Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  31. See the testimony of Nina Antonovna Zhevzhik, reprinted in Tec and Weiss, “A Historical Injustice,” 367–68.

  32. Petr Pavlovich Borisenko, quoted in Lev Arkadiev and Ada Dekhtyar, “The Unknown Girl: A Documentary Story,” Yiddish Writers’ Almanac 1 (1987): 187.

  Document 9-9 portrays the young girl directly after her hanging. Her comrade, sixteen-year-old Volodya Shcherbatsevich, weeps at the sight of his dead friend, as a German officer tightens the noose about his neck.

  Document 9-9. The hanging of teenage resistance figures, believed to be Masha Bruskina and Volodya Shcherbatsevich, by an officer of the German 707th Infantry Division, Minsk, October 26, 1941, USHMMPA WS# 25136, courtesy of Ada Dekhtyar.

  The photographs became public in the immediate postwar period and soon became iconic images of the Great Patriotic War, as the Soviet partisan resistance movement came to be known. The two men in the photos were quickly identified, but the identity of the “unknown girl” remained a mystery for years to come. Many historians now believe the teenage female in the photographs to be Masha Bruskina, based on extensive documentary evidence and identification by contemporary eyewitnesses, family members, and friends.

  In Hiding

  When war began in Europe in September 1939, some 1.6 million Jewish children lived in those areas that would fall under the control of Nazi Germany and its allies. Historians estimate that as many as 1.1 million youngsters died in the Holocaust. The small percentage of young people who survived the genocide did so in part because they were the focus of rescue efforts by individuals, religious institutions, welfare agencies, and resistance organizations that sought to save Jews—especially Jewish children—from Nazi persecution. Many thousands survived because their rescuers concealed them in their own homes or because a dense network of supporters protected and sustained them.33

  33. For a discussion of hidden children, see Howard Greenfeld, The Hidden Children (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1993); Andre Stein, Hidden Children: Forgotten Survivors of the Holocaust (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994); Ewa Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939–1945 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997); Mordecai Paldiel, “Fear and Comfort: The Plight of Hidden Children in Wartime-Poland,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 6, no. 4 (1992): 397–413.

  Jewish children faced exceptional challenges when they went into hiding. Some youngsters could pass as non-Jews and lived openly with their rescuers. In these circumstances, obtaining falsified identity papers, often purchased on the black market or provided by members of the underground resistance, was crucial. By acquiring forged papers, such children might have access to legitimate documentation from local authorities as well as to food and clothing ration coupons, essential for survival in Nazi Germany or its occupied territories. A hidden child’s safety depended on strict secrecy. Rescuers often needed to invent elaborate fictions in order to justify the child’s presence in their household, explaining to neighbors that the youngster was a distant relative or a refugee from a distant town or village. It was essential that the child adapt swiftly and completely to his new identity and environment. Young people learned to answer by their fictive name without fail and to avoid any language or mannerisms that might be considered “Jewish” or foreign. As most Jewish children were hidden by individuals or religious institutions that embraced faiths different from their own, youngsters carefully learned to recite the prayers and catechism of their “adopted” religion in order to avert the suspicions of both adults and peers. One false word or gesture was sufficient to place both the child and his or her rescuers in jeopardy.

  Of course, there were children who could not pass as “Aryans” or live openly with their protectors. Many youngsters had classical “Jewish features” or had spoken only Yiddish at home, and thus spoke the local language imperfectly or with a telltale accent. Others had lived in the immediate area before ghettoization or deportation had taken place and feared that former neighbors and acquaintances might recognize them. These children remained physically concealed for a significant portion, or for the entirety, of their time in hiding. In rural settings, such youngsters might live out the war in barns, root cellars, or farm outbuildings. In urban areas the risks were greater, so rescuers might conceal their young charges in attics, cellars, closets, or wardrobes, away from prying eyes. Youngsters often had to remain silent or even motionless in their hiding places for hours at a time. Both children and their protectors lived in constant fear lest a raised voice or a footfall should arouse the suspicion of their neighbors. While children with an “Aryan appearance” might continue their education and find companionship among school-age friends, children in complete concealment had no such options and spent interminable hours alone, often in uncomfortable quarters, without occupation or human interaction. Like their coreligionists living openly with foster families, clandestinely concealed children often moved from one hiding place to another to ensure the safety of both the rescuers and their charges. Some hidden children lived with their families; for others, life in hiding meant long separation from loved ones, a division that tormented both children and their parents.

  Through his work as the chief archivist of the underground archive Oneg Shabbat, Emmanuel Ringelblum observed the minute workings of the Warsaw ghetto. In an essay in 1943, he chronicled the daily challenges faced by children hiding with family members or rescuers on Warsaw’s “Aryan side.”

  Document 9-10. Emmanuel Ringelblum, “Jewish Children on the Aryan Side,” 1943, in Emmanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War, ed. Joseph Kermish and Shmuel Krakowski (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1974), 140–45.

