Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  20. See Catherine Wheeler, Representing Children at Play in the Literature of the Shoah (PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2003).

  Document 8-5. Children at play in a field in Marysin, Łód´z ghetto, c. 1941, USHMMPA WS# 33844, courtesy of the Archiwum Panstowe w Łód´zi, sygn. 1120, fot. 27-832-6.

  For many adults, the sight of children at play in the camp barracks or among the rubble of the ghetto alley was a heartening sight. While the misery and deprivation of their surroundings told a story of destruction and loss, child’s play prefigured life, continuity, and collective survival. One such encouraged individual was Oskar Rosenfeld (1884–1944),21 a Czech-born writer and novelist who had been active in Vienna until the Anschluss. Deported to the Łódź ghetto from Prague in November 1941, Rosenfeld soon numbered among the authors who contributed essays and commentaries for The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto,22 an effort to document the history of the incarcerated community. In July 1943, Rosenfeld captured ghetto youngsters’ enduring love of play and pastimes in an essay for the official chronicle titled “The Ghetto Children’s Toys.” A month later, Rosenfeld took up this theme again, announcing to his readers that the children of the Łódź ghetto had invented a new plaything.

  21. Living in Vienna in the interwar period, Moravian-born Oskar Rosenfeld worked as a journalist and author, publishing a series of novels under the title Tage und Nächte (Days and Nights); from 1929 he was the editor in chief of the Viennese illustrated weekly Die Neue Welt (The New World). Following the Anschluss, Rosenfeld and his wife moved to Prague. Unable to emigrate to England, the couple was deported to the Łódź ghetto in November 1941, where Rosenfeld became active in writing for The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto. Upon the liquidation of the ghetto, Rosenfeld was deported to Auschwitz in August 1944, where he perished. See Oskar Rosenfeld, In the Beginning There Was the Ghetto: Notebooks of Łódź (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002).

  22. Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

  Document 8-6. Oskar Rosenfeld, entry in The Chronicle of the Łód´z Ghetto, August 25, 1943, in Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łód´z Ghetto, 1941–1944, trans. Richard Lourie et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 373–74.

  For several days now, the streets and courtyards of the ghetto have been filled with a noise like the clatter of wooden shoes. The noise is disturbing at first, but one gradually gets used to it and says to oneself: this is as much a part of the ghetto as are cesspools. The observer soon discovers that this “clattering” is produced by boys who have invented a pastime, an entertainment. More precisely, the children of the ghetto have invented a new toy.

  All the various amusing toys and noisemakers—harmonicas, hobby horses, rattles, building blocks, decals, etc.—are things our youngsters must, of course, do without. In other ways as well, as ghetto dwellers, they are excluded from all the enchantments of the child’s world. And so, on their own, they invent toys to replace all the things that delight children everywhere and are unavailable here.

  The ghetto toy in the summer of 1943: two small slabs of wood—hardwood if possible! One slab is held between the forefinger and the middle finger, the other between the middle finger and the ring finger. The little finger presses against the other fingers, squeezing them so hard that the slabs are rigidly fixed in position and can thus be struck against one another by means of a skillful motion. The resulting noise resembles the clattering of storks or, to use musical terms, the clicking of castanets. The harder the wood, the more piercing and precise the clicking, the more successful the toy, and the greater the enjoyment. Naturally, the artistic talents of the toy carver and performer can be refined to a very high level.

  The instrument imposes no limit on the individual’s musical ability. There are children who are content to use the primitive clicking of the slabs to produce something like the sounds of a Morse code transmitter. Other children imitate the beating of a drum, improvising marches out of banging sounds as they parade with their playmates like soldiers.

  The streets of the Litzmannstadt ghetto are filled with clicking, drumming, banging. . . . Barefoot boys scurry past you, performing their music right under your nose, with great earnestness, as though their lives depended on it. Here the musical instinct of eastern European Jews is cultivated to the full. An area that has given the world so many musicians, chiefly violinists—just think of Hubermann, Heifetz, Elman, Milstein, Menuhin23—now presents a new line of artists.

