Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  I held my sister’s hand. We found a compartment. As we got on the train they shut the door, we tried to open the windows and all of a sudden these black uniforms appeared and they pushed our parents back, they weren’t allowed to come near us. Father tried to shout something, but with all the commotion, we couldn’t hear. The younger children started to cry then. I had a sense of relief; I felt a sense of sadness; I felt a sense of anger. I thought: Was I such a bad lad to be torn away from my father and mother? Will I ever be lucky enough to see them again? The emotions that were going through me! For some reason, I don’t know what, my sister didn’t cry. Later on in life, she told me that from the day we left Nordbahnhof in Vienna, she cut the past out of her life.

  Kindertransport: A Girl Arrives in Britain, 1939

  ANONYMOUS

  The first thing I remember about being in England is Aunt Helen trying to put me on her lap. We are on a train taking us from London to Swansea, and since I speak no English it is difficult to resolve my urgent need to get off the lap of this woman I have never seen before. Not, at least, without becoming impolite about it. I have been warned of dire consequences if I fail to be polite when I get to England.

  Luckily, my sister Ruth is along. Ruth speaks English. ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ I tell her in German. She translates this for the woman with the lap, who threatens to get up and take me there. ‘Not her. You have to take me,’ I say to Ruth. My poor sister – she is thirteen, an awkward age at best, and the Basic English she has learned at school has never been tested on a native speaker. I have admired and adored her from afar for years – my handsome, scornful, heroic sister, six years older than I am and good at sports – but at that point she must be loathing me. ‘If you don’t make that woman put me down,’ I tell her when we are finally alone in the corridor heading towards the toilet, which in fact I do not need, ‘I will start screaming.’

  But by the time we get back to the compartment, nothing needs to be explained after all: the woman’s lap has been magically withdrawn from combat and is no longer a menace. It is filled with egg salad sandwiches, and I can settle down in my own and distant corner to eat one without fear of further interference.

  I do not remember the journey before that, though I know it was a journey of children: children of every age and size and condition. I vaguely recall weeping adults, my mother presumably among them, although I do not remember her. They stood, blocked by wooden barriers, as we were taken along the platform and put into railway compartments, which I seem to remember had hard, slatted seats. There was a boy, a country boy I suppose, with a huge basket of strawberries that he handed around to us all. The guard came by now and then and made jokes, and the officer in uniform and with a swastika armband who collected our papers at the border looked upon me with what I took to be parental concern as he handed back my passport, which under my name – augmented by the Jewish ‘Sarah’ mandated by the Third Reich – had been stamped STATELESS. I remember feeling a shy affection for him, a sense of safety in travelling in this carriage under his care.

  I know that to cross to England we boarded the boat at Rotterdam. I know this because I had thought we would go through Amsterdam, which I had read about in the Bibi books of Karen Michaëlis; Rotterdam, unsung in literature, was a great disappointment, which I resented enough to file firmly in memory. But the crossing itself is a blank. Probably we were all asleep. The next day comes to mind as the revelation of a huge London station with massive steel arches overhead. Liverpool Street Station. There were, I think, people at tables who shuffled through papers and who spoke an incomprehensible language that I knew must be English. I was wearing a brown hat with a rolled-up brim, and there were labels pinned to my collar and dangling from the various buttons of my new brown coat.

  And then a tall, thin, aquiline woman, encased in a tweed suit that looked as if it would cause severe abrasions to any skin with which it came in contact, emerged from the crowd to lay claim to this refugee package from Germany, and she led us away.

  That point of my life is where my real memory begins. My earlier recollections are not much more than mental snapshots of discrete moments, deprived of emotional content and effect. Or if there is any emotion, it tends towards shame, which I have somehow breathed in during my last year there, from the air of Karlsruhe. I understand, for instance, when my best friend Ursula no longer comes to my house, that shame must be the element that most properly belongs to me. When I go to visit her, her mother will not open the gate, and when on my way home three children call out names at me which I completely fail to comprehend, I nevertheless know them to be shameful.

  One day, coming home from school, I see a quartet of Hitler Jugend knocking on the door; they are rattling coins in round tins marked with swastikas in which they are collecting money for some worthy Nazi cause. I have been told that we never give money to the Hitler Jugend’s worthy causes and that we regard swastikas as hostile emblems. I shrink against the privet hedge, trying to be invisible, and am preparing myself to run away when, to my embarrassment, I find that terror has just made me pee in my pants. Luckily, however, the Jugendbund has given up knocking and is running down the path, going right past me on their way out. They are chatting and still rattling their tins and seem totally unaware of my shame: my twin shames, actually – of being Jewish and being incontinent. But even when they are gone, I am so overwhelmed by humiliation that for several minutes I can’t move.

  Shame is there in abundance. Other emotions, other moods, seem to have evaporated from the scenes I call up for myself.

