KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (68 page)

Children

The Holocaust
was unprecedented, it has often been said, because of the Nazis’ intention to annihilate an entire people, “down to its last member” in the words of Elie Wiesel.
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The program of all-out mass extermination meant that countless families were dragged to SS concentration camps together. On arrival, they were almost always ripped apart, and most were dead within hours, at least in a death camp like
Auschwitz. The survivors suffered a dual trauma. In addition to the shock of Auschwitz, which hit all new prisoners, they soon learned that their wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, or children had already been killed in the nearby gas chambers.

After Salmen Gradowski was allocated a prisoner barrack in Birkenau, having just survived the initial selection following his deportation from Grodno
ghetto (Bialystok district) in late 1942, he and other men on his transport immediately asked the more experienced inmates about the fate of their families: What had happened since their separation at the ramp? The veterans answered with brutal honesty, as Gradowski recorded in secret notes buried on the grounds of the camp: “They are already in heaven,” the veterans said, and: “Your families have
already been let go with the smoke.” Auschwitz was an extermination camp, the newcomers were told, and the first rule was to “leave behind all sorrow about your families.”
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Many other recent arrivals were initiated similarly, but once the awful truth sank in, they reacted in very different ways. Some tried to repress their grief; when Dr. Elie Cohen, a thirty-four-year-old Dutch Jew who arrived
in Auschwitz from Westerbork in September 1943, learned that his wife and son had been murdered in the gas chambers, he just wanted “to keep it up”—to go on living (as he later wrote).
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Other men and women broke down. Magda Zelikovitz remembers that she went “completely mad” after she realized that her seven-year-old son, her mother, and the rest of her family (with whom she had just been deported
from Budapest) had been gassed: “I did not want to live anymore.” Other prisoners stopped her several times from throwing herself into the electric fence.
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The shock of Auschwitz was greatest for children who suddenly found themselves abandoned. Although the vast majority of Jewish children were murdered on arrival, thousands were registered as prisoners, here and in the other KL for Jews in
the east. Albert Abraham Buton was just thirteen years old when he was separated from his mother and father at the Auschwitz ramp in April 1943, after their deportation from Salonika. His parents were taken straight to the gas chambers, leaving Albert and his brother behind. “We couldn’t think, we were so stunned,” he recalled, “we were unable to grasp what was happening.”
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As more child prisoners
like Buton were registered (both Jews and non-Jews), the average age of the prisoner population fell. In Majdanek, the authorities responded by creating a new position in the prisoner hierarchy: in addition to the camp elder, there was now a camp youngest, who received special SS privileges.
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The SS was partially blind to the age of its prisoners and forced the younger victims to undergo many
of the same hardships as adults. Many children, too, suffered abuse, hunger, and roll calls, as well as hard labor. Mascha Rolnikaite was sixteen years old when she had to carry heavy rocks and push carts full of stones and sand on construction sites near the Riga satellite camp Strasdenhof. Other youths worked as gardeners and bricklayers. As for those judged too young to work, small children in
Majdanek had to march in circles all day.
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Nor were child prisoners exempt from SS beatings and official punishments like the penal companies.
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Some suffered an even worse fate. In the Vaivara satellite camp Narva, for example, ten-year-old Mordchaj was strung up, after a failed escape, by the SS commando leader as a warning to all others (the SS man later cut him down and he survived).
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Selections posed a constant threat, as the children learned only too well. After one of the periodic selections among Jews in the Birkenau quarantine camp, a prisoner doctor briefly spoke to a small boy from B
ę
dzin called Jurek, who was among those chosen to die. When the doctor asked him how he was, the boy answered: “I am not afraid, everything is so dreadful here, it can only be better up there.”
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Some SS sweeps targeted children only. In Majdanek, Jewish children and babies were taken to a special barrack, cut off from the women’s compound by barbed wire. At regular intervals, SS men emptied this barrack, driving the victims into the gas chambers. Some children escaped, only to be pulled out of hiding by guard dogs. Others struggled with the guards. “The children screamed and did not
want to go,” the Majdanek survivor Henrika Mitron testified after the war. “The children were dragged around and thrown on the truck.”
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There was no room for innocence in the KL. Children had to live by the rules of the camp and were often forced to act like adults.
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Terror even seeped into the games they occasionally played, such as “Caps off” and “Roll call,” where older children pretended
to be Kapos or SS guards and chased the younger ones. In Birkenau, there was a game called “Gas chamber,” though none of the children wanted to enact their own deaths. Instead, they used stones to represent the doomed, throwing them into a trench—the gas chamber—and mimicking the screams of those pressed inside.
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No child could survive alone. Occasionally, adult prisoners tried to protect those
who had been separated from their parents, acting as their so-called camp mothers or fathers. “We were … really well taken care of,” recalled Janka Avram, one of the small number of Jewish children to survive Plaszow, “because the thousands of Jewish women who had lost their children to the death camps treated us like their own.”
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More commonly, children stayed with one of their own parents,
though their relationships invariably changed. While younger children were terrified of being separated, older ones often grew up fast; as their parents’ authority was eroded by helplessness and illness, they sometimes assumed the role of protector and provider.
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Several camps in the east, in addition to Majdanek, had special barracks for isolating Jewish children.
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In Vaivara, they were
placed in the lower part of the Ereda satellite camp, together with sick prisoners. Conditions were dreadful. Built on marshy ground, the primitive huts offered no protection from the elements; in winter, it was so cold that the prisoners’ hair sometimes froze to the ground as they were sleeping. Among the children languishing here was a five-year-old girl who had been deported to Estonia in summer
1943 with her mother from the Wilna ghetto. Her mother was held in the upper part of Ereda, less than a mile away, and although it was forbidden, she tried to sneak past the SS guards every day to visit her daughter. When her girl became gravely ill, she smuggled her out of the children’s compound and hid her in a barrack for adults. But the girl was discovered by the SS camp leader just before
a death transport left the camp. “I cried for a whole night,” the mother later wrote, “fell to his feet and kissed the boots of the murderer, he should not take my child from me, but it was no use.” The next morning, the girl was taken away with several hundred other children, and she was murdered a few days later in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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Close to the Birkenau extermination complex, where these
children from Ereda were gassed and burned, lay one of the most unusual compounds in any of the concentration camps: the so-called family camp, a special sector for Jewish families deported from Theresienstadt, the dismal Nazi ghetto for elderly and so-called privileged Jews in the Czech Protectorate, which shared some similarities with the KL.
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The Birkenau family camp had been set up after
the arrival of two transports from Theresienstadt in September 1943, carrying some five thousand Jewish men, women, and children, almost all of them Czech Jews; in December 1943, further mass transports from the ghetto arrived in the family camp (this was not the only such compound in Birkenau, as the SS also forced families into the so-called Gypsy camp). Inside, Jewish men and women were divided
into barracks on opposite sides of the path dissecting the compound, but they could meet before evening roll call or secretly in the latrines during the day.

