26. The Jewish Agency for Palestine was established by the World Zionist Organization in 1922. Its offices in Jerusalem, London, and Geneva facilitated emigration to Palestine and provided representation to those Jews already in the British Mandate of Palestine until the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.
Document 10-9. An exercise class for preschoolers in the Bergen-Belsen DP Camp, Germany, 1947, USHMMPA WS# 11811, courtesy of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Regina Laks (later Regina Gelb) was a bright young student at the Hebrew Public School sponsored by UNRRA at the Schlachtensee Displaced Persons Camp in Berlin. Regina, often called Renia, was born in Wierzbnik, Poland, on December 16, 1929, the youngest daughter of Isaac and Pola Laks. The Laks were a secular Jewish family but maintained a kosher household at the behest of Pola Laks, an activist in local Zionist organizations. Like her elder sisters, Hania and Rozalia Krysia (later Chris), Regina attended Polish public school, as well as Hebrew school in the afternoon. The girls were excellent pupils, and when, following the German occupation, Jewish students were prohibited from attending school, Pola Laks organized an ad hoc classroom in her own home. Eager to expand their knowledge and education, Regina and her friends organized an informal lending library, pooling the reading resources of many local Jewish families.27
27. Information concerning the Laks sisters stems from “Interview with Regina Gelb,” February 20, 2001, and “Interview with Rosalie (Chris) Lerman,” January 13, 1999, both of the Holocaust Museum Oral History Project, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
On October 27, 1942, German authorities rounded up Jews in the Wierzbnik-Starachowice region. Pola Laks, who had assisted an elderly woman as they approached the assembly point, was deported directly to the Treblinka extermination camp. Regina, her father, and her sisters survived for the next two years in a series of labor camps, sustained by a gentile Polish family whom the Lakses had entrusted with their possessions and who, at great risk, smuggled money to the family to purchase food on the camps’ black markets. In the early autumn of 1944, the girls and their father were deported to Auschwitz, where Isaac Laks perished in October. Regina and her sisters did not face a selection on the ramp at Birkenau but were processed and confined to the quarantine camp. In October or November 1944, an acquaintance among the prisoner staff arranged for the girls to work with a special labor detail in the Effektenkammer, a separate warehouse that held the confiscated effects of non-Jewish prisoners. In this indoor environment, the Laks sisters survived the cold autumn and winter months before the liquidation of the Auschwitz camp in January 1945. Preparing for a forced march to the Gleiwitz concentration camp, Hania, Rozalia, and Regina helped themselves to the piles of warm clothing and shoes in the warehouse, an act of foresight that may have saved their lives. Escaping from a death march near Retzow, an auxiliary camp of the Ravensbrück concentration camp near Mecklenburg, Germany, Regina and her sisters spent the last days of the war at an abandoned German estate.
At war’s end the Laks sisters took a train to Poland, where they were reunited with members of their father’s family in Łódź. Yet, as they attempted to return to their native village of Wierzbnik, they narrowly evaded an attack by angry Poles who wished to keep them from regaining their family’s property. In the spring of 1946, Regina traveled with her sister Rozalia—who had recently wed Jewish resistance fighter Shmuel Milek (Miles) Lerman28—to Berlin in order to escape rising antisemitic violence in Poland. There they settled in the Schlachtensee DP Camp, where Regina proved an excellent student at the Hebrew public high school sponsored by UNRRA. In the winter of 1947, the teenager joined the Lermans in immigrating to the United States.
28. Miles Lerman (1920–2008) was a founding member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Born in Tomasźow Lubelski, Poland, Lerman grew up with Zionist convictions and hoped to emigrate to Palestine. With the German invasion of Poland, he was arrested and sent to the Viniki forced labor camp. Lerman escaped and spent the rest of the war years as a Jewish partisan. Following his emigration to the United States, Lerman became a successful businessman, active in the real estate, gasoline, and heating trades. In 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter named him to the advisory board of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. Lerman served as chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s governing board from the time of its opening in 1993 until his retirement from the museum in 2000.
