Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  34. Diary of Oskar Rosenfeld, quoted in Loewy et al., Unser einziger Weg, 235.

  35. The diarist had a sister aged seventeen in 1942 and a brother aged sixteen. As the youngest child, the girl in question must have been fifteen years old or younger.

  Document 4-10. Diary of an anonymous girl, Łód´z ghetto, entries for March 10 and 11, 1942, in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 236–38.

  Tuesday, March 10, 1942

  My mom, brother, and sister leave for work at seven-thirty in the morning. My father leaves at 8:00. Lying in bed, I noticed that my sister had forgotten her bread. I got dressed very quickly and brought it to her. [. . .] I have no idea why I don’t live more harmoniously with my sister. We fight all the time and scream at each other. I must cause my parents a lot of worry. My sister doesn’t look well. She is like a stranger to me.

  The hunger is getting worse. In the morning I want my father to leave as soon as possible. Then I jump up from my bed and consume all the bread my mom has left me for the entire day. My God, what has happened to me? I [don’t] know how to restrain myself. Then I starve all day. I wish I were different. God, take pity on me. During the day I drink tap water and vinegar left from the pickled beets. Eating only this I wait until seven o’clock. I have a stomachache frequently.

  Today they are distributing bread. I stood three hours in the line and got three loaves. When I came back, I just had to take a piece. In the evening I promised myself not to eat, even if my mom offered me some, because I can’t have someone else’s bread. [. . .]

  Everybody is home, except my father. He came back at seven in the evening. We could hardly wait for him. He showed up with his two co-workers. They put two rutabagas on the table and divided each of them into three. It worked out at 70 decagrams (24.7 ounces) each.36 When they left, my father took out [a few] pieces of rutabaga from his pocket. Two rutabagas had been swiped from the kitchen, but some other scraps were given to my father by the women working there. He knew that there was nothing to eat at home, so he didn’t eat them on the spot, although he was very hungry. The soup has been thrown out by one of the apprentices. I can’t write anymore, my eyes are filled with tears.

  36. A decagram is 1/1,000 of a kilogram, or 10 grams.

  Wednesday March 11, 1942

  [. . .] When I went out to the street, I heard that there was a food ration for those who were not getting any food in the kitchen. This ration could be eaten only on the sixteenth.37 [. . .]

  37. That is, on March 16.

  This ration is much worse than the previous one. Terrible hunger is awaiting us again. I got the vegetable ration right away. There is only vinegar and ice in the beets. There is no food, we are going to starve to death. All my teeth ache and I am very hungry. My left leg is frostbitten. I ate almost all the honey. What have I done? I’m so selfish. What are they going to put on their bread now, what will they say? Mom, I’m unworthy of you. You work so hard. Besides working in the workshop, she also moonlights by working for a woman who sells clothes in the street. My mom looks awful, like a shadow. She works very hard. When I wake up at twelve or one o’clock at night, I see her exhaustedly struggling to keep working at the sewing machine. And she gets up at six in the morning. I must have a heart of stone. I’m ruthless. I eat everything I can lay my hands on.

  Today I had a fight with my father. I swore at him, even cursed him. It happened because yesterday I weighed twenty decagrams [7 ounces] of zacierki38 and then sneaked a spoonful. When my father came back, he immediately noticed that some zacierki were missing. My father started yelling at me and he was right. But since the chairman39 gave out these zacierki to be cooked, why can’t I have some? I became very upset and cursed my father. What have I done? I regret so much, but it can’t be undone. My father is not going to forgive me. How will I ever look him in the eyes? He stood by the window and cried like a baby. Not even a stranger has ever insulted him before [like this]. The whole family witnessed this incident. I went to bed as soon as possible, without dinner. I thought I would die of hunger, because we have our meal only in the evening. I fell asleep and woke up at twelve. My mom was still working at the sewing machine. I couldn’t stand the hunger, so I got up and took a piece of meal. We would be a happy family, if I didn’t fight with everybody. All the fights are started by me. I must be manipulated by an evil force. I would like to be different, but I don’t have a strong enough will. Why isn’t there anybody who would guide me, why can’t anybody teach me? I hate my sister. She is a stranger to me. God show me what is right.

