It seems a fitting memorial to them, even though it is in a country they never saw, for this is the country that gave us, the surviving children, freedom and a new life.
Postscript
Information on Key People Mentioned in this Book
Murdered by the Nazis:
The Orenstein Family: all except my brothers Fred and Sam, cousins Motie, Elezer (Bucio’s son), and Rose Toren.
The Strum Family: all except cousin Józiek (died of cancer in 1981). The Peretz Family: all except son Lolek (now in Israel).
The Lichtenstein Family: all.
The Burstyn Family: all.
The Silberstein Family: all except Hy.
Survived:
Bencio Fink and David Rotenberg now live in Israel.
Chaim Ajzen and Tobka Becker joined the partisans, were married, and now live in Australia with their two children.
Jurek Topaz now lives in the United States.
The “mathematicians” all survived, with the possible exception of the lady who worked with us in Płaszów but did not rejoin us in Ravensbrück.
The Nazis:
Hans Wagner was captured after the war, sentenced to death, and hanged.
Demant was sentenced to life in prison by a German court.
Waldner, the Gestapo chief of Hrubieszów, was freed by a German court.
Alex disappeared after the war.
Dr. Gross was tried and hanged in Poland after the war for collaborating with the Nazis.
I have received word from Mordechai Paldiel, Director, Department of the Righteous, that Mrs. Lipińska was nominated for induction into the “Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles.” The “Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles” is a path near Yad Vashem (Israel’s memorial to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust), which commemorates Gentiles who saved many Jewish lives at tremendous risk to their own and their families’ lives. There are trees planted and marble plaques for each of the Righteous Gentiles. This is an exceptional honor for Mrs. Lipińska.
ABOUT THE AUTHOUR
Henry Orenstein is a philanthropist, inventor, entrepreneur, and Holocaust survivor. After surviving World War II, much of it in various concentration camps, Orenstein became a toymaker who convinced Hasbro to start producing Transformers in the U.S. He holds over 100 other patents, the best-known of which gave Orenstein the exclusive rights in the United States to detect and display a player’s hidden cards to the audience in poker games, one of the principal reasons that televised poker is so popular today. Orenstein is the creator and executive producer of the Poker Superstars Invitational Tournament as well as the popular TV show High Stakes Poker. In 2008 he was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame.
*The German general Heinz Guderian, who commanded the tank formations, saw an opportunity to wipe out the entire BEF of several hundred thousand men, which would deal the British a crippling, perhaps a knockout, blow. Knowing they had not had time to organize the evacuation of their troops, he wanted to strike the final blow before they got a chance to do that. To his astonishment, Hitler ordered him to hold off. Again and again Guderian, knowing that this unique chance to wipe out the British army en masse was slipping away with every passing hour, pleaded with his Führer for permission to press the attack and drive the British into the Channel. And again and again Hitler denied permission, until it was too late. An improvised armada of ships of every size and description was forming in England’s ports, and would soon come to the rescue of their countrymen. Under intense and continuous bombardment by Goering’s air force, the British navy, and civilians as well, plying steadily back and forth across the waters of the Channel, managed to evacuate over three hundred thousand British soldiers and thousands of French in the space of a few days. All their equipment was lost, but they lived to fight again.
Military historians are still debating the reasons for Hitler’s fatal hesitation. The prevailing view is that he was so surprised by the lack of resistance to Guderian’s attack that he began to suspect some sort of trap for his overextended forces. Whatever the reason, Hitler’s failure to act had a far-reaching effect on the course of the war. Without those hundreds of thousands of their best-trained officers and men, the English would have found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to fight the victorious Germans alone, for more than a year.
