Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  The Kinderblock was the “one oasis in our camp,” recalled Hanna Hoffmann, a young and idealistic instructor in the children’s block. The children spent most of their waking hours in this area of the camp. Here they took their meals and washed themselves, even in the coldest weather. Prisoners in the family camp were not exempt from the monotonous roll calls conducted twice daily in Auschwitz, but Hirsch arranged for his charges to report to Appell inside their block, a relative luxury, especially in inclement weather. Calisthenics were generally held before instruction began, and children were also allowed time for games, sport, and recreation. Youngsters spent the evening hours with their parents and slept in the barracks of their father or mother, depending on their gender.22 The difficult conditions that prevailed in the family camp created special challenges for the young educators who sought to improve the lot of their pupils. Yet, as instructor Avi Fischer later recounted, when the children came together to play or sing in the afternoon, “the barracks became a safe ship sailing through the vast spaces,”23 even in the heart of Birkenau.

  22. Keren, “The Family Camp,” 431–33.

  23. Avi Fischer, quoted in Keren, “The Family Camp,” 435.

  Document 5-7. Personal testimony of Hanna Hoffmann-Fischel, c. 1960, in Inge Deutschkron, Denn ihrer war die Hölle: Kinder in Gettos und Lagern (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1965), 49–52 (translated from the German).

  There was one oasis in our camp, a place in which one could forget the present, in which one was still a human being. That was the children’s home [Kinderheim], an undertaking of Fredy Hirsch. Fredy, whose demeanor and bearing the Germans approved of and were even impressed by right from the start, was at the first Lagerkapo [camp kapo]. From the SS Lagerleiter he had succeeded in obtaining an area of the block in which could be set up a day care home for children between eight and fourteen years of age. Before this time, children had been divided among the various blocks, among the old and sick, and no one had taken care of them. Their only activity was roll call [Appell]; anything else would have destroyed the “discipline” of the camp.

  Fredy then looked for several young people among the prisoners who had already worked as educators in Theresienstadt. With their help he assembled, according to age and language, 700 children who up till this time were only “numbers.” He managed to acquire better food for them and was even successful in requisitioning for the Kinderblock a portion of the parcels which came to the concentration camp and whose recipients were no longer alive. (These parcels came only for “Aryan” Germans and Poles.) The caregivers for the various groups of children were above all responsible for the cleanliness of their charges. Daily, all articles of clothing were searched for lice; care was taken that hands, fingernails, ears, eating utensils, and so on were clean. Fredy even made spot-checks himself. And when a child was not completely clean, the whole group lost its special rations.

  Each day there were five hours of lessons. Most of the children could not speak German. Fredy had convinced the SS that lessons in the German language would be in their best interest. Naturally, these German lessons were limited to drilling the children in a few phrases, to be used in the event that a German guest would visit the home.24 The classroom lessons took place under difficult conditions. The tables of the various groups stood close together, so that it was difficult for the children to concentrate. They were noisy, and it was difficult to keep them in their seats; the nagging hunger troubled both the children and their caregivers. Then we had neither paper nor pencils, not to mention any books. Few of us were trained as teachers, who might at least have some special skills at our disposal. Nevertheless, we attempted to teach the children, many of whom had not yet had any schooling, the fundamental basics.

  24. Auschwitz authorities were expecting a visit of officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross, as had been organized at Theresienstadt, an event that never transpired.

  The distribution of food at noon and in the evenings demanded a great deal of moral fortitude on the part of the caregivers. The children received better food than we did and got extra rations in addition; and they kept a sharp lookout because they knew that we should not keep anything back for ourselves. The caregivers were placed in an especially difficult position when the children, out of compassion, offered them something from their own rations. Fredy had also strictly forbidden this, and we would also have lost the respect of the children. Some who could not resist the temptation—especially the young men, who already suffered edema25 from hunger—were barred without leniency from the home.

  25. Edema is the abnormal accumulation of fluid beneath the skin or in one or more cavities of the body. Edema caused by severe malnourishment (hunger edema) often appears in the extremities, especially the lower legs.

  Because we came from the Zionist movement, we tried as hard as we could to give the children some understanding of the things which we wanted to live for. We assembled everything we knew about Israel, portrayed to them life on a kibbutz, tried to get them enthused about collectives in Israel. But this was very difficult. The children, stemming mostly from assimilated Czech families were, in experience, as old as we were, and therefore more skeptical, even cynical. They certainly had had very little opportunity in their short lives to learn about goodness and beauty. They couldn’t believe in anything; no, there was one thing in which they believed: the omnipotent power of the crematorium chimney, which they saw smoking before them. When it spewed forth flames, they only remarked drily that another transport must have come in. And if we sometimes believed to have ignited a spark in them, then it came time to distribute the food again, and the youth leader was once again a poor sucker and the [Israeli] collective forgotten.

