Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  45. For a discussion of the Chełmno killing center, see Shmuel Krakowski, Chełmno, A Small Village in Europe: The First Nazi Mass Extermination Camp, trans. Ralph Mandel (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009); Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak, ed., The Extermination Center for Jews in Chełmno-on-Ner in the Light of the Latest Research, trans. Arkadiusz Kamiński and Katarzyna Krawczyk (Konin: District Museum, 2004).

  46. Note that the term Sonderkommando, literally meaning “special detail or detachment,” was applied equally to certain special SS units, such as the Sonderkommando Lange above, and to those details of Jewish prisoners who disposed of victims’ bodies and belongings in Nazi killing centers.

  At the camp’s inception, the small number of SS and police functionaries united under the command of SS-Standartenführer Herbert Lange; although his tenure was brief, the detachment would ever after be described in German documents as “Sonderkommando Lange”47 even after SS-Standartenführer Hans Bothmann48 replaced Lange in the spring of 1942. By this time, Chełmno had already claimed the lives of five thousand Roma from Austria, among the first transports arriving at the killing center from the Łódź (or Litzmannstadt) ghetto. From mid-January 1942 until March 1943, thousands of Jewish ghetto inhabitants, as well as indigenous Jews from the surrounding districts, were murdered at Chełmno. In the spring of 1943, these deportation actions ceased, and SS personnel dismantled the camp, demolishing the so-called palace and shooting the last detachment of Jewish workers. In the spring of 1944, however, German authorities decided at last to liquidate the Łódź ghetto. Thus, for a brief period, trains again rolled along the Koło-Łódź line from Litzmannstadt, bringing Jewish transports to Chełmno until mid-July 1944, when the last Łódź ghetto inhabitants were deported to Auschwitz.

  47. In 1939 and 1940, before his tenure at Chełmno, Herbert Lange (1909–1945) had been responsible for the deaths of thousands of institutionalized disabled patients in the Wartheland. His unit, already styled as the Sonderkommando Lange, employed an early, ad hoc version of the gas vans used at Chełmno; see Volker Riess, Die Anfänge der Vernichtung “lebensunwerten Lebens” in den Reichsgauen Danzig, Westpreussen und Wartheland, 1939–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995). Lange is believed to have died in Berlin on April 20, 1945.

  48. Hans Bothmann (1911–1946) committed suicide in British custody in 1946.

  In all, at least 152,000 persons, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered at Chełmno. Only four people are known to have survived the killing center,49 one of them a teenage boy. Szymon Srebrnik (Simon Srebnik) was thirteen when he arrived at the camp from Łódź. His father had recently been shot before his eyes in the ghetto; his mother perished in Chełmno’s gas vans. Once at the killing center, he was assigned to the Hauskommando. Nicknamed “Spinnefix”50 for his swiftness and agility, the boy became something of a mascot among the German camp personnel, especially for gas van driver Walter Burmeister,51 who insisted he would take the youth home with him after the war. Prized for his beautiful voice, Srebnik endured frequent beatings and humiliations at the camp, but he was continually spared in the numerous selections, during which other Sonderkommando Jews were put to death.52 On January 17, 1945, two days before the arrival of Soviet troops, Bothmann ordered Chełmno’s liquidation and, with it, the shooting of the Jewish Sonderkommando. Among the first to be shot, Srebnik miraculously survived, as the bullet missed both spine and skull, instead propelling through the oral cavity and exiting through the nose. Quickly regaining consciousness, the youngster made his way to a nearby farmhouse, where he hid until the arrival of Soviet forces. Treated by a Red Army physician, Srebnik gave testimony concerning his experiences to Polish authorities in June 1945, as did fellow prisoner Max (Mordechai or Mordka) Żurawski, the only other known survivor of Chełmno from this period. In the early 1980s, Srebnik, then in his forties, appeared in the haunting opening sequence of Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary film Shoah. Simon Srebnik died in September 2006 in Ness Ziona, Israel, aged seventy-six.

