Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  We terminated every pregnancy. There were women, I would say, who displayed signs of heroism and who, under no circumstances, wanted to end their pregnancy. And it goes without saying that, in such cases, we encouraged them, although I now feel myself to be guilty. For I, too, would encourage her—I would give her further strength. All kinds of outside events or news items, which described a setback for Hitler, would encourage the women to continue their pregnancy. [. . .]

  With every political event women would come and ask, “Perhaps I should wait some while longer before having the abortion.” There were also those who took the risk and did not put an end to it. Needless to say their fate was very bitter, afterwards, when the babies were put to death. Women who were forbidden to give birth would cover themselves beneath the pillows, they didn’t cry out, they would not utter a sound, so that nobody would hear any cries. I was also requested only to come to a birth when I was sent for by the midwife or nurse, when there was some complication, and not to go to a normal birth, for by doing so I could arouse the suspicions of the neighbourhood. [. . .]

  Eva Ginzová was born in Prague on February 21, 1930, the daughter of a mixed marriage. Her father, Otto Ginz, came from a liberal Jewish family and worked as a manager at a large textile concern in Prague. His wife, Maria, had been raised a Catholic but left the church in her early twenties. The Ginzes maintained a traditional Jewish home, observing the Sabbath and major holidays and keeping a kosher household, while Eva and her brother, Petr, attended a Jewish school. Eva adored her elder brother and had strong bonds with her large extended family, especially her father’s brother Miloš and his two children, Pavel and Hanka.

  The fate of Eva Ginzová and her family closely followed the course of Nazi policy in the Czech lands. During the Munich Crisis of September 1938, Great Britain and France forced the Czechoslovak republic to cede the German-speaking borderlands (e.g., the Sudetenland) to Nazi Germany. On March 15, 1939, the German army occupied the remainder of rump Czechoslovakia. The region of Slovakia became the quasi-independent Slovak State,50 a puppet republic allied to Nazi Germany. German authorities annexed to the Reich the territory roughly encompassing the modern Czech Republic, creating the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. With its incorporation by National Socialist Germany, the new Protectorate adopted Nazi antisemitic legislation. As children of a mixed marriage and themselves practicing Jews, the Ginzes were categorized as Geltungsjuden according to the tenets of the Nuremberg Laws and therefore subject to a number of restrictions. Beginning in September 1941, when all Jews in the Reich had to wear distinguishing badges on their outer garments, Petr and Eva, too, were forced to wear the yellow star.

  50. This is sometimes known as the First Slovak Republic.

  In December 1941, deportations of Jews from Prague to Theresienstadt began. Two months earlier, as planners of the “Final Solution” began to organize the first transports of German Jews to the East, Reinhard Heydrich—who once served as chief of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) and as governor general of the Protectorate51—suggested that the Theresienstadt site act as the primary way station for Jews in the Czech lands being deported to the camps and ghettos. On November 24, 1941, the first one thousand Czech Jews arrived at Theresienstadt, whose old fortress works, built in the era of Empress Maria Theresa, served as an ideal infrastructure for the new ghetto. Following the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, Theresienstadt also became a “settlement area” for German and Austrian Jews over the age of sixty-five and for Jewish war veterans who had been decorated or disabled in combat, those categories of German Jews initially exempted from deportation. Later the ghetto also came to hold prominent Jewish artists, musicians, and other cultural figures whose disappearance might evoke adverse public reaction at home and abroad.

  51. On September 27, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich was appointed deputy Reich Protector (Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor) in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, assuming the effective government of the territory. Konstantin von Neurath, Heydrich’s immediate predecessor in this post, held the official title of Protector until August 20, 1943, but, as Hitler believed him ineffectual in the position, he retained very little power.

  Thus, from the beginning, Theresienstadt served a dual purpose. First, it functioned as a device to help allay criticism of Nazi racial policy at home. Nazi propagandists portrayed Theresienstadt as a kind of model ghetto community for Jews deported from the Reich. This fiction helped to solve a dilemma inherent in Nazi claims that Jews “resettled in the East” were being relocated to labor colonies. Why then, many German citizens wondered, were elderly and disabled Jews included in such transports when they might no longer be deployed as forced labor? The Theresienstadt ghetto helped to put an end to such questions. German authorities also employed the “model Jewish city” to manipulate foreign governments and agencies, as when concentration camp administration officials permitted the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to visit a highly sanitized Theresienstadt in June 1944.52 The reality of Theresienstadt was quite different from the impressions foreign dignitaries gathered on carefully choreographed visits and from those images captured on film, just before the ICRC’s inspection, in the Nazi propaganda piece Der Führer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (The Führer Gives a City to the Jews). Theresienstadt was a complex amalgam of Nazi concentration camp, forced labor camp, and ghetto. Of the more than 140,000 Jews transferred to Terezin, 33,500 died there, victims of starvation, disease, and ill treatment. More significantly, Theresienstadt, in its second essential role, functioned as a way station for deported Czech Jews and eventually for Jews deported from the Reich to the Auschwitz II–Birkenau, Majdanek, and Treblinka extermination camps. Between December 1941 and the end of war in the spring of 1945, eighty-eight thousand individuals passed through Theresienstadt on their way to the East and to almost certain death.53

  52. See Birgitt Morgenbrod and Stephanie Merkenich, Das Rote Kreuz unter der NS-Diktatur, 1933–1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008), 374–91.

