Children during the Holocaust
Page 56
Meanwhile, we continue walking and come closer to the pit, the flames. An infernal heat was rising from it. [. . .] In the depths of my heart, I bid farewell to my father and to the whole world. Words are forming themselves in my mind involuntarily, without crossing the threshold of my lips: Yisgadal veyiskadash shmey rabo. And I still thought of Him, of God. I was still too close to my past, to my illusions back then. My heart is about to burst from too much excitement. That’s it! Soon . . . a rendezvous with the Angel of Death. . . .
No. All the fear was in vain. Two steps from the pit we were ordered to turn to the left, toward the bath barracks. [. . .] I will never forget that night either. The first night in the camp, which turned my entire life into one long night.
I will never forget the smoke that took my mother and Tsipoyrele,47 like sacrifices, up to heaven.
47. This is the Yiddish diminutive of Tzipora, the name of Wiesel’s sister.
I will never forget the little faceless children, whose tiny bodies and souls I saw turned into clouds in a clear, sinfully silent sky.
I will never forget the fire that consumed my faith in everything that is beautiful, in everything that is true, and in everything that is holy, forever. I will never forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me of the desire to live and the possibility to make peace with the future.
I will never forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams into a desert.
I will never forget these things, even if I am condemned to live longer than God himself. Never.
Historians often prefer in situ testimony because of its immediacy to events: there is no time for embellishment or outside influence to cloud or to intrude upon the “truth” of the matter. Yet, scholars must also be grateful for postwar accounts of Holocaust survivors. Time allows for the contemplation and recollection of details perhaps omitted in initial testimonies and facilitates the interweaving of historical and factual knowledge with personal experiences. In some cases, the lack of immediacy to events also allows for the candidness that comes with distance. While former persecutees generally do not hesitate to come forward with memories of shootings, roundups, and deportations, many survivors are loathe to discuss incidents of a sensitive nature connected with the war years—family conflict, betrayal of personal principles, issues of child abuse and sexual violence—and feel safer in including such topics in their history only with the passage of time.
Child survivors who write about their experiences face an extraordinary challenge in untangling the confusing web of childhood memories. In his memoir A Story of a Life, Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld suggests that his recollection of six perilous years of war are, for the most part, fragmented images that “fade away quickly, as if refusing to reveal themselves.”48
48. See Aharon Appelfeld, The Story of a Life, trans. Aloma Halter (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), vii.
Appelfeld was born in 1932 in Czernowicz (Ukrainian: Chernitvsi; Romanian: Cernăuţi), a city occupied by Romanian forces following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. He was eight when his mother was murdered by Romanian fascists. Deported with his father to a camp in the Transnistrian Reservation, in Romanian-occupied Ukraine, the young Appelfeld escaped and spent three years in hiding before joining the Soviet army as a kitchen boy. He came to Palestine via Italy in 1946 and is widely regarded today as one of the most prominent Hebrew-language authors.49
49. From his prolific oeuvre, see Appelfeld, The Story of a Life, and Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Fromm, 1994).
In his series of essays titled Beyond Despair, Appelfeld records his fascination with the manner in which child survivors like himself absorbed and processed the tragedies that they had witnessed and experienced. While adults had known another life before the Holocaust and toiled to rebuild their lives in the postwar years on the memory of those former times, the children of the Shoah had no other chronology. The Holocaust was the indestructible present that shaped their lives, while their adult contemporaries could and often chose to exorcise such memories from their histories.
Document 10-16. Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation with Philip Roth, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1994), 36–37.
There were child acrobats who walked tightropes with marvelous skill. In the woods they had learned how to climb in the highest, thinnest branches. Among them was a set of twins, boys of about ten, who juggled wooden balls fantastically. There were also child mimics who would imitate animals and birds. Dozens of children like that wandered around the camps. While the adults tried to forget what had happened and to forget themselves, to get back into the fabric of life, the children refined their sufferings as, perhaps, can be done only in a folk song.