  23. All are famous contemporary Jewish violinists.

  A conversation with a virtuoso: “We get the wood from the Wood Works Department, but only the hardest wood is good enough.”—“What is the toy called?”—“It’s called a castanet. . . . I don’t know why. Never heard the name before. We paint the toy to make it look nicer. That guy over there,” he pointed to a barefoot boy who was sitting in the street dust, ragged and dirty, “doesn’t know how to do it. You have to swing your whole hand if you want to get a good tune out. Hard wood and a hefty swing—those are the main things.” A few boys gathered, clicked their castanets, and all hell let loose. It was the first castanet concert I had ever attended.

  The chronicler assumes that the clicker music will vanish “after it’s run its course” and be replaced by some other sort of music. But he may be wrong.

  O[skar] R[osenfeld]

  Youngsters in camp and ghetto settings lived in a kind of exile from childhood. With the loss of their homes and belongings, young children felt the absence of their favorite playthings acutely. With forced ghettoization, families brought to their cramped quarters only what they could carry; personal items, among them children’s toys and games, were necessarily limited. Possession of material goods became even more severely circumscribed with an individual’s transfer to concentration and forced labor camps, and where young children survived in these circumstances, as in the so-called Theresienstadt family camp in Auschwitz, playthings were a rare commodity. With a creativity and ingenuity that often impressed their adult contemporaries, young people forged new toys from cardboard, bits of wood, scraps of metal and cloth—the refuse of the captive society that surrounded them. Children played with what was at hand. When her interviewer expressed incredulity that she had been able to entertain herself at Auschwitz, a young survivor from Kielce exclaimed adamantly, “But I played! I played there with nothing! With the snow. With balls of snow.”24

  24. Quoted in Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust, 72.

  For those children fortunate enough to retain a cherished toy or childhood possession, a doll or stuffed animal might figure as the center of the youngster’s existence. Playthings were rare and precious, and their young owners often clung to them with a fierce possessiveness. Such toys offered not only an opportunity for amusement but also a source of emotional stability and security. In a menacing world of upheaval and change, material items remained steadfast and unchanging. Toys were good listeners in the way that harried and exhausted adults were not. Even broken and damaged playthings retained their currency; they did not wither away from hunger or face deportation as parents or siblings did. A toy might also transport its small owner into an imaginary world, far away from the miserable surroundings of the camp or ghetto.

  In the formative years of the Theresienstadt ghetto, a prisoner employed as a carpenter in a joiner’s workshop in the Small Fortress created the remarkable pull toy in the shape of a butterfly shown in Document 8-7. Affixed to a wheeled base, the brightly painted butterfly “takes flight,” fluttering its wooden wings, when it is rolled across a floor or flat surface. The butterfly motif has long been associated with the children of Theresienstadt, thanks largely to the discovery and widespread publication of Pavel Friedman’s poem “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” written shortly after the young man
’s arrival in the Theresienstadt ghetto in April 1942. Friedman died at age twenty-three in the gas chambers at Birkenau in late September 1944, but his poem is one of the most famous in the genre of Holocaust poetry:

  The last, the very last,

  So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

  Perhaps if the sun’s tears sing

  against a white stone [. . .]

  For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,

  Penned up inside this ghetto,

  But I have found my people here.

  The dandelions call to me,

  And the white chestnut candles in the court.

  Only I never saw another butterfly.

  That butterfly was the last one.

  Butterflies don’t live here in the ghetto.25

  25. Pavel Friedman, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” in I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942–44, ed. Hana Volavková, exp. 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken Books and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1993), 39.

  The butterfly was an evocative symbol not only because it represented an element of natural beauty long inaccessible to Theresienstadt’s incarcerated community but also because the winged creature had the ability literally to transcend the confining walls of the ghetto and to escape the barrenness and despair of the prisoners’ existence. Of course, the craftsman who constructed the pull toy in question is unlikely to have been aware of Friedman’s poem, and it is doubtful that a concrete connection lies between the artifact and the young writer’s famous verse. The maker of the small wooden toy is unknown, as are the identity and fate of its young recipient. But the object is a poignant reminder of children’s need for the tangible vestiges of childhood in the harrowing world of the Holocaust.

