Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  27. The word “Aryan” derives from Sanskrit. Since ancient times, Persians (the peoples of modern-day Iran) have used the term Aryan as a racial and ethnic designation to describe their lineage, language, and culture. Indeed, the name “Iran” is a cognate of “Aryan” and means “land of the Aryans.” In linguistic terminology, “Aryan” refers to a subfamily of the Indo-European languages, and before the term’s adoption and perversion by National Socialist ideologues, it was employed to describe the parent language of the Indo-European language family. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linguists and ethnologists began to argue that speakers of the Indo-European languages constituted a distinct race, separated in the racial hierarchy from the Semitic peoples (i.e., Jews).

  The history of the Roman Empire is the history of Rome. Its march of destiny leads from the Latin patrician state to the national state and climaxed with world empire. The founders of the Roman state [were] the Indo-Germanic and Nordic peasant peoples. The healthy growth from city-state to national state advanced mainly through the constant foundation of farming settlements, which was first made possible by the great reproductive capacity [Kinderreichtum] of the peasant families and the gens.28 For centuries, the vitality of the Roman people, built upon peasant foundations, maintained its ascendancy. With the further expansion of the empire beyond the borders of Italy, friction slowly developed between those peoples who, no longer tied to the soil, followed the advance of expansion—together with nonfarming peoples engaged in trade—and those of a Nordic hereditary disposition whose innate drive for expansion of ethnic territory functioned through a strategy of colonization. These two opposing impulses, which developed side by side contemporaneously, we can clearly perceive in Rome’s political actions, but to explore specific examples would take us too far afield from our subject matter. After the greatest and most difficult wars which Rome had to fight, after the war against Carthage, the foundation of the state, its peasant class, was almost completely [decimated]29; the racial core of the population was most gravely affected. Now the greatly enervated foundation of peasant stock succumbed to the geopolitical laws of a world power, with all of the consequences inherent in racial transformation. With the riches from every land streamed into Rome also masses of peoples of foreign race. A mercantile spirit and a dissolute culture, introduced from other religious practices, also permeated deeply into political life. The newly established class of great landholders adopted from Carthage the plantation farming economy, with thousands of slaves. The peasantry was completely undermined, both racially and economically. While the Romans’ hereditary character, as well as their political forms and prototypical works, would have great impact for hundreds of years to come, the old vitality of the Roman Volk, with its origins in the race, began slowly to erode, until their world empire was overrun by Germanic tribes. [. . .]In conclusion, let us look within the confines of contemporary history and the present. Can we not here clearly see the results and consequences of racial mixing? We have only to compare North and South America. While in South America, the predominantly Latin European settlers have for the most part mingled with the aboriginal inhabitants, the largely Nordic population of North America has interbred very little with the lowly colored peoples.30 The results that must arise from these circumstances we see before us. The racial makeup and culture of South America are clearly different from that in North America; the racially pure Germanic has become the lord of the American continent, and will remain so as long as he does not degenerate by defiling his blood.

  28. These were Roman patrilineal clans comprising families with the same stock in the male line, sharing a common family name and worshipping a common ancestor.

  29. This word is obscured in the original.

  30. Today this reference would be viewed as pejorative.

  In September 1935, in the midst of the seventh annual Nuremberg party rally, Nazi leaders promulgated the so-called Nuremberg racial laws, which historians view as a central feature of the acceleration of legislated discriminatory measures in Nazi Germany. The first, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor (Blood Protection Law) (Gesetz zum Schutze des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre, or Blutschutzgesetz), imposed bans upon marriage and extramarital relations between German Jews and German “Aryans,” thus providing a legal basis for the punishment of Rassenschande (“race defilement”), or miscegenation. The second piece of legislation, the Reich Citizenship Law (Reichsbürgergesetz), created a new status for “Aryan” Germans, “Reich citizen,” upon which all political and civil rights in Germany would be based. Jews were denied most integral civil rights, possessing only Staatsbürgerschaft (state citizenship), a status that suggested they were now subjects, not citizens. Ancillary ordinances provided a legal definition for “Jewishness” based on confessional, as well as biological, terms.31

