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 Holocaust 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.

These considerations pose a number of difficulties to the collector of sources concerning children during the Holocaust. This volume represents a very small selection from among the wealth of materials concerning the fate of children during the Nazi era; yet, a close examination of such documentation reveals that only a fraction of these contemporary sources were actually created by children. In part, the physical circumstances of persecutees and victims of war are responsible for this dearth of materials. Resettlement, deportation, and incarceration in concentration or forced labor camp settings imposed formidable obstacles for both adults and children who wished to record accounts of their experiences. The lack of writing instruments and especially paper hampered children’s efforts to depict what happened to them and their parents. Other reasons for the lack of children’s sources lies in the very nature of childhood and young adolescence. Children generally did not, and do not, generate as much written material as their adult contemporaries. With certain exceptions, children do not engage in the same amount of private and public correspondence as their parents do; they do not, in the main, write studies, monographs, or letters to newspaper editors or author administrative files or legal documents. Furthermore, persecutory polices in German- and Axis-occupied countries often prevented school-age youngsters from acquiring the education necessary to read and write, thus depriving them of the intellectual capacity to record their experiences. There is a marked imbalance between sources created by young children and those stemming from older youngsters and adolescents, which this volume reflects. Most of the childhood diaries, letters, and drawings available to us from the Holocaust period came from young people in their preteen or teenaged years. Of course, very young children without the appropriate skill sets to write or draw had no chance to document their thoughts and feelings. Particularly for these youngsters, accounts by adult parents, relatives, or caretakers are the only sources we have to testify to their young lives. These voices often restrict our insight, for not even the most sensitive or perceptive adult can capture the full range of a child’s experiences, hopes, and anxieties.6

6. See, e.g., Bela Weicherz, In Her Father’s Eyes: A Childhood Extinguished by the Holocaust, ed. and trans. Daniel Magilow (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

Using the varied sources available to us, this volume forms a narrative weaving historical documentation with contextualization by the author. Its chapters have been developed thematically to articulate the wide variety of children’s experiences during the Holocaust. The majority of these deal with young Jewish victims and follow the chronological arc of persecution from discrimination to deportation, ghettoization, and incarceration and murder in the vast Nazi concentration camp system. The last two chapters of the book cover issues of resistance and rescue of Jewish youngsters and the experiences of surviving young Jewish victims at liberation and in the immediate postwar period. Chapters 2 and 7 examine Jewish and non-Jewish children as victims of war and as targets of racial hygiene (eugenic) policy, respectively. Chapter 7, “The Lives of Others,” stands out in this collection in that it addresses the experiences of youngsters growing up as “Aryans” in Nazi Germany. Chapter 8, “The World of the Child,” also deviates from the chronological progression of the work in order to explore the ways in which youngsters coped with their menacing world through study, play, and creative endeavors. In each chapter, the historical documents have been printed in a distinct format to distinguish them from the explanatory text. They have been reproduced, and translated where necessary, to correspond as faithfully as possible to their original version both in form and content. Emphasis on words or phrases by the original author or authors of the document has been highlighted here by underlining the relevant portion. In places where the document could not be printed in its entirety, ellipses ([. . .]) have been inserted to mark omissions in the text. In some places, always clearly delineated by footnotes in the text, the surnames of victims and their families have been anonymized or replaced by pseudonyms to protect the privacy of these individuals.

A number of names, places, events, and organizations appear in boldface throughout this volume when they are mentioned for the first time in a chapter. This indicates that readers can find further information on these highlighted terms in the glossary at the end of the volume. Using the rich resources of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s library and archives, I have attempted to provide brief information concerning the lives and fates of individuals discussed in this book. Some of this data appears in the glossary and some of it in the footnotes to the documents and explanatory texts. Regrettably, it was not always possible to find biographical information on every individual named in these pages. A bibliography at the end of the volume offers readers the opportunity to explore the topics discussed in this book in greater depth.

Finally, it gives me great pleasure to thank the many individuals who made this volume possible. I am grateful to our donors, the Blum Family Foundation and the Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus Fund for the Study of the Fate and Rescue of Children in the Holocaust, for their generous support, which proved crucial to the fruition of this project. Series editor Jürgen Matthäus offered scholarly direction and was a voice of calm reason during the vicissitudes of production and publication. He and project manager Mel Hecker provided careful and conscientious editing and saw that the transition from draft to publication went smoothly and efficiently. Researcher Greg Wilkowski helped me enormously with reference work for this volume, while Ryan Farrell undertook the thorny task of securing rights with patience and tenacity. Jan Lambertz continuously plied me with new source materials and bibliographical references. Doris Bergen (Toronto), Jochen Böhler (Jena), and Beate Meyer (Hamburg) provided me with many useful suggestions and references to documents that are reprinted in this book. Sara Horowitz (Toronto) and Judy Gerson (New Brunswick) reviewed an early version of the manuscript, providing helpful insights for revision and commentary on its use as a source edition for classroom teaching. Nechama Tec (Connecticut), in addition to authoring the volume’s introduction, shared valuable advice and suggestions at every stage of writing. I am profoundly grateful to Louise Lawrence-Israels, Rabbi Jacob Weiner, and Robert Ehrenreich for sharing with me materials and firsthand accounts concerning their experiences or those of their family members during the Holocaust. At AltaMira Press, thanks are in order to Marissa Parks, Elaine McGarraugh, Jennifer Kelland, and Kim Lyons for their dedication to this project.

I am indebted to so many of my wonderful colleagues at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Paul A. Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, has provided unwavering support for the staff’s scholarly endeavors, including the production of this volume. The personnel of the museum’s library; film, photo, and textual records archives; and its collections division have been enormously helpful in securing documents, photographs, and other sources. Special thanks are due to my colleagues Michlean Amir, Vadim Altskan, Bill Connelly, Judy Cohen, Radu Ioanid, Marc Masurovsky, Nancy Hartman, Teresa Pollin, Vincent Slatt, and Anatol Steck for making me aware of an interesting collection, an important artifact, or a fascinating document that I might have otherwise overlooked. Within the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, staff historians Martin Dean, Emil Kerenji, Geoffrey Megargee, and Leah Wolfson shared with me their knowledge and experiences gleaned from their efforts for the center’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Jewish Responses to Persecution. I am also grateful to my supervisor, Senior Historian Peter Black, for the breadth of his historical knowledge and for his enduring support of this project; thanks also to our interns Elissa Frankle, Johannes Breit, Lukas Lang, Philipp Selim, Emily Utzerath, and Anna Ullrich, who, when deadlines loomed, generously undertook some of my usual tasks to free my time for writing.

I owe a very personal debt of gratitude to my family: to Jim Rice, who endured long-winded descriptions of each new find I made in the library or archive and who read several iterations of this manuscript; and to Diane Heberer: may every child have such a kind and loving parent. My very last thanks go to our museum’s survivor volunteers, many whom of were child survivors of the Holocaust and who have been a daily source of inspiration to me as I wrote this volume. This work is dedicated to them.

 

Patricia Heberer

Washington, DC, 2010