Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  34. Otto Frank had owned two businesses in Amsterdam that produced and sold pectin and other food preservatives and spices. After Nazi German forces overran the Netherlands, Frank was forced to liquidate his assets. He transferred the ownership of the businesses, including Opetka, to trusted colleagues so that he could continue to make sufficient income for his family and might recover his assets in the postwar period.

  35. Anne Frank gave pseudonyms to fellow dwellers in the annex who were not members of her immediate family. The van Pelses received the fictive name “van Daan,” while the dentist Fritz Pfeffer became “Albert Dussel.”

  This diary entry would be her last. Three days later, on August 4, 1944, members of the SS and Dutch Green Police discovered the Franks’ hiding place and arrested its inhabitants. Anne, her family, and the friends who had been concealed with them were transferred to the Dutch transit camp Westerbork, then on September 3 to Auschwitz. Sometime in October 1944, Anne and Margot arrived on a transport from Auschwitz to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Both succumbed to typhus there in late February or early March 1945, just weeks before the liberation of the camp by British forces. The sole survivor of the group in hiding, Otto Frank,36 returned to Amsterdam in the summer of 1945. There he recovered his daughter’s diary and papers, which had been retained by Miep Gies. Anne’s diary appeared in print for the first time in Dutch in 1947 and has been in publication ever since.37

  36. Hermann van Pels was gassed shortly after arrival at Auschwitz, where Edith Frank died of starvation in January 1945. Fritz Pfeffer perished in Neuengamme concentration camp in December 1944. Peter van Pels, Anne’s love interest, survived until the last days of the war, dying of exhaustion at Mauthausen on May 5, 1945. Mrs. van Pels joined Margot and Anne briefly at Bergen Belsen and probably died shortly thereafter on a transport bound for Theresienstadt.

  37. For a further discussion of Anne Frank and the influence of her diary, see Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition, ed. David Barouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans, B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday, and Susan Massotty (New York: Doubleday, 2001); Hyman Aaron Enzer and Sandra Solotaroff-Enzer, eds., Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

  Two days before Anne Frank wrote the last lines in her journal, another young girl in Amsterdam, Louise Israels, was celebrating her second birthday in hiding. She had been born on July 30, 1942, in the Dutch city of Haarlem, where she lived with her parents, grandparents, and elder brother. The Israelses were a secular and assimilated Jewish family. Louise’s father, a reserve officer with the Dutch army, worked in the family business selling women’s lingerie and accessories. Although the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands had imposed a number of antisemitic measures and restrictions upon the Jewish population, the Israelses, like many Dutch Jews, hoped that their little family might emerge from the war years intact. Two events shook their confidence. In early March 1943, in a bold and imaginative move, the Dutch national resistance bombed the central population registry office in Amsterdam, effectively hindering German authorities from comparing forged personal documents held by Jews and other persecutees in Holland against authentic public records. Nazi officials countered this measure with a series of brutal reprisals. In Haarlem, Nazi occupiers arrested the Israelses’ neighbor, the president of the city’s Jewish community, and shot him and nine other prominent Jews before the eyes of their fellow citizens. At the same time, the Jews of Haarlem received a summons to concentrate in Amsterdam as a prelude to deportation. Spurred by these events, Louise’s father devised a daring plan to save his family. First, he secured false papers for his wife and children from the Dutch underground. Then, liquidating all available assets, Israels located a small apartment near the city’s famous Vondelpark and paid the leasing agent funds sufficient for ten years’ rent.

  Sometime in the spring months of 1943, the young family slipped quietly inside the doors of their new residence. They would not emerge again until the arrival of Allied forces in Amsterdam two years later. Joining the Israelses in hiding was a young woman named Selma, the daughter of the president of Haarlem’s Jewish community who had been murdered just weeks before. Her family had been deported following her father’s death, and the young woman now became an integral part of the Israels family. She would prove a valuable source of information when a maturing Louise Israels began to piece together her wartime experiences.

  Unlike the more famous Frank family, who lived in a secret annex, the Israelses literally hid in plain sight, lodged in a residential apartment building amid dozens of neighbors. It was a perilous existence in which the threat of denunciation was an ever-present reality. The family lived in a silent world, isolated from the vibrant city outside. After dark, Louise’s father risked a nighttime curfew to provide his family with food and firewood. Israels’ army reserve comrades represented a vital lifeline for the little household, regularly bringing them provisions and news from the outside world.

  In the summer of 1944, the family had been living in hiding for more than one year. Although their situation was certainly preferable to that of thousands of Dutch Jews awaiting deportation in transit camps such as Westerbork and Vught, the family knew hunger and privation and lived in constant fear lest a raised voice or obtrusive noise should rouse the suspicion of their neighbors. So, when little Louise’s second birthday arrived on July 30, 1944, her parents decided to use the event to lift the family’s morale. In a photograph from that day, Louise wears a new dress for her party, which her mother made from an old blouse. She is perched on a rattan doll’s chair that her father purchased through Dutch friends “on the outside.” Her nurse, Selma, cobbled together old scraps to make a rag doll, which Louise clutches wistfully. For the occasion, her elder brother has lent her his favorite pull-toy horse, a special treat—but just for the day!38

  38. Information concerning the story of the Israelses’ years in hiding is provided courtesy of Louise Lawrence-Israels.

  Document 9-12. Louise Israels celebrates her second birthday in hiding, Amsterdam, July 30, 1944, USHMMPA WS# 16427, courtesy of Louise Lawrence-Israels.

