At the start of 1944, the air war is still raging over Europe. The German Reich begins its last bombing offensive against London’s civilian population; the Allied bombers continue their air raids on German cities, targeting the civilian population. The Allies have been co-ordinating their military strategy with teams of advisors, in numerous commissions and at conferences in Washington, Quebec, Moscow and Cairo. At the Teheran Conference, from November to December 1943, the ‘Big Three’ – Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin – decided on the forthcoming invasion of northern France. The post-war order was also mapped out at the conference: the new Polish border in the east was determined, as well as the expansion of Poland to the Oder River.
Now the tables are turned; Hitler’s soldiers are on the defensive on almost every front. One gathers nothing of this from the German media as in the newspapers losses read as victories. In January 1944, ‘61 British Terror Bombers Shot Down’, ‘Soviets Pushed Back in Heavy Fighting’, and ‘Extension of Fierce Conflict into Southern Italy’ are typical headlines. A serious defeat is disguised with the words, ‘The German Soldier Stands Firm Amidst Bitter Fighting’.
Yet in one theatre of war, ‘the German soldier’ does in fact ‘stand firm’ amidst fierce fighting – in the multi-national Battle of Monte Cassino, which is carried out around a famous abbey in the southern Italian province of Frosinono. During the space of several months, the German troops are attacked in a campaign that involves American, British, New Zealand and Indian divisions, including the Ghurka Rifles, the French Expeditionary Corps (composed of Algerians, Tunisians and Moroccans), the Canadian Corps and the Polish Corps. In a series of battles beginning in January 1944, more than 54,000 Allied troops and more than 24,000 German soldiers will die. Some estimates are considerably higher.
Early attempts to take Monte Cassino, the hill on which the monastery is perched, fail. The Germans have built concrete bunkers and set up artillery positions in the slopes below the monastery. On 12 February 1944, the New Zealand Corps (comprising the 2nd New Zealand Division and the 4th Indian Division) under Commander Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg relieves the exhausted American forces.
On 15 February American planes reduce the monastery to ash and rubble. Several hundred civilians who had taken refuge in the monastery meet their deaths through the aerial bombing. Because of poor co-ordination, the Allied troops are too far away to take advantage of the element of surprise. The Germans are able to entrench themselves behind the ash and rubble. The attempt involving New Zealanders to take the mountain is repulsed. Two companies of the Maori Battallion capture Cassino railway station but are forced to withdraw, suffering heavy casualties.
In mid-March, there is massive aerial bombing of the town of Cassino and in the ensuing battle hundreds of New Zealand soldiers die. A further attack on the mountain by the New Zealanders fails as the steep area around the monastery is heavily mined. By late March, the New Zealand Corps are disbanded.
It is not until May 1944, when there is a concerted Allied offensive and the deception of a diversionary attack further north, that the ruins of the Monte Cassino monastery can finally be taken. The Polish Corps, together with New Zealand armoured regiments, are involved in the final assault. The way north is opened for the Allied troops, who are able to capture Rome on 4 June 1944.
The New Zealand fighter wing claims to have shot down ninety-nine Japanese aircraft during its wartime engagement. The danger of a Japanese attack disappears, enabling New Zealand to substantially reduce its troops in the Pacific in 1944. Some of the soldiers from the 3rd New Zealand Division return home; others are transferred to the New Zealand 2nd Division in Italy and are involved in the capture of Florence.
For a population of 1.7 million, the outlay of troops is enormous and is possible in such numbers only because New Zealand’s economy, based to a large extent on sheep and dairy farming, does not require too much manpower. The country is not involved in arms manufacturing, an industry that absorbs a considerable labour force in other countries involved in the war.
After the drastic discovery that England is unable to protect Australia and New Zealand from a Japanese attack in a dire situation, a change of direction takes place in the Dominions; New Zealand leans perceptibly towards the protecting ‘Great Power’, the United States. The country has had its own embassy in Washington for two years. In 1944, New Zealand signs the Canberra Pact with Australia, in which the two countries agree to collaborate over Pacific questions and establish a common defence zone extending as far as Western Samoa and the Cook Islands.
