Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  56. After Soviet authorities liberated Lvov, Rose Landau tried, without success, to learn the fates of her husband and other family members still incarcerated in the Lvov ghetto at the time of their concealment. Sygmunt Landau likely perished at Bełżec.

  For the next thirteen months, Nelly and her mother lived in their tiny room with its boarded window, their quarters sealed off from the Wojteks’ flat by a door concealed behind a hanging tapestry. After a few long weeks in hiding, Rose Landau arranged for a Polish friend to procure a set of watercolors for her daughter. Over the next several months, ten-year-old Nelly amused herself by painting images on small note cards and writing in her diary. The youngster drew many of her miniature scenes from imagination: from her readings in Leo Tolstoy and Jules Verne, from stories her mother told her to pass the time, or from memories of her happy childhood before the war. Looking through her “secret window,” Nelly Landau often blended the reality of what she saw with her own fantasies and hopes for the future. In Teacher with Children Wearing Black Uniforms, Nelly painted children she glimpsed on their way to class, imagining the time when she too could be out of doors and go to school. “I walked with them. I silently talked with them,”57 Nelly Landau Toll recalled in a 1998 interview.58 Young Nelly’s watercolors enabled her to reshape the perilous world around her into gentle tones and tranquil scenes. “My art was done in very dangerous times,” Toll explained. “It gave me pleasure, it let me forget.”

  57. Bruce Frankel, “Nelly’s Secret,” People 49, no. 27 (July 13, 1998).

  58. Frankel, “Nelly’s Secret.”

  Nelly and Rose Landau were liberated in July 1944, when Soviet forces arrived in Lvov. After Rose’s remarriage, seventeen-year-old Nelly joined her mother and stepfather in immigrating to the United States in 1951. There she married Ervin Toll in 1954 and went on to pursue studies in English and art, gaining a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. She has authored three books, as well as a play based on her wartime experiences. Nelly Toll’s contemporary paintings continue to transform her observations and experiences into works of art.

  Document 8-20. Watercolor by Nelly Toll, Teacher with Children Wearing Black Uniforms, Lvov, Poland, c.1943–1944, USHMMPA WS# 94466, courtesy of Nelly Landau Toll.

  Chapter 9

  Children and Resistance and Rescue

  This chapter addresses a theme traditionally important to Holocaust discourse: resistance. In this case, the subject is children’s resistance, a theme often overlooked in monographs dedicated to active opposition to Nazi rule. Boys and girls in their teens participated in armed resistance, their tender ages belying their achievements as partisans, ghetto fighters, and members of organized resistance groups. Youngsters struck at Nazi genocidal policy in uprisings at concentration camps and killing centers, such as the prisoner revolt at Sobibór in 1943 (Document 9-2). Children lived in family units protected by partisan bands in the forests of eastern Europe (Document 9-4). Young people formed the core of insurgents who battled Nazi forces in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Document 9-1) and in other armed struggles in ghettoized communities under Nazi occupation. More often, however, children engaged in acts of unarmed resistance, as with the publication of clandestine youth newspapers in the Warsaw ghetto (Document 9-5) or through the provision of aid and intelligence to armed opposition movements (Documents 9-8 and 9-9). Even young children practiced solitary acts of defiance against Nazi authorities, often as smugglers risking their lives to bring food and essential goods to fellow ghetto inhabitants from outside the ghetto boundaries.

  Rescue is the mirror image of resistance. Hundreds of organizations and thousands of committed individuals worked to save persecutees in Axis-occupied Europe. Many of these focused principally or solely on the rescue of children. In Allied countries, refugee organizations sought to bring children to the safety of their shores. In England, associations such as the British Committee for the Jews of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany organized the famous Kindertransporte, which carried Jewish and refugee children to Great Britain (Document 9-13), an effort that many private benefactors worked to emulate (Documents 9-14 and 9-15). Within Nazi-occupied territories, children’s aid organizations such as the Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants in France and the Żegota, an auxiliary branch of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa), proved particularly successful in removing young children from concentration and internment camps and concealing them from Nazi authorities in a series of safe houses and children’s homes. Finally, thousands of young Jewish children spent the war in hiding, either alone or with their families, shielded by a network of rescuers and protectors. These so-called hidden children (Documents 9-10 through 9-12) have become an iconic symbol of rescue efforts during the Holocaust, but the following documentation demonstrates that a dense nexus of individuals, aid organizations, and child-welfare agencies worked tirelessly and with singular ingenuity to save Jewish and non-Jewish children from harm in Nazi Europe.

