Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  35. In the Jewish liturgy, these are public prayers of confession.

  It was a nightmare. The Ukrainians beat us and wouldn’t let us out to relieve ourselves. People evacuated on the spot. Later, they told us they wouldn’t do anything to us, that the women had only been taken off to work. In the morning, SS men came and selected craftsmen and artisans to work as shoemakers, carpenters, locksmiths. I felt they’d let these people live. I also wanted to join these baleymlukhe [artisans], but I’d never been a worker and was afraid that if they ordered me to saw off a small piece of wood even, I’d bungle it and then would be worse off. So I sat and wondered—what can I do? Then the SS man pointed out all the healthy young men and ordered them to step forward, so I jumped up and squeezed in among these towering youths and sturdy craftsmen. I pleaded with my uncle to come with me, but he wouldn’t move and I went alone. He was afraid, and something in my heart told me he wouldn’t survive anyway. It took a long time to carry out this [selection]. We were led through still another tower, again to an assembly area, but there were no barracks here yet, only lean-tos and frames. The others were immediately sent away and we never saw them again.

  There were thirty men in our group. They divided us up right away. Some [of us] were used to sort our belongings. The bundles were lying in ditches surrounded by wires and vines, with the same metal-hooded perimeter posts. The whole camp looked like this. I was taken into the second group and set to work digging a latrine. I never held a shovel in my life and a German who guarded us at work noticed my “skill” and let fly such a blow over my head that he nearly split my skull. That was when I learned how to work.

  We worked from daybreak till nine, then they gave us breakfast. Bread and fingerbowls of fat [were] all we got and afterwards, they put us to work till late evening. As night fell, we were all lined up and an SS man informed us nothing would happen to us if we behaved well. If we didn’t—they’d “make us a gift” of a bullet to the head. For the time being, they say, we work here, and in a week they’ll take us to where the women are working. They’d already reached their destination and we’ll be able to correspond with them soon. Their belongings which [were] still lying in the ditch were left behind because [they had been given] new work clothes at the labor site, so we could go ahead and help ourselves to their coats and cover ourselves up and even sleep in the work shacks nearby. Then, simply, because he had the urge, he picked two men out—one who had stomach pains and the other who just wasn’t to his liking—and led them off into the woods where he shot them. Most of the time the men returned from work beaten, bloodied, and injured all over the body. We knew what was in store for us now and everyone just limped off to go to sleep. [. . .]

  Wagner36—he was the worst murderer—[once] broke a shovel over my head. My face was completely disfigured. The eyes were pulp. No matter on which side I tried to lie down, I couldn’t. I stayed up whole nights and howled and wept in pain. They tortured us unbelievably. I looked like death itself. Everyone said I was a candidate for the Lazarett37 because, in the beginning, I was never completely conscious. I was young, so they kept beating me. We had to keep working like this for two weeks without stop, because what seemed like an endless number of transports were arriving then from Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany, and afterwards, from Poland. [. . .]

  36. SS-Oberscharführer Gustav Wagner (1911–1980) served as an official at the Hartheim T4 facility and as deputy camp commandant at the Sobibór killing center. In the postwar years, Wagner fled to Brazil with T4 colleague Franz Stangl. A survivor of Sobibór identified Wagner in 1978, and German justice authorities applied for his extradition, a request Brazilian authorities denied in June 1979. Wagner committed suicide in São Paulo on October 3, 1980.

  37. At Sobibór, this was a site disguised as an infirmary, where guards shot prisoners too elderly or weak to walk to the gas chambers under their own power.

  While we cut their hair, we stole some conversation with the women—as long as no German was watching, of course. They asked, “Tell us, can you? Will this death be painless? Does it last long?”

  They asked us how we were still able to work for “them” while everyone else was dead. We answered, “You have it better. You’re going to die soon—but we have to keep working, getting beaten all the time, till we’re finally exterminated too.”

