Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  A boy or girl sets out from home in the morning, clutching a carefully weighed, rationed slice of bread—the meal—in one hand and schoolbooks in the other hand. Instead of heading for school, the children head for the “coal mines.” They’re not miners yet, but they keep their eyes open, and slowly but steadily they learn the technique. [. . .] From now on, Moshe, Chaim, or Mendel are recognized “coal miners” who go about this work with their mothers’ and fathers’ permission.

  Such a “miner,” officially recognized, finds an old baking pan or some other old container, pokes holes in it with a nail to use as a sieve, and becomes a contractor himself. As this Chaim, Moshe, or Mendel sinks into the mud up to his neck on a summer day and delivers the results of his labor at dusk, he gradually brings into the business his younger or older brother; sometimes the father too—who in any case has nothing more lucrative to do—or even his mother, who would rather rummage through the trash or carry a load on her stooped back than run a household on nothing.

  When this Moshe, Chaim, or Mendel becomes an official “coal miner,” his upbringing in Jewish values comes to an end. [. . .] Here in the “coal mine” sit girls who own nothing but the dresses they wear and cannot bear to wear them as they sit in the mud. So they take off their dresses and lay them on the heap. Their unclad bodies are immediately clad with mud and dust. This dusty nakedness, however, is even more alluring. Here, in the “coal mine,” boys aged eleven and twelve and girls aged thirteen and fourteen discover mommy’s and daddy’s secrets. Here, in the coal mine, everyone is equal and everyone sees to nature’s demands under each other’s noses. Why waste time? [. . .]

  Where’s Lipa? Twelve-year-old Lipa, does he go to school? [. . .]

  No, he doesn’t go to school.

  Lipa, why don’t you go to school?

  Because I don’t have shoes.

  And in the summer, when you could have gone barefoot? Why not?

  I didn’t go then either! What for? What did they give me in school that I should run to them barefoot?

  Reading, writing, and other things: don’t you think they’re important?

  If I knew how to read and write, wouldn’t I still be hungry . . . ?

  And when you stayed home from school, were you well fed?

  Better than in school. I dug coal!

  How much did you make from digging coal?

  Well, sometimes, a mark, or a mark and a few pfennigs. You gotta be lucky [. . .]!

  Lipa, the twelve-year-old “coal miner.”

  Document 4-6. Children digging for “coal” in the Łód´z ghetto, 1941, USHMMPA WS# 61900, courtesy of the YIVO Institute.

  “Give Me Your Children”: The “Children’s Actions”

  The Łódź, or Litzmannstadt, ghetto was the longest-lasting entity of its kind in German-occupied Poland. The process of ghettoizing the Jewish communities of Łódź and its surrounding territories began on September 8, 1939, shortly after the German conquest of the city.17 On April 30, 1940, German civilian authorities under Hans Biebow ordered the enclosure of the ghetto, effectively incarcerating some 164,000 individuals within its walls. Its population experienced a number of harrowing roundups, or razzias, in which thousands of Jews and Roma were deported to their deaths at the Chełmno extermination camp. Yet, even as ghettos in occupied Poland were liquidated one by one—including the largest, the Warsaw ghetto in May 1943—the Łódź ghetto endured as a working entity, until its last inhabitants were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in August 1944.18

  17. See Jochen Boehler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen, 1939 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006).

  18. For a detailed discussion of the Łódź ghetto, see Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, ed. and trans. Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006); Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides, eds., Łódź Ghetto: Inside a Community under Siege (New York: Viking, 1989); Peter Klein, Die “Gettoverwaltung Litzmannstadt,” 1940–1944: Eine Dienststelle im Spannungsfeld von Kommunalbürokratie und staatlicher Verfolgungspolitik (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009); Löw, Juden in Getto Litzmannstadt.

