31. Lynn Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 313.
32. Nicholas, Cruel World, 313.
33. Reinhard Rürup, ed., Der Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, 1941–1945: Eine Dokumentation zum 50. Jahrestag des Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion (Berlin: Argon-Verlag, 1991), 67. For a detailed discussion of the Leningrad siege, see Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Twelve-year-old Tanya Savicheva is perhaps Russia’s most famous chronicler of the Leningrad siege. Tanya began keeping her brief “journal” during roughly the same period that Anne Frank commenced writing to her “Dear Kitty,” in early 1942. While the Russian youngster’s entries lack the length, elegance, and intricate detail of Frank’s more famous diary, they succeed by terse intensity in conveying the desperateness of the times. Tanya was born on January 25, 1930, the youngest child of a Leningrad baker, Nicolai Rodionovich Savichev, and his wife, Mariya Ignatievna, a seamstress. Savichev died when Tanya was six, leaving his wife to support their five children. When the siege began in September 1941, all family members but Mikhail, an elder son who had left Leningrad months earlier, helped to promote the city’s survival. Mariya Ignatievna sewed uniforms. Her son Leka worked as a planner in the admiralty office. Tanya’s elder sister Nina was enlisted to help in constructing and stabilizing the city’s defense lines, while sister Zhenya labored in a munitions factory. Uncles Vasily (Vasya) and Alexander (Lesha) manned antiaircraft defenses. Tanya herself, then only eleven, was put to work digging ditches.
In the late fall of 1941, as the siege tightened, Nina Savicheva was evacuated with other defense workers. Unaware of the measure, her family believed her dead. It was in memory of Nina that Tanya received her sister’s small address book in which to record her thoughts. Tanya had long kept a real diary, a thick leaf volume, but along with all the other books in the house, it had long ago been burned for fuel. Because it had once belonged to the “dead” girl, Nina’s address book was spared and would now serve as the basis for Tanya’s unusual journal.
Tanya Savicheva began making entries in her diminutive “diary” shortly after December 28, 1941, the day on which her sister Zhenya succumbed to severe malnutrition during her shift at the munitions plant. Thereafter the youngster noted the deaths of each family member throughout the terrible Leningrad winter and spring of 1942. On May 13, the day her mother died, Tanya presumably made the final three entries in her journal, noting that she was the last living member of her family. In August 1943, a students’ nursing brigade rescued Tanya, weak with hunger, from the family apartment. The young girl was then evacuated with other Leningrad children along the narrow lifeline carved out by the Soviet army that summer, to an orphanage in Krasny Bor, 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) away. Despite the best efforts of physicians and nursing staff, Tanya Savicheva died in the hospital on July 1, 1944, probably of chronic dysentery. At war’s end in 1945, Nina Savicheva, evacuated in 1941, returned to the family home in Leningrad and discovered Tanya’s writings. The diary contains only nine lines; the child was too weak to write more. The terse pages bear witness to the harrowing world of deprivation and death that children inhabited during the Leningrad siege.
Document 2-9. Diary of Tanya Savicheva, Leningrad, December 1941 to May 1942, courtesy of the Saint Petersburg Museum of History, Saint Petersburg, Russia (translated from the Russian).
Sheet 1: Zhenya died on December 28, 1941, at twelve noon.
Sheet 2: Grandma died on January 25, 1942, at three in the afternoon.
Sheet 3. Leka died on March 17, 1942, at five o’clock in the morning.
Sheet 4: Uncle Vasya died on April 13, 1942, at two o’clock at night.
Sheet 5: Uncle Lesha died on May 10, 1942, at four o’clock in the afternoon.
Sheet 6: Mama died on May 13, 1942, at 7:30 in the morning.
Sheet 7: The Savichevs are dead.
Sheet 8: Everyone is dead.
Sheet 9: The only one left is Tanya. [See sample page below.]
In territories controlled by German military or civilian administrations, indigenous resistance, in both organized and spontaneous forms, attempted to break the hold of the Nazi occupiers. German authorities reacted to the killing of German soldiers and occupation officials by guerrilla forces with brutal reprisals, often directed against innocent civilians. In the spring of 1942, trained volunteers of the Czech army in exile, aided by British armed forces, planned the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, acting Reich Protector of German-annexed Bohemia and Moravia. On May 27, 1942, Czech parachutist Jan Kubiš and his Slovakian counterpart, Jozef Gabčík,34 succeeded in hurling a bomb at the passing motorcade as Heydrich made his way from his living quarters at the villa Panenské Břežany to his headquarters in Prague. Heydrich, best known for his seminal role in planning the “Final Solution,” survived the attack but succumbed to infection on June 4, 1942. In the days immediately following the attempt on Heydrich’s life, Gestapo intelligence in the Protectorate erroneously linked the small Czech town of Lidice with the assassins.
34. SS and police discovered Jan Kubiš (1913–1942) and Jozef Gabčík (1912–1942) with several other resistance fighters on June 18, 1942, in the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodious in Prague. Kubiš died of wounds incurred in the firefight with police officials, while Gabčík and his comrades committed suicide in order to evade capture.
