From January 18 till February 2, I was not at home; but it was so convenient that I could go ride along for a few hours by sleigh by riding with Christl and Gina-Maus because [their trip] coincided with a farmer’s holiday.45 That was really fun, and it appeared to me as if [the scene] came out of a novel or a winter’s tale, riding in a charming horse-drawn sleigh through the winter landscape, bundled warmly. And when home, what a surprise, Papa was home; he had frostbite on his fingers and had leave—the timing was perfect. We all drank coffee together, and then they were off once more, but I was happy when I came again into the warm living room, because I was completely frozen when I arrived.
45. February 2 is Candlemas in the Christian calendar.
In Hopes and Dreams: Coping with the Holocaust
Perhaps Elisabeth Block’s aversion to recording unpleasant developments represented a strategy to cope with the increasingly difficult circumstances in which she found herself. It is possible that the teenager used her diary to rewrite events: to reshape painful experiences, giving them gentler and less threatening contours. In recasting each day without its uncertainties and adversities, she may have discovered a way to regain a sense of control over her situation and to replace disagreeable memories with those thoughts of home, nature, and family that she treasured most.
Children adopted many strategies to help them adapt to the horrors and deprivations of the Holocaust. Youngsters matured quickly and beyond their years under such conditions, and many of their responses to persecution were practical and pragmatic. Often powerless to shape their individual circumstances in the way that adults could, however, children frequently found highly creative ways to cope with the terrors they faced. Through imagination, play, and their dreams for the future, young people were able to transcend the physical and emotional traumas they experienced and cling to their hopes for survival.
Where possible, adults contributed to this process. Through educational activities and structured play, teachers and caregivers worked to create a world in which children could thrive and feel secure, if only temporarily. In the Theresienstadt family camp in Auschwitz, dedicated instructors like Hanna Hoffmann (later Hanna Hoffmann-Fischel) constructed a safe haven for youngsters in the so-called Kinderblock (children’s block) located in the midst of the killing center in Birkenau. Under the aegis of Fredy Hirsch, a popular youth leader in the Theresienstadt ghetto, teachers in the children’s home organized craft workshops and cultural events for their young charges. A high point for the youngsters was the staging of a play adapted from the beloved Walt Disney film Snow White, produced in 1937.
Document 8-16. 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).
We taught lessons in sociology, Jewish history, etc. When the SS men came for inspection, the children had to recite poems in the German language while standing at attention. It was thanks to Fredy’s exemplary leadership that the SS were pleased with the Kinderblock and often showed it off as a curiosity to the commandants of other camps. They also provided us with further favors. Thus, for example, we could even establish a sewing room in the block.
For the home, one of our comrades painted pictures from Walt Disney’s Snow White. At the German’s request, as they were very impressed by the pictures, Fredy produced a play of the fairy tale with the children in the German language and performed it for the dignitaries at Auschwitz. From tables, stools, and straw sacks, we constructed the stage, the backdrop, and the costumes. Because of the language difficulties which had to be overcome, the rehearsals lasted three months. We practiced dances and choruses with the children, rewrote the script, and adapted it to our circumstances. Thus the dwarves appeared as representatives of order and cleanliness. The demoralization to which they were opposed was embodied by the wicked stepmother. It was a truly lovely performance, and for the children it was the grandest experience of their lives—for many of them unfortunately also their last.
It was thanks not least to this performance that the SS-Lagerführer put aside a second block, as a day care center for children from three to eight years old and into whose living quarters mothers with children up to the age of ten could move. In this way, we could also look after the children at night, and prevent the exchange of children’s food for other goods and services. [. . .]
After a while, we succeeded in translating the harmony which existed among us youth leaders unto the children themselves. We initiated a boy scout system, with challenges that had to be undergone; the children composed slogans and songs. The groups competed with each other to see if each one in the group could do a good deed each day for fourteen days straight. We organized scouting games, made playthings from clay, colored woven straw, and paper, which we later displayed in an exhibition where they were very much admired by the Germans.