  Jewish families rarely crossed to the Aryan side together. First the children went, while the parents stayed on in the ghetto in order to mobilize the necessary funds for staying on the Aryan side. Very often the parents gave up the idea of going across to the Aryan side, as they did not have the money to fix up the whole family. The cost of keeping a child on the Aryan side in the summer of 1942, when the number of children being sent over was at its peak, was very high, about 100 złoty a day. A sum was demanded for six months or a year in advance, for fear that the parents might be deported in the interim. Thus, a sum of several tens of thousands of złoty was required to fix up a child on the Aryan side and only very wealthy people could afford to do so. Parents of limited means and especially working intellectuals were forced to see their children taken as the first victims in the various “selections” and “actions.” Not all Jewish parents wanted to send their children to the Aryan side. There were those who weighed the question of survival for the children, especially the youngest ones, when no one knew what would happen to the parents at the next “selection.” Some parents argued that a child deprived of its parents’ care will wither like a flower without the sun. There were children who strongly opposed being sent to the Aryan side. They did not want to go to the other side alone, but preferred to die together with their parents. [. . .]

  The majority of children, however, agreed to go across to the Aryan side, as living conditions in the ghetto were terrible. They were not allowed to leave their flats, they stayed for whole weeks in stuffy, uncomfortable hide-outs, they did not see daylight for long months. No wonder then that they let themselves be tempted by the promise of going out into the street, of walking in a garden, etc., and agreed to go to the Aryan side by themselves.

  I know an eight-year-old boy who stayed for eight months on the Aryan side without his parents. The boy was hiding with friends of his father’s, who treated him like their own child. The child spoke in whispers and moved as silently as a cat, so that the neighbors should not become aware of the presence of a Jewish child. He often had to listen to the anti-Semitic talk of young Poles who came to visit the landlord’s daughters. Then he would pretend not to listen to the conversation and become engrossed in reading one of the books wh
ich he devoured in quantities. On one occasion he was present when the young visitors boasted that Hitler had taught the Poles how to deal with the Jews and that the remnant that survived the Nazi slaughter would be dealt with likewise. The boy was choking with tears; so that no one would notice he was upset, he hid in the kitchen and there burst out crying. He is now staying in a narrow, stuffy hideout, but he is happy because he is with his parents.

  The situation is much worse for the children who have lost their parents, who were taken away to Treblinka. Some of their Aryan protectors have meanwhile taken a liking to the children and keep them and look after them. But these are only a small percentage of the protectors, generally people of limited means in whom Mammon has not yet killed all human feeling. People like these have to suffer on account of the Jewish children, but they do not throw them out into the street. The more energetic among them know how to fix themselves up and receive money subsidies from suitable social organizations. We know of cases where the governesses of wealthy children took care of them after their parents had been taken away to Treblinka. They keep these children out of their beggarly wages and don’t want to leave them to their fate. Some of these Jewish orphans were fixed up in institutions, registered as having come from places affected by the displacement of the Polish population (Zamo´s´c, Hrubies´zow, Pozna´n, Lublin, etc.). A considerable percentage of the orphans returned to the ghetto, where the Jewish Council fixed them up in boarding schools; they were taken away in the “resettlement actions.” There were frequent instances, when the “protectors,” having received a large sum of money, simply turned the child out into the street. There were even worse cases where the “protectors” turned Jewish children over to the uniformed police or the Germans, who sent them back to the ghetto while it was still in existence.

  There were also cases of Jewish children, especially very small children, who were adopted by childless couples, or by noble individuals who wanted to manifest their attitude to the tragedy of the Jews. A few Jewish children were rescued by being placed in foundling homes, where they arrive as Christian children; they are brought by Polish Police, who, for remuneration of course, report them as having been found in staircase wells, inside the entrances to blocks of flats, etc.

  There were no problems with Jewish children as far as the need for keeping their Jewish origin secret. In the ghetto Jewish children went through stern schooling for life. [. . .] They ceased to be children and grew up fast, surpassing their elders in many things. So when they were sent to the Aryan side, their parents could assure their Aryan friends and acquaintances that their little daughter or son would never breathe a word about his Jewish origin and would keep the secret to the grave. I know of a young girl who was dying in an Aryan hospital, far from her parents. She kept the secret of her origin till her death. Even in those moments of the death agony, when earthly ties are loosed and people no longer master themselves, she did not betray herself by a word or the least movement. When the nurse who was present at her death bed called her by her Jewish name, Dorka, she would not reply, for she remembered that she was only allowed to respond to the sound of the Aryan name, Ewa.

  Even the youngest children were able to carry out their parents’ instructions and conceal their Jewish origin expertly. I remember a four-year-old tot who replied to my asking him treacherously what he was called before—a question often put to children by police agents—by giving his Aryan name and surname and declaring emphatically that he never had any other name.

