We were confronted with the most serious dilemma, the dilemma with
which we had been faced throughout our work: Should we
leave the selection to blind fate or should we try to influence it? We tried…
REZSŐ KASZTNER1
EICHMANN RENEGED on the “Jews on ice” agreement even before the Va’ada provided all the lists. There were to be fifteen thousand people from the provinces and fifteen thousand from Budapest, but the second group was never selected. The fact that the final numbers came close to twenty thousand was due to bureaucratic bungling rather than to any effort to make up the shortfall. In some ghettos it was too late for a selection—the boxcars were packed, the people counted. The gendarmes in charge were not about to start afresh with new lists and new numbers. The local Jewish councils still alive in the western ghettos had tried to make the lists for Strasshof voluntary, but few people realized that they had a better chance of survival in one train versus another. By then their one, overwhelming desire was to get away from the horrors of the ghetto as fast as they could.
The boxcars were unbearably hot and airless. Some of them had liquid lime covering the floor; the fumes were toxic. And there was a ghastly human error: shift workers at the Hungarian border had routinely switched the tracks toward Auschwitz-Birkenau, as they had been doing every day since the beginning of May. They did not notice that two train-loads were supposed to have been redirected to Strasshof. By the time the other trains arrived at Strasshof between July 3 and 5, many people were comatose from lack of water and suffering from unbearable pain in their legs and open sores in their throats and mouths. Since a chief criterion for selection had been families with young children, the trains were full of shrieking infants and inconsolable toddlers. Ukrainian volunteer workers with long, rubber whips tried to drive the new arrivals into the already full barracks. Most could not be accommodated and spent the first few nights and days in the fields and the adjacent cemetery. The dead and the dying lay side by side with the living. Traumatized babies clung to their exhausted mothers, children snuggled up to corpses. Two women gave birth while lying on gravestones.
On arrival, the Vienna commercial and administrative office, headed by Hermann Krumey, registered only 6,889 men and 9,812 women—it did not register small children under ten years of age.2
The Hungarian families stayed together in the barracks and fields, each group selecting its most robust members to line up for water and soup rations. Beyond a barbed-wire enclosure, they could see hundreds of Soviet prisoners of war milling about. (Most of these were systematically beaten to death by the guards, and they lie buried in mass graves in Strasshof.)
Much to Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner's surprise and Brigadeführer Karl Blaschke's consternation, fewer than half of these new arrivals could work. Blaschke had expected to receive able-bodied men to toil in the factories and on farms, and in the towns and the capital by clearing rubble from the bombed streets. All able-bodied Austrian males were serving in the armed forces. Now Kaltenbrunner had to explain to his friend the mayor that the young children and the very old were to be kept safe despite their inability to work. They were a special group of “exchange Jews.”3In practice that did not amount to much, but even this little bit helped.
Paul Varnai was only six years old when he arrived at the Strasshof distribution camp.4 His father and older brother had been drafted into labor battalions, but the rest of his extended family stayed together in a lice-infested barrack with wooden bunks and bits of damp straw bedding. No one could sleep. The heat and the lice were maddening. His two baby cousins cried themselves hoarse.
The family was taken to a farm in Annahof on the Czech border. The Polish overseer allowed the youngest children to pick apples and potatoes in the fields on Sundays. The grandparents cooked and mended clothes while the others worked on the farm. Paul's grandmother made jam and apple cider. On Sunday afternoons they were allowed to bathe in the River Thaya. His memories of anxiety and constant hunger are idyllic compared with the wretchedness of the Bergen-Belsen camp that was to follow Annahof.
HERMANN KRUMEY had been ordered to set up the new office in Vienna and charged with the fate of the Hungarian “exchange” Jews. The Nazis arranged to rent them out of the Strasshof sorting camp and collected their wages from family farms, construction companies, wood-processing plants, paper mills, city maintenance and cleaning operations, manufacturing industries, and small businesses. The Jews sent to Vienna fared worse than those, like Paul Varnai's family, who worked on farms. Allied bombardments had destroyed entire streets; dead bodies had to be carted to the cemeteries, roads had to be cleared and rebuilt. The Jews were barred from entering bomb shelters, and many were wounded, and some killed, by bombs and falling debris. They were forbidden to speak with gentiles even when they were standing near them or working with them at bombed sites.
Children over ten were regarded as adults and worked the same long shifts. István Hargittai wrote that he was in one of the special labor units in Vienna comprised of children between ten and fifteen years old. “We were taken into buildings immediately after a bombing. We had to reach places that adults couldn’t have reached. We brought out cadavers, the wounded, and all valuables. If we found limbs or other body parts, we had to bring them out as well.” The German guards encouraged small children to climb up brickworks and along smoldering beams by unleashing bursts of machine-gun fire. When István tried to replace his own torn, newspaper-stuffed shoes with new shoes off a corpse, the guards threatened to shoot him. They wanted everything for themselves. The prisoners lived in bombed-out buildings with little or no roof, in stables, or in woodsheds, storage facilities, or factories.
The Vienna Jews were moved from place to place, depending on where labor was most needed. No trucks were available to take the prisoners to their work sites, so they walked or traveled by streetcars, which led to local residents seeing their pitifully thin, grimy clothes and their hungry children. It was impossible for the guards to prevent chunks of bread, apples, or bits of cookies from being slipped into Jewish hands. To the surprise of the German authorities, many local Austrians who came into direct contact with the deportees were not without humanity.
At family farms, some local villagers volunteered to send letters home to relatives in Hungary and provided their own addresses for return mail. Despite their own strained circumstances, a few farmers gave clothing to their Jewish workers. Many ignored the prohibition against giving the Jews anything other than the prescribed near-starvation diet. When villagers saw emaciated elderly people being marched to the farms in the half dark of early dawn, they felt angry at the system that caused such things to happen. A boy named George, only seven years old when he was deported with his family to a farm near Wiener-Neustadt, would slip through half-open doors and beg for food as the group marched to the fields. He was rarely disappointed and never betrayed. To underline the warnings, the SS arrested and interned a number of local Christians, some of whose lives ended in concentration camps alongside the Jews they had tried to help. During the years of Nazi terror, over 100,000 Austrian gentiles were incarcerated and almost 20,000 were murdered by the Gestapo.
Reports from civilian employers to Nazi headquarters in Vienna about the behavior of the forced laborers were, overall, very positive. Only a few of the managers found it necessary to insert derogatory phrases about Jews so that they would be viewed as trustworthy Reich citizens and continue to receive Jewish workers.