Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  45. Established in Russia in 1880, the Jewish self-help organization Obshestvo Remeslenofo zemledelcheskofo Truda (The Society for Trades and Agricultural Labor) still provides occupational training to Jewish communities around the world.

  Document 3-17. Iser Franghieru in a Bucharest orphanage, c. 1947, USHMMPA WS# 01827, courtesy of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

  Throughout the early 1940s, the National Socialist regime and its allies succeeded in destroying most of the Jewish communities within their jurisdictions. Yet, incredibly, in 1944 in the heart of central Europe, one large national community of Jews remained largely intact. Hungary’s Jewish population numbered approximately 825,000. Four hundred thousand of these individuals lived in Trianon Hungary,46 together with several hundred thousand Jews living in regions acquired by the regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy after 1938. A further one hundred thousand people in these areas were classified as Jews by the Hungarian racial laws. Hungary’s Jews faced harsh discriminatory measures beginning in 1938. After 1940, further legislation compelled all able-bodied Jewish males of draft age to perform forced labor. Working under brutal conditions without adequate food, shelter, or medical care, at least twenty-seven thousand perished before the German forces occupied Hungary in March 1944.

  46. This refers to the traditional Hungarian borders minus those crown lands ceded in the Treaty of Trianon following World War I.

  And yet, even as their coreligionists all over Europe perished in the Holocaust, members of Hungary’s Jewish community continued to survive. Most Hungarian Jews had been spared deportation prior to the German occupation because Nazi German leaders were unable to control the internal policies of their Hungarian allies. Confident after the German defeat of Stalingrad in 1943 that Nazi Germany would ultimately lose the war, Hungarian prime minister Miklós Kállay,47 with the tacit approval of Admiral Horthy, sought to negotiate a separate armistice with the Western powers. In order to preclude these events, German troops moved to occupy Hungary on March 19, 1944. Dismissing Kállay, who had so far resisted German demands to deport Hungarian Jewry, Nazi leaders installed the pro-German Döme Sztójay as premier.48 Sztójay proved committed to Hungary’s continued participation in the war effort and yielded to German pressure to allow the deportation process to begin. In April 1944, German authorities ordered Jews living outside Budapest to concentrate in certain regional centers; Hungarian gendarmes enforced this ghettoization of Jews from rural areas. Beginning in mid-May, German authorities under the personal direction of Adolf Eichmann worked with Hungarian officials to deport Jews from these districts. By July 1944, some 440,000 Jewish men, women, and children had been removed from Hungarian soil, primarily to Auschwitz; only the Jews of Budapest remained.

  47. Miklós Kállay (1887–1967) was a member of the Upper House of the Hungarian Parliament when he replaced the pro-German Lászlo Bárdossy as prime minister of Hungary. Following the arrest of Admiral Miklós Horthy in October 1944, Kállay surrendered to Arrow Cross officials and was deported to Mauthausen and then Dachau, where he was imprisoned with other prominent political prisoners. Kállay survived the war and settled in New York City, where he served on the Executive Committee of the Hungarian National Council in Exile. He died in New York on January 14, 1967.

  48. Döme Sztójay (1883–1946) was a member of the Hungarian General Staff; from 1925 to 1933, he was a military attaché in Berlin, and from 1935 until March 1944, he served as Hungary’s chief diplomat to Nazi Germany. Replacing Kállay as prime minister, Sztójay introduced extensive anti-Jewish legislation and allowed the deportation of Hungarian Jews to killing centers. Following his removal as prime minister on August 29, 1944, Sztójay, already in failing health, retired to a sanatorium. Sztójay fled Hungary before the arrival of Soviet troops in January 1945, but he was arrested by American military authorities and tried by a Budapest court for war crimes in March 1946. He was sentenced to death and executed by firing squad on August 24, 1946.