  The longevity of the Łódź ghetto must be attributed at least in part to the policies of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of its Judenrat. A controversial figure who wielded almost dictatorial power over his fellow Jews, Rumkowski believed from the start that the ghetto’s best chance for survival lay in cooperating fully with the German officials. As elder of the Jews, he reported directly to the Nazi administration under Hans Biebow. In return, Biebow allowed Rumkowski almost unlimited authority in shaping the Łódź ghetto into a viable working community. Given the enormous obstacles encountered by Jewish communities in German-occupied Poland, “Rumkowski’s ghetto” boasted an impressive array of welfare institutions and social services. Under the chairman’s auspices, Łódź flourished in its early stages, with workshops, schools, hospitals, a postal system, and a broad range of self-help organizations. Nevertheless, many Jews saw in Rumkowski not a benevolent administrator of the public trust but a collaborator and an “incomparable tyrant”19 who used German authority to crush all existing opposition and sacrificed the welfare of his fellow Jews in order to maintain his personal power.20

  19. This phrase comes from Łódź ghetto survivor Yehuda Leib Gerst in his From the Straits (Jerusalem: Safra Fund, 1949), 26.

  20. For a discussion of the debate surrounding Rumkowski’s role as chairman of the Łódź ghetto, see Michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004); Richard Rubenstein, “Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, ed. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 299–310.

  From the beginning, Rumkowski felt that providing a labor force in ghetto industries and workshops would make the Łódź ghetto indispensible to German authorities. Under the motto “Labor is our only way,” Rumkowski argued that only ghetto industry could stave off liquidation of the ghetto population by the German civilian administration.21 In early December 1941, as the Chełmno extermination camp began gassing operations, the first deportations to that killing center took place. By May of 1942, some fifty thousand Jews and five thousand Roma22 from Łódź had been deported to their deaths there. In time, word reached the ghetto’s Judenrat concerning the true significance of this Nazi “resettlement” policy. In similar circumstances, the chairman of Warsaw’s Judenrat, Adam Czerniakow, took his own life rather than participate in the preparation of deportation lists.23 In stark contrast, Rumkowski cooperated, stressing even more vehemently the necessity for compliance with Nazi policies and emphasizing the imperative of maintaining a viable forced labor workforce to ensure the ghetto’s long-term survival.

  21. See Hanno Loewy et al., eds., “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit”: Das Getto in Łódź, 1940–1944 (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1990).

  22. From September 5 to 9, 1941, some five thousand Roma were deported to Łódź and concentrated in their own area of the ghetto, known as the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy camp). These individuals were among the first to be included in the initial deportation actions to Chełmno.

  23. See Adam Czerniakow, The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed. Raul Hilberg et al. (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 1979.)

  Following these initial roundups, the ghetto experienced a brief period of calm. In the late summer of 1942, however, German authorities approached Rumkowski with demands for an additional twenty thousand deportees from Łódź. Following unsuccessful efforts on the part of the Judenrat to reverse these orders, Rumkowski seized upon a desperate and terrible solution; he would
fill the required quota with the ghetto’s least productive members: the ailing, the aged, and children under ten. On September 4, 1942, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a man who had spent much of his career advancing the welfare of youngsters, addressed the ghetto’s parents in a now infamous speech. “Give me your children!” he pleaded, in order to avert a communitywide deportation.

  Rumkowski’s appeal preceded the Gehsperre (curfew) in Łódź. In the days between September 5 and 12, German forces entered the ghetto and proceeded block by block, brutally seizing those unfit for labor from their homes and from the community’s streets. The Gehsperre began with the liquidation of the ghetto hospitals, where SS officials apprehended ailing patients in their beds. In the days that followed, police units, with great violence, cleared schoolrooms and orphanages, many of them in Marysin, once a haven for Łódź’s youngsters. Of the approximately 15,500 individuals rounded up for deportation, the vast majority were young children and adults over the age of sixty-five. Those attempting to evade arrest were summarily shot. Heartrending scenes took place along the length of wire fence at the ghetto’s central prison, where family members bid farewell to their loved ones awaiting deportation to their deaths at Chełmno.

