16. International Tracing Service, An Introduction to the International Tracing Service (Bad Arolsen: International Tracing Service, 2009).
17. Peter Suedfeld, “Life after the Ashes: The Postwar Pain, and Resilience, of Young Holocaust Survivors,” Occasional Paper of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), 5.
Document 10-5. Hedvig Dydyna holds a name card intended to help surviving family members locate her at the Kloster Indersdorf DP camp, Germany, c. May 1945, USHMMPA WS# 06677, courtesy of Lilo Plaschkes.
Maria Straucher was one of the more fortunate ones. Born on May 4, 1938, in Bochnia, a town near Kraków in southern Poland, Maria remembered little about her parents, who perished in the Holocaust, or about life before her concealment with peasants in the Polish countryside. Like many hidden children, Maria stayed with several rescuers before settling with her newly married guardian, Tadeusz Polowiec, in the last stages of the war. There the youngster, made to work long hours, was often beaten by Polowiec, a man with a violent temper who did not spare his own infant child. Maria was precisely seven years old when the war ended in May 1945. After several months of searching, Maria’s aunt, now her closest living relative, succeeded in locating and reclaiming the youngster, showing her perhaps the first tenderness the child had experienced for some years.
Document 10-6. Interview with Maria Straucher by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, Kraków, December 2, 1947, USHMMA, RG-15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/3292/1-2 (translated from the Polish).
Maria Straucher, born in Bochnia, May 4, 1938, reports:
I don’t remember anything about things before the war. I remember that I lived with an old woman in the area of Bochnia. There I was very hungry; it was already war. Day after day I was locked in the house. I was never permitted to go outside. Then Tadeusz Polowiec, who had taken charge of me, took me away from there and housed me with another old woman. There were many Germans there at the farmyard who came there with wagons. I always situated myself in the area of the wagons and got something to eat from the Germans, who did not know that I was Jewish. I didn’t know it either. There I looked after a cow or goats. I was often struck when I was not obedient. After a year Polowiec took me to peasants in the countryside. There I went to school. After school I tended the cows. There were no children in the house. I don’t remember anymore how long I stayed there—maybe the whole summer? Then the man took me back and put me with a younger woman who had had a little baby. There I washed diapers, cleaned, and brought water from the cellar; I had a lot of work to do. This woman had married my guardian, Polowiec. I was often beaten there. My guardian in his rage even beat his little eight-month-old child. Because of this, his mother had to call the physician in order to bandage up the child, who had a wound on its buttocks. Once he kicked me with so much force that I fell down and dislocated a bone in my throat. I became unconscious. They poured cold water on me. When I came to, Polowiec had me wipe up and mop up the water that they had poured on me. I liked the little child very much. They always swore at me, calling me “Jewess,” which I didn’t understand, because nobody explained it to me. Polowiec never called me by name, always only “little girl.” He never petted or hugged me. The first time in my life someone kissed me was an aunt, whom I call mother. She had located me and come to me. She kissed me, and burst into tears. I didn’t know and couldn’t understand why she was crying. She told me that she was my aunt. I went back to work on this day as usual and did not interrupt my chores. Only in the evening did I sleep by my aunt; she stayed the night with us. My aunt explained to me that she was a sister of my mother and how she had finally found me in Bochnia after searching a long time; and she promised me to take me with her to Kraków. I wasn’t afraid and immediately agreed to go with her. My guardian asked me if I would file a complaint against him. Later I was taken before a judge and asked if I wanted to go with my aunt. All the neighbors knew how hard and how much I had worked and wondered how I had held out, because I had been beaten so often there.
I went with my aunt to Kraków, where she placed me in the children’s home. I have been there a month, that is, since October. My aunt I call “Mama,” and I am doing so well, oh so well!
Maria S.
Kraków, December 2, 1947
Protocol by Janina Masłowska
The effort to reunite as a family unit was not confined to the task of locating missing members. For many young people, the search for parents and other loved ones was often a search for their own identity. Hidden children in particular had spent years concealing their true origins, their religion, and even their own names. Children whose parents had placed them with rescuers in their infancy or young childhood had little or no memory of their families or their lives before the war. Many remained unaware that they were Jewish. For these youngsters, reunion with family members initiated a long and often painful process of reconciling their past and present selves.18
18. See Robert Krell, Child Holocaust Survivors: Memories and Reflections (Victoria: Trafford Publishing, 2007).
On the other hand, a parent’s recovery of a missing child did not necessarily guarantee the successful reconstruction of the family circle. Throughout Europe, thousands of rescuers refused to return their charges to parents, family members, or Jewish or public organizations. Sometimes their motives were pecuniary: former foster families demanded that parents compensate them for their care of the child and for incurring tremendous risks in their safekeeping. Other individuals had exploited the labor of their wards in households and on family farms and were reluctant to lose the child’s services. More commonly, however, rescuers had grown genuinely attached to their young charges and did not wish to part with them. Sometimes it was the child who resisted such a reunion. Many youngsters had endured such traumatic upheaval in their young lives that they proved profoundly averse to yet another change. Many, through experience, had grown distrustful of adults and were reluctant to put their faith in family members who had “reappeared” to claim them after the war, particularly if these were distant relatives with whom the child had had little contact before hostilities began. Children often felt betrayed by parents who had “abandoned” them during their long years in hiding. Others had learned to renounce their Jewish heritage and were reluctant to discard their new Christian identity, which had offered them such security, in order to return to the Jewish roots that had been the source of their persecution. Very young children could remember no other home than that of their rescuers and fiercely resisted leaving the only family they had known for the arms of strangers—in this case, their parents.
