Voices from the Holocaust

by Jon E. Lewis

  During one such operation I was kneeling by the turn-table holding on to it with all my strength so that the truck might roll on smoothly. But, my hands being unsteady, I failed to set the turn-table exactly in line with the track, which resulted in the empty truck jumping rails as it rattled back from the oven. I felt a sharp pain in the little finger of my right hand and saw that I was bleeding. This wound nearly frightened me out of my wits. I vaguely remembered being told about ptomaine poisoning as a child. Quickly I tore a piece out of my sweaty shirt and tried to bandage my wound. At that moment nothing else seemed to matter; my mind was completely preoccupied with the wound. And then Stark appeared. He was annoyed about the derailed truck and began to hit me. I screamed with pain. Then, making one last and desperate effort, I jumped up and helped to put the truck back on to the track. Of one thing I was quite sure: any failure on my part to comply would have meant instant death.

  When all six ovens were loaded, we returned to our job of stripping corpses. I worked with the greatest of care, anxiously trying to prevent my wounded finger from coming into contact with a dead body. Stark was standing in the doorway from where he could observe both rooms. My wound continued to bleed and had already soaked through my emergency bandage. Thus it happened that a little blood spilled on an undergarment just as Stark was standing near me. He noticed it at once and, raising his horsewhip, he shouted at me: ‘You there, go and poke the stiffs, and be quick about it!’ Although I quite failed to grasp what precisely it was he wanted me to do, I ran instinctively into the cremation room where I looked round completely at a loss. And then I saw Fischl: he walked up to one of the ovens and, lifting a flap in the lower half of the oven door, he proceeded to poke about inside the oven with a long fork. ‘Come on, grab hold of this,’ he whispered, ‘poke the fork in and rattle it about, it’ll make them burn better. Quick, or he’ll kill you.’ I grabbed this devil’s tool and used it as Fischl had shown me, poking about among the burning disintegrating corpses as though I was poking a coal fire with a poker.

  The powers that be had allocated twenty minutes for the cremation of three corpses. It was Stark’s duty to see to it that this time was strictly adhered to. All at once, while I busied myself with my ghoulish task, three prisoners started to scurry around crazily in front of the ovens. They had refused to go on working and were trying to dodge Stark’s blows. In the end they flung themselves on the concrete floor and, crawling on their bellies before him, implored him for pity’s sake to finish them off with a bullet. Stark drove them into the room where the corpses lay and ordered them to get on with their work. But once again they threw themselves on the floor: they were beyond caring. Stark went purple with rage. His hand clutching the horsewhip was raised to come down on them in yet another vicious blow when suddenly he stopped short and simply said venomously: ‘Just you wait, you lazy bastards, you’ve got it coming to you!’ Then without another word he returned to the cremation room where he could be heard issuing orders.

  When all six ovens were working, Stark hustled us next door to strip more corpses while he stayed behind in the cremation room. Meanwhile, pretending all the time to be working hard, I was trying desperately to gather new strength. Among the dead bodies I discovered our three fellow prisoners. Although they were still breathing, they were lying quite still, all their physical energy and the spiritual will to live drained out of them. They had given up.

  I, on the other hand, had not yet reached that point of despair. Of course, I had no illusions: I knew with certainty that a dreadful end awaited me. But I was not yet ready to capitulate. The more menacing death grew, the stronger grew my will to survive. My every thought, every fibre of my being, was concentrated on only one thing: to stay alive, one minute, one hour, one day, one week. But not to die. I was still young, after all. The memory of my parents, my family and my early youth in my home town had faded. I was obsessed and dominated by the determination that I must not die. The heap of dead bodies which I had seen and which I was made to help remove only served to strengthen my determination to do everything possible not to perish in the same way; not to have to lie under a heap of dead bodies; not to be pushed into the oven, prodded with an iron fork and, ultimately, changed into smoke and ashes. Anything but that! I only wanted one thing: to go on living. Sometime, somehow, there might be a chance to get out of here. But if I wanted to survive there was only one thing: I must submit and carry out every single order. It was only by adopting this attitude that a man was able to carry on his ghastly trade in the crematorium of Auschwitz.