  31. See Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2003); Cornelia Essner, “Die Nürnberger Gesetze” oder die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns, 1933–1945 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 2002); Lothar Gruchmann, “Blutschutzgesetz und Justiz: Zur Entstehung und Auswirkung des Nürnberger Gesetzes vom 15. September 1935,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 31 (1983): 418–42; Otto Dov Kulka, “Die Nürnberger Rassengesetze und die deutsche Bevölkerung im Lichte geheimer Stimmungs- und Lageberichte,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 32 (1984): 582–624; Abraham Margaliot, “The Reaction of the Jewish Public in Germany to the Nuremberg Laws,” Yad Vashem Studies 12 (1977): 75–107.

  Artist Irene Spicker Awret lives today in Falls Church, Virginia. In the summer months of 1935, fourteen-year-old Irene lived with her parents in a comfortable middle-class district of Berlin, where she dreamed of becoming a painter. Although the escalating discriminatory legislation had persuaded the secular teenager to take increased pride in her Jewish heritage, the regime’s antisemitic measures had had limited practical impact upon the young girl’s life: the demeanor of her teachers and classmates had not yet altered, and best friend Tutti Mahlow “did not care that [she] was Jewish.”32 The two girls spent hours together, playing, studying, and reciting the plays of Goethe and Schiller. With the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws, however, Irene’s world changed dramatically. Lifelong friendships extinguished overnight, and the girl who had once hidden her childhood illnesses from her parents in her eagerness to go to school now hated the classroom lectures in history and ethnology (Volkskunde), which were punctuated with antisemitic rhetoric and Nazi propaganda. With the Nuremberg Laws came a heightened sense of discomfort and anxiety for Germany’s Jews, both young and old. For young Irene Spicker, in those difficult days before her family left Germany for Belgium in 1939, art seemed her only stable refuge.33

  32. Irene Spicker Awret, They’ll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist’s Coming of Age in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), 78.

  33. Irene Spicker (1921–) fled from Berlin to Belgium in 1939, where she remained in hiding for several years. Arrested in 1943, she continued to draw while confined to a Gestapo prison in Brussels. Her artwork attracted the attention of Gestapo officials, who ordered her transfer to an art workshop at the Mechelen (Malines) transit camp. There Spicker avoided deportation and fell in love with fellow prisoner-artist Azriel Awret. The couple married soon after their liberation from Mechelen in September 1944.

  Document 1-5. Irene Spicker Awret, They’ll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist’s Coming of Age in the Third Reich (Madison, WI/Takoma Park, MD: University of Wisconsin Press/Dryad Press, 2004), 88.

  Shortly after returning from my vacation trip, the Nuremberg Laws were published, making mixed marriages unlawful and punishing sexual intercourse between Jews and “Aryans” with hard labor.34 At the same time we were demoted from citizens to subjects. To top it all, my friend Tutti Mahlow dropped me like the proverbial hot potato. I should try to understand, she said, sounding ver
y considerate—her father was a magistrate, her sister had to think of her fiancé’s career. In the space of a day, we went from being good friends to classmates who politely greeted each other from a distance. It was more humiliating than having to sit through one of Doctor Kadner’s ethnology courses. Though he was a good teacher of French and geography, and had a doctorate from the Sorbonne, the Nazi bacillus seemed to have softened his brain. More and more often he arrived in class wearing his brown S.A. uniform, giving the “Heil Hitler” salute as if from a grandstand, and proclaiming the planned geography lesson had been changed to ethnology. For forty-five minutes I would try to concentrate on a drawing so as not to have to listen to Doctor Kadner’s description of the characteristics of sub-species such as Negroes and Jews, mainly of Jews. On the blackboard, he wrote in neat rows: “kinky hair,” “flat feet,” “receding forehead,” “obesity.” Then he strode to my bench at the back of the class, praising my drawing. My teacher’s conduct toward me remained correct and friendly, the unspoken agreement of my dispensation from the “German greeting,”35 extending to ethnology. While he taught his revolting antisemitic drivel, I continued to sit in the back of the class drawing.

