CHILD HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS:

TRIALS, TRIBULATIONS AND MEMORY OF TIME

SPENT IN GHETTOS AND/OR CAMPS

____________________________________

A Thesis

Presented to the

Faculty of

California State University, Fullerton

____________________________________

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

in

History

____________________________________

By

Ana Luisa Cisneros

Thesis Committee Approval:

Cora Granata, Department of History, Chair

Nancy Fitch, Department of History

Stephen Neufeld, Department of History

Spring, 2018

ii

ABSTRACT

In the vast scholarship of Holocaust history, a lacuna exists with regards to child

Holocaust survivors. It would not be until after the 1980s, when child Holocaust

survivors were given acknowledgement as well as a survivors group in which to

participate. By using interviews from the University of Southern California’s Shoah

Foundation archives of fourteen child survivors, as well as memoirs, scholars of

Holocaust history are provided with a broader view of their experiences; from how their

childhoods were transformed throughout their early lives in European countries and all at

ages ranging from three to eighteen through the duration of the war, to how those

experiences affected them into adulthood, emigration, and parenthood. To survive day

after day, these children used a variety of survival strategies. The experiences they lived

through shaping not only themselves as they matured, but also their children and families.

Ultimately, I argue there is no singular experience for children in the Holocaust, nor in

their legacy thereafter.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................... ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................. v

Chapter

1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1

Historiography ...................................................................................................... 5

Finding Testimonies ............................................................................................. 9

Structure ................................................................................................................ 10

2. LIFE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST: ..................................................................... 12

Never Forget, Never Again ................................................................................... 12

Representation of Jewish Children Post-War ....................................................... 16

Living Through Traumatic Events ........................................................................ 18

Silence After War ................................................................................................. 22

Child Survivors Emerge ........................................................................................ 23

Bearing Witness .................................................................................................... 25

Legacy ................................................................................................................... 28

Descendants of Survivors ..................................................................................... 51

Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 59

3. CHILDHOOD ....................................................................................................... 61

Childhood Throughout the Ages ........................................................................... 61

Childhood in Other Disciplines ............................................................................ 76

Children and War .................................................................................................. 86

Children and Trauma ............................................................................................ 88

Children and Resiliency ........................................................................................ 90

Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 94

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4. HARROWING EXPERIENCES .......................................................................... 96

Life for Jewish Children in Nazi Ghettos and Camps .......................................... 96

Ghettos .................................................................................................................. 97

Experiences of Children ........................................................................................ 104

Concentration Camps ............................................................................................ 127

Experiences of Child Survivors ............................................................................ 128

Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 161

REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 166

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It goes without saying that undertaking the writing of a Master’s thesis is a long

and difficult journey. Having to do so while working fulltime adds on additional stress

and pressure, especially when one keeps having to extend their graduation date. That

being said, I first need to thank all of my students past and present, that have been with

me through the journey of writing this thesis. I remember thinking–after all my

coursework had been completed–all right, just finish this last (and long) paper, and

you’re all set! That was certainly easier said than done. My students (mostly juniors at

the time) were there when I started page one . . . and since then, those student have

graduated and gone on, graduated, and many are currently in pursuit of their own

degrees. Luckily, I managed to complete my master’s before they even finished any type

of post-secondary degree! To all the students from the class of 2014–2021, thank you, for

putting up with a stressed out teacher, asking (harassing) me repeatedly to get to work

and finish! I cannot believe it has taken me this long to finish this one paper, but I hope

one day any and all of my students, from 2005 to today, realize, that no matter how many

things get in your way, if you persevere, the goals you set for yourself can be achieved.

Eventually.

To all of my family and friends, thank you for putting up with me as well during

these times. I know there were times when I was reading, researching, watching

vi

testimonies, etc. and I completely ignored you. There were other times when I had to put

those things on the back burner to save my sanity, and you were all there. For the times

you let me rant, or gave me a shoulder to lean on, or cheered me to the finish line, my

profound thanks, and you know, I’m always here to return the favor when you need it!

To my CrossFit Lifted coaches and friends, the stress relief you provided as we

went through insane WOD’s helped me get motivated and keep going–because if you can

survive CrossFit, you can survive just about anything!

Carmen, my sister, my heartbeat, my best friend, I cannot even quantify the

amount of gratitude I feel for you. You hadn’t even finished high school when I started

my master’s program, and now, we will both be graduating the same year–I’m proud of

you, sis, and I know you worked just as hard for your two bachelor’s as I did for my

master’s. You’ll be another amazing teacher! It runs in the family.

Mom, you are the wind beneath my wings–there’s no other way to say it. You are

and have always been the best role model and my biggest supporter. I pray every day that

I will grow up to be just like you one day; you are so many things I aspire to be!

