Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  Young children had almost no chance to survive in the Nazi system of concentration camps and killing centers. In camps where selections took place, German officials almost always dispatched Jewish children directly to the gas chambers. Infants and toddlers who arrived in the arms of their mothers or another relative went immediately to their deaths, often dooming the adults who accompanied them. The very young likewise rarely survived labor and concentration camps settings. When they did so, it was usually with the aid of relatives, adult prisoners, or members of the camp underground, who protected them and shared food and other essentials. Juveniles, particularly those over the age of twelve, often managed to mix in with the camp’s adult population because of their fitness and ability to work. The following documentation examines the fates of children and adolescents who lived and died in the concentration camp universe and explores the ways in which the experiences of child detainees paralleled and diverged from those of their adult counterparts.

  At the Edge of the Abyss

  Janina Hescheles2 was born in Lvov (then in Polish Galicia; today Lviv in Ukraine) on January 2, 1931. Her father, Henryk Hescheles, a respected journalist with Zionist credentials, served as the editor in chief of the Polish-language daily newspaper Chwila (The Moment) and was murdered shortly after German forces occupied Lvov in June 1941. Her mother worked as a nurse and administrator at a local hospital.3 As a young child, Janina had already been drawn to writing, especially to poetry, a form in which she would preserve many of her wartime memories and experiences. After a number of unsuccessful attempts to place the young girl with a Christian aunt on Lvov’s “Aryan side,” Janina and her mother found themselves incarcerated in the Janowska concentration camp.4 This complex was established in the autumn of 1941 to intern forced laborers working in a network of factories belonging to the German Armaments Works (Deutsche Rüstungswerke, or DAW); the first of these factories stood along the Janowska Road in Lvov’s suburbs.5 Owned and operated by the SS, the DAW works deployed thousands of Jewish prisoners as well as Jewish inhabitants of the Lvov ghetto, founded by German authorities in November 1941. In addition to its role as a forced labor camp, Janowska also served as a transit camp for the mass deportation of Jews from the region to killing centers in the context of the “Final Solution.” Jews arriving in Janowska on transports, or more commonly from the adjacent ghetto, underwent selections much as they might have experienced upon arrival at Auschwitz. Those found fit to work were absorbed into Janowska’s prisoner population. The rest were deported to the Bełżec killing center or shot at the Piaski ravine, a massacre site north of the camp.

  2. She is also cited as Jania, or Janka, Hescheles.

  3. Janina Hescheles, “Mit den Augen eines zwölfjähriges Mädchen,” in Im Feuer vergangen: Tagebücher aus dem Ghetto, ed. Johann Christoph Hampe (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1963), 151–89.

  4. See Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 131.

  5. See Leon Weliczker Wells, The Janowska Road (Washington DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1999).

  By August 1942, some sixty-five thousand Jews from Lvov had been deported to their deaths from Janowska. At this time, the camp was rife with rumors of what awaited these transports at Bełżec, an extermination camp on the Lvov-Lublin axis—one of three facilities, with Sobibór and Treblinka, comprising the camps of Operation Reinhard. These killing centers, which together claimed the lives of some 1.5 million Jews and thousands of Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war, were tasked principally with the murder of the Jewish population of the General Government.6 In 1943, young Janina, who often composed and recited poems for her fellow inmates, turned her thoughts to the deportees bound for Bełżec and the terrible fate that awaited them.7

  6. See Yitzhak Arad, Belżec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987); Bogdan Musial, ed., “Aktion Reinhardt”: Der Völkermord an den Juden im Generalgouvernement, 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: Fibre Verlag, 2004).

  7. Robert Kuwalek, From Lublin to Bełżec: Traces of Jewish Presence and the Holocaust in South-Eastern Part of the Lublin Region, trans. Adam Janiszewski (Lublin: Ad Rem, 2005); Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka.