  38. This is a kind of noodle used in Polish cuisine, usually in soup.

  39. That is, Ghetto Elder Rumkowski.

  Starvation was a daily reality of life in the Łódź ghetto and in other communities of its kind. Because the German administration essentially intended to sustain only the ghetto’s labor force over the long term, the rationing system favored “productive” members of the community at the expense of the “unproductive.” Those who worked in ghetto workshops, industries, or services received a larger allocation of food than those who had no employment. Thus, a place in the ghetto’s labor pool often meant more than a stay from deportation, as it literally did for carriers of work certificates (Scheine) in ghettos like Kovno or Vilna; a work position, however humble or low paying, also represented a vital lifeline, providing the ghetto’s working community with the very sustenance its members needed to survive.

  A significant amount of the forced labor carried out in the ghettos of German-occupied eastern Europe was performed by children. Of course such labor provided youngsters with their most basic nutritional needs and helped to lessen the burden on impoverished households. Likewise, in the upside-down world of the ghetto, older children and juveniles often shouldered tremendous responsibilities for the upkeep of their families. In such an environment, these young people might represent their household’s sole source of income. In July 1942, writer Oskar Singer40 chronicled the life of such a youngster, sixteen-year-old Alfred B. from Prague.41 Following his deportation from the Czech capital to Łódź in October 1941, Singer joined fellow writers, such as Julian Cukier,42 Josef Zelkowicz, and Oskar Rosenfeld, in assembling material for their Ghetto Chronicle,43 which would collect pertinent data and statistics concerning the Łódź ghetto and portray the lives and deaths of its inhabitants. In one of his most poignant entries, Singer traces the story of a young Czech Jew arriving in the Łódź ghetto in the early winter of 1941 to 1942. Alfred B. is a likeable and capable young man, who immediately finds work with a construction battalion in order to bolster his family’s precarious circumstances. All goes well until a minor accident at the worksite causes the teenager to lose his position. Alfred’s fate is a tragic example of how Nazi ghettoization policy cost a generation of Jewish youth their lives.

  40. Born in 1883 in Prague, Oskar Singer was an author and journalist, writing for such Czech and Jewish newspapers as the Prager Tagblatt (Czech Daily) and the Jüdische Nachrichten (Jewish News). In August 1944, Singer was deported to Auschwitz where he perished.

  41. Singer abbreviated his subject’s surname to protect the young man’s privacy.

  42. Julian Cukier (1900–1943) is better known by his pen name, Stanisław Cerski.

  43. See Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto.

  Document 4-11. Diary of Oskar Singer, entry for July 28, 1942, in Hanno Loewy et al., eds., “Unser einziger Weg ist Arbeit”: Das Getto in Łód´z, 1940–1944 (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1990), 221–22 (translated from the German).

  With his parents and a sister, Alfred B. came from Prague to the Litzmannstadt [Łódź] ghetto. Just sixteen years old, Alfred has graduated from an agricultural Hachscharah44 as a member of the Maccabi Hazair.45 His comrades loved him for his kindly, helpful ways. Arriv
ing in the ghetto, he is the first in the family immediately to seek work and receives a place in a construction battalion. After him his mother succeeds in getting work in a straw shoe workshop. She puts in honest labor in order to share her soup with her husband and daughter. She comes from a wealthy, respectable family in Prague. Alfred’s father was an attorney in Prague. Shortly before the journey here he had a serious operation upon his stomach, and came, so to speak, with half a stomach to the ghetto. He dared not undertake physical labor. [. . .]

  44. This refers to a vocational-training program aimed at training Jewish youths for emigration to Palestine.

  45. This refers to a Zionist youth organization.

  Alfred carries heavy burdens. But he is still aided by the reserves of strength he has stored up before his arrival. In a good mood he goes early in the morning to his daily work. Alfred is a strong youth; he will survive this ghetto adventure. The same cannot be guaranteed of his father. He is visibly falling apart, although he only has half a stomach. Alfred suffers from hunger, but he does not complain very much. But his parents observe with deep concern that he is losing so much weight. But everyone in the ghetto is losing weight. Everyone will lose several pounds, but Alfred will survive all that. [. . .]

