My second memorable Holocaust-survivor encounter was with Leon Greenman. Unlike David Gold, Leon had a definite English accent. I met Leon in 1991 while I was working on one of the first Anne Frank exhibitions I had organized myself. It was staged at the Gunnersbury Park Museum in west London and one afternoon just before the opening, I was having coffee in the museum’s café set in its beautiful garden. Opposite me was an elderly man who had introduced himself as Leon.
Born in the East End of London in 1910, and thus a British citizen, Leon happened to be living and working in Rotterdam when the Germans invaded in May 1940. He had considered returning to live in England in the 1930s, but after hearing Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 promise of ‘peace in our time’ decided to stay in the Netherlands with his wife Esther and young son Barney. Leon expected that his British passport would mean the family would soon be repatriated back to England, but found to his horror that the British consulate in Rotterdam had immediately closed down. The Greenman family found themselves trapped.
As he continued to tell me his story amidst the usual coffee-shop backdrop of clattering coffee cups and trays, Leon pulled out from his jacket pocket photos of his young wife and angelic little curly haired toddler Barney, both of whom were gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz. I thought about the innocence of curly-haired Barney walking into a strange room clutching his mother’s hand, and his painful struggle to breathe as the Zyklon B gas replaced oxygen in the packed room, or perhaps being trampled to death under hundreds of adult feet fighting for air. It is recorded that the screams before the silence in the chambers of death could last up to twenty minutes.
Leon endured slave labour, medical experiments and a death march. A small man of just over five foot, he had a fiery spirit, and felt he owed his survival to his physical fitness and the skills he could offer in the camp. Before the war he had trained as a boxer, became a professional barber and had loved singing songs from the operas, all of which skills came to be used in the camp.
Unlike most of the survivors I have subsequently met, Leon Greenman had begun speaking publically about the Holocaust not so long after the war. In fact, it was in 1962 after hearing a racist tirade by the leader of the British Neo-Nazis Colin Jordan. Leon became a very active anti-Fascist campaigner and in fact received his OBE in 1998 for ‘Services against Racism’. To educators his talks to schools were always memorable, but sometimes deemed to be controversial as Leon admitted to me that he wished to see the pupils show their shock at his story by openly crying in the classroom. Leon Greenman died aged 97 in March 2008 and the permanent Holocaust exhibition at London’s Jewish Museum is dedicated to his story.
As in the case of Leon, many of the survivors I have met have been rewarded by long lives and relative good health. Could this be explained through a combination of genes and strong will? Perhaps, but a Holocaust survivor, and even a rescuer, needed not one, not two, but many incidents of lucky escapes to evade the killing machine, often seizing opportunities that others were afraid of taking.
Otto Frank died at 91 and his wife Fritzi Geiringer-Frank at 94. Gena Turgel and Freda Wineman, both of whom survived the starvation and typhus of Bergen-Belsen, are in their 90s as I write. Rescuers Miep Gies and Sir Nicholas Winton were both over 100 when they died.
Sometimes just being in the presence of a survivor stops you in your tracks at the sheer miracle that they are actually standing in front of you. It is often hard to believe that this was the same physical entity that was living under the chimneys of Auschwitz, in the slave labour death pit of Mauthausen or in the squalor of Bergen-Belsen – you are looking into the very same eyes that saw these things. In Wakefield Cathedral in 2001 I sat listening to the by-then elderly writer and journalist Janina Bauman describing living in the Warsaw Ghetto. Throughout her talk I could not take my eyes off her feet. These are the very same feet, I was telling myself, that had walked through those foul-smelling cobbled streets of the ghetto, trying to avoid stepping on the desperate and the dying.