*Looking back now, from the perspective of time, I believe that Hitler’s greatest blunder in World War II was his treatment of the local populations in the territories the Germans captured from the retreating Soviets. Most of these people hated Stalin and his regime. In the Ukraine—and, judging from the accounts of friends and relatives who were there at the time, in Byelorussia as well—the great majority of the inhabitants wanted to see Communism destroyed. They had always dreamed of an independent Ukraine and Byelorussia, even though throughout most of their history they had lived under the dominion of others. For centuries, Russians, Poles, Swedes, Turks, and Mongolians had taken turns occupying these areas; only sporadically, as in Chmielnicki’s rebellion three hundred years earlier, had the Ukrainians had a taste of independence.
I am convinced that had the Germans announced the immediate formation of Ukrainian and Byelorussian governments under nationalist leaders, and had they treated the people well, played down occasional partisan activity, and conducted themselves as liberators, they would have enjoyed considerable support from the local population. Even in Russia itself, had they come in with such slogans as “Liberty from Communism,” or “We want to give Russia back to the Russian people,” Russian resistance both on the fighting fronts and in the conquered areas would have been much weaker. By behaving like brutal aggressors, treating the local population as racial inferiors, confiscating their possessions, and literally starving to death hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war, they gave the people no choice except to fight to the bitter end, even under the hated leadership of Stalin. Had Hitler turned this simmering dislike of Communism to his advantage, he probably would have succeeded in occupying Moscow and Leningrad, perhaps bringing about the collapse of the Soviet armies late in 1941. And without the enormous pressure the Soviet army exerted on the Germans later on, it would have taken the Allies many more years, perhaps decades, to win the war. It is not even inconceivable that in such circumstances the British, and perhaps the Americans as well, would have concluded that a temporary truce with Hitler, however uneasy, might be preferable to a very long, costly war—and, given the uncertainty as to which side might first develop devastating new weaponry, perhaps an unwinnable one.
*It was the infamous massacre of Babi Yar.
*Hitler’s generals did advise retreat in order to save the army. Had Hitler taken their advice, the retreat might have turned into a rout. But he refused, and ordered anybody retreating to be shot. The generals were dismayed. They had never liked Hitler, and now they hated him. “The man is mad,” they said. “He knows nothing about military strategy.” But the generals were also frightened that Hitler would order the Gestapo to kill them, so they obeyed. The German soldiers followed their orders. They died by the hundreds of thousands, they froze to death, but they gave ground grudgingly.
*In his memoirs Churchill speaks of the later German defeats at Stalingrad and El Alamein, toward the end of 1942, as the turning point of the war. With all due respect to the great man, I disagree. I think the real turning point was the cruel Russian winter of 1941–1942. Until then the German soldiers, buoyed by their victories, had expected the war against the Soviets to be quick and easy. “The Russians are dumb animals,” they said. “They run from us like rabbits. Their planes are being shot down by our Messerschmitts. Their tanks and artillery are pretty good, but no match for ours. The German soldier is invincible. Hitler is right; we should have won World War I. We lost only because we were betrayed.”
Suddenly all this had changed. The Russians were fighting back, and fighting well. They were tougher than the Germans, and more tenacious; they could take the cold. The Germans were not such a su
perior race after all. This shift in the Germans soldiers’ view of their Russian foe was, I believe, decisive. In the great battles that followed—Orel, Kharkov, Stalingrad, Kursk—the Germans became frightened, even demoralized. They began to realize the enormity of what they had gotten into. The huge Russian landmass confronting them looked overwhelming. They were oppressed by a sense of futility, which put them at a critically important psychological disadvantage in the battles to come.
*Churchill wrote in his memoirs that on December 7, 1941, for the first time since the beginning of the war, he had a really good night’s sleep. He was certain now of victory.
*For years after the liberation, I felt guilty at not having gone with my parents. But as time passed, I came to see that it would have been a great mistake for us to remain with them. They suffered a terrible death, but they died knowing that we had gotten out and been given another chance at life. Mother’s last cry to Fred, “Save the children!” showed she thought there was some hope for us. Father too, especially in the last few months of his life, had worried only about us and not at all about himself. It would have been unbearable for them to watch the murder of their five children.