  Many told us where they hid their gold and jewels so that we could save ourselves, and they begged us to take revenge against the murderers. They couldn’t part with their children—if to die, then together, together till the last moment. While we cut their hair, they clutched their children to their bodies to be together like this till the end. And many women wouldn’t let their hair be cut! They were shot at and beaten, but it was no use. They sat down and refused to move, not letting the barbers cut their hair, and refusing to walk on into the “bath” [i.e., the gas chamber]. They were either shot on the spot, or such a hail of blows rained down on them that they were driven [alive] into the furnaces. . . .

  Many times, we planned dropping poison into the soup kettles so we’d die—but what would it have accomplished? We wanted to achieve a death that would take some of “them” along with us. But some of us must survive so the world would learn of us. There were countless times we planned rebelling and sabotaging the work. Enough! But then what? They’d shoot us and get others. It was senseless. We had to do something which would really change things and hit at them: arson, assassinations. As long as one person survived to tell the world!

  Thousands of children survived the war years in concentration and forced labor camps throughout German- and Axis-controlled Europe. While young Jewish children were almost inevitably sent immediately to the gas chambers upon their arrival at killing centers such as Auschwitz, some adolescents, particularly those in their late teens, did survive such selections. Life for young people in concentration camp settings was fraught with danger, particularly if those youngsters were separated from their parents. Young prisoners suffered the same deprivation, overcrowding, and unsanitary conditions as adult detainees did, but children often proved less resourceful than their grown-up counterparts and were more vulnerable to duplicity and abuse both from their guards and from their fellow prisoners. In many camps, such as Auschwitz, children under the age of fourteen could not officially be assigned to forced labor details, although in practice this regulation was seldom observed.38 Those who did not or could not work found themselves continually at risk of deportation to a killing center in the frequent selections that took place in forced labor and concentration camps. Children proved especially vulnerable to these selektsyes, as prisoners called them, and several camps experienced genuine “children’s actions” aimed at culling very young prisoners from the camp population.

  38. Kubica, “Children and Adolescents in Auschwitz,” 249.

  Youngsters who survived such hellish conditions needed an equal share of courage, stamina, and good fortune. Adolescents often did manage to mix in with the camps’ adult populations because of their fitness or ability to work, and many succeeded in enduring the harsh conditions and grueling labor through the help of adult prisoners. One such lucky youngster was Janka Avram.39 Born in Kraków in 1931, she was just ten years old when Nazi authorities established a ghetto for Jews in her native city in March 1941. In June 1942, Janka hid amid rubbish in a garbage can near the local Judenrat headquarters as SS officials and members of the Jewish Order Police searched nearby buildings, rounding up children for deportation. Nearly half of the Kraków ghetto’s population—four thousand Jews—was transported to the Bełżec extermination camp as a result of this deportation action, including most of the ghetto’s remaining children.40 In the aftermath of the razzia, Janka’s mother paid Judenrat officials to supply her young daughter with a fictive birth certificate so that she might be spared in any future children’s actions. “I was eleven, looked like I was five, and was passing for a sixteen-year-old,” r
ecalled Janka, who worked for the next year in a ghetto factory.41

  39. The name of the interviewee cannot be established with certainty; a pseudonym has been used instead.

  40. An initial deportation action in the Kraków ghetto, on May 30, 1942, claimed seven thousand inhabitants.

  41. J. A., quoted in Trunk, Jewish Responses, 117.

  On March 13 and 14, 1943, SS units under SS-Untersturmführer Amon Göth liquidated the Kraków ghetto. Some three thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz, while two thousand other residents were murdered directly within the ghetto walls in the course of the roundups themselves. Janka, along with her mother and father, numbered among the remaining two thousand Jews who were deemed fit to work and transferred to the nearby Płaszów forced labor camp. Separated from her parents, Janka again survived an extensive culling of the camp’s children by sheer pluck and determination. Ultimately spared by Göth, Płaszów’s universally feared commandant, twelve-year-old Janka was restored to her mother and survived the war at her side.42 In February 1955, the twenty-four-year-old university student recounted her remarkable escape from Płaszów guards—immortalized in the Academy Award–winning film Schindler’s List—to oral historian Icek Shmulewitz.