I have discussed the children because it was from them, in the course of time, that artistic expression arose. I shall try to explain myself. Ultimately the children did not absorb the full horror, only that portion of it which children could take in. Children lack a sense of chronology, of comparison with the past. While the adults spoke about what had been, for the children the Holocaust was the present, their childhood and youth. They knew no other childhood. Or happiness. They grew up in dread. They knew no other life.
While the adults fled from themselves and from their memories, repressing them and building up a new life in the place of the previous one, the children had no previous life or, if they had, it was now effaced. The Holocaust was the black milk, as the poet said, that they sucked morning, noon, and night. [. . .]50
50. This line refers to a recurring line in the celebrated 1948 poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”) by Romanian Holocaust survivor Paul Celan.
The Holocaust as life, as life in its most dreadfully concentrated form from both the existential and social point of view—that approach was rejected by the [adult] victim. The numerous books of testimony that were written about the Holocaust are, if you will, a desperate effort to force the Holocaust into a remote recess of madness, to cut it off from life, and in other cases, to envelop it in a kind of mystical aura, intangible, which must be discussed as a kind of experience that cannot be expressed in words, but rather in prolonged silence. In the case of children who grew up in the Holocaust, life during the Holocaust was something they could understand, for they had absorbed it with their blood.
While some individuals prefer not to discuss their memories of the Holocaust, many survivors, including child survivors, feel the need to share their experiences with others, either through oral or written testimonies. Many hope that their stories will have historical or pedagogical value, or they feel compelled to bear witness to the tragedy, lest the world forget. For others, the process of remembering has become an artistic endeavor. For those already gifted at writing, drawing, or sculpting, creativity and memory can combine in a lasting testament to their Holocaust experience. Visual arts and literature also provide an innovative way for former persecutees to process their experiences and convey the deep emotions attached to them. For child survivors like Halina Birenbaum, poetry is a means to articulate childhood recollections in an adult voice.
Halina was born in Warsaw in 1929.51 At the age of ten, she was interned with her family in the Warsaw ghetto. In April 1943, the thirteen-year-old, along with her mother, brother, and sister-in-law, were deported from the Umschlagplatz in Warsaw to the Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin. Halina’s mother died in the gas chambers directly upon arrival.52 Two months later, Halina and her sister-in-law, Hela, found themselves on a transport to Auschwitz. There, the twenty-year-old Hela assumed the role of the young girl’s mother and protector; when Hela died of tuberculosis in the Auschwitz infirmary, a heartbroken Halina was left to face the horrors of the killing center alone. Struck by a sentry’s bullet
on New Year’s Day 1945, the youngster was convalescing when she learned that the camp was being liquidated on January 27, 1945. Still weak from her injuries, Hadina endured a series of forced marches to Ravensbrück and Neustadt-Glewe, where on May 2, she and her fellow prisoners were liberated by Soviet army forces.
51. See Halina Birenbaum, Hope Is the Last to Die: A Coming of Age under Nazi Terror, trans. David Welsh (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996).
52. See Halina Birenbaum’s poem “She Was Waiting There” describing her first visit to the Majdanek memorial site in 1986, in Halina Birenbaum, Sounds of a Guilty Silence: Selected Poems, trans. June Friedman (Kraków: Centrum Dialogu, 1997), 50–52.
In 1947, Halina Birenbaum emigrated to Israel and worked on a kibbutz until her marriage in 1950. She remembers that in the chaotic early days of Israeli independence, she found little time to contemplate her recent past. “When I arrived in Israel, at the beginning of the War of Independence in 1947, everyone was struggling for his very existence and that of the State which had just been established. There was no time to talk about still fresh memories. There was also no one interested in listening. There was no lack of burning issues of the moment, and a great desire to provide [ourselves] with new experiences and values—different ones, the ones of Israel.”53
