The Holocaust: Key Players
Margarethe ‘Gretel’ Bergmann was born into a German-Jewish family in April 1914. She was a keen sportswoman from an early age and specialized in the high jump. By the early 1930s she was training and competing professionally, but in 1933, following the Nazi accession to power, Bergmann was banned from her athletics club on account of being Jewish.
Unable to train in her home country, she travelled to England, where in 1934 she became the British high jump champion. The Nazis subsequently ordered her to return to Germany in order to prepare for the 1936 Olympics, which had been awarded to Berlin in 1931. This was to allay criticisms from America, which had proposed boycotting the Games due to Nazi exclusion of Jews and other minority groups from sports. Fearing dangerous consequences for her family if she did not comply, Bergmann returned.
Along with other Jewish athletes selected for the German Olympic team, Bergmann was denied access to top training facilities, but she nevertheless continued to excel: on 30 June 1936, she equalled the German women’s high jump record, clearing 1.60 metres (five feet three inches). Despite being a strong contender for an Olympic medal in this event, two weeks after her achievement Bergmann was informed that she could not compete on the German team due to underperformance. Her jump of 30 June was erased from the record books. The American athletes were already en route to Germany by this time, thus no boycott or protest took place. Only one Jewish athlete eventually represented Germany in the Berlin summer Olympics and she was a Mischling (part-Jew) rather than a ‘full Jew’.
Bergmann fled Germany in 1937, one of thousands of Jews who ultimately did so in the hope of escaping Nazi persecution. She settled in the USA, where she continued to compete in high jump and shot put championships until the start of the Second World War. She became known as Margaret Bergmann-Lambert after her marriage and had two sons.
Although Bergmann had declared that she would never return to Germany, in 1999 she conceded and attended a ceremony at a Berlin sports stadium which had been named in her honour in 1995. An HBO documentary about her story, Hitler’s Pawn, was released in 2004, and a German film, Berlin ’36, was released in 2009.
Adam Czerniakow (1880–1942)
Adam Czerniakow was an assimilated Polish Jew and a trained chemical engineer. He became leader of Warsaw’s Jewish community following the Nazi invasion of Poland and was head of the Judenrat in the Warsaw ghetto.
As head of the Judenrat, Czerniakow had to liaise directly with the German authorities and was much criticized for this by some factions in the ghetto, who interpreted his dealings as collaborative rather than obligatory. In reality, Czerniakow did endeavour to improve the situation for the Jews and to keep Nazi involvement in the ghetto to a minimum, but his efforts were often in vain.
In late April 1942, Czerniakow was ordered to provide the authorities with details about how many Jews lived in each street and building in the ghetto. Rumours of deportation abounded among the inhabitants but when Czerniakow questioned his German superiors, they denounced the stories as nonsense. On 22 July 1942, however, Czerniakow received orders that the Judenrat was to supervise daily round-ups of 6,000 Jews for ‘resettlement’. The next day, following unsuccessful negotiations to try to save the children in the ghetto, he committed suicide. It is alleged that he left his wife a note, which stated,
‘They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. There is nothing for me to do but die.’
Czerniakow’s wife survived the war and preserved his diary, in which he had written regularly from September 1939 until the day he took his life. It was later published. Although Czerniakow had many critics during his tenure as leader of the Warsaw ghetto’s Judenrat, it is now generally agreed that his suicide was an act of integrity.
Adolf Eichmann (1906–62)
Adolf Eichmann was born in Germany in March 1906. During his childhood he was pejoratively referred to as ‘the little Jew’ on account of his complexion, which may have fuelled his personal anti-Semitism. Eichmann joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1932 and worked at Dachau concentration camp in 1934. Through extensive study he became an expert on Jewish culture, leading to his appointment as Head of the Scientific Museum for Jewish Affairs.
After the Anschluss of March 1938, Eichmann established the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Vienna, which was considered so effective that it became the model for further emigration offices in the Third Reich that ‘encouraged’ Jews to leave their homelands. Through Eichmann’s system, hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced to give their personal possessions and life savings to the Nazis in order to gain safe passage to a new country.
Eichmann’s expertise in organizing mass emigration was applied to the deportation of Jews throughout the Second World War. He took the minutes at the Wannsee conference and subsequently coordinated the deportation operations that were central to the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’. His directives were pivotal in sending an estimated 1.5 million Jews from across Europe to extermination and labour camps in the East. Among these people were 70,000 Jews from Budapest whom Eichmann sent on a brutal death march to Austria in November 1944, in direct violation of orders from his superiors.