Document 10-10. Report card of Regina Laks from the Herzel Hebrew Public School, Schlachtensee DP Camp, Berlin, January 18, 1947, USHMMPA WS# 96426, courtesy of Regina Laks Gelb.
Hebrew Public School
“Herzel”
UNRRA Camp “Düppel Center”
Berlin Schlachtensee
Certificate
Pupil: Regina LaksBorn: December 16, 1929
City: StarachowiceCountry: [Poland]
Attended the Fifth class from September 18, 1946 to January 18, 1947
And graded as follows
Behavior:ExcellentMathematics:Excellent
Bible:ExcellentAlgebra:Excellent
Hebrew Language:ExcellentGeometry:Excellent
Hebrew LiteratureExcellentPhysics:Excellent
English Language:ExcellentBotanics:Excellent
Hebrew History:ExcellentDrawing:Excellent
Palestine Geography:ExcellentMusic:Excellent
Geography:ExcellentPhysical Training:Excellent
Decision of the pedagogical body
Day: January 18thYear: 1947
Class teacher[signature]School director
Both Jewish and non-Jewish survivors faced the daunting challenge of rebuilding their lives in the aftermath of the Holocaust. After liberation, Jewish displaced persons often feared returning to their homes in view of the antisemitism that persisted in many regions of Europe. Particularly in postwar Poland, many Jewish refugees encountered violence as they attempted to return to their old residences and reclaim their former possessions.29 For others, the inability to locate or discover the fate of family members or loved ones made the journey home a distressing prospect. Children who had lost or become separated from their parents in the course of the war faced a number of difficult dilemmas. Should they attempt to make the arduous journey back to their place of origin, or should they remain in an orphanage or DP camp that could provide them with food and shelter? How was such a journey possible without resources or provisions? Would missing parents, siblings, or relatives be waiting for them on their return? Who would care for them if their relatives were dead? Could one build a new life and a new future beside one’s old roots, in a place where one had perhaps been forgotten or forsaken by one’s neighbors?
29. In early July 1946, a pogrom initiated by Polish rioters in Kielce claimed the lives of forty-two Jewish Poles and a Polish gentile who attempted to help wounded victims to safety. See Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, “Patterns of Return: Survivors’ Postwar Journeys to Poland,” Occasional Paper of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2007).
In the late spring of 1945, fifteen-year-old Michal Kraus returned to his native Czechoslovakia. Michal (later Michael) had been raised in the Bohemian town of Nachod, where his father, Karl Kraus, was a physician. In December 1942, the Krauses, like many Czech Jews, were deported to Theresienstadt. The following year the small family arrived on a transport to Auschwitz II–Birkenau. There the Krauses joined other deportees of the Terezin ghetto in the so-called Theresienstadt family camp in Birkenau.30 When this camp was liquidated in July 1944, an emaciated Karl Kraus perished in the gas chambers, while camp physician Dr. Josef Mengele selected young Michal and eighty-eight other young boys from the family camp to serve as Läufer (runners), couriers who carried information and goods among guards and officials within the Birkenau camp. In the early months of 1945, the fourteen-year-old endured a
series of forced marches from Auschwitz to Gleiwitz and then to several camps and subcamps of the Mauthausen concentration camp system. He was severely ill with typhus when liberated by American forces at Gunskirchen Lager on May 5, 1945.
30. For a broader discussion of the Krauses and the Theresienstadt family camp, see chapter 5.
After recovering in an American military hospital, Michal and several other young Czech friends decided to make their way back to Prague. The journey to Czechoslovakia was arduous; without sufficient funds, the boys made their way along the Danube by boat and train, then walked nearly 100 kilometers (62 miles) to reach Bratislava (in today’s Slovakia) when local rail lines fell into disrepair. The group reached Prague on June 28, 1945. There Michal Kraus remained briefly with a family friend, Vera Loewenbach. Loewenbach had been with Lotte Kraus on a transport from Auschwitz, and it was she who told the young boy of his mother’s death in Stutthof in January 1945.
