32. See Isaiah Trunk, Łódź Ghetto: A History, ed. and trans., Robert Moses Shapiro (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2006).
Josef Zelkowicz recorded the events of the Gehsperre in a 1942 anthology of essays he called In Those Terrible Days.33 Amid the chaos of the September roundups, Zelkowicz noted that most youngsters were well aware of the terrifying implications of the razzias, although parents often chose not to share the news of the upcoming tragedy with their youngsters.
33. See the essay in its entirety in Josef Zelkowitz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), 249–381.
Some children [. . .] have caught on. And that is because ten-year-olds in the ghetto are already adults. They know and understand the fate that awaits them. They may not, for now, know why they are being torn from their parents; this may not have been explained to them. For now it suffices to know that they are being separated from their trusted guardians, their devoted mothers and fathers. [. . .] They already rove alone in the street. They already cry their own tears, and these tears are so bitter and stinging that they pierce the heart like poisoned arrows. . . . The ghetto hearts, however, have ossified. They wish to break but cannot. This may be the cruelest curse of all.34
34. Zelkowitz, In Those Terrible Days, 265–67.
Of course very young children could not fathom—as their parents might—the terrible significance of the roundups or the fate that awaited them at the Chełmno killing center. As Zelkowicz observed that autumn, some youngsters stood in carts bound for the collection point, bemused by the cacophony and the laments of adult bystanders, eager for the “game” to continue.
Document 8-12. Excerpt from Josef Zelkowicz’s essay “The Optimist in the Potato Queue,” Łód´z ghetto, September 5, 1942, in Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), 306–7.
A cart stands on Rybna Street. Several children are standing in the cart, their eyes wide, as if they were lost. They have already been “nabbed”—gekhapped. They do not know what all these people want from them. Why are all these people standing around them and gazing at them sadly? Why are they crying? Why are they pounding their chests in despair?
These children see no reason to cry. They are quite content: they have been placed on a wagon and they are going for a ride! Since when have children in the ghetto had such an opportunity? If it were not for all those wailing people, if their mothers and fathers had not screamed so as they placed them in the cart, they would have danced to the cart. After all, they are going for a wagon ride. But all that shouting, noise, and crying upset them and disrupted their joy. They jostle in the elongated wagon bed with its high barriers, as if lost, and their bulging eyes ask: What’s going on? What do these people want from us? Why won’t they let us take a little ride?
Document 8-13. Young children from the Marysin colony wait to be conveyed to the deportation assembly point during the Gehsperre, Łód´z ghetto, September 1942, USHMMPA WS# 50334, courtesy of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej.
“Draw what you see!” Inspired by her father’s injunction, Helga Weissová began to sketch her observations of ghetto life shortly after her arrival in Theresienstadt in December 1941.35 Helga was born on November 10, 1929, to Otto Weiss, a state bank official, and his wife, Irena. The family led a comfortable middle-class existence in the Czech capital, and from an early age young Helga occupied much of her free time with drawing and painting. Exactly one month after her twelfth birthday, Helga arrived with her parents on one of the first transports of Czech Jews to Theresienstadt. The youngster would remain at Terezin for almost three years, during which time she completed over one hundred drawings and illustrations. In late 1944, Helga and Irena Weissová were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Due to the continuing advance of the Soviet army, the two women were transported almost immediately to a series of camps in the German interior. In the last days of the war, the pair found themselves in the Mauthausen concentration camp, where American forces liberated them and their fellow prisoners on May 5, 1945. Mother and daughter returned to Prague, where they learned of the deaths of Otto Weiss and most of their nearest relatives and acquaintances. Helga Weissová pursued a career in graphic arts at the National Academy of the Arts and in 1954 married Czech musician Jiři Hošek. She became an internationally celebrated artist, settling in her native Prague.
35. For a more extensive view of Helga Weissová’s life and Holocaust-era drawings, see Helga Weissová, Zeichne, was Du siehst! Zeichnungen eines Kindes aus Theresienstadt/Terezin, ed., Niedersächsischen Verein zur Förderung von Theresienstadt/Terezin, e.V. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998).
Helga began to ply her artistic talents in Terezin shortly after settling into Mädchenheim L-410, one of the ghetto’s homes for young girls, in December 1941. Using art supplies that she had packed with her at the time of her deportation, Weissová initially sought to ease her loneliness by drawing upon the happy images of her girlhood in Prague. After painting a nostalgic winter scene in which small children built a snowman, she persuaded fellow prisoners to smuggle the picture to her father in the men’s barracks. Otto Weiss, who had constantly championed his daughter’s artistic endeavors, admonished Helga instead to draw what she observed around her. “That snowman was actually my last genuine drawing as a child,” Weissová later recalled. “Through this sentence of my father’s, and through my own inner motivation, I felt called from now on to capture in my drawings the everyday life of the ghetto. The impressions that from this point in time would affect me, ended my childhood.”36
