24. For a discussion of deportations from the Riga ghetto, see Andrej Angrick and Peter Klein, Final Solution in Riga: Exploitation and Annihilation, trans. Ray Brandon (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).
25. See Dennis Klein et al., A Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1997).
26. For a discussion of the Treblinka killing center, see Alexander Donat, ed., The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979); Richard Glazar: Trap with a Green Fence, trans. Roslyn Theobald (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995); and Yizhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
27. Adolf Avraham Berman (1906–1978) was a Zionist activist and politician active in the Warsaw ghetto underground. A psychologist by training, Berman served as the director of CENTOS until September 1942. In the midst of the mass deportations of Jews from the ghetto, Berman and his wife succeeded in fleeing to Warsaw’s “Aryan side.” Passing as a gentile, he survived the war, functioning as a general secretary with the Żegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews. In 1950, he emigrated to Israel, where he served briefly as a member of the Knesset. In 1961, Berman testified at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem.
28. See Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to a Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
After receiving notification that SS officials would begin clearing the ghetto’s orphanages, Berman attempted to mobilize ghetto authorities in defense of the children, in vain. Each day Berman witnessed SS troops leading columns of young orphans under his charge to the Umschlagplatz, the loading area where deportees boarded freight trains bound for Treblinka.
One of the orphanages under Berman’s jurisdiction stood under the management of the famous Janusz Korczak, pen name of eminent pediatrician, pedagogue, and children’s author Henryk Goldszmit. Korczak was born in Warsaw to assimilated Jewish parents on July 22, 1878. After studying medicine at the University of Warsaw, he set up a pediatric practice at the Berson-Baumann Children’s Hospital in the Polish capital in 1904. While working for the Polish Orphan’s Society in 1909, he met Stefania Wilczyńska (1886–1942), a gifted pedagogue who would become his closest associate. In 1911, Korczak came to direct his own orphanage, Dom Seriot, which incorporated his innovative approaches to child care. By the 1930s, Korczak was a celebrity in his native Poland. Over the course of his career, he had founded Poland’s first national children’s newspaper, written influential books on parenting and child psychology, and worked within the juvenile court system to defend the rights of children and adolescents. His most famous children’s book, King Matt the First, had become a beloved classic in many languages, and Korczak himself hosted a syndicated radio program in which he dispensed advice on child rearing and family matters.29
29. For further discussion of the life and works of Janusz Korczak, see Betty Jean Lifton, The King of Children: A Biography of Janusz Korczak (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988); Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Janusz Korczak, King Matt the First, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986).
As director of a Jewish and a Catholic orphanage, Korczak witnessed the occupation of Warsaw by German forces. In 1940 when German authorities established the Warsaw ghetto, Korczak moved with his young Jewish charges inside the ghetto’s walls. His many Gentile friends offered to hide him on the “Aryan side,” but Korczak refused. “You do not leave a sick child in the night,” he said, “and you do not leave children at a time like this.”30 Korczak’s orphanage within the ghetto remained a model of progressive reform. Even in the midst of the terrible deprivations imposed by ghetto life, Korczak provided a safe haven for hundreds of orphans, protecting them from disease and starvation. In August 1942, however, he could no longer shield his charges from the brutal effects of Nazi policy. On August 5, 1942, SS officials ordered the 192 children living at the orphanage to appear with their caregivers for deportation.31 Aides cautioned Janusz Korczak that, as director of the facility, he did not have to join the children, but he and his chief associate, Stefania Wilczyńska, prepared the young children as best they could, ensuring that each had a favorite stuffed animal, book, or toy, and emerged from the building with the youngsters. Many eyewitnesses, including Warsaw CENTOS director Adolf Berman, who recalled the event in testimony at the Eichmann Trial in 1961, observed a dignified Korczak, leading with Wilczyńska the solemn procession of children through the ghetto streets to the roundup point, some two miles away. When the group reached the Umschlagplatz, Jewish, and by some accounts also German, policemen on the scene attempted to intervene to save the celebrated educator. Korczak refused to abandon the children and, with Wilczyńska, boarded the train with his charges. The group was gassed upon arrival at Treblinka.
30. Lifton, The King of Children, 3.
31. Eyewitness sources differ as to whether the date of this particular deportation action was August 5 or 6; likewise, some contemporary records suggest that 196, not 192, children were affected.
Document 4-9. Testimony of Adolf Avraham Berman, May 3, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995), 1:425–26.
Presiding Judge: What is your full name?
Witness: Adolf Avraham Berman. [. . .]
Q: After the outbreak of the Second World War, you were one of the directors of “CENTOS” in Warsaw?