US troops arrested Eichmann in 1945 but he escaped in 1946, eventually fleeing to Argentina where he assumed the false name Ricardo Klement and was later joined by his wife and children. In 1960 he was tracked down and captured by members of the Israeli secret service. His trial began in Jerusalem just under a year later, on 11 April 1961, and was publicized internationally. Found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes against the Jewish people, Eichmann was hanged by the state of Israel on 31 May 1962.
Anne Frank (1929–45)
Annelies Marie Frank, known as Anne (pronounced Anna), is arguably the most well-known victim of the Holocaust. She was the second daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Holländer, whose families had lived in Germany for generations. Along with her sister Margot, Anne was raised in an assimilated, liberal, German-Jewish environment. Anne lived in Frankfurt-am-Main until early 1934, when she joined her parents and Margot in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, where they had emigrated voluntarily due to increasing anti-Semitic legislation under Nazi rule. She had a happy childhood, becoming fluent in Dutch and attending the local Montessori school. Following the Nazi occupation in 1940, however, Anne’s life was irrevocably altered. She had many friends and enjoyed flirting with boys, but restrictions imposed on the Jewish community by the occupying forces meant life became considerably less carefree as the war progressed. On her thirteenth birthday, 12 June 1942, Anne could only celebrate becoming a teenager with her Jewish friends. Nevertheless, her parents made the most of the day and among the gifts she received was a diary.
Margot Frank received a call-up notice from the SS on 5 July 1942, which prompted the Frank family to go into hiding. They spent the next twenty-five months living in four rooms at the back of Otto Frank’s business premises at 263 Prinsengracht, with four other German-Jewish refugees. Anne no longer had an outlet for her chatter and energy, but during the two years spent clandestinely she pursued her interests in history and mythology and received tuition in other subjects from her father. She read broadly, which may have lent itself to her increasingly confident writing style. Without a friend in whom to confide, she poured her thoughts into her diary.
On 4 August 1944, the eight Jews living in the Secret Annexe were arrested by the Gestapo following an anonymous tip-off. They were held in prison cells in Amsterdam before being sent to Westerbork. Their luck ran out again after nearly a month in the camp, when they were put on the last transport to leave the Netherlands for Auschwitz. Separated from her father, Anne became closer to her mother and Margot in Auschwitz. She was transported with Margot to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of October 1944, where she died of typhus in late February or early March 1945, around three months before her sixteenth birthday.
Her diary was published posthumously and became a worldwide best-seller. It was adapted for stage and screen in the 1950s and many actresses have portrayed the young diarist in subsequent film and television adaptations. The Secret Annexe was converted into a museum and education centre and opened to the public on 3 May 1960. Now called the Anne Frank House, it remains one of Amsterdam’s most visited tourist attractions.
For many people, Anne Frank has become a symbol of suffering throughout history and of faith in humanity.
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945)
Dr Paul Joseph Goebbels joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and was appointed the party’s propaganda minister in 1929. In 1933, following Hitler’s assumption of power, he became the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.
Joseph Goebbels speaking in 1932
Bundesarchiv, Bild 119-2406-01 / CC-BY-SA
Goebbels had a club foot that had prevented him seeing action during World War One, a fact he resented greatly throughout his life. In spite of this affliction and his diminutive stature, he ardently preached the physical superiority of the Aryan master race. With control over all media channels and cultural output in the Third Reich, Goebbels oversaw the dissemination of Nazi racial ideology to the masses, from celebrations of German culture to warnings about the dangers that Jews and other supposedly subversive peoples posed to society.
A fervent anti-Semite, Goebbels purged the German arts, culture and media sectors of all Jewish influence and involvement. In 1935, he publicly claimed that Jews were the destroyers of culture and throughout his tenure as propaganda minister he reiterated their guilt for Germany’s defeat in 1918.
Following the death of Ernst vom Rath in November 1938, it was Goebbels who ordered the Kristallnacht pogrom. The widespread violence and destruction of Jewish property provoked extensive criticism both within and outside Germany, yet did not sway Goebbels from his conviction that the Jews were inferior and should be segregated – just days later he requested that they be legally banned from public places.