  Following the bloody week of the Gehsperre, no further deportations from Łódź to the extermination camps occurred for the next year and a half. For Rumkowski, the cessation of roundups within the ghetto vindicated his policy of compliance with German demands. However, in the late spring of 1944, Nazi authorities decided to liquidate this last large ghetto existing in German-occupied Poland. From June 23 to July 15, 1944, seven thousand Jews from the Łódź ghetto were deported to Chełmno, which Nazi authorities had reactivated as a killing center in order to support the action. Then, in August, transports carrying the ghetto’s remaining seventy-four thousand inhabitants turned toward Auschwitz. Among these deportees was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, whose moral ambiguity as chairman of the Łódź ghetto continues to engage scholars in the debate concerning collaboration. Rumkowski died, together with his family, in Auschwitz II–Birkenau on August 28, 1944.

  Document 4-7. Speech of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, Łód´z ghetto, September 4, 1942, in Isaiah Trunk, Łód´z Ghetto: A History, ed. and trans. Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006), 272–75.

  A severe blow has befallen the ghetto. They are asking from it the best that it possesses—children and old people. I have not had the privilege to have a child of my own, and therefore I devoted the best of my years to children. I lived and breathed together with the children. I never imagined that my own hands would have to deliver the sacrifice to the altar. In my old age, I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children! (Tremendous and dreadful weeping among the assembled crowd.)

  I had the premonition that something was descending upon us. I anticipated “something” and I stood constantly on alert like a guard, in order to avoid that “something.” But I could not do it, because I did not know what was menacing us. I did not know what is awaiting us.

  That the sick were taken away from the hospitals, this was for me totally unanticipated. You have the best sign: I had my own kin and near ones there and I could not do anything for them. I thought that it would end with this, that after that we would be left in peace. This is the peace for which I yearn so strongly, for which I have always worked and striven, but it turned out that something different was predestined for us. The luck of Jews is of course thus: always to suffer more and worse, particularly in wartime.

  Yesterday during the day, I was given a command to send twenty-odd thousand Jews out from the ghetto; if not—“We will do it.” And the question arose, “Should we take it over and do it ourselves, or leave it for others to carry out?” But being dominated not by the thought, “How many will be lost,” but by the thought, “How many can be saved,” we, i.e., I and my closest co-workers, came to the conclusion that as difficult as this will be for us, we must take into our own hands the carrying out of the decree. I have to carry out this difficult and bloody operation. I must cut off limbs in order to save the body! I must take children because, if not, others could also, God forbid, be taken . . . (Frightful wailing).

  I have not come today to console you. Nor have I come today to calm you, but to uncover all your sorrow and pain. I have come like a robber to take away from you the best from under your hearts! I tried with all my abilities to get the decree revoked. After trying to get it revoked was impossible, I attempted to moderate it. Just yesterday, I arranged a registration of all nine-year-old children. I wanted to rescue at least that single year, from nine to ten years old. But they did not want to grant this to me. One thing I succeeded [in]—to save the children from ten years and up. Let this be our comfort in our great sorrow. [. . .]

  I understand you, mothers. I see your tears quite well. I also feel your hearts, fathers, that tomorrow, immediately after your child will have been taken away from you, you will have to go to work, while just yesterday you still played with your dear kids. I know all of this and I feel it. Since four o’clock yesterday, since I found out about the decree, I am entirely broken down. I am living with your grief and your pain torments me and I don’t know how and with what strength I will be able to survive it. I must disclose to you a secret: twenty-four thousand victims were demanded. Through eight days of three thousand people each day, but I succeeded in pushing the number down to twenty thousand, even less than twenty thousand, but on condition that there will be children up to ten years old. Children from ten years and up are secure. Since the children together with the elderly give only a number of approximately thirteen thousand souls, it will be necessary to fill the gap with sick people too.

  It is difficult for me to speak. I don’t have any strength, I only want to say to you my request: Help me carry out the action! I am trembling. I fear that others will, God forbid, take over the implementation into their hands. . . .