  To Wear the Yellow Star or Not? The Dilemma of a Parisian Student, 7–8 June 1942

  HELENE BERR

  With the German invasion of Norway, Denmark, France and the Low Countries in April–May 1940 hundreds of thousands more Jews had become caught in the Nazi net. The first deportation of French Jews to the camps in the East occurred on 27 March 1942. Jews left behind were subject to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and their refinements. Berr was a student at the Sorbonne.

  It was scorching hot when I left. I took the 92 bus. At Mme Jourdan’s I met [...] and we talked about the meaning of the insignia. At that point I was determined not to wear it. I considered it degrading to do so, proof of one’s submission to the Germans’ laws.

  This evening I’ve changed my mind: I now think it is cowardly not to wear it, vis-à-vis people who will.

  Only, if I do wear it, I want to stay very elegant and dignified at all times so that people can see what that means. I want to do whatever is most courageous. This evening I believe that means wearing the star.

  But where will it lead?

  Monday, 8 June

  This is the first day I feel I’m really on holiday. The weather is glorious, yesterday’s storm has brought fresher air. The birds are twittering, it’s a morning as in Paul Valéry. It’s also the first day I’m going to wear the yellow star. Those are the two sides of how life is now: youth, beauty and freshness, all contained in this limpid morning; barbarity and evil, represented by this yellow star.

  I was very courageous all day long. I held my head high, and I stared at other people so hard that it made them avert their eyes. But it’s difficult.

  In any case most people don’t even look. The awkwardest thing is to meet other people wearing it. This morning I went out with Maman. In the street two boys pointed at us and said: ‘Eh? You seen that? Jew.’ Otherwise things went normally. In place de la Madeleine we ran into M. Simon, who stopped and got off his bicycle. I went back to place de l’Etoile on the métro on my own. At Etoile I went to the Artisanat to get my blouse, then I went to catch the 92. At the stop there was a young man and woman in the queue, and I saw the girl point me out to her companion. Then they exchanged some remarks.

  Instinctively I raised my head – in full sunlight – and heard them say: ‘It’s disgusting.’ There was a woman on the bus, probably a maid, who had smiled at me in the queue, and she turned round several times to smile at me again; a well-groomed gentleman stared at me. I couldn’t make out the meaning of his stare, but I returned it with pride.

  I set off again for the Sorbonne. Another working-class woman smiled at me on the métro. It brought tears to my eyes, I don’t know why. There weren’t many people about in the Latin Quarter. I had nothing to keep me busy at the library. Until 4.00 I whiled away the time with dreams, in the cool air of the reading room, in the brownish light seeping in through closed shutters. At 4.00 Jean Morawiecki came in. It was a relief to be able to talk to him. He sat down in front of my desk and stayed until closing time, chatting or saying nothing. He went out for half an hour to get tickets for Wednesday’s concert. Meanwhile Nicole S. turned up.

  When everyone had left the reading room, I got out my jacket and showed him the star. But I could not look him in the eye, so I took the star off and put in its place the tricolour brooch which I used to hold it in my buttonhole. When I looked up, I saw that this had touched his heart. I’m sure he hadn’t realized. I was afraid that
our friendship might suddenly be shattered or diminished. But afterwards we walked together to Sèvres-Babylone and he was very sweet. I wonder what he was thinking.

  Hélène’s father, managing director of Etablissements Kuhlmann, was interned in Drancy on 23 June 1942; he was released against a ransom but required to perform his job without coming into contact with the public. On 8 March 1944, Hélène and her parents were arrested in their Paris apartment and transferred to Drancy. All three died during their incarceration by the Nazis; Hélène herself was beaten to death in Bergen-Belsen while suffering from typhus just five days before the camp was liberated by the British. To the Nazis she was a routine Jew; they never discovered that she had been an active member of L’Entraide Temporaire, a clandestine network dedicated to saving Jewish children from deportation.