To my brothers, my dad, my aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews–all of

you helped push me along in one way or another. Perhaps a kind word, a tolerant ear, that

bit of encouragements, a smile, a laugh; it all counted, it was and is all valued and

appreciated. Clearly, I procrastinate–this thesis could have and should have been done

years ago–but regardless, you loved me and supported me and when you find yourself

procrastinating, I will be there for you. I’m pretty sure it’s genetic.

vii

Just about every professor I had while a student of Cal State Fullerton had a

positive effect on my journey as a historian, but I would be remiss if I did not extend

extra praise upon Dr. Cora Granata. When I first began my master’s, I did not realize that

I was facing some medical issues which could have cut my academics–and life–short.

Regardless, through that time in my life, subsequent surgery, and full recovery, I

continued focusing the best I could on my studies and my career. During my time at

CSUF, the classes I took with Dr. Granata were always the one I most looked forward to.

I told her once before, but she is the professor I would see myself being if and when I am

able to pursue a doctorate and move from a secondary classroom to a collegiate one. I

appreciate professors such as she; one who set the standards high and has full confidence

that any and all of her students can achieve it. The tasks we were given in her classes

meant something, and I learned so much about myself as a student in working hard to get

an A in her classes–with her class I felt an A was just a little richer, a little more

significant than in any other graduate course I took at CSUF. Thank you, Dr. Granata, for

your wisdom, your advice, your patience, and your guidance. You have made the top of

my “Teachers Hall of Fame”.

Lastly, I would like to thank Peter Daniels, Holocaust survivor–whom I was

fortunate enough to interview in 2012 for one of Dr. Granata’s oral history courses. His

story is one of millions, but also one in a million–the experience of every person who

lived during this time should be valued, should be heard. It is a difficult subject to

discuss, the atrocities and the genocide that the rest of the world stood by and watched,

and it is unfortunate that even today events like this happen. Would that one day,

viii

humanity could say never again and mean it. To those brave Holocaust survivors who

have given lectures, speeches or testimonies, who have tried to warn the world what

happens if . . . you are an inspiration and a beacon of hope. I hope that one day, everyone

can hear your words and realize enough is enough, to take action and stop atrocities like

this from occurring once again, on any scale. You will be remembered forever.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

“I probably wasn’t too sad, you know. My mother and I didn’t get along very well. My mother

was a very harsh woman, and, uh, she took her harshness out on me, both physically and, uh,

mentally, emotionally. So it’s not like I really missed her that much, in fact I probably had a better

time–I wouldn’t say I had a better time in the camp, but, uh, well, then, not being near her, wasn’t

a hardship for me at all. I mean, I was, it was fine.”1

On October 18, 2012, I was granted the privilege of interviewing Mr. Peter

(Berlowitz) Daniels, a child survivor of the Holocaust. During this interview, Daniels

replied rather surprisingly to a question on how he dealt with being separated from his

mother, by stating that overall, it was fine. While his experience was a unique one, his

words inspired within me a curiosity as to the experience of child survivors of the ghettos

and camps created by the Third Reich. Peter Daniels was born three years prior to the

outbreak of war in Europe, and, although a young boy during most of the war, presented

a “threat” to the Nazi government by the sole virtue of being alive. Or so, that was the

propaganda that was being promulgated at the time. For a time, survivor testimony was

minimal following World War II, and testimony of child survivors even more so. By

focusing on the testimony of child survivors of ghettos and camps, new perspectives are

provided to the primary sources available. Child survivors, by the nature of them being

younger during this time, have just as valid testimonies as their adult counterparts.

1 Peter Daniels, interview by Ana Cisneros, Oral History #5072, October 18, 2012, Palm Desert,

CA, Lawrence de Graaf Center for Public and Oral History at California State University, Fullerton, CA.

2

World War II began on September 1, 1939, when German troops invaded Poland

by land and air under the leadership of Adolf Hitler of the National Socialist Worker’s

(Nazi) Party. By that time, however, the war against Germany’s Jewish population had

already been underway for six years. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor by

President Paul von Hindenburg on January 30, 1933, it signaled the beginning of the end

for millions of European Jews. By fueling anti-Semitism, which was present in many

European countries, Hitler and his associates justified the need for the Holocaust.

The Holocaust has, for decades, been a focus of study and continues to spark

debate among scholars today. Known as the first modern genocide, the Holocaust called

for the extermination of so-called undesirables, 6 million of which were Jews. While

other groups were persecuted for their “inferiority,” Jews were targeted specifically as a

threat. As such, over half of the population killed during the twelve year span of the

Holocaust were people of Jewish faith or “race”; the rest were comprised of political

prisoners, the asocial, Sinti or Roma, Jehovah Witnesses, homosexuals, criminals, and the

mentally and physically disabled–all groups which the Nazis and their collaborators

considered a threat to the Aryan race. Hitler’s plans for Jews was evident as early as

1922 when he stated: “Once I am really in power, my first and foremost task will be the

annihilation of the Jews . . . I will have gallows built in rows . . . until the last Jew in

Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion,

until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.”2 The process by which Hitler

2 Adolf Hitler quoted in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and

Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 437.

