Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  Then Blobel ordered me to have the children shot. I asked him, “Who should carry out the shooting?” He answered, “The Waffen SS.” I objected. I said to him, “These are all young men. How are we going to answer to them if we make them shoot small children?” To this, he said, “Then take your men.” Again I said to him, “How can they do that? They also have little children.” This tug-of-war lasted about ten minutes. . . . I suggested that the field commander’s Ukrainian militia should shoot the children. There were no objections from either side to this suggestion . . . ;

  I went out to the woods all alone. The Wehrmacht had already dug a pit. The children were brought along in an all-terrain military vehicle. I had nothing to do with these technical arrangements. The Ukrainians stood around trembling. The children were taken down from the [vehicle]. They were lined up along the edge of the pit and shot so that they fell into it. They were hit wherever they were hit.35 They fell into the pit. The wailing was indescribable. This scene I will never forget as long as I live. I [still] find it very hard to bear. I particularly remember an experience I had with a small blond-haired girl who took me by the hand. She was shot later too. [. . .] Some of the children were hit four or five times before they died.

  35. By this, Häfner means that the Ukrainian commando, apparently intimidated by the age of the children, did not aim carefully at their victims.

  Document 3-12. A young mother with her two young children waits with other Jews from Lubny at an assembly point before their murder, c. April 1942, USHMMPA WS# 83014, courtesy of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung.

  “We’ve Been Picked Up”: Roundups and Deportations

  The note was written hastily on a small slip of paper. Several months after Nazi authorities began deporting German Jews from the Reich to ghettos and concentration camps in the East, agents of the Berlin Gestapo had come to collect young Klaus Scheurenberg and his mother, Lucie. Sixteen-year-old Klaus left a quickly scrawled message for his father on the kitchen table, notifying him that the pair had been rounded up and could be found at the collection camp (Sammellager) for Jews awaiting deportation in Berlin’s Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse. This was not the first time that Klaus and Lucie Scheurenberg had been picked up by the Gestapo or that the family patriarch, Paul Scheurenberg, would be able to wrest his family members from the grasp of deportation officials.

  The elder Scheurenberg had served the Jewish community through their social welfare agency, the Jewish Winterhilfe (Winter Relief Organization), throughout the late 1930s. As Gestapo authorities regularly compelled officials of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany to assist in deportation measures, Paul Scheurenberg received a summons in November 1942 to help organize transports of Berlin Jews at a collection point in the Levetzowstrasse. There he worked distributing food to hapless deportees as they awaited processing and stored their baggage for the journey east. His forced service in the deportation of his own community weighed heavily upon him. Scheurenberg’s one consolation was that his loathsome responsibilities granted his immediate family a stay from deportation. Several times he had freed his wife and son from internment in the Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse, and although he had not been able to prevent initial measures against his newly wed daughter, Lisa, and her husband, technically a separate household, he had, with the help of a sympathetic SS officer, been able to retain them at the collection camp indefinitely, staving off the threat of immediate deportation.36

  36. The couple was eventually transferred in 1943 to Theresienstadt and in 1944 to Auschwitz, where both perished in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival.

  Luck ran out for the family in May 1943, when Gestapo agents came at last for the Scheurenbergs at their home in the Elsässer Strasse. As Paul Scheurenberg had been a veteran of World War I, the family was deported to Theresienstadt, where young Klaus Scheurenberg became so proficient in carpentry that, in August 1944, he was transferred to a detachment of Jewish artisans assigned to build evacuation headquarters for the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) 60 kilometers (37.3 miles) outside Berlin. Camp officials promised that the Jewish workmen and their immediate households would be spared from deportation to killing centers. Although tendered in order to reduce the chance of flight among workmen at the thinly guarded worksite, this measure meant that sixteen-year-old Klaus effectively replaced his father as the family’s benefactor. Klaus Scheurenberg and his parents survived the war. From 1981 until his death in 1990, Scheurenberg served as chairman of the Berlin Society for Christian-Jewish Relations.37

  37. For a complete discussion of the Scheurenberg family, see Christian Dirks, “‘Traurige Erlebnisse aus der Nazi-Hölle Deutschland’: Zum Schicksal der Familie Scheurenberg,” in Juden in Berlin, 1938–1945: Begleitband zur gleichnamigen Ausstellung in der Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin, ed. Beate Meyer and Hermann Simon (Berlin: Philo Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000), 204–13.