On June 9, the day of Heydrich’s state funeral in Berlin, Hitler ordered retaliatory measures against the Czech population. Services for the fallen Protector had scarcely ended when SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank,35 who held the positions of German state secretary (Staatssekretär) and higher SS and Police Leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, ordered units under SS-Standartenführer Horst Böhme36 to raze the small village of Lidice to the ground and to take a number of prescribed actions against its citizens.37
35. Czech authorities convicted and executed Karl Hermann Frank (1898–1946) in May 1946 for his role in organizing the massacres of the citizens of Lidice and Ležáky.
36. Following the retaliatory measures at Lidice, Horst Böhme (1909–1945) was transferred as a police attaché to Bucharest. From January 1943 through August 1944, he undertook the leadership of Einsatzgruppen B and C. He was last seen on April 1945 in the area of Königsberg; in 1954, a German court in Kiel officially declared him dead.
37. Less famously, the small Bohemian town of Ležáky (pop. forty-seven) was also included in the retaliatory actions. Most of the village’s adult inhabitants were shot to death, and the town, like Lidice, was razed to its foundations.
That very evening, German police and Schutzstaffel (SS) officials surrounded Lidice. Near midnight, the town’s five hundred residents learned that they must pack warm clothing, valuables, and food for three days and appear in the village square. Once the people had assembled, SS-men separated males over the age of fifteen from the townswomen and children. On the following morning, the village’s 173 men and boys were shot by firing squad on a farmstead on the outskirts of Lidice.38 Later that day, the women and children, who had spent the night in the local schoolhouse, were transferred to the nearby town of Kladno. “You know what has happened in Lidice,” a Gestapo official told the group, “and that is why you will spend some time in a camp. You women will travel by train; the children will be sent to you by bus because it will be more comfortable for them.”39 With few exceptions, the women of Lidice found themselves deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where most spent the balance of the war years. Of the 203 women, 60 died in the Nazi camp system prior to the end of World War II.
38. In all, 192 men and boys from the village were murdered in this and later shootings
in the vicinity of Lidice.
39. Unidentified female survivor of Lidice, quoted in Jolana Macková and Ivan Ulrych, eds., Fates of the Children of Lidice: Memories, Testimonies, Documents, trans. Elias Khelil (Nymburk: Lidice Memorial, 2004), 15.
Before the forcible separation of the townswomen from their children, the youngsters of Lidice endured a racial screening carried out by SS personnel. On the orders of Heinrich Himmler, officials of the organization Lebensborn (Fount of Life)40 ultimately chose nine children41 who possessed sufficient Germanic background or “appropriate racial features” to make them candidates for Germanization and placed them with adoptive German parents.42 At war’s end, Allied humanitarian agencies returned these children to their mothers or to other surviving family members in Czechoslovakia. Under the auspices of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (SS Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt), the remaining children of Lidice traveled by train to Łódź in occupied Poland. There they found themselves interned at a camp in the city’s Gneisenaustrasse, while German authorities awaited further instructions. Confined in an abandoned textile factory, the group, which included many small children, lived for several weeks, ill clothed, lice ridden, sleeping on the bare floor, and surviving on a bare minimum of black bread and water. On July 2, 1942, Security Police officials in Łódź took formal possession of the children, sealing their fates. It was presumably on this day or the next that German authorities asked the children to compose letters to surviving relatives in the Protectorate, instructing them to request that food, clothing, and other provisions be sent to them in Łódź. On July 3, 1942, the camp register noted the transfer of the children to an undisclosed location. At this point, they vanished without a trace. Historians strongly suspect that the eighty-two remaining youngsters from Lidice—including fifteen-year-old Marie Šroubková and her eight-year-old brother Josef—perished in the mobile gas chambers of Chełmno, the first killing center of the “Final Solution.”43
40. For a detailed discussion of the Nazi organization Lebensborn and its part in Nazi racial policies, see chapter 6.
41. Ten children were initially chosen from racial selections for “Germanization,” three in Kladno and a further seven when the remainder of the children arrived at the camp at Łódź. One of the children, Dagmar Veselá, who had been selected and later rejected for inclusion in the Lebensborn program, was sent to Łódź on a later transport and shared the fate of the other Lidice children.
42. NARA, RG 238, Office of U.S. Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, Doc, NO-4173, Heinrich Himmler to Max Sollmann (Lebensborn), re Lidice children, June 21, 1943.
43. See Macková and Ulrych, Fates of the Children of Lidice, 41; Isabel Heinemann, “Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut”: Die Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003).
Document 2-10. Letter of Marie (Maruška) Šroubková, c. July 2, 1942, in Jolana Macková and Ivan Ulrych, eds., Fates of the Children of Lidice: Memories, Testimonies, Documents, trans. Elias Khelil (Nymburk: Lidice Memorial, 2004), 36.
Dear Uncle and Auntie!