Goebbels was a committed diarist and often elucidated his desire to rid Germany of its Jewish population. On 27 March 1942, by which time preparations for the ‘Final Solution’ were well underway, he wrote, ‘not much will remain of the Jews’ – words which transpired to be tragically prophetic. Tasked with maintaining morale on the home front throughout the war years, Goebbels exercised his propaganda skills to uphold the nation’s faith in a German victory. In mid-1944 Hitler made him General Plenipotentiary for the Mobilization of Total War.
Goebbels had a particularly close relationship with Hitler and remained loyal to his Führer to the very end. Hitler decreed that Goebbels would succeed him as chancellor prior to committing suicide on 30 April 1945. A day later, however, realizing the defeat of Nazi Germany was inevitable, Goebbels and his wife Magda poisoned their six children, and then also killed themselves.
Reinhard Heydrich (1904–42)
Reinhard Heydrich was born into a Roman Catholic family in 1904, but harboured lifelong paranoia about rumoured Jewish ancestry. This was never proven and Heydrich was, in fact, the physical embodiment of the Aryan ideal. Although a talented musician and champion fencer, Heydrich pursued a naval career in the 1920s before joining the SS at Himmler’s invitation in 1931.
Reinhard Heydrich, 1940
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R98683 / CC-BY-SA
In the late 1930s, Heydrich ordered the formation of the Einsatzgruppen, which were later responsible for the deaths of an estimated 2 million ‘enemies’ of the Third Reich following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. An advocate of forced emigration, Heydrich admired Eichmann’s Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung in Vienna and established the Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Berlin in early 1939.
From September 1939, Heydrich was head of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptampt, or RSHA), which amalgamated all the Nazi police forces. In this capacity he was charged with coordinating a solution to the Jewish question. Convening the infamous Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942, he presented fellow Nazis with plans for the ‘Final Solution’ and encouraged their participation in implementing deportation, slave labour and mass murder.
Heydrich died on 4 June 1942 from wounds sustained following an assassination attempt in Prague a week previously. Operation Reinhard was named in his honour and at his funeral Hitler referred to him as ‘the man with the Iron Heart’.
Heinrich Himmler (1900–45)
Heinrich Himmler joined the Nazi Party in the early 1920s and became head of Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) in January 1929. Himmler’s power increased steadily throughout the 1930s, with the SS evolving into an elite police corps responsible for suppressing enemies of the Führer and the Third Reich.
Heinrich Himmler, 1938
Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R99621 / CC-BY-SA
Following the successful establishment of Dachau in 1933, Himmler oversaw the development of a centralized concentration camp system, also managed by the SS. In the autumn of 1939, he became Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of German Ethnic Stock and was charged with organizing population policy in Poland. Under his orders, hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were forcibly ‘resettled’ in the pursuit of Lebensraum for ethnic Germans. Himmler shared Hitler’s racial ideology and encouraged the SS to father children outside of marriage to ensure that the Aryan race would prosper.
As Heydrich’s superior, Himmler supervised the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’ and throughout the war visited concentration camps and killing sites to oversee their expansion. During a visit to a camp near Minsk, in August 1941, he felt unwell watching violent murders and called for more efficient and less distressing methods of annihilation. After failed experiments with explosives, gassing was decided to be the most effective means of killing enemies of the Reich.
Despite his ardent belief that physical extermination was necessary to the preservation of German hegemony, Himmler did not want the details of the ‘Final Solution’ to become common knowledge. In October 1943 he stated to SS generals, ‘I want to refer explicitly to a very serious matter…the annihilation of the Jewish people…This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written…We had the moral right, we were obligated to our people, to kill this people which wanted to kill us.’
In the final weeks of the war, Himmler unsuccessfully attempted to negotiate with the Allies and was consequently deemed a traitor by Hitler. Himmler was captured while bearing the false name Heinrich Hitzinger, but confessed his true identity to British troops before swallowing cyanide on 23 May 1945.
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
Adolf Hitler was born in Austria on 20 April 1889. His personal anti-Semitism probably dated back to his youth in Vienna, where he studied art, but was cemented in the aftermath of the First World War, when his hatred of the Jews became a violent obsession.
Adolf Hitler, 1933
Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1990-048-29A / CC-BY-SA
The 1920s saw Hitler rise through the ranks of the DAP, which he had joined in 1919. While in jail following the failed Munich Beerhall Putsch, he wrote the now infamous Mein Kampf. His conviction that an international Jewish conspiracy threatened the prestige of Germany reflected the themes of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he had read and commended. He aspired towards a pan-Germany that united all German-speaking peoples and condemned the Treaty of Versailles, the political and military terms of which he would later violate.