Document 10-7. Renée Pallarés (right) and her family helped save Diane Popowski, an infant who had been with her mother at the Agde internment camp in France. In 1949, nine-year-old Diane reluctantly returned to her widowed father. She reunited with the Pallarés family some years later. USHMMPA WS# 13346, courtesy of Diane Popowski Fenster.
Gizela Szulberg was five years old when her parents left her with relatives of their gardener in the village of Włoska Wola. Michał and Necha Szulberg were fleeing a roundup of Jews in the area of Dubeczno, near Lublin, Poland, and had packed a small suitcase for their only child, believing they would be reunited with her soon. The Szulbergs’ gardener had received handsome compensation for hiding the youngster and advised his relations to kill the girl so that they might pocket the money. The Wajdziks, a fiercely antisemitic peasant family, had nevertheless refused to harm Gizela and reluctantly hid the child. Gizela settled with them for the remainder of the war. For much of her stay, the family concealed the youngster in a wardrobe, away from the prying eyes of farmhands and neighbors. In time, Gizela learned that her parents had been murdered on their way to reclaim her. Her foster family, who had presumably expected a lucrative payment from the Szulbergs for the safe return of their daughter, decided to continue concealing the child, but only if t
he youngster signed over her property to her rescuers. Gizela’s father had been a prosperous engineer and part owner of a glass factory in Warsaw before the invasion of Poland, and it is possible that the Wajdziks hoped to acquire these assets as payment for their troubles at the end of the war. Following the cessation of hostilities, Gizela, like many hidden children, continued to live with her foster family. Although she had been sorely mistreated and exploited by her rescuers, the eleven-year-old felt enduring gratitude to the Wajdziks and had herself baptized in 1946 in order to “give them my soul as a gift.” Although they had created a hostile environment for the child, the family represented the only stability that Gizela had known for seven years. Strongly identifying with the Wajdziks and their beliefs, she was violently opposed to returning to Warsaw with a surviving family member when her distant cousin came to claim her.
Document 10-8. Interview with Gizela Szulberg by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, Bytom, September 3, 1947, USHMMA RG 15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, 301/2731/2-3 (translated from the Polish).
Deposition: Szulberg, Gizela, born October 23, 1934, in Warsaw
Father: Michał Mother: Necha, née Bernstein
Resident: Bytom, ul. Prusa 23, Jewish orphanage.
[. . .] At this time I found out what had happened to my parents. They had been in hiding, but later they had nothing to live on because this woman [with whom they had stored their possessions] did not want to give them their things back. They were on their way to me, to pick me up, when the Germans caught them, killed them, and buried their bodies into a ditch. My host wanted to keep me, but I should sign all of my property over to him. They talked for days on end of nothing else but this property, only of this property. I wanted to ingratiate myself with them and promised to give them everything. Despite this, they once threw me out of the house. I set myself out by the barn because I didn’t have anywhere else to go. Later they found me there and allowed me to return to the house. I was already so resigned that I didn’t really care what happened to me. In the spring I watched after the cows and was already much happier, because I did not have to cower locked up in the wardrobe. I am even still a little humped over from sitting like that so much. After this I came down with the measles, and my hostess laid me on top of the stove, where it was very dusty, and at the end of my illness I lay up in the attic. How much I have had to suffer from them! They hated me because I was a Jew. I was treated like Cinderella, truly. At dawn I rose and tended the cattle, together with the sheep there were eighteen [animals]. My legs were covered in sores—it was so frightening.
Then the Soviets came and the people said to me, “Now the Germans won’t kill you anymore; now you are free.” But I didn’t believe in my good fortune. In spring 1946, I had myself baptized, because I wanted to show [my rescuers] that I appreciated it that they had taken me in. I simply wanted to give them my soul. After this I went to the grave of my parents, that is to the ditch [where they were buried], and lay [a bouquet of] violets there and cried a good deal. Today I don’t cry anymore, so hardened is my heart from all the fear through which I have lived. After this the people from the AK [Armia Krajowa, or Polish Home Army] wanted to kill me. They said to my host, “If you don’t hide us, we will kill this Chaja19 of yours.” My hosts still often called me “Bejlis!”20 After all this, one of my cousins found me and wanted to take me away from them. But they said, “Either a half a million or the child.” He didn’t have that much money because he was in the military, and he went away. I didn’t even want to say good-bye to him, I was so dumb. I wanted to stay with them and be a Pole, so used had I grown to this way of life. But my cousin had told the Jews21 about me and they took me away from the Wajdziks. While on the way I ran away from them, ran seven kilometers [almost 4.5 miles] on foot, and went back to my host family. The police came to get me, but they had to drag me by my hands and feet because I always broke free. Then the Jews put me in an orphanage and now I am really doing well.