  My father’s death, for instance, is encapsulated in a single image of a featureless figure wrapped head to toe in bandages, looking, I have lately come to think, more like the Michelin man or the Pilsbury Doughboy than a human being – though unlike the Michelin man and the Doughboy this creature does not have a face. I suppose I am extrapolating from the bandages around my father’s head at the time he died – of uremic poisoning from a carbuncle at the base of his neck. In my waking life there were never any particular feelings associated with this apparition – no fear or affection or yearning – though throughout my childhood it consistently invaded my dreams and led them into nightmare. Up to that moment when Aunt Helen collected us it is as though I had flattened everything out for easy storage, and to make things simpler I seem to have removed the sound track as well. But in that second-class compartment, halfway between London and Swansea, my memory springs into three dimensions – becomes, I suppose, normal. It decorates itself with words and sounds and feelings; it attaches itself to things like regret and pleasure. None of this is entirely reliable, of course – over the years the landscape of memory shifts and its details rearrange themselves; or it fails to shift and one knows that what is being remembered is not a memory any more at all – that it has petrified into myth. But, as I say, all that is normal, more or less. And in some way impossible to define, my life begins when I am seven going on eight – when I have just set foot in England. It is 1939 – the end of April or perhaps the beginning of May. By the time the train has arrived in Swansea and the taxi has driven us to Aunt Helen’s house, it is early evening.

  The house is huge, much grander than anything we have ever lived in in Karlsruhe. A young woman wearing a black dress and a little white apron opens the door for us and takes our bags; she is wearing a starched white cotton tiara thing on her head like the women who served Mandeltorte and Schillerlocken in the Konditorei on Kaiserstrasse. Aunt Helen has taken my reluctant hand and is leading me upstairs, followed by two of our suitcases under the care of the young woman in black. Ruth trails behind; the rucksack containing our papers and disposable treasure (two Swiss watches and some gold and platinum jewellery in case there should be an emergency need for ready cash) is clutched to her heart. Aunt Helen did try at the door to separate Ruth from the rucksack, a move that established an even firmer bond between them. Ruth and rucksack are now inseparable.

  But when we get to the room whe
re we are to sleep, she loosens her clutch a little; the two beds are turned down and there are two bowls of steaming, creamy mushroom soup on the bedside table. There is a fire in the fireplace too, and the curtains breathing at the slightly opened window frame a twilight view of a walled spring garden beyond which there is a distant glimmer of sea.

  There were four Harveys. Aunt Helen you have already met, but at her introduction she was wearing a Harris tweed suit – topped by a sprightly fedora that I did not mention, with a rakish little feather in it announcing its readiness for battle. But that was a different Aunt Helen from the one who floated in through the firelight an hour later to kiss us goodnight – our soup finished, our cup of Horlicks drunk, our pyjamas already on. This white-gowned woman, the new Aunt Helen, had about her the aroma of something wonderful: roses, perhaps, and lavender.

  I had never eaten mushroom soup in bed before or drunk Horlicks; I had never walked down two miles of corridor before to go to the bathroom. I had certainly never been kissed before by someone wearing an evening gown. Kissed, more or less, by two people in evening clothes, because right behind Aunt Helen came Uncle Bourke, and he was wearing what I know now beyond a reasonable doubt to have been a dinner jacket. Not that it was exactly me he kissed. It was the air three inches above my right ear and three inches to the right of the spot on my scalp that still held the memory of Aunt Helen’s goodnight on it.

  It was a ritual, an unfaltering expression of affection balanced exquisitely with reticence, which was conducted every night for the seven years we were in England.

  Part II: FLAME

  The Holocaust,

  1939–19 January 1942

  Hitler had decided, even before going to war on 1 September 1939, that Jews in areas occupied by the expanded Third Reich would be exterminated. In the mind of the Führer, war for greater living space (lebensraum) was synonymous with war against the Jews. As he stated in 1939:

  Today I will be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will be not the Bolshevization of the world and therewith a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.

  On the destruction of the Jews, Hitler for once kept his word. By 1939 the Führer had also convinced Germany that race war and imperialist expansion were synonymous; German trains carrying troops to the front had daubed on them the slogan: Wir fahren nach Polen, um Juden zu versohlen. We’re off to Poland, to thrash the Jews.

  ‘All Necessary Measures’: Heydrich’s Instructions to the Einsatzgruppen, 21 September 1939

  REINHARD HEYDRICH, CHIEF OF THE SECURITY POLICE

  As Chief of the Security Police and Security Service, Heydrich had primary responsibility for implementing the Final Solution. The preliminary to extermination was the removal of Jews from those areas of Poland which would be incorporated into Germany, and their concentration in large settlements, preferably near railways, ‘so as to facilitate subsequent measures’. The clock was now ticking for Poland’s Jewry.