A: Yes. [. . .]
Q: Tell us what the position was of children in the Warsaw ghetto in those years in which you served as director of the institution?
A: The tragedy of the Jewish children began on 8 September 1939, on the day Hitler’s forces entered Warsaw, the capital of Poland. Then the position was such that the authorities conducted a policy of systematic and planned starvation, they conducted a policy which led to epidemics, first of all to typhus and also to the spread of tuberculosis.
Q: Is it true that the incidence of death amongst the Jewish children reached thousands per month?
A: Yes. This process of pauperization, of continually increasing poverty of the masses, cast a multitude of children onto the streets. What did they turn into? To street children and little beggars. [. . .]
Q: How many of them needed the help and care of “CENTOS”?
A: Generally speaking, it may be said that within the Jewish population of the Warsaw ghetto, which at its peak period reached almost half a million Jews [. . .]—here were more than 100,000 children. Of these 100,000 children, at least seventy-five percent were in need of aid.
Q: To how many of these did you manage to extend help in the institutions of “CENTOS”?
A: As soon as we saw that a huge disaster was coming, we decided to mobilize ourselves for an extensive operation for the rescue of children, thanks to a great effort on the part of the organized Jewish community in the Warsaw ghetto, thanks to the unity in this matter of all those involved, from the left to the right, we managed to set up a large network of institutions for the aid of children. We had about one hundred institutions and we succeeded in giving help to 25,000 Jewish children.
Q: Amongst these institutions there was one headed by the well-known pedagogue Janusz Korczak—is that right?
A: Yes.
Q: You established tens of dormitories and kitchens for children and day shelters and kitchens for children and youths?
A: We set up thirty orphanages and dormitories also for the street children. In these dormitories and orphanages there were about 4,000 children. Amongst these institutions there was also the well-known orphanage
headed by that genius educator and distinguished writer, children’s writer, Janusz Korczak, whose name used to be Dr. Henryk Goldszmit, whose books and whose methods were both exceedingly famous in Poland. Apart from this, we established about twenty day shelters, especially for the small children. In addition to this, we set up about twenty kitchens for children. We also established about thirty children’s and youth clubs for the children of the refugee houses. We wanted to take advantage of every corner of vegetation for the children who had never known what greenery was, what a forest was, what a flower was.
Q: You maintained a widespread education network in the underground, since education was forbidden?
A: Yes.
Presiding Judge: Was all education forbidden?
Witness Berman: Vocational education was possible to some extent, but general education was banned. Under cover of the children’s kitchens and other institutions, we maintained a large network of secret underground schools, of all trends—from the secular to the religious, from the left to the right, in complete unity.32
32. For a discussion of clandestine learning in the ghettos of German-occupied Europe, see chapter 8.
Attorney General: You observed children’s festivals under the slogan “Give the child a little joy.” Is that correct?
Witness Berman: Yes. I would like to say a few words about this. We saw what the situation was, and we wanted to make the melancholy and terrible life of tens of thousands of children easier. We then decided to organize a Month of the Jewish Child in the ghetto and also a Jewish children’s festival in the ghetto. The last festival before the awful “action” which commenced on 22 July 1942, we had already celebrated on 5 May. And on that day—I remember this well—in all our institutions, in all the orphanages, in all the dormitories, in all the kitchens, there were celebrations. There were performances of children, on that day the children were given slightly more food, some sweets. And our slogan was “Give our children a little joy.”
Q: But all this was in vain, Dr. Berman. You kept the children busy, [but they were to] be the victims of the “actions,” isn’t that so? And the children were the first victims of the “actions,” is that correct?
A: Correct. I would like to say that almost from the outset the tragic race began between the efforts of the Jewish community in the Warsaw ghetto and the policy of mass impoverishment and general decline—the race between social aid and starvation. Our watchword was naturally to save our children from hunger and from death. We did not save them. We did not succeed in saving them.
Q: Do you recall attacks especially directed against children, on the part of German units?
A: Yes.
Q: Which units?
A: First of all, SS units. This I would like to describe somewhat in detail. As is known, the first large “action” of the extermination of Jews [in the ghetto] began on 22 July 1942. On that day, the first victims of the “action” were the Jewish children and I shall never forget the shocking, the frightful scenes, when SS men together with their collaborators cruelly fell upon the children, on the street children, and dragged them onto carts. And I remember how these children defended themselves. To this day I can hear the crying of the children—I hear the screams “Mama, Mama! Rette, rette!” [“Save us! Save us!”] They put up a struggle.
Q: Did they burst into your institutions?
