Children during the Holocaust

by Heberer, Patricia;

  35. Judith Feist Hemmendinger was born in 1923 in Bad Homburg, Germany. In the late 1920s, her family moved to France; in 1943, her father, Phillip Feist, was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. During World War II, Feist worked extensively for Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants. In 1948 she married Claude Hemmendinger and emigrated to Israel.

  Document 10-14. Judith Feist Hemmendinger remembers the “Buchenwald Boys,” 1984, in Judith Hemmendinger and Robert Krell, The Children of Buchenwald: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Post-War Lives (Jerusalem: Gefen Press, 2000, 27–31).

  When the special French train arrived at Buchenwald on June 2, 1945, children stormed it for fear that it would leave without them. Dr. Revel, who accompanied the children, described that “dressed in their striped pyjamas or in uniforms of the Hitler Youth (the only clothes available), they looked like young savages.” Many had suffered a total loss of identity. They did not remember their names, having been addressed only by their numbers or nicknames.

  Each time the train stopped, the boys jumped out to pillage the countryside, but once in France, the vandalism stopped. A new problem presented itself when the French spotted the German uniforms and attacked the train. The child survivors, now perceived as the enemy, were in such great danger that the train had to be diverted to a sidetrack overnight at the Metz railroad station. [. . .]

  Écouis was an abandoned sanatorium placed at the disposal of the OSE by the French government. The OSE had prepared 500 beds for little children, unaware that nearly 400 were aged twelve to twenty-one and only thirty were between eight and twelve years old. They looked like bandits, suspicious and mute. Their heads were shorn; all dressed the same, with faces still swollen from hunger and not a smile to be seen. Their eyes bespoke sadness and suspicion. They were apathetic towards the outside world. They likened the supervisors to guards and were terror stricken at the sight of doctors who reminded them of Mengele, the man who, upon their arrival in Auschwitz, had sent the weak ones to gas chambers, the able-bodied to slave labour.

  It was clear that Écouis would not function in the manner of more traditional institutions. The youngsters felt entitled to everything that they had been deprived of for so many years. The food they had received from American soldiers was of better quality than what postwar France could offer during the first year. So they bartered in the neighboring farms for extra food by trading blankets, sheets, and dishes and pots from the home. One of them stole puppies that he sold in Paris.

  Écouis was a collection of houses surrounding a common yard where all the youngsters were gathered on various occasions. It was at Écouis [that] they vented their anger, their rage. Their rebelliousness led to factions splitting off into groups, by age, by degree of [religious] observance, and by nationality. The older boys in their late teens and even early twenties were sent to Paris, to a big home on Rue Rollin and to Fontenay-aux-Roses, another place on the outskirts of Paris. They were about ten to fifteen percent of the total group.

  Unfortunately, the architecture of Écouis reminded the children of the camps. In addition the Director spoke only French and German and could communicate, barely, only with the [Romanians] who knew a little French. All the other boys would not respond when addressed in German. When pieces of bread were handed out, this too reminded them of the camps and they requested that bread be put on the table so that they could help themselves. At the end of each meal the leftovers disappeared into their rooms since one could never know when the next meal would be served.

  For these young people, all adults were potential enemies who were not to be trusted. One day they were served Camembert cheese for dessert. The strong smell convinced them that it was poison. They threw the cheese at the adults who were supervising dinner. [. . .]

  There were many visitors who came to Écouis to talk with the young survivors of Buchenwald. There were journalists and rabbis and numerous officials who came to meet with these earliest arrivals from Germany. As a matter of fact, visitors did36 want to hear [their] experiences but the boys refused to speak of them. The children listened silently to the beautiful and affectionate words, noted that it was well meant, but did not react for they were totally disillusioned about human nature.

  36. Emphasis is in the original.

  One day Chaplain Marcus of the American army came to Écouis. He had met the boys before in Buchenwald. They sat in a circle around him on the lawn. The Chaplain stood in front of them unable to utter a word, overcome by his emotions, tears streamed down his cheeks. It had been a long time since the children had seen an adult cry. Something in them thawed and they too began to cry. One of them described later, “The Chaplain returned to us our souls. He reawakened the feeling we had buried within us.”

  The Process of Remembering

  When Judith Feist Hemmendinger decided to publish her compelling account of her years with the Buchenwald Boys in 1984, she received a letter from a former student, in 1945 a fifteen-year-old youngster from Romania.