  The Einsatzgruppen (Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD) were SS paramilitary special-duty groups under Heydrich’s direct control; before using them to hunt Jews, Heydrich had employed them in the capture and killing of political opponents of the Nazis in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

  His directive, fashioned after a lunch with his cohorts (including Adolf Eichmann), is a landmark along the road to the Final Solution because it acknowledges a pre-existing master plan for the extermination of Europe’s Jews – the ‘planned overall measures’ which are to be kept ‘strictly secret’. When faced with the document at his trial in Israel in 1961, Eichmann agreed that ‘planned overall measures’ meant genocide.

  The Chief of the Security Police

  SECRET

  Berlin: 2 September 1939

  To:

  Chiefs of all Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police

  Subject

  Jewish question in the occupied territory

  I refer to the conference held in Berlin today and once more point out that the planned overall measures (i.e., the final aim) are to be kept strictly secret.

  Distinction must be made between:

  (1) The final aim (which will require extended periods of time), and

  (2) The stages leading to the fulfilment of this final aim (which will be carried out in short terms).

  The planning measures demand the most thorough preparation in their technical as well as economic aspects.

  It is obvious that the tasks that lie ahead cannot be laid down in full detail here. The instructions and guidelines below will at the same time serve the purpose of urging the chiefs of the Einsatzgruppen to give the matter their practical thought.

  I

  For the time being, the first pre-requisite for the final aim is the concentration of the Jews from the countryside into the larger cities.

  This is to be carried out with all speed.

  In doing so, distinction must be made:

  (1) between the areas of Danzig and West Prussia, Posen, Eastern Upper Silesia, and

  (2) the rest of the occupied territories.

  As far as possible, the area mentioned (in item 1) is to be cleared of Jews; at least the aim should be to establish only a few cities of concentration.

  In the areas mentioned in item 2, as few concentration points as possible are to be set up, so as to facilitate subsequent measures.

  In this connection, it is to be borne in mind that only cities which are rail junctions, or at least are located along railway lines, are to be designated as concentration points.

  On principle, Jewish communities of fewer than 500 persons are to be dissolved and to be transferred to the nearest city of concentration.

  This decree does not apply to the area of Einsatzgruppe 1, which is situated east of Kraków and is bounded roughly by Polanico, Jaroslaw, the new line of demarcation, and the former Slovak-Polish border. Within this area, only an improvised census of Jews is to be carried out. Furthermore, Councils of Jewish Elders, as discussed below, are to be set up.

  II

  Councils of Jewish Elders [Jüdische Ältestenräte]

  (1) In each Jewish community, a Council of Jewish Elders is to be set up, to be composed, as far as possible, of the remaining influential personalities and rabbis. The council is to comprise up to twenty-four Jews (depending on the size of the Jewish community).

  The council is to be made fully responsible, in the literal sense of the word, for the exact and punctual execution of all directives issued or yet to be issued.

  (2) In case of sabotage of such instructions, the councils are to be warned of the severest measures.

  (3) The Jewish councils are to take an improvised census of the Jews in their local areas – broken down if possible by sex (age groups): a) up to sixteen years of age, b) from sixteen to twenty years of age, and c) over, as well as by principal occupational groups – and are to report the results in the shortest possible time.

  (4) The Councils of Elders are to be informed of the dates and deadlines for departure, departure facilities, and finally departure routes. They are then to be made personally responsible for the departure of the Jews from the countryside.

  The reason to be given for the concentration of the Jews into the cities is that Jews have most influentially participated in guerrilla attacks and plundering actions.

  (5) The Councils of Elders in the cities of concentration are to be made responsible for appropriately housing the Jews moving in from the countryside.

  For general reasons of security, the concentration of Jews in the cities will probably necessitate orders altogether barring Jews from certain sections of cities, or, for example, forbidding them to leave the ghetto or go out after a designated evening hour, etc. However, economic necessities are always to be considered in this connection.

  (6) The Councils of Elders are also to be made responsible f
or appropriate provisioning of the Jews during the transport to the cities.

  No objections are to be voiced in the event that migrating Jews take their movable possessions with them, to the extent that this is technically possible.

  (7) Jews who do not comply with the order to move into the cities are to be allowed a short additional period of grace where circumstances warrant. They are to be warned of strictest punishment if they should fail to comply with this latter deadline.

  III

  On principle, all necessary measures are always to be taken in closest accord and cooperation with the German civil administration agencies and locally competent military authorities.

  In carrying them out, care must be taken that the economic security of the occupied territories not be impaired.

  (1) Above all, the needs of the army must be considered.

  For example, for the time being it will hardly be possible to avoid leaving behind some Jew traders here and there, who in the absence of other possibilities simply must stay for the sake of supplying the troops. In such cases, however, prompt Aryanization of these enterprises is to be sought and the emigration of the Jews is to be completed later, in accord with the locally competent German administrative authorities.