I expected her to reproach me. Instead she said tenderly, almost in a whisper, “Helka, I am so grateful that you are alive. Maybe there is a God after all!” I felt too miserable and ashamed of myself to answer. A few people stopped by for a brief moment to see if we had been spared and to tell us of the disasters that had befallen so many others. Almost all of those I cared about were gone; there would be no point in looking for them. Czuczka and Stach watched as I silently got ready to go. I could not bear the idea of saying good-bye to them at that public ghetto gate, and it was as if Czuczka had read my mind. “Let us part here,” she said, “not at the gate.” First I embraced Czuczka’s parents and brother. Then I turned to Stach. After a strong, almost desperate hug, he took my face into his hands, looked straight into my eyes, and said seriously, “Promise me always to be brave. Don’t ever give up. Ever!” I nodded, feeling a lump in my throat, and turned to Czuczka. I held on to her with all my strength. If I hurt her, she did not show it. I lost control and began to cry bitterly. I could not let go of her. I felt her body tremble, and she too began to cry openly—Czuczka, whom I had never seen weep before.
My mother’s hand was on my shoulder: “We must go. Surely you will see them again soon.” I did not believe her. I felt my mother did not believe herself. Inside me was a void, and with it came the strong conviction that I would never see any of them again. Still crying, I followed my mother into the street. When I turned, Czuczka and Stach were standing just as I had left them. Blinded by my tears and unable to make out their faces, I quickly wiped my eyes with the palms of both my hands, but just as quickly, before I had a chance to see them one last time, I turned away. My mother, with her shoulders stooped, walked in front of me. As we neared the ghetto gate, she lovingly reached for my hand. I was overcome by a wave of sad tenderness. Oh, Mama, how good it is to have you! I thought.
Majdan Tatarski, the Lublin ghetto, was behind me. I had spent less than two months there, but the time seemed longer. I had learned so much, made so many friends, received so much attention and love. It had been a period packed with meaningful impressions and events, and everything that had happened had touched me deeply. Perhaps it was the significance and fullness of life that made those few months seem to stretch out in memory as if they had been years.
Back in Lublin, no one worried about my well-being. Survival was the only consideration, and my parents were convinced that the factory was a good place to work. Everybody had enough food, and the treatment was humane. But we were not making the decisions; nor was the seemingly powerful and humane German director of the plant. I became friendly with a Polish chemist named Bronek and his wife, Genia, who lived in the house in the garden. Genia, in particular, enjoyed having me around. She liked to hug me and would say, “You are such a lovely child, not Jewish at all, not at all.” As I did not “look Jewish” and spoke Polish very well, I had a good chance of passing as a “hidden child” on the “Aryan side”; in addition, my parents had the means to facilitate our evading the German’s escalating anti-Jewish measures. In the early part of November 1942, Lublin was declared free of Jews (judenrein). Majdan Tatarski ceased to exist. Some of the ghetto inmates were murdered. Others were deported to concentration camps. Only a handful escaped. After my parents had acquired false papers, we moved to Warsaw in stages. There, we spent much of our energy on eluding the relentless Jewish persecutions. For safety we moved separately from place to place. In Warsaw the life-threatening situations prevented us from staying together for long. As most Jews, we had to change locations frequently to elude capture.
Because I could more easily pass for a Polish Catholic than the rest of my family, I often had to be separated from my parents and sister. I found these separations painful and refused to recognize that they were supposed to improve my chances of survival. Most Jews who tried to pass for Christian Poles were forced to change their living quarters often. By placing me with Poles who were willing to protect me, my parents felt that they were improving my chances of eluding the Nazis. Fortunately, after a number of life-threatening efforts, my father and mother found Polish rescuers who, for payment, offered them a more permanent place to reside. Officially my parents ceased to exist. For two years they never left their living quarters. My sister moved in with us. Protected by my “Aryan” looks and command of the Polish language, I had often stayed behind alone. For the final two years of the war, we did reconnect as a family in Kielce. My parents remained invisible. My sister and I appeared as nieces of the Polish family of laborers who protected us for payment. We were, in effect, supporting this Polish family.
Publications about the Holocaust refer to children who tried to survive by pretending to be Christian as “hidden children.” Two basic demands dominated our lives: relinquishing our Jewish identity and remaining silent. Complying with both, even temporarily, implied a rejection of our pasts. In part, this was also a denial of our religion. Most of us came from secular homes—Jewish Orthodox children hardly ever made it to the Christian world. And yet, religion assumed an important place in our lives. We knew that being Jewish had deprived us of our right to live. Being Jewish meant something bad, something for which we could be killed. Being Christian meant being protected. The difference between being Christian and being Jewish hinged on the approval of different kinds of Gods. Invariably, the question had to come up about the differences between these Gods. A God who could not even protect his children did not seem very trustworthy. Undoubtedly, the extent to which children followed this kind of reasoning depended on many factors: age, Christian protectors, and contact with both parents and other Jews.