53. Birenbaum, Hope, ix–x.
The Eichmann Trial, played out in a Jerusalem courtroom from 1961 to 1962, galvanized Birenbaum to reflect upon her childhood and to express her recollections in writing. In 1967, she published a memoir, Hope Is the Last to Die, and spent much of the next three decades recounting her history to young listeners and pressing, particularly in her native Poland, for Jewish-Christian reconciliation. In the early 1980s, Birenbaum turned to poetry to give voice to the powerful memories that linked her harrowing past with her workaday present. Many of her poems turn on the contemplation of a common activity or object that holds a deeper significance in her traumatic childhood. Other works arose as a result of visits she made to the Auschwitz and Majdanek concentration camp memorials in the 1980s and 1990s. In “There Is My Soul,” the poet is aware that she sees more vividly than her fellow visitors as she walks through a deserted Auschwitz in spring. She is haunted. She sees ghosts in the ruins, in the dust, in the sky where once there was smoke. Her experiences and memories hold her here, as if she were bound. Whatever her future, her fate is here, where so many of her friends and loved ones have died. In “My Life Started from the End,” however, Birenbaum sees resurrection in the miracle of her survival. The nightmare years have done their work, but they have not destroyed her or her belief in the essential good in human nature. Painful memories remain, but they cannot eclipse the present or bar her egress to the living world.
Documents 10-17 and 10-18. Halina Birenbaum, “There Is My Soul” (1994) and “My Life Started from the End” (1983), in Halina Birenbaum, Sounds of a Guilty Silence: Selected Poems, trans. June Friedman (Kraków: Centrum Dialogu, 1997), 5, 35–36.
There Is My Soul
There among the ghosts
between the barracks,
crematorium’s ruins,
silence full of murmurs
audible, visible, but
only to me
faces, figures
between present greenery
or whiteness of snow
futile moans, prayers
Dead and gone, suspended forever
in the clouds over Auschwitz
on the ground, in the earth
in every pebble, speck of sand
speck of dust,
over there among ashes and bones
crushed, mixed
crowds of souls in space
lost for eternity
also mine
it’s not important where I live
when, how or where I will die
or wherever in the world
they will bury my body
marked number 48693
tattooed here
My Life Started from the End
My life started from the end
first I have known death,
then—birth
I was growing amidst hatred,
in the kingdom of destruction
only to learn later about creation
breathing bleakness, fires, deterioration of feeling
this was the atmosphere of my childhood
only then I have seen the light;
only then I have flourished.
I have always known love
even when it was terrible or worse!
love was there even in hell
I have encountered it!
my life began from the end and just then
everything returned to the beginning,
I was resurrected.
it was all not in vain, not in vain,
because goodness is not less powerful then evil
in me is strength too
I am the proof.
Document 10-19. A boy displays his Auschwitz tattoo as other children from the Neu Freimann DP camp look on, USHMMPA WS# 29314, courtesy of Jack Sutin.
List of Documents
1 Children in the Early Years of Antisemitic Persecution
From Assimilation to Marginalization
Document 1-1. Bertel Kugelmann, “My Story,” 1996, quoted in Paulgerhard Lohmann, “Hier waren wir zu Hause”: Die Geschichte der Juden vom Fritzlar, 1096–2000, vor dem Hintergrund der allgemeinen Geschichte der deutschen Juden (Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2002), 257–58 (translated from the German).
Document 1-2. Irmgard Marx, “Everyday Terror,” 1989, in Elfi Pracht, ed., Frankfurter jüdische Erinnerungen: Ein Lesebuch zur Sozialgeschichte (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1997), 227–32 (translated from the German).
Document 1-3. The antisemitic Der Stürmer newspaper portrays Jewish children ejected from a public swimming pool in Bad Herweck, near Mannheim, 1935, USHMMPA WS# 11196, courtesy of the Wiener Library Institute of Contemporary History.
In the Schoolroom
Document 1-4. A class essay by Gerd Zwienicki, “Does History Show That Racial Mixing Leads to the Decline of a People,” c. 1934, USHMMA, Acc. 2005.122.1 (translated from the German).