Hitler led the Nazis to victory in 1933, when he was voted into power through entirely legitimate means. The dawn of the Third Reich was almost immediately followed by an escalation in the persecution of Jews and people from other minority groups. Hitler did moderate the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 but, as with the minimizing of anti-Semitic propaganda during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, this was due only to his concern of provoking international criticism. His personal rhetoric against the Jews remained virulent. On 30 January 1939, he declared that, ‘If the international Jewish financiers, inside and outside Europe, succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.’
Although there is nothing in writing about the ‘Final Solution’ that bears Hitler’s signature, he often gave authorizations to other senior Nazis verbally. His own racism was paramount in the Nazi pursuit of total Aryanization and his approval was knowingly given for numerous other persecutory measures to be executed. It is almost certain, therefore, that he was fully aware of and had sanctioned the atrocities that were perpetrated in the concentration and extermination camps.
On 30 April 1945, shortly before he committed suicide with his new wife Eva Braun in a bunker beneath Berlin, Hitler dictated a last political testament. Within this document he asserted that Jews had caused the war and finally called upon all future leaders to oppose ‘the universal poisoner of all peoples, International Jewry’.
Rudolf Höss (1900–47)
Rudolf Höss worked in the concentration camp system from the mid-1930s, first as a guard at Dachau and then as a lieutenant at Sachsenhausen. He was promoted to be commandant of Auschwitz in May 1940, where he lived in a villa on the outskirts of the main camp with his wife Hedwig and their five children.
Under Höss, Auschwitz evolved into the largest, most notorious concentration camp and extermination centre of the Nazi regime. He presided over the day-to-day running of operations at the camp and attended early gassing experiments on prisoners. He was reportedly relieved when Zyklon-B was found to be an efficient and impersonal killing method, as he disliked the ‘bloodbath’ of shooting.
Höss was proud of the efficiency with which Auschwitz was run, especially the fact that prisoners were largely deceived about the true function of the gas chambers. During the day he oversaw mass murder and at night he returned home to his family. Ash from the crematoria settled in the garden of his villa and the Höss children had to wash it from the strawberries they picked.
Corruption at Auschwitz was extensive and in late 1943 Höss was dismissed from his post following an official investigation. He subsequently worked in a concentration camp administration role in Berlin, but returned to Auschwitz in the spring and summer of 1944 to oversee the mass murder of the Hungarian Jews, which was codenamed Aktion Höss.
At the end of the war, Höss disguised himself as a sailor and then worked as a farmer before being tracked down by the British in March 1946. In the months before he came to trial he penned his memoirs, later published under the title Commandant of Auschwitz. He remained unrepentant for his role in the ‘Final Solution’, maintaining that, ‘the reasons behind the extermination programme seemed to me to be right’. His one regret was not spending more time with his family. Höss was tried at Nuremberg and hung on a gallows at Auschwitz on 16 April 1947.
Rutka Laskier (1929–43)
Rutka Laskier was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1929, the eldest of two children. Her hometown of Bedzin was occupied by the Nazis at the start of September 1939 and on 8 September, many members of Bedzin’s Jewish community were burned to death while praying in the local synagogue. The Laskiers were moved into a house that the Nazis had repossessed from a Catholic family to be part of the new ghetto.
Over three years later, in January 1943, the teenage Rutka began writing a diary. She chronicled her life in the ghetto in sixty pages of a notebook, reflecting not only on the war and the increasing precariousness of the situation for Jews, but on her social life and budding relationships with boys. She also recounted the ‘action’ that had taken place the previous August, when Bedzin’s Jews were herded into a local sports stadium and subjected to a selection. Rutka had been selected for labour on this occasion; however, she escaped by jumping from a window and returned to her family.
Soon after Rutka’s final diary entry, dated 24 April 1943, the family were moved to the closed Kamionka ghetto on the outskirts of Bedzin. On 5 August 1943, all four were deported to Auschwitz, just twenty miles away. For decades it was assumed that Rutka was gassed on arrival, along with her mother and younger brother Henius. In 2008, however, evidence surfaced that revealed Rutka had, in fact, survived several months in Auschwitz before contracting cholera. According to a fellow female inmate who survived, Rutka begged to be taken to the electric fence so she could end her life, but armed guards on the camp’s watch towers made this impossible. Her friend transported her to the crematoria on a wheelbarrow, as she was too weak to walk, and she died sometime in December 1943.