In Christchurch, one hardly senses that a war is going on. Americans are not yet stationed there – in 1944, the city still feels like England’s Cambridge in peacetime. The student Peter Munz has already settled in well; he feels very comfortable in New Zealand and has gained his honours degree in history the previous year.
Peter Munz still cherishes Communist ideals, as does his younger sister, who works in a bookshop. She is studying English literature and economics to keep abreast of the capitalists. Labour is re-elected in New Zealand and the Munz siblings prefer its socialist ideology to pure Communism. New Zealand, being similar in size to Great Britain but with less than two million inhabitants, seems an ideal place to project ‘Utopia’.
Peter retains respect for Popper’s expertise and intellectual breadth, although he is disappointed by Popper’s attitude to people. The philosopher makes it clear to people around him that he cannot develop further academically in New Zealand: ‘Popper felt like a fish out of water in exile here and definitely wanted to leave’, Peter Munz recalls some fifty years later. ‘During the war, of course this was not possible but he sometimes complained to friends in England and America about how badly he was treated in New Zealand, how little he had to eat and so on … He wanted them to help him get away. The whole thing with the letters is just terrible because they are in the archives today and all the young people who use the letters for research believe them.’ Karl Popper complains that he is badly paid – but he lives in a comfortable house with dream views and drives his own car, which at that time was quite uncommon.
Popper objects to the fact that he is refused adequate supplies of paper and accuses others of wanting to keep him from writing. Paper is in scarce supply during the war years – his students have to write on both sides of the page and also rip pages from the newspaper in order to scribble notes in the margins – the allocation of paper really is a nightmare for Karl Popper.
At the University College of Canterbury, he is subordinate to a man towards whom he feels a deep antipathy. The director of his department is a New Zealand anthropologist, who acquired the position for which Karl Popper had originally applied. As far as competence in his subject is concerned, Popper is clearly superior and if there is one thing he cannot abide, it is being subordinate to someone less competent. The Austrian philosopher feels overburdened by the teaching load, while his superior views the time Popper devotes to his own study with suspicion. The relationship between the two men develops into open confrontation. A veritable paper war breaks out: the director uses the argument of paper shortage caused by the war to make Popper pay for the considerable amount of paper he needs for his manuscripts.
As far as interpersonal skills are concerned, Popper leaves something to be desired; the same cannot be said for his ability to innovate. He takes on the reform of the entire New Zealand university system, succeeding in convincing his colleagues to do likewise. His goal is to open the teaching-oriented institution to a stronger focus on research.
At the same time, he allows nothing to prevent him from writing, not even his superiors. He is perturbed by the fact that he still does not have a publisher for the first volume of The Open Society and its Enemies and the second volume is already completed. Impatiently he awaits answers from friends, intermediaries and publishers. Refusals or requests for a contribution towards printing costs (which he is not prepared to make) come from the United States. He may have a car but like many New Zealanders he and his wife live mainly on produce from their garden and have to pay the mortgage. Popper has even made some items of furniture for their home himself. His wife supplements their income by giving private German lessons.
The acquisition of books is a luxury that has to be foregone at this time but the philosopher has bought a harmonium – no real substitute for the piano which stood in his home in Vienna, but at least he can play music again.
Although most New Zealanders accept the refugees with openness and without prejudice, some xenophobia rears its head just as it did in the later years of World War I. The Returned Servicemen’s Association, an association for returned soldiers, complains about the competition that the immigrants represent and demands that the government prohibit the sale of real estate in inner city areas to foreigners. The association has in mind instances such as inner city Auckland being overrun with thirty-two Chinese fruit shops in the first years of the war. At times, the association’s demands are accompanied by extremely inflammatory voices in the press. For instance, the 14 July 1944 issue of tabloid newspaper Truth attacks the ‘underhand relentless invasion of swarms of foreigners, slippery as eels, who have seized the opportunity by the horns and bought up small businesses, when their proprietors joined the Armed Forces or those, who entered the country as suffering needy victims of Nazi oppression in Europe and suddenly miraculously blossom here as owners of lucrative businesses and choice properties in the inner city’. These open and unmistakable attacks deeply wound those who did not leave their homeland willingly, not least because many of them were equally prepared to go to war for New Zealand without hesitation, an opportunity denied them because of their classification as ‘enemy aliens’.
