Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  David Boder: Did you have an opportunity to talk to the SS?

  Gert Silberbart: I did not have an opportunity myself because the whole time I was too weak to just go a few steps. [. . .] I just rested. Others had the opportunity to talk to the SS men. Many also took revenge on them.

  David Boder: In what form?

  Gert Silberbart: Simply by harassing them.

  David Boder: Yes. Did the Americans defend or protect the SS in any form?

  Gert Silberbart: Neither defended nor protected them. They took—in the first . . . in the first days you saw rather few Americans in our camp because the camp was still on the front lines, that whole area. Only later, when the front had moved further into Germany, there came a special camp commando of the U.S. Army, a great number of personnel who took over the running of the camp. Also many tankers came that brought water into the camp. Because it took about a week and a half after our liberation until the water pipeline was restored.

  David Boder: Aha. Now tell me, there were so many inmates, how come the SS was even left alive?

  Gert Silberbart: They were left alive. Because if we would not have let them live, then we would—we would not have been much different than the Germans. So we had to—we wanted, after all, to set a good example. If not a good example . . . but we should not act as they acted towards us: then we would have been just like them in the end.

  David Boder: That was the philosophy of the matter?

  Gert Silberbart: That was not the philosophy of the matter. That is my opinion. Surely many others had a different opinion. But overall that was the mind set in the camp. [. . .]

  David Boder: Now, and how did it go with the food and care?

  Gert Silberbart: Of course the food improved immediately and immensely. Many were not used to the good fare of the American military, in fact, no one was. [. . .] [Many] suffered right away from diarrhea, gastritis, stomach cramps. Nobody took well to it. The whole camp suffered from diarrhea. And only later, slowly, slowly, did we get used to the normal diet.

  David Boder: Now, and how long were you then in Buchenwald?

  Gert Silberbart: I was then in Buchenwald until the beginning of June 1945, when many youths had to sign up through the UN,7 and the transports went to Switzerland, and I was among them. And so I came to Switzerland. [. . .]

  7. Gert Silberbart is referring to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which undertook the provision of food, clothing, and essentials for displaced persons and victims of war and persecution following World War II. Among the administration’s tasks were documenting orphaned or unaccompanied minors and assisting in their reunion with relatives or relocation.

  David Boder: And how old are you now?

  Gert Silberbart: I will be eighteen.

  David Boder: And what are your plans? What do you want to do in the future?

  Gert Silberbart: I am intending to finish the dental technician course and the [evening] course at the trade school, and then go to my relatives in Chile and work there as a dental technician.

  Document 10-2. Young boys join adult survivors in cheering their U.S. Army liberators at Dachau, April 29, 1945, USHMMPA WS# 45075, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park.

  Fourteen-year-old P. H.8 experienced his liberation from the Dachau concentration camp in a markedly different way. At the age of nine, the young boy had been forced to move into the Łódź ghetto with his family. There, in September 1942, he and his younger brother had evaded the children’s action (Kinderaktion) associated with the ghetto’s notorious Gehsperre by hiding in the attic of their small apartment. The family remained in Łódź until the final liquidation of that ghetto in August 1944. At the time, P. H. reflected, he did not understand that his intact family had provided an invaluable source of stability and support. “I didn’t value as a young child what it means to have a family with a father and mother. I only really appreciate it now that it’s too late . . . ”9 During the final deportation action, thirteen-year-old P. H. was separated from his mother and little brother and arrived with his father on a transport to Auschwitz. Flushed with crying and wearing several sets of clothing in the warm summer heat, the young H. appeared robust to SS officers performing selections on the ramp, and he and his father were chosen for labor. Two days after disembarking at Birkenau, father and son reboarded a transport for the Kaufbeuren concentration camp,10 a subcamp of Dachau near Augsburg. In the last weeks of the war, young H. was transferred with other ill and exhausted Jews to the Dachau concentration camp.