  Janina herself did not share the destiny of those Jews who passed through Janowska to their destruction. After the death of her mother, who committed suicide before her eyes, the young girl was spirited out of the camp by Josefa Rysinska (alias “Ziutka”),8 an operative of the Polish underground organization Żegota, which aided in the rescue of Jewish children. Traveling with Ziutka to Kraków in 1943, Janina Hescheles survived the war in hiding. To the vexation of her rescuers, who feared her journal might fall into German hands, she used every available scrap of paper to record her wartime experiences. In 1946, the Jewish Historical Commission of Kraków published her diary under the title Through the Eyes of a Twelve-Year-Old Girl.

  8. Josefa Rysinska (b. 1922) served as a liaison officer in the Kraków branch of the underground Żegota organization. Among other rescue missions, she helped Jews to escape from the Pustkow and Szebnie forced labor camps and provided them with “Aryan” papers. Rysinska was arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo during a rescue attempt and sent to the Płaszów concentration camp in 1943. She was liberated from Płaszów in January 1945. In September 1979, Josefa Rysinska was recognized by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among the Nations.”

  Document 5-1. Janina Hescheles, “Bełz·ec,” Janowska, 1943, published in Michał Borwicz, ed., Pie´s´n ujdzie cało: Antologia wierszy o z·ydach pod okupacja˛ niemiecka˛ (Warsaw/Łód´z/Kraków: Centralna Z·ydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947), 270–71 (translated from the Polish).

  Bełz·ec

  How terrible the sight:

  A cattle car filled with people

  And corpses in the corner.

  Naked they stand;

  Their moans roll down in the clatter of the wheels.

  Only the condemned knows

  What the wheel says to him:

  To Bełz·ec!—to Bełz·ec!—to Bełz·ec!

  To death!—To death!—To death!

  If you want to live,

  then jump! run! rush! but remember

  The train guards lie in wait

  And whisper to the other condemned,

  “Nevermore will you see your mother.

  Useless to cry, useless to sob,

  Your father, never more shall you see.

  Because the wheel drives you to Bełz·ec!”

  To Bełz·ec!—to Bełz·ec!—to Bełz·ec!

  To death!—To death!—To death!

  The train goes more slowly, ends its travels.

  From a thousand breasts wells up one moan.

  The train has reached its goal,

  the locomotive whistles:

  Here is Bełz·ec! Here is Bełz·ec! Here is Bełz·ec!

  Death at Auschwitz

  The Auschwitz complex was the largest camp of its kind established by the National Socialist regime. Located near Oświęcim, Poland, some forty miles west of Kraków, the complex comprised three camps: Auschwitz I, established in May 1940; Birkenau (Auschwitz II), built in early 1942; and Monowitz, or Buna (Auschwitz III), established in May 1942. Auschwitz I, the main camp, was similar to most German concentration camps in that its primary aim was to incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the German Reich; like Monowitz, it also deployed a significant number of forced laborers both on-site and in SS-owned construction and war-related enterprises. Auschwitz II–Birkenau, with sections for men and women and temporary family camps for Roma (Gypsies) and for Jewish deportees from Theresienstadt, housed the largest prisoner population and accommodated the complex’s killing center. It was Birkenau, with its four massive crematoria, which played a
central role in the genocide of European Jewry.9

  9. For a discussion of the Auschwitz complex, see Wacław Długoborski and Franciszek Piper, eds., Auschwitz: 1940–1945, trans. William Brand, 5 vols. (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000); Danuta Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939–1945 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990); Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994).

  From 1942 through the late summer of 1944, trains carrying transports of Jews arrived at Auschwitz II–Birkenau from every corner of Axis-occupied Europe. In all, some 1.1 million Jews were deported there.10 Depending upon their point of origin, Jewish transports often traveled many days before they reached their destination. Occasionally, deportees from western European countries came to Auschwitz aboard regular passenger trains so as not to alert unsuspecting individuals to the fate that awaited them. For Jews from eastern Europe, many of whom had experienced years of brutal treatment in ghettos or labor camps, such subterfuge was unnecessary; these individuals reached Birkenau in freight cars. Eighty to one hundred people often crowded into each car, with little or no provisions for a journey of several days. Such neglect was strategic, for exhausted prisoners, driven by extreme hunger and thirst, were more likely to cooperate in the offloading and sorting procedures when promised a shower and refreshment after their long ordeal.