  Of the 231,640 children deported to Auschwitz, some 650 young persons under the age of seventeen remained at the camp to witness its liberation by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945.26 Hundreds more of their number survived brutal forced marches from Auschwitz to an array of camps in the German interior in the weeks proceeding the liquidation of that complex. As meager as these survival rates appear, they are significant when compared to corresponding figures for the remainder of the National Socialist extermination camps. Unlike Auschwitz, these killing centers did not have genuine selections. The overwhelming majority of Jews and other deportees arriving at these centers went directly to their deaths in the gas chambers. Only a few hundred individuals among the 1.5 million Jews deported to the Operation Reinhard camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka survived the war, and even this survival rate resulted largely from prisoner revolts at the latter two facilities. Four prisoners survived to tell of their experiences at Chełmno, the first extermination camp of the “Final Solution.” In each of these instances, only a tiny fraction of the surviving prisoners were children.

  26. See Helena Kubica, “Children and Adolescents in Auschwitz,” in Auschwitz, 1940–1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp, ed. Tadeusz Iwasko et al., trans. William Brand (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2000), 2:201–90. Jewish children represented a majority (93 percent) of this figure, but the statistic also includes Roma and other non-Jewish children, especially from Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia.

  Berel Dov Freiberg (or Fraiberg)27 was one of the very few youngsters to survive the Sobibór killing center. The small village of Sobibór lies five kilometers (three miles) west of the Bug River, near Włodawa, on the eastern border of today’s Poland. During World War II, the town fell within occupied Poland’s Lublin District; due to its location in a wooded and thinly populated region at a point along the Chelm-Włodawa railroad line, Sobibór was chosen as a site for the second of those extermination camps operating under the auspices of Operation Reinhard, the campaign to murder the Jews of the General Government.28

  27. Berel Dov Freiberg wrote a memoir of his experiences at Sobibór; see Dov Fraiberg, To Survive Sobibor (Jerusalem: Gefen, 200
7).

  28. For a discussion of the Sobibór killing center, see Jules Schelvis, Sobibor: A History of a Nazi Death Camp, trans. Karin Dixon (Oxford: Berg in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007); Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka; Miriam Novitch, ed., Sobibor, Martyrdom and Revolt: Documents and Testimonies (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980).

  The camp personnel at Sobibór comprised twenty to thirty German SS and police officials, as well as some one hundred Ukrainian and Polish civilians recruited as auxiliary guards. Although each German functionary nominally belonged to the SS, the core of the German staff formally remained personnel of Operation T4, the mass-murder program that targeted disabled patients in killing centers on German soil. The directors of this “euthanasia” program had loaned these operatives to the planners of the “Final Solution” during the halt in their killing operations beginning in the summer of 1941. Sobibór’s first commandant, Franz Stangl, had been a former T4 administrator at the Hartheim “euthanasia” facility before his transfer to the East in the spring of 1942. In August of that year, Stangl was transferred to the Treblinka camp to replace its ineffectual commandant, Dr. Irmfried Eberl,29 and Stangl’s deputy, Franz Reichleitner,30 succeeded him at Sobibór.31

  29. Graduating with a degree in medicine from the University of Innsbruck, Austrian psychiatrist Irmfried Eberl (1910–1948) was the director of the Brandenburg and Bernburg “euthanasia” (T4) facilities. Following a temporary halt in T4 operations, Eberl served as the first commandant of the Treblinka killing center. At the end of August 1942, gross disorganization at the complex resulted in Eberl’s replacement by Franz Stangl (1908–1971). Eberl was arrested by American authorities in early 1948 and committed suicide in custody on February 16, 1948.

  30. Franz Reichleitner (1906–1944), like Franz Stangl, was a member of the Austrian criminal police and served with his colleague as an official at the Hartheim “euthanasia” (T4) facility. When Stangl became commandant at the Treblinka killing center in September 1942, Reichleitner, his deputy, assumed his role as commandant at Sobibór. Following the liquidation of the Reinhard camps in November 1943, Reichleitner joined other T4 personnel for the so-called Aktion R (Operation R) on the Adriatic coast, where at least a portion of the group’s responsibility was to carry out the deportation and murder of Italian Jewry. Reichleitner was killed by partisans near Fiume in January 1944.

  31. In the immediate postwar period, Franz Stangl procured a fictive Red Cross passport and fled abroad. He lived hidden in Syria for three years and in 1951 joined his wife in São Paulo, Brazil, where he found work in a Volkswagen automobile plant. Although he had registered with consular officials under his own name and his crimes were known to Austrian justice officials, Stangl continued to live unencumbered in Brazil. Spurred by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, Brazilian police arrested him in 1967. In 1970, a Düsseldorf court sentenced Stangl to life imprisonment in proceedings against former officials of the Treblinka killing center. Stangl died of heart failure while incarcerated on June 28, 1971. For an intensive discussion of Stangl’s activities in the T4 and Operation Reinhard programs, see Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).

