100,000 Kalmyks from the steppe land south of Stalingrad were deported en masse to Siberia for the collective “crime”—in the Soviet dictator’s eyes—of not resisting the Germans sufficiently. The Crimean Tartars, the Chechens, and many other ethnic minorities within the Soviet Union were to endure the same fate in the last days of the war and its immediate aftermath. No one knows exactly how many Soviet citizens were deported, but the figure is certainly greater than a million. Additionally, although—unlike for the Jews, where the majority was murdered upon falling into Nazi hands—a large proportion of the ethnic groups that Stalin persecuted was able to return home from Siberia after his death, it is certain that Chechens, Tartars, Kalmyks, and others suffered hugely as a result of Stalin’s desire to punish whole groups for the infractions of individuals.
In May 1945 most of eastern Europe swapped one cruel dictator for another—a stark reality that was to impact on many of the Auschwitz survivors as they tried to return home. Initially, Linda Breder’s15 experience of Soviet occupation was immensely positive—these were the people, after all, who had defeated the Nazis, liberated the camps, and stopped the mass extermination of the Jews.
When, on May 5th, Linda finally was liberated from the camp north of Berlin to which she had been transferred after two and a half years in Auschwitz, the Red Army soldiers were “very friendly” to her and the other inmates. The soldiers helped them find new clothes—so that they could cast aside the hated striped uniforms they had worn for so long—by the simple expedient of taking them to a nearby German house and telling them they could take anything they wanted. The terrified woman who lived there started shouting, “No SS! No SS!” as Linda and several other Slovak ex-prisoners pushed past her and started searching for clothes. Upon opening the wardrobe, they found several SS uniforms—clearly this was the wife of an SS man. So they “looted” the whole place, throwing eiderdowns and other belongings out of the window and taking all the clothes they needed. Linda Breder claims they scarcely touched the woman, though she admits one “strong girl” did “grab and yell at her.”
All Linda thought of was returning to Slovakia—others dreamt of a new life in America or Israel, but her only desire was to go home. So she began her long journey through a Europe devastated by war, with railways smashed and roads destroyed, traveling with some other Slovak ex-prisoners. In Berlin, they saw German prisoners of war flattening the ground and repairing giant potholes. The sight of members of the “master race” forced to do manual labor excited Linda and the other women so much that they asked the Red Army soldier who was supervising the POWs if they could speak to them. He agreed and the women all started to taunt them, shouting, “Quick! Quick! Move! Move!” and then they “really shoved them around.” More so than the “looting” of the German house, this was a moment of absolute realization for Linda Breder that she would never have to be frightened of Germans again. No longer would she feel terror in her heart at selections, desperate that she would be the one chosen to live.
Beyond Berlin they traveled on foot—there was no other means of transport available. Then, one day, as they walked the dusty roads of central Germany in the hot summer of 1945, some Red Army soldiers drove up and offered them a lift. Linda and the other women “were really scared, because they often raped girls.” They longed to have a rest from walking and so, in spite of their fears, they climbed aboard the truck with the Soviet soldiers. After they had traveled only a few kilometers, the soldiers suddenly stopped and robbed them of almost everything they had. “They even stole those things we had stolen from the Germans,” says Linda Breder. “But at least we saved our lives.”
Dumped by the side of the road and now with scarcely any possessions, they walked on again, with only the occasional respite of a short train ride, until at last they reached Prague. Linda and a number of the other women found shelter in the city, but still she was obsessed with a desire to return home to Slovakia as soon as she possibly could. When one train a day was running between Prague and Bratislava, the Slovak capital, Linda was able to travel to her family home in the eastern Slovakian town of Stropkov. At last, after more than three years away from home, after deportation in freight trucks, after the privations and suffering of Auschwitz and the struggle of th
e journey home from northern Germany, at last she had attained the goal she had been dreaming of for so long—she stood in front of her own home. There was, however, one problem: Someone else appeared to be living there. She knocked on the door, which was opened moments later by a Russian or Ukrainian man. “What do you want?” he demanded. “I’ve come back home,” she replied. “Go back to where you came from!” he said as he slammed the door in her face.