  Diary of a Dutch Girl in Hiding, Netherlands, 9 July 1942–29 October 1943

  ANNE FRANK

  In 1942 the German-born Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam. Also in the ‘Secret Annexe’ were the three members of the Van Pels family (called by Anne the van Daan family), and later Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel). Anne Frank was thirteen when she first went into hiding. ‘Kitty’ is the name she gave her diary, in pretence that it was an imaginary friend

  Thursday, 9 July 1942

  Dearest Kitty,

  So there we were, Father, Mother and I, walking in the pouring rain, each of us with a satchel and a shopping bag filled to the brim with the most varied assortment of items. The people on their way to work at that early hour gave us sympathetic looks; you could tell by their faces that they were sorry they couldn’t offer us some kind of transport; the conspicuous yellow star spoke for itself.

  Only when we were walking down the street did Father and Mother reveal, little by little, what the plan was. For months we’d been moving as much of our furniture and apparel out of the flat as we could. It was agreed that we’d go into hiding on 16 July. Because of Margot’s call-up notice, the plan had to be moved forward ten days, which meant we’d have to make do with less orderly rooms.

  The hiding place was located in Father’s office building. That’s a little hard for outsiders to understand, so I’ll explain. Father didn’t have a lot of people working in his office, just Mr Kugler, Mr Kleiman, Miep and a twenty-three-year-old typist named Bep Voskuij, all of whom were informed of our coming. Mr Voskuijl, Bep’s father, works in the warehouse, along with two assistants, none of whom were told anything.

  Here’s a description of the building. The large warehouse on the ground floor is used as a workroom and storeroom and is divided into several different sections, such as the stockroom and the milling room, where cinnamon, cloves and a pepper substitute are ground.

  Next to the warehouse doors is another outside door, a separate entrance to the office. Just inside the office door is a second door, and beyond that a stairway. At the top of the stairs is another door, with a frosted window on which the word ‘Office’ is written in black letters. This is the big front office – very large, very light and very full. Bep, Miep and Mr Kleiman work there during the day. After passing through an alcove containing a safe, a wardrobe and a big stationery cupboard, you come to the small, dark, stuffy back office. This used to be shared by Mr Kugler and Mr van Daan, but now Mr Kugler is its only occupant. Mr Kugler’s office can also be reached from the passage, but only through a glass door that can be opened from the inside but not easily from the outside. If you leave Mr Kugler’s office and proceed through the long, narrow passage past the coal store and go up four steps, you find yourself in the private office, the showpiece of the entire building. Elegant mahogany furniture, a linoleum floor covered with rugs, a radio, a fancy lamp, everything first class. Next door is a spacious kitchen with a water-heater and two gas rings, and beside that a lavatory. That’s the first floor.

  A wooden staircase leads from the downstairs passage to the second floor. At the top of the stairs is a landing, with doors on either side. The door on the left takes you up to the spice storage area, attic and loft in the front part of the house. A typically Dutch, very steep, ankle-twisting flight of stairs also runs from the front part of the house to another door opening on to the street.

  The door to the right of the landing leads to the ‘Secret Annexe’ at the back of the house. No one would ever suspect there were so many rooms behind that plain grey door. There’s just one small step in front of the door, and then you’re inside. Straight ahead of you is a steep flight of stairs. To the left is a narrow hallway opening on to a room that serves as the Frank family’s living-room and bedroom. Next door is a smaller room, the bedroom and study of the two young ladies of the family. To the right of the stairs is a ‘bathroom’, a windowless room with just a sink. The door in the corner leads to the lavatory and another one to Margot’s and my room. If you go up the stairs and open the door at the top, you’re surprised to see such a large, light and spacious room in an old canalside house like this. It contains a gas cooker (thanks to the fact that it is used to be Mr Kugler’s laboratory) and a sink. This will be the kitchen and bedroom of Mr and Mrs van Daan, as well as the general living-room, dining-room and study for us all. A tiny side room is to be Peter van Daan’s bedroom. Then, just as in the front part of the building, there’s an attic and a loft. So there you are. Now I’ve introduced you to the whole of our lovely Annexe!

