"Why Not 13?" Tales from the Holocaust

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I’ve been collecting stories about the Holocaust recently. I thought other educators might find them of some use. 

These tend to be tales of the lucky, those who survived. They include a man saved by his pencil, the lone survivor from a sunken ship, and a dozen Jewish children rescued by a good Dutch soul. “Why not 13?” he asked himself later. 

Why could he not have rescued one more soul?

Imagine how many hearts were broken during the Holocaust.

(The story of the ring follows below.)

 

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Sports Illustrated ran a story recently, “Remember the Ringleader,” about a Dutch soccer star who perished in the Holocaust. 

As a teacher, I always felt the number of victims, by itself had little impact on my students. If 6,000,000 Jews and as many as 10,000,000 others died in Nazi death camps, what did those numbers represent? In fact, the story of the Holocaust is now fading from view. A 2018 poll of American millennials showed that two-thirds did not know what “Auschwitz” was. 

More than 1 in 5 said they had never heard of the Holocaust, or if they had, they didn’t remember.

 

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The twins were gassed.

To teach about the Holocaust effectively, it helps to personalize the tragedy, to focus on the human beings, their hopes and fears and dreams and terrors, who make up that vast universe of tragedy. 

Eddy Hamel, a Dutch Jew, was one such individual. Hamel arrived at Auschwitz after a 36-hour train ride from Holland in January 1943. His wife Johanna and twin sons, Paul and Robert, were with him, packed in railroad box cars, served no food, with no toilet facilities and almost nothing to drink. 

If I were teaching today, I’d ask my students: What fears do you think this father had? What might have scared his wife? Were the boys, not yet old enough to go to school, afraid? Or had their parents calmed their fears? 

What did the Hamels imagine lay ahead? 

They were only four in a shipment of 659 Dutch Jews, including 240 men and boys and 419 women and girls who arrived at Auschwitz on that day. Two other trainloads of Jews, 5,284 arrived from Belarus, then part of Russia, around the same time. Of that number 4,510 were immediately gassed, including 1,207 children. Only 19 men and 50 women were spared from Hamel’s group. 

“Männer zur linken! Frauen nach rechts!” the new arrivals heard guards shout as they left the crowded cars. “Men to the left! Women to the right!” 

Leon Greenman, 32, was one of the few Dutch Jews spared that day and assigned to work detail. 

Eddy Hamel, 40, was another. 

Paul Hamel, 4, was gassed. 

Robert Hamel, 4, was gassed. 

Johanna Hamel was gassed. 

Greenman’s wife and two-year-old son were gassed.

 

I’d ask students: Think of those 590 Dutch Jews or those 1,207 children from Belarus. Think of their lives cut short? Would you want to die today? What last words would your mother share with you if she knew both of you were about to die? What did these children miss in all the years that they did not live? 

The sheer magnitude of the numbers deadens the senses. So personalize. Of an estimated 1.3 million prisoners who arrived at Auschwitz, 1.1 million were immediately gassed. 

Many others perished in days and weeks and months at a camp, as Sports Illustrated writes, “secretly administered by bullet, poisonous injection, medical experiment, beating, overwork and malnutrition.”  

On that fateful day in January 1943, neither Greenman nor Hamel had any idea what fates awaited. Greenman, who survived the war, later wrote about his experience at Auschwitz, noting that he saw suitcases piled high and buried in drifts of snow beside the tracks. “Where are the people who packed up their few belongings, their most treasured items, and brought them along on the train?” he wondered. “What had happened to the owners?” 

At that point during the war, it is unlikely that any of the victims realized what was coming until too late. “To believe such a thing,” said one survivor, that mass murder awaited, “you had to cease being human.”

 

In 1922, Eddy Hamel had been known as a star right wing for Ajax, in those days the Netherlands’ “biggest football club and probably the country’s most popular institution after the royal family.” Hamel wasn’t a big scorer, but his speed and passing ignited the Ajax attack, earning him the nickname, “Belhamel,” or the Ringleader. The club played at Houten Stadion (Wooden Stadium), which seated 11,000 fans; but attendance often swelled to 20,000 with crowds lining the pitch. In those days, European soccer clubs were just that, clubs. Players were not paid until the 1950s. 

What was Hamel like on the field? An elderly Ajax fan gave this description of Hamel to a reporter years later. Hamel, he recalled, was a “tall boy, black hair combed back. Not a product of the Jewish Quarter. He was what you might call an idol. Eddy Hamel, I can still see him before me. Quick, and he had a very good cross. Something like David Beckham now.” 

Houten Stadion happened to be located close by the Jewish Quarter in Amsterdam and the fan base was heavily Jewish. Even today, fans of Ajax may have tattoos of the “Star of David” on their arms or carry Jewish paraphernalia to games to show their support. Rival fans have been known to “hiss” at such displays, mimicking the sound of gas entering the chambers, proving that some lessons in history are never fully learned. Over the course of eight seasons, Hamel played in 125 games with Ajax, before wrecking his knee. In 1929 he married his wife Johanna in an Amsterdam synagogue. Five years later the young couple celebrated the birth of their sons. Hamel was coaching by then, sometimes as many as three teams at once. One team paid him in fish.

 

After the Germans took over the Netherlands in 1940, Hamel was, like all Jews, banned by law from involvement in sports. According to Sports Illustrated he continued to play for Lucky Ajax, the club’s alumni team. On October 27, 1942 he was arrested after two officers of the Jewish Affairs division of the Amsterdam Police Department spotted him on the street without wearing a Jewish star. Hamel and his family were sent to a detention center at Westerbork. That camp, remembered one prisoner, “was designed to project calmness. The Germans wanted to keep prisoners pacified until they went to die.” There was a cabaret there, a good hospital, an orchestra, and on Sunday even soccer games were played. 

Again, if you personalize the victims, I think it helps. Since many students play soccer today, you could ask: What do you think Hamel loved about the game? 

With luck, perhaps, Hamel could have survived the war; but it would have been freak luck at best. In the short time they worked together in the camp, Greenman and Hamel became friends. Early on, they agreed not to talk about their loved ones. “We saw the smoking chimneys, heard the tales about the crematoria, but we convinced ourselves that they were just factories.” Greenman had his ID number 98288 tattooed on his left forearm. Hamel, in line next, probably received 98289. “Our conditions were turning some of into different people,” Greenman later wrote. “Not all of us—some remained almost the same as they arrived. Eddie Hamel was always a gentlemen [sic].” The two shared a wooden bed without a mattress. It was built for one man, but eight prisoners packed it, in a stack of three similar beds. Greenman remembers lying tight beside Hamel because the barracks was unheated and his friend’s body helped keep him warm. 

One day, Greenman remembers guards leading everyone in the barracks to a room where they were forced to strip. 

“Leon, what’s going to happen to me?” Eddy asked. “I have an abscess in my mouth.” Greenman took a look and saw it was badly swollen. 

Eddy was soon led away. 

“I never saw him again. It took a few months before I realized that they really did gas people,” Greenman said.

 

Gas them they did. Eddy’s parents, Moses and Eva Hamel, and his sister Estella died at Sobibor that year. His sister Hendrika died at Auschwitz in the fall of 1942, before Eddy arrived. 

No records have been found to tell us what happened to his sister Celina, but it can be assumed that she too was a victim of the Holocaust.

Hamel, front row, left.

1933-1945: Holocaust

 

“Naked ruthless force reduced to an exact science.”

1933 

This item is from Remember the Women, in a NYT book review (April 12, 2015); a story of Ravensbruck camp. 

Overall, the Germans set up 980 concentration camps; 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos and 500 brothels where women served as sex slaves. Ravensbruck opened in 1939, for women, at first, “asocials,” prostitutes, “race defilers,” and criminals, including political prisoners and Roma (Gypsies). 