  8. Editor Isaiah Trunk chose to anonymize all sources of oral testimony published in his 1982 anthology Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution.

  9. P. H., quoted in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 326.

  10. The Bavarian city of Kaufbeuren was also the location of the “euthanasia” facility mentioned in chapter 6.

  Unlike Gert Silberbart, P. H. did not experience a sense of joy when U.S. forces liberated Dachau on April 28, 1945. While Silberbart had lost his parents and other family members at the outset of his Holocaust odyssey, H.’s father had died just weeks before the arrival of American troops, deepening his son’s sense of loss. Bereft of family members and close friends, H. felt a profound sense of loneliness and abandonment at liberation. Isolated from his fellow survivors, with whom, as a new arrival at Dachau, he felt very little connection, H. could not understand the elation that other prisoners demonstrated when their hour of freedom finally came. In this moment of celebration, the fourteen-year-old felt only apathy and despair. In a February 1946 interview, he confided to oral historian David Rum that only the injunction of his dying father enabled him to face his future alone.

  Document 10-3. Oral history testimony of P. H. by the Canadian Jewish Congress, Montreal, February 1946, in Isaiah Trunk, ed., Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 326–28.

  We were 600 men. On the first morning, we were sent out to the sites. My father worked in the forest for two days and caught pneumonia. I tried to muster all my strength for this work and was beaten hard all the time. After eight days, my father got better, but he was still too weak for the labor gangs. They put him in the infirmary—which was very bad. He died in two days. I was left all alone, without anyone or any hope for tomorrow. The number of dead grew from day to day. Of 600 Jews, only 320 were left. The camp went on operating for another week, and by then, the last exhausted remnant of 125 people was transferred to Dachau. I looked like a corpse, with no strength left at all. We were put into the infirmary, but forty other people had died in the train on the way there—they couldn’t have held out for another moment. Since I was the youngest here, the others gave me more food and I only started coming back to life after two long weeks. The doctor, who was French, felt sorry for me and didn’t discharge me from the infirmary right away. He gave me light work to do inside the clinic. On April 25, all the Jews were packed into a transport that was headed for the Tyrol. This doctor tried to save me and write out a false diagnosis which confined me to bed, though I was already better. Both of us risked our lives doing this. But luckily, they crossed me off the transport list and I stayed behind in the infirmary.

  On April 28, the Americans walked in. Thousands of people “rose from the dead” to come out on the grounds and stare at the liberators. The SS were marched past us with their hands stuck high in the air. I reacted coldly to all these signs of liberation—I had no reason to be glad. I fell into complete apathy. I watched the people sing and dance with joy, and they seemed to me as if they’d lost their minds. I looked at myself and couldn’t recognize who I was. I lost all sense of what had happened to me. After a long time, I began to understand. I was left all alone, without help or protecti
on, without a living soul I could call my own. There were [times] I regretted having been left alive among these last survivors and handful of Jews. This was how the two months at Dachau passed. Many people died and many recovered. [. . .] I only live today for the words my father said to me on his deathbed: “I’m already forty-three—I won’t be able to survive this hell. But you—you’re young, see to it our name isn’t torn out from the pages of the world.”

  This keeps alive my spirit and I live with the hope for a better tomorrow.

  One of the most extraordinary accounts of the last days of the Theresienstadt ghetto comes to us from the diary of eighteen-year-old Alice Ehrmann (later Alisa11 Shek), born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on May 5, 1927. Her Czech Jewish father, Rudolf Ehrmann, was a successful civil engineer; her Catholic mother, Pavla, was from Vienna. As children of a mixed marriage, Alice and her siblings became subject to Nazi antisemitic legislation when the Czech lands were annexed by the German Reich in March 1939.