  The Sobibór killing center comprised three separate camps consisting of an administrative area for camp offices, another area for guard residences, and a third area containing barracks for the small prison labor force. Camp II accommodated a receiving area, adjacent to the railroad siding. Beginning in May 1942, when regular gassing operations began at the killing center, transports consisting of forty to sixty freight cars arrived at the Sobibór railway station, several hundred yards away. Twenty cars at a time approached the siding, where camp guards ordered deportees to descend from the train to the platform, enjoining them to leave their luggage behind. The camp’s reception area held barracks where the new arrivals were forced to undress and surrender any last valuables and other possessions. Now guards forced their victims down a narrow enclosed footpath, known as the “Tube” (Schlauch), which connected the receiving area to Camp III, the part of the complex that housed the gas chambers. In a special barracks inside the Tube, a handful of veteran prisoners sheared the hair of the Jewish women. Thereafter, the victims were driven, often with brutal force, into gas chambers disguised as shower facilities. Once the doors were sealed, powerful engines from adjacent rooms pumped deadly carbon monoxide gas into the chambers, killing all inside. This process was repeated until the entire transport had been murdered.

  German SS and police officials conducted gassing operations at Sobibór from May 1942 until the fall of 1943, when revolts by Jewish prisoners here and at Treblinka spurred the liquidation of both killing centers.32 In all, at least 167,000 individuals perished at the Sobibór extermination camp.

  32. For a discussion of the Sobibór prisoner uprising, see chapter 9.

  On the ramp of Sobibór, no elaborate selection process separated individuals physically fit for labor from the bulk of deportees destined for immediate gassing. Often whole transports were sent directly to their deaths in the gas chambers. Occasionally, as the need arose, guards in the reception area chose from among the new arrivals a handful of prisoners who seemed physically robust or possessed specific skills to round out the camp’s prison labor force. A number of these individuals worked as tailors or cobblers, serving the needs of the German or auxiliary guards. This force also typically included several women who cooked, cleaned, and laundered for camp personnel. Most of the prisoners, however, served in so-called Sonderkommandos (special detachments). As at Auschwitz and other extermination camps, these forced laborers worked in the reception area to facilitate the processing of each transport to the camp; others worked in Camp III, hurrying the victims along the Tube or shearing the hair of female prisoners. After each transport, these veteran Jewish prisoners were forced to burn or bury the corpses of murdered victims, to sort and store their abandoned possessions, and to clean the freight cars for the next round of deportations. Camp officials regularly murdered members of these labor brigades and filled their ranks with prisoners from newly arriving transports.

  Berel Dov Freiberg was fourteen when he arrived at Sobibór. When he was a young child, he and his family had left their native Łódź for the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942, he and other family members had escaped the ghetto but were caught in a roundup in the town of Turobin, near Lublin in eastern Poland. Berel and his uncle were deported to Sobibór in May 1942. From his long experience as a youth in the ghetto, Berel immediately recognized an opportunity for survival when camp officials announced that they were looking for artisans and skilled laborers. Although he had neither training nor experience, the young boy was chosen from among the prisoners and soon found himself a member of the camp’s Sonderkommando. Freiberg endured brutal treatment, hunger, and disease in his first months at Sobibór. Hard physical labor and the heart-wrenching nature of his new tasks quickly took their toll. Suicide was common among Sonderkommando units, and the teenager tried to hang himself on at least one occasion.33 Memories of his loved ones helped steel his resilience, as did his decision to join the growing underground resistance movement among veteran Jewish prisoners at the camp. Freiberg participated in the Sobibór Uprising on October 14, 1943, and was one of nearly seventy Sobibór prisoners to survive the war.34 In 1945, he gave an account of his arrival at the killing center to former Oneg Shabbat chronicler Bluma Wasser, herself a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto.

  33. See Berel Dov Freiberg’s complete account in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 268–87.

  34. For an account of Berel Dov Freiberg’s actions in the Sobibór prisoner revolt, see chapter 9.

  Document 5-8. Oral history of Berel Dov Freiberg, recorded by Bluma Wasser, 1945, in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective an
d Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 268–78.

  After traveling on the train for a few hours, we suddenly stopped—we’d arrived in Sobibór. A platform on both sides of the tracks in the middle of a forest, with a tower ahead of us covered by barbed wire and vines through which the tracks led deeper into the woods. [. . .]

  After our train moved in, the doors were thrown open and armed Germans and Ukrainians, cracking whips, drove us out of the wagons. We had bloody welts all over our bodies. The day we came to Sobibór was May 5, in the year [19]42. We were led through a second tower to an assembly point which was ringed by barbed wire fences, with posts on the wire perimeters capped by some sort of metal hoods. They split us up here—men to one side, and women and children to the other. Soon, SS squads came in and led the women with the children away. Where they were being taken to we didn’t know, but off in the distance we heard screams of people being beaten and stripped and then we heard the rumblings of motors being started. It was the women and children being killed. We could sense in the air that, locked up like this between the wires, we’d be slaughtered right here. Night fell and we fell into a panic. We’d been told that in Bełżec, people were burned alive in pits. We wouldn’t believe this while we were in the ghetto, but here, when we saw a fire in the distance, we were sure they were burning people. We were overcome with fear and started saying our viduyim.35