  34. Persons convicted of Rassenschande (“race defilement”) typically received a prison sentence; during the war years, such a crime might warrant the death sentence or internment in a concentration camp without trial.

  35. This was Heil Hitler, the Nazi salutation that often replaced such greetings as “good day” in common conversation.

  “I Decide Who Is a Jew”36

  36. This saying, later attributed to various Nazi leaders, was first spoken by Karl Lueger (1844–1910), the antisemitic Christian Socialist mayor of Vienna.

  On March 12, 1938, German troops marched into Austria. A long tradition of sentiment in both countries favored a unification of the two German-speaking lands, particularly in truncated Austria after World War I. Although the Treaty of Versailles and that of St. Germaine37 specifically forbade such a union, a pan-German nation represented a political goal of many disparate interest groups in both states, including the National Socialist Party. Supported by the Hitler government, the Austrian Nazi Party, which had been illegal since 1933, staged a coup on March 11, 1938, the eve of the German invasion, in part to preclude a national referendum on Austro-German unification. The so-called Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria into Germany, proceeded formally on March 13, 1938, and received the enthusiastic support of most of the Austrian population.38 In the days and weeks following these events, German anti-Jewish legislation was extended to what came to be called the Ostmark, and Vienna and other centers of Jewish life in Austria became sites of brutal and spontaneous antisemitic violence.39 For Austria’s 192,000 Jews, some 4 percent of the general population, the spring and summer months of 1938 played out in nightmarish scenes of physical violence, appropriation of private property, and public humiliation. Eighteen-year-old Walter Grab,40 from a Viennese middle-class family, learned two valuable lessons from his own encounter with local Nazi zealots in this context. For him, the events of the spring of 1938 demonstrated what many Jews in Germany did not yet comprehend and would first grasp in the wake of Kristallnacht: that Jews could no longer count themselves safe from the escalating anti-Jewish measures of regional and national authorities or from the sometimes violent wrath of the local antisemitic population, many of whom were their neighbors. Second, Grab began to understand that grassroots antisemitism was neither logical nor rational and that familiarity could breed both contempt and salvation.

  37. The Versailles Treaty officially ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied powers in World War I, while the Treaty of St. Germaine-en-Laye represented peace terms between the Allies and the new Republic of Austria.

  38. See Evan Burr Bukey, Hitler’s Austria: Popular Sentiment in the Nazi Era, 1938–1945 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

  39. See Hans Safrian and Hans Witek, Und keiner war dabei: Dokumente des alltäglichen Antisemitismus in Wien, 2nd ed. (1938; Vienna: Picus Verlag, 2008); Evan Burr Bukey and F. Parkinson, eds., Conquering the Past: Austrian Nazism Yesterday and Today (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989; Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men, trans. Uta Stargardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010).

  40. Walter Grab (1919–2000) emigrated to Palestine in 1938. He became a prominent historian of Germany, researching the democratic trends prevalent before German unification in 1870 and writing extensively on the history of German-Jewish emancipation. As a professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv, Grab founded that university’s Institute for German History in 1971.

  Document 1-6. Walter Grab, “The Jews are Vermin Except for My Jewish Schoolmate Grab,”41 in “Niemand war dabei, und keiner hat’s gewußt”: Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die Judenverfolgung, 1933–1945, ed. Jörg Wollenberg (Munich: Piper, 1989), 45–50 (translated from the German).