Rutka’s father Yaakov survived the Holocaust and remarried in Israel in 1947. Unbeknown to him, Rutka had hidden her diary in a gap beneath the top step and the landing of the house in which they had lived before moving to Kamionka. Stanislawa Sapinska, whose family owned the house, had been friends with Rutka and knew about the hiding place. When Stanislawa returned after the war, she found the diary almost perfectly preserved and kept it secret for nearly sixty years. The diary was published in 2006 as Rutka’s Notebook and Rutka is often referred to as the Polish Anne Frank.
Primo Levi (1919–87)
Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919. His family were Jewish and fully assimilated into Italian society. He was captured by fascists in December 1943 and deported to Auschwitz III, Buna-Monowitz, in February 1944.
Like the majority of inmates who entered Auschwitz, Levi was subjected to hard labour in the open air and had to adapt quickly to the deprivations of camp life. Due to his professional chemistry qualifications, in November 1944 he was assigned work in the Buna factory, where he was largely sheltered from the harsh Polish winter. Falling ill with scarlet fever in January 1945, Levi was not sent on a death march out of Auschwitz and he later reflected that his survival may have been partially due to the timing of this illness.
After liberation Levi returned to Italy, where he married, had two children and became the manager of a paint factory. He felt a psychological need to write about what he had experienced and his first book, If this is a Man (also published as Survival in Auschwitz), chronicled his incarceration in Buna-Monowitz in a voice that was both calm and non-judgemental. In subsequent works Levi endeavoured to understand the mind-set of those who had carried out the atrocities of the Holocaust and he earned a reputation for optimism and humanity.
On 11 April 1987, Levi fell headfirst from the fourth floor landing of his Turin apartment and died instantly. He had suffered regularly from depression and it remains a matter of debate whether his death was a tragic accident or suicide. Unlike some Holocaust survivors, Levi never had his Auschwitz tattoo surgically removed and his prisoner number, 174517, is inscribed on his gravestone.
Josef Mengele (1911–79)
Dr Josef Mengele studied in both Munich and Frankfurt, specializing first in philosophy and then in medicine. He shared Hitler’s racial views, believing in Aryan supremacy, and joined the Nazi Party in 1937.
Mengele served in the medical corps on the Eastern Front from 1940, but returned to Germany in early 1943 after sustaining an injury. In the spring of 1943 he arrived at Auschwitz, where he gained more notoriety than any of the other camp physicians and became known as the ‘Angel of Death’. He was regularly involved in the selections at the arrivals ramp, where in addition to determining which of the incoming prisoners would perish immediately, he searched for twins and people with unusual physical conditions.
Mengele’s fascination with twins may have been linked to the Nazi desire for an increased Aryan birth rate. This man, who made such swift decisions about the life and death of thousands of human beings, was bizarrely called ‘Onkel Mengele’ or ‘the good uncle’ by many of the children on whom he conducted experiments. He often brought these children sweets or toys and is reported to have personally carried some infants to the gas chambers.
After a brief period in US custody in 1945, during which his captors failed to realize that he had been part of the SS, Mengele was mistakenly released and subsequently worked covertly on a farm in Bavaria. He escaped to South America in 1949 and evaded capture for the rest of his life, despite the efforts of Israeli agents and Nazi hunters. He drowned while swimming in Brazil in 1979 and was buried under a false name.
Oskar Schindler (1908–74)
Oskar Schindler was born into a German family in the Czech Sudetenland in 1908. He joined the Nazi Party at the age of 30, following the absorption of the Sudetenland into the Third Reich.
An enterprising businessman, Schindler took over an enamelware factory in Krakow, within the Generalgouvernement, in the autumn of 1939. Although he remained a member of the Nazi Party, he became increasingly opposed to the violent persecution of Jews in Poland and by late 1942, 370 Jews from the Krakow ghetto were among the workers employed in his factory.
Besides enamelware, Schindler’s factory, known as Emalia, also manufactured ammunitions. As ammunitions were vital to the German war effort, Schindler argued that the Jews employed in Emalia were indispensable if high production levels were to be maintained, thus preventing their deportation to labour and extermination camps. He protected his workers while the Krakow ghetto was liquidated in March 1943 by allowing them to remain in the factory overnight and subsequently established his own sub-camp, so they would not be subjected to harsh forced labour in nearby Plaszow.