  11. This is also transliterated as Alisah in some sources.

  Like many other Czech Mischling children, sixteen-year-old Alice and her sister Ruth, nineteen, were deported to Theresienstadt in July 1943 without their parents. While their “Aryan” mother continued to live in Prague until the end of the war, Rudolf Ehrmann was arrested and held in Theresienstadt’s Small Fortress in the spring of 1944. He was ultimately deported to Auschwitz, which he survived.

  Alice Ehrmann began her diary in October 1944. In the ghetto she had met twenty-four-year-old Ze’ev Shek (then Scheck), a leading figure in the Czech Zionist youth movement. Soon after his arrival in the ghetto in October 1943, Shek began to assemble a small archive in order to document the true state of Theresienstadt, which Nazi authorities showcased to outsiders as a model ghetto. The young couple fell in love. After Shek was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944, Alice took over his task, concealing his trunk of documents within the workings of the Terezin fortress. When Shek returned to Prague after the war, Ehrmann retrieved the trunk from its hiding place, and the couple presented the collection to the new Czech director of the Jewish Agency.12

  12. In 1947, Ze’ev Shek received permission to emigrate to Palestine, where he studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. That same year he returned to Prague as a member of a delegation to a youth conference and married Alice Ehrmann. The couple emigrated to Israel in July 1948, and Ze’ev entered the diplomatic service. From 1950 to 1953, he was the first secretary of the Israeli embassy in Prague. His diplomatic career included postings in London and Paris. From 1967 until 1971, he served as Israeli ambassador to Austria. From 1977 he functioned as ambassador to Italy until his death in Rome on October 2, 1978. Alisa Shek was instrumental in founding and sustaining Israel’s Beit Theresienstadt, a memorial to the survivors of the Terezin ghetto. She died in 2007.

  Through her diary, the teenage Alice performed another important service. Her descriptions of the ghetto’s last months provide us with a detailed eyewitness account of those turbulent days after the arrival of the Russian forces that liberated Prague and, with it, Theresienstadt. Particularly poignant are her impressions of the first days of peace, in which the celebratory mood of the local population contrasted starkly with the ongoing suffering of the liberated ghetto inhabitants. As she and her sister Ruth, a nurse, stayed behind to aid in the general evacuation, they could not fail to notice the mounting mortality rates among ghetto survivors. Amid the chaos, young Alice Ehrmann portrayed the experiences of many concentration camp and ghetto inmates for whom the first days of liberation appeared an incongruous juxtaposition of death and salvation.

  Document 10-4. Diary of Alice Ehrmann (Alisah Shek), entries for May 10, 11, and 18, 1945, in Alisah Shek, “Tagebuch,” in Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente, ed. Miroslav Kárný, Raimund Kemper, and Margita Kárná (Prague: Verlag Academica, 1994), 196–99 (translated from the German).

  May 10, 1945

  Russians in the ghetto. They came to pick up the Russian [prisoners of war]. They broke through to the “Hamburg” [barracks], were halfway pushed out again. The Russians have disarmed the gendarmes; the chaos grows exponentially. The racially “Aryan” prisoners are registering; people are running away, they are going with the Russians. The Soviet flag flies over headquarters. Everywhere else, Czechoslovakian and Red Cross flags. [. . .] In the afternoon two cars with German wounded. Boys with red armbands and weapons in front of headquarters. Rioting. In the back sit two girls; a soldier holds a thin blonde, and around them the crowd howls. They threaten them with their fists. I know that they have done all this, but really, it wasn’t just them. What does it help to beat them? Everything is always the same; people are always the same; no, they are always malicious. I am so unhappy. [. . .]

  Evenings: the Russians drive all about, young girls ride on their tanks. The modern woman. People fill the city. Shaven heads and women’s hairstyles, painted backs and summer clothes; stripes and bright clothing.13 [. . .] What are we to them? For the Russians a hospital city. And here there is no nurse besides Ruth and another girl. South barracks: we drove over two cars with beds and mattresses for twelve “Aryan” nurses.

