Children during the Holocaust Read online

  nUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum

  Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies

  Documenting Life

  and Destruction

  Holocaust Sources

  in Context

  Series Editor

  Jürgen Matthäus

  Documenting Life and Destruction

  Holocaust Sources in Context

  This groundbreaking series provides a new perspective on history using firsthand accounts of the lives of those who suffered through the Holocaust, those who perpetrated it, and those who witnessed it as bystanders. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies presents a wide range of documents from different archival holdings, expanding knowledge about the lives and fates of Holocaust victims and making those resources broadly available to the general public and scholarly communities for the first time.

  SERIES EDITOR:

  Jürgen Matthäus is the research director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies.

  Books in the Series

  1.Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946, Volume I, 1933–1938, Jürgen Matthäus and Mark Roseman (2009)

  2.Children during the Holocaust, Patricia Heberer (2011)

  A project of the

  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

  Sara J. Bloomfield

  Director

  Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies

  Paul A. Shapiro

  Director

  Jürgen Matthäus

  Director, Applied Research

  under the auspices of the

  Academic Committee

  of the

  United States Holocaust Memorial Council

  Alvin H. Rosenfeld, Chair

  Doris L. Bergen

  Peter Hayes

  John T. Pawlikowski

  Richard Breitman

  Sara Horowitz

  Harry Reicher

  Christopher R. Browning

  Steven T. Katz

  Aron Rodrigue

  David Engel

  William S. Levine

  George D. Schwab

  Willard A. Fletcher

  Deborah E. Lipstadt

  Nechama Tec

  Zvi Y. Gitelman

  Michael R. Marrus

  James E. Young

  with major support from

  The Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus Fund

  for the Study of the Fate and Rescue

  of Children in the Holocaust

  and

  The Blum Family Foundation

  The authors have worked to provide clear information about the provenance of each document and illustration included here. In some instances we have been unable to verify the existence or identity of any present copyright owners. If notified of any item inadvertently credited wrongly, we will include updated credit information in reprints of this work. In the same vein, if a reader has verifiable information about a person’s fate that remains incomplete in this volume, it would be greatly appreciated if that data were shared with the authors.

  Documenting Life and Destruction

  Holocaust Sources in Context

  CHILDREN DURING THE HOLOCAUST

  Patricia Heberer

  Introduction by Nechama Tec

  Advisory Committee:

  Christopher R. Browning

  David Engel

  Sara Horowitz

  Steven T. Katz

  Aaron Rodrigue

  Alvin H. Rosenfeld

  Nechama Tec

  AltaMira Press

  in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

  2011

  For USHMM:

  Project Manager: Mel Hecker

  Contributing Editor: Jan Lambertz

  Researchers: Ryan Farrell, Greg Wilkowski

  Translators: Ania Borejsza-Wysocka, Pavel Ilyin, Louise Lawrence-Israels, Jolanta Kraemer, Kathleen Luft, Margit Meissner, Anya Nowakowski, Steven Sage, Veronika Szabó

  Published by AltaMira Press

  A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  http://www.altamirapress.com

  Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2011 by AltaMira Press

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Heberer, Patricia.

  Children during the Holocaust / Patricia Heberer.

  p. cm. — (Documenting life and destruction)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-7591-1984-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7591-1986-4 (ebook)

  1. Jewish children in the Holocaust. 2. Jewish children in the Holocaust—Sources.

  3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) 4. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Sources.

  5. World War, 1939-1945—Children. 6. World War, 1939-1945—Children—Sources.

  7. Jews—Persecutions—Europe—History—20th century. 8. Jews—Persecutions—

  Europe—History—20th century—Sources. I. Title.

  D804.48.H43 2011

  940.53’18083—dc22 2010047167

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  “I think that possibly the greatest tragedy the Jewish people underwent was the tragedy of the children. The children in the ghetto also used to play and laugh, and in their games the tragedy of the Jewish people was reflected.”

  —From Document 8-8. Testimony of Dr. Aharon Peretz, May 4, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995), 1:478–479.