At this camp the killings usually involved workers who could no longer serve, who were sick or weak from hunger. Polish “rabbits” were subjected to medical experiments, including breaking their legs to work on repair procedures, insertion of contaminated material to study treatments for German soldiers. Russian army women tried to resist – refused to make munitions – tried to hold onto uniforms. After the war those who survived were sometimes sent to Siberia, on false charges of having collaborated with the Germans. 

At Ravensbruck, killings became a way to make room for healthier arrivals. 

Himmler’s mistress had a baby at a clinic not far from the camp and he took a special interest in the camp. Siemens and Daimler-Benz both used slave labor and sent prisoners back to the camps when they could no longer work. With the Russians approaching, Dr. Carl Clauberg continued to sterilize prisoners. Rudolf Hoss, commandant at Auschwitz and then Ravensbruck, admitted later, in the words of author Sarah Helm, that the urge to kill “was nurtured for so long in the Nazi psyche that it eventually ran of its own volition, impossible to extinguish.” 

Gandhi once called Hitler’s regime “naked ruthless force reduced to an exact science.”

 

*

 

A deck stacked for death.

1933

 

Problems for the Reich family began as soon as the Nazis came to power in Germany. Ely (Dux) Reich had been a nurse in World War I, and for her service was awarded the Iron Cross. Wilhelm Reich, her husband, was an engineer; but they were Jews, and he was forced out of his job.

 

In 1940, the family fled to Yugoslavia, where Wilhelm died of natural causes. When Nazis invaded, Ely sent their two children, Werner, and his sister Renate, into hiding, with different families. Eventually, Werner was found and arrested. While at the police station, he looked out a window and saw his mother in the prison yard. He never saw her again.

 

After the war, Werner explained how he managed to survive, when millions of others did not. First, he was sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. That camp was used by the Nazis to disguise the real fate of most of the Jews they had arrested. Conditions there were not nearly so harsh as in other camps – and Nazi leaders could point to Theresienstadt for propaganda purposes. See? These camps aren’t really so bad.

 

Rumors of mass extermination were said to be false.

 

As The New York Times explained, “At the Theresienstadt concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic, one of [Werner’s] jobs was to exterminate vermin with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon B, which the Germans used in gas chambers.” 

 

His luck changed eventually, and he was sent to Auschwitz.

 

…At Auschwitz, when he and other prisoners ran naked past Dr. Josef Mengele, who would decide who was fit enough to work and who went to the gas chambers, they tried to appear robust enough to avoid being selected for death.

 

“We were running for our lives,” Mr. Reich told The New York Times in 2017 for a profile about him. “We tried to look bigger, stronger. We’d smile, do anything under the sun to look for work.”

 

Mengele decided Werner was one of the prisoners who could still work. Luck again.

 

Then a deck of cards changed his life. Luck again for Werner, and an older prisoner, who became his friend: 

In the Auschwitz barracks where starving, emaciated, dying men were crammed six to a bed, Werner Reich’s closest neighbor was a gentlemanly German Jewish man in his 30s named Herbert Levin, who had been known before World War II as Nivelli the magician.

 

One day in early 1944, Mr. Reich, then 16, returned to the barracks from a work assignment, climbed to the top of his three-tier bunk and watched Mr. Levin shuffle the dirty deck of cards that prison guards had given him so that he could entertain them – a bit of protection against being sent to the extermination camp’s gas chamber.

 

“And I couldn’t understand it, you know – having a deck of cards in Auschwitz was like finding a gorilla in your bathroom,” Mr. Reich recalled in a TEDx Talk in 2020. “And then Mr. Levin turned to me and offered me the deck and said, ‘Pick a card.’ So I picked a card, and he performed a card trick for me.”

 

To a teenager who had never seen a card trick, he said, it was a “miracle.”

 

Mr. Levin explained the trick, and Mr. Reich replayed the instructions in his mind for the rest of his time at Auschwitz – a distraction that helped him survive its horrors – and then through a 35-mile death march in snow and ice on the way to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Only after he was liberated and found his way to England several years later did he buy a deck of cards and perform the magic on his own.

 

“And it worked,” he said. “It worked beautifully.”

 

Mr. Reich, who became an engineer after his immigration to the United States, never lost his love of magic, performing close-up tricks with cards and coins for small groups of other magicians, at temples and at his sons’ birthday parties.

 

Many of the prisoners who were forced to march from Auschwitz died from beatings, cold and exhaustion. Werner suffered from frostbite and lost parts of the toes on his right foot. He could easily have died in his final months of imprisonment at Mauthausen, but luck was still with him – and not with him – and the U.S. Army liberated the camp on May 5, 1945. 

The Times adds: “He was 17. He weighed 64 pounds.”

 

After the war, he returned to Yugoslavia for two years. Then he fled to England to escape Communist rule. There he met his future wife, Eva Schiff, also one of the lucky ones during the war.

 

She was among the 669 Czech children, mostly Jews, who were rescued before the outbreak of World War II in 1939 by Sir Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker, who used bribes, forgery and secret contacts with the Gestapo to bring the children to Britain by train and boat.

 

[Reich] and Miss Schiff married in England and emigrated to the United States in 1955. After earning a bachelor’s degree at City College in New York, he worked as an engineer at Nabisco and the Hills supermarket chain.

 

Good luck for one, here and there. Hideous luck for millions. Werner and Eva had two sons, David and Mikal, and they had children too. His sister, Renate also survived and came to America in 1948. She married, and spent the next half century in the United States.

 

Werner never knew what happened to Herbert Levin. He kept practicing magic tricks, and eventually became quite good. Levin, it turned out, had also survived the war, and also emigrated to the U.S. He died in 1977, but Werner did not learn of his death for thirty years. Then he read a story about the magician who probably saved his life. Werner’s own story became the subject of an autobiography, The Death Camp Magicians.

 

In a deck stacked for death, Werner had always picked the right card.

POSTSCRIPT: A few lines from a poem written in 2014, “Could Have,” by Wislawa Szymborska, seem appropriate here:

 

It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left. 

 *

A special family picture.

1938 

On Kristallnacht, a group of Nazis stormed into the Muller family’s apartment in Nuremberg, and used axes to smash furniture, featherbeds, a cupboard filled with jars of jam and pickles, and even a piano and cello. In the wake of that night of great destruction – and murder for others – Norbert Muller, his sister Susanne, and his parents Sebald and Laura , began making plans to leave Germany; but they could only manage to get Norbert to the Netherlands, and later to Britain, as part of a program that saved 10,000 children from German-occupied countries. 

For two years, the boy and his family were able to exchange letters. Included in one letter was a family picture, with Norbert spliced in, between his sister and mother. In late 1941, however, his loved ones were shipped to a concentration camp at Riga, in Latvia. A few months later, they were taken to a forest with thousands of others, shot down, and buried in a mass grave. 

The family photo.

 

In 1944, Norbert – now going by the name of Norman Miller – joined the British Army, where he put his ability to speak German to good use interrogating prisoners. On May 7, 1945, Miller was posted at a checkpoint in Hamburg, when a brown Opel, which had been driving erratically, was ordered to stop. Inside, there were four men, and a check of papers revealed to Miller, as he later remembered, that “we have a big Nazi fish here.” 

That “fish” was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, a top German official. Miller recognized his name and face from stories in the newspaper; and he was placed under arrest. (Seyss-Inquart would be hanged on October 16, 1946, for his war crimes.) Miller later emigrated to the United States, where he married and started a family. But it was not until 1999, during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, that he told his family about the arrest. 

In 2013, he and his son Steven traveled to Riga, to visit the site of the mass grave, and filled three vials of soil, including one for Michael, his other son. When  Norman died in 2024, at age 99, his relatives sprinkled the dirt from the three vials onto his coffin. 

As The New York Times explained, “In his eulogy, Steven Miller said that the purpose of sprinkling the coffin with the Riga soil was ‘so that they, who were torn from him and never had a proper burial of their own, can finally be prayed over and reunited and laid to rest with their son.’”