36. Weissová, Zeichne, was Du siehst! 13.
Twelve-year-old Helga clearly comprehended the dangers of her new environment in Theresienstadt and resolved to record them on paper and canvas. For the next several years, she created paintings and illustrations that captured the quotidian incidents and tragedies of ghetto life. “We all did the same things, with the exception of Helga—who, when she was not working, used to sit on her bed and draw and paint constantly,” Charlotta Verešová,37 a child diarist of Theresienstadt, remembered of her friend and bunkmate. “We all admired her because she was able to depict our plight.”38 With an unsettling candidness, the young teenager faithfully portrayed the wrenching arrivals and departures of transports at Terezin, the unending lines to receive meager rations, the colonies of workers going to forced labor. Helga had an eye for the ironic, depicting with unvarnished candor the macabre and surreal aspects of ghetto culture. We feel for the aged German Jews who arrive at the “rest community for the elderly,” promised them by the Nazi government, only to encounter the ugly and deadly reality of Theresienstadt. We are likewise amused by the farcical efforts of camp authorities to create from Terezin a “model ghetto” for the visit of officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1944. Other illustrations capture the pathos and suffering of Helga’s fellow prisoners: the faces of deportees waiting for days in the cold or heat of the ghetto’s dreaded “Sluice”39 before their transport to Auschwitz or ghetto residents’ solemn farewells to their dead comrades, who were daily carried on sledges to a crematorium outside the ghetto.
37. Charlotta Verešová was born on December 13, 1928, in Litoměřice, Czechoslovakia, the daughter of a mixed marriage. At age fourteen she was separated from her family and deported to Theresienstadt, where she kept a diary of her time in confinement. Verešová survived the war in the Terezin ghetto and worked as a librarian and technical designer after the war; see Laurel Holliday, Children in the Holocaust and World War II: Their Secret Diaries (New York: Washington Square Press, 1995), 201–7.
38. Holliday, Children in the Holocaust and World War II, 16.
39. Slojska is a Czech variant of the
German Schleuse, a slang term used in Theresienstadt for the collection point that held deportees arriving and departing on transports.
Sometimes Helga deployed her artistic gifts in a more traditional vein: to create a birthday greeting or a holiday card for friends and loved ones. In Birthday Wish I (Pŕání k narozeninám I), she transcends the hunger and deprivation of the ghetto by conjuring a delicious torte for the birthday honoree. Here a childish yearning is fulfilled as a young boy and girl, clad in their summer best, wheel an enormous birthday cake from Prague to Theresienstadt. The fourteen-year-old artist gave her native city gauzy contours; one can make out the prominent features of Prague Castle—the Hradschin—in its outlines. The well-dressed youngsters push the gigantic confection through the green landscape and up to the fortress walls of Terezin. On the surface, the composition is a dreamlike, innocent vision, like a fairytale from childhood. But the idyllic scene bristles with dark humor. The cart that carries the mighty cake is a hearse, a conveyance often used in Theresienstadt to transport items. In another stroke of wit, the wagon seems to bear the inscription “Entsorgung” (waste disposal). Perhaps the young artist meant to suggest that her diminutive helpers have cleared the ghetto of its debris and brought back in its place a wonderful cake?
Document 8-14. Watercolor by Helga Weissová, Birthday Wish I (P´rání k narozeninám I), Theresienstadt ghetto, December 1941, USHMMPA WS# 60926, courtesy Helga Weissová.
A third document concerning innocence and knowledge strikes out into different territory. The opening pages of this book introduce the reader to Elisabeth Block, a Jewish teenager living in rural Bavaria. As Peter Miesbeck, the historian who helped to publish Block’s journal in 1993, noted, Elisabeth was “no Bavarian Anne Frank,”40 who described her experiences explicitly and in vivid detail. Indeed, her diary is interesting to scholars because, even in the blackest moments of her personal history, she appears almost pathologically unable to record unpleasant developments. It is certainly true that in the village of Niedernburg, near Rosenheim, Elisabeth and her family felt closely integrated into the small community in which they lived and endured little discrimination at the hands of their neighbors, even as Nazi anti-Jewish policy escalated in the late 1930s. Elisabeth was loath to record those encroachments that the government’s antisemitic measures made on her family’s economic and social circumstances during these years. During Kristallnacht, for example, rampaging Sturmabteilung (SA) men had murdered Elisabeth’s uncle, Dr. Leo Levy in his apartment in Bad Polzin, an event the teenager referenced only in passing in her journal. Further disturbing developments—the exclusion of Jewish pupils from public schools, the loss of the family home and business, and the compulsory sterilization of Elisabeth’s father, Fritz Block—received similarly short shrift. It was as if the young girl failed to see herself and her family within the wider framework of Nazi persecution. In her diary, coincidentally begun in 1933, Block uses the phrase “we Jews” just once, in the context of the September 1941 decree requiring German Jews to wear the yellow star.41
40. Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte/Historischer Verein Rosenheim (Rosenheim: Wendelstein-Druck, 1993), 17.