  42. Avram and her mother survived a brief stay at Auschwitz and a series of forced marches into the German interior. In the midst of one such “death march,” American units liberated the women near the village of Husinec on the Czech border.

  Document 5-9. Testimony of anonymous girl (Janka Avram), interviewed by Icek Shmulewitz, New York, 1955, in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 117–19.

  The Kraków Ghetto was liquidated at the start of 1943. Most of the people still left inside the ghetto were taken to the death camps. Those who could still work were interned in the Płaszów concentration camp. [. . .] There, my mother and I were put in the women’s camp and my father was separated from us along with the men.43 The 100 of us were taken to work at the factory from Płaszów just like we’d been taken from the Kraków Ghetto. After two months in Płaszów, I was no longer allowed to work at the factory because the Germans said my strength was failing and I could no longer do the work right. They had me work at the brush factory in Płaszów for the time. I could no longer see my parents, either, because the 100 Jews who worked at the factory were locked up inside and never let out—they were no longer part of Płaszów as they had been till now. [. . .]

  43. After a brutal beating by the commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp, Amon Göth (1908–1946), Avram’s father was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died in the summer of 1944. Infamous today, partly because of his portrayal by Ralph Fiennes in the movie Schindler’s List, Göth was found guilty of war crimes by a Polish court in Kraków and executed in 1946.

  Selektsyes [selections] took place all the time now, and the people were sent either to other labor camps or to Auschwitz. The most tragic [selection] was the one in August 1943. Children, sick people, and the aged were hunted down, herded together, and packed off to Auschwitz.

  There was a children’s home in Płaszów where the workers left their children for the day. The children of the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst [Jewish Order Service] were also kept there. I was put inside this home with many other children while the big [selection] I just mentioned was going on.

  The head of the Jewish police in Płaszów had been a suspected informer, but said he’d only been a milkman in Kraków. His name was Chilewicz. He knew I was going by a false birth certificate, that I was still a child. His wife was the head inmate of the women’s camp. Soon, during an [Appell], Chilewicz’s wife took me out of line and sent me to the children’s home where all the other children were being gathered for deportation. She said I was also a child and belonged with them.

  There were about 500 to 600 of us inside the children’s home. The building was sealed behind barbed wire and guarded by Gestapo agents and not the sentries of the Ordnungsdienst. I spent only one night inside this children’s home. The following morning, they started loading the children into trucks headed for Auschwitz. I felt sure they were leading us away to die and I decided to escape. As they were pushing me toward a truck with the other children, a German guard stopped a moment to light his cigarette. He stood [with his legs apart]. In a second, me [sic] and three other children—a boy and two girls—dropped out of line and, running low on the ground, we shot through the German’s spread long legs. We broke for the latrine. The German whirled around and fired, but he didn’t hit anyone because we dropped to the ground as soon as we heard the first of his many shots. He couldn’t come after us because he was afraid if he left the other children, they’d break away too.

  The camp latrine in which the three children and I hid was exposed. As we stood there, we could be seen from all sides and we were afraid they’d spot us. So I quickly ripped out one of the boards covering the pit and jumped right into the hole, into all the excrement. The children jumped down after me. The last child dragged down the board I had ripped out with him, and this saved us. The latrine ditch was very deep because they dug the waste out every few days. We edged the board in between the two walls of the pit and sat over the feces on it for six long hours, not knowing what to do or how to get out.

  When the [action] had finished, after the children and the old people were gone, the Jewish women started coming into the latrine to relieve themselves in the ditch we were in. The excrement was dropping all over us. We screamed and yelled to them for help, but no one could hear us because we were down so deep. So we dug our feet into the pit wall, and holding each other up, we used the board to bang on the floor above our heads. The Jewish women finally heard our screams and knocking; they yanked the boards out of the floor and pulled us up. Two children were half-faint from the stench they’d breathed in during the long hours at the bottom of the pit and collapsed. There were now no other children left in the camp—we were the last four Jewish children of Płaszów.