  Document 3-13. Note of Klaus Scheurenberg to his father, Paul Scheurenberg, c. 1942, Scheurenberg collection, Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin–Centrum Judaicum, CJA 614 Nr. 8.

  Papa!

  Have been picked up. Come to the Gr.[oss]-Hamburger[-Strasse] immediately.

  Klaus and Mama.

  Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, Nazi authorities began to prepare the deportation of Jews in France and other western European countries occupied by Germany. Securing the cooperation of the French government in Vichy, German officials aided by French police conducted roundups of Jews in both occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. As regional policy dictated that these initial deportation convoys from France carry only adult Jews to the East, these razzias literally rent families apart, as parents, grandparents, and elder siblings were separated from younger children at collection points and at French or German assembly camps. By the autumn of 1942, some forty-two thousand Jews had passed through the Drancy transit camp on the outskirts of Paris. Nearly one-third of these individuals came from unoccupied France. A significant percentage of these were foreign or stateless Jews, sacrificed by the Vichy government in a vain attempt to spare France’s indigenous Jewish population. The final destination of these deportees was Auschwitz, where the vast majority was gassed upon arrival.38

  38. See Serge Klarsfeld, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942–1944: Documentation of the Deportation of the Victims of the Final Solution in France (New York: Beate Klarsfeld Foundation, 1983); Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, trans. Nathan Bracher (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press in association with University Press of New England and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001).

  Among those caught in the roundups in Vichy were members of the Gumpel family from northern Germany. In August 1937 Gertrud Gumpel had left Hamburg with her young children, Felicitas and Thomas, to join her husband and eldest son, Kurt, in Antwerp. In the months before the German invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands, businessman Berthold Gumpel succeeded in emigrating to the United States, but as his prospective employer had issued the visa to him alone, he had had to leave his family, now settled in Brussels, behind. With the German occupation of Belgium in May 1940, Gumpel, in New York, frantically sought to secure the necessary travel papers for his wife and children, without success. As the Nazi persecution of Belgian Jews escalated, Gertrud Gumpel decided to undertake a dangerous venture: to journey with her children across southern France in an attempt to reach Portugal, where her husband’s business associates might help her arrange a passage to America. The desperate gamble failed, and the small family fell into the hands of Nazi authorities, who interned them.

  On July 14, 1942, thirteen-year-old Felicitas Gumpel, nicknamed Fee, wrote a letter to her grandmother from Drancy advising her that her mother, Gertrud, and eighteen-year-old brother, Kurt, had been taken away to another camp
. Writing awkwardly in German, for she had only had a few years of formal schooling in Hamburg before fleeing to Belgium, Fee attempted to calm the elderly woman’s fears about the fate of her daughter and grandchildren. The brief lines added by her eleven-year-old brother, Tommy, as a postscript reveals the children’s true sense of loss and despair. On July 20, 1942, Gertrud and Kurt Gumpel departed France on a convoy to Auschwitz, where they perished. By late summer, local exigencies had convinced French authorities to alter their policy in favor of including juveniles in deportations to the East. On September 23, 1942, Felicitas and Thomas boarded Convoy 36 from Drancy to Auschwitz, where they shared the fate of their mother and brother.39

  39. See Gert Koppel, Untergetaucht: Eine Flucht aus Deutschland (Westermann: Braunschweig, 1999).

  Document 3-14. Letter of Felicitas and Thomas Gumpel, July 14, 1942, in Reiner Lehberger and Ursula Randt, eds., “Aus Kindern werden Briefe”: Dokumente zum Schicksal jüdischer Kinder und Jugendlicher in der NS-Zeit (Hamburg: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg Behörde für Schule, Jugend und Berufsbildung, 1999), 52–53 (translated from the German).