Document 1-5. Irene Spicker Awret, They’ll Have to Catch Me First: An Artist’s Coming of Age in the Third Reich (Madison, WI/Takoma Park, MD: University of Wisconsin Press/Dryad Press, 2004), 88.
“I Decide Who Is a Jew”
Document 1-6. Walter Grab, “The Jews are Vermin Except for my Jewish Schoolmate Grab,” in “Niemand war dabei, und keiner hat’s gewußt”: Die deutsche Öffentlichkeit und die Judenverfolgung, 1933–1945, ed. Jörg Wollenberg (Munich: Piper, 1989), 45–50 (translated from the German).
Document 1-7. A crowd of Viennese children look on as an Austrian Nazi forces a youth to paint the word Jud (Jew) on the facade of his father’s store, 1938, USHMMPA WS# 01510, courtesy of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Zeitgeschichte.
Training Youth for Jobs Abroad
Document 1-8. Letter of Ernst Löwensberg, Burkeville, Virginia, to students of the emigration-training farm at Gross-Breesen, Silesia, June 16, 1938, USHMMA, Acc. 2000.227, Herbert Cohn Gross-Breesen Collection (translated from the German).
Document 1-9. Jewish teenagers unload a cart of hay at the Gross-Breesen’s emigration-training farm, Germany, c. 1936, USHMMPA WS# 68299, courtesy of George Landecker.
Reichskristallnacht
Document 1-10. Marguerite Strasser, “Then I Felt Like a Subhuman . . . ,” in Friedrich Kraft, ed., Kristallnacht in Bayern: Judenpogrom am 9. November 1938: Eine Dokumentation (Ingolstadt: Claudius Verlag, 1988), 109–10 (translated from the German).
The Dismissal of Jewish Children from “German” Schools
Document 1-11. Decree
of the Reich Minister of Science, Education, and Adult Education re the Schooling of Jews, November 15, 1938 (translated from the German).
Document 1-12. Diary of Elisabeth Block, entry for November 17, 1938, in Elisabeth Block, Erinnerungszeichen: Die Tagebücher der Elisabeth Block, ed. Haus der Bayerischen Geschichte/Historischer Verein Rosenheim (Rosenheim: Wendelstein-Druck, 1993), 162–63 (translated from the German).
Document 1-13. A young girl reads her classroom lesson in Hebrew to her fellow classmates at a school sponsored by the Jewish Community of Berlin, c. 1935, USHMMPA WS# 32505, courtesy of the Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz.
What’s in a Name? Israel and Sara
Document 1-14. Eleanor Kraus, “Don’t Wave Good-bye” (unpublished manuscript, private collection, c. 1940), 144–46 (© Liz Perle and Steven Kraus, reprinted with permission).
2 Children and the War
The First Taste of Conflict
Document 2-1. Ten-year-old Kazimiera Kostewicz (Mika) discovers the body of her sister Anna, killed in a strafing run by German pilots on Polish civilians near Warsaw, September 1939, USHMMPA WS# 50898, courtesy of Julien Bryan.
Document 2-2. Julien Bryan, Warsaw: 1939 Siege, 1959 Warsaw Revisited (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1959), 20–21.
Document 2-3. Inge Deutschkron, Ich trug den gelben Stern, 4th ed. (1975; Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1983), 60–67 (translated from the German).
Document 2-4. Interview of Idel Kozłowski (Kozlovskij) by the Central Jewish Historical Commission, February 14, 1947, USHMMA, RG-15.084, Holocaust Survivor Testimonies, LódŹ, 301/3626 (translated from the Russian).
Document 2-5. A Jewish child in occupied France wears the yellow star, USHMMPA WS# 63042, courtesy of Michael O’Hara.
Caught in the Crossfire: The War on Civilians
Document 2-6. Olive McNeil, London, England, undated testimony, quoted in Jane Waller and Michael Vaughan-Rees, Blitz: The Civilian War, 1940–1945 (London: McDonald Optima, 1990), 12–13.