Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  These considerations pose a number of difficulties to the collector of sources concerning children during the Holocaust. This volume represents a very small selection from among the wealth of materials concerning the fate of children during the Nazi era; yet, a close examination of such documentation reveals that only a fraction of these contemporary sources were actually created by children. In part, the physical circumstances of persecutees and victims of war are responsible for this dearth of materials. Resettlement, deportation, and incarceration in concentration or forced labor camp settings imposed formidable obstacles for both adults and children who wished to record accounts of their experiences. The lack of writing instruments and especially paper hampered children’s efforts to depict what happened to them and their parents. Other reasons for the lack of children’s sources lies in the very nature of childhood and young adolescence. Children generally did not, and do not, generate as much written material as their adult contemporaries. With certain exceptions, children do not engage in the same amount of private and public correspondence as their parents do; they do not, in the main, write studies, monographs, or letters to newspaper editors or author administrative files or legal documents. Furthermore, persecutory polices in German- and Axis-occupied countries often prevented school-age youngsters from acquiring the education necessary to read and write, thus depriving them of the intellectual capacity to record their experiences. There is a marked imbalance between sources created by young children and those stemming from older youngsters and adolescents, which this volume reflects. Most of the childhood diaries, letters, and drawings available to us from the Holocaust period came from young people in their preteen or teenaged years. Of course, very young children without the appropriate skill sets to write or draw had no chance to document their thoughts and feelings. Particularly for these youngsters, accounts by adult parents, relatives, or caretakers are the only sources we have to testify to their young lives. These voices often restrict our insight, for not even the most sensitive or perceptive adult can capture the full range of a child’s experiences, hopes, and anxieties.6

  6. See, e.g., Bela Weicherz, In Her Father’s Eyes: A Childhood Extinguished by the Holocaust, ed. and trans. Daniel Magilow (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

  Using the varied sources available to us, this volume forms a narrative weaving historical documentation with contextualization by the author. Its chapters have been developed thematically to articulate the wide variety of children’s experiences during the Holocaust. The majority of these deal with young Jewish victims and follow the chronological arc of persecution from discrimination to deportation, ghettoization, and incarceration and murder in the vast Nazi concentration camp system. The last two chapters of the book cover issues of resistance and rescue of Jewish youngsters and the experiences of surviving young Jewish victims at liberation and in the immediate postwar period. Chapters 2 and 7 examine Jewish and non-Jewish children as victims of war and as targets of racial hygiene (eugenic) policy, respectively. Chapter 7, “The Lives of Others,” stands out in this collection in that it addresses the experiences of youngsters growing up as “Aryans” in Nazi Germany. Chapter 8, “The World of the Child,” also deviates from the chronological progression of the work in order to explore the ways in which youngsters coped with their menacing world through study, play, and creative endeavors. In each chapter, the historical documents have been printed in a distinct format to distinguish them from the explanatory text. They have been reproduced, and translated where necessary, to correspond as faithfully as possible to their original version both in form and content. Emphasis on words or phrases by the original author or authors of the document has been highlighted here by underlining the relevant portion. In places where the document could not be printed in its entirety, ellipses ([. . .]) have been inserted to mark omissions in the text. In some places, always clearly delineated by footnotes in the text, the surnames of victims and their families have been anonymized or replaced by pseudonyms to protect the privacy of these individuals.

  A number of names, places, events, and organizations appear in boldface throughout this volume when they are mentioned for the first time in a chapter. This indicates that readers can find further information on these highlighted terms in the glossary at the end of the volume. Using the rich resources of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s library and archives, I have attempted to provide brief information concerning the lives and fates of individuals discussed in this book. Some of this data appears in the glossary and some of it in the footnotes to the documents and explanatory texts. Regrettably, it was not always possible to find biographical information on every individual named in these pages. A bibliography at the end of the volume offers readers the opportunity to explore the topics discussed in this book in greater depth.

  Finally, it gives me great pleasure to thank the many individuals who made this volume possible. I am grateful to our donors, the Blum Family Foundation and the Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus Fund for the Study of the Fate and Rescue of Children in the Holocaust, for their generous support, which proved crucial to the fruition of this project. Series editor Jürgen Matthäus offered scholarly direction and was a voice of calm reason during the vicissitudes of production and publication. He and project manager Mel Hecker provided careful and conscientious editing and saw that the transition from draft to publication went smoothly and efficiently. Researcher Greg Wilkowski helped me enormously with reference work for this volume, while Ryan Farrell undertook the thorny task of securing rights with patience and tenacity. Jan Lambertz continuously plied me with new source materials and bibliographical references. Doris Bergen (Toronto), Jochen Böhler (Jena), and Beate Meyer (Hamburg) provided me with many useful suggestions and references to documents that are reprinted in this book. Sara Horowitz (Toronto) and Judy Gerson (New Brunswick) reviewed an early version of the manuscript, providing helpful insights for revision and commentary on its use as a source edition for classroom teaching. Nechama Tec (Connecticut), in addition to authoring the volume’s introduction, shared valuable advice and suggestions at every stage of writing. I am profoundly grateful to Louise Lawrence-Israels, Rabbi Jacob Weiner, and Robert Ehrenreich for sharing with me materials and firsthand accounts concerning their experiences or those of their family members during the Holocaust. At AltaMira Press, thanks are in order to Marissa Parks, Elaine McGarraugh, Jennifer Kelland, and Kim Lyons for their dedication to this project.