This world, into which we had fled from reality, was suddenly shaken to its foundations in early March 1944. We had already spent the three winter months in Birkenau; those from the September transport had even been there for six months. And nothing had happened up until then. Of course many had perished, dead of starvation, and there were more and more Muselmänner. But the roll calls were shorter and occurred less frequently. Block curfew [Blocksperre] was seldom declared. Those of us who did not suffer from “chimney fever”46 had new cause for hope. But one day the camp elder announced that those from the September transport would be going as a unit to work in Heidebrück in Germany—men, women and children; only the very ill would be exempted. There began a wild guessing game as to where this Heidebrück would be and if it was also a concentration camp. The pessimists maintained that this time certainly they would go to the gas: saying that the chimneys had not been smoking for many days now and they needed new material for burning. The optimists saw this very fact as proof that the gas chambers would be shut down for good.
46. That is, fear of being gassed.
The pessimists maintained correctly: the September transport, to which nearly all of these children belonged, was within a short time sent to the gas chamber.
Document 8-17. Just as youngsters at Birkenau reenacted Snow White, children in the Novaky labor camp perform a play about another popular Disney character, Mickey Mouse, Slovakia, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 40080, courtesy of Mira Frenkel.
Separation from loved ones was a central experience for many young persecutees during the Holocaust. Whether divided by long distances or isolated in hiding, youngsters often bore the pain of separation in silence, either because they lacked a sympathetic environment in which to express their emotions or because doing so might endanger themselves or their rescuers. Very young children, such as hidden child Ilona Goldman (later Alona Frankel), suffered doubly, for they had very few practical avenues to communicate with parents or family members or to convey their feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Born in Kraków on July 27, 1937,47 Ilona was two years old when German forces invaded her native Poland in September 1939. Like many Jewish families, the Goldmans decided to escape German-occupied Poland and fled to Lvov (now Lviv), then in Soviet territory.
47. Concerning the story of Ilona Goldman and her family, see Alona Frankel, A Girl, trans. Sondra Silverston (Ramat Gan: Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, 2009).
Her father, Salomon (1900–1958), a Communist Party member from nearby Bochnia, owned a wholesale materials business. Her mother, Gusta (b. 1904), a Ha-Shomer Ha-Za’ir48 youth group member who had spent her teenage years in Palestine, came from the Silesian town of Oświęcim, a city better known by its German name, Auschwitz. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Goldman family found itself incarcerated in the Lvov ghetto. In the spring of 1942, fearing the upcoming liquidation of the ghetto, Salomon Goldman managed to escape with his family to the “Aryan side” of Lvov, where
a former employee, Josef Jozak, agreed to hide the Goldmans on one condition: that they find another place of concealment for their lively and voluble four-year-old daughter.49 In the end, Salomon and Gusta found a hiding place for young Ilona with a Polish peasant family in the small village of Marcinkowice. Ilona spent some six months there posing as a Christian child with the family of Hania Seremet, whom the Goldmans paid handsomely each week for the care and concealment of their daughter. In Ilona’s last months with her foster family, Gusta Goldman sacrificed a gold dental crown every week for her only child’s continued safety, with Salomon prying each tooth from her mouth with the help of his Swiss Army knife.50 The Goldmans were careful to pay Seremet on schedule, for they had learned that the rescuer had abandoned an earlier charge, a very young boy, to his death when his parents were killed in a ghetto action and relatives were unable to pay for his continued upkeep.51
48. Ha-Shomer Ha-Za’ir (also Hashomer Hatzair, youth organization of socialist Zionism) was founded in 1918, merging two groups, Hashomer, a Zionist scouting group, and Ze’irei Zion, an ideological group committed to the study of Zionism, socialism, and Jewish history. The oldest existing Zionist youth movement, Ha-Shomer Ha-Za’ir encouraged Aliyah to Palestine and the establishment of kibbutzim; it counted among its members Mordecai Anielewicz, leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
49. Frankel, A Girl, 18.
50. Frankel, A Girl, 2.
51. Frankel, A Girl, 16.
Ilona Goldman spent several months separated from her parents. Because the four-year-old had not yet learned to write, she could not converse with her parents through notes or letters. Instead she communicated with them through a series of drawings sketched on the reverse side of Seremet’s weekly correspondence with the Goldmans. Besides the connection they established between parents and child, Ilona’s drawings served another important purpose: the pictures assured the Goldmans on a weekly basis that their daughter was still alive.