  Yours, Anne

  Thursday, 25 March 1943

  Dearest Kitty,

  Mother, Father, Margot and I were sitting quite pleasantly together last night when Peter suddenly came in and whispered in Father’s ear. I caught the words ‘a barrel falling over in the warehouse’ and ‘someone fiddling with the door’.

  Margot heard it too, but was trying to calm me down, since I’d turned white as chalk and was extremely nervous. The three of us waited while Father and Peter went downstairs. A minute or two later Mrs van Daan came up from where she’d been listening to the radio and told us that Pim had asked her to turn it off and tiptoe upstairs. But you know what happens when you’re trying to be quiet – the old stairs creaked twice as loud. Five minutes later Peter and Pim, the colour drained from their faces, appeared again to relate their experiences.

  They had positioned themselves under the staircase and waited. Nothing happened. Then all of a sudden they heard a couple of bangs, as if two doors had been slammed shut inside the house. Pim bounded up the stairs, while Peter went to warn Dussel, who finally presented himself upstairs, though not without kicking up a fuss and making a lot of noise. Then we all tiptoed in our stockinged feet to the van Daans on the next floor. Mr van D. had a bad cold and had already gone to bed, so we gathered around his bedside and discussed our suspicions in a whisper. Every time Mr van D. coughed loudly, Mrs van D. and I nearly had a nervous fit. He kept coughing until someone came up with the bright idea of giving him codeine. His cough subsided immediately.

  Once again we waited and waited, but heard nothing. Finally we came to the conclusion that the burglars had taken to their heels when they heard footsteps in an otherwise quiet building. The problem now was that the chairs in the private office were neatly grouped around the radio, which was tuned to England. If the burglars had forced the door and the air-raid wardens were to notice it and call the police, there could be very serious repercussions. So Mr van Daan got up, pulled on his coat and trousers, put on his hat and cautiously followed Father down the stairs, with Peter (armed with a heavy hammer, to be on the safe side) right behind him. The ladies (including Margot and me) waited in suspense until the men returned five minutes later and reported that there was no sign of activity in the building. We agreed not to run any water or flush the toilet; but since everyone’s stomach was churning from all the tension, you can imagine the stench after we’d each had a turn in the lavatory.

  Incidents like these are always accompanied by other disasters, and this was no exception. Number one: the Westertoren bells stopped chiming, and I’d always found them so co
mforting. Number two: Mr Voskuijl left early last night, and we weren’t sure if he’d given Bep the key and she’d forgotten to lock the door.

  But that was of little importance now. The night had just begun, and we still weren’t sure what to expect. We were somewhat reassured by the fact that between eight-fifteen – when the burglar had first entered the building and put our lives in jeopardy – and ten-thirty, we hadn’t heard a sound. The more we thought about it, the less likely it seemed that a burglar would have forced a door so early in the evening, when there were still people out on the streets. Besides that, it occurred to us that the warehouse manager at the Keg Company next door might still have been at work. What with the excitement and the thin walls, it’s easy to mistake the sounds. Besides, your imagination often plays tricks on you in moments of danger.

  So we went to bed, though not to sleep. Father and Mother and Mr Dussel were awake most of the night, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I hardly got a wink of sleep. This morning the men went downstairs to see if the outside door was still locked, but all was well!

  Of course, we gave the entire office staff a blow-by-blow account of the incident, which had been far from pleasant. It’s much easier to laugh at these kinds of things after they’ve happened, and Bep was the only one who took us seriously.

  Yours, Anne

  P.S. This morning the toilet was clogged, and Father had to stick in a long wooden pole and fish out several pounds of excrement and strawberry recipes (which is what we use for toilet paper these days). Afterwards we burned the pole.