A: On the same day also the expulsion from the refugee homes commenced and especially from the death houses, as they called them then, where there was the greatest mortality rate. And amongst them they deported many, many thousands of children to Treblinka. The inferno lasted thus for about a week.
Q: What happened to your institutions, those of “CENTOS?”
A: After one week the SS men and their collaborators began to attack our institutions as well, including the orphanages and the dormitories. We then informed all the institutions in the name of the “CENTOS” management—all the institutions in the ghetto and also Police Headquarters in the ghetto—that the orphans must be saved, the children must be saved. No entreaties on our part, no requests of ours, saved them, and during these days long columns of the children of our institutions, institution after institution, together with their tutors, with their teachers, began to march through the streets of Warsaw.
Q: Where were they marching to?
A: To the Umschlagplatz, to the death [cars], and from there to Treblinka.
Q: Do you remember Janusz Korczak marching at the head of the procession?
A: Yes, I remember that well. One of those institutions which they were leading off to the Umschlagplatz was this outstanding and exemplary institution, the orphanage of Janusz Korczak. It was a shocking procession.
Presiding Judge: You saw this with your own eyes?
Witness Berman: Yes. He walked at the head of the procession, and next to him there were two small children. Behind him was the chief woman tutor, Stefania Wilczyńska, together with little children. They marched together with the huge crowd of Jews who had been caught in this blockade, in this terrible siege in this quarter. When they reached the Umschlagplatz, there were certain policemen there who ran to free Janusz Korczak. He was very well known and beloved.
Attorney General: Polish policemen?
Witness Berman: Jewish. But then he said that he didn’t want to be separated from the children whom he had taught. The sole worry of Janusz Korczak then was that the children who were forced to [come out] . . . at the shouts I remember to this day: “Alle herunter, alle herunter, schneller, heraus” [“Everybody out, everybody out, faster, out!”]—this I shall never forget, the “alle herunter”; at that time Janusz Korczak’s concern was that the children did not have enough time to get dressed—they were barefooted. Stefania Wilczyńska told the small children that they were going on an outing, that at long last they would see the fields and the forests, and the flowers that they had never seen in the ghetto. And there was a smile, a faint smile on her lips. Of course, after he refused, after several hours, they made them enter the death wagons, and this was the last journey of this great educator.
Death and Survival in the Ghetto
One of the cardinal features of ghetto life in German-occupied eastern Europe was hunger. The general policy of German administrators was to provide ghettoized communities with only a modicum of resources necessary to fulfill their basic needs. Warsaw ghetto inhabitants in 1941, for example, typically received a maximum allocation of 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) of bread each month.33 The minuscule allotments available through the ration card system meant that residents had to acquire additional food by other means: through legitimate channels, such as soup kitchens, schools, and welfare associations, or illegally, through the omnipresent black market. As the war progressed, ration allowances diminished consistently, with terrible consequences for the captive population. In most ghettos, moreover, the number of ration cards available to each individual was invariably tied to participation in the forced labor pool, so persons unable to work and their dependents soon succumbed to severe malnutrition. Children suffered particularly under these conditions, especially those youngsters who had been orphaned or abandoned by their parents. Hundreds of children begged or sold improvised wares in the streets of ghettos such as Warsaw and Łódź in order to survive or to help subsidize their family’s meager rations. Many died on those streets too, of starvation and neglect.
33. Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 417.
While malnutrition played an outward and visible role in undermining the ghetto community, it also represented a destabilizing and divisive element in the homes and kitchens of ghetto inhabitants. “The hunger grows stronger,” Łódź ghetto chronicler Oskar Rosenfeld reported in his diary in 1942. “One person becomes the enemy of the other. The son takes the [last] bite away from his father. Everyone has lost their feeling for how to live normally.”34 In March 1942, an anonymous
diarist captured an image of a family divided by hunger. We know little about the young writer, except that she lived in the Łódź ghetto with her parents and two elder siblings. She was called either Esther or Minia because a passage in her diary cites a letter addressed to herself and her sister using these names. As the only person in her household who did not work, the teenager35 remained home alone for much of the day. In two entries in her journal, dated March 10 and 11, she records her daylong and often futile struggle to refrain from eating the entirety of her daily rations in one sitting—and those of her absent family as well. The teenager’s shame at devouring provisions meant for her entire household was compounded by the perceived restraint and self-sacrifice manifested by her parents. It is unknown whether this young diarist survived hunger and disease in Łódź or perished in the deportations that decimated the ghetto’s population. A fragment of her diary detailing the winter and spring months of 1942 was found in the ruins of the Łódź ghetto in July 1945.
Children during the Holocaust Page 21