  49. Like Simon Srebnik, Max Żurawski survived the second phase of gassings at Chełmno and gave testimony to Polish authorities in June 1945. Mordechai (Michael) Podchlebnik, from a village near Koło, arrived at Chełmno in January 1942, during the first killing phase, and as a member of the Sonderkommando managed to escape the camp, spending the rest of the war in hiding. He was a witness at the Eichmann Trial in 1961. A fourth individual, Szlamek Bajler, served in the so-called Waldkommando with Podchlebnik and escaped some two weeks after his arrival at Chełmno. He made his way to the Warsaw ghetto, where Emmanuel Ringelblum, director of the secret ghetto archive Oneg Shabbat, encouraged Bajler to write an account of Chełmno. Bajler was later deported to Bełżec and murdered there.

  50. Literally meaning “quick little spider,” this German term of endearment usually applies to slim, nimble youngsters.

  51. Walter Burmeister was sentenced to thirteen years in prison at the 1962–1965 West German Chełmno Trial.

  52. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, RG 60.5024 (Claude Lanzmann Shoah Collection), Outtakes, Interview with Simon Srebnik, Tape 3279, Transcript, 8.

  Document 5-11. Testimony of Szymon (Simon) Srebrnik before the examining judge of the district court in Łód´z, Władysław Bednarz, June 29, 1945, in Archives of the District Museum in Konin, Chełmno Witnesses Speak, ed., Łucja Pawlicka-Nowak, trans. Juliet D. Golden (Konin: Council for the Protection of Memory of Combat and Martyrdom in Warsaw/District Museum in Konin, 2004), 125–29.

  Up to March 1944, I had been in the Łódź ghetto, from where I was then driven off to Chełmno. In Łódź, I worked in the ghetto in the so-called “metal department.” In March 1944, the Germans organized a roundup. They caught me while I was on a streetcar and led me to Bałucki Square where there were some cars from Chełmno. We were loaded inside and driven off. Besides me, there were fifty other Jews on the truck. [. . .] The Germans took us to a granary on the grounds of the Chełmno palace. There were no other Jews. We found out that we were in the Sonderkommando camp. An hour later the prisoners were divided into two groups. The stronger and better workers were sent to the woods; they formed the so-called “Waldkommando.” Weaker and younger ones, I was among them, were left to work in the so-called “Hauskommando.” The Waldkommando chief was Lenz. Other Germans employed in the woods were Runge and [Kretschmer].53 The Hauskommando chief was [Häfele]. The Waldkommando consisted of about forty Jews; the remainder was assigned to the Hauskommando. We were all shackled. The shackles prevented us from walking in a normal way. We had to take very short steps. The shackles on our ankles were also chained to our waists. We slept in the granary on a cement floor. It was very cold. The members of the Waldkommando told us that they were building two furnaces in the woods. They did not know what purpose they would serve, but they expected the furnaces might be used to make charcoal. The furnaces were very primitive. [. . .] Jews building the furnaces were sometimes killed for entertainment. Lenz and Sonderkommando chief commissioner Bothmann showed extreme cruelty. At times, out of thirty workers sent to the woods, only fourteen returned. The groups of workers were constantly supplied with new men brought from Łódź. [. . .] The workers were given 200 grams (7 ounces) of bread a day, some coffee in the morning, and one-half liter (one pint) of soup for dinner. Only after the first transport had arrived did we get any blankets. We were constantly beaten during work. They hit us with their hands or spades. Obviously, blows from a spade resulted in death or mutilation, which actually equaled death, as those unable to work were finished off. [. . .]