 

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A train headed for life.

1938 

On December 10, 500 Jewish children board a Kindertransport train in Vienna, bound for England and safety. This train is headed for life, where so many others will be headed for death. Lore Groszmann, 10, is Child Number 152, and one of the fortunate who will escape the hells of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Treblinka. 

An only child, she will live with four different foster families, until her parents also escape, on domestic servant visas, and join her. 

Later, she would emigrate to New York, and write a novel, Other People’s Houses, based on her real-life experiences. As The New York Times explains in Segal’s [her married name] obituary:

 

One of its early, artful scenes describes the fallout from a knackwurst rotting in Ms. Segal’s luggage while aboard the Kindertransport. It was a last-minute treat from her doting parents that she forgets is there. Its pungent smell becomes a proxy for Ms. Segal’s sense of herself as human contraband, and also an opportunity for some humor: When the offending package is finally discovered, flooding young Lore with shame, she hears another child exclaim, “And it isn’t even kosher!”

 

The young girl would go on to a tumultuous relationship with a much older African American man, then be fixed up on a date with David Segal, whom she married in 1961. (He would die of a heart attack just seven years later.) In 1985, she would tackle America’s racial taboos in another novel based on her experiences, Her First American. As the Times explains:

 

The book was Ms. Segal’s rendering and reckoning of her own five-year relationship with Horace R. Cayton, a Black sociologist who died in 1970 at 66. He is Carter Bayoux in her novel, and Ms. Segal’s stand-in is Ilka Weissnix, a surname that translates to know-nothing, as Ilka explains to Carter, who disputes her translation and supplies his own: not-white, because she was Jewish.

 

Ms. Segal and Mr. Cayton met in a creative-writing class at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan; she was in her 20s, and he was in his 50s, and it was a coup de foudre not destined to last – he was already too far gone in his alcoholism.

 

In the novel, the couple meet at a bar in Nevada; Ilka is searching for “the real” America on a train trip out West. Carter Bayoux becomes her guide and lover. The cultural critic Stanley Crouch, writing in the foreword to the book’s 20th-anniversary edition, called it “a quiet, unassuming, hilarious and bold novel that may or may not be a masterpiece.” He described Carter Bayoux as the most complex Black character in American fiction since the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.”

 

Segal would later tell a reporter that the novel took eighteen years to write. Ilka was the character that gave her most difficulty, so, “I settled on making her a newcomer and a naïf because I wanted to trace her Americanization and her growing sophistication by the use of her language.” 

In her old age, she will compare her efforts to describe the human condition, to Robert Frost, who once said of poetry: “It stays our confusion.”

 

“Other People’s Houses” concluded with the author’s wonderment at her own tentative place in the New World: “But I, now that I have children and am about the age my mother was when Hitler came, walk gingerly and in astonishment upon this island of my comforts, knowing that it is surrounded on all sides by calamity.”

 

She also wrote children’s books, raised her two children, a son and a daughter, and helped with three grandchildren, before dying at age 96.

 

*

 

A Tour of Hell.

1939

 

In a NYT book review of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, the reviewer cites the case of Moritz Choinowski, a Polish-born Jew who survived six years in the camps, 1939 until the end of the war. His tour of Hell included stops at Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Dachau.

 

A few details from the book and review:

 

Primo Levy: “Trains heavily laden with human beings went in each day, and all that came out was the ashes of their bodies, their hair, the gold of their teeth.”

 

Hans Loritz, SS, who took over one camp explained, “In regards to discipline, I am a swine.”

 

Rudolph Hoss had been wounded in WWI; he rose in the ranks and took over at Auschwitz in 1940. Female prisoners worked as tailors and hairdressers for his wife. “Every wish of my wife, of my children, was met,” he explained.

 

The first use of Zyklon-B, there in 1941, dispatched a group of Russian POW’s. “One could see that these people had scratched and bitten each other in a fit of madness before they died,” one witness admitted.

 

Hoss was pleased with this new method of killing, sparing his SS soldiers the trauma that followed mass shooting bloodbaths.

 

At Auschwitz some prison doctors decided it was best to kill newborns and therefore spare the mothers for work. Olga Lengyel arrived at the camp with her son. When asked by an SS physician, Dr. Fritz Klein, how old the boy was she made sure to tell him he was under 13, and only looked older. This was her way, she hoped, of sparing him a life of hard labor. At Auschwitz nearly all prisoners under age 14 were gassed, her son among them.

 

After the war she still wondered, “How should I have known?”

  

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“We never knew when a friend would die.”

1939

 

NYT obit, 3/18/18: Kalman Aron was born near Riga in 1924. His mother, Sonia, was from Lithuania. His father, Chaim, was a custom women’s shoemaker from Russia. After the German invasion his father was taken away for a work detail and never seen again. The rest of the family was herded into the Riga ghetto in 1941. His mother was one of 25,000 Jews taken to the nearby forests and murdered later that year.

 

Kalman was later shipped to a series of camps where he was used for slave labor. “I survived by disappearing,” he later explained. “In the camps, we never knew when a friend would die. So one way to protect yourself, to insulate yourself, was to be alone. A deep stark place of loneliness is where I was.”

 

Guards soon discovered he had artistic talent (he had been a prodigy at age seven). He would sketch their pictures or make renderings of their photographs of loved ones and girlfriends. They would give him extra food or a blanket. “They wouldn’t pay me anything, but I would get a piece of bread, something to eat. Without that,” he later explained, “I wouldn’t be here.” “I made it through the Holocaust with a pencil,” he once told a filmmaker.

 

He had a brother who also survived the war; but they lost touch after the Iron Curtain descended. After the war an American soldier noticed Aron’s talents. He had sketched his girlfriend; the soldier brought him to the attention of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Aron enrolled on a scholarship. The NYT notes: “He moved to the United States in 1949, newly married, unable to speak English, by his account, carrying only $4.” He settled in California, illustrated maps to make a living, “but also completed a pastel portrait drawn from an indelible, haunting memory: of a mother clutching her child so tightly to her face that they are almost fused together.” He later made a larger version which hangs in the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.

 

Later he switched to different themes, “vibrant landscapes and portraits,” with famous clients. Ronald Reagan and Henry Miller both commissioned works. He was married four times and had one son. “In the camps, I looked at and studied people,” he later recalled. “The Holocaust gave me an understanding of people that most people won’t understand.”

"The Lost Children" by Aron.

"Susan" by Aron, painted long after the war.

 

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“Above all, we must love God.”

1939

 The New York Times reports on a legal fight involving records kept by the Kusserow family, members of a pacifist religion, later purchased by a German museum. 

The archive documents the lives and suffering of the family of Franz and Hilda Kusserow, devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, who were raising their 11 children in a large house in Bad Lippspringe in northern Germany when the Nazis came to power. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were the first religious denomination to be banned, and the Kusserows’ home was searched for religious materials by the Gestapo 18 times.

 

In 1939, the three youngest children were abducted from their school and sent to a Nazi training school, where they were denied contact with their family. Franz, Hilda and the other children were all sentenced to prison terms. Two of the brothers, Wilhelm and Wolfgang, were executed as conscientious objectors.

 

On April 26, 1940, the evening before he was executed, Wilhelm sent a letter to his family.

 

“All of you know how much you mean to me, and I am repeatedly reminded of this every time I look at our family photo,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, above all we must love God, as our Leader Jesus Christ commanded. If we stand up for him, he will reward us.”

 

In the end, 1,600 Jehovah’s Witnesses died at the hands of the Nazis. Another 4,200 were sent to concentration camps, where they were identified by purple triangles on their prison uniforms. 

In a member of the faith was willing to renounce his or her beliefs, they could be freed from the camps. Very few did.

 

*

 

Letters for Sala.