  I read your book and I remember. I see us back in 1945. Écouis, Ambloy, Taverny. The dumbfounded instructors, the disoriented children. [. . .] Did you know, Judith, that we pitied you? We felt sorry for you. I hope you are not angry that I speak so openly? You thought you could educate us, and yet the younger of us knew more than the oldest among you, about what existed in the world, of the futility of life, the brutal triumph of death. We were not impressed with your age, or your authority. We observed you with amusement and mistrust. We felt ourselves stronger than you. How did you succeed to tame us, Judith? [. . .] Reasonably, Judith, we were doomed to live cloistered lives on the other side of the wall. And yet we succeeded in a short time to find ourselves on the same side. To whom can we attribute the miracle? How can one explain it? To our belief? To yours?37

  37. Elie Wiesel, quoted in Hemmendinger and Krell, The Children of Buchenwald, 10–11.

  The author of this letter, soon to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, was Elie Wiesel. By then an internationally recognized writer and chairman of the U.S. Presidential Commission on the Holocaust,38 Wiesel had certainly fulfilled the promise of integrity and intellectual achievement that Hemmendinger had seen in that band of sullen, mistrustful boys from Buchenwald in 1945. Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928, in Sighet, Transylvania, then part of the Kingdom of Romania. His father, Shlomo, an Orthodox Jew of Hungarian descent, was a shopkeeper who owned a grocery store in Sighet and figured as a respected and influential man in his community. His mother, Sarah (née Feig), was the daughter of a prominent Hassidic family from the next village. Wiesel often claimed that within his household circle, his father had represented reason and his mother belief and faith. Shlomo Wiesel had always encouraged young Elie to improve his intellect, urging him to study literature, history, and modern Hebrew. It was Sarah who convinced her young son to read the Torah and other religious works.39

  38. Later, this became the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, the founding and governing body of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

  39. See Ellen S. Fine, The Legacy of Night: The Literary Universe of Elie Wiesel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1982).

  Romania ceded northern and eastern Transylvania to Hungary in 1940, and as Hungarian authorities instituted an array of antisemitic legislation, Transylvanian Jews like the Wiesels became subject to these measures. In April 1944, thirteen thousand Jews from Sighet and the surrounding rural communities were ghettoized. In the following month the Hungarian authorities, in coordination with the German Security Police, began systematically to deport Hungarian Jews. Between May 16 and 22, 1944, the Wiesels and their fellow residents of the Sighet ghetto were dispatched to Auschwitz. In the chaos of selection at Birkenau, Wiesel’s elder sisters were separated from the family and survived the war. Sarah Wiesel and her youngest daughter, Tzipora, perished in the gas chamber immediately upon arrival at the camp. Spared on the ramp, Elie and his father
found themselves attached to a labor detail in Buna (Auschwitz III–Monowitz). Father and son endured appalling conditions there and at three subsequent forced labor camps, and survived the “death march” that brought them to Buchenwald. There, in the last weeks of the war, Shlomo Wiesel died of dysentery, starvation, and exhaustion. On April 11, 1945, Elie Wiesel, just fifteen years old, witnessed the liberation of Buchenwald by American forces.

  Following World War II, Wiesel, as we have seen, traveled with other young former prisoners of Buchenwald to France, where he convalesced and received formal educational instruction at OSE children’s homes at Écouis, Ambloy, and Taverny. At this time, he learned that his sisters Hilda and Beatrice had survived the war and was reunited with them. Wiesel remained in France after leaving the OSE home and began studies at the Sorbonne in literature and philosophy. Although he supported himself by working as a journalist for French and Israeli newspapers, Wiesel initially refused to write or speak about his Holocaust experiences. In 1954, however, he broke his self-imposed silence, penning an 862-page manuscript that he called Un di Velt Hot Geshvign (And the World Remained Silent). The manuscript, published in Yiddish in Argentina, failed to attract literary interest, and Wiesel shelved the project until an interview he hoped to carry out for a Tel Aviv daily with French prime minister Pierre Mendes-France brought the young man into contact with French novelist and Nobel laureate François Mauriac. Mauriac persuaded Wiesel to translate and shorten his text. The result was a spare, 109-page volume published in 1958 in French and retitled La Nuit, or in English, Night (1960). With Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man,40 Night remains one of the seminal memoirs in Holocaust literature.41

  40. The American title of this work by Primo Levi is Survival in Auschwitz.

  41. Scholars have had difficulty classifying Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece specifically as a memoir; some call it an autobiographical novel and others as a semifictional memoir. See Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: Elie Wiesel’s Night (Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001). Wiesel himself disputes that his work has any aspects of a novel, calling it instead his “deposition”; see Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (New York: Schocken Books, 1996).

  The following selection, a pivotal scene in Wiesel’s original Yiddish manuscript as well as in Night,42 differs strikingly from most sources presented in this volume. With few exceptions, this edition has attempted to reconstruct the experiences of children during the Holocaust through sources produced at the time or through oral testimony or trial depositions provided in the early postwar years. The last section of this chapter, however, examines how adult survivors have framed their memories of childhood during the Holocaust. It is not uncommon for a survivor’s in situ accounts or recollections articulated in the immediate aftermath of the Shoah to differ appreciably from testimonies given decades later, if not in detail, then in emphasis and perspective. This is particularly true of the testimonies of child survivors, for whom the passage into adulthood may fundamentally alter perceptions of persons and events. The passing of time obscures certain aspects of the past, while others stand out in sharp relief. Intellectual understanding and emotional maturity sharpen the lens and bring once inexplicable incidents into clearer focus. The middle-aged man connects more cogently the kaleidoscope of events that facilitated his survival. A child may have felt only anger and bitterness toward parents who “abandoned” her to utter strangers during the war years; now grown with children of her own, the adult survivor may at last comprehend the deed that saved her life and the tremendous personal sacrifice made by her parents in such an undertaking. For Wiesel, writing a decade after his arrival at Auschwitz, the intervening years had accentuated the caesura between past and future, which had emerged in that first terrible night in the camp: that break which separated the author from his childhood and his faith.