  Louise and her family would remain in hiding for almost ten more months before Canadian forces liberated the city of Amsterdam on May 5, 1945. In the Netherlands Louise Israels would eventually earn a degree in physical education; in 1967 she married American physician Sidney Lawrence and immigrated to the United States. She later became a volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where her small rattan doll’s chair is displayed in the museum’s “Permanent Exhibition.”

  The stories of two young girls in Amsterdam, Louise Israels and Anne Frank, present us with two very different pictures of children in hiding and represent dramatically different fates.

  Children and Aid Organizations: The Politics of Rescue

  Among the myriad attempts to rescue children from persecution during the Holocaust, none is more celebrated than the efforts of public and private refugee and child-welfare organizations to bring children from Germany to Great Britain, collectively known as the Kindertransporte (children’s transports). Following the violent Kristallnacht pogrom staged by the Nazi authorities on Jews in Germany on November 9 and 10, 1938, the British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees. Spurred by British public opinion and the persistent efforts of refugee aid committees, most notably the British Committee for the Jews of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany, British authorities agreed to permit an unspecified number of children under the age of seventeen to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-annexed territories in what had formerly been Austria and the Czech lands.39

  39. For a discussion of the Kindertransporte, see Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport (New York: Bloomsbury Publishers of St. Martin
’s Press, 2000); Rebekka Göpfert, Der jüdische Kindertransport von Deutschland nach England, 1938–1939: Geschichte und Erinnerung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1999); Anne L. Fox and Eva Abraham-Podietz, Ten Thousand Children: True Stories Told by Children who Escaped the Holocaust on the Kindertransport (West Orange, NJ: Behrman House, 1999).

  Private citizens or organizations had to guarantee to pay for each child’s care, education, and eventual emigration from Britain. In return, the British government agreed to allow unaccompanied refugee children to enter the country on temporary travel visas. It was understood at the time that when the crisis was over, the youngsters would return to their families. Parents or guardians could not travel with their children.

  The first Kindertransport arrived in Harwich, Great Britain, on December 2, 1938, bringing some two hundred children, many from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin that had been destroyed during Kristallnacht. Like this convoy, most transports left by train from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and other major cities in central Europe. Children from smaller towns and villages traveled from their homes to these collection points in order to join the transports. Jewish organizations inside the Greater German Reich—specifically the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany),40 headquartered in Berlin, as well as the Jewish Community Organization (Kultusgemeinde) in Vienna—planned the transports. These associations generally favored children whose emigration was urgent because their parents were in concentration camps or no longer able to support them. They also gave priority to homeless children and orphans.

  40. In early 1939, this organization replaced the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden (Reich Representation of German Jewry), founded in September 1933.

  Children chosen for a Kindertransport convoy traveled by train to ports in Belgium and the Netherlands, then by ship to Harwich. At least one of the early transports left from the port of Hamburg in Germany, while some children from Czechoslovakia flew by plane directly to Britain. The last transport from Germany left on September 1, 1939, just as World War II began, while the very last Kindertransport sailed from the Netherlands for Britain on May 14, 1940, the day on which the Dutch army surrendered to German forces. In all, the rescue operation brought about nine to ten thousand children, some seventy-five hundred of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland to Great Britain.

  After the children’s transports arrived in Harwich, those children with sponsors went to London to meet their host families. Those children without sponsors were housed in a summer camp in Dovercourt Bay and in other facilities until individual families agreed to care for them or until hostels could be organized to accept larger groups of children. About half the children lived with foster families. The others stayed in boarding houses, at schools, or on farms throughout Great Britain. In 1940, British authorities interned about one thousand adolescents from the children’s transport program as enemy aliens on the Isle of Man and in other internment camps in Canada and Australia. Despite their classification as German aliens, some of the young men from the children’s transport program later joined the British army and fought in the war against Germany. After the war, many children from the children’s transport program became citizens of Great Britain or emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, or Australia. Most of these children would never again see their parents, who were murdered in the Holocaust.