  53. For a more detailed discussion of the Theresienstadt ghetto, see H. G. Adler, Theresienstadt, 1941–1945: Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft (Tübingen: Mohr, 1960); Vojtěch Blodig, Terezin in the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” 1941–1945, trans. Jan Valěska and Lewis Paines (Prague: Památník Terezín/Oswald, 2003).

  At least fifteen thousand Jewish children came to Terezin. One of them was Eva Ginzová, who arrived at the ghetto in May 1944, when she was fourteen. Her beloved brother, Petr, had already been transferred to Theresienstadt in October 1942; her paternal grandmother, uncle Miloš, and cousins Pavel and Hanka had preceded her there as well. Eva began keeping a diary on June 24, after spending approximately six weeks in the ghetto. Her father did not arrive at Terezin until the very end of the war, so Eva’s central experience at Theresienstadt was one of homesickness and the pain of separation from her parents. Her loneliness intensified in the fall of 1944, when both her brother and cousin Pavel were deported to Auschwitz. Eva’s diary entries from this period underscore an elemental feature in the lives of many ghetto inhabitants: the grief, uncertainty, and anxiety felt by those whose loved ones had been deported to an unknown fate. Eva’s despondency over the loss of her brother grew with each passing week and increased in the last days of the war as trainloads of Auschwitz prisoners passed through Theresienstadt, telling stories about the horror of death camps in the East.

  Units of the Soviet army liberated Eva and her father at Theresienstadt in May 1945. The pair returned home to Prague in order to reunite with Eva’s mother and to await news of Petr. Eva Ginzová closed her Theresienstadt diary with the notation “When Petr comes back, I’ll write it here.” Almost two years later she added a final note: “Petr hasn’t come back.”54 He would not. Petr Ginz perished in the gas chambers at Auschwitz shortly after his arrival.55

  54. Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, 167.<
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  55. Petr Ginz also left a diary to posterity; see Petr Ginz, The Diary of Petr Ginz, 1941–1942, ed. Chava Pressburger, trans. Eva Lappin (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007).

  Document 4-14. Diary of Eva Ginzová, entries for September 28, 1944, and April 23, 1945, Theresienstadt, in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 180, 187–88.

  September 28, [1944]

  The train’s already here and both boys have already got on it. Petr’s number [is] 2392 and Pavel 2626. They’re together in the same car. Petr’s terribly calm and Uncle is full of admiration for him. I hoped to the last minute that the train wouldn’t come, even though I knew it would. But what can be done? Just this morning Hanka and I were with them at the slojska.56 It was a horrible sight that will stay with me forever. A crowd of women, children, and old men were pressed around the barracks to get a last look at their son, husband, father, or brother. The men leaning out of the windows were pressed one against the other to catch a glimpse of their dearest ones. But the barracks were guarded by police guards so that no one would escape. The Ghettowachmanns [ghetto guards] stood by the building and drove back people who came too close to it. The men from the windows waved and said good-bye to their relatives with looks. The sound of crying came from all around. We quickly ran home and brought the boys two slices of bread each so that they wouldn’t be hungry. I pressed through the crowd, crawled under the rope that separated the crowd from the barracks, and passed Petr the bread through the window. I had enough time to hold his hand through the bars before a guard drove me away. At least it worked out all right. Now the boys are gone and the only thing left from them here is their empty beds.

  56. This is the Czech variant of the German Schleuse (sluice), a slang word used in Theresienstadt for the collection point for prisoners arriving and departing upon transports. Here, incoming and outgoing baggage was examined and “contraband” confiscated.

  April 23, [1945]

  [. . .] My God, the things that are happening here now, it’s difficult to describe. One afternoon (on Friday, April 20), I was at work when we saw a freight train go past. There were people sticking their heads out of the window. They looked awful. They were pale, completely yellow and green in the face, unshaven, emaciated, with sunken cheeks and shaven heads, dressed in prison clothes . . . and with a strange shine in their eyes . . . from hunger.

  I ran to the ghetto straightaway (we’re working outside at the moment), to the railway station. They were just getting off the train, if one can call it getting off. Very few could stand on their feet (bones, covered in nothing but skin), others lay on the floor completely exhausted. They’d been traveling for two weeks with hardly anything to eat. They came from Buchenwald and Auschwitz (Oświęcim). Most of them were Hungarians and Poles. I was so upset I thought I would collapse. I was still looking for our Petr among them since some of those who arrived now were those who had left from here. But our Petr wasn’t there.