  53. Misspelled in original text; names in brackets are the correct spellings.

  The first transport came at the beginning of April from Łódź. In the morning Bothmann ordered the Hauskommando out of the granary. We were ordered to move baggage that had been unloaded near the narrow-gauge railroad track, in the place where it
met the road. The prisoners were already locked in the church. We carried their belongings to the park, where two barracks had been built, one larger than the other. The confiscated clothes were sorted in the smaller building. Suitcases were put on one side and the sorted items on the other. The belongings were sorted by the Hauskommando. The most valuable items, new suits, etc., were kept in the smaller building. Valuables were given to Burmeister. The transported prisoners were taken to the woods by trucks at six in the morning. But before that the Waldkommando, consisting of about thirty people, had already left for the woods. The Jews did not expect any danger on the way. Three trucks transported prisoners to the woods. They were not allowed to take any baggage. In the evening fellow prisoners from the Waldkommando told us what had happened in the woods. After the trucks arrived the Jews were ordered to go to one of the barracks in the woods. The Germans told them to take off their clothes and put them in a separate pile, because they would put them back on after bathing. The underwear also had to be removed. Women could leave their panties on. Signs on the walls of the barracks read: “to the bathhouse” and “to the doctor.” The Jews were driven out of the barracks and loaded into a van of a special type. If they refused to get in, the Germans used force. There were three vans: [a] larger one and two smaller ones. The larger van could hold up to 170 people, while the smaller ones, 100–120. The van doors were locked with a bolt and a padlock. Then the engine was started. The exhaust fumes entered the interior of the van and suffocated those inside. [. . .] Shouting and banging on the door lasted about four minutes. The van was not moving at that time. After the shouting faded, the vehicle started moving in the direction of the crematoriums. When the van reached its destination, its door was unlocked to let the fumes out. Then two Jews went inside and threw out the bodies. The gas coming out had all the characteristics of exhaust fumes (color and smell). I cannot be mistaken here. The corpses, having been searched through, were placed in the furnace. [. . .] It took approximately one hour for the corpses to burn. Then a new pile of bodies was added. There were a few instances of unintended self-incineration: a Jew trying to set fire to a pile of bodies died in the flames himself. The bones were ground with the use of a hand-operated grinder on a cement surface near the woods. [. . .]

  [Srebnik reports that transports arrived in Chełmno every second day for two months, until July 1944.]

  The camp was liquidated and the barracks dismantled. Machines for shredding clothes and underwear were sent back. The furnaces were also dismantled. In the granary there were still eighty-seven Jewish workers. Those were tailors and shoemakers. They lived upstairs. The number of workers decreased and finally there were forty-seven of them left—twenty-two tailors and twenty-five courtyard workers. Bothmann wanted to kill me several times, but [Häfele] liked me and this partly helped save my life. [. . .] When the Soviet army was advancing quickly, one night we were ordered to leave the granary in groups of five. I cannot remember the date. The area was lit with car headlights. I went outside in the first group of five. Lenz ordered us to lie down on the ground. He shot everybody in the back of the head. I lost consciousness and regained it when there was no one around. All the SS-men were shooting inside the granary. I crawled to the car lighting the spot and broke both headlights. Under the cover of darkness, I managed to run away. The wound was not deadly. The bullet went through the neck and mouth and pierced the nose and then went out. I hid in Wieczorek’s barn (he knew about it). They did not find me. Later I learned that while killing the Jews, Lenz and [Haase] also died (I saw their bodies). When the two went inside, the Jews hung one of them and shot the other one with his own weapon. Apart from me, one other person managed to save his life that night. It was Max Żurawski, who pushed his way past the gendarmes and escaped.

  Unlike the teenage survivors we have encountered, very young children had almost no chance to survive in the Nazi system of concentration camps and killing centers. In camps where selections took place, the very young shared the fate of the elderly and unfit in going directly to the gas chambers. Small children likewise rarely survived labor and concentration camp settings, although some succeeded in doing so, usually with the complicity and aid of adult prisoners or the camp underground. This was certainly the case with young Stefan Jerzy Zweig, whose rescue by members of the socialist and communist underground resistance movement at Buchenwald formed the basis for the celebrated East German novel Nackt unter Wölfen, written by Bruno Apitz in 1958.54

  54. A successful German film by the same name premiered in 1961.

  Stefan Jerzy Zweig, born in Kraków, Poland, on January 28, 1941, was the second child of Zacharias Zweig, a prominent young attorney, and his wife, Helena.55 Less than one month after Stefan’s birth, the family went into hiding to escape deportation to Lublin.