Now in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ilona Goldman’s childhood drawings capture the themes of village life: the work of peasants in the fields, animals ambling across green meadows, passenger trains traversing the Polish countryside. Wartime shortages also found a place in Ilona’s sketches. During her time in hiding in Marcinkowice, the little girl had heard incessant complaints from local farmers about the continual shortages of consumer items, especially cigarettes and smoking materials. Tobacco, hard to come by in wartime, was strictly rationed. In the drawing in Document 8-18, Ilona has rectified the situation. As the residents of her rescuer’s household engage in hunting for mushrooms, a common family pastime in late summer and early autumn, the menfolk drag at their cigarettes. The farmers smoke; the house chimney smokes; yes, even the bird aloft in the sky seems to take a few puffs.
Sometime during that autumn of 1942, Ilona’s caretakers lost courage and returned her to her parents in their hiding place. For months, the child lived in a kind of double concealment: hidden from the reach of German officials and from the Jozaks, who had forbidden the Goldmans to keep Ilona with them. In July 1944, the Soviet army liberated Lvov and, with the city, the emaciated family. In 1949 the Goldmans emigrated to Israel, where Ilona established herself as an award-winning children’s author and illustrator.
Document 8-18. Drawing of Ilona Goldman (Alona Frankel) for her parents in hiding, Marcinkowice, Poland, 1942, USHMM Collections, gift of Alona Goldman Frankel (note: writing showing through from other side).
Ilona Goldman’s drawings served both as a mode of communication with absent parents and as a means of entertaining herself during her long and lonely time in hiding. For many children during the Holocaust, escape into a world of imagination proved an efficacious way to eschew the harsh realities that surrounded them. Whether through drawing, painting, poetry, or play, imagination provided an important avenue for eluding the miseries of hunger, fear, and deprivation. For young Abram (Avraham) Koplowicz, writing became a way to reassert a sense of control over his environment and to banish feelings of pain and helplessness. Born in Łódź on February 18, 1930, the only child of Mendel and Yochet Koplowicz (née Gittel),52 Abram was just nine years old when German troops entered his native city and forced its Jewish inhabitants to reside in the Łódź ghetto. Even in his preteen years, he showed a precocious talent for writing, and within the ghetto walls, the young boy turned to poetry to transcend the physical and spiritual barrenness of his surroundings. His poem “When I Am Twenty” is a literal flight into fancy, a magical journey into a space and time where the horrors of the ghetto could not reach him.
52. Institute of Tolerance/State Archives in Łódź (in cooperation with the Centre de Civilization Française and the Embassy of France in Poland), eds., The Children of the Łódź Ghetto (Łódź: Bilbo, 2004), n.p.
Abram Koplowicz was deported with the transport from the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz in August 1944 and perished in the Birkenau gas chambers in September of that year. Mendel Koplowicz succeeded in surviving the war and, on returning to Łódź, discovered his son’s illustrated volume of poetry among the ruins of the ghetto. Abram Koplowicz’s original copybook is now reposited in the archives of Yad Vashem. Several selections of the young boy’s poetry were published in their original Polish in 1993.53
53. Abramka Koplowicz, Utwory własne: Niezwykłe świadectwo trzynastoletniego poety z łódzkiego getta (Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów, 1993).