The medical associations also resume their diatribes: after Jewish doctors, with years of professional experience, were required to requalify in Dunedin, they now blame them for successfully requalifying and building up their own practices. They are accused of stealing the practices of New Zealand doctors who are deployed in the war, instead of fulfilling their war duty.
Such reproaches are distressing for doctors like Alfred Heppner, whose practice in a poor suburb is probably envied by very few colleagues. In 1933 in Germany, Jewish doctors had to endure the silence of many of their colleagues who would not speak out against Jewish expulsion from the medical registry, because they realised that this would significantly improve their own career prospects. Now the same people who were defamed in Germany, although their lives are no longer in danger, once again experience being labelled as irksome competition. This is happening despite the fact that only thirty-four refugee doctors are practising in New Zealand at this time.
Snide remarks and attacks carry on throughout the year, although the press is not universally inflammatory – some journalists try to exercise a pacifying influence. Media representatives, particularly in Auckland, constantly warn against continuing to use discriminating terms such as ‘enemy alien’. The government concurs with this viewpoint.
Meanwhile the immigrants are frantic with concern for their relatives left behind in Europe; there are more and more radio and newspaper reports about conditions in concentration camps and wholesale mass murder by gassing. Words like Auschwitz and ‘final solution’ are dropped more and more frequently by the BBC – words which rob the immigrants of sleep.
Lotte Heppner, Alfred Heppner’s wife, is in a particularly bad emotional state. Her parents and brother remained behind in Oppeln, Upper Silesia. At the age of 26, holding 9-month-old baby Kim in her arms, she arrived with her husband Alfred in New Zealand, which represents their salvation. For several years she struggles to get entry permits for her family, running from one authority to the next, always in vain as the institutions responsible finally gave her to understand that there were too many German-Jewish refugees in the country.
News from relatives, which was in any case scant, has totally ceased! Censored, short and non-committal Red Cross cards came in 1941; in 1942, the last remaining signs of life cease. Since then Lotte Heppner has been sinking deeper and deeper into despair. Uncertainty and frantic worry about her relatives deplete her, mentally and emotionally. While she is in this state, Lotte brings her second child, Margaret, into the world. Having to care for a young life helps her retain her sanity.
Alice and Frank Briess hardly ever share their feelings about their remaining relatives; it makes them feel sad and leaves them feeling helpless. Alice has already suffered a second miscarriage. They too have tried everything to obtain further entry visas for New Zealand. They cannot forget the last news they received from their families and their pleas ‘Help us if it’s not already too late, before it is too late!’
At least they are inundated with work, which helps a little. About 60,000 members of the American Army are stationed around Auckland at that time and so there is a lot to do in their Centreway restaurant. The couple often meets with other Europeans. There is a small Czech club in Auckland, where some of their compatriots meet on Wednesdays. They have Czech and Slovakian products on display and collect money for the Czech Red Cross. The small club is overshadowed by sadness.
Karl Wolfskehl is meanwhile still without a home; for a while, he is accommodated in the Aratonga Convalescent Home near One Tree Hill in Auckland. Here the exiled poet regains a little of his internal calm. He describes its magnificent, subtropical yet homely garden to a woman in England. The letter concludes with the reassuring message: ‘The sisters and nurses here are attentive and understanding. My sense of equilibrium is returning accordingly.’
After the turbulence of the past year, Wolfskehl has begun to write poetry again in the soothing atmosphere of the convalescent home. Notwithstanding, the future is no longer rosy for him. He is conscious of becoming weaker and weaker and he misses Margot Ruben, who continues to see him regularly but has started to lead her own life. Amidst all of this, he feels exceedingly lonely.
