Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  2. For a discussion of education in the Łódź ghetto, see chapter 4.

  3. Barbara Engelking-Boni, “Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 34–35.

  According to available statistics, some 48,207 school-age children between the ages of seven and fourteen lived in the Warsaw ghetto4; to this figure we must add thousands of adolescents who, under normal circumstances, would have attended secondary or college-preparatory schools (Gymnasia). Yet, only a small fraction of their number had access to formal instruction. In such a setting, how was it possible to provide an education to the youth of the Warsaw ghetto? Clearly, a certain number of children were educated within their own homes, by parents, older siblings, or relatives. Several thousand orphaned or severely disadvantaged youths who lived in CENTOS homes or orphanages presumably also received at least limited informal instruction from caregivers. Yet, already in the summer and autumn of 1940, representatives of Jewish educational and welfare organizations had begun working to construct a network of clandestine schools for youngsters and adolescents. Many underground classrooms gathered in soup kitchens and care institutions for young people. In these instances, instructors and administrators pursued the dual goal of feeding hungry children and providing them a basic educational foundation. Other less formally organized “schools” met secretly in the private homes of instructors or their pupils. From the autumn of 1940 until the summer of 1942, a wide range of underground centers offered educational instruction to ghetto youths. In addition to kindergartens and elementary schools, there existed a number of high schools, Gymnasia, vocational-training institutions, and cheder schools for religious instruction.

  4. Engelking-Boni, “Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto,” 34.

  Clandestine classes for very young children incorporated lessons through stories, songs, and games. Parents and educators often described such gatherings as “play groups” in order to conceal covert learning activities and to prevent youngsters from inadvertently revealing their illicit schooling to others. Teachers stressed the importance of Beschäftigung (engagement in useful activity) as a way to combat boredom and delinquency among young children and to prepare them for the proficiency necessary from primary education.5 For elementary school children, educators stressed reading and writing, fearing that such skill sets might be lost to a generation of Jewish youth. For older children, clandestine Gymnasia and secondary schools also thrived in ghetto communities. The first underground Gymnasium in Warsaw, established under the auspices of the Dror youth organization, sheltered seventy-two pupils in its first year and employed as its teachers intellectuals such as the famed Jewish writer Isaac Katzenelson.6 Because many instructors and sponsoring organizations were Zionist in political orientation, curricula often stressed Judaic and Zionist themes and offered theoretical and practical preparation for a new Jewish future in Palestine. Covert secondary schools in the ghetto maintained high standards, devising enrollment criteria for prospective pupils, offering advanced courses in literature, the arts, and the sciences, and issuing degrees. As secrecy was an important issue, students did not receive certificates on graduation; examination records were preserved in hiding and legitimized by a special education commission after the war.7

  5. See Lisa Anne Plante, “Transition and Resistance: Schooling Efforts for Jewish Children and Youth in Hiding, Ghettos, and Camps,” in Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 45ff.

  6. Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 346. Isaac Katzenelson (1886–1944) was born in Korelichi in Belorussia (now Belarus) and moved to Warsaw as a small boy. For many years he directed a Hebrew-Polish school in Łódź; writing in Hebrew, he produced many well-received plays, including The Prophet and The White Life. When German forces invaded Poland, Katzenelson began to write his works in Yiddish. In November 1939, he fled to Warsaw, where he was active as a writer and educator until 1943. In April 1943, during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Katzenelson escaped and succeeded in making his way to France on false papers; he was interned, however, in the Vittel detention camp and in 1944 deported to Auschwitz, where he perished. After the war his manuscript titled The Song of the Slaughtered Jewish People was discovered at Vittel and published in several languages.

  7. Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 349.

  According to calculations made by chroniclers of the Oneg Shabbat archive, some ten thousand children and adolescents attended clandestine classes in the Warsaw ghetto between 1940 and 1942.8 One of those students was fifteen-year-old Miriam Wattenberg, whose family had fled Łódź in late 1939. Mary’s mother was an American citizen, a connection that provided some security to Mary and her fellow pupils who engaged in a series of Gymnasium-level courses in the Wattenberg home.9 In her diary/memoir, published in February 1945, Wattenberg described how the clandestine nature of the instruction inspired a “strange earnestness” in pursuing an education among like-minded teachers and classmates.

  8. Engelking and Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto, 344.

  9. Miriam Wattenberg was born in Łódź on October 10, 1924. She began a wartime diary in October 1939; in November 1940, Miriam, with her parents and younger sister, was compelled to live in the Warsaw ghetto. The Wattenbergs held a privileged position there because Miriam’s mother, Lena Wattenberg, was an American citizen. On July 17, 1942, shortly before the first large deportation of Warsaw Jews to Treblinka, German authorities detained the Wattenbergs and other residents with foreign passports in Warsaw’s infamous Pawiak Prison. In January 1943, the family was transferred to the Vittel internment camp, then one year later was allowed to emigrate to the United States. Wattenberg’s diary was published in English in February 1945, three months before the end of World War II in Europe; to protect friends and relatives still in Nazi hands, the author employed the pen name “Mary Berg.” The resulting volume, The Diary of Mary Berg, was one of the very few eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw ghetto available to American audiences before the end of World War II. See Susan Lee Pentlin, ed., The Diary of Mary Berg: Growing Up in the Warsaw Ghetto, ed. S. L. Shneiderman, trans. Norbert Guterman and Sylvia Glass (Oxford: Oneworld Publishers, 2006).