  10. See Franciszek Piper, Auschwitz: How Many Perished There? (Kraków: Polygraphia ITS, 1992).

  New arrivals on the Birkenau ramp underwent the process of selection. Amid the chaos of disembarkation, Auschwitz prisoner-workers and SS guards separated the deportees by gender and ordered them to form short ranks. SS medical staff then performed selections of Jewish prisoners, determining from among the mass of humanity who would be retained for work and who would perish immediately in the gas chambers. Young and able-bodied Jews were often chosen for labor and registered as prisoners at the camp. The sick, the weak, and the aged were murdered upon arrival. Young children generally shared the fate of the elderly and unfit in going directly to the gas chamber, often dooming their mothers or other adults who accompanied them.

  Document 5-2. Jewish women and children from Transcarpathian Rus who have been selected for the death walk to the gas chamber, Auschwitz, May 1944, USHMMPA WS# 77342, courtesy of Yad Vashem.

  Magda Szabo11 was a young schoolteacher when she arrived at Auschwitz with her mother, sister-in-law, and two-year-old niece from Udvárhely, then in Hungary, in the late spring of 1944. She was holding the toddler on the ramp when a prisoner approached her and entreated her to hand the child to her own mother. Hoping that such an action would spare the older woman from hard labor and provide supervision for her niece, Szabo unwittingly sealed her mother’s fate.

  11. Magda Szabo (née Guttmann, b. 1919) survived the Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen concentration camps. Following the war she became a teacher in Sighişoara, Romania. In August 1964, she became a key witness at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial.

  Document 5-3. Testimony of Magda Szabo, August 24, 1964, Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, in Fritz Bauer Institute and the State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, eds., Der Auschwitz-Prozess: Tonbandmitschnitte, Protokolle, Dokumente (DVD) (Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2004) (translated from the German).

  Presiding Judge: Ms. Szabo, you lived with your parents where, before you were arrested?

  Witness Magda Szabo: In Odorhei, Udvárhely. [. . .]

  Judge: Did you have a profession at that time?

  Magda Szabo: Yes, I was employed as a teacher.

  Judge: Employed as a teacher. And when were you arrested?

  Magda Szabo: Early May, around May 5, we were taken from Vásárhely into the ghetto at Tîrgu Mures, everyone from the area of Odorhei, together with my parents. And in the ghetto I also met my brother, his wife and children, and her parents; and we were transported after about three weeks with the first transport to Auschwitz.

  Judge: Then you were first assembled in a ghetto—

  Magda Szabo: [interrupting] Yes.

  Judge: Near Tîrgu Mures, yes?

  Magda Szabo: In the brick factory, yes.

  Judge: And there you were together with your family?

  Magda Szabo: Yes, yes.

  Judge: Who belonged to your family?

  Magda Szabo: Father, mother, sister-in-law and her children and her sister, the sister-in-law of her sister, and her parents. . . .

  Judge: And did you have children? Did you already have at this time—

  Magda Szabo: [Interrupting] Myself, no, no. I was still unmarried. [. . .]

  Judge: Now when were you sent to Auschwitz?

  Magda Szabo: At the end of May. I think it was May 29th, 30th, 1st of June or so. My sister-in-law had a little child, two years old: she had her birthday in the cattle car. It was—I don’t know—the last day in the car or so.

  Judge: So you think the end of May?

  Magda Szabo: In any case at the end of May, early June, to the 1st of June. I can’t remember exactly any more. [. . .]

  Judge: Do you know approximately how many people were in your transport? Naturally you didn’t count them, but . . .

  Magda Szabo: I didn’t count, but we were eighty people in that car, and that was a very long . . .

  Judge: Very long train.

  Magda Szabo: Transport. Forty, fifty cars there were at least.

  Judge: Tell me, please, during this transport, did you receive any provisions?