  I am indebted to so many of my wonderful colleagues at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Paul A. Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, has provided unwavering support for the staff’s scholarly endeavors, including the production of this volume. The personnel of the museum’s library; film, photo, and textual records archives; and its collections division have been enormously helpful in securing documents, photographs, and other sources. Special thanks are due to my colleagues Michlean Amir, Vadim Altskan, Bill Connelly, Judy Cohen, Radu Ioanid, Marc Masurovsky, Nancy Hartman, Teresa Pollin, Vincent Slatt, and Anatol Steck for making me aware of an interesting collection, an important artifact, or a fascinating document that I might have otherwise overlooked. Within the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, staff historians Martin Dean, Emil Kerenji, Geoffrey Megargee, and Leah Wolfson shared with me their knowledge and experiences gleaned from their efforts for the center’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Jewish Responses to Persecution. I am also grateful to my supervisor, Senior Historian Peter Black, for the breadth of his historical knowledge and for his enduring support of this project; thanks also to our interns Elissa Frankle, Johannes Breit, Lukas Lang, Philipp Selim, Emily Utzerath, and Anna Ullrich, who, when deadlines loomed, generously undertook some of my usual tasks to free my time for writing.

  I owe a very personal debt of gratitude to my family: to Jim Rice, who endured long-winded descriptions of each new find I made in the library or archive and who read several
iterations of this manuscript; and to Diane Heberer: may every child have such a kind and loving parent. My very last thanks go to our museum’s survivor volunteers, many whom of were child survivors of the Holocaust and who have been a daily source of inspiration to me as I wrote this volume. This work is dedicated to them.

  Patricia Heberer

  Washington, DC, 2010

  Abbreviations

  AJDC, AJJDC, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee

  JDC, the Joint

  BDMBund Deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls)

  BdSBefehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (commander of the Security Police and SD)

  DPdisplaced person(s)

  GestapoGeheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)

  HIASHebrew Immigrant Aid Society

  HJHitlerjugend (Hitler Youth)

  ICRCInternational Committee of the Red Cross

  ITSInternational Tracing Service

  KLVKinderlandverschickung (literally, “transfer of children to the countryside”)

  KZKonzentrationslager (concentration camp)

  NARANational Archives and Records Administration

  NSDAPNationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party)

  NSVNationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization)

  ORTObshestvo Remeslenofo zemledelcheskofo Truda (Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor)

  OSEOeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (Children’s Aid Society)

  Pg.Parteigenosse (party comrade)

  POWprisoner of war

  RKFDVReichskommissariat für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of German Ethnicity)

  RMReichsmark

  RSHAReichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office)

  RuSHARasse- und Siedlungshauptamt

  SASturmabteilung (Storm Division or Storm Troopers)

  SDSicherheitsdienst (Security Service)

  SSSchutzstaffel (Protective Squadron)

  UNRRAUnited Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

  USHMMUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

  USHMMAUSHMM Archives

  USHMMPAUSHMM Photo Archive

  YIVOYidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Jewish Scientific Institute)

  Introduction

  by Nechama Tec

  As a Holocaust scholar and child survivor, I welcome Dr. Patricia Heberer’s essential publication about children during the Holocaust. I am convinced that the crimes committed against children are the most shocking and least understood injustices against humanity. As we try to unravel the mysteries of these crimes, we inevitably turn to Poland, the largest Jewish community in Europe and the prewar home of roughly 1 million Jewish children. In part because of my personal experiences, I concentrate in this introduction on the Holocaust in Poland and its effects on the fate of Jewish children in order to highlight some specific features of this book’s intriguing topic.1

  1. This text draws on my earlier publications, particularly Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).

  My Holocaust research is guided by the assumption that a concentration on the extreme inevitably promotes our understandings of less acute circumstances. From the perspective of the Third Reich, what did the presence of Jewish children mean? It appears that there was a dual and contradictory perception of Jewish children as they were seen as at once useless and potentially threatening. They were useless because children could not contribute to the German economy. They were threatening because, as future adults, these children would inevitably undermine the purity of the “Aryan” race. Eventually, and more certainly, as adults, these former children would want to avenge the crimes committed against their ancestors. Even in cases where Jewish children were considered useful for exploitation, their ultimate fate seldom differed. Historical evidence consistently shows that when the Germans faced decisions that required choosing between racial and economic advantages, racial calculations usually trumped considerations of economic utility.2

  2. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939; Vol. 2: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997, 2007).