It is the year of ‘total war’. Not only Europe but the whole world has been sucked into the maelstrom of war. By the end of 1944, over forty nations are in a state of war against Germany. The world powers – the Soviet Union, USA, and Great Britain – stake everything on forcing the National Socialist German state and its leader and Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, to capitulate unconditionally. ‘Germany first’ is therefore US President Roosevelt’s maxim for the war in Europe.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is at the helm when the most decisive military blow is carried out against the German Reich, the Western Allies’ invasion of Normandy. In June 1944, powerful Anglo-American-led forces land on the coast of northern France. At first, the Germans succeed in beating back the landing troops by marshalling all of their forces, but their front collapses at the end of July. The Allied troops advance into the French hinterland.
Nevertheless, the SS mobilises its last reserves for the ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question and consequently the twenty-sixth Jewish transport leaves the collection camp in Mechelen for Auschwitz on 31 July.
The Belgian orphanages have always been vulnerable, yet their peaceful atmosphere has lulled the younger children into believing that they will survive the war protected and be reunited with their family members who are still alive. However, this is a fallacy as the Germans have by no means forgotten the Jewish children in homes around the Belgian capital; in August previously prepared lists of ‘Jews within reach’ are being produced for Mechelen, the transfer camp from which transportations to Auschwitz depart. Among those on their records are Jewish children’s homes and rest homes. A night-time visit by the Gestapo finally convinces the home management that the Tiefenbrunner Home is now in its sights. After this deportation plan is leaked – and after hesitating far too long – the go-ahead is given, literally at the last second, to evacuate the Jewish establishments that were previously protected enclaves of the Red Cross. Numbered among them are the orphanages. Have they basked in a false sense of security too long?
Now everything has to happen quickly. The home directors, with the help of the largely Jewish clandestine underground movement the Comité de Défense des Juifs ( Jewish Defence Committee), which is connected to the Belgian resistance, manage to collect all 400 children from the children’s homes in and around Brussels and bring them to safety in a night-time operation. Many children from orphanages all over Belgium are hidden, including little Salomon Grynbaum, who has been given the name of André Gautier. ‘We were smuggled out of the home at night, put on a train and taken to Waesenborg, a small hamlet in central Belgium,’ he later recalls. ‘A Catholic priest greeted us. He brought us to a village and took us into a large church. The church nave was divided down the middle, two parts separated from each other by coverings and curtains; the girls went to one side, the boys to the other. We were totally churned up. We did not know whether we had been saved …’
When the Gestapo officials in Brussels want to clear the orphanage the next day they find it empty. The neighbours deny any knowledge of the children’s disappearance.
The retreat of the Germans, which is now finally beginning, prevents further persecution in Brussels as the availability of the German military constabulary for major search operations ceases. The military situation and the cloak-and-dagger operation save the children’s lives. However, the children, who have previously led a sheltered life according to strict orthodox rules, now have to cope with an unfamiliar environment.
Salomon Grynbaum and his friends from the home are so unsettled at first that they don’t eat any food. They don’t dare put on their kippot purely out of fear, but orthodox Jews are forbidden to eat without a head covering. The children do not know if the Catholic priest realises that Jewish children are involved. They get hungrier and hungrier. The priest now tries to find out why the boys aren’t eating. On the third day, he catches on, goes to them and says ‘Boys, put your caps on at last and say your blessing!’
The Germans barely offer any resistance to the second Allied landing in southern France on 15 August. Supported by the French Resistance, the Allies enter Paris on 25 August 1944 to the jubilation of the Parisian population and, parallel with this, they move closer and closer to the German Reich.
The beginning of September 1944 sees the start of Belgium’s liberation. Brussels, Antwerp and Luttich are liberated. Inhabitants in village after village cheer the liberators; there is kissing and embracing, some people cry. The Jewish orphans who have been hidden, stand amazed as American soldiers distribute chewing gum, sweets and chocolate.