  Magda Szabo: No. As we got into the car, we got a small piece of bread, every person, no water, nothing. We climbed in. We brought some food with us, but we ate it sparingly—we thought that we were going somewhere to work, [and] the children should have some of it.

  Judge: Did you at least receive anything to drink?

  Magda Szabo: No. Once it rained, I remember very well, and we caught the water in a glass.

  Judge: Some rainwater.

  Magda Szabo: A little water so that we could give the children in the car at least a little water.

  Judge: When you arrived in Auschwitz, do you know who opened your cars and had you get out?

  Magda Szabo: There were prisoners there who helped us. And they said we should leave our baggage there. We should get out. And then immediately five to a row . . .

  Judge: They lined you up?

  Magda Szabo: Women separately, yes, lined us up. And I was with my sister-in-law; she had a small child, two years old. I took it in my arms because she was still younger and weaker [than I was]. And as we stood there in the row, a prisoner came to me and asked me if the child belonged to me. “No,” I said. He said, “Give it to the mother.” And I understood that I should give the child to my mother. Perhaps she would get lighter work. And so I gave it to her. Probably he meant that I should give it to an older . . .

  Judge: Woman.

  Magda Szabo: [An older woman], yes. And I also said to my mother, “Mother, say that you are old. Perhaps you can stay there, if you are older, so you could care for the children when my sister-in-law goes to work.”

  Judge: Yes.

  Magda Szabo: And because this officer, the SS officer who was there, spoke so nicely to me and even spoke in Hungarian,12 I said, “Oh Mama, how good it would be if you could be with the children. Say that you are old.”

  12. The individual in question was pharmacist Victor Capesius, a Transylvanian ethnic German (Volksdeutsche) who was a defendant in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial.

  Judge: Yes.

  Magda Szabo: And I was taken out of the row, and I never saw her again. [. . .]

  Fifteen-year-old Helga Weissová faced selection at Auschwitz with her own mother. In December 1941, shortly after her twelfth birthday, Helga and her parents, Otto and Irena Weiss, arrived with one of the first transports of Czec
h Jews to Theresienstadt. The girl would remain in the Terezin ghetto for three years, during which time she honed an early talent for drawing and painting. Enjoined by her father to paint what she observed around her, Helga completed over one hundred drawings and illustrations during her tenure at Theresienstadt, most of them portraying the bleak and often surreal aspects of ghetto existence.

  In late 1944, Helga and her mother were deported to Auschwitz. Helga was fifteen, an age at which Birkenau camp officials often selected adolescents for forced labor. Moreover, mother and daughter arrived at Auschwitz shortly before the camp’s liquidation and, amid the chaotic conditions, were transported almost immediately to camps in the German interior. In the last days of the war, the pair found themselves in the Mauthausen concentration camp, where American forces liberated them and their fellow prisoners on May 5, 1945.

  Helga and her mother returned to Prague, where they learned of the death of Otto Weiss and of most of their family members and friends. At this time, Helga began to draw again, eager to capture images of her experiences, which, after her deportation to Auschwitz, she had had no opportunity to put down on paper. In late 1945 or early 1946, Helga Weissová depicted her vision of the ramp at Birkenau, where many of her fellow deportees had met their end. Wrote Weissová of her illustration, “Selection,” “Prisoners were classified immediately on arrival to Auschwitz and subsequently from time to time. It was determined that the young and the strong should work, while the old, the weak, and the children were sent to the gas chambers. Children under fifteen had no chance of survival.”13

  13. Helga Weissová, Zeichne, was Du siehst! Zeichnungen eines Kindes aus Theresienstadt/Terezin, ed. Niedersächsischer Verein zur Förderung von Theresienstadt/Terezin, e.V. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998), 138.

  Document 5-4. Ink drawing by Helga Weissová, “Selection,” 1945–1946, in Helga Weissová, Zeichne, was Du siehst! Zeichnungen eines Kindes aus Theresienstadt/Terezin, ed. Niedersächsischer Verein zur Förderung von Theresienstadt/Terezin, e.V. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998), 139.