Michal lodged with a number of family friends and acquaintances in his hometown of Nachod, where he returned to school. At this time he began a retrospective “diary” of his Holocaust experiences, which he finished in 1947 and dedicated to his parents. In the summer of 1948, Michal’s guardian arranged for him to join an American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee orphans’ transport to Canada. In 1951, the youth emigrated to the United States, where he enrolled in Columbia University’s School of Architecture. After positions with architectural firms in London and Geneva, he settled with his new wife, Ilana Eppenstein, in the Boston area. Of Michael Kraus’s extended family, only one aunt and one cousin survived the Holocaust.
Document 10-11. Memoir/Diary of Michal (Michael) Kraus, handwritten with illustrations, 1945–1947, 2, 23–28, USHMMA, Acc. 2006.51, Michael Kraus Collection (translated from the Czech).
Thousands of people returned to their homes. You see the repatriated everywhere. Everyone hurries home. What kind of upheaval were you able to create, Hitler! And those are just the few who are left: those who endured, and they will not forget! [. . .]
We were all at the end of our strength. It was evening as we walked along the Bratislava streets. People turned around to stare at us. We looked terrible. They led us to a new building that was supposed to have been a department store; but now many refugees are sleeping there on the floor. On the third story, we settled down on the floor of a small room. Last night we were able to get a piece of bread and some coffee; and a man on the street gave us about 20 KC [Czechoslovak crowns].
We went to sleep early and fell asleep immediately after the exhausting trip. We were still not completely recuperated, and walking the whole distance was terribly taxing. We spent several days in Bratislava. At the Jewish Community office, we received 400 KC after a considerable wait, which we used to purchase food in a soup kitchen. The food was not anything special, but better than that usually given to refugees. We even went to the movies there for the first time: Ivan the Terrible.
Daily we waited in the repatriation offices for our turn to come. They issued us identity cards. We went to the public baths to bathe, and the next day set off for Prague. A lady gave us a loaf of bread. We hopped on a streetcar, went along to the railroad station, and without tickets got on the express train.
Our group dispersed. Herz and Goldberger got out in Brno. Here the train emptied out a bit, so that we were able to sit down instead of standing in the corridor. A man joined us in our compartment; he gave us a sweet pastry, which for us was an incredible delight. In Pardubice Pavel Werner got out; and at two in the morning only three of us stood at the Wilson Railway Station31: Fink, Skoba and I.
31. From 1945 until 1953, this was the name of the central railway station in Prague.
First we looked for the repatriation office. It was closed, it opened at eight a.m. So we went to the Masaryk Railway Station, and I slept under a desk.
In the morning Harry left us and we went to the repatriation office, across from the Representative House in the Hybernska. There we met Mr. Berger, an acquaintance from Terezin. They sent us to some sort of shelter on Peter Square. [. . .] At Peter Square I asked about my relatives, but nobody knew anything. I still hoped that Mother was alive, but I began to have my doubts. It was a terrible uncertainty.
They sent us to the Milicova32 house where they received us cordially and told us that we had to get examined for lice and only then could we go to the convalescent center. [. . .] They found that I had some scabs, so that I had to go to the disinfection station, and only late at night they came to get us again. In the morning I went to the Milicova again and then immediately went to the convalescent center by car with Director Pitter.
32. This refers to a street in central Prague.
The car in which we were traveling stopped in Olesovice. [. . .] We got out there and walked through the beautiful countryside to Kamenice. It was June 19. Yesterday was my birthday. There in Prague, in the disinfection station, it was my fifteenth birthday. But now I feel good. I go with Skoba and a lady teacher to a pretty castle in a large garden. There for the first time I ate again at a table with knife and fork, slept in a bed, went on outings and enjoyed my freedom.
I began to correspond. With the Horaceks, the Bazelovs. Then Vera [Loewenbach] told me the sad news of my mother’s fate. One day we drove to Pardubice and then to Skalice. Vera said that she will keep me there for the time being.