1940

 

NYT obituary (3/14/18): Sala Kirschner dies at 94. Born Sala Garncarz in 1924 in Sosnowiec, Poland.

 

At age 16 she was sent to a Nazi labor camp and survived, unlike so many, till the war’s end. What made her story unique was her ability to hide 350 letters, postcards, and notes – and pass them on many years later to her family. Her parents were gassed at Auschwitz as were most of 35,000 Jews deported from her hometown during the war. Four siblings also died during the Holocaust.

 

For years, Sala kept her letters from her children. “I wanted to raise them in a normal way,” she once explained, “and not have them take on the burden of their mother.”

 

In the camps, however, letters from family helped her survive. “If I was lonely, I would take out these letters and read them over and over again. It was my way of feeling close to them.”

 

The young woman was lucky, in a sense, because in some labor camps workers were granted limited privileges. At first, the Germans wanted the world (and even other Jews) to believe such camps were ordinary work sites. Prisoners were allowed to send and receive mail. (The Times notes the scope of the destruction: none of Sala’s letters to relatives have survived, nor did most of those she loved.) Sala was first sent to a labor camp in Geppersdorf, Germany. Male inmates built a stretch of autobahn; female inmates peeled potatoes and sewed swastikas on German uniforms.

 

In one letter, her sister Raizel talks about life in the ghetto back home, coding the news of a mass deportation. There had been a “big wedding here to which I wasn’t invited.”

 

“Be happy, be glad and thank God a thousand times every day that you still have somebody to whom you can write with the way things are going here,” she wrote in May 1942. Not long after Raizel and her sister Blima were sent to labor camps. (Both sisters survived and ended up in Sweden after the war.)

 

“Don’t worry about us,” Raizel added. “But we’re worried about our dear precious parents. We don’t know what happened to them. May God give us some great news.”

 

God did not.

 

Even under extreme conditions, love could not entirely be extinguished. Sala kept a diary for a few months. She speaks of an older “guardian angel,” her friend, Ala Gartner, back home. Gartner would be sent to Auschwitz and hanged later for participating in a camp uprising.

 

On another occasion a Czech Jew, Harry Haubenstock, passed along a note to the young Polish girl. “You look very cute in your pajamas,” he wrote. As for his own appearance, he admitted, “I hardly recognize myself any longer. I have changed so much, and if someone were to see me now, they would hardly believe that I should be capable of such a deep and sincere love.”

 

When the Germans occupied Poland, Raizel was chosen to go to the labor camps first. Sala, “shrewd and resourceful,” in the words of the Times, “felt her older sister was too bookish to weather the camp and volunteered to take her place.”

 

Sala survived the war; later she hitchhiked back to Sosnowiec, discovered her family was gone. Her future husband, Cpl. Sidney Kirschner, an American G.I. spotted her in the women’s balcony during a Rosh Hashana service and they married in 1946. He brought her home not long after and they raised three children in Monsey, N.Y. In later years he encouraged her to put the past behind her.

 

Her daughter Ann would later remember asking her about the war; “her eyes would fill with tears, and it was clear she wanted that door shut.” It was not until 1991 that she showed a red box full of the letters to her daughter. They were written in Yiddish, Polish and German. Many carried Hitler stamps and an inked “Z,” indicating they had been passed through the censors.

 

* 

A volunteer for the SS.

1940 

This next example comes from the San Francisco Chronicle (April 22, 2015), a story titled: Concentration Camp Guard Testifies at Trial. 

SS Sgt. Oskar Groening told a German court he helped guard thousands of Jews at Auschwitz as they left the cattle cars and headed for the gas chambers. At age 93, he is charged with 300,000 counts of “accessory to murder.” He admitted seeing another guard silence a crying baby by bashing its head against a truck. He says he requested a transfer; when it was not granted he began drinking vodka heavily. “I share morally in the guilt but whether I am guilty under criminal law, you will have to decide,” he told the judges. He volunteered for the SS in 1940; worked at the camp 1942-1944; says his main task was to “help collect and tally money as part of his job of dealing with the belongings stolen from people arriving;” the presiding judge asked him what his opinion of this money being sent back to Berlin. 

In his opinion, Groening responded, it belonged to the state. “They didn’t really need it anymore,” he told the court, to the shock of Auschwitz survivors watching. He could get 15 years in jail.

 

* 

“Sharing a roof with an SS officer.”

1940 

The New York Times highlights the story of another victim of the Holocaust, although a survivor. Elsa Koditschek was living in a prosperous neighborhood of Vienna when the Nazis took over Austria. Herbert Gerbing, an officer in the German SS, took over her home in 1940. Elsa, a Jew, was allowed to remain, moving to an upstairs apartment she shared with a tenant known as “Aunt Sylvia.”

Koditschek as a young woman.

 

Eventually, a deportation order arrived, and she was notified that she would be sent to Lodz, in Poland. She fled instead, leaving behind most of her valued possessions, including a landscape painted in 1913 by Egon Shiele, titled “City in Twilight (The Small City II).” For several years “she hid in the homes of non-Jewish friends,” writing about her life in letters she sent to relatives. “Who would think I would find myself sharing a roof with an SS officer?” she wrote, to her son Paul, who had moved to New York. 

That painting was sold during the war – resold several times since – but Mrs. Koditschek had mentioned it in several letters. The provenance of the painting was clear. An agreement was recently worked out. When the piece sells at auction (estimated value today: $12 to $18 million) her heirs will receive a share of the proceeds. 

Elsa was the widow of a Vienna banker and had sent her son and daughter away for safety as war clouds gathered. She stayed behind in her three-story home, which she and her husband had purchased in 1911. Upstairs lives Sylvia Kosmininski, a longtime tenant known as “Aunt Sylvia,” but not a real relative. When Gerbing moved in she moved upstairs, her family believes, taking the painting with her. 

The Times notes: 

The letters do not indicate that Mrs. Koditschek was particularly fearful of the Nazi she was living with. He occasionally summoned her to explain how things in the house worked. She described his demeanor as civil, even after she received “an ominous card” directing her to show up at a school to be deported to German-occupied Poland. When she asked the officer if the trip could be delayed, he replied that it could not, she wrote. But he painted a glowing portrait of what life would be like in the Lodz ghetto and offered a word of advice, suggesting she bring a minimum of belongings.

 

“This was a kind thing for him to say,” Mrs. Koditschek wrote, “because the luggage of most Jews was robbed even before they arrived at their destination. Also of course their lives.”

 

After she fled she lived for years with non-Jewish friends. She often spent hours hidden behind a cupboard in the apartment of a family named Heinz. She practiced her English and played chess against herself to while away the hours. One day, Mr. Heinz came home “under the escort of some strange men,” she wrote. They began searching the apartment and she had to slip away through an open door. 

The Times again: 

“I must have been wearing a magic cap of invisibility because the plainclothes men did not notice me,” she wrote, adding that as she roamed the streets that night, “people stared at me as if I was a ghost from another time.”     

 

Under cover of darkness Mrs. Koditschek met Aunt Sylvia, and they returned to her home, rushing inside, she said in a letter, “when the coast was all clear.” For the next two years she lived a clandestine life there, sleeping on a makeshift bed and hiding whenever the doorbell rang.

 

Mr. Gerbing was not often home, she wrote. Historians have recorded that he had a role in deportation efforts in Paris, Slovakia and Thessaloniki. When he was away, Mrs. Koditschek noticed, Jewish laborers, marked by badges, would carry the plunder of war — furniture, a piano, clothing — into her home. “Wherever he stays,” Mrs. Koditschek wrote, “in Greece, in France, in Slovakia, he sends big boxes back with goods from each country.”

 

“If there was something that had to be repaired in the house,” she wrote, “the Jews came again, and they also labored in the garden.”

 

Eventually, Aunt Sylvia began to run low on money and came to ask Mrs. Koditschek’s permission to sell the painting and other items, including a microscope once owned by her son, perhaps in 1943. 