  One transport after another started to arrive now. Hungarians, Frenchmen, Slovaks, Poles (they had spent seven years in concentration camps), Czechs, too. No one from our family. And the number of dead among them! A whole pile in every car. Dressed in rags, barefoot or in broken clogs. It was such a terrible sight that hardly anyone had seen before. I wish I could express on paper all the things that are happening inside me. But I’m not talented enough to do that.

  And how the poor people threw themselves at any food they were given, whatever it was. How they fought over it—awful! A woman gave a lump of sugar to a sick boy, he was about seventeen. He burst out crying. He was sobbing terribly, kept looking at the piece of sugar and the bread the woman had given him and kept on crying, “Sugar, sugar, sugar, weissbrot, weissbrot [white bread].” Then he ate it. God knows how long it had been since he had seen any. Some have spotted fever [presumably typhus] and many other nasty diseases.

  And those who arrived from Litzmannstadt [Łódź] and from Birkenau told us awful things. They said Oświęcim [Auschwitz] and Birkenau were made into one. They used to be two concentration camps right next to each other. Now it has been liberated. Every transport that had arrived in Birkenau had had everything taken away and been divided immediately. Children under fourteen, people over fifty, went straight into the gas chambers and were then burned. Moreover, they always selected some more to be gassed from those who remained. And the food was lousy. Coffee, soup, coffee, and so on. I wouldn’t believe any of it if I wasn’t told about it by those who themselves experienced it. I’m so worried about Petr and whether he’s still alive.

  Chapter 5

  Children in the Concentration Camp Universe

  In National Socialist Germany, the concentration camp (Konzentrationslager, or KZ) system was an integral feature of the regime. The very first concentration camps were established soon after the appointment of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor in January 1933. Nazi authorities founded the first regular camp of its kind, Dachau, near Munich, in March of that same year to incarcerate political prisoners and ideological opponents. Before World War II, concentration camps served primarily as detention centers for real and perceived enemies of the Reich. One deviation from this policy was the arrest and imprisonment in camps of some thirty thousand German Jewish men, entirely on racial grounds, following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938. At the time of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, six major concentration camps were operating in the Greater German Reich: Dachau (founded 1933); Sachsenhausen, near Berlin (1936); Buchenwald, near Weimar (1937); Flossenbürg, in northeastern Bavaria near the former Czech border (1938); Mauthausen, near Linz, in Austria (the Ostmark) (1938); and Ravensbrück, a women’s camp established in the province of Brandenburg (1939).

  Following the outbreak of World War II, Germany’s vast territorial conquests prompted an expansion of the concentration camp system, primarily to its eastern annexed and occupied territories. At first the war did not alter the original function of these camps as detention centers for political prisoners, resistance figures, and dissidents of belief and conscience. Gradually, however, such sites began to serve as reservoirs for an expanding population of forced laborers deployed in construction and industrial enterprises in support of the German war effort. Nazi policy with regard to the use of concentration camp labor evolved in three discrete phases. In the period between 1933 and 1937, prison labor served a punitive purpose and was limited primarily to the construction and maintenance of the camps themselves. With the coming of war, forced laborers were deployed on large-scale construction projects and in the raw materials industry, largely under the auspices of the Schutzstaffel (SS). After 1942, with the war in full swing, prison labor was utilized extensively in the armaments industry and in weapons manufacture; dozens of subcamps were established for each major concentration camp, often located near production facilities or sites for the extraction of raw materials.1 Despite a pressing need for forced labor, SS officials and guards deliberately malnourished and mistreated their prisoners so that hundreds of thousands of their number died in camps throughout Europe of hunger, illness, and maltreatment.

  1. See Franciszek Piper, “The System of Prisoner Exploitation,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994); Paul Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London: Routledge, 2000).

  The exploitation of prison labor was a significant factor in the expansion of the Nazi concentration camp system. But with the invasion of the Soviet Union and the escalation of Nazi racial policy, a new category of camps emerged, sites designated to facilitate the “Final Solution” and the mass murder of groups and individuals deemed inferior by Nazi ideology and racial theory. German authorities establ
ished the first of these killing centers, Chełmno, in December 1941. SS officials murdered at least 152,000 individuals, primarily Jews and Roma, there between December 1941 and March 1943 and in June and July of 1944. In 1942, the planners of genocide founded the Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka killing centers, known collectively as the Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard) camps, to murder the Jews of the Generalgouvernement (General Government). At these extermination camps (Vernichtungslager), the SS and their auxiliaries killed approximately 1,526,500 Jews between March 1942 and November 1943. The largest killing center was Auschwitz, which by the spring of 1943 deployed four massive gas chambers, known as crematoria. At the height of the deportations to Auschwitz, up to six thousand Jews were gassed each day in its killing center, Birkenau. By November 1944, over 1 million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war had been murdered at the Auschwitz complex.