Linda was in a state of shock. She wandered off down the main street of her hometown, and as she did so the sudden realization came to her that all of the houses that had previously belonged to her friends and relations were now occupied by people from the Soviet Union. “When I looked into the windows of those houses I had a feeling that all eyes were gazing at me.” Only the non-Jewish population of the town were still in evidence, but many of them had previously been friendly with Linda and her family and she still thought they at least would welcome her. She was wrong.
I recognized one of them, but she didn’t come to me to tell me, “I’m glad to see you.” Everybody was keeping his distance as if I was poisoned or something. I left the next day and never went back. To come back was my worst experience. This was really a catastrophic experience.
Linda Breder’s story of her bitter return home is one mirrored by many survivors, not just from Auschwitz but from other camps as well. In captivity they had been inspired by the thought of home, believing that they could recapture the life they had possessed once the war was over. But it was impossible. Linda Breder eventually left Slovakia and made a new life for herself in California.
Walter Fried16 was another Slovakian Jew who returned home in the summer of 1945. He was seventeen years old and had been imprisoned with his family in a labor camp in Slovakia. Jewish deportations from Slovakia had ceased in October 1942, partly as a result of pressure from a faction within the Slovak government, and a number of Slovakian Jews had subsequently been retained as forced labor within the country rather than handed over to the Nazis. Walter came from a relatively wealthy family—his father owned a restaurant and a taxi in the town of Topolčany and, until 1939, they had all lived happily alongside their neighbors. Now, as they returned home with Fascism defeated, they expected to regain their former lives.
They were part of a small minority who made it home—out of 3,200 Jews who had lived in the town before the war, only around 10 percent ever returned. When Walter and his family came back, however, they found something waiting for them that they could never have imagined—hatred. Someone else was in their apartment and, when they tried to recover it, the current occupant refused to leave. It was the same with their restaurant. The new proprietor told them that under Soviet occupation the business was now “nationalized,” and because he was the one paying the rent he was there legitimately.
The Fried family thought it had one salvation. Walter’s father had asked some good friends—a Christian family—to hide their gold, jewelry, and money before they were deported. Now, full of confidence, they came to collect it. They met their friends over lunch and initially the conversation was stilted. Eventually Walter’s father broached the subject that was on everyone’s minds, saying, “We left a little package with you, and you know exactly what the package contained—there was gold, diamonds and money.” But their friends had a different recollection, replying that while the Frieds had indeed left some things with them, they consisted of only a few clothes, which they were now happy to return. “We gave you gold and diamonds!” said Walter’s father in despair. But it was useless; they never recovered their valuables.
The devastation the Frieds felt was caused not just by the outright theft of their money and property, but by the feeling of emotional betrayal. Says Walter Fried,We lost our minimum of hope, that the good Christian, who used to be a friend of the Jew, someone the Jew supported all the time—who used to be given food when he didn’t have any money when he came to our restaurant—would respond. They didn’t want us to come back, so they wouldn’t have to settle their accounts with us and look us in the eye and say, “We don’t owe you anything.” Our best friends from before became our worst enemies. In 1945 we were more threatened than in 1942 when we left—that’s how much hatred there was.
The hatred directed against them took physical form one night in the summer of 1945. Walter and his father were walking down a street in Topolčany when they encountered a group of about thirty young people. One of them was an old school friend of Walter’s from before the war, called Josho. However, Josho was anything but friendly now.
The group rushed towards Walter and his father and started hitting them. “Jew! You’re a Jew!” shouted Josho as he beat them. As Walter lay on the ground, injured, he remembered how before the war he had shared his bread with Josho at school. He said to him: “Isn’t it enough you ate my bread? Now you come and beat me up! Why?” But all Josho replied was “Jew! You are a Jew!”
Others in the mob screamed: “Jews! You take Christian blood!” They beat Walter and his father not just with their fists but with sticks until they were both badly injured. The attack was perpetrated in the open on one of the town’s main streets, and Walter observed how not a single person stopped to help them—even though some of those who walked by were acquaintances. “I had thought that I knew so many people,” says Walter, “but all of a sudden nobody knew us.”
Then the youths dragged them to the local police station and threw them on the steps. “The police were no better,” says Walter. “Instead of chasing them away or arresting them, they let them go. Then they gave us another beating.” Walter knew he could remain in Slovakia no longer, and at the first opportunity emigrated to Israel, where he lives today.