  Faced with Allied threats and a worsening military situation, Miklós Horthy called a halt to these deportations on July 7, 1944. While the admiral negotiated with Soviet leaders, whose troops were nearing the Hungarian frontier, and prepared to announce an armistice, German officials staged a coup d’état. On October 15, 1944, they arrested Horthy and installed a new government under Ferenc Szalasi, leader of the fascist and radically antisemitic Arrow Cross. During its brief time in power, the Arrow Cross initiated a reign of terror, torturing and murdering Budapest Jews in the streets and reinitiating deportations from the capital.49

  49. See Randolph Braham and Brewster Chamberlin, eds., The Holocaust in Hungary: Sixty Years Later (New York: Rosenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, 2006); Randolph Braham, Eichmann and the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry (New York: World Federation of Hungarian Jews, 1961); Randolph Braham and Scott Miller, eds., The Nazis’ Last Victims: The Holocaust in Hungary (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998); Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men, trans. Uta Stargardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2010).

  Caught up in the initial wave of Arrow Cross violence against Jews was seventeen-year-old Pinchas Eisner. Fearing his family would soon be deported or share the fate of neighbors murdered in their own homes, the youth wrote a letter of farewell to his elder brother Mordechai, who was serving in a Hungarian forced labor camp. Five days later, the young man was seized by an Arrow Cross militia and transferred to the village of Csomád outside Budapest. On November 3, 1944, Eisner and seventy other Jews were marched to a nearby forest, instructed to dig a large trench, and shot to death before their self-made grave. Mordechai Eisner received his brother’s letter when he returned home upon liberation.

  Document 3-18. Letter of Pinchas Eisner to his brother Mordechai Eisner, Budapest, October 16, 1944, in Reuvan Dafni and Yehudit Keliman, eds., Final Letters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholas 1991), 454–57.

  Budapest, October 16, 1944, 6:15 p.m.

  My Dear Brother:

  Good-bye! Think of our talk that night. I felt as one with you. I knew that, if it were you whose life would end, I would go on living as if I had lost half of my body and soul. You said that if I die, you will kill yourself. Think of what I told you, that if you stay alive, I will live on within you. I would have liked to continue my life with you and with our family. Plans, desires, hopes were before me. I longed for the unknown. I would have liked to know, to live, to see, to do, to love. . . . But now it is all over. In the city, Jews were exterminated from entire streets. There is no escape. Tonight or at the latest tomorrow it will be our turn. At seventeen I have to face certain death. There is no escape. We thought that we would be exceptions, but fate made no exceptions. [. . .] It seems like fate put a curse on each of us. After Jisreal50 it is now my turn together with my father, mother, and Sorele. I hope you will survive us. Farewell and forgive me if ever I have offended you. [. . .]

  50. This was the Eisners’ brother, who died at nineteen. Sorele, mentioned in the next line, is their sister.

  The calamity started last evening. By nightfall, the Jews of [house numbers] 64 and 54 had already been taken away. There was a pool of blood on the pavement, but by morning it was washed away. I was awake the whole night. R. J. and K. S. [friends of the boys] were here. Poor R. J. could hardly stand on his feet he was so full of fright. At first we hoped that the police and the army would protect us, but after a phone call we learned everything. Slowly morning arrived, but the events of the day made our situation hopeless. K. S. came at 6:00. He was about to faint after he fought with four Nazis who beat him terribly. He barely escaped with his life. He was stumbling and trembling, and could not start talking because of what he had seen and been through. I write fast, who knows if I will have time to finish? K. S. offered to take Sorele to a safe place. She promptly jumped at the su
ggestion and wanted to go immediately. But Mummy stepped in front of her and with a completely calm voice said that she would not let her go, because the Nazis might catch them on the street. Sorele was crying and hysterical. She wanted to go, she wants to live. Finally Mother proposed that if I go too then she will give her consent. You should have heard the way she said that. Sorele wanted to go, I stayed. . . . I could not leave our mother and father. [. . .] Father was praying the whole night. He still has some hope left, but he is talking about this world being like a vestibule to prepare ourselves [for] the real world to come.

  Mother and Father are telling religious parables to K. S. about the inevitability of destiny. Mathild [an aunt] is sitting next to us and listens. Sorele is outside and I am writing. I am relatively calm, facing death, my thoughts coherent. [. . .] It is not fear that I feel but the terribly-considered, bitter and painful realization of things to come. I hope I’ll get it over with quickly, only it will be terrible to see each other’s agony. God will help us and we will be over it.