  A broken Jew is standing before you. Don’t envy me. It is the most difficult decree that I have ever had to carry out. I extend to you my broken, trembling arms and I beg: give the victims into my hands, in order through them to avoid additional victims, in order to protect a congregation of a hundred thousand Jews. They promised me so: if we ourselves will deliver our victims, there will be calm. . . . (Yells are heard: “We’ll all go”; “Mr. Chairman, not only-children should be taken—individual children should be taken away from those who have several!” . . .) These are empty phrases! I don’t have any strength to conduct discussions with you! If someone will come from the authorities, no one [would] yell. . . .

  I understand what it means to tear off a limb from the body. Yesterday, I pleaded on my knees, but it was no use. From small towns that possessed seven thousand to eight thousand Jews, barely a thousand have arrived here. What then is better? What are you asking for? To leave eighty thousand to ninety thousand Jews or, God forbid, to annihilate everybody? . . . Judge as you wish; my obligation is to take care of the remnant of Jews. I am not talking to hotheads—I am speaking to your reason and conscience. I have done everything and will also continue to do everything to prevent weapons being brought into the streets and that blood be shed. . . . The decree did not permit us to get it revoked; it only allowed itself to be reduced.

  One needs the heart of a bandit in order to ask for what I am asking of you. But put yourself in my position and think logically and you yourself will come to the conclusion that you cannot act differently, because the number of the portion that can be saved is much larger than the part that must be surrendered.

  Document 4-8. Children selected for deportation bid farewell to their families through the wire fence of the central prison during the Gehsperre action in the Łód´z ghetto, September 1942, USHMMPA WS# 30057, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot.

  A large percentage of the 15
,500 persons deported to Chełmno from the Łódź ghetto in September 1942 were young inhabitants under the age of ten. Because young children were not usually utilized for forced labor, Nazi authorities viewed them as “useless eaters” and targeted them for early deportation measures. So-called children’s actions like the one associated with the Gehsperre occurred in many of the major ghettos in German-occupied eastern Europe. In two shooting operations known collectively as the Dünamünde Action, for example, Latvian auxiliaries attached to the Einsatzgruppen removed thirty-eight hundred Jews from the Riga ghetto and massacred them in the nearby Bikernieke Forest on March 15 and 26, 1942.24 Young children, the ailing, and the aged represented a majority of these victims. In Vilna and Kovno, large-scale actions against inhabitants and their family members who did not possess work certificates (Scheine) radically reduced the number of young persons in each ghetto. In addition a children’s action directed against Kovno’s still significant number of young residents took place on March 27 and 28, 1944.25 On those days, German forces and their auxiliaries sent at least thirteen hundred children to the Auschwitz concentration camp and to the nearby massacre site at the infamous Fort IX, where these victims were shot to death. In the Warsaw ghetto, the largest such community in German-occupied eastern Europe, the first large-scale deportation efforts targeted the most defenseless members of that population. Beginning on July 22, 1942, SS troops rounded up thousands of the ghetto’s young children and sent them to their deaths at the Treblinka extermination camp some eighty kilometers (fifty miles) northwest of Warsaw.26 Many of these first young deportees were homeless and abandoned children or youngsters living with their families in the so-called death houses, where the very poorest strata of Warsaw’s Jewish community found shelter. Approximately one week later, the director of the ghetto’s CENTOS relief agency, Adolf Avraham Berman,27 received word that all orphanage officials under his administration were to prepare their charges to join in the next wave of deportations. The CENTOS organization represented an arm of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee founded specifically to address the needs of Jewish orphans and children living in impoverished circumstances. Within the context of the Warsaw ghetto, CENTOS operatives, with the aid and good will of Judenrat officials, developed a broad network of institutions that provided relief to the ghetto’s poorest youngsters. Under its auspices, CENTOS founded soup kitchens, homes, and dormitories for the many hundreds of destitute children who begged, and starved, in the ghetto’s city streets. CENTOS also supported educational programs and youth clubs for young people.28