  41. In German, “Die Juden sind Ungeziefer, ausgenommen mein jüdischer Schulkamerad Grab.”

  On the afternoon of April 25, 1938, after six weeks of Nazi rule in Austria, I was on my way home. Not far from our apartment there was a Jewish gymnasium [Turnheim] in the basement of the house at 20 Liechtensteinstrasse. As a child of seven or eight, I had often exercised there. As I neared this building, I was halted by a number of Nazis who had formed a column and were wearing armbands and swastikas. One of them called to me, “Are you a Jew?” As I answered in the affirmative, he dragged me to the building where the gym hall was and ordered me down the cellar stairs. [. . .] In this anteroom of the gymnasium, I saw some twenty to twenty-five Jews, whom the Nazis had assembled and forced into a corner of the room. A Nazi sent me over there as well. The large gymnasium and also this antechamber were—you must pardon the expression—completely covered in shit. The floors and even the walls were completely plastered with excrement. It stank to high heaven. Here, in my estimation, an entire regiment of SA or SS or some other kind of Nazis had relieved themselves, and clearly right before they began to gather Jews together here; the excrement was still very fresh and moist. Apart from the Jews, there were fifteen or twenty Nazis in the changing room. Behind me there were more Jews being forced down the cellar steps, so that there were thirty-five or forty of us in all—only males. For the Nazis, this was enormous fun. They amused themselves tremendously because they could vent their anger on these helpless and perplexed Jews whom they had chased into this excrement-covered gymnasium. They laughed and shouted at us for ten or fifteen minutes, and mocked us because we were afraid. Finally, one of them stepped forward and said, “You Jews have left us this filthy gymnasium. Jewish gyms are so dirty! Once again one can see how filthy Jews are! And now you have to lick it up!” What does one say when one is delivered into the hands of such barbarians, who seem to have human faces? Nothing. We stood there silently. We had been delivered up to them and imagined now that anything could happen. But they were just making a joke. They had devised a way to humiliate and humble the Jews. This was not an ordered action, like the pogrom of November 9 [Kristallnacht], in which Jewish businesses were plundered and the homes of Jewish citizens demolished. No, this was mob amusement. I am not sure if such “fun” took place in other cities, but in Vienna it did. We were completely at the mercy of the arbitrary whims of these Nazis. And they found it so hilarious that we huddled together in terror. How could one lick up this Nazi excrement?

  And then one of them shouted, “Okay, let’s get started. To work!” And several Jews actually tried to scrape together the excrement with their hands and to throw it in the bathroom toilets. But it was impossible. At the best one could only smear the excrement around. It wasn’t possible to clean the dressing room and gymnasium in this way. The Nazis laughed and jeered at us, but finally one of them brought us a shovel, a broom, a waste can, and a couple of tow
els, and we turned the water faucet on. But for this type of cleaning one needed a fire hose. I took one of the towels—had a burning fear of being beaten in this cellar by these Nazis and tried to crawl after the other Jews and throw the excrement into the toilets. The whole thing lasted a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes, during which time we tried to obey the Nazi orders. We were not very successful. And while I squatted and bent, so that in my terror, I would hide my fright as much as possible, I lift my eyes, and my glance meets unequivocally the glance of one of these laughing Nazis, standing around with the swastika armband on his brown shirt. And I recognized him immediately. It was a [former] schoolmate of mine from the Volksschule. [. . .] He had even once eaten next to me, had played in the schoolyard with me. His name was Lichtenegger. That I will never forget.

  And this former schoolmate Lichtenegger saw me and recognized me, even as I had recognized him. This recognition was uncomfortable for him and embarrassing. I saw that in an instant; I sensed that he did not want to humiliate me, a Jew whom he knew, but an anonymous Jew, the Jewish bogeyman of the National Socialist racial madness. “The Jew” was a vermin that one crushed underfoot, that one must destroy, but schoolmate Grab, whom he had known as a fellow creature, that he didn’t want. These were his thoughts, which I comprehended in a split second, as our eyes met. And I got up, threw down my towel, and went over to Lichtenegger, while the other Jews tried to wipe the mess away. In my broadest Viennese dialect, I said, “Look here, Lichtenegger, you know me, get me outta this.” He looked down at the ground, [. . .] tore a piece of the edge of a newspaper, and wrote on it, “This Jew can go.” Apparently he had a little authority, was some kind of low-level leader of these Nazis. After he wordlessly handed me the piece of paper, I went to the cellar stairs, said to the Nazi on guard there, “Lichtenegger said I can go,” and revealed the scrap of paper. Then I ran up the stairs, showed the paper to the Nazi before the door, and ran home as fast as my legs could carry me.