  Farewell, dear, sweet Brother. Farewell! Remember me. I hope that I, too, will be able to think of you even from over there. I would like to hug and kiss you once more. But who knows to whom I write these lines? Are you alive? Farewell, my dear brother, my sweet Mordechele, live happily. Kissing you for the last time—till we meet again.

  Your Loving Brother

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Children in the World of the Ghetto

  During World War II, German policy aimed to isolate Jewish communities from non-Jewish populations, particularly in the occupied eastern territories. Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, German authorities began a systematic concentration of Jews in so-called ghettos in many Polish metropolitan areas. Confined within an enclosed municipal district, Jewish populations were often incarcerated behind makeshift walls and barbed wire fences and forced to live under deplorable conditions. Nazi officials often compelled Jews from surrounding communities and adjacent rural districts to resettle in urban ghettos so that many ghettoized populations suffered from severe overcrowding and acute shortages of food and essential goods.

  German authorities established over one thousand ghettos in German-annexed Poland, the General Government,1 and the occupied Soviet territories alone. The first ghettoization effort took place in the small city of Piotrków Trybunalski, in central Poland in October 1939. Other major ghettos were established in Łódź, Vilna (today Vilnius), Kovno (today Kaunas), Białystok, Kraków, Riga, Lvov (today Lviv), Czestochowa, Minsk, and Theresienstadt (Terezin). The largest of these concentrated communities was the Warsaw ghetto with four hundred thousand Jews crowded into a total area of 1.3 square miles. Although each community differed appreciably in terms of composition and structure, most ghettos in eastern Europe shared some characteristics in common. Communal life within the ghetto was administered by a German-appointed Jewish Council (Judenrat), responsible for the internal organization of the community and the management of its goods and services. A ghetto police force, the Jewish Order Service, imposed public order and enforced the decrees of German authorities and ordinances promulgated by the Jewish Council. Jews within the ghettos were required to wear distinguishing badges or armbands, often bearing the Jewish star, in order to further differentiate them from the population outside the ghetto. Many ghetto inhabitants were subjected to forced labor, either outside the parameters of the ghetto itself or within the community’s workshops and industries. Finally, many ghettos in the German-occupied East were the destinations of Jews deported from western Europe, especially from the Third Reich itself. In ghettos such as Riga, Łódź, Minsk, Kovno, and Theresienstadt, these deportees blended with Jews from indigenous communities and contributed to even more drastic overcrowding.2

  1. That is, German-occupied Poland.

  2. In some cases, as in the instance of the Riga ghetto, a significant segment of the local population of Jews was murdered in order to make room for deportees from Germany or western Europe. See Gertrude Schneider, Reise in den Tod: Deutsche Juden in Riga, 1941–1944 (Berlin: Hentrich, 2006).

  Most scholars believe that German authorities viewed ghettoization as a provisional measure that allowed Nazi officials to segregate and control Jewish populations while planners in Berlin deliberated the ultimate objectives of their anti-Jewish policy. With the implementation of the “Final Solution,” Nazi officials targeted ghetto populations for deportation and mass murder. In occupied Soviet territories, units of the Einsatzgruppen and their auxiliaries murdered thousands of Jews at killing sites in the vicinity of ghettos, such as Riga, Vilna, Kovno, and Minsk. In Poland, many larger ghettos, such as that in Łódź, maintained their own industries, which supported the German war effort. In these cases, ghetto populations were gradually decimated by a series of “actions” (Aktionen) in which Schutzstaffel (SS) authorities, often with the aid of the Jewish Order Police, rounded up thousands of ghetto residents for transfer to killing centers. In 1943 and 1944, these larger communities were liquidated through large-scale deportations to extermination camps. The destruction of the Jewish community in Warsaw in April 1943 initiated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the most ambitious insurgencies by Jewish resistance fighters against Nazi authorities.