  July 14, 1942

  Dear Grandma,

  Now don’t be shocked about the newest thing that I have to tell you: this morning Mama and Kurt were taken away with others to work. But they are staying in France, they are still in Tours in order that they will be examined [by a doctor]. Those that are sick40 will come back here. We children all remained here and are in good hands; they are taking good care of us. We have good things to eat, better than normal anyway: cookies, bread with butter, etc. We even sleep at night with a family that Mama had befriended before; they are very kind to us. At nine-thirty we must all assemble again in our barracks, and then we will get to hear news; I hope good news. Just don’t excite yourself too much; this is all only for the time being. Share this letter with the entire family, because I cannot write to everyone. It is very sad in the camp, because only the old men and women are here. They each have a suitcase a piece and 200 francs and a comforter, a thick one from us. This evening we haven’t heard any more [news]. I must close for today. Many, many greetings and kisses,

  40. The translator has attempted to reflect Fee Gumpel’s imperfect German in the text.

  Your Fee

  Dear Grandma,

  With this news I think I have cried as never before, but this is how it is, so [many] fathers gone from their children, mothers gone from their children. I write these lines with tears in my eyes. Many greetings and kisses,

  Your Tommy

  Document 3-15. Lissy Asser, a young girl from Göttingen, waits with other German Jews at a deportation point in Hildesheim, c. March 1942. Lissy, her parents, and a younger brother are believed to have been murdered in Treblinka, USHMMPA WS# 69635, courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Hildesheim.

  While Nazi authorities and their indigenous collaborators carried on their efforts to deport Jews from German-occupied central and western Europe, the fate of Romanian Jewry lay in the hands of Germany’s Axis allies. Approximately one-half of Romania’s prewar Jewish population of 756,000 perished in the Holocaust. As a result of territorial changes realized during the course of World War II, 150,000 Romanian Jews living in northern Transylvania fell under Hungarian jurisdiction. In 1944, Hungarian authorities deported this population, along with other Hungarian Jews, to Nazi concentration camps and killing centers, where 135,000 were murdered. Some forty-five to sixty thousand Jews living within wartime Romanian borders were killed by Romanian and German forces in the regions of Bessarabia and Bukovina in the summer and fall months of 1941.41 Most remaining Jews from these areas were deported in 1941 to the so-called Transnistrian Reservation, within a newly created Romanian military district established from recently acquired Soviet territory between the Bug and Dniester rivers. Terrible atrocities often preceded these deportations, such as the infamous Iasi Pogrom (June 28 to July 2, 1941), in which as many as thirteen thousand Jews were murdered in cold blood or died of starvation, dehydration, or suffocation aboard the infamous “Death Trains” that carried the surviving Jews of Iasi to other parts of the province.

  41. See Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2000); “Executive Summary” in Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (Bucharest: International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, 2004).

  Transnistria was a deathtrap for the 155,000 Jews and 25,000 Roma driven to remote areas by Romanian authorities. Thousands died en route of hunger, thirst, exposure, and maltreatment. Once the deportees reached their destination, Romanian officials took little responsibility for feeding and sheltering them. Interned in ghettos and camps, thousands fell victim to mass shootings and epidemics of typhus and other diseases. Starvation, forced labor, and abuse shaped deportees’ daily lives. Between 105,000 and 120,000 Romanian Jews and 11,000 Roma died as a result of the expulsions to Transnistria.42

  42. Final Report, 3. The reservation was also a killing site for indigenous Jews. Scholars estimate that between 115,000 and 180,000 Jews living in the area of the newly formed Transnistria were murdered, especially in Odessa and in the counties of Golta and Berezovka.