*I have to admit that I got hold of the document not as a result of laborious research but by sheer accident. Recently Dr. Gotz Aly, a fellow historian, came from West Germany to see me at YIVO and asked me to read his study on Helmut Meinhold, a former Nazi staff worker of the Institut fur Deutsche Ostarbeit in Cracow and author of many anti-Jewish and anti-Polish pamphlets, and who, after the war, became the main scholarly adviser both to the government and parliament of the German Federal Republic. In his study, Dr. Aly quoted a few documents, one of which immediately caught my eye. I read it and it turned out to be Koppe’s letter to Himmler.
*I was not particularly religious before the war, still less so during the Holocaust. But many years later I came to believe in God. Nevertheless, although my Jewish identity is very strong, I still don’t go to a synagogue or observe the religious holidays. However, I believe that the Creator of this Universe—so perfect in its complexity and harmony, compared with which even the greatest achievements of man seem child’s play—could not be fundamentally cruel. The answer then must be that whatever happens to us on earth, however harsh our individual fate, our existence here is part of a great mystery, which we, in this lifetime at least, shall never understand. Since logic is useless here, we must take it on faith that God, who had the power to create the universe and its awe-inspiring phenomena, is also wise and just. The perfection of His Great Design is inconsistent with cruelty and murder. The answer is only to be found in the mystery that lies beyond our reach and which we shall never understand in our lifetime. All we can do is try to follow what we believe to be His will, and that is to be just to one another, and try to help our fellow man.
*My memory of this woman is hazy, and I don’t remember the circumstances under which she joined our commando.
*Amon Goeth had used Chilowicz and his underlings to accumulate enormous amounts of diamonds, gold, and other valuables. Chilowicz was using these valuables, which he obtained by searches of the new prisoner arrivals and other means, to secure his position as the Lagerälteste. Goeth was anxious to get rid of Chilowicz before Płaszów was liquidated, by setting him up, as well as his wife and Finkelstein, in a phony “escape plan,” and then making sure that the group was caught and killed. Goeth himself was captured by the Polish authorities, sentenced to death on September 5, 1946, and hanged on September 13, 1946.
*Not until after the war did I learn that in fact sometime late in the summer of 1944 all the concentration camps had been notified that the execution of any prisoner had to be approved by Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. The reason for this we never learned; the most likely explanation is that the Gestapo and SS camp personnel, in order to avoid being sent to the front themselves, needed to keep the camps filled with prisoners.
*Speaking of real scientists, had Hitler’s attitude toward Jews been different, it’s conceivable that the course and outcome of World War II might have been affected. Jewish scientists in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and other European countries that had fallen into Hitler’s hands happened to be in the forefront of nuclear research, which eventually led to the development of the atom bomb. People like Leó Szilárd, Enrico Fermi, Lise Meitner, Edward Teller, and Albert Einstein fled to escape the Nazis’ racial policies, and later were very instrumental in the United States becoming the world’s first power to make atomic weapons. It’s entirely possible that had these very same scientists been working on behalf of Germany, it and not the United States could have been the first nation to have atomic weapons at its disposal. This in turn could have changed history. It’s hard to imagine England not seeking some accommodation with Hitler had London and other English cities been destroyed by atomic bombs during the 1941–1945 period.
*I’m sorry to say that when I tried it after liberation, the old magic just wasn’t there.
*As I found out after the liberation, it was the Swedish Red Cross that delivered the food packages to us. The Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, who organized the delivery, and a few others, were able to get approval for this mission of mercy from Himmler, who was trying to ingratiate himself to the Western powers, hoping that his cooperation would somehow save his life. Himmler was captured at the end of the war and, realizing that nothing would save him, committed suicide by crushing a cyanide pill in his mouth.
A note of interest: there are several eyewitness stories about Himmler personally observing, through a small window, the suffocation of hundreds of Jews in a gas chamber during his visit to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
I Shall Live Page 30