  The following documents are reprinted with permission by:

  Cover photo (top row, far right) © Archiwum Państwowe w Łodzi; Document 1-5 © The University of Wisconsin Press; Document 1-7 © ÖNB/Wien; Document 1-14 © Liz Perle and Steven Kraus; Document 2-3 © Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co. KG; Document 2-7 © The University of Michigan Press; Document 2-9 © Saint Petersburg Museum of History, Saint Petersburg, Russia; Document 3-1 ©Keren Kayemeth Le’Israel Photo Archive; Document 3-2© Evangelische Verlagsanstalt; Documents 3-9, 3-10, 3-11 © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH; Document 3-13 © Centrum Judaicum Berlin; Documents 4-5, 8-12, 9-1, 9-10 © Yad Vashem; Documents 5-4, 8-14 © Wallstein Verlag; Documents 5-7, 8-9, 8-16 © Inge Deutschkron; Document 7-14 © Emmy E. Werner; Document 7-15 © F.A. Herbig Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH; Document 8-1 © Oneworld Publications; Document 8-6 © Lucjan Dobroszycki; Document 8-19 © Bilbo; Documents 10-13, 10-14 © Gefen Publishing House Ltd.; Document 10-15 © Elie Wiesel; Document 10-16 © Aharon Appelfeld
.

  For further provenance information see document header.

  Front cover: (top row left to right) USHMMPA WS# 96464, courtesy of Anita Willens; Serge Klarsfeld, The Children of Izieu: A Human Tragedy, trans. Kenneth Jacobsen (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 95; USHMMPA WS# 33953, courtesy of the Archiwum Panstwowe w Lodzi; (bottom row left to right) USHMMA, Acc. 2006.396, Ehrenreich Family Papers; USHMMPA WS# 30057, courtesy of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot; USHMMA, Acc. 1997.36.12, Betty Troper Yaeger Collection.

  For USHMM:

  Project Manager: Mel Hecker

  Contributing Editor: Jan Lambertz

  Researchers: Ryan Farrell, Greg Wilkowski

  Translators: Ania Borejsza-Wysocka, Pavel Ilyin, Louise Lawrence-Israels, Jolanta Kraemer, Kathleen Luft, Margit Meissner, Anya Nowakowski, Steven Sage, Veronika Szabó

  “I think that possibly the greatest tragedy the Jewish people underwent was the tragedy of the children. The children in the ghetto also used to play and laugh, and in their games the tragedy of the Jewish people was reflected.”

  —From Document 8-8. Testimony of Dr. Aharon Peretz, May 4, 1961, in The Trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of Proceedings in the District Court of Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Trust for the Publication of the Proceedings of the Eichmann Trial in cooperation with the Israel State Archives and Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, 1992–1995), 1:478–479.

  Contents

  Contents

  Author’s Introduction

  Author’s Introduction

  Author’s Introduction

  Author’s Introduction

  Author’s Introduction

  Abbreviations

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Introduction

  Author’s Introduction

  Krystyna Żywulska (born Sonia Landau) was a survivor of Auschwitz. Born in September 1914, she and her family fled to the Polish capital to escape Nazi persecution in their native city of Łódź and were resettled in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941. In late August 1942, Żywulska and her mother escaped to Warsaw’s “Aryan side,” where the young woman assumed a Christian identity and joined the Polish resistance. Arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo in August 1943, “Blond Zosia,” as she was known, was incarcerated in Auschwitz as a political prisoner. Creating poems to endure the endless Appells (roll calls) at Auschwitz II–Birkenau, Żywulska established herself after the war as an author and songwriter, retaining her Polish gentile identity. Compelled in the early 1960s to reveal her Jewish ethnicity, Żywulska wrote Empty Water (Pusta Woda, 1963), which detailed her life as a young woman in the Warsaw ghetto.1 Within its pages, she recalls observing the play of her young neighbors, six-year-old Szymus and Anulka, aged five. Szymus was constructing forms with a set of building blocks, which Anulka always angrily destroyed. The young boy explained his playmate’s actions to Żywulska.

  1. See Barbara Milewski, “Krystyna Żywulska: The Making of a Satirist and Songwriter in Auschwitz-Birkenau As Discovered through Camp Mementos,” Swarthmore College Bulletin (July 2009): 30. Most famous for her memoir Przezylam Oświęcim (1946), Żywulska married a prominent official in the Polish communist secret police. In 1970, she emigrated to join her son in Düsseldorf, Germany, and died there in 1992.