We were disappointed in our God. We felt abandoned by Him. Yet, we needed consolation from a God, from a religion. Comforted by a new God who promised us acceptance and safety, we were in fact ready for that God. By saving us, this new God protected us from evil, and so we equated Him with goodness. Of the different Christian religions, Catholicism was particularly influential in the lives of the hidden children, partly for the simple reason that the vast majority of Poles are Catholic. Those of us old enough to realize what was happening welcomed Catholicism; those who were very young embraced it blindly. From the perspective of the Jewish child, baptism and Catholicism were positive forces. Each shielded him or her from danger. Each offered a feeling of security and comfort. However, this security required a certain proficiency and ability to learn the kind of behaviors required by the Catholic religion. We had to become well versed in the new religion. We had to know principles, prayers, and how to behave in church. We had to know which behavior was appropriate for each religious and nonreligious setting.
Inevitably, the influence of religion spilled over into the postwar lives of the hidden children. For them, their very survival proved that they had adjusted well to their roles as Christians. But at the end of the war, they were often asked to switch again. For many of us, the return to Jewish identity was a drawn-out process. Some never returned. Acceptance, hostility, ambivalence, resentment, shame, and regret were only some of the emotions we hidden children shared. Some of us may continue to harbor such feelings about our Jewishness, about our religion. At times mixed together, appearing and disappearing, these emotions are not surprising. We could not easily give up that which had helped us to survive. If being Jewish brought danger and disapproval, if it was something one could be killed for, why would a child want to take it back? Most of us felt conflicted about these issues. For a while, we were suspended between two worlds. Some of us could not reconcile them. Still others took a definite step toward Christianity or Judaism. Did becoming a part of two different worlds give us a broader, less prejudiced perspective on life, on people? Perhaps.9
9. See also Nechama Tec, “Conflicts of Identity,” The Hidden Child Newsletter 7, no. 1 (1997): 1–2.
Children represent the future. In the ghettos, women, bound by their special ties to children, continued to gravitate toward activities related to the young. But prec
isely because ghetto children promised a Jewish future, the Germans targeted them for annihilation, most visibly by prohibiting births. Under German rule, the laws and expectations regarding procreation and motherhood were diametrically opposed when applied to the Jewish women and to the “Aryan” German women. As chapter 6 of this volume, devoted to German racial hygiene policies, demonstrates, for “Aryan” German women, childbearing and child care were highly valued, promising imaginary and actual rewards. In sharp contrast, Jewish procreation and motherhood were defined as political threats. The severity of German opposition to Jewish children and to Jewish procreation varied with time and place. Humiliation, starvation, and the accompanying oppressions themselves diminished the chances of successful births. When occasionally pregnancies happened, to avert punishment, Jews often relied on abortions.
Dobka Freund-Waldhorn was one of the women caught in a web of conflicting orders and wishes: prohibitions against Jewish motherhood and a desire to give birth to a baby. Dobka came from a wealthy, Orthodox family of nine children. Her father, in particular, saw Dobka as an independent rebel. Even in her 1939 marriage to Julek Frohlich, a man she loved deeply, this father saw a form of resistance. Handsome, intelligent, and from a respectable family, Julek was deemed unsuitable because he was not Orthodox. The war and the opposition to Dobka’s marriage pushed the young couple to Vilna and from there into the Vilna ghetto. In Israel, in 1995, in Dobka’s comfortable home, at the end of a long interview, she invited me to come again because she wanted to share with me a secret she never talked about: a wartime pregnancy. Since I was leaving Israel the next day, the interview took place a year later. At that time I heard that when Dobka was transferred from the Vilna ghetto to a nearby estate, she realized that she was pregnant. By then Jewish women in Vilna were prohibited from having babies. Dobka’s husband and a Polish doctor at the estate pleaded with her to discontinue the pregnancy. She refused. In love with Julek, she wanted his child.
When she was seven months pregnant, as a concession to her husband, Dobka went to the ghetto hospital to learn firsthand about her options. Although sympathetic, the doctor in the ghetto hospital urged her to give birth and “to dispose” of the baby. Under the existing rules, unless she followed that advice, both she and her baby would die. The doctor accepted Dobka into the ghetto hospital and tried to induce delivery. In a restrained, almost artificial voice, Dobka said,
I stayed in the hospital, for a long time, maybe a month. They gave me medication to have the water move, but there was no birth. They increased the dosage. They did all kinds of things, but the child refused to be born. Eventually, I got a fever, high fever. I think that it was already the eighth month. Only then it happened. She was alive. They showed me the little girl. She was so beautiful. She looked just like my husband, and we were so much in love! Then, they took her away. . . . The doctor tried to console me, that I was young, that I will have other children, that this had to be. . . . My husband came to the hospital. He knelt next to my bed. . . . He took my hands into his, and he cried . . . terribly, terribly. “You will see, we will have children, there will be children.”10
10. Dobka Freund-Waldhorn, personal interviews conducted by the author, Kvar Shmariahu, Israel, 1995, 1996. See also Nechama Tec, Resilience and Courage: Women, Men and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 67–69.