Conditions in the family camp were appalling—around one in four Jews perished within six months of their arrival in September 1943—but they were still better than in some other parts of the Auschwitz complex. Compared to other Jews in Birkenau,
the prisoners enjoyed numerous privileges. They kept some of their possessions and clothes, even their own hair, and received occasional food packages from outside. Most strikingly, Jews were not subjected to SS selections, neither on arrival nor over the following months. The reason for these exceptions is not clear. Most likely, Himmler wanted to use the Birkenau family camp as a propaganda
showcase in case of a visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross (just as the SS planned to deceive the Red Cross with the “model” ghetto Theresienstadt). Whatever the reason, other Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz looked with disbelief and envy upon the family camp.
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Among the prisoners in the Birkenau family camp were several thousand children. During the day, many of those under
the age of fourteen were allowed into the children’s block, run by Fredy Hirsch, a charismatic twenty-eight-year-old German Jew who had already played a leading role in youth welfare in Theresienstadt. While there were barracks for children in other parts of Birkenau, too, the one in the family camp was unique, reflecting the compound’s special status. Despite shortages of everything, from paper to
pens, Hirsch and the other teachers drew up a full curriculum. There were songs, stories, and German lessons, as well as sports and games. Older children wrote their own newspaper and painted the walls of the barrack. And the children put on plays, including a musical based on the cartoon
Snow White
. But such eerie moments of normality in the midst of terror—epitomized by Jewish children dancing
and singing Disney tunes, just a few hundred yards from the Birkenau gas chambers—did not last long. In the night from March 8 to 9, 1944, barely a week after Adolf Eichmann had inspected the family camp, the SS murdered some 3,800 inmates, who had arrived the previous September, in the gas chambers of crematoria II and III. Among the dead were many of the children; their mentor Fredy Hirsch had
committed suicide hours earlier, after another prisoner had told him about the SS plans.
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The survivors included some twins spared for human experiments. Among them were Zden
ĕ
k and Ji
ř
i Steiner. When the two boys surveyed the compound after the murders in March 1944, which had claimed their parents, it seemed eerily empty; all they saw were “flames flickering from the chimney of the crematorium.”
The remaining inmates of the family camp were soon joined by thousands of new arrivals from Theresienstadt, following another wave of deportations in May 1944. But few of them would live for long, either. In July, following the selection of some 3,200 prisoners for slave labor, the remaining 6,700 inmates—mostly women, children, the elderly, and the infirm—were murdered in the gas chambers.
In the eyes of the SS, the Birkenau family camp had outlived its purpose and was abandoned.
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Some Auschwitz SS men felt uneasy about the eradication of the family camp. It was not unusual for guards to hesitate when it came to the abuse and murder of prisoners whom they had come to know personally.
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This was especially true for the Jewish children in Birkenau, many of whom had spent several
months inside. During that time, individual SS men had developed a soft spot for them, bringing toys, playing football with them, and enjoying their theater performances. When the orders came through to liquidate the camp, a few SS staff apparently tried to intervene with their superiors to save the children.
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But they still carried out their murderous orders, leaving them full of self-pity
about the difficult tasks they had to perform for the German fatherland in the Nazi-occupied east. It was a complaint that had been heard many times before.