  Among those Jews deported from Bessarabia were ten-year-old Iser Franghieru and his family. Placed in a Hehalutz43 orphanage after the war, the teenager shared his wartime experiences in the Transnistria with a social worker from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

  43. This international youth organization was founded in 1921 in Warsaw. Dedicated to the Zionist ideal of reestablishing a Jewish homestead, the Hehalutz organized professional training courses for European Jews as they prepared to leave for Palestine and create kibbutz settlements there. In the ghettos of German-occupied eastern Europe, Hehalutz cells maintained their structure, and the organization’s members formed the activist core of fighters in ghetto uprisings and the Jewish partisan units. In the postwar period, it was instrumental in encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine.

  Document 3-16. Vita of Iser Franghieru, Hehalutz Orphanage, September 12, 1947, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, USHMMA RG 25.001, American Joint Distribution Committee, Case Files of Romanian Orphans.

  Iser Franghieru

  Among the crowd of children, inmates of the Hehalutz, Bucharest, home for Transnistrian orphans, it is rather easy to discern the tall figure of this young fellow, and the warm smile permanently fluttering on his face.

  Iser Franghieru is a boy of Hertza, where he was born on February 12, 1931. His father, Haim Leib, the shoemaker, died when Iser was only a baby.

  In 1941 the ten-year-old child followed his mother and a married sister with her husband and two children over the Dniester into deportation, in a convoy formed at Edinetz.

  “We marched whole days and nights, through rain and knee-deep mud as far as Casauti forest. There we halted for the night. I was terribly cold and shivering. The first snow flakes of winter were falling and the next dawn revealed among the trees in the snow several hundred dead hard frozen by the frost.”

  The others resumed their trudge, eyes fixed on the ground. All moaned with pain, many fell. Of these some died immediately as they fell, others were helped to death by the gendarmes.

  “All the road was strewn with corpses. I saw many children fall with little streams of blood oozing from their mouths. Mother covered my eyes to stop me from seeing so many dead.”

  The convoy crossed the Dniester, then marched through Jampol and towards evening halted one kilometer [0.6 miles] off Obodowka.

  “The whole night was spent in a stable, but only after the first hour you stepped44 on the dead bodies of those who succumbed to hunger and weariness. Dead and alive were robbed by those who drove us.”

  44. This word is misspelled as “s
tipped” in the original. The author of the document, typing for Joint records, made many similar typographical errors in the text. To aid the reader, they have been corrected in this manuscript.

  The next day in a crowd of 283, they were sent to labor on a farm at Dubina. All were huddled for the night in a stable.

  Before long the continual hunger began to tell on the mother. She suffered, and the child ran out one afternoon to beg by all means some food for his mother. On his return towards evening, it was too late. She had died. Transportation of the dead was allowed for full cartloads only. So the dead body lay for three days with the living until twelve corpses were completed [collected]. The deportees worked hard and long hours and were too scantily fed, so mortality was great. The boy’s brother-in-law died, a child of his died, and out of the 238 which [sic] set out, only seventy-six were left in the end.

  The dead were buried under the dung heap and covered with snow. But in spring the pigs unearthed heads and limbs from the rotten bodies.

  Left alone with his married sister and one of her children, the boy did all he could to get them some food. He toiled in the fields, sold off the remnants of the rags they had left, begged, and at last watched a herd of swine. Of the food for his charge he too could have his fill, and when he managed to save some for his relatives there was jubilation in the stable.

  But one day, new hope surged in the weakened hearts of the survivors. Iser had sighted a group of partisans.

  He was repatriated in 1944. For three months in Iasi, then at Baarlad, now in Bucharest. Here the Hehalutz movement supervises a home exclusively supported by JDC [the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] for Transnistrian orphans. Iser enjoys young life in it and attends the ORT45 technical courses, likewise supported by JDC. He does very well and is particularly good at draughtsmanship. His plans for the near future are to become an efficient mechanic and then emigrate.