  Document 8-1. Diary/memoir of Miriam Wattenberg, entry for July 12, 1940, in Mary Berg, Warsaw Ghetto: A Diary by Mary Berg, ed. S. L. Shneiderman, trans. Norbert Guterman and Sylvia Glass (New York: L. B. Fischer, 1945), 32–33.

  There are now a great number of illegal schools, and they are multiplying every day. People are studying in attics and cellars, and every subject is included in the curriculum, even Latin and Greek. Two such schools were discovered by the Germans some time in June [1940]; later we heard that the teachers were shot on the spot, and that the pupils had been sent to a concentration camp near Lublin.

  Our Łódź Gymnasium too has started its classes.10 The majority of the teachers are in Warsaw, and twice a week the courses are given at our home, which is a relatively safe spot because of my mother’s American citizenship. We study all the regular subjects, and have even organized a chemical and physics laboratory using glasses and pots from our kitchen, instead of test tubes and retorts.11 Special attention is paid to the study of foreign languages, chiefly English and Hebrew. Our discussions of Polish literature have a peculiarly passionate character. The teachers try to show that the great Polish poets Mickiewicz, Slowacki, and Wyspianski prophesied the present disaster. [. . .]

  10. Many of Mary Wattenberg’s classmates and teachers from Łódź had also gone to Warsaw. A portion of this class now reassembled for clandestine schooling in Mary’s house.

  11. These are vessels often used in chemistry to distill or decompose substances over heat.

  The teachers put their wh
ole heart and soul into their teaching, and all the pupils study with exemplary diligence. There are no bad pupils. The illegal character of the teaching, the danger that threatens us every minute, fills us all with a strange earnestness. The old distance between teachers and pupils has vanished, we feel like comrades-in-arms responsible to each other.

  For Warsaw ghetto teenager Pola Rotszyld, meeting with her clandestine study group gave her a sense of identity and purpose. “From this moment the most beautiful period of my life began,” she later recalled, “which lasted for more than a year. It was a time when I was really alive. I knew why and what I lived for.”12

  12. Pola Rotszyld, quoted in Engelking-Boni, Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, 35. Born in 1926, Rotszyld survived the Warsaw ghetto and the final deportations and emigrated to Palestine in 1945.

  Teenagers like Pola came to feel that emotional and intellectual survival was integral to their physical survival. Clandestine learning provided a sense of fellowship and camaraderie, which had evaporated elsewhere among a desperate community, and allowed young students, at least temporarily, to transcend the deprivation and misery of ghetto life. Such secret study was quite literally an escape into learning. For sixteen-year-old Pola and her circle of fellow pupils,13 these clandestine classes represented a central and transforming experience, as she recounted in 1945.

  13. This circle included Andzia Adler, Luba Bursztyn, Sara Fajfer, Estera Gutgold, Dorka Jelén, Henia Majzlic, Gucia Rozenstrauch, and Guta Wołowicz. With the exception of Pola Rotszyld, none of these young girls survived the Holocaust. See Engelking-Boni, Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, 34–35.

  Document 8-2. Diary entry of Pola Rotszyld (Yad Vashem Archives, sign. 03/438) in Barbara Engelking-Boni, “Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington DC: USHMM, 2004), 35.

  These lessons were our happiness, our oblivion. Outside there was a warstorm[;] the groans of people dying of hunger, and the animal-like screams of Germans beating up people on the street were heard. And somewhere in the corner of the room on Pawia or Nowolipki Street, some girls between thirteen to fifteen years of age were sitting around the table with a teacher, engaged in studying. They all forgot about the whole world, even about the fact that they were a bit hungry, maybe more than a bit.

  Document 8-3. Three girls study at a clandestine Jewish school in Prague, c. 1942, USHMMPA WS# 37424, courtesy of the Jewish Museum of Prague Photo Archive.

  Particularly for older children and adolescents, the chance to engage in educational and cultural activities was a means to regain the normal opportunities of intellectual enrichment and advancement available to most school-age youths but inaccessible to those living within the finite borders of the ghetto. In many ghettoized communities, child-welfare associations attempted to provide youngsters with academic and vocational training, as well as a variety of organized educational and leisure activities. Sometimes, too, the impetus for creative and cultural endeavors sprang from young people themselves.