  Historical documentation concerning the fate of Jewish children during the Holocaust is at the same time extensive and limited. German perpetrators generated many of the sources that survived the war, but these often offer dry statistics or general references to the execution of what came to be called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” These documents shed at best a pale light on the suffering of victims, and clearly they show no empathy even for the most innocent and vulnerable among them. But even the most cursory reference in German documents to underaged targets of mass annihilation is historically important. In the course of events that formed the Holocaust, the systematic murder of Jewish children marked the passing of the threshold toward genocide. In the summer of 1941, just weeks after the Third Reich commenced its war of annihilation against the Soviet Union, traces of the “Final Solution” began to appear in reports and letters written by Germans who were involved in or witnessed the wave of mass executions sweeping across the occupied area. A member of a German police battalion wrote home to his family in the Reich, “The Jews are free game. [. . .] One can only give the Jews some well-intentioned advice: bring no more children into the world. They no longer have a future.” In early August 1941 he noted, “Last night 150 Jews from this village were shot, men, women, and children, all killed. The Jews are being totally eradicated.”3 In perpetrator documents, Jewish children, like adult Jews, appear only as logical targets in a process of “cleansing” German-dominated territory; yet, as the murders of the children in Byelaya Tserkov (Documents 3-9 through 3-11) demonstrate, what transpired in the ghettos and at the killing sites in eastern Europe depended as much on local conditions and decisions on the ground as on directions from Berlin.

  3. Quoted from Christopher R. Browning with Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln/Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press/Yad Vashem, 2004), 260–61.

  What do we learn from listening to the voice of a child attesting in the early postwar period to the criminality of the German regime? The time is 1945 to 1946. The name of the child survivor is Ala Openheim; she is from Poland. What she shares she calls “A Horrible Experience,” recollections of her escape from persecution as an eight-year-old. She wrote these lines in an orphanage in Pieszyce (formerly called Pietrolesie, located in Lower Silesia):

  With the approaching New Year, my past returns to haunt me. This past forces me to revisit portions of my wartime experiences. These are memories which I cannot forget. They had penetrated into the depths of my existence, towering over my entire soul. They cannot and ought not to be forgotten! Horrible, horrible . . . !

  A dark night. The city is engrossed in a deep sleep. The city is in a state of complete silence. Here and there, desperate people fly by, actually already not people but shadows of people. They run to hiding places to become invisible to the SS men. This means that I, my mother and my sister were among them. Nevertheless, nothing helped us. We fell into the hands of the oppressors. The hands of these bandits were beating us in a horrible way. They were pushing us into the prison. They forced us into a cell in which there were many people like us. Many who resembled us, in darkness, in dampness, in horrible hygienic conditions of cleanliness. We sat there for two weeks. Patience was bursting with impatience. Our fate was anyway predetermined. This fate was hanging over us. In the same camp I stayed in were my father and my brother. They were not locked up. Here and there, they would approach our barred windows.r />
  One time, in the middle of the night I asked my astonished father for a hammer. Father refused to grant my request, but my brother, exposing himself to death, brought me a large German hammer. It was very dark. The prison was surrounded by SS men. Without giving it much thought, I banged the bars, everything hit the ground with a big crash. I, an eight-year-old child jumped out in a nightgown through the opening in the window. The Germans shot after me, but I escaped. Bullets were whizzing past my head, but I did not stop. I imagined that someone was calling me, screaming, “Escape, escape!” Behind me I heard steps. Someone was running, but no one could have guessed who. My little sister ran after me. It was terribly cold. This was December. We were barefoot and in nightgowns. We ran in an unknown direction, petrified, unconscious through the streets of the little town. Where to? We had no idea.

  Here we were: two little orphans! We sat down next to a gate. Our frozen feet refused to obey. Sitting like that, we realized that we were all alone. Our mother had not succeeded in running away with us. Remembering that we had abandoned our mother, we forgot about the freezing cold. We forgot that we were almost naked. The snow kept falling, covering us. Exhausted, leaning on the gate of the house, we wondered if happy children, in clean beds, had lived and slept there. Also wondering if such children had mothers, we fell asleep.4

  4. Testimony by Ada Openheim, 1945/46, ŻIH 301/2215 (my translation from Polish).

  Postwar recollections by child survivors are crucial because they open a window onto a past otherwise closed to us. At the same time, a combination of factors—children’s lack of perspective at the time of persecution, the impact of trauma, and later transformations in memory—may blur our comprehension of the concrete circumstances and causal connections of events that are remembered. No doubt, postwar accounts by child survivors are indispensable to our understanding of what happened to children, their families, and their communities. At the same time, we must acknowledge especially the limits—or, rather, the complexities—of young children’s recollections in our attempt to reconstruct the harrowing history of the Holocaust.