By late 1944 at least 1,000 Jews were working for Schindler, in relatively humane conditions compared to the deprivation of other labour camps. With the advance of Soviet troops from the East, the evacuation of all Jews in the Krakow-Plaszow area was ordered. Over 20,000 people were sent to extermination centres, but Schindler obtained permission to relocate his workers to another factory in Brünnlitz, back in the Sudetenland. Several versions of his now famous list were drafted that named over 1,000 Jews who would continue working at this location. They were diverted, however, to Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, another concentration camp.
Upon hearing of the diversions, Schindler intervened to secure the release of his workers and succeeded in bringing the majority of them back to Brünnlitz, where they survived for the rest of the war. Those who were saved by his actions are known collectively as the Schindlerjuden.
Schindler died in Germany in 1974 and was buried in Jerusalem’s Catholic cemetery. The story of how he saved over 1,000 Jews from almost certain death became popularized in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning 1993 film Schindler’s List, based on Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel. Schindler and his wife Emilie have both been honoured by Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to and museum of the Holocaust, as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ for their actions.
Hannah Szenes (1921–44)
Hannah Szenes (also known as Hannah Senesh) was born in Budapest in 1921. Her father, a journalist and playwright, died when she was 6, but Hannah inherited his gift for writing, becoming a talented poet and regular diarist as she matured.
Hannah Szenes in Palestine, September 1939
Although the Szenes family were assimilated Jews, Hannah experienced anti-Semitism first-hand when she enrolled at a private high school in the early 1930s and had to pay triple tuition fees because of her religion. An intelligent and studious pupil, Hannah became increasingly interested in Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
In September 1939, the same month that the Second World War broke out, Hannah’s dream of travelling to Palestine became a reality. Despite her strong academic performance, she chose to enrol in the Nahalal Agricultural School, as she firmly believed that Jewish youth should build the new country.
As news of the war and persecution of the Jews trickled through to Palestine, Hannah grew ever more concerned for her brother George, who was studying in Paris, and for her mother, who was still in Budapest. In 1943 she joined the Haganah (an underground Jewish military force) and was subsequently accepted for a British Army mission that would enable her to travel back to Central Europe. The day before she left for training in Cairo, she saw her brother George, who had just arrived in Palestine, for what would be the last time.
Hannah was the only female among five parachutists to jump into Yugoslavia on 14 March 1944. The German occupation of Hungary just days later cast doubt on whether their mission to assist the Jews would still be feasible, but Hannah nevertheless determined to cross the border. She spent three months assisting the partisans before entering Hungary on 9 June, whereupon she was almost immediately captured. She refused to surrender her radio transmitter codes despite being beaten and interrogated and was taken to prison in Budapest.
Hannah’s mother, Catherine, was also arrested and imprisoned in the same building as her daughter. The two women were occasionally able to meet and communicated by signalling from their windows across the prison yard. After nearly five months, Hannah was tried for treason against Hungary in October 1944. She was executed by firing squad on 7 November, aged 23. She refused a blindfold. Among the lines of poetry later found in her cell were the words:
I gambled on what mattered most.
The dice were cast. I lost.
Catherine Szenes was among thousands of Jews sent on a death march from Budapest to Austria, but she survived the war, as did George. Hannah’s body was returned to Israel in 1950 and buried in the military cemetery in Jerusalem. She is considered a national heroine in Israel and her poems are widely known and highly acclaimed.
Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)
Eliezer ‘Elie’ Wiesel was the only son of Shlomo and Sarah Wiesel, observant Jews who lived in a small town called Sighet that is now part of Romania. Along with his parents and three sisters, Wiesel was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. His mother and youngest sister, Tzipora (aged 8), did not survive the camp.
Wiesel and his father worked in Buna throughout 1944, where they were both subjected to brutal physical punishment on more than one occasion. Faced with the decision of remaining in Auschwitz or being evacuated in January 1945, they opted for evacuation and were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, via Gleiwitz. Already severely weakened from the death march, Shlomo Wiesel became increasingly frail in Buchenwald and was beaten by fellow prisoners and SS guards before being taken to the crematorium.
Elie Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald in early April 1945. He was reunited with his two older sisters, who had also survived, in a French orphanage. Wiesel subsequently studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and became a journalist. He was persuaded to write about his own experiences and his acclaimed memoir Night (first published in 1958) is now a set text in many schools.
Wiesel became a US citizen in 1956. He is an internationally acclaimed author, academic and advocate of human rights and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. With his wife Marion, he established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which aims to combat intolerance, indifference and injustice.