  Document 8-7. Painted wooden butterfly toy, Small Fortress, Theresienstadt ghetto, 1941–1945, USHMMPA WS# N00049, original reposited in Pamatnik Terezin Narodni Kulturni Pamatka.

  As we have seen, children often invented new modes of play in order to accommodate their difficult circumstances and the limited resources available to them. Sometimes, too, youngsters adapted traditional children’s games to incorporate their radically altered environment.26 To the horror of many adult witnesses, who had experienced normal childhoods, youngsters modified such conventional children’s games as tag and hide-and-seek with the macabre trappings of their camp or ghetto existence. At the 1961 Eichmann Trial, Dr. Aharon Peretz, a physician who survived the Kovno ghetto, recounted how the play of ghetto children came to reflect the frightening reality of the Holocaust.

  26. See Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust, esp. 76–80.

  Document 8-8. Testimony of Dr. Aharon Peretz, May 4, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995), 1:478–79.

  Witness Peretz: I think that possibly the greatest tragedy the Jewish people underwent was the tragedy of the children. The children in the ghetto also used to play and laugh, and in their games the tragedy of the Jewish people was reflected. They used to play at graves, they would dig a pit, place a child in it, and call him Hitler. They used to play as if they were at the gate of the ghetto, some would be Germans and others Jews. The Germans would shout and strike the Jews. They used to play at funerals, and all such games.

  Children’s “new” games accurately depicted the dramas and tragedies of ghetto life. Many Jewish youngsters had never known a park or a playground, had never owned a doll or stuffed animal, had never frolicked amid trees and flowery meadows. Thus, they constructed their make-believe worlds from the only existence they knew. Starvation and deprivation were a part of their quotidian lives. Words from the ghetto vernacular, such as Aktion, “deportation,” and “transport,” became a part of their daily vocabulary. While play that incorporated camp or ghetto life was unconventional and shocked adult observers, such activities presumably helped young children to process the perplexing circumstances in which they found themselves and offered them a kind of “buffered learning,” as George Eisen suggests—a way to rehearse a dangerous situation within a secure sphere, as within the parameters of a game or play activity.27 Into their imaginary world, children integrated the cruelty, irony, and pathos that they observed around them. In personal testimony given in the 1960s, Hanna Hoffmann-Fischel, a young and idealistic educator, recalled the unsettling games played by her young charges at the Theresienstadt family camp in Birkenau.

  27. Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust, 79.

  Document 8-9. 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), 52–55 (translated from the German).

  Even in the next block, with the smaller children, we had enormous difficulties. We could not teach them according to a lesson plan, but we told them of the kind of life that we wished for ourselves. But if we were not careful, they played the kind of life’s games that they had experienced themselves. They played “Camp Elder and Block Elder,” “Roll Call,” with “caps off!”28 They played the ailing prisoners who would faint during roll call and receive a thrashing, or the “Doctor” who took away patients’ rations and who refused to give treatment if they could not give him anything in return. Once they even played the game “Gas Chamber.” They made a trench into which they pushed in one stone after another. These were supposed to be people who went into the crematorium, and they imitated their cries. They came to me for advice, asking me to show them where they should put the crematorium chimney.