  Hidden children often spent anguished weeks and months away from their parents. Szepsel Griner, born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, became separated from his family in the early years of the German occupation of Poland. Presumably because Szepsel was the youngest child, his father placed the toddler with a Polish farmer before relocating his wife and remaining children to a hiding place in the home of an acquaintance. Szepzel’s father visited him daily, bringing his son toys and provisions, and it was from him that the small boy learned of the deportation and murder of his mother and siblings. After a time, the elder Griner stopped coming to the farm, and Szepzel came to understand that his father had been killed. Following the liberation of Zamoś´c by Soviet forces, the youngster spent a year in a Polish orphanage. Discovered at the home by his nineteen-year-old cousin, Szepsel was adopted by an aunt who had been living in Russia. In the immediate postwar period, the young boy related his experiences in hiding to an official of the Jewish Historical Commission in Warsaw.

  Document 9-11. Oral history of Szepsel Griner by the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland, c. 1947, USHMMA RG 15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/2284 (translated from the Polish).

  Statement 35

  Szepsel Griner, eight years old, born in Zamoś´c. Before the war he lived in Zamoś´c. During the occupation in Zamoś´c. Currently he lives in Wałbrzych 1-Maja 4:

  When the German marched into our area, a man knocked on our window and called to Papa to flee. Papa took some clothes with him and fled to a German acquaintance. We—that is, I, Mama, my sister and two brothers, as well as my uncle—were supposed to follow.

  Once, as we sat in our hiding place, the Germans came to take us away, but our German defended us. He said he would not deliver us up, and they had to go away empty-handed. We stayed there hidden for ten days.

  Papa lodged me with a Polish woman, and he himself went to find another hiding place. He found an empty room at someone’s home. He prepared a lot to eat there and brought Mama, my sister, and my brothers there. After four weeks they were discovered by the Germans and brought to a camp. Mama was sick. The Germans came to the camp, and Papa understood that they wanted to kill all the Jews, so he fled, but my sister and my brothers didn’t manage to get away. The Germans took them, deported them, and killed them. Papa came to me and told me all of that. At first he didn’t want to tell me any of this, but I saw that he was so sad, and I cried constantly that I wanted to go to Mama. So he told me everything. Papa came to me daily. Every time he brought vodka for the Pole and other things with him. He said to me that I should be good, mind the Pole, and not wander out upon the farm.

  Papa brought me a revolver (a play one), a harmonica, and other toys. The whole day I played the harmonica.

  In the shed next to me the farmer kept rabbits, which I liked to play with.

  At night I cried often. I was so sad, I wanted so badly to have someone from among my relatives with me.

  I had completely lost my appetite and I got very bad food to eat besides. For a long time, Papa didn’t come anymore to me. This is when I understood that the Germans had killed Papa too.

  Once I sat in the house and looked out the window. I saw that many Jews with children were being led away. Some of them didn’t have any hands. Where they were brought to, I don’t know.

  I always felt as if I were going to burst into tears, but I only cried when no one was in the house, or at nights.

  Later, the Russians started throwing bombs, and soon they also came to us.

  During World War II, thousands of Jewish children were concealed by conscientious individuals, by religious and resistance groups, and by various aid and relief organizations dedicated to helping Jews and other persecutees escape from harm in areas controlled by Nazi Germany and its allies. In most cases, hidden children lived with their rescuers or in a series of safe houses, isolated from friends and loved ones. Yet the Shoah’s most famous hidden child did not suffer her long ordeal alone but lived in concealment with her family, aided and insulated from deportation by a network of friends and supporters. That youngster was, of course, Anne Frank, whose diary has captured the imagination of generations of young readers and personalized the fate of hundreds of thousands of children murdered in the Holocaust.

  Annelies (Anne) Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on June 12, 1929, the second daughter of prosperous businessman Otto Frank, and his wife, Edith. Immediat
ely after Hitler’s rise to power, Anne fled with her parents and elder sister, Margot, to Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The Franks had hoped to escape antisemitic persecution in their native Germany, but when German forces invaded Dutch territory, the family once again figured as targets of Nazi anti-Jewish policy. When Margot Frank received a summons for deportation on July 5, 1942, Otto Frank convinced his family to go into hiding. On the following day, the family entered a narrow, three-story annex attached to Frank’s Opetka office building at 263 Prinsengracht34; the family would not leave it again until their arrests two years later. The vivacious Anne had just received a plaid-covered autograph book for her twelfth birthday and now began to use the volume as her diary, keeping a faithful and detailed account of events as they took place in the “secret annex.” Addressing her entries to “Dear Kitty,” a favorite character in a book series that she had been reading, the young Anne captured a portrait of a family in hiding; she also vividly portrayed a young girl growing up under desperate circumstances. Among the individuals introduced in her journal were the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer, friends or acquaintances who eventually joined the Frank family in their hiding space,35 and the groups’ rescuers, including Miep Gies and Viktor Kugler, Otto Frank’s former employees, who brought food, supplies, and information and ensured the hidden Jews’ safety during their confinement. In March 1944, while listening to Radio Oranje, a Dutch resistance radio station, Anne heard a broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein, education minister within the Dutch government in exile. Bolkestein announced that he would make a public record of the Dutch population’s experiences during World War II and asked his countrymen to save their letters and journals for collection in the postwar. At this point, Anne began composing and editing her diary with future publication in mind. She continued writing until August 1, 1944.