SS ROUTINES

Early on Wednesday, September 23, 1942, WVHA leader Oswald Pohl and other senior SS officers, including his trusted construction chief Hans Kammler, arrived in Auschwitz for a day packed full of meetings and inspections.
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Just
one week earlier, on September 15, Pohl and Kammler had met with Armaments Minister Albert Speer, who signed off on ambitious plans for the extension of Auschwitz (projected cost: 13.7 million Reichsmark), reflecting its increasing prominence in the Holocaust. The budget included more funds for the Birkenau killing complex, additional barracks, and other facilities. When all was done, Pohl expected
Auschwitz prisoner numbers to reach one hundred thirty-two thousand, effectively quadrupling the current capacity.
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Pohl immediately informed Himmler about his deal with Speer, and then met him in person on September 19, once more accompanied by Kammler, to review some of the details.
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During their visit to Auschwitz four days later, Pohl and Kammler talked over the plans with SS experts
from the local construction office. This was just one of many items on their agenda. Pohl also chaired a large meeting with party and state officials to resolve thorny issues about the place of the camp within the wider local community. In addition to the never-ending problem of the camp’s water supply and waste disposal, the officials discussed the ongoing efforts to turn the city of Auschwitz into
a model settlement. The architect Hans Stosberg offered some particulars about the SS neighborhood and received Pohl’s permission to build a leisure park for local residents not far from the camp.
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On the afternoon of September 23, 1942, Pohl then embarked on a lengthy tour across the SS interest zone itself, visiting the main camp, Birkenau, Monowitz, and other sites. Pohl’s trip took longer
than expected and he returned just in time for a lavish dinner in the officers’ mess, serving the best beer and as much fish as the men could eat.
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