  42. Compare Document 10-15 with the depiction of this scene in Elie Wiesel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 31–32.

  Document 10-15. Elie Wiesel, Un di Velt hot Geshvign, trans. Vera Szabó (Buenos Aires: Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine, 1956), 66–71 (translated from the Yiddish).

  At that point we did not yet know which was the good direction—left or right; which way led to work, and which to the crematorium. Nevertheless, I felt lucky—I was going with my father.

  A new inmate came up to us:

  “Satisfied?”

  “Yes,” someone replied.

  “Idiots,” he said, “you’re going straight to the chimney.”

  They are taking us to the chimney. . . .

  Could this be true? Or is he just trying to scare us? Is he just a sadist, who takes pleasure in seeing others’ fear? No, it looks like he was telling the truth. Sixty meters [almost 200 feet] from us, flames are leaping up from a pit, gigantic flames. They are burning something there. What can it be? A truck drives up to the pit and drops its load automatically. Suddenly, I catch a glimpse of what it was delivering and pouring into the pit—little children! Infants! Newborn babies! Yes, I saw it with my own eyes. . . . I saw that they threw children into the flames alive!

  (Is it surprising, dear Reader, that I have not been able to sleep ever since? Is it surprising, that I stopped believing in the holiness of fire? And in the shkhine43 that is supposed to be present when babies are born?)

  43. That is, “Divine Presence.”

  The blood froze in my veins. Suddenly, an icy wind blew through my entire body. So it’s true, we are really going to the chimney. To the burning pit. There must be another pit farther down, a bigger one, for adults. For us. For me.

  I pinch my cheek instinctively. Am I still alive? Am I awake? Or is this just a dream of a hypersensitive child? Maybe it’s a nightmare? Or a feverish vision? The fruit of my sick fantasy?

  I pinched my cheek, I felt the pain, but I still couldn’t believe that this was really happening. One thought kept hammering away at my brain: how is it possible that they are burning people, and the world remains silent? How is it possible that they are throwing children into burning pits alive, just like coal; and the civilized world, our educated, progressive world is not voicing its fury and not protesting. “Impossible . . . impossible,” I murmured to myself. The world would not remain silent. People would say something. They would revolt, or at least react somehow. After all, we are not living in the Middle Ages! We are more advanced; this is the twentieth century! Once upon a time there was wanton disregard for human life [“amol iz take dem mentshns lebn hefker geven”], but today? No, none of this is true; it can’t be true. It was a dream. Just a dream. I am dreaming. A nightmare . . . I will wake up soon, with a pounding heart, and I will see again the home where I grew up, the bookshelf. . . .

  My father’s voice ripped me out of the quarrel that was going on in my head:

  “It’s a pity . . . a pity that you didn’t go with your mother. . . . I saw several boys your age going with their mothers . . .”

  His voice was terribly sad. I realized that he did not want to see what they were going to do to me. He did not want to see how they burned his only son alive. . . .

  You have to know: at that point we did not yet know about the perfection of the German death factory, about the elegant gas chambers. We thought that they simply burned people alive. . . . And we were even wondering—how come we can’t hear the agonizing moans of the dying, their painful outcries.

  A cold sweat ran down my forehead. Death by fire! The most horrible way to die. No, I don’t want to die like this. No way!

  But why cause pain to my father? I tell him that I don’t believe they would burn people in our modern world. Humanity would never let this happen. . . .

  “Humanity?” answered my father. “Humanity is not concerned with us. They wouldn’t move a finger for us. Our age is the age of possibilities, endless possibilit
ies. . . . Today anything is possible. Anything is permitted, even these chimneys.”

  His voice was choking on the tears he held back.

  “Father,” I said, “if that is so, I will commit suicide. I am going to run to the electric wire. Let them shoot me. And if they won’t, I will be electrocuted. I would rather die quickly than after a long agony . . . after fighting with the flames for hours. If I have to die, Father, I would rather die like a human being, not a piece of wood.”

  He did not answer. He was weeping. My father’s entire body, his whole self, was shaking convulsively. Everyone was weeping.

  Someone began to say kaddish.44 Another person said the vide.45 I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jewish people’s sufferings, that Jews would say kaddish for themselves.

  44. This is a prayer for the dead.

  45. This prayer confessing sins is said on Yom Kippur and before dying.

  “Yisgadal . . . veyiskadash shmey rabo. . . .46 I hear my father whisper it too.

  46. From the Hebrew, “Magnified and sanctified be His great name,” the opening line of the Kaddish prayer.

  This was the first time that I revolted against God, against the One whose name is blessed.

  Why should I sanctify His name? Does He deserve it? How did He earn our blessings? If humanity is silent, I won’t sanctify its name. But the Lord of the Universe, the great, mighty and awesome God—He was silent too. So why should I thank Him? Why should I sanctify His name? Why praise Him?