  Yitskhok Rudashevski lived in the Vilna ghetto from the time of its inception until its final liquidation in the autumn of 1943. His father was a typesetter for Vilna’s most prominent prewar Yiddish daily newspaper, Vilner Tog, and from a young age, young Yitskhok showed a pronounced gift for writing. In September 1941, when he and his family were forced to settle in Vilna’s newly established ghetto, the fourteen-year-old began to keep a diary.14 The teenager filled his journal with vignettes of ghetto life, penning sketches of its teeming streets and its diverse and colorful inhabitants. Yet, the young man’s chronicle focused primarily on his own efforts and those of like-minded individuals to forge an intellectual life for the youth of the Vilna ghetto. In addition to his studies, at which he excelled, Rudashevski dedicated himself to the activities of two youth organizations, the first of which endeavored to compile a history of the ghetto and its residents in order to leave a record for future generations. The second club collected ghetto folklore: its stories and tall tales, jokes and curses, songs and literature. “Our youth works and does not perish,”15 Rudashevski wrote on October 22, 1942, suggesting that his activities and those of his colleagues represented a means to transcend the narrow limitations of their confinement and to defy both the physical and spiritual repression that persecution embodied. For the young Rudashevski, efforts such as those to create an exhibition honoring the Yiddish poet Yehoash16 provided a way to escape the moral and material barrenness of the ghetto and to create a space and time in which beauty and enlightenment could continue to exist.17

  14. See Yitskhok Rudashevski’s description of his family’s relocation to the Vilna ghetto in Document 4-1.

  15. Yitskhok Rudashevski, quoted in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 192.

  16. This is the pen name of Lithuanian-born Solomon Blumgarten (1870–1927), one of the most celebrated Yiddish poets of the early twentieth century. Immigrating to the United States in 1890, Blumgarten was responsible for translating many of the classics of world literature into Yiddish; his two-volume translation of the Bible is widely regarded as one of the great masterpieces in that language.

  17. Yitskhok Rudashevski was shot to death with members of his family in the Ponary Woods in October 1943, during the dissolution of the Vilna ghetto.

  Document 8-4. Diary of Yitskhok Rudashevski, Vilna ghetto, entry for March 14, 1943, in Alexandra Zapruder, ed., Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 223.

  Today the Yehoash celebration as well as the opening of the Yehoash exhibition took place in the club. The exhibition is exceptionally beautiful. The entire reading room in the club is filled with material. The room is bright and clean. It is a delight to come into it. We are indebted for the exhibition to Friend Sutzkever, who smuggled into the ghetto from the YIVO where he works a great deal of material for the Yehoash exhibition. [. . .]

  People entering here forgot that this is the ghetto. Here in the Yehoash exhibition we have many valuable documents that now are treasures: manuscripts from Peretz to Yehoash, Yehoash’s original letters. We have rare newspaper clippings. In the section—Bible translations into Yiddish—we have old Bible translations into Yiddish from the seventeenth century. Looking at the exhibition, at our work, our hearts swell with enthusiasm. We actually forget that we are in a dark ghetto. The celebration today was also carried out in a grand manner. The dramatic circle presented Yehoash’s tableau Saul. The members read essays on the writings of Yehoash, on Yehoash the poet, on beauty, sound, and color.

  The mood of the celebration was an exalted one. It was indeed a holiday, a demonstration on behalf of Yiddish literature and culture.

  At Play during the Holocaust

  The juxtaposition of child’s play with the tragic events of the Holocaust presents the reader with a striking contradiction. Popular imagination associates play with the carefree world of merriment and simple delights. Instinctively, we balk at the suggestion that mass murder and the games and amusements of youth could exist side by side. And yet, scores of contemporary documents and the vivid recollections of survivors and bystanders make it plain that they did.18

  18. See George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Yad Vashem, No Child’s Play (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004).

  What can account for the existence of such activities in the midst of such catastrophic circumstances—in the desolate streets of the ghetto, in the bleak and dangerous world of the concentration camp? The most logical explanation for such a phenomenon is that play in every place and time is an instinct of childhood. Child survivor Nechama Tec recalled that her stay in the Majdan Tatarski ghetto in Lublin in 1942, though fraught w
ith danger, was a happy time for her, for after a long period of isolation, she at last had the opportunity to play with other children.

  The children formed a small minority. As a matter of policy, the Nazis were concentrating on the extermination of Jewish children. Because we were thus in special danger, adults looked upon us as a special commodity. We came to expect our elders to treat us with special indulgence, and they did. No Jew would have thought of mistreating a child, and almost all of them refrained from even the mildest form of discipline.

  And so we were free of adult supervision. We had no special duties. It was summer. Because there were few of us left, we felt close to each other. We relied on each other for entertainment, and for enlightenment. [. . .] We children managed to be happy as we roamed the little dirt roads in search of adventure. We spent our days outdoors, constantly on the move. In the evenings we took turns visiting each other’s houses. In the process, we made many exciting adventures about life, love, and our fellow mortals.19

  19. Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 22–23.

  To run and frolic with their playmates, to act out their fantasies, and to explore the world about them gave children a powerful way to escape the harsh realities that surrounded them. Play also represented a way for youngsters to adapt to the difficulties and traumatic circumstances they confronted and to reshape their environment through daydream and imagination. As in the pre-Holocaust world, children also used such activities in order to develop needed skill sets and to socialize themselves for future mature roles and responsibilities.20