The 20-year-old fighter pilot, Denis Adam, is with the British troops when they enter Holland along a broad front. Denis will later be deployed in Germany at Wunsdorf and afterwards at Lingen as an operational fighter-bomber pilot.
The demise of the German Reich is, however, a long-drawn-out process. In the greatest air landing operation of World War II, in mid-September, 35,000 Allied soldiers parachute behind the German lines near Arnhem and Nijmegen in order to take the Rhine bridges. The Allies’ operation is largely unsuccessful and constitutes the last major defensive victory of the war for the Germans.
In December a new German counter-offensive starts in the Ardennes in Belgium, in which the Germans try one last time to win back the upper hand on the western front, in what becomes known as the Battle of the Bulge. After its initial success, the German Ardennes Offensive fails and it costs the lives of tens of thousands of men.
On 24 March 1944, US President Roosevelt makes a declaration concerning Jewish persecution in the Third Reich. In it he describes the systematic annihilation of people as the worst crime in the history of the world. President Roosevelt announces that the perpetrators will be harshly punished but amidst it all, the mass murder in Auschwitz continues, the trains with their cattle trucks laden with people arrive at extermination camps unhindered, Jews continue to be gassed.
For a short period, all four members of the Silberstein family are in Auschwitz at the same time. The children are unaware of the parents’ presence. The parents have heard nothing more of Hansi since her deportation at the beginning of March 1943; they are uncertain about Fred’s fate, since he was dragged off in the summer of 1942. The children know nothing of what has been happening to their parents.
The parents were deported to Theresienstadt in the fourth major ‘elderly transport’ to the ghetto. Although German countrymen will later murder the friendly couple, the bureaucracy involved in this ‘process’ drags out over the entire year of 1944. There are lists and evaluations to prepare; the central credit office writes to the asset evaluation authority asking for precise documentation of credit balances, securities, properties and even bonds they may have with the Berlin electrical and gas supply companies. These are to be collated in an orderly way. After receiving a report from Keilig, a senior civil servant, the taxation department in Friedenau, Berlin, informs the asset evaluation authority in Moabit under the business reference number 05205–49/31525 that the ‘Jews who have been removed, labourers Berthold Isr. Silberstein and his wife, Käthe Sara née Wolff, are not obliged to pay income tax or property tax’. The financial president of the Berlin-Brandenburg asset evaluation authority compensates the manager of the Jew’s flat for rent lost over the past ten months because of the deportation. He has to forego a share of the heating and water costs, however.
At the end of October 1944, Hansi and Fred’s parents are transported from the Theresienstadt ghetto to the extermination camp of Auschwitz. Hansi’s mother told a fellow prisoner in Theresienstadt before they left that they hope to ‘catch up with Hansi’ there. A short time after their arrival, they are gassed.
Together with a female French prison doctor and two Jewish women doctors from Poland and Berlin, Hansi Silberstein has been working from March 1943 in the dental clinic at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They all have an ‘Auschwitz number’ tattooed on their arms but they are allowed to keep their hair and live in far more hygienic conditions than the rest of the prisoners. Blonde Hansi performs clerical work at the clinic and has to compile reports about how many patients are treated. The reports are sent to Berlin.
At first the clinic is well-equipped; there is a dentist’s chair, as well as all the necessary equipment and materials required for dental treatment, but word gets around that the SS man responsible is obviously too friendly towards the prisoners – he is soon sent to the front. Afterwards, filling materials are no longer provided. Treatment essentially consists of pulling out diseased teeth.
Sometimes it is possible to use the dental clinic as a place to rest. If a prisoner is too weak to work, she is sent to the dental clinic by the block supervisor so that she can rest there at least for a day and escape the intolerably cramped barracks, where the prisoners have to sleep sometimes six to a camp bed.