19. “Chaja” or “Chaya,” the Hebrew form of “Eva,” is used here to designate a female Jew.
20. Menahem Mendel Bejilis (also transliterated as Beilis or Beiliss) was a Ukrainian Jew tried for ritual murder in a notorious trial in Kiev in 1913. The proceedings sparked international criticism of antisemitic sentiment and practice in Imperial Russia. Szulberg suggests that her foster family repeatedly confronted her with Bejilis’s “crimes,” although Bejilis was ultimately acquitted of murder charges.
21. That is, to officials of the Jewish Committee.
Protocol taken by Ida Gliksztejn [signature]
Bytom, September 3, 1947
Witness: Gizela Szulberg
Where Is Home?
At the end of World War II in Europe, the Allied powers discovered that some 7 to 9 million persons remained displaced by the conflict. This number included 2 to 3 million former camp inmates—Jews and non-Jews—who had survived concentration and forced labor camps, killing centers, and death marches from the east into the German interior in the last months of the war.22 Many thousands of former prisoners, exhausted and ill from years of malnourishment and mistreatment, perished in the weeks directly following their liberation. Those who survived joined the hundreds of thousands seeking repatriation through Allied efforts or migration to European ports in the hopes of settling abroad. By the end of 1945, more than 6 million individuals had returned to their countries of origin or succeeded in immigrating to non-European countries, such as the United States, Canada, and Australia or in a trickle to British-controlled Palestine. Remaining behind, mainly on German and Austrian soil, were some 2 million refugees and displaced persons, among them 250,000 Jews.
22. Lavksy, “The Role of Children,” 103.
Three kinds of Jewish DPs lived in the Allied zones of occupation by early 1946. The first included those who had remained in western Europe, hoping for a British settlement to the “Palestine Question” so that they might legally emigrate to today’s Israel. The second category included those who had refused to return to their homelands directly after the war, either because they chose not to reside in an eastern Europe haunted by memories of the Holocaust or because they feared a resurgence of antisemitism in these regions. Finally, a third set of Jewish refugees had remained in, or returned to, their homelands in the early postwar period but now migrated west to the safety of the Allied zones in Germany and Austria. In this so-called Beriha (flight, migration, or exodus), tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors fled eastern Europe in order to evade economic ruin or renewed anti-Jewish persecution from local populations. Approximately three hundred thousand Jewish survivors resided in German and Austrian territory between late 1945 and 1950.23
23. Lavksy, “The Role of Children,” 104.
To deal with the massive postwar refugee crisis, a series of DP camps had been established in Allied zones throughout Germany and Austria and in occupied areas of Italy.24 Originally these camps were run by Allied authorities within their zones of occupation. Initial conditions at such facilities were dismal. Rations were meager, and residents lived under imposed curfews in fenced enclosures, often within the same confines as Nazi perpetrators and collaborators. As relations between Jewish DPs and Allied officials became strained, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), established in 1943 to aid victims of war and to facilitate the repatriation of refugees, undertook the management of the DP camps, aided by voluntary relief agencies and Jewish organizations. Jewish DPs, known in Hebrew as the Sh’erit ha Pletah (Surviving Remnant), would prove long-term charges of the UNRRA camps, whose last displaced persons facility, Föhrenwald, near Munich, closed in 1957.25
24. Concerning the topic of displaced persons camps following World War II, see Angelika Königseder and Juliane Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post–World War II Germany, trans. John Broadwin (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Micha
el Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.)
25. Joachim Schröder, “Politische und kulturelle Geschichte der jüdischen Displaced Persons anhand des von den USA verwalteten Lagers Föhrenwald in der amerikanischen Besatzungszone” (master’s thesis, Ludwig-Maximilians Universitat, 1990).
By the summer of 1945, most Jewish DP camps had begun to exercise internal autonomy within their complexes, fostering the creation of a Jewish society within the camp structure. Once Jewish displaced persons had won the right to separate from the general DP population, each camp elected a central committee, which managed the facility’s internal administration and promoted cultural and religious activities. Camp committees also established an elaborate school system, at least within the American and British zones, which provided youngsters and adolescents with nursery schools, elementary education, religious schools and yeshivas, high schools, teacher-training academies, and vocational-training facilities organized by the ORT. As the Jewish Agency for Palestine26 sponsored many school systems, education in the DP camps had a decidedly Zionist orientation; course work and curricula inculcated in young students the ambition to make Aliyah and provided extensive language training and instruction in those disciplines useful for immigration to Palestine. Despite the tremendous obstacles they faced, teachers and administrators worked to aid in the emotional, physical, and intellectual rehabilitation of child survivors, many of whom had had little or no formal instruction during the war years.
Children during the Holocaust Page 53