There were also reports of post-war pogroms against the Jews in Poland, and no one knows how many Jews returning from the camps endured similar experiences across eastern Europe. No detailed statistical survey has ever been completed of the extent of the lack of restitution. Such evidence as there is, however, suggests that Walter Fried’s and Linda Breder’s stories do not represent isolated incidents but are part of a wider pattern. In the chaotic atmosphere of the immediate post-war years, with the population adjusting to living under their new masters from the Soviet Union, pursuing justice for the Jewish survivors of anti-Semitic persecution was not high on anyone’s agenda—if it appeared on the agenda at all.
Toivi Blatt, who had escaped from Sobibór in October 1943, had an even more immediate experience of how life could never return to its relative pre-war calm. As he traveled through Poland after the revolt, hiding from the Germans and seeking help from locals, he found that many Poles refused him aid—not just because they were frightened of the Nazis, but because of outright anti-Semitism. When eventually a farmer did agree to hide him in an underground chamber in one of his farm outbuildings, it was a strictly business transaction—the farmer demanded money for concealing him. And when the war did not end as quickly as expected, one of the farmer’s relatives entered Toivi’s hiding place and tried to kill him. Only by pretending to be dead did he miraculously manage to escape.
At the end of the war, Toivi Blatt returned to his home in Izbica but discovered, just as Linda Breder and Walter Fried had found, that the Jewish community of his town had been destroyed. He subsequently left Izbica and tried to make a new life elsewhere in Poland, but without finding much happiness. “Most of my life was in Poland,” he says, “[but] I still felt like I didn’t belong there. I wanted to get married and there was a problem—how will she act if I am Jewish? Most of them are negative I must tell you.” Toivi felt sufficiently out of place in the land of his birth that, in 1957, he took the opportunity to emigrate—first to Israel and then to America. He thought he had detected anti-Semitism from the Communist Party of Poland, which he believed perceived the Jews as a “fifth column.”
Toivi Blatt eventually made a successful life for himself in the United States, but he always felt part of him remained Polish and so returned to visit Izbica in the ea
rly 1990s. He walked back into a village that had once been home to nearly 4,000 Jews and now contained not one. A Polish Catholic friend of his who lived in the village had always said that Toivi should stay with him if he were ever in town, but now, when Toivi arrived to take up the offer, he was turned away without reason—although Toivi felt he knew the reason all too well: “He didn’t want the neighbors to know that he had a Jew sleeping at his place.”
This reticence to admit to a friendship with, or even admit to knowing, Toivi Blatt extended to those Poles who had hidden him during the war. As Toivi is the first to acknowledge, there were some gallant Poles who did give him food and shelter on his long journey back from Sobibór (and recent scholarship focused on Warsaw reveals that there were thousands of such brave people),17 but instead of feeling pride at these actions today some feel only shame. When Toivi was walking through a nearby village with a Catholic priest he pointed out the house of someone who had helped him during the war and started to walk up to the front door. But the man hid behind the curtain and would not let them in. Again the reason seemed clear to Toivi: “Many people that hid Jews didn’t want the neighbors to know because they would immediately say, ‘Oh, he had a lot of money because he hid Jews.’”
The most devastating example of how anti-Semitic beliefs and values still live on, however, occurred when Toivi visited his old family home in Izbica. He knocked on the front door and asked the man who now lived there if he would be happy to let him enter and look around the house in which he had been raised, the house in which he had hidden from the German “actions,” and the house in which his beloved mother and father had spent their last days before being taken to Sobibór. Initially the new owner was reluctant, but when Toivi pressed three American dollars into his hand he was allowed to enter. Immediately Toivi noticed a chair in the living room and remarked that it had once belonged to his father. “Oh, no,” the man replied. “That’s impossible.” So Tovi took the chair, turned it over, and there written on the base of it was his family name. At this the man said, “Mr. Blatt, why the whole comedy with the chair? I know why you are here.” Toivi looked at him, bemused. “You have come for the hidden money,” the man continued. “We could divide it—50 percent for you and 50 percent for me.” Furious, Toivi Blatt left the house without a backward glance.
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