With Julek Frohlich, there were no more children. He died in the Klooga concentration camp (in Estonia). After the war, Dobka remarried and gave birth to two sons. In the same, constrained voice, Dobka continued: “After the birth of my second son, with my second husband, I dreamt that my first husband, Julek, came to me. He looked very neglected, not shaved. ‘Where were you?’ I asked, ‘so many years? I have a husband and children.’ He answered, ‘Yes, but you will come back to me.’ In the dream I thought how could I go back to him? But to him I said, ‘I will come back to you.’ I woke up and found my pillow soaking wet from my tears.”11
11. See Nechama Tec, “Historical Perspective: Tracing the History of the Hidden Child Experience,” in The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust, ed. Jane Marks (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), 273–91. Marks’s book is a collection of memoirs written by Jewish child survivors.
Childbearing and child rearing are universally cherished traditions. Hence these anti-childbearing German prohibitions created havoc within Jewish communities, especially among potential and actual parents. Significantly, the intricately close mother-child connections, by themselves, took a heavy toll upon potential and actual mothers of young children. In the end, these German measures resulted in startling differences between young single women and mothers. Beyond the direct German killing of Jewish mothers and their young offspring, Jewish mothers often experienced the terrible pain of watching their children starve to death or witnessing their brutal murder. Many reports about parents, and more particularly mothers, marvel at the ingenuity and courage with which they tried to protect their young, born and unborn.
Pregnancy as a prelude to life compelled some Jewish women toward life-threatening decisions. At one time, when Zwia Rechtman roamed the Polish countryside alone, searching for a resting place, she heard that her mother had been denounced and murdered. This intelligent and resourceful woman was arrested in the office of a Polish gynecologist to whom she had turned for help. Zwia was convinced that this physician had betrayed her mother when she asked him to abort her pregnancy. Jewish mothers with children often faced insurmountable obstacles. Even though most of them preferred to stay with their children, they were willing to separate if doing so promised the child’s survival. Sometimes Gentile rescuers agreed to keep a child but not the mother.
Indeed, ten at the time, Zwia Rechtman recalls in an interview conducted in 1995 how she and her mother had to move from one place to another begging for shelter. Rarely were they kept for more than a few days. Then, one winter night, when the two were resting in a cold attic, the peasant giving them shelter asked them to leave. This daughter recalled with pain how her intelligent and proud mother begged the peasant to let Zwia stay. In the end, the woman agreed to keep the starved and half-frozen girl. Zwia was not sure whether her acquiescence was promoted by pity, money, or both. When I asked how she felt about staying there, I heard Zwia say, “I don’t know if I wanted to stay or not. The situation was such that if she wanted to keep me, I should have stayed. Of course, I didn’t know that I will never see my mother again. . . . Till the present, I cannot say good-bye to anyone! [Zwia cries]. . . . When mother left, the woman asked me to come into the house. [. . .] There was only one small room in the entire place. I don’t even remember who else was there. I wasn’t even thinking if that peasant was nice or not. She was very, very poor. [. . .] But this arrangement did not last.” In a little while, Zwia had to leave.12 She received sporadic help from a variety of Poles. Eventually exhausted by the many changes, with the help of one of her protectors, Zwia decided to volunteer, pretending to be a Pole, for work in Germany. She survived the war as a Polish laborer in the German countryside.
12. Zwia Rechtman, personal interview conducted by the author, Tel Aviv, Israel, 1995. Born in 1927 in Niedrzwica Duża in the Lublin district of Poland, of her five-member family only Zwia survived. Her interview was permeated with admiration for and pain about her mother, whom Zwia continues to miss. She had a family of her own that she valued and loved. A capable and fine individual—for Zwia the loss of her mother is a painful reminder that she continues to deplore deeply.
In trying to understand the Holocaust as it relates to Jewish children, the meaning of motherhood, and death, we cannot ignore the diversity of findings. The assaults upon Jewish children and their parents varied with time and place. As the war drew to a close, persecution against Jews and their rescuers became more stringent. In eastern European countries, more so than western ones, German opposition to motherhood and Jewish children had perilous implications. As the
Germans lost the war at the front, they seemingly became more obsessed with winning the war against the Jews. Concretely, this meant that the attacks against all and any Jews became more severe.
Margot Draenger was one of the rare women who did not take into consideration the hardships associated with motherhood. Born in 1922 in Berlin, Margot was deported to Poland with her Polish-born parents in 1938. The family relocated to Kraków, then was forced into the Kraków ghetto. There, Margot met and married Jurek Draenger. At the end of 1943, the young couple was in hiding in a bunker in Bochnia, near Kraków. Jurek Draenger, familiar with this area and its many forests, was very resourceful. He knew who among the local peasants had sheltered Jews. For a while, the young Draengers stayed at a farm owned by a widow, Hanka Berota, who protected them without pay. The couple shared a small, damp, dark hiding place with Margot’s father and uncle. They were denounced twice. Each time the police failed to find their hideout. Food and money were scarce. At night, Jurek would sneak out to steal whatever he could find in fields and unguarded barns. Their protector was barely able to feed her two young children.
Children during the Holocaust Page 4