  This chapter explores the roles and reactions of children within the wider context of Nazi ghettoization policy. Children often played unique roles in the ghetto communities. As adept and nimble smugglers, they helped to sustain their fellow ghetto inhabitants with black market goods and contraband from the “Aryan side.” As forced laborers, those youngsters fit enough to work helped their families survive in a perilous climate of starvation and deportation. Children were manifestly recipients of the ghettos’ extensive self-help and social welfare organizations. Yet, for children the ghetto also represented a particularly dangerous environment. Youngsters figured as the likeliest victims of starvation, illness, and destitution. Along with the elderly and sick, children also numbered among the first deported from ghetto settings to killing centers. Łódź ghetto elder Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski famously appealed to parents under his jurisdiction to “give me your children” in order to avert wider deportation measures during that ghetto’s notorious Gehsperre. So-called children’s actions (Kinderaktionen), like the one associated with the Gehsperre, occurred in many major ghettos, as Nazi authorities targeted these “useless eaters” for early deportation measures. Likewise, German ordinances strictly forbade pregnancies or live births in many ghettos, forcing parents to make agonizing decisions concerning their future offspring. The following documentation explores these complex experiences of children and adolescents in the world of the ghetto.

  Into the Ghetto

  Beginning in 1939 with the occupation of Poland, German authorities began a systematic concentration of Jewish populations within specially designated sectors of Polish metropolitan areas. The first large-scale efforts at ghettoization began in Łódź, Poland’s second-largest city: the Łódź ghetto was created in April 1940 and eventually held 164,000 inhabitants. The largest ghetto of its kind, the Warsaw ghetto, established in October 1940, incarcerated 390,000 Jews. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, German administrators in Soviet territories altered their strategy of ghettoization, initially creating ghettos in order to concentrate Jews for shooting actions as the Einsatzgruppen followed Wehrmacht forces into the Soviet interior. An illustrative example of such a practice was the formation of the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania in September 1941.

  In July 1941, shortly after the German occupation of Vilna, units of the Einsatzgruppen, together with local collaborators, rounded up some five thousand Jewish men in the Lithuanian capital and murdered them in the Ponary (or Paneriai) woods, some eleven kilometers (seven miles) from Vilna. In early August, Lithuania passed from German military governance to German civilian administration. From August 31 until September 3, mobil
e killing units attached to Einsatzkommando 9 carried out a more ambitious shooting action, murdering eight thousand Jews at Ponary, including members of Vilna’s recently appointed Jewish Council. In the following days, German authorities fenced off the enclosure that had been used to detain assembled Jews prior to their murder in the recent massacre and created from this space two ghettos, separated from each other by a municipal thoroughfare.3 On September 6, 1941, all surviving Jewish inhabitants of the city of Vilna were ordered into the two areas, which together comprised the Vilna ghetto. Each component ghetto had its own Jewish Council, appointed the following day, and maintained its own Jewish Order Police force and welfare and social services.4

  3. This refers to Niemiecka (German) Street.

  4. See Yitzhak Arad, Ghetto in Flames: The Struggle and Destruction of the Jews in Vilna in the Holocaust (New York: Holocaust Library, 1982).

  We know much about what that tumultuous day in September 1941 looked and sounded like from the diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski, an only child born in Vilna on December 10, 1927. Rudashevski lived in the Lithuanian capital with his parents and maternal grandmother. His father was a typesetter for the city’s most prominent Yiddish newspaper, Vilner Tog, and perhaps this proximity to the world of journalism spurred Yitskhok’s interest in writing. He attended high school at the city’s prestigious Realgymnasium, where he excelled in languages, history, and literature. On September 6, 1941, his small household, like so many others in the city’s Jewish community, received orders to move into the Vilna ghetto. Not yet fourteen, Rudashevski recorded the chaos and pathos of that day in his journal. The youngster’s poignant account reveals how acutely he felt his sudden loss of freedom, as well as a strong presentiment of tragedy. Once settled, Yitskhok filled his diary with vivid descriptions of the ghetto and the individuals who inhabited it. Prominent in his narrative is a discussion of the vibrant intellectual and cultural world that he and other like-minded youths nurtured there.5