Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  53. Léa (Laja) Feldblum (1918–) was born July 1, 1918, in Warsaw. By 1929, her family had emigrated to Antwerp, but after the German occupation of Belgium, the Feldblums fled to southern France. Léa Feldblum worked at several OSE facilities before her employment at the Izieu children’s home. Here, like the Zlatins, she lived under false papers, assuming the name Marie-Louise Decoste. Arriving at the Drancy transit camp following the Barbie raid on Izieu, she revealed her true identity so that she might be deported with the children to Auschwitz. Feldblum was liberated at the Auschwitz complex in January 1945 and emigrated the following year to Palestine.

  54. For a discussion of the trials of Klaus Barbie and René Bousquet, mentioned previously, see Richard J. Golsan, “Crimes-against-Humanity Trials in France and Their Historical and Legal Contexts,” in Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes, ed. Patricia Heberer and Jürgen Matthäus (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2008), 247–61.

  Document 9-18. Telex from Klaus Barbie, commanding officer of the Security Police and Security Service IV B, Lyon, to Department IV B 4, Paris (Barbie Telex), April 6, 1944, in Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy, trans. Kenneth Jacobsen (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 95 (translated from the German).

  The Commander of the Security Police and the SD [Sicherheitsdienst, or Security Service] in the area of the Military Commander in France

  [Telegraph Office]

  Lyon No 5,269 4/6/44 8:10 p.m. FI.

  To the BdS Dept. IV B Paris

  Re: Jewish children’s home in Izieu/Ain

  Prev[ious]: none

  This morning the Jewish children’s home “Colonie Enfant” in Izieu/Ain was raided. In total, forty-one children aged from three to thirteen were taken into custody. In addition, officials succeeded in arresting the entire Jewish staff, consisting of ten persons, five of them women. Neither cash nor other valuables could be secured.

  The transport to Drancy is to take place on April 7, 1944.

  The commanding officer of the Sipo [Sicherheitspolizei, or Security Police] and the SD Lyon, IV B 61/43 [Dr. Werner Knab]

  As authorized, signed [Klaus] Barbie, SS[-Obersturmführer]

  [Handwritten]

  1. Affair discussed in the presence of Dr. v. B.55 and Hauptsturmführer [Alois] Brunner.56 Dr. v. B. stated that in such cases, special measures regarding the lodging of the children had been provided for by Obersturmführer Röthke. Hauptsturmführer Brunner replied that he had no knowledge of such instructions or plans, and that as a matter of principle, he would not consent to such special measures. In these cases also he would proceed in the normal manner as regards deportation. For the time being I have made no decision in principle.

  55. Dr. von Behr, director of the Einsatzstab Rosenberg in Paris, was responsible for the confiscation of the valuables of deported Jews.

  56. Alois Brunner (1912–?) was one of Adolf Eichmann’s most trusted associates in the deportation of European Jews to killing centers and ghettos in the East. As commander of the Drancy internment camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, Brunner was responsible for sending thousands of Jews to their deaths. After the war, Brunner escaped abroad and is believed to have resided in Syria. He was condemned to death in absentia by French courts in 1954 and again in March 2002. It is unclear whether Brunner is alive and at large. See Hans Safrian, Eichmann’s Men, trans. Uta Stargardt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009).

  [Obersturmführer] Röthke for information and decision.

  Chapter 10

  Elsewhere, Perhaps?

  Children and the End of the Holocaust

  On May 8, 1945, World War II, the most destructive conflict in modern history, came to an end in Europe. Between 7 and 9 million people had been uprooted from their homes as a result of hostilities. Between 2 and 3 million of these individuals were former prisoners—Jews and non-Jews—who had survived the war in concentration camps, forced labor camps, and killing centers throughout Axis-controlled Europe.1 Ill and exhausted from years of malnourishment and maltreatment, many child and adult survivors greeted their liberation with jubilation and set about making plans for a new future. Particularly for adolescents who had witnessed the deaths of parents and family members, however, a sense of overwhelming loss and uncertainty tempered the joy of this newfound freedom. Where would they go now? What would the future hold in a world without family love and support?

  1. Hagit Lavsky, “The Role of Children in the Rehabilitation Process of Survivors: The Case of Bergen Belsen,” Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 103.

  For survivors, the end of World War II marked a rupture between past and present. The immediate postwar period was a time to reconstruct their lives and reestablish homes and households dissolved during the war years. Separation from loved ones was a central experience of Jewish families during the Holocaust, and already in the late spring of 1945, surviving Jews and other victims of Axis policy began the complex process of locating family members scattered during the years of persecution. Parents sought their missing children in orphanages, children’s homes, and religious institutions throughout Europe. Such searches often became protracted, as hidden children had often moved from safe house to safe house during the war years, and many were still listed in official records under assumed names. Even those children fortunate enough to be reunited with their parents or other relatives often found rejoining their family units traumatic. For many young children, leaving the safety of their rescuers’ homes for parents they scarcely remembered was a distressing experience. Likewise, hidden children who had spent years living under false identities discovered that returning to the family fold meant a difficult period of readjustment, as youngsters struggled to reconcile their past and present selves.