Document 8-19. Abram Koplowicz, “When I Am Twenty,” Łód´z ghetto, c. 1943, in Institute of Tolerance/State Archives in Łód´z (in cooperation with the Centre de Civilization Française and the Embassy of France in Poland), eds., The Children of the Łód´z Ghetto (Łód´z: Bilbo, 2004).
When I Am Twenty
When I am twenty,
I will start admiring our beautiful world
I will sit down in a huge motor-bird
And I will rise heavenward
I will sail, I will fly over rivers, seas and skies
Clouds will be my sisters, winds will be my brothers
I’ll be watching rivers: Nile, Euphrates and others
I’ll see the sphinxes and the pyramids
In the old country of divine [Isis].
I’ll conquer the huge water of Niagara
And I’ll be sunbathing in the heat of the Sahara
Over Tibetan mountains which reach for the sky
Over wonderful and mysterious land of the magicians
And when I finally leave the kingdom of heat
I’ll rush flying to see the ice of the North
I’ll fly over the great kangaroo island
And over the ruins of the Pompeian walls
Over the Holy Land of Orthodox Order
And over famous Homer’s mother country
I’ll be stunned by our beautiful world
Clouds will be my sister, wind will be my brother.
Lvov ghetto survivor Nelly Toll used her interest in painting to transcend the dangerous world in which she lived. She was born Nelly Landau in 1933, the only daughter of Sygmunt and Rose Landau.54 With her parents and her younger brother, Janek (b. 1937), Nelly resided in Lvov,55 where her father was an affluent businessman who owned several apartment buildings. When Lvov came under Soviet occupation in the early months of World War II, Sygmunt Landau went into hiding, fearing arrest by the Soviets as a “wealthy capitalist.” The family was therefore initially relieved when German troops arrived in the region on June 30, 1941, and Sygmunt could leave his hiding place and rejoin his loved ones. The Landaus’ enthusiasm for the new Nazi occupiers was short-lived, however, as German authorities quickly initiated draconian legislation against the large local Jewish population.
54. For information concerning Nelly Landau Toll and her Holocaust experiences, see Nelly S. Toll, Behind the Secret Window: A Memoir of
Hidden Childhood during World War Two (New York: Dial Books, 1993).
55. Before World War II, Lvov had the third-largest Jewish population in Poland, numbering nearly one hundred thousand individuals; this number nearly doubled during the period of Soviet occupation with a rapid influx of Jewish refugees from German-occupied Poland.
On November 8, 1941, the Germans established a ghetto in the city’s northern districts and, by December 15, had forced all Jews in the municipal area into the sealed “Jewish quarter.” The Landaus’ initial strategy was to place Nelly with a Catholic family outside the ghetto until the war’s end. In hiding, the eight-year-old began to use the world of fantasy to cope with the intense loneliness and confusion she experienced. While the young girl lived clandestinely on Lvov’s “Aryan side,” she imagined that she was journeying on a long trip without her parents. During her later time in hiding, she would capture the sense of isolation she felt during these weeks in a wartime self-portrait that she titled All Alone.
Nelly tried to make the best of her time with her kindly Polish guardians, but a few short months later, tragedy struck. Nelly’s younger brother, Janek, together with his aunt and young cousin, was caught up in a wave of deportations from Lvov and murdered, presumably in the Bełżec killing center. After Janek’s death, Nelly returned to her parents in the ghetto. Sygmunt Landau was now more desperate than ever to rescue his remaining family from the Nazi dragnet. After an ill-fated attempt to escape to Hungary, Landau succeeded in finding a hiding place for his wife and daughter. Drawing on earlier loyalties and proffering a handsome sum as compensation, he convinced his former Polish tenants Michaj and Krysia Wojtek to conceal Nelly and her mother in a hidden room in their apartment. Sygmunt planned to join them there as soon as he had found places for members of his extended family. Yet, a short time after his wife and daughter went into hiding, Sygmunt Landau disappeared without a trace; Nelly and Rose Landau never saw him again.56
Children during the Holocaust Page 44