  The women brought us inside their barracks and hid us in the top bunks. We were separated—each one of us to a different barrack. The women got one of the Jewish doctors in the camp to come see us, and he gave us shots against cholera—this was all done secretly, of course. We were hidden inside the four separate barracks for a week. The women took very good care of us and brought us food. Finally, the head of the women’s camp—Chilewicz’s wife—found out about us and informed the camp commandant, Göth. This German said to her that if we four children had the guts to jump into the waste to save ourselves, then we should be spared and not deported like the other children. This is how we were able to remain in the camp legally. We were the only children there and were really well taken care of—this was because the thousands of Jewish women who lost their children to the death camps treated us like their own.

  My mother no longer believed I was alive—she again thought I’d been taken away with the other children when they cleared out the children’s home. Someone who took food to the factory where my mother was locked up let her know I was alive and that I was still inside the camp. When my mother heard I’d survived, she went straight to the factory supervisor and begged him to let me come to her, to let me work by her side. The supervisor was a German, Captain Fischer—a decent man. This German gave in to my mother’s pleas and went to the Płaszów Gestapo chief himself to take out a permit that would let me work in the factory with my mother. Captain Fischer then sent his adjutant, Hilbig, also a German, to bring me to my mother by auto. My mother had no idea this would happen—she didn’t even believe they had really listened to her at all. But Captain Fischer and his aide were kind—it’s because of them that I’m alive. [As the witness recounts this episode, she’s noticeably moved when speaking of the two Hitlerite officers.—I. S.] From then on, I stayed at the plant with my mother and the others—we wo
rked together past the summer of 1943.

  Document 5-10. Following the liberation of Auschwitz, child survivors display their tattooed arms, January 1945, USHMMPA WS# 12110C, courtesy Wytwornia Filmow Dokumentalnych i Fabularnych.

  In late 1941, the National Socialist regime established the first stationary killing center to murder Jews within the context of the “Final Solution.” German SS and police authorities chose the small village of Chełmno (German: Kulmhof) on the Ner River because of its location along a central road linking the nearby town of Koło to the city of Łódź. An abandoned manorial estate (the Schloss, or “palace”) and an adjacent forest formed the nexus of the camp, which was planned as a killing site for the Jewish population of the Wartheland,44 including the inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto.

  44. This region in Poland was annexed by the Third Reich.

  Mass-murder operations began at Chełmno on December 8, 1941.45 From that time until the spring of 1943, almost daily transports of Jews arrived at the “palace,” where SS officials informed the deportees that they were to be transferred as foreign laborers to Germany but must first undergo disinfection. After the unsuspecting Jews had undressed and surrendered their valuables, SS and police personnel led them to the well-lit cellar; there they forced the naked prisoners down a sloping ramp that led into the rear of a large cargo van parked outside. The vehicle in question was a gas van, like those already used successfully by the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) to murder Jews and other victims on the killing fields of the Soviet Union. Once the cargo room was filled to capacity, the doors of the van were closed and sealed, and an SS driver diverted the carbon monoxide fumes from the exhaust into the interior of the van, asphyxiating those inside. Once the victims were believed dead, the van drove from the so-called Schlosslager (palace camp) to the seclusion of the Waldlager (forest camp), where any surviving Jews in the van were shot and the bodies buried in mass graves by a handful of Jews forming a special labor detachment, or Sonderkommando.46 In the summer of 1942, when the smell of decomposing bodies could be detected in the surrounding villages, the Sonderkommando was enlisted to burn freshly murdered and buried bodies in crematory pits, while a smaller Jewish unit, the so-called Hauskommando (housework detail), sorted the victims’ clothes and belongings and catered to the needs of camp officials. As at other killing centers, camp guards periodically murdered the members of each Sonderkommando and replaced them with a new detail selected from the incoming transports.