Concentration camp inmates, like those caught up in other wars, tried to hold on to their humanity and innate humanness whenever and wherever they could. Eva Clarke, who lives in Cambridge, has been involved with the Anne Frank Trust since I met her in 2000. She has been a great support to our team by enhancing the power of our work with her remarkable story, both in schools and prisons. Eva’s mother Anka was a lively law student in Prague when the Germans invaded and she and her handsome new husband Bernd Nathan found themselves sent to Theresienstadt camp. The couple remained there for three years, and after several furtive visits to her husband in the men’s barracks, Anka became pregnant. The baby boy, named Daniel, died of pneumonia just two months after his birth. Anka miraculously became pregnant again by her husband (Eva explains that despite being so weak from the privations, ‘inmates sought human comfort whenever they could’). Early into Anka’s pregnancy the couple were deported to Auschwitz; first Bernd was herded into the cattle truck and then one day later Anka, who volunteered to follow her beloved husband. The loving couple never saw each other again as Bernd was shot by the guards in January, three months before his daughter Eva was born.
Anka, by then heavily pregnant, was next transported on an open coal truck to Mauthausen in Austria, where, seeing the sign that showed she was about to enter the slave labour camp she had heard was even crueller to its inmates than Auschwitz, she went into sudden labour in the coal truck. Anka gave birth to a girl inside Mauthausen, just five days before its liberation, and miraculously Eva, who came into the world weighing just 3lbs (1.5kg), survived. Anka weighed 5 stone (31kg). Eva well understands that she owes her own existence to her older brother’s death as, if Anka had arrived in Auschwitz with her baby boy in her arms, both mother and baby would have been immediately gassed.
Eva was born on 29 April and is also aware that if her mother had arrived in Mauthausen a couple of days earlier, while its gas chambers were still functioning, she would have died inside the body of her gassed mother. The new-born baby Eva was wrapped in newspaper and hidden until the camp’s liberation on 5 May. After being nursed back to health, Anka remarried and the family moved to Cardiff. I saw Anka whenever I brought an Anne Frank exhibition or educational project to Cardiff. She remained a beautiful and strong woman into old age and a proud ‘Cardiffian’ (I am not sure if that word actually exists but my own mother who grew up in the city described herself as such). One time I had set up the Anne Frank exhibition at the new Welsh Assembly building and Anka and I were invited to sit in on that afternoon’s parliamentary debate. As we sat listening to the session, Wales’s First Minister, the late Rhodri Morgan, stood up to speak. Anka turned to me and with her twinkling blue eyes and mid-European accent, said with great pride, ‘That’s our Rhodri.’
Anka, whose young husband had not survived to see the birth of his beautiful daughter, lived to be 96 and was able to welcome into the world her three great-grandchildren. Mother and daughter remained extremely close and in her last years Anka moved to Cambridge to be with Eva. Eva’s first public speaking engagement after Anka’s death in July 2013 was seven months later at the February opening of the ‘Anne Frank + You’ exhibition at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire. Eva had written out her speech, but before the proceedings began, she beckoned me over to where she was standing almost hidden behind one of the building’s ancient Norman columns. I was quizzical about why she had beckoned me so furtively during the welcoming drinks reception. Her luminous green eyes stared straight into mine. ‘Gillian, I may need your help. This is so emotional for me. It is the first time I’ll be telling my parents’ story since my mother’s death. I just don’t know if I’ll be able to get through it.’ I nodded sympathetically. And then she pointed to her notes and asked me, ‘If I have to stop midway, will you take over?’ I reassured her that of course she would be able to do it and what’s more, in her customary brilliant way, but if she were to find herself overcome with emotion, then of course I would.
And tha
t’s what happened. Two-thirds into Eva’s address as she was describing her mother’s journey to Mauthausen, she stopped mid-sentence, looked at me and nodded. I walked towards the podium where she stood and, holding her close, I continued to read out her words. After this incident Eva regained her fortitude, and now retired from her work as administrator at Cambridgeshire Further Education College, she continues to speak in schools and other settings. The publication of a book Born Survivors, telling her story and those of two other babies born in the camps who now live in America, has opened up many new speaking opportunities. Eva well knows that, as she is perhaps one of the very youngest Holocaust camp survivors, even without the memories of those times being her own, the responsibility for educating new generations will fall to her for many more years.