  55. Biographical information concerning Stefan Jerzy Zweig and his family is drawn from Zacharias Zweig’s, “Mein Vater, was machst Du hier?” Zwischen Buchenwald und Auschwitz: Der Bericht des Zacharias Zweig (Frankfurt: Dipa-Verlag, 1987).

  Moving into the newly created Kraków ghetto, Zacharias Zweig promised his small family that he would do his utmost to see that they all remained together. Miraculously surviving the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto and several work camps, the Zweig family, still intact, learned in July 1944 that they would all be sent to a HASAG56 armaments factory camp in Leipzig, in the German interior. Upon their arrival in Leipzig, Zacharias and his son were separated from Helena and Stefan’s eleven-year-old sister, Sylvia. Zacharias never saw his wife or daughter again; their train was bound for Auschwitz, where the two were murdered upon arrival. Zacharias, concealing his three-year-old son from German guards, reached the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany, on August 5, 1944. Once at Buchenwald, the elder Zweig explained to camp authorities that he had received permission to bring the toddler along on the transport, and Stefan was officially registered as a camp prisoner. His personal information index card, shown in Document 5-12, indicates that camp authorities recorded the grounds for the three-year-old’s incarceration as “Political [Prisoner], Pole—Jew” and gave him the prisoner number 67509.

  56. This is an acronym for Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft–Metallwarenfabrik, Leipzig, one of the largest privately owned German industrial companies, which utilized concentration camp prisoners for armaments manufacture.

  Buchenwald had existed as a concentration camp complex since 1937, and over the years, a strong underground resistance movement flourished there. A large percentage of its detainees were German political prisoners: communists and socialists arrested in the early 1930s and long established among the prisoner population. Many held influential positions as the heads of forced labor brigades or played vital roles within the camp prisoner administration. A circle of these prisoners, led by Willi Bleicher57 and Robert Siewert,58 decided that protecting the small boy would represent an act of resistance to camp authorities. These political prisoners worked to record the toddler in official records as a regular inmate and settled him in their barracks, providing him with food, clothing, and toys. In the fall of 1944, Zweig’s prisoner guardians averted the young boy’s deportation to Auschwitz by hiding him in the camp infirmary and replacing his name on the transport list with that of a sixteen-year-old Roma boy, Willy Blum, who tragically died in the gas chambers upon arrival at Birkenau.

  57. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1934 for endangering state security, young trade unionist Willi Bleicher (1907–1981) was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. After serving his full sentence, he was transferred in 1938 directly to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was liberated in April 1945. After the war he continued his efforts as a trade unionist in West Germany. From 1959 until his retirement in 1972, he served as regional director of the trade union IG Metall in northern Baden and northern Württemberg. In 1977, Bleicher was awarded the Carl von Ossietzky prize for achievements in human rights.

 
58. Following the war, Robert Siewert (1887–1973) rejoined the Communist Party in East Germany, becoming the first vice president of the East German state of Saxony and later minister of the interior of Saxony-Anhalt. In 1950, the official Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) fostered a series of campaigns to discredit its more moderate members, and Siewert’s career suffered as a consequence. Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Siewert was rehabilitated. Until the end of his life, he was an important voice within the GDR’s Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime.

  Stefan Jerzy Zweig and his father were liberated by American troops at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. The toddler was one of several hundred “Buchenwald Boys”59 who survived the camp, although at four years of age, he was certainly one of the youngest of their number. Father and son were reunited with their chief benefactor, Willi Bleicher in 1963. Stefan Jerzy Zweig settled in Vienna, where he worked as a cameraman for Austrian public television (ORF).