  And then, child and adult Holocaust survivors alike faced the most daunting dilemma of all: where should they call home? Was it a viable option to return to one’s homeland, where the memories of persecution were still fresh? Could one begin a new life in old surroundings? Would they discover missing friends and relatives when they returned, or would they find only the ghosts of the past? Many children, both with and without parents, waited, sometimes for years, in displaced persons (DP) camps throughout the Allied occupation zones of Germany and Austria for the chance to settle elsewhere, to emigrate abroad, perhaps to the United States or British-controlled Palestine. And there these surviving children began again, pursing the education denied to them under Nazi occupation. Slowly and tenaciously, they made lives for themselves in the shadow of the Shoah. Many later shared their experiences, filtering the memories of their extraordinary childhoods with the perspectives they had gained as adults. Their testimonies are essential, for sixty-five years after those harrowing years of war and genocide, these individuals are our last living witnesses to the events of the Holocaust.

  “Over This Field of Death, Peace Breaks Out”: Liberation

  It is impossible to ascertain with precision the number of young people who survived persecution by the Nazi regime or its allies in concentration camps and ghettos or in hiding. Yet, in the winter and spring months of 1945, thousands of children experienced liberation, as Allied armies made their way through Axis-controlled Europe and into the German Reich itself. In the last months of the war, as German military and occupation forces retreated, they evacuated hundreds of camps in eastern Europe before the advance of the Soviet army, driving their prisoner populations to camps deep in the German interior. Schutzstaffel (SS) personnel forced these prisoners to march hundreds of miles on foot in brutal winter conditions without adequate food, shelter, or clothing. Their SS guards summarily shot those too il
l or exhausted to keep pace on these death marches. Concentration camps on German soil were often unprepared for the vast numbers of incoming prisoners from the east. Burgeoning camp populations outstripped the food and water supplies; extreme overcrowding spread epidemics of typhus, tuberculosis, and dysentery. In many camps the last weeks of the war witnessed catastrophic losses among Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners due to starvation, exposure, and disease.2

  2. See, for example, a discussion of the final days of the Bergen Belsen camp in Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani, eds., Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (London: Imperial War Museum, 2006).

  On April 11, 1945, units of the U.S. Ninth Armored Infantry Battalion liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. On that day, the camp’s underground prisoner resistance movement seized control of Buchenwald in order to prevent atrocities by retreating camp guards. It was the first major Nazi concentration camp uncovered by U.S. forces,3 and American soldiers were horrified when they encountered more than twenty thousand starving and emaciated prisoners.4

  3. On April 4, 1945, units of the U.S. 89th Infantry Division overran Ohrdruf, a Buchenwald subcamp. It was the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by U.S. forces.

  4. See Robert Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

  Gert Silberbart was sixteen when he learned that American troops were approaching the perimeter of the Buchenwald camp. A young Jew from Berlin, Silberbart had lived in the German capital until February 1943, when Gestapo agents arrested him and his family and transported them to Berlin’s collection camp (Sammellager) for Jews at Grosse-Hamburger-Strasse. The Silberbarts were deported directly to the Auschwitz concentration camp. His parents and eight-year-old sister went directly to the gas chambers, but Gert, then fourteen, had an athletic build and was selected for forced labor. He spent several months in the Buna camp (Auschwitz III–Monowitz), before civilian contractors from the Siemens concern recruited him as a skilled worker in an electronics factory attached to the Bobrek5 subcamp of Auschwitz. There the youth worked under comparatively good conditions until the last months of the war. In early January 1945, he and several of his fellow prisoners from Bobrek endured a forced march to Buchenwald. In the last days of the camp’s existence, SS guards oversaw almost daily transports of prisoners to other camps in Germany’s interior. Fearing that he would have to undergo another death march, a starving and exhausted Silberbart hid in the camp’s cellars and sewage holes, hoping to survive a potential liquidation of Buchenwald’s prisoner population. The teenager’s first indication that Allied forces had arrived at the complex was the sound of American music playing from the camp’s loudspeakers. Silberbart emerged from his hiding place and embraced his fellow prisoners with joy.

  5. See “Bobrek” in The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Vol. 1: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS–Business Administration Main Office (WVHA), ed. Geoffrey Megargee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), 228–30.

  Gert Silberbart responded to his liberation at Buchenwald with jubilation. Although weak and malnourished, he walked out to greet his American rescuers and to share the happiness and relief of the moment with his fellow survivors. In an August 1946 interview with American psychologist Dr. David Boder,6 Silberbart expressed his satisfaction at the arrest of his former SS tormentors. His rejection of retribution against SS guards held temporarily at the Buchenwald camp after liberation indicates that the young man had emerged from the years of persecution with his humanity intact. Now almost eighteen, Gert Silberbart looked ahead to a brighter future; he envisioned reuniting with his extended family and studying dentistry.