  One day Alfred comes home with a slight injury to his leg. Mother treats the insignificant wound carefully. Nevertheless it becomes infected. In the ghetto no wound will heal properly, and an infection not at all. The body does not have any defenses; the cells are helplessly abandoned to decay. Alfred cannot work for several weeks. Whoever does not work receives no soup, and later when an additional piece of bread replaces the soup ration, receives no bread. That lack is felt acutely. Father searches frantically for work. [. . .]

  Alfred suffers terribly from his unemployment. He sees how his mother is overworked and then gives her worker’s rations to the children and his father. He pulls himself together and looks for work. Perhaps he can find something easier in one of the many workshops. No, he finds nothing, because now the sixteen-year-olds have to arrange things through the school department. A little patronage helps a bit. Someone puts in a good word for this upstanding young man. Because in Prague he attended the school of the Youth Aliyah and learned metalworking, he finally succeeds in getting a place in a metal workshop. It pays almost nothing, but the main thing is the bread and sausage! Every worker gets that now because there is no longer any soup. That works for a few days. But the department director is no do-gooder. He expects production. Even in the ghetto one wants to get ahead. Alfred cannot get lighter work. He wishes himself back at the lathe in Prague where he learned his trade and where one could just stand and work and did not have to carry heavy pieces of metal up and down the stairs.

  It doesn’t work. He has to give up all the walking, has to stay at home again, must lie down. In the meantime he loses a frightening amount of weight. The skin clings like a transparent membrane to his forehead and nose. The young man is simply not recognizable anymore. At least he wants to help with the housework, while Mother works so hard in the workshop and Father looks for work without ceasing. He carries the heaviest water buckets from the courtyard up two flights of stairs to the miserable apartment, stands in the long line before the stores; sometimes he still has enough energy to contend with those behind him in line, who would like to drive him from the queue.

  Then at home he must lie quietly. The physician thinks that his heart is not working quite right. Certainly better nutrition would help, but there is nothing to be done about that. Alfred knows for certain. Whoever does not work here must die. He does not want to die! Again he seeks out a benefactor. He manages this with certain difficulty, and obtains a place in a carpentry shop. The director is already well informed. He has seen the young man and will manage to give him very light tasks. The school department does not make any difficulties. Alfred can start already tomorrow morning. But tomorrow . . . tomorrow, that means that today there will be no bread with sausage. And yesterday already he had nothing to eat. That is already two days. But things can’t be hurried along. Introduced yesterday and starting tomorrow—what more can one ask? How many in the ghetto are that lucky? Alfred is certainly a rare exception. All right, we will have to wait till morning, then there will be light work and bread with sausage. Good, says Albert, we’ll wait, starve until morning, that is only one more night.

  But in the morning, he cannot go to work, he cannot begin his easy tasks, and cannot eat his bread with sausage. Tomorrow—there will be no tomorrow for him. Alfred did not wake up. Today he will already lie in Marysin.46 Perhaps this would not have happened if yesterday he had just had his bread and sausage.

  46. This was the ghetto’s “green lung,” where the cemetery was located.

  Document 4-12. Jewish children work at a box-making factory in the Glubokoye ghetto, Belorussia, c. early 1942, USHMMPA WS# 08059, courtesy of Karl Katz.