  13. Here the author means to indicate the mix of concentration camp prisoners and members of the local population.

  Night. Down below the barracks with half-lit windows, barbed wire, and everywhere the death’s head: typhus, rags, blankets full of lice, and shoes lie everywhere. And the smell, the eternal stench of cattle cars and assembly areas [Schleusen]. Here and there a bent figure hobbles from one barracks to another. The shaved head next to the signboard. . . . The first barracks, No. 11, almost everyone dead. Only a few moan, whimper, and wail. And over this field of death, peace breaks out. In the distances you can see rockets. The people are celebrating peace—peace, happiness. They build from the unhappiness they have caused a joy and are happy, and now everyone is supposed to go home.

  May 11, 1945

  Relative order, the ghetto is functioning, more or less. Many are leaving. [. . .] South barracks: the promised transfer [of the sick] to a field hospital does not materialize. The doctor does not dare to go inside; he14 promised to transfer them. All who can walk have been disinfected and moved to the Bodenbacher barracks. Two hundred and fifty who cannot move must face a gruesome death in the barracks, surrounded by their own excrement and the corpses. It is terrible, terrible. My sister is there; she cannot pull herself away. I understand her. The decision to leave the barracks behind, knowing that 250 living, young people are gasping their last—and how, who could do that? And even when one knows that, he cannot help. I am unendingly tired of everything. I think it must be wonderful not to have to do anything anymore. Ever.

  14. That is, the physician; emphasis is in the original.

  May 18, 1945

  In the evening Mařka Pick, Honza Meissner [visited]. Father in Slovakia,15 I believe. Everything is spinning round me. All the compressed thoughts of horror concerning him fly before my eyes. It is like a storm that breaks out, terrible and yet harmless, all dark spirits and ghosts of night—I extinguish them with one gesture. No, the light is too bright, and I am blind [from it]. And around me the darkness is so thick. A letter this evening. I have my mother again.

  15. Emphasis is in the original.

  The Search for Family Members

  One of the most universal experiences of the Holocaust was the separation from loved ones. The division of family members tormented both children and their parents. Each lived in fear for the others’ safety, yet remained in ignorance of their circumstances and felt powerless to aid them in extremity. Hidden children in particular learned to bear this burden in silence, for any mention of an absent mother or father might endanger their own safety or jeopardize the lives of their rescuers or loved ones. Thousands of young people spent most of the war years divided from their families. For many youngsters, the long separation in wartime would b
ecome a permanent reality.

  As the war in Europe ended in May 1945, surviving Jews and other victims of Axis policy began the arduous process of locating family members scattered during the years of persecution. Parents searched for their children in foster families, orphanages, and religious institutions. Such quests were often grueling and protracted, for the war and Nazi policies of deportation and population transfer had produced massive relocation, a ceaseless stream of refugees from devastated regions, and millions of displaced persons. Tracing services, most notably the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross,16 together with many other relief organizations and Jewish agencies, aided in locating missing persons, but these searches were often fraught with difficulty. Many hidden children had passed through several safe houses during the war years and thus no longer remained with the original foster families in which their parents had left them. Others had relocated with their rescuers from war-torn areas and now lived far from their native communities. Still others languished, ill and exhausted, among other concentration camp survivors in relief camps or hospitals or lived in DP camps hundreds of miles from home. Psychologist and child survivor Peter Suedfeld, quartered in a Red Cross children’s home in Budapest after World War II, remembers that he thought he might be lost forever. “I was passing as a Christian, under a false name unknown to my family, and my current orphanage was only the latest in a series of bombed-out shelters, far from the original address where they had left me.”17 Parents, siblings, grandparents, and other family members often spent months looking for their young ones. In many instances, such searches ended in tragedy, as parents learned that their youngsters had perished. Children too came face to face with the devastating knowledge that none of their family had survived. Thousands spent their childhoods in orphanages or were placed with foster families by state or municipal authorities when no family members stepped forward to reclaim them.