  6. See David Boder, The Displaced People of Europe: Preliminary Notes on a Psychological and Anthropological Study (Chicago: Illinois Institute of Technology and the Psychological Museum, 1947), and David Boder, I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), as well as the online site for Boder interviews, “Voices of the Holocaust” (http://voices.iit.edu), a project of the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology.

  Document 10-1. David P. Boder, interview with Gert Silberbart, Geneva, August 27, 1946, USHMMA RG-50.472, spool 9-82 and 83 (translated from the German).

  Gert Silberbart: [. . .] I stayed hidden for about a week. Constantly there was the call “Juden raus, Juden raus,” [“Jews out, Jews out!”] and when the largest part of the Jews were gone, they went after the Christians. There were daily transports from the camp, so that in the camp that had held 100,000 people a week before, at the point of liberation by the Americans on April 11, there were only 22,000 people left. [. . .]

  David Boder: Well? And so?

  Gert Silberbart: And so the Americans came on the 11th, on April 11 at four o’clock in the afternoon, and liberated us.

  David Boder: Now, and how was that? Do you want to tell us about the last three days? [. . .]

  Gert Silberbart: Well, so, during these . . . during these last three days I hid in cellars and sewage holes. I did not eat or drink during these days, just always listened anxiously to the cry of “Juden raus”; and when somebody, something moved close to me, when I heard any sound, I immediately grew terrified.

  David Boder: So you say you did not really eat anything during those three days?

  Gert Silberbart: Yes. That was not . . . that was not the first time. I had already starved for seven days. Nothing to eat and nothing to drink. [. . .] [I hid] until I heard the cries of jubilation on the afternoon of April 11, and heard American music from the loud speakers, and then I immediately crawled out, completely exhausted, and we embraced each other, crying . . .

  David Boder: So American music from the radios . . .

  Gert Silberbart: It was like this. In the room of the camp commandant, which was outside the camp, there was a big . . . a microphone [. . .] and this radio in the commandant’s room played American music. The inmates stood immediately. [. . .]

  David Boder: Tuned in and one heard American music?

  Gert Silberbart: . . . immediately heard American music. And then the first Americans immediately talked over the loudspeakers. We were . . . we just [knew] we were free.

  David Boder: And?

  Gert Silberbart: We just could not grasp it in the first hours. Yes, and then we embraced crying. It is really hard to describe the last—the first hours after the liberation.

  David Boder: Try it!

  Gert Silberbart: Yes, when I crawled out, I saw some comrades again whom I had known for a long time, and we embraced and we almost could not fathom that we were free. We were so exhausted from the last days that we had not eaten—in short, we were exhausted. The bad thing was also that the Germans in their retreat had destroyed the water pipeline, so that there was no water in the whole camp, and we almost died of thirst.

  David Boder: [Interviewer David Boder changes the recording spool and identifies the interviewee, date, and time.] So you said you heard American music, now go on.

  Gert Silberbart: Yes, so we just crawled out of our hiding places and were happy about our newly regained freedom; many actually collapsed from the thought, at this occasion . . .

  David Boder: Did you immediately see some Americans, too?

  Gert Silberbart: Yes, we immediately saw American tanks that drove through the barbed wire and the electrical fences. At once you saw white flags on all the roofs, and—to make a long story short—there was jubilation and laughter all over the camp.

  David Boder: Who put out the white flags?

  Gert Silberbart: Those were simple bed sheets. [. . .]

  David Boder: Now, the prisoners did not have to surrender. What did the white flags mean?

  G
ert Silberbart: No, the white flags meant simply that we were together with the Americans. [. . .]

  David Boder: Yes, and what happened to the kapos?

  Gert Silberbart: The kapos were—a part of the kapos who had a bad conscience, who had collaborated with the SS men during all these times, fled with the SS men who fled at the last minute. [. . .] The kapos who had a good conscience, who had been behaving fairly towards their fellow prisoners, they stayed with us and also celebrated their freedom.

  David Boder: Yes. Now. Eh—did they catch some SS men? Did they . . . ?

  Gert Silberbart: Very many were still caught on the way because . . . many inmates took, eh, plundered right away these weapons arsenals, the arsenals of the SS . . .

  David Boder: Yes . . .

  Gert Silberbart: . . . and armed themselves, and those who were strong enough ran after the SS, together with the Americans. Quite a few were still arrested.

  David Boder: And what was done with them?

  Gert Silberbart: They were first brought into the camp and held in a block. They were disarmed and everything taken from them. Then, several days later, they were transported by the Americans, by the military, further into Germany. [. . .]