  [She acts so] because I am building a forest. And I say to her: this is the green tree named the oak. The oak is a tree with leaves. And there is a tree named a pine, and it has needles. And then she destroys the blocks and says that there are not any trees anywhere in the world. But my Mom told me that there are many trees because she saw them herself. And these trees smell and when I am big we will go to see them.

  “There are no trees, you are lying!” said Anulka.

  “You see, she doesn’t believe me,” said Szymus. “She never believes me but anyway my Mom doesn’t lie. Yesterday she didn’t believe there was water named a river. With this river, water is flowing and together this is called the Vistula River.2 So tell her that the Vistula exists; you saw it, didn’t you? Did you see the Vistula or not?”

  2. The Vistula is one of Poland’s longest and most important waterways.

  “There is no river,” said Anulka, scowling and stamping her feet. “There is no river at all. [. . .]”

  “Leave her in peace, Szymus,” Krystyna intervened. “You can play other games. Perhaps Anulka would like to build something from the blocks herself. Let her do it and don’t quarrel anymore.”

  “She wants to play only ‘The Wall and the Gendarme,’” replied Szymus. “She always builds the wall. Then she shouts at me, ‘Stop smuggling!’ or ‘I’m the gendarme and now I will kill you!’ But I don’t want to play such a game. I don’t want to be a smuggler.”3

  3. Krystyna Żylwulska, Pusta Wodo, quoted in Barbara Engelking-Boni, “Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto,” in Children and the Holocaust: Symposium Presentations of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Washington, DC: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 34.

  Approximately 1.1 million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.4 Millions of youngsters—Jews and non-Jews—suffered persecution, deprivation, and resettlement at the hands of the National Socialists and their wartime allies. Like Szymus and Anulka in the Warsaw ghetto, a generation of young people lost their childhoods in the conventional sense. Like them, many European children of the period knew less about meadows, flowers, pets, and toys than they did about violence, hunger, and death.

  4. Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children’s Lives under the Nazis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 9.

  This volume is, in essence, a narrative in microcosm: it is the story of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes, and fates, of its youngest victims. With notable exceptions, the contours and chronology of Nazi racial policy were parallel for children, throughout defined as youths under the age of eighteen, and adults.5 Jewish youngsters, just like their parents, were victims of discrimination, ghettoization, deportation, and mass murder. Yet, children encountered and contended with the persecutory policies of the Nazis in markedly different ways. This study portrays the experiences of children during the Nazi era and explores their reactions and responses to war and persecution in the schoolroom, on the playground, at home, and in the camps and ghettos of Nazi-occupied Europe.

  5. Significant exceptions include, at least in its initial stages, the child “euthanasia” program, which, unlike its adult corollary, also targeted disabled infants and toddlers outside institutional settings. Another notable exception includes aspects of Germanization policy associated with the Lebensborn program, which sought out Slavic children in German areas of occupation who possessed German racial characteristics and, often removing them from their parents by force, settled them with adoptive parents in Germany; see chapter 6 of this volume.

  To depict the lives and circumstances of children during the Holocaust, this volume embeds contemporary documentation within an explanatory narrative. The documents represented in each chapter have been selected to reflect the full range of experiences of children during the Nazi period in terms of region, age, and ethnic identity. I have also endeavored to capture a diversity of voices and viewpoints in this volume. As a result, this story of child witnesses and victims of the H
olocaust is told not only through the accounts of young persons themselves but in the words of their parents and caregivers, teachers and rescuers, liberators and persecutors. Wherever possible, the documents in this collection stem from an in situ source—that is to say, they were written or recorded at the time in which the events portrayed occurred. It is true that today there is no shortage of excellent memoirs authored by child survivors of the Holocaust. Yet, to freely juxtapose contemporary and latter-day sources (produced after the Holocaust) creates a kind of tension within the text in which the immediacy of events inherent in the former contends with the teleology and circumspection of the latter. Thus, every effort has been made to limit the use of memoir material in this volume. Sometimes the nature of the event in question or the age of the child involved has made it impossible to use in situ documentation. In these instances, the closest available primary source, such as postwar trial testimony or the accounts of witnesses made in the immediate postwar period, have been used in their stead.