Gerbing was killed by a mob in 1945, as the Germans lost control of occupied Austria. 

Russian troops ransacked her home in 1944. 

Otherwise, Mrs. Koditschek was extremely fortunate. Of 250,000 Jews who lived in or were deported to the Lodz Ghetto, less than 1,000 survived the war.

The valuable painting.

 

* 

“No more camp for you.”

1941 

Henry Bawnik died at 92. He had avoided death twice – once during the Holocaust, a second time when a ship he was aboard was bombed and sunk (NYT, 9/11/18). He was rounded up in 1941, at age 15, as the Nazis liquidated the Lodz ghetto. 

He was loaded aboard a passenger ship in the last days of World War II; Hitler was already dead. Ten thousand prisoners from different camps had been gathered and loaded onto three passenger ships, “none…believed to be seaworthy,” as the Times put it. 

On May 3, Bawnik watched warplanes approach. They turned out to be Royal Air Force aircraft and they bombed the Cap Arcona, thinking SS officers were aboard. “We were just counting the hours before we were going to be dead,” he told the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo in an interview in 2016. “I couldn’t swim.” 

The ships began to burn, but Bawnik hung from a rope over the side away from the fires. A fellow prisoner pulled him up. After the vessel sank, Bawnik and others were fished from the water and rescued. “What camp are we going to now?” he recalled asking his rescuers. 

“No more camp for you,” he said he was told. “The British are in town.” 

He worked in construction and the dry-cleaning business later and spent most of his 73 extra years in the United States.

 

The Times obituary reads: 

Chaim Hercko Bawnik was born in Lodz on Nov. 16, 1925. His father, Yakov, was a baker. His mother, Nacha (Baran) Bawnik, tried to run the bakery after her husband died of diabetes in 1932 but closed it and started money-lending and dressmaking businesses.

 

Soon after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Bawniks split up: Henry, his mother and his sister Rywka moved first to Warsaw and then to Lublin, while his brother, David, and his sister Dora fled to Russia. Henry, his mother and Rywka returned to Lodz in early 1940—shortly before the Nazis established part of it as a Jewish ghetto and sealed it off.

 

“They gave you so much bread for a week,” Mr. Bawnik told the Holocaust Resource Center. “You ate the bread up the first day because you were starving, hungry.” His mother, he said, “would hide some bread from her own rations and give us a bite during the week.”

 

Mr. Bawnik said there were several thousand people in the roundup that sent him from Lodz.

 

“We didn’t know where we were going,” he told the Buffalo News in 2015. “They chose the young people that they could get work out of and put us in the ware-house.” He assumed that he would soon die.

 

Bawnik was taken to a series of camps. He helped build railroad tracks at the first camp. At Auchwitz, he looked at the sign that said, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Sets You Free”) and thought he had come to a better camp. He did not at first believe the talk of prisoners being gassed to death. He remained at the main camp only briefly, and then transferred to a subcamp, where he was assigned to work as a bricklayer, thanks to a cousin who was a kapo. “Because you were a professional, a bricklayer, you were treated well,” he told the Buffalo News. “You weren’t beaten to death.” 

He was evacuated in January 1945, as Allied forces closed in and sent to the Dora-Mittelbau camp in Germany. Crammed into cattle cars, many prisoners died during the 10-day trip. On arrival survivors dragged the dead from the cars, piled them on wood pyres and burned their bodies up. 

In April, he and about 500 other prisoners were moved again, marched to the Baltic coast, and placed on board the Cap Arcona. The ship was soon filled with prisoners, hoping to survive the war, terrified death would be their fate. Bawnik told reporters for the Jerusalem Post, “I was on the right end, and the wind was going the other way,” he said, when the ship began to burn. “It took three, three and a half hours, and I could see the floor was starting to melt; you could see it smoking, it was wood on top of steel, and not long after that it started tilting.” 

Hanging over the side later, he could look down and seem others jumping into the cold waters. He remembers thinking, “They’re going down. “A lot of good friends, my God.” 

The ship was slowly capsizing. A friend, Peter Abramowicz, pulled him up and carried him to a partially submerged part of the ship to await help. The British ordered the Germans to go out and rescue survivors. 

As many as 7,000 prisoners had died in the attacks, just days before the war ended. 

Bawnik told his grandson later that he spent the next four years in Germany, selling cigarettes on the black market. He also drove a taxi. Many of the Germans in Ahrensbok, the town where he lived, were friendly and generous. His grandson said later that his grandfather described those years as “among the best of his life.” He was reunited with his brother and sister Dora. They left Germany, settled in Israel, but then moved on to New Jersey. 

His mother and sister Rywka probably died in Auschwitz. 

Bawnik emigrated to this country in 1949. He soon moved to Hartford, met his future wife Linda Gordon, and married. He is survived by three daughters, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. He was not religious and said he survived the camps and the bombing by luck.  “If you really believe in God, how could he do this to his people?” he told the Buffalo News. “How can you believe in God? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Bawnik in 1949.

 

* 

“Kissed my mother and took his walking stick with him.”

1941 

Bret Stephens, writing in the NYT (6/9/18) takes offense to the words of a German right-wing politician Alexander Gauland. “Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.” 

Stephens’ maternal grandmother, born Rachel Westerman was born in the Latvian port town of Liepaja (or Libau) in 1919. She died 96 years later in Israel. She left behind a book about her life which he long feared to read. In it she describes a happy Jewish childhood, he says. 

When the Soviets took over in 1940, she was living in Riga, the capital, studying and acting and being wooed by a journalist and playwright named Grisha, her future husband.

 

The Russian occupation brought midnight arrests and deportations. The Nazis, who invaded the following June, brought mass slaughter and enslavement.

 

Raya’s father, Shmuel, was arrested along with the other Jewish men on his street in Liepaja on July 14. He “kissed my mother and took his walking stick with him to the jail,” Raya wrote. “Later the men were taken to the lighthouse and shot.”

 

Raya’s older brother, Abrasha, was arrested on Oct. 1 and murdered about a week later, most likely by Germany’s Latvian henchmen. “Bye, my girl, I hope we meet again,” were his last words to Raya. His wife, Zina, was murdered as well.

 

Grisha’s entire family – his green-eyed mother, Bella, his older sister, her three children – were murdered in Riga “in the first days of the German occupation.”

 

Raya’s mother, Haya, and two of her sisters, Becka and Ethel, survived a little longer. On Monday, Dec. 15, 1941, they and thousands of other Jews were taken to the women’s prison in Liepaja. From there, in the freezing cold, they were marched to a nearby beach called Skede, forced to strip to their underclothes, taken to the edge of a trench, made to strip naked, and shot in groups of 10. After three straight days of methodical slaughter, 2,749 Jews – mostly women and children – had perished.

 

The victims were photographed in their final moments….

 

What about Raya? She and Grisha had barely escaped Riga under heavy German fire. They wound up in Samarkand, in what is now Uzbekistan, where he enlisted in the Red Army and was badly wounded in action. In 1945 they were reunited in Riga, and Raya set about discovering what had happened to her family.

 

One of the handful of Jewish survivors of Liepaja (out of the original population of 6,500) had known Raya’s mother and had tried to help her. “I brought your mother a work certificate attesting that she was working and did not need to go with the rest,” the survivor told Raya.

 

“I begged here to take the paper, but she told me, ‘I will not take it. My husband is already gone. My sister, Becka, is terrified, and we will go together. Just know that I am not afraid.’”

 

She added this:

 

“If you meet any of my children, tell them I was not afraid. Tell them to continue living knowing that I was not afraid.”

 

In 1972, Raya emigrated to Israel, which is where I came to know her. She had taken her mother’s words to heart and had the steady gaze of a woman who feared nothing because she had seen the worst.

*

“Splintered” family.