  Youth and Armed Resistance

  One of the most ambitious and fiercely contended insurgencies against Nazi genocidal policy, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had its origins in the perceived defenselessness of Warsaw’s incarcerated Jewish population during the time of the Great Deportation Action, a period between July 22 and September 21, 1942, when German authorities dispatched three hundred thousand ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka killing center. On July 23, the day the first massive deportation effort from Warsaw began, members of the ghetto’s underground movement met to discuss a plan of action that might save the endangered community. Representatives of Warsaw’s Jewish youth organizations, which had thus far played a vital role in ghetto resistance, favored the formation of a defense force that might resist further deportation measures through armed intervention. On July 28, 1942, members of the Ha-Shomer, Dror, Ha-Za’ir, and Akiva movements founded the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ŻOB) under the command of twenty-three-year-old Ha-Shomer Ha-Za’ir1 organizer Mordechai Anielewicz.2 In the coming months, activists from the ŻOB distributed leaflets to the ghetto populace informing them of the significance of the Treblinka camp and the fate of persons deported there. More significantly, its leaders made overtures to the Polish Home Army and the Polish communist underground in an attempt to acquire arms, with limited success. In the autumn, another resistance organization, the Jewish Military Union (Żydowski Związek Wojskowy, or ŻZW) formed under the auspices of the Revisionist Zionist associations. For a time the two defense forces vied for men and material, but in the face of renewed deportations from the ghetto, the ŻZW accepted the ŻOB’s authority, and the two bodies worked to coordinate their activities.

  1. See note 48, chapter 8.

  2. Mordechai Anielewicz (1919–1943) was born in the small town of Wyszków, near Warsaw, Poland. In his late teenage years, he joined, and became a local leader of, the Zionist youth movement Ha-Shomer Ha-Za’ir. In early 1943, Anielewicz was instrumental in organizing the first clashes with German forces during the brief January deportation action in the Warsaw ghetto. As the leader of the ŻOB, he played a chief role in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. It is believed that Anielewicz committed suicide with other leading resistance figures when German forces captured ŻOB headquarters on May 8, 1943. See Norah Levin, Mordechai Anielewicz: Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Philadelphia: Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Philadelphia, 1988).

  On January 18, 1943, a second wave of deportations to Treblinka began. This time, members of the ŻOB engaged German forces in combat. Encouraged by the resistance fighters, thousands of ghetto inhabitants refused to show in response to German deportation summons in the days that followed. Nazi officials succeeded in rounding up five to six thousand Jews and halted the action after a few days. Jews and “Aryan” Poles alike interpreted the brevity of the deportation action as a victory for the ghetto’s defense organizations. The
heroism of the ghetto fighters, together with the realization that any further deportation efforts would mean the final liquidation of the ghetto unit, worked to undercut the authority of the Jewish Order Police and the Judenrat, which had counseled against armed resistance. The ŻOB had given ghetto inhabitants a measure of hope, and the population gave its allegiance to the ghetto resistance leaders in the days to come. In the winter months of 1943, the preparation of bunkers and subterranean hiding places (malines) proceeded on a massive scale, while ghetto defense forces worked to consolidate their strategies and to arm and equip themselves for the coming battle. The commanders of these units were under no illusion that their resistance efforts would lead to rescue: most viewed the upcoming revolt as a last protest against Nazi Germany’s murderous policies and an attempt to live and die with their honor intact.

  The resistance campaign known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began on the evening of Passover on April 19, 1943.3 The ŻOB had received advanced warning of this final deportation action and prepared assiduously for the coming attack. From their experiences in January, German authorities likewise had knowledge of the ghetto’s defense organizations and, on the eve of the action, replaced the chief of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and police in Warsaw, Obergruppenführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg,4 with SS and Police Leader (SS- und Polizeiführer) Jürgen Stroop,5 a man with considerable experience in partisan warfare. The uprising lasted twenty-seven days. Stroop had committed a considerable force, some 2,054 soldiers and police, reinforced with artillery and tanks. Clashing with them, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat, were some seven hundred young Jewish fighters, poorly equipped and lacking in military training and experience. The ŻOB did have the advantage of waging a guerrilla war, striking and then retreating to the safety of ghetto buildings and rooftops. The general population likewise thwarted German deportation efforts, refusing to assemble at collection points and burrowing in malines and underground bunkers. In the end, German troops were obliged to burn the ghetto down block by block in order to smoke out their quarry. The ghetto fighters and the population that supported them held out for nearly a month. On May 8, 1943, German forces succeeded in seizing ŻOB headquarters at 18 Mila Street; Anielewicz and many of his staff commanders are thought to have committed suicide in order to avoid capture. On May 16, Stroop announced in his daily report to Berlin that “the former Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more.”6 Some thirteen thousand Jews had died in the uprising, while the remaining fifty thousand Warsaw ghetto residents were deported to Treblinka. Only a handful of ghetto inhabitants survived the final Aktion in Warsaw, subsisting in their subterranean hiding places or escaping through the city’s labyrinthine sewer system to the “Aryan side.”

  3. For a discussion of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, see Israel Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt, trans. Ina Friedman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982); Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to a Perished City, trans. Emma Harris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

  4. SS-Oberführer Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg (1897–1944) was the Police Leader (Polizieführer) of the Warsaw district on the eve of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Transferred to Croatia following his replacement by Jürgen Stroop in Warsaw, he was killed by Yugoslav partisans on September 20, 1944.