Although we may believe that all camp inmates were no more than dehumanized tattooed numbers to their guards, I have heard first hand of the rare instances where there have been lightning flashes of empathy by guards with their prisoners. In 2009, I met Catherine Hill, who was in London for the launch of a book entitled The Thoughtful Dresser, a philosophical exploration of the importance of fashion by the journalist and writer Linda Grant. Catherine was featured in a chapter of the book.
Why was a Holocaust survivor being interviewed about a book on fashion? Well it transpired that her own desire to look pretty, even in Auschwitz, helped sustain her determination to survive. After her liberation from Auschwitz, Catherine moved to Canada, which in the post-war years had none of the creative and progressive drive of the large American cities. Starting her career as retail assistant on the shop floor of a major Montreal department store, Catherine’s European flair for fashion saw her soon become appointed as the store’s women’s wear senior buyer. In the early 1970s and following divorce, she opened a boutique called ‘Chez Catherine’ where she gave women in Toronto their first experience of exciting young Italian designers such as Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace and Gianfranco Ferre. Catherine Hill became a highly influential name in the growth of Canadian fashion, but not many of her followers may have been aware that her love of clothes could well have saved her life.
Having heard her speak at the book launch and then on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, I wanted to spend more time with this glamorous and intriguing woman, so I invited her for lunch. She told me more about her time in Auschwitz as a teenager, just one of thousands around her earmarked for death. Her mother had been immediately gassed on arrival and her father died of typhus. When she arrived at the camp and her clothes were replaced by the dirty, ragged striped uniform still smelling of its murdered previous occupant, she knew she would have to do something to keep her spirits up. She tore a strip from the jacket and created a striped headband to cover her shaven head, reminding herself of the beauty of clothing and of life. Catherine could have been killed just for this act of defiance, but seeing the teenager’s determination to be pretty in the face of death somehow generated a spark of humanity from a male guard. At the daily 5.00 a.m. roll call he had quickly spotted her covered head but chose to spare her life by sending her for kitchen duties instead of to the gas chamber. Catherine has carried that deep understanding of our need to be clothed and to look beautiful throughout her life, and when I recall her visit to London in 2009, I can still picture her sashaying into our lunch rendezvous in a sassy pink fur coat that drew approving smiles from all around the room.
French-born Freda Wineman, also a strikingly pretty woman, immaculately dressed and now in her nineties, survived the camps of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Raguhn, and finally Theresienstadt – but only just. Freda told me that in Auschwitz-Birkenau in September 1944 she is certain that she was held in the same barrack as Margot and Anne Frank, as all the women and girls who had arrived from France, Belgium and the Netherlands at that time were put together. Her own sister in law Janine was with Freda in the same barracks and when Anne Frank’s diary started to become known, prompted Freda’s memory by asking her, ‘Don’t you remember those two teenage sisters from Amsterdam who were with us in the barrack?’. Freda and Janine were moved on from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen, where they spent five months. When she speaks to schools, Freda describes the weeks in Bergen-Belsen without any substantial food, just a little watery soup, and only dirty water to slake her desperate thirst.
During a taxi ride in 2015 from north London to the predominantly Bengali area of Whitechapel to speak at our Anne Frank exhibition, Freda told me that she had only discovered in the 1980s how close she had come to being blown up along with hundreds of other women. She had long wondered why, in the last days of the war and so close to death from starvation, she had been transported away from Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany all the way south to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Once there, she met women who had been brought from camps all over Europe. Why had the Germans soldiers bothered with this final act of complex logistics, when they could already have gone home to their families?