1941 

Karen Frostig’s grandparents, German Jews, died in the Holocaust; but until she started doing research, even the camp where they died seemed forgotten. It was Jungfernhof, near Riga, Latvia. 

The New York Times focused on her work in a story in January 2023:

 

In a week of record cold in late November to early December 1941, trainloads of 3,985 Reich Jews like her grandparents, who had been rounded up across Austria and Germany, left Nuremberg, Hamburg, Stuttgart and Vienna for Skirotava, where they were marched two miles to the desolate camp. There was no fence; the remoteness and armed patrols by Latvian auxiliaries barred escape. Prisoners were executed or worked to death, starved, or died from disease.

 

An estimated 60,000 other deported Jews were shot in the nearby Rumbula and Bikernieki forests. In March 1942, the Nazis pretended they were relocating some 2,000 Jungfernhof prisoners to a fictional refuge where they would have jobs and medical care, but instead sent them to their execution, in forests outside Riga, a massacre known as the Dünamünde Action.

 

By the time the approaching Red Army sent the Germans fleeing in 1944, no more than 28 prisoners at Jungfernhof were left alive, Ms. Frostig established. They were among the 149 people known to have once been at the camp who survived. Six are known to be still alive, she said, including two 93-year-old childhood friends from Würzburg whose video interview last year is online in an extensive project she created, called “Locker of Memory.”

 

Herbert Mai of Boynton Beach, Fla., and Fred Zielberger of Cedarhurst, N.Y., were 12 when they and their families were forced aboard a transport from Nuremberg to Riga in November 1941. There they were marched several kilometers to the camp.

 

“Anybody that couldn’t walk was shot,” Mr. Mai said.

 

Seats on a bus were offered. “My mother wanted to get on,” he remembered, but he dissuaded her. “We walked.” Everyone on the bus was taken to be shot.

 

Frostig’s own father, and her uncle Herman both managed to escape from Germany. Her father almost never talked about what had happened, only once admitting that the Holocaust had “splintered” the family.

 

*

 

“As if it happened yesterday.”

1942

 

David Stoliar (obituary, NYT 1-24-16): Stoliar was the only survivor among nearly 800 Jews fleeing Romania aboard a refugee ship, the Struma, a leaky old cattle boat, with bunks stacked ten high, which tried to land in Palestine. Romania was then under the control of the fascist Iron Hand, and allied with Hitler.

 

The vessel was turned away by British authorities, later interned by Turkey for 71 days, then towed out of port and set adrift on the Black Sea. On February 24, 1942, a Soviet submarine sank it with torpedoes, seven miles from the coast. There were no life preservers on the ship and only two small lifeboats, and all aboard, save Stoliar, were lost.

 

He died in 2014 at his home in Bend, Oregon.

 

Stoliar remembered that passengers had paid up to $1,000 to gain a place on the ship, including a promise of visas, which did not exist. Soon after the Struma left port, the engine failed. The captain of a passing tugboat agreed to fix it but demanded the passengers give up their wedding rings in payment, for most, their only remaining valuables. Briefly, the vessel was allowed to dock at Istanbul. One pregnant woman was allowed to disembark. Nine others were helped by an American oil executive. Finally, the Turks cut the anchor, and towed the ship into the Black Sea. There, SC-213, a Soviet sub torpedoed the Struma because Stalin had standing orders to sink all neutral ships in the area and prevent supplies from reaching Germany. Stoliar, 19, had been asleep in a deckhouse and the explosion sent him flying into the air and into the sea. “When I came to the surface, there was nothing except a tremendous amount of debris and many, many people swimming in the water. It was very, very cold, and we had a hard time moving our feet and our hands.”

 

Stoliar saw a number of survivors clinging to a partially submerged section of wooden deck, tangled with metal cables and with part of a ship’s railing still attached. He grabbed hold and looked around at all the other terrified faces. People were shivering and sobbing; but as the hours passed the cries for help faded. Hypothermia and exhaustion proved too much. Some sank out of view; others lost their grip and floated away. As more and more people died the wooden deck rose to the surface and Stoliar was able to crawl aboard. That afternoon another survivor floated by on a wooden door and Stoliar pulled him onto his perch. The man died soon after. The next day, a passing ship appeared in the distance and Stoliar was able to wave for help. He was later sent to a hospital in Istanbul, with frostbite to hands and feet. Then he was jailed for six weeks, he believed, to keep him from talking to the press. Of the Turks, he later said, “I was the only witness to their inhumanity, really, from the beginning to the end.”

 

He was born in Romania in 1922; his parents divorced when he was ten and he lived with his mother in Paris for several years. He returned to Romania in 1936 and graduated from high school. He was soon taken for forced labor, digging trenches; so his father, a textile manufacturer, paid for his passage on Struma, hoping to save his son.

 

He joined the British Army in 1943, as part of the Jewish Brigade, later fought with the Israeli Army and worked in Japan for eighteen years. He married and had one son before his wife died. He remarried and moved to the United States in 1971. In 2000 explorers photographed the wreckage of the ship and interest in the story revived. Stoliar told one filmmaker in 2001, “For 58 years, no one asked me about the Struma and I felt that no one cared. I carried the memories in my head as if it happened yesterday.”

 

* 

“A showman from an early age.”

1942

 

On September 23, 1942, Robert Max Widerman (later known as Robert Clary), and his family, including thirteen siblings, are arrested. Parisian police officers and Gestapo agents arrive and clear out all the Jews  from their crowded apartment building. 

Robert, the youngest Widerman child, is 16. 

The teenager had already carved out a bit of a role as an entertainer and that would save his life. The New York Times explains: “‘A showman from an early age,’ he had learned to dance by watching Fred Astaire’s movies and copying his moves. By age 12, he was singing in a backup chorus with five other children on a weekly Parisian radio show.” 

For most members of his family, arrest was followed quickly by death at camps like Auschwitz.

 

The young, able-bodied men who were deemed capable of work were separated from the women and children; Mr. Clary [the name he took later], who was 16 but looked 12, managed to stay behind with the men. He would recall his mother’s last words that day, before she was sent to Auschwitz to die: “Do what they tell you to do,” she told him. “Tantrums won’t work anymore. I won’t be there to protect you.”

 

After he had been shipped to a nearby concentration camp…he began to perform in weekly Sunday revues with other prisoners. “Because I entertained, sometimes I would receive an extra piece of bread and another bowl of soup.”

 

As if poised for stardom, he adopted the stage name Robert Clary, taking his surname from the 1942 French film “Le Destin Fabuleux de Désirée Clary.”

 

In the years to come, Clary – as he now called himself – would be transferred to several different camps. But his ability to perform his song-and-dance routines gave him some value. “That helped me tremendously when I was deported, because automatically, even in the first camp, I started to sing for the people who were there, the prisoners,” he would say later. 

“For the 10 minutes that I worked, or the 15 minutes that I sang,” he once explained to a film maker, “they had forgotten where they were. And that was the most important thing.” 

Even the SS guards sometimes enjoyed the show. This singing, dancing and clowning around, Clary said,“ was second nature to me.” 

In April 1945, with Russian troops closing in, Clary and 4,000 other prisoners were herded out of one camp and marched, in winter, to Buchenwald. “If you sat down to rest or were too weak to go on,” during that long march, “you were shot by one of the guards. Twice during those two weeks, they gave us a piece of bread.” Fewer than 2,000 made it to their destination.

 

Not long after, Clary was liberated. He returned to Paris,  hoping to be reunited with lost family. He found success singing in nightclubs. Records he made attracted an audience in the United States, and in 1949, he emigrated. He found success again in American nightclubs, even occasionally on Broadway, or in movies. Then he heard that a TV producer was looking for an actor to play a French prisoner in a sitcom, set in a P.O.W. camp, during World War II. Hogan’s Heroes was a hit and ran for six seasons, from 1965 to 1971. 