41. Block, Erinnerungszeichen, 25.
On March 8, 1942, Elisabeth Block wrote the last entry in her journal. As usual, she focused on her daily activities, on her interactions with friends and family members, on the weather, and on events that had transpired in her community. In this instance, the latest excitement was the birth and baptism of little Friedi, the newborn daughter of Elisabeth’s friend Regina Zielke, in Benning, a little town two kilometers from Niedernburg. Elisabeth had been deployed to a farm in the vicinity in compliance with a March 1941 decree compelling all able-bodied Jews to undertake compulsory labor assignments. It is clear from the teenager’s own descriptions of her experiences and from contemporary eyewitnesses that she was well treated on the farmstead and that she and her employers felt she was part of the family there. This may explain in part why she makes so little mention of the summons by the local labor office (Arbeitsamt) dispatching her to agricultural work or of the fact that her service there, however agreeable, was essentially forced labor.42 Elisabeth pays little attention to her father’s more strenuous compulsory service laying tracks for railway and commuter transit lines. In her March 1942 account, she mentions only that the frostbite that Fritz Block contracted from his heavy work in freezing weather had fortunately occasioned him leave at a time when the family could spend the weekend together.
42. German Jews performing compulsory labor in accordance with the 1941 decree were not entitled to compensation, paid leave, or benefits, which German “Aryan” workers received.
Most notably missing from Elisabeth’s March 1943 entry is mention of the Blocks’ fear of imminent deportation “to the East.” The exact date on which they received their summons to assemble at the collection point (Sammelstelle) in Munich-Milbertshofen is unknown, but in the early weeks of March, when the teenager wrote of Friedi’s baptism and her winter sleigh ride, the family had clearly already begun packing up their household, gathering those few possessions they might be allowed to carry with them and storing furniture and valuables with trusted friends and neighbors.43 Eighteen years old when she wrote the last passage in her diary, Elisabeth could scarcely have been ignorant of the mass deportation of Jews from Germany and the policy’s significance for herself and her family. Was her silence on this point a matter of discretion or circumspection? Did her refusal to acknowledge these menacing developments spring from denial or a naive belief that the charmed existence she and her loved ones enjoyed in Niedernburg would continue, even as the rest of her coreligionists were sent to their deaths? We will never know. On April 3, 1942, the Blocks were deported with 989 fellow Bavarian Jews to the Piaski ghetto, near Lublin, in German-occupied Poland. On an unknown date, Elisabeth and her family were transferred to a killing center, presumably Bełżec or Sobibór, and murdered there.
43. See Block, Erinnerungszeichen, 46.
Document 8-15. Diary of Elisabeth Block, entry for March 8, 1943, in Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte/Historischer Verein Rosenheim (Rosenheim: Wendelstein-Druck, 1993), 265–66.
Sunday, March 8, 1942
It has already been seven weeks now that I have not written in my diary, a long time, and what has happened in the meantime! The most important and greatest event would be the birth of the little Friedi on Wednesday, January 28.44 That was a terribly exciting day. The hard struggle lasted from ten a.m. until four in the afternoon, then finally there was a black-haired, healthy girl there. On Friday, amidst a terrible snowstorm and deep snow, the little tot [Butzerl] was carried, heavily bundled, to the baptism. Christl stood up as the godmother. To everyone’s great surprise and joy, Mama came in the afternoon, just in time to attend the christening luncheon and to inquire after the mother and child. The farmer’s wife was very touched that Mama dared to come in such weather and walked two hours, but I was very happy to be able to speak my piece on the subject again.
44. Emphasis is in the original.
The whole time until February 22, it snowed practically every day, so that we had three-quarters of a meter [2.5 feet] of snow, and with it minus 16 to 20 degrees (Celsius) [3.2 to –4 degrees Fahrenheit] and even a week of 35 degrees below zero [–31 degrees Fahrenheit]. My daily work now consists of laundering, mending, and darning. In the mornings the farmer’s wife (and I) get up at quarter to seven and milk our nine cows—recently I even milked seven of them by myself—and are finished cleaning the stalls by 8:30. We have just had three calves and now have twenty-four head of cattle. After breakfast at 10:00, when the living room, foyer, and kitchen have been cleaned, I do the wash; after the midday meal at 12:30, I go back to the stalls to clean the stable and water the animals. After t
his there is the mending, and at 6:00 p.m. back out to the stall. That is the daily flow of things, to which is added the washing of the cows and calves and scouring of the house on Saturday.
Children during the Holocaust Page 43