There are no toilets in the camp, only latrines with buckets. There are only a few washbasins to go around everyone – it is hard to keep clean. One day Hansi is going through the camp when she in some way attracts the attention of the supervisor. She is made to clean the latrines with her bare hands.
Not long afterwards Hansi starts looking for her friend who was sent to Auschwitz with her. Someone warns her not to go into the main camp because typhus is rampant there but she is not deterred. Hansi doesn’t find her friend but she does contract typhus and in the camp this is tantamount to a death sentence:
Fortunately we had our own rooms to sleep in at the camp, so I was able to lie there unobtrusively for two or three days. Our barrack was not far away from the barbed wire fence, you could see the street behind it. And so I had to lie there suffering from typhus and watch cars going back and forth from the camp to the crematorium. I just wept and wept the whole time and I wondered, ‘Why do they do this, why? We talk like them, we work like them …’ I longed for my parents and for my brother, Fred. I wept and lapsed into unconsciousness in-between times. After a few days, my condition began to improve.
Hansi learns that she is the only surviving person from the transport on which she arrived from Berlin. It took only two months to kill 2000 people.
In block 24 lie skeletons of those who have been murdered, whether through the extremely harsh slave labour, epidemics or simply arbitrarily. Hansi Silberstein watches the chimneys smoking day and night, sometimes with flames leaping out. The smell of burnt flesh perpetually hangs over the camp: ‘It was terrible; one focused constantly on surviving and not losing one’s mind in the face of such horror. People died en masse and then new masses of people came …’
From its inception, Auschwitz has been constantly expanded; Birkenau includes a gypsy camp with a children’s block and a family camp. The people who are now arriving are from Hungary, Greece or the Warsaw ghetto. They all receive a coffee-like drink each day, which Hansi believes contains a supplement to prevent women from menstruating.
Sometimes Dr Josef Mengele or one of his assistants comes to the dental clinic with twins whom he has selected for his medical experiments. The dentist has to examine whether the twins have the same dental features and Hansi has to record the results in Mengele’s files. The children are always brought here immediately after their arrival; the women at the dental clinic do not find out what happens to them afterwards.
They are, however, witnesses to other atrocities. ‘Right next to the dental clinic was an X-ray department. Adolescent boys were brought there from the main camp to sterilise them. Each day truck loads full of boys arrived, they were already so emaciated that their bones could be seen clearly. Then they were bombarded with heavy X-rays. I do not think they lived very long afterwards.’
In late August 1944, Hansi Silberstein is taken with the female French dentist daily to work in an outer camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There she sees SS keeping hens and pigs in a nearby camp separated from where she stands only by a fence. The animals are kept in houses in which Jews previously used to live; in contrast to the prisoners’ barracks, the animals’ accommodation is heated. She sees glasshouses in which flowers are growing. Hansi does not know that her brother Fred is also in Auschwitz.
For months, 16-year-old Fred has had to slave away working in a Todeskommando (a ‘death detail’ composed of prisoners who are not expected to live) in Buna-Monowitz, otherwise known as Auschwitz III. The company I.G. Farben has erected a plant for the production of synthetic rubber and oil with its own concentration camp. The ‘work engagement’ of some thousand prisoners was arranged with the Reich SS Commander Heinrich Himmler to the mutual satisfaction of both parties. When I.G. Farben realised that its productivity and profits were threatened by the quick passing on, in other words, the mass death of its ‘workers’, it makes an agreement with the SS, according to which ‘all weak prisoners can be removed, to guarantee that an almost full performance can be achieved, comparable with that of a German worker’.
For many weakened prisoners, this agreement resembles a death sentence, as daily selections are now made on the basis of ‘suitability for work’ while prisoners are standing at the assembly place in front of the barracks, or marching out with the Arbeitskommandos (‘work details’) early in the morning. Statements made about the work performance of the prisoners by their foremen are passed on: a comment about an unfulfilled work quota spells imminent death. The weakened prisoner is then loaded onto a truck and transferred to the extermination camp of Birkenau nearby, where he is sent without hesitation to the gas chambers.