  5. Jürgen Stroop (1895–1952) joined the Nazi Party and SS in 1932 and saw combat during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. In 1942, as SS-Brigadeführer, Stroop commanded an SS garrison at Kherson before becoming the SS and Police Leader for Lemberg (now Lviv) in February 1943. Following his suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943, he was dispatched to Greece as Higher SS and Police Leader. After difficulties with German civilian authorities there, he ended the war as commander of SS-Oberabschnitt Rhein-Westmark in the Rhineland. An American military court condemned Stroop to death in March 1947 for his role in the murder of downed Allied fliers within his jurisdiction but allowed him to be extradited to Poland to face trial for his crimes there, including the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Jürgen Stroop was convicted of war crimes and executed in Warsaw on March 6, 1952.

  6. See Jürgen Stroop, The Stroop Report, The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More! ed. and trans. Sybil Milton (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).

  The first major revolt of an urban population in German-occupied Europe, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising combined the valiant efforts of ghetto fighters with the dogged resistance of the general population. Many of those who engaged in armed resistance in Warsaw were adolescents in their teens; a majority of these came from the city’s active underground Jewish youth movements. Writing at the height of the insurgency, Oneg Shabbat chronicler Emmanuel Ringelblum noted that many of the bravest fighters were not men but young girls, who matched their male counterparts in courage, daring, and commitment. In his essay “Little Stalingrad Defends Itself,” Ringelblum reports that a Jewish teenager in Świętojerska Street had captured the public’s imagination as the Jewish Joan of Arc.

  Document 9-1. Emmanuel Ringelblum, “Little Stalingrad Defends Itself,” c. April 1943, in Joseph Kermish, ed., “To Live with Honor and Die with Honor”: Selected Documents from the Warsaw Ghetto Underground Archives “O.S.” (Oneg Shabbath) (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1986), 601–3.

  On the “Aryan side” there was intense interest in what was happening in the ghetto. It was related that the Germans were afraid to show themselves in the ghetto, and that they operated on burnt ground [i.e., scorched earth policy] only, moving forward by burning down block after block. The Germans were spoken of with contempt because of their atrocities. They were laughed at for not being able to put down a handful of Jews fighting for their honour. [. . .] There were rumours about Jews reconquering the Pawiak7 and releasing the prisoners there, who then joined the fighting. A story was spread in town about a handful of Jews who had captured a tank, got into it, and left the ghetto area. Popular fantasy also created a Jewish Joan of Arc. At 28 Świętojerska Street, the bristle workshop, a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl dressed in white had been seen firing a machine gun at the Germans with extraordinary accuracy, while she herself was invulnerable. [. . .] Among the rumours being spread on the “Aryan side” at that time there was a good deal of fantasy, but there were also authentic facts, if somewhat altered. The legend about the Jewish Maid of Orleans8 had its origin in the fact that Jewish girls took part in combat alongside the men. I knew these heroic girls from the period preceding the “action.” Most of them belonged to the Ha-Shomer Ha-Za’ir and Hechalutz [youth] movements. Throughout the war, they had carried on welfare work all the time with great devotion and extraordinary self-sacrifice. Disguised as “Aryan” women, they had carried illegal literature around the country, managed to get everywhere with instructions from the Jewish National Committee; they bought and transported arms, executed O.B.9 death sentences, and shot gendarmes and SS-men during the January “action.” Altogether they completely outdid the men in courage, alertness, and daring. I myself saw Jewish women firing a machine gun from a roof. Clearly one of these heroic girls must have distinguished herself in the heavy fighting waged by the O.B. at Świętojerska Street, and that was probably the origin of the story of the Jewish Maid of Orleans.

  7. During the German occupation of Warsaw, Pawiak Prison served as the Gestapo’s largest political prison in occupied Poland and became synonymous with Nazi terror.

  8. This is an appellation of Joan of Arc, whose greatest military success was the lifting of the Siege of Orleans against English forces in April 1429 during the Hundred Years’ War.

  9. This is a common abbreviation of the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization, or ŻOB). The ŻOB issued “death sentences” against those within the ghetto who collaborated with the Germans, including certain members of the Jewish Order Police.

  The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the largest s
how of Jewish armed resistance in the course of World War II. The ŻOB and ŻZW, which instigated the insurgency, were two of the most successful manifestations of organized resistance, but they represented just the tip of the iceberg. Jewish underground organizations existed in over one hundred ghettos in German-occupied eastern Europe. Incredibly, under the most adverse conditions, Jewish prisoners also succeeded in forming resistance cells within the Nazi concentration camp system. During the late war years, surviving Jewish Sonderkommando units initiated uprisings at several extermination camps. On August 2, 1943, for example, Jewish prisoners rebelled at Treblinka, seizing firearms from their captors and setting fire to the camp. Some two hundred individuals escaped; half their number were soon recaptured and executed. Likewise, on October 7, 1944, Auschwitz prisoners assigned to maintain Crematorium IV in the Auschwitz II–Birkenau concentration camp rebelled when they learned that their unit was slated for killing. German guards and their auxiliaries brutally crushed the revolt, murdering several hundred prisoners, but not before the Sonderkommando succeeded in destroying Crematorium IV with homemade explosives, rendering it inoperable for the duration of the war.10

  10. See Hermann Langbein, “The Auschwitz Underground,” and Nathan Cohen, “Diaries of the Sonderkommando,” both in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 485–502 and 522–34; Gideon Graif, We Wept without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).