Attending a lecture at the Imperial War Museum by a Russian army officer in the mid-1980s, Freda at last heard why. The Russian officer shocked the audience by what he revealed. Newly-discovered Russian archives had shown that the Nazi units had been directed by senior authorities to gather the remains of Europe’s Jews in Theresienstadt. There they were planning to blow up the camp and all those inside in order to destroy evidence of their atrocities. This was to take place on 10 May. By a miracle, Theresienstadt camp, with Freda in it, was liberated by the Americans on 9 May.
Speaking to the audience at the Anne Frank exhibition launch, Freda told of another example of the persistence of the human capacity to love and dream of a future, even in the most hopeless of circumstances. Several members of the audience were seen wiping away a tear as she told them how her brother David had actually met his wife to be on the way to Auschwitz. In the same cattle car taking Freda and David and their family from the French internment camp of Drancy in the suburbs of Paris there was a pretty girl called Janine, who also came from their home region of Alsace. David and Janine’s eyes had met in the frightened melee of people crushed together in the wagon over the three days of the journey.
Stepping out of the cattle truck into the blinding light at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the terrified and weakened people were confronted by SS guards, their whips and barking German Shepherd dogs. Freda’s mother was ordered by an SS guard to take a baby from a young Dutch woman. Despite the young mother’s imploring screams, Freda’s mother had no choice but to take the baby. And because she was holding a baby and was with her own young son Marcel, Freda’s mother and the children were sent to one side with other mothers, children and elderly. Freda tried to follow her mother but was ordered to stand in the other line, and told by the guard not to worry as her mother would be helping by looking after the children. In fact, Freda’s mother and all those in her line were being sent immediately to the gas chamber.
Janine and Freda became close and supportive friends once they were in the crowded and uncomfortable women’s barrack. It was there among the French, Belgian and Dutch women crammed together on bare wooden bunks that Janine first remembered coming across Margot and Anne Frank, ‘the two young sisters from Amsterdam’. Janine and Freda were set to work in the Kanada Kommando block alongside the crematorium sorting the still-warm clothes of murdered Jews. The two terrified young women formed a camaraderie, especially through the trauma of seeing three of the girls who worked alongside them being hanged for smuggling a few of the clothes back into the camp.
Janine confided in Freda that if she survived she wanted to spend her life with David. Her determination bore fruit. Janine and David were able to find each other again after liberation, they married and had four children. In 1950 Freda relocated to London and also fell in love. She married a discharged British soldier who had fought in the war. They had two children but when Freda’s youngest child was six weeks old, her husband died of hepatitis, probably picked up during the war. Having to bring up two young children on her own and without th
e benefits of modern post traumatic counselling, Freda could not shake off the nightmares she endured. It was only after she gave her testimony to the British Library Sound Archive in the 1990s that Freda Wineman at last found herself more at peace.
When she speaks to schools Freda gives a powerful message to young people:
They were terrible times. I sometimes wonder why it was that my friends and family were made to suffer in this way. It could happen again. The world has become much more fragmented and the prospect of suffering is very great indeed. It is certain that if you do nothing and say nothing this lets evil in. You should speak up for civilized behaviour . . . There are still people who deny that it happened. It was not a mistake by an otherwise good government. It was pure evil. It is vital that this message is not diluted. We all need to understand this.
Polish-born survivor Gena Turgel met her husband to be in the ruins of Bergen-Belsen. Norman Turgel was not another inmate but a liberating British soldier, attached to the British Intelligence Corps. He had been tasked with rounding up SS commanders.
Three days after they first spotted each other, Norman invited Gena to dinner with his commanding officer. Gena recalled,
I walked in and saw beautiful decorated tables with white tablecloths and flowers, which I hadn’t seen for six years. I said ‘You must be expecting special visitors, what am I doing here?’ Norman answered, ‘You are the special guest. This is our engagement party’. I said ‘Pardon?’ All his colleagues said “Congratulations’ too and I thought to myself: ‘They must be mad’. But, you see, Norman had made up his mind when he first saw me in the hospital, in a white overall, that this was the woman he was going to marry.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 34