Document 10-12. “Where are our parents, you murderers?” a young survivor of Buchenwald writes on the side of the train car that will take him and other “Buchenwald Boys” from Germany to an orphanage in France, June 1945, USHMMPA WS# 44251, courtesy of Willy Fogel.
While the teenage Michal Kraus was able to travel with his comrades back to his Czech homeland in the hopes of finding his mother, many young Holocaust survivors had no home to which they could return. Many had no surviving family. Others were too young to travel on their own or to make an informed choice about where to go. What to do with youngsters such as these?
This dilemma confronted U.S. authorities shortly after the liberation of Buchenwald in April 1945. American soldiers of the U.S. Ninth Armored Infantry Battalion, arriving at the concentration camp complex on April 11, were astonished to discover among the twenty thousand starving and emaciated prisoners over one thousand children, most of them Jewish youngsters from Poland, Romania, and Hungary. The bewildered U.S. commander immediately cabled officials of the Children’s Aid Society (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, or OSE), the French Jewish humanitarian organization with offices in Geneva: “Have found a thousand Jewish children in Buchenwald,” the commander wrote. “Take immediate measures to evacuate them.”33
33. Judith Hemmendinger and Robert Krell, The Children of Buchenwald: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Post-War Lives (Jerusalem: Gefen Press, 2000), 21.
Document 10-13. Page of convoy list of Buchenwald’s orphaned children taken from Germany to Écouis, France, June 8, 1945, in Judith Hemmendinger and Robert Krell, The Children of Buchenwald: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Post-War Lives (Jerusalem: Gefen Press, 2000), 180.
Two American army chaplains, Rabbis Herschel Schacter and Robert Marcus, coordinated the evacuation of the children with OSE representatives. Most of the children wanted to go to Palestine, but the British Mandate there had placed strict limitations on Jewish immigration. In the end, it was arranged that English organizations would take in 250 boys, while OSE homes and orphanages in France and Switzerland would accommodate the remaining children. On June 2, 1945, 426 boys boarded a train bound for the French town of Écouis (Eure) in Normandy. Incongruously, many of the youngsters wore Hitler Youth uniforms, the only age-appropriate clothing that American officials could find; thus, the appearance of the boys in their compartment windows initiated a full-blown riot among local observers when the train crossed the French frontier at Metz. When the boys reached Écouis, their instructors realized that their new pupils face
d a formidable array of obstacles. Most of the children, both young and old, had experienced Auschwitz and the horrors of the death marches, as well as the last terrible months of the war in Buchenwald. Starved and brutalized, the boys now grappled with the physical and emotional trauma of their recent past, as well as the very present grief for their murdered loved ones. Besides the psychological devastation, there were intellectual hurdles as well. Many of these young charges had not undertaken formal schooling since the beginning of the war; all had missed several years of instruction and lagged behind their age cohort in terms of academic development. Teachers and administrators understood that the boys’ rehabilitation would pose difficult challenges, but they were quite unprepared for what they found as the boys moved into Écouis. The youngsters were sullen and intractable. Years spent in the concentration camp universe had left them distinctly distrustful of adults and utterly free of many moral scruples. Polite and correct comportment was conducive to the classroom setting, but such behavior might mean certain death in a place like Auschwitz. Committed instructors, among them twenty-two-year-old social worker Judith Feist, saw that they had their work cut out for them. Feist was a German Jewish refugee working in the Geneva OSE offices when she heard of the now-famous Buchenwald Boys and decided to visit some of the youngsters at the OSE home of Ambloy.34 Deeply moved by what she found, Feist agreed to take over directorship of the facility and remained until 1947, when the last boy was settled elsewhere. In 1984, Feist, by then Judith Hemmendinger,35 recalled the first challenging months with “her children of Buchenwald.”
34. In August 1945, the Écouis home was closed down and the children redistributed among more suitable facilities, such as Ambloy, Le Vesinet, and Taverny; 173 of the youngsters with relatives in Palestine were permitted to immigrate to the mandate by British officials and departed Marseilles for Palestine aboard the RMS Mataroa in July 1945.
Children during the Holocaust Page 54