At least 50,000 people died in the construction of I.G. Farben’s rubber plant; of the 35,000 prisoners who work as slave labourers at the plant through to 1945, at least 25,000 die.
Fred Silberstein was lucky – he was assigned to a work detail for heating and sanitary plants but was not long afterwards given work within the camp, which was a little easier.
Not long after this change, I believe it was in August 1944, Josef Mengele reappeared. He came every Saturday. We had to appear naked before a team of SS officers and doctors and Mengele was one of those who decided who had to die and who could continue living – for a time. Besides this, he selected people for his medical experiments. One day we were standing in line once again, when he pointed his finger at me. I had to step forward. I went to another barrack, where I was operated on. I was laid on the operating table, then six men held me down. I was slit open from my stomach to my legs without anaesthetic, I screamed like crazy and kept fainting.
It is not over in one session. Each time the gash in Fred’s groin is in the process of healing, it is opened up again, each time without anaesthetic, and it is smeared with different preparations to observe the healing progress. Fred does not know why these things are happening to him; it is only after the war that he learns that these experiments were for wound healing, designed to benefit wounded German soldiers.
Other prisoners in the barracks experience the same thing. On Thursdays, women are also taken there from another part of the camp. Fred hears their screams through the wooden walls; the kapos tell them that the women are being treated with electric shocks.
Some days Fred’s only wish is to die. Sometimes he clings to childhood memories to get through it all. He tries to remember being allowed to go to Upper Silesia with relatives by train … or on outings with Hansi and his father to the Wannsee lakes where they went swimming.
In November 1944, shortly before his seventeenth birthday, even this no longer helps him; Fred attempts to take his life by slashing his wrists. Other Jewish prisoners find him and bring him back to life. They comfort him and implore him to hold out as the Russian Army is already advancing. ‘At some point news went through the camp that the prisoners were to be taken from Auschwitz back to Germany. I could hardly walk because of the severe wounds in my groin and it was obvious that those who were not capable of walking would be shot. So I removed myself from the sickness barrack and dragged myself unobtrusively back to my own barrack.’
Not to be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by the Jews in April 1943, which was brutally crushed, the underground Polish Home Army opposes the German occupiers in the Warsaw Uprising beginning 1 August 1944. The 1944 Warsaw Uprising is bloodily beaten back in October. Over 170,000 Warsaw inhabitants lose their lives in the reprisals by the Germans. Some 55,000 Polish civilians are deported to concentration camps, including 13,000 to Auschwitz, and others are sent to forced labour camps within Germany. Amongst the civilians are many women and children, who are transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Some children are more fortunate. On 31 October 1944, an American ship reaches Wellington’s coastline. On board are 103 adult escorts and 733 children who came to be known as the ‘Polish orphans’.
Most of the children are orphans and some have lost siblings as well; others have been separated from their families. When Poland was invaded by Germany and Russia in 1939 the country was effectively partitioned between the Nazi occupiers and the Soviets. The Russians deported vast numbers of servicemen and civilians to ‘gulags’ and enforced settlements in remote areas including Siberia and central Asia. Many did not survive the hardships. After Germany’s attack on Russia in 1941, Stalin declared a general amnesty for the Poles in its territories. It enabled the Polish Army to reform to some degree and in 1942 over 100,000 Polish soldiers and civilians, including thousands of orphans, made a gruelling journey to Persia (present-day Iran).
In 1944, able-bodied men and women leave for training in the Middle East and go on to fight in North Africa, the Middle East and Italy. Their families and thousands of orphans are left behind under the temporary protection of Persia. New Zealand’s willingness to help people in need is again tested. The Polish government-in-exile in London makes appeals worldwide on their behalf and after the visit of an earlier ship en route to Mexico, New Zealand responds. After an arduous journey to Bombay, the children board an American ship. On 1 November 1944, Prime Minister Peter Fraser goes on board ship to welcome the Polish children to New Zealand.