  28. In German, “Mützen ab!” is the command SS guards inevitably gave prisoners at roll call.

  Children’s games incorporated the harrowing reality of the camp or ghetto environment. This kind of play was not an escape into fantasy or imagination but a way of assimilating the dangerous world that surrounded youngsters during the Holocaust. Role-playing in particular represented a creative means of accommodating and coping with the tremendous challenges youngsters confronted. Naturally, such play grew in part from children’s natural impulse to emulate the actions of adults. As in the normal realm of childhood, the enactment of adult behaviors often followed gender lines. Predictably, as in other places and times, young boys’ play frequently took the shape of war games. Ghetto lads of six or seven engaged in make-believe combat as Germans and Russians or pretended to join in the adventures of the partisans of whom they had heard so much. Closer to their own experience, preteenage boys in Vilna or Warsaw played “Going through the Gate” in which young “Gestapo men” searched returning “forced laborers” for smuggled food and contraband.29 Girls could and did participate in such games, but their play more often embraced female roles in the ghetto. Small girls who had perhaps once nursed their dolls now imitated their mothers in an eerily realistic form of playing house. Standing in queues before an imaginary shop window, little girls clutched make-believe ration cards, jostling their neighbors and bickering with the shopkeeper over goods and wares. The young housewives could be heard to wonder aloud where their next piece of bread would come from or how, with their few rotten potatoes, they might manage to feed their families.30

  29. Testimony of Dr. Aharon Peretz, May 4, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995), 1:478.

  30. Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust, 77.

  One activity that perhaps best exemplifies the tragedy of Jews during the Holocaust was a favorite of both genders. The ga
me “Jews and Germans” wed aspects of cops and robbers with the traditional hide-and-seek. In Document 8-10, an eight-year-old inhabitant of the Vilna ghetto explains how youngsters masqueraded as members of the Schutzstaffel (SS) or Jewish Order Police and sought to round up their playmates for deportation. Document 8-11, a photograph capturing children at play in the Łódź ghetto, illustrates that the game Jews and Germans was popular in almost every ghetto in German-occupied eastern Europe.

  Document 8-10. An eight-year-old resident of the Vilna ghetto describes the game “Jews and Germans” (Genia Silkes Collection, YIVO Institute), quoted in George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 72.

  Part of the children became “policemen” and part “German.” The third group was comprised of “Jews” who were to hide in make-believe bunkers; that is under chairs, tables, in barrels and garbage cans. The highest distinction went to the child who played Kommandant [Kittel], the head of the Gestapo [sic].31 He was always the strongest boy or girl. If a dressed-up “policeman” happened to find “Jewish” children, he handed them over to the “Germans.”

  31. Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel, a member of the Security Police, was later responsible for the liquidation of Vilna ghetto.

  Document 8-11. In the Łód´z ghetto, children, one dressed as a ghetto policeman, play a peculiar version of cops and robbers, 1943, USHMMPA WS# 80401, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot.

  Innocence and Knowledge

  Innocence is a characteristic closely associated with childhood. And yet, as the testimony of Aharon Peretz and the anecdotes of Hanna Hoffmann-Fischel show, most Jewish children did not long remain in ignorance of the perilous circumstances in which they found themselves during the Holocaust. As a rule, innocence suggests a kind of purity that stems from the ignorance of evil and an absence of worldliness and guile. Yet, living in the upside-down world of the ghetto or in the charnel atmosphere of the concentration camps, many children had become well acquainted with evil and understood from their own limited experience that guilelessness and naiveté could prove a deadly combination. Here youngsters grew up quickly. At a tender age, many had witnessed unimaginable horrors and shouldered adult responsibilities. Łódź ghetto chronicler Josef Zelkowicz noted this premature maturation during that ghetto’s notorious Gehsperre. In the late summer of 1942, German authorities approached ghetto elder Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski demanding twenty thousand deportees. Faced with an ultimatum, Rumkowski settled upon a desperate and terrible solution; he would fill the prescribed quota with the least productive members of the community: the severely ill, the aged, and all children up to the age of ten. From September 5 through 12, 1942, German forces entered the ghetto, seizing those unfit for labor from their homes and from the community’s streets. The Gehsperre began with the liquidation of the ghetto hospitals, where SS officials apprehended patients in their beds. In the days that followed, police units cleared schoolrooms and orphanages, many of them in Marysin, once a haven for Łódź’s youngsters. Approximately 15,500 individuals were rounded up for deportation; the vast majority of these victims were young children and adults over the age of sixty-five.32