  In ghettos across German-occupied Europe, Nazi persecutory policies decimated a generation of young people, through starvation, disease, deportation, and murder. In many ghettoized communities, German administrators employed an additional measure to ensure the eventual extinction of the “Jewish race”: a ban on Jewish births. The cruel realities of ghetto life surely discouraged couples from reproducing and from forming large families. Moreover, malnutrition and heavy labor caused the onset of amenorrhea47 in a large proportion of women of reproductive age. For these reasons, birthrates in most ghettos were already extremely low; in Łódź, only 2,306 babies were born in the ghetto in the four years of its existence (1940–1944), relative to an initial population of 164,000.48 Nevertheless, in 1942 German authorities in Lithuania issued a number of decrees prohibiting Jewish births in the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno, and Shavli (Sauliai). In Kovno, a July 1942 edict forbade both pregnancies and births in that ghetto. Gynecologists such as Dr. Aharon Peretz,49 whose chief occupation had been the delivery of babies, now found that his major work consisted in terminating pregnancies. Initially, Peretz reported, the decree, viewed as a propaganda maneuver, had not been taken seriously; thus, a large part of the physician’s efforts lay in informing women of the dire consequences that resulted from disobeying the order. The ghetto health administration arranged the medical services for most abortions; ghetto policemen escorted women in advanced stages of pregnancy to the hospital to enforce the procedure. As the prohibition went into effect, German authorities announced that women then in their eighth and ninth months of pregnancy would be permitted to carry their babies to term; all other pregnancies were to be terminated. Peretz suddenly found himself confronted with complicated surgeries for those women who required late-term abortions. In all cases, the ghetto’s crowded and unhygienic conditions and the lack of medicine and other supplies compounded his moral and material difficulties. Many women tried to defy the ban and delivered their infants in secret, often with terrible consequences for both mother and child. In May 1961, Peretz testified at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem concerning the effects of this policy on the Kovno ghetto population.

  47. This refers to the temporary cessation of menstruation in women of child-bearing age. Deficits in caloric and protein intake often caused this condition, which was also widely reported among women prisoners of reproductive age in the Nazi concentration camp system. Most women with this disorder who survived to liberation found that their normal menstrual cycles were restored on return to a balanced and nutritious diet.

  48. Leah Preiss, “Women’s Health in the Ghettoes of Eastern Europe,” Jewish Women’s Archive, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/author/preiss-leah (accessed January 22, 2010).

  49. In the postwar period, Dr. Aharon Peretz (b. 1910) became director of the gynecological and obstetrics department at Rambam Hospital and a professor in the medical faculty of the Institute of Technology (Technion) in Haifa.

  Document 4-13. Testimony of Dr. Aharon Peretz, May 4, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichm
ann: 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), 1:478.

  Presiding Judge: [. . .] Dr. Peretz, you are a gynaecologist. Were there births in the ghetto during the occupation?

  Aharon Peretz: There were births, obviously, for pregnant women had entered the ghetto—in all the months of pregnancy.

  Q: What were the orders regarding pregnant women?

  A: In July 1942 an order was issued forbidding women to become pregnant and to give birth.

  Q: What women?

  A: The women in the ghetto, the Jewish women. And we—I must tell the truth—both the Ältestenrat [the Council of Elders] and the doctors, did not take this order too seriously. For each time we received a new blow, some time had to pass for us to believe and get used to this blow. But once, when a woman came to me in the advanced months of pregnancy and told me that an SS man had encountered her in the street, in one of the lanes of the ghetto, had recorded her address and said that he would come in two weeks’ time and if she were still pregnant he would kill her—the matter became clear.

  And, as the gynaecologist in the ghetto, I received an instruction from the Ältestenrat to end each and every pregnancy that came our way. We then made arrangements and received confirmation from the Germans that only those who were in the eighth and ninth months would be permitted to give birth, and up to the eighth month the pregnancy would be terminated. Naturally, as a doctor, I was confronted with very serious medical problems, because to end a pregnancy in the sixth and seventh months involved a difficult operation. The conditions were very bad, for when we left the small ghetto they burned the hospital, and we did not have one. All the operations were performed under difficult conditions—in kitchens, in small attics, amidst terrible congestion, and understandably there were fatalities. But the head of the Jewish Council was at the same time a very well-known physician of Kovno, an internist; he understood these problems, and he told me that we were permitted to end a pregnancy on the grounds of danger to the woman’s life, because anyhow the life of the woman was in danger and consequently, “You have to terminate the pregnancy.”