Week in, and week out, the prisoners of the fictional Stalag 13, managed to outwit the bumbling German head guard, Sgt. Shultz, and the vainglorious Nazi commandant, Colonel Klink. (Ironically, both roles were also played by Jews who had escaped the Holocaust.)

 

As for Mr. Clary, he had lost both parents, as well as ten brothers and sisters. For years, he refused to talk about his experiences, but eventually started speaking to high school students.

 

Clary soon found that talking about his time in the camps turned out to be a kind of therapy. “I used to have nightmares I’m going to be arrested again,” he once told a reporter, “and this time they’re not going to catch me. But as soon as I talked, the nightmares disappeared.”

 

“His point was always: Never hate,” a niece later remembered. “Despite his experiences in the concentration camps, he always looked for beauty, and to make life joyful for everyone else.”

 

*

 

“I love you so much that I was happy to be deported with you.”

1943

 

NYT (1-2-16): Marceline Rozenberg was arrested in 1943, in France, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944.

 

She was a teen at the time and went with her father, Szlhama (Schloime) Froim Rozenberg. Awaiting transport, he told her, “You will come back, perhaps, because you’re young, but I will not come back.”

 

She has since done films about the Holocaust; in one she has an actor stretch out on a bed and speak the words she said to her father: “I love you so much that I was happy to be deported with you.” (Her parents had moved to France in 1919, from Poland, because they wanted greater freedom. France failed the Jews in many ways, she feels, helped them in others.)

*

 

“Why not 13?”

1943

 

NYT obituary for Johan van Hulst (4/2/18); also the British Independent, the Jerusalem Post, the BBC, and other sources: In the spring and summer of 1943, van Hulst was part of a daring rescue scheme for Jewish children in Amsterdam. He worked at a teacher’s college next to a nursery. Children were taken from their parents at a deportation center, sent to the nursery, then one-by-one, “erased” from the nursery records. They were handed over a hedge, often to van Hulst, hidden in a classroom and then smuggled into the Dutch countryside. In all, more than 600 were saved, from infants to children aged 12.

 

Records for the center no longer exist; but as many as 46,000 Jews may have been deported from there – most headed to extermination camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor in Poland. 

The horror, for van Hulst, came in knowing only individuals could be saved. He could not save them all – they could not all vanish without the scheme being revealed. When the nursery was about to be shut down in September 1943, more than a hundred children remained. He had to choose. “Try to imagine 80, 90, perhaps 70 or 100 children standing there, and you have to decide which children to take with you. That was the most difficult day of my life. You realize that you cannot possibly take all the children with you. You know for a fact that the children you leave behind are going to die. I took 12 with me. Later on I asked myself, ‘Why not 13?’”

 

In 1972, he was recognized by Israel as one of “the righteous among nations,” for his role in saving Jews during the Holocaust. 

In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told him, “We say those who save one life saves [sic] a universe. You saved hundreds of universes.”

 

Van Hulst died March 22, age 107.

 

He had started teaching at the Reformed Teachers’ Training College in 1938. Two years later he became deputy principal; and when the school ran into financial difficulties after the Nazis took over, he came up with ways to keep the operation going and rose to principal.

 

The deportation center was also involved in the scheme. The nursery, run by Henriette Pimentel, began asking him to allow the use of the college garden for a play area and for use of a classroom for napping. Walter Suskind, a German-Jewish refugee, who ran the center, also played a key role. He had to convince parents it was a good choice—to let their children “disappear” from records. Then Pimentel convinced them to allow children to be smuggled out. Van Hulst was aided by students and other resistance members. Sometimes, children were rescued when a tram stopped in front of the center, briefly blocking the Nazi guards’ view. Then a young woman, working for the resistance, might board the tram with a child and disappear. Other times, C.A van Wijngaarden, the school janitor kept watch at the front door. He would let people coming to fetch the children if and keep watch to make sure the coast was clear. Then, at his signal, they could leave with a child, from the front door. But only a few could be rescued. “Everyone understood that if 30 children were brought, we could not save 30 children,” he explained many years later. “We had to make a choice anyway, and one of the most horrible things was to make a choice.”

 

One day, a government examiner arrived at the school without warning. Hearing a baby crying in a classroom, she went for a look. Were these Jewish children she asked van Hulst? He hesitated to answer, but she turned out to be a member of the Dutch resistance, as well. Having discovered his secret, she shook his hand, but quietly told him, “In God’s name, be careful.”

 

During all this time, he never told his wife Anna what he was doing. He did not want her to possess any information that might be compromising or might even be revealed under torture. Pimentel, for example, was arrested in July and sent to Auschwitz, where she was one of millions who were gassed. 

At times, van Hulst’s students would watch as German guards led Jews away. Van Hulst would shout at his students, “‘Let these people do their job, it’s none of your business,’ while winking at the SS guards, trying to gain their trust,” it was remembered later. “He performed an act quite regularly in order to get their confidence.” 

According to the BBC,    

One of the children Van Hulst helped rescue was Lies Caransa, who was smuggled out of the crèche [nursery] aged four while hiding in a bag. Most of her family was later killed at Sobibor, but she was later reunited with her mother.

 

“I was not allowed to say goodbye or cuddle my mother and grandmother, because that might make a scene.”

 

“I was just allowed to wave. I felt alone and lonely.”

 

Johan van Hulst was born in 1911, in Amsterdam. He had master’s degrees in psychology and pedagogy and a Ph.D. in humanities. He was a skilled chess player and chaired a club in the city. When rules were passed that Jews could no longer play the game with non-Jews, “we decided to secretly play at their houses instead of at the club. Later this had to stop as well,” he said.

 

He was humble about his role. “I was at the center of a particular activity. It’s not about me. I don’t want to put myself in the foreground or play Resistance hero. All I really think about is the things I couldn’t do, the few thousand children I wasn’t able to save.”

 

An Italian police officer, Giovanni Palatucci, was executed by the Germans after it was discovered he had helped 500 Jews escape roundup, by giving them fake “Aryan” papers. 

In Belgium, a lack of reprisals led to the arrest of General von Falkenhausen, who was sent to Dachau.

 

*

 

Breakout at Sobibor.

1943

 

In 2014 archaeologists working at the site of Sobibor came across a wedding ring. It was traced back to the family of Regina Zielinski. 

Regina Zielinski, now deceased, was a teenager when she hid the ring and just days after that she was part of the largest breakout of Jewish inmates from a death camp during World War II.

 

While captive in Sobibor, Regina had been forced by Nazi guards to sort through the clothes of people sent to the gas chambers and found her mother's jacket.

 

“The jacket had a breast pocket and she hid her wedding ring there but I didn’t give up the ring,” she recalled, years later.

 * 

Two little girls lost – a painting found

1944 

In January, Rosemarie van den Bergh, age seven, and her little sister, Marianne, four, two Dutch Jews, are sent to Auschwitz after the Nazis raid a home where they have been hiding. 

They do not survive the war – having been gassed on February 11. 

The family story is brought into focus long afterward, when a claim for a lost painting surfaces. 

Their parents, Jaap and Ellen, had gone into hiding separately, hoping to increase everyone’s chances of escaping capture and were not found. At one point, however, Mr. van den Bergh sold a painting by Camille Pissarro, a noted 19th-century Impressionist. With the return of peace, he filed a request, hoping to find and reclaim the painting. “I was forced to sell the aforementioned piece to procure currency to survive,” he told Dutch authorities. 

“Been in hiding for four years,” he added. 

They had a daughter, Suzan, after the war; but her parents rarely spoke of the two lost girls, or the painting, or their experiences during the war. The request was lost in a pile of paperwork and discovered again only in 2015. A search then turned up Suzan, as an heir, and located the painting “Les Repos,” or “Girl Lying in the Grass,” in a German art museum. 