The New Zealand government’s response does not represent a departure from its ‘closed door’ policy as acceptance of the children is planned only for the duration of the war. The children are accommodated in that spacious camp close to Pahiatua, north of Wellington, in which the ‘enemy aliens’ were temporarily interned. Many of the adult refugees are taken back to their original camp on Somes Island as the threat from Japan has receded. The children are taught in Polish and the camp is renamed the Polish Children’s Camp.
Karl Wolfskehl celebrates his 75th birthday but feels that his friends have forgotten him. In Jerusalem there is a commemoration held in his honour but letters dribble through only very sporadically from Europe to his exile in Auckland. The poet no longer lives in the Aratonga Convalescent Home: in order to live more independently again, he has moved to a small boarding house, which is within his means. Margot Ruben lives only a few streets away from him and so she is able to help the almost blind man with his correspondence and read to him occasionally.
Frank Sargeson does not appear at Wolfskehl’s home any longer. Wolfskehl wonders if he has overtaxed his friend with his demands on his time and energy. The New Zealander’s initial overflowing admiration for the German scholar and poet, ‘the blind genius’, has increasingly given way to pity for a needy old man whom he nevertheless holds in high esteem as a poet. Among the people who come to visit in the autumn of 1944 are Jewish refugees, including the Blumenfeld family, Alice and Wolf Strauss and Paul Hoffman, who shared the same plight of having to flee Europe. Karl Wolfskehl follows the Allies’ advance in Europe with optimism – after their victory over the Nazis, he might venture to return to his familiar circle.
Peter Munz in Christchurch does not have the same experience. Nothing attracts the 23-year-old to Germany any longer. He has just received his Masters degree. His final grades are so high that the history professor at Victoria University College, who is seeking an assistant and enquires after suitable candidates from his colleagues in other parts of the country, chooses Peter.
The young man formerly from Chemnitz now moves from Christchurch to the capital. His future prospects could not be brighter. Scarcely has he become an assistant at Victoria University than he is granted a scholarship to Cambridge University. So it will be Europe after all. Of course, he cannot go to Cambridge for the time being, as the war is still in progress, but its end is in sight.
Ever more impatiently Karl Popper looks towards England. His research methods have provoked divided opinions in academic circles in Christchurch but by no means does he have only opponents. In January 1944, the Australian neuroscientist John Carew Eccles arrives in Dunedin from England. The later Nobel prize-winner takes up a professorship at the other university in the South Island and he still remembers decades later how Popper impressed him with his reasoning.
I had heard wonderful stories about the academic whirlwind that a philosopher, Karl Popper, from Canterbury had caused. I immediately felt enthusiastic about Popper’s argument that a problem must first be defined in science. Then one must propose hypothetical solutions and then try to test these through selected experiments, that is, one must undertake the attempt to falsify them. I was absolutely convinced by Popper’s destructive attack on the inductive method of science, in which I had naïvely believed until then.
At last Popper’s manuscript ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’ that no one had previously wanted to publish, has found a prominent advocate: it is in the hands of Friedrich August von Hayek, an Austrian national economist and Keynesian opponent. Karl Popper reacts to this news with euphoria but these feelings are short lived. ‘The printing will happen,’ he reads in a letter from London, ‘but it is not possible now – there is still a war on!’
The philosopher lurches into bouts of depression again. He suffers from periods of exhaustion; his physical reserves are so depleted that he loses nine teeth.
In October 1944 at Auschwitz, a Sonderkommando, a special unit of men who were forced to work in the crematoria and remove corpses in the gas chambers, rebels and partly destroys one crematorium. However their revolt is soon bloodily squashed. A month later, on 25 November, gassing installations and crematoria at Auschwitz begin to be dismantled on Himmler’s orders. Parts of the death chambers are to be sent to Gross-Rosen, a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, and Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz. By Christmas 1944, the Red Army is advancing westwards at an ever more threatening speed. In Auschwitz, rumours are circulating that the camp will shortly be freed by the partisans; the SS have already begun to clear camps in the east and send prisoners to Germany.