  Helmuth Ehrenreich was one of thousands of German children fortunate enough to gain a place aboard a Kindertransport headed for Britain. Born in Frankfurt am Main on May 11, 1928, Helmuth was the son of Nathan Ehrenreich, a prominent pianist, choral director, and music critic, and his wife, Frieda. In the early summer of 1939, a distant cousin had gained a berth on a children’s transport, but then decided to remain behind with his family. Frieda Ehrenreich accepted her relatives’ offer to send young Helmuth in his cousin’s place, a decision that saved her son’s life. Eleven-year-old Helmuth traveled with a Kindertransport on June 20, 1939, arriving in Harwich the following day. In the following weeks, he was housed at a refugee camp in Margate, before being lodged with a host family in the heart of London. Helmuth enjoyed exploring the city and practicing his newly gained English skills, but when London became the target of German bombs during the Blitz, he, like many British children, was evacuated to the English countryside. There Helmuth settled with a foster family that harbored antisemitic sympathies, and they mistreated him. Fortunately, in August 1939, his mother had succeeded in obtaining an entry visa for Britain and fled Germany on one of the last airplane flights from Frankfurt to London before hostilities began. She found work as a housekeeper in Ditchling, in East Sussex, and was able to relocate her son to a nearby home so that they could visit each other more easily. That winter the family’s U.S. visas were finally issued, and Nathan Ehrenreich, who had spent the last year in a Dutch refugee camp following his arrest on Kristallnacht, arrived in New York City. In March 1940, nine months after Helmuth’s voyage to Britain aboard a Kindertransport, the entire family was reunited in the United States. Adopting the more American name “Henry,” the young man thrived in the United States, excelling in high school and attending Cornell and Columbia universities. In 1963 he became a professor of engineering and applied physics at Harvard University, a post he retained, finally as emeritus professor, until his death in 2008.

  Document 9-13. Child identification card of Helmuth Ehrenreich, Police Presidium of Frankfurt am Main, June 16, 1939, USHMMA, Acc. 2006.396, Ehrenreich Family Papers (translated from the German).

  [Handwritten] For emigration to [England]

  The Police Presidium in Frankfurt am Main

  (Issuing Authority)

  Frankfurt am Main, June 16, 1939

  Child Identification Number 8874/39

  [Only valid until June 15, 1940]

  Family name: Ehrenreich

  First Name:Helmuth Israel41

  41. Beginning in January 1939, all Jews whose given names did not correspond to those on an authorized register of “Jewish” names had to add the name “Sara” after their first name if female and “Israel” if male. The letter J stamped on the identification card indicates that Helmuth Ehrenreich is a Jew.

  Born on:May 11, 1928

  Nationality:German Reich

  Residence (permanent): Frankfurt am Main

  Fee 50 RM

  [Administrative remarks]

  Many aid agencies worked to ensure the success of the Kindertransport endeavor. The effort of British child-welfare societies to rescue children from Nazi Germany inspired Jewish and refugee organizations in the United States to emulate the English example. In the early 1930s a small number of German Jewish children arrived as unaccompanied minors on U.S. shores. They came largely through the sponsorship of private citizens or under the auspices of local Jewish congregations who undertook the costs of their immigration and provided foster homes for the youngsters. Such efforts increased as Nazi antisemitic policy radicalized in the wake of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. Even in this time of sorest need, refugee organizations faced major obstacles in bringing young children to the United States. The effects of the Great Depression had sparked hostility to foreigners entering the United States, and American internal and foreign policy continued to place limits on immigration.42 The Wagner-Rogers Bill, cosponsored by Senator Robert Wagner (D-NY) and Representative Edith Rogers (R-MA), proposed to admit twenty thousand Jewish refugee children under the age of fourteen from National Socialist Germany but failed to garner congressional approval in February 1939. Although many welfare organizations were daunted by this decision, one young American couple refused to abandon their plans to rescue Jewish youngsters from Nazi oppression.

  42. See David Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 1987).

  The mission to bring fifty children to safety in the United States was the brainchild of Philadelphia lawyer Gilbert Kraus and his wife, Eleanor.43 Kraus’s father had been a founding member of the Independent Order Brith Sholom, a Jewish fraternal organization that, particularly in the first decades of the twentieth century, supported many charitable and educational programs for Jewish immigrants. Kraus’s local chapter had recently erected a new residence center just outside Philadelphia. Faced with the mounting crisis in Europe, Brith Sholom’s grand master, Louis Levine, suggested to Kraus that the complex be used to house refugee Jewish children from Germany.

  43. The rescue efforts of Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus are documented in Eleanor Kraus, “Don’t Wave Good-bye” (unpublished manuscript, private collection, c. 1940).

  Both Levine and Kraus were aware that many efforts on the part of welfare and religious organizations to arrange a kind of Kindertransport to America had met with failure. Hampering such efforts was an otherwise reasonable U.S. Labor Department guideline making it unlawful for any organization to bring unaccompanied children into the United States. A capable lawyer, Kraus now suggested locating fifty members within his local Brith Sholom lodge who would be willing to serve as individual sponsors for the children. Each would have to pledge to support a young person and to guarantee that he or she would not become a public charge. On February 3, 1939, Kraus laid out his plans to Assistant Secretary of State George Messerschmidt.

  Document 9-14. Letter of Gilbert Kraus to George Messerschmidt, assistant secretary of state, February 3, 1939 (National Archives and Records Administration, RG-59, General Records of the Department of State, Decimal File 150.6265/610).