Lengthy negotiations resulted. Suzan van den Bergh did not want the painting back, so much as she wanted her family story to be told (although paintings by Pissarro have sold for as much as $32 million).  An agreement was reached, to publish a book, The Girl in the Grass: The Tragic Fate of the Van den Bergh Family and the Search for a Painting, with publishing costs partly funded by the German museum.

Suzan van den Bergh was said to be happy because, “She never knew her sisters, her parents never spoke about it, and that obviously had a big impact on her life. She’s searched throughout her life to find out what happened, and what her own place is in it.” 

Suzan is quoted in the book as saying: “It is the tiny bit of life that I can breathe into Rosemarie and Marianne.”

"Les Repos."

* 

“50 meant death.”

(1944) 

Josette Molland, a 20-year-old art student, living in Lyon, France, is making a good living creating designs for silk weavers in the city, when the German occupation becomes too unbearable. 

Molland joins the Resistance, and put her skills to work, forging fake Nazi documents. Captured less than a year later, and interrogated by the Gestapo, she was sent on to various concentration camps, including Ravensbrück.

 

The kind of horrors Ms. Molland endured — transported in packed cattle cars, arriving at the camp at Holleischen to find that a young woman had been hanged in the courtyard as punishment, sustaining a beating for helping a fellow prisoner who had collapsed (“Happily I only got 25 blows; 50 meant death”) — have been recounted before by other camp survivors. And like other victims of the Nazis, she often gave talks in French schools.

 

Concerned that her message wasn’t getting through, she decided to do a series of fifteen paintings, to better capture her experience. She explained the scenes:

 

“The Big Search: In front of the whole camp, a woman, naked on the table, a ‘nurse’ searches her most intimate parts, he finds a gold chain and a medal.”

 

“Sundays, these Gentlemen were Bored: They invented a game to distract themselves: throwing bits of bread from the balcony. A fight ensues. Nothing for the older women.”

 

“Collecting the Dead at Night: They are naked, because their clothing must be used by others. In the autumn of 1944, typhus killed many at the Holleischen camp.”

 

“I use them to explain to young people in the schools what the human race is capable of, hoping that my testimony awakens their vigilance and encourages them to act, every day, so they don’t have to live what I did,” she once explained.

 

Josette’s experience was typical of that terrible time and place. On arrest, she was tortured by Gestapo agents, but never spoke about what it was like. When she tried to escape on the way to Ravensbrück, she was chained by the ankle and thrown onto a pile of charcoal. Soon, she was transferred to Holleischen, a slave labor camp, where prisoners worked to make ammunition for the Germans. She organized a strike – but the guards had a way of breaking the prisoners’ resistance. They were called out at dawn and forced to stand at attention for hours. If one fell, the guards shot her. 

In part, Molland survived by using her artistry to paint a picture of a guard, and win her good graces. “What I lived in the camps, I can’t even describe it,” she wrote in a memoir. “Unimaginable. If you haven’t lived it, you can’t understand. Every day we thought would be our last.” 

She went on to marry, and live fifty good years, she once said. And when she died at age 100, in March 2024, she was buried – as a brave member of the Resistance – with full military honors.

A camp dentists looks for gold teeth - full bucket at bottom of scene.

A prisoner, too weak to continue working is shot in the head.

* 

“Dressing dolls in a death camp.”

1944 

NYT (11/13/18): Archival footage from the documentary “Shoah” has recently been issued as a new film. The Times notes: 

The subject of the segment “The Merry Flea,” Ada Lichtman, from Poland, recalls how she was forced to clean dolls taken from Jewish children to prepare them for Germans to give to their own offspring. “It’s unbelievable, dressing dolls in a death camp,” Lanzmann says to her. “But everything is unbelievable,” she replies. “It’s unbelievable being in a death camp.”

 

Ruth Elias, born in Czechoslovakia recalls her arrival at Auschwitz, eight months pregnant, and how she barely avoided selection. But Dr. Josef Mengele controlled the birth and the fate of her infant. 

Hanna Marton tells her story in a segment called, “Noah’s Ark.” She was part of a convoy of 1,700 Hungarian Jews that was saved in 1944 by Rezso Kasztner, who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann. 

After the war, Kasztner was branded a collaborator and faulted for not warning more victims. 

Finally, the Times describes the experience of Paula Biren, who worked for a Jewish women’s police force in the Lodz ghetto. One night she arrests a peddler and takes him in—almost surely marking him for deportation. “Did she have a choice but to take part in the ghetto machinery? She has wrestled with that question for years,” The New York Times explains.

* 

“We were the fuel.”

1944

Lily Engleman, a Hungarian Jew, is 20, when the Nazis finally come for her family in July 1944. Facing inevitable defeat, as Russian forces batter German lines in the east, the Nazis still hope to wipe out the last remnants of the Jewish people; so 440,000 Jews in Hungary are shipped to slave labor camps, or killing factories, as Lily will describe them, like Auschwitz. 

She will later vow to tell the story to the world, write a book, Lily’s Promise, go on to become a Tik Tok star, and live to 100. 

From her New York Times obituary:

 

Lívia Engelman was born on Dec. 29, 1923, in Bonyhád, Hungary, to Ahron and Nina (Bresnitz) Engelman. Her father sold textiles. In her memoir, Ms. Ebert [her married name] described an idyllic childhood, with tender parents and a town that was a “friendly, bustling kind of place.” One of six siblings – four sisters and two brothers – she grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family that considered itself proudly Hungarian. Her father died when she was 18.

 

In 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and occupied Bonyhád and other towns and cities. First came a curfew – and soldiers who confiscated family valuables. “Then on May 15, with only an hour’s notice, Hungarian police officers, guns drawn, forced the town’s Jewish residents into a ghetto.”

 

“We thought we were going for a few days, a few weeks at most,” Ms. Ebert wrote in her memoir. “We had no idea we’d never come back.” 

Weeks passed as Ms. Ebert and her family lived in cramped quarters and worked weeding fields. Then, in July 1944, the officers forced all of the Jews in the ghetto onto cattle cars, squeezed together in fetid air, with two buckets in each car – one for water, and one to use as a toilet.

 

When the train arrived at Auschwitz, Lily watched as soldiers dragged away those too weak to be of any service to their Nazi captors. Two younger sisters, Bela and Berta, and her mother were sent to the gas chambers. She and two other sisters were sent to the barracks. In the distance, she could see smoke pouring from a large chimney where bodies were being burned in a crematory. As Lily later remembered, when other prisoners told her what was happening, the reality seemed impossible to comprehend.

 

“Auschwitz was really a killing factory – we were the fuel,” Ms. Ebert said in a 2014 interview with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

 

In October 1944, Ms. Ebert and her surviving sisters were sent to Altenburg, in Germany, a sub-camp of Buchenwald that operated as a munitions factory.

 

With Germany on the brink of surrender in April 1945, the Nazis sent Ms. Ebert, her two sisters and more than 2,000 others from the camp on a death march, but when American forces began bombing the area, the Nazis fled, enabling Allied troops to rescue them. Later, in 1956, Ms. Ebert was reunited with her brother, Imi, who had been sent from the ghetto to a labor camp.

 

Ms. Ebert would later emigrate to Israel, where she met her future husband, Shmuel Ebert, like her, a Hungarian Jew. They married in 1948, and had three children. Esther died of cancer in 2012, Bilha (later Bilha Weider) and Ahron, both of whom survived their mother. As The New York Times notes in her obituary, “Ms. Ebert is also survived by her sister Piri Engelman, 10 grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandson.”

 

In 1992, Lily was asked to speak to an audience about her experiences, and from then on, she worked hard to remind younger generations about the horrors one set of humans inflicted on another.

 

“I would talk for my own sake, and I would also speak for those I loved who hadn’t survived,” she wrote in her memoir. “And for all the millions of people I never knew who died with them, all over Europe, I want the world to never forget this terrible crime against humanity.”