Regards and memories from Poland from Pepoušek44 and Maruška. We are all children here. Do you know of Daddy’s whereabouts?45 Do you know about Mommy?46 We would like to ask you to send us something. We have nothing but what we are dressed in. We need a lot. Please if you could send something for Pepoušek and me as well. Besides, I would need a couple of needles and a reel of w[hite] thread and a reel of b[lack] thread. We have got only one pair of shoes and one pair of stockings each here. On Saturday it will have been three weeks since we came here, and we have not changed clothes yet. And if you could send us also some German money—coins would be best—also notepaper, envelopes—and German stamps. Please speak to the Cˇicˇovskýs [and see] whether they could send us something too. I have sent them a letter too. We do not know how long we will stay here [. . .] but it is likely that we will stay long. Reply soon, with a detailed letter. If you would, also send us something to eat, we would appreciate it.
44. This is the Czech diminutive for Josef, the name of Marie Šroubková’s younger brother.
45. Josef Šroubek Sr. (1894–1942) was murdered in the Lidice massacre on June 10, 1942.
46. The elder Marie Šroubková (née Chalupová, b. 1914) was transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on June 12, 1942; there she was subjected to medical experimentation and murdered in September 1942. See Bärbel Schindler-Saefkow, Gedenkbuch für die Opfer des Konzentrationslagers Ravensbrück (Berlin: Metropol, 2005).
Please, I have just been told that I am allowed to write only one letter; could you show this letter to Grandpa and Grandma in Chýneˇ? I know they will feel sorry about it, but I cannot help it.
Yours,
Pepoušek and Maruška
[On reverse of postcard]
To Chýneˇ: Dear Grandpa and Grandma!
First, accept please the warmest regards and memories from Poland. Can you answer any of the questions on the other side? Please, if you could send Pepoušek a pair of stockings. And if you could send us two spoons, a comb, a towel, a pencil, and maybe some food. God bless you for this.
Yours,
Pepoušek and Maruška
The War’s Long Shadow: The Last Years of Conflict
In the winter months of 1944 to 1945, the population of the German-occupied Netherlands experienced a devastating famine. Following their successful landing on the coast of Normandy on D-day (June 6, 1944), Allied forces were able to drive into the Dutch interior, liberating the country’s southern provinces. The failure of Operation Market Garden,47 which halted western troops at the Rhine, effectively thwarted further Allied efforts to wrest northern and western regions of the Netherlands from German control until the very last days of the European conflict. A national railway strike, called by the Dutch government in exile in support of the Allied offensive, triggered a retaliatory German embargo on food provisions to the Dutch western provinces. By November, even as German administrators had lifted certain terms of the embargo, food resources in occupied areas were in short supply. A particularly harsh winter set in, further compounding the crisis, as frozen canals impeded barge traffic. As the deadly winter wore on, fierce fighting, now on Dutch soil, contributed to a further dislocation of the transport system; the destruction of agricultural lands, as well as German sabotage of locks and dams, which flooded arable areas, exacerbated the shortages. As the nutritional intake of the Dutch population plummeted to less than one thousand calories per day, city dwellers fanned out into the countryside to forage for fuel and foodstuff. In desperation, Dutch citizens ate tulip bulbs and sugar beets and destroyed vacant lodgings for firewood. Relief finally came in late April and early May of 1945, when Canadian, British, and American troops liberated the remnant of the Netherlands still in German hands. In the end, the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945 claimed the lives of eighteen thousand citizens.48
47. This was an Allied offensive of September 17–25, 1944, whose strategic purpose was to facilitate the crossing of the Rhine River, the last major natural barrier to an advance into Germany and into that nation’s industrial stronghold in the Ruhr Valley. The operation’s failure to capture the bridge at Arnhem formed the basis for the popular epic film A Bridge Too Far (1977).
48. See Henri A. van der Zee, The Hunger Winter: Occupied Holland, 1944–1945 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), esp. 304ff.
The well-known Dutch poet Bert Voeten (1918–1992) chronicled the months before Allied liberation in his only prose work, Doortocht: Een Oorlagsdagboek (Passage: A War Diary), published in 1946. Linked with the Dutch Resistance, Voeten was living on false papers in Heemstede, near Amsterdam, in 1944. Joining him in hiding was the writer and journalist Marga Minco (1920–), whose Orthodox Jewish parents had already been deported to the Auschwitz or Sobib
ór concentration camps. The only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, Minco would use her wartime experiences to transform her approach to writing, establishing herself as one of the Netherlands’ most important postwar authors with such powerful and laconic works as Bitter Herbs (Het bittere Kruid, 1957) and An Empty House (Een leeg huis, 1966). Minco and Voeten, a non-Jew, were able to legally marry at war’s end in 1945. In December 1944, their first daughter, Bettie, was born amid the catastrophic first months of the Hunger Winter. In his diary entry for December 12, Voeten contemplated the birth of a child in such harrowing and uncertain times.
Document 2-11. Bert Voeten, Doortocht: Een Oorlogsdagboek, 1940–1945, 4th ed. (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Contact, 1947), 198–99 (translated from the Dutch).
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