3

accomplished his plans, however, was neither swift nor immediate, but rather drawn out

and increasingly alarming to the population that had been largely singled out.

Initially, the Nazi government–while disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda–

encouraged Jewish emigration as a way for German Jews to avoid the harsh restrictions

on their public life that began almost immediately after the Nazi Party took over the

government in 1933. According to German historian Peter Longerich, the Nazis

perpetrated three waves of anti-Semitism: anti-Semitic laws and boycotts meant to drive

Jews from the public sphere; followed by renewed attacks in 1935, including actions such

as the Nuremberg laws to limit rights and assigning Jews a “special” status; finally in

1938, “the regime decreed the complete disenfranchisement of the German Jews,

statutory steps towards their total economic depredation and their enforced expulsion.”3

Many students of the Holocaust cannot comprehend why the Jews of Germany, and later,

other parts of Europe, did not fight back en masse because they do not realize that Hitler

and officials such as Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Adolf Eichmann began

their persecution by encroaching on Jewish rights - including their social and work lives -

slowly and steadily until it was too late, and rather difficult, for Jews to attempt mass

resistance. As Raul Hilberg noted, “The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by

[an] almost complete lack of resistance. In marked contrast to German propaganda, the

documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight. On a

European-wide scale the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed

3 Peter Longerich, The Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2010), 44.

4

action, no plan for even psychological warfare. They were completely unprepared.”4

Without a strong, active resistance, many Jews were forced to endure all stages of

persecution, ranging from the benign, such as being banned from parks, to the fatal, such

as being underfed and overworked in camps that were breeding grounds for a myriad of

diseases. That is not to say, however, that there was no resistance either armed, physical,

spiritual, emotional, or otherwise during the Holocaust. Hilberg’s work was originally

published in 1961, a relatively short time after the Holocaust, and during a time when

open discussion by survivors was not what it would be in later decades. Accounts of

resistance have been noted in many survivors’ testimonies, be they large, such as the

uprising at Sobibor, or small, as in the act of saying prayers.

While the Holocaust continues to provide lessons for students and the general

public today, the accounts of children who survived some or all of the stages of the

Holocaust comprise a smaller portion of survivor testimony because many children were

killed in hopes of exterminating newer Jewish generations. Much more has been written

with regards to hidden child survivors, as they had a better chance at survival on the

whole. As I will show, it was not until the late 20th century that child survivors were

given a closer look and their experiences given equal authority as the adults they had

experienced the Holocaust with. This was due in part to many more of them giving their

testimony and forming local as well as international organizations in order to educate

future generations about this time period. These child survivors have had much longer to

deal with the effects of the Holocaust and in some cases were also impacted by the adult

4 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961),

1104-1105.

5

survivors in their lives. In order to create a better understanding of child survivors, I am

looking extensively at the lives of child survivors of the ghettos and camps and their

experiences both during that time, and afterwards as they grew into adulthood and faced

the same milestones that most people do: education, marriage, children, and work. Today

there continues to be a lacuna in the history of children who survived the Holocaust.

However, in more recent times, efforts have been made to connect with this population in

order to establish yet another perspective to perhaps the most recognized of genocides in

world history. Ultimately, I will argue that while there was no one singular child

Holocaust survivor experience, an examination of children in the Holocaust can shed

light on the daily lives and survival strategies of Jews during the Holocaust and on the

lasting social, cultural, and psychological impact of the Holocaust on its survivors after

the war.

Historiography

According to Dan Stone, Holocaust historiography “reveals the necessity of

looking at the events from the point of view of the victims or the ‘bystanders’, of seeking

ways of explaining the Holocaust through less traditional historical methods.”5 Overall,

the historiography of children in the Holocaust–some of the most innocent victims–is

minimal when compared to the literature on perpetrators or concentration camps

themselves, and a good portion of available scholarship centers itself widely in the

history of hidden children. One of the notable works regarding Jewish children and their

experiences, comes from Rose Professor of Holocaust History, Deborah Dwork. In her

5 Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 4.

6

1991 Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, Dwork reveals that “As far as

the Nazis were concerned, children–and their mothers–were simply fodder for the murder

mills. They had absolutely no interest in maintaining their lives for an extra moment.

Their death was a matter of automatic procedure. Clearly, then, there would be little Nazi

archive material directly relevant to child life.”6 Most Jewish youth were nothing more

than a nuisance in the grand scheme of things for the Nazis; “ . . . they were not old

enough to be explicit objects of the policy, and therefore they never became part of

recorded history.”7 Knowing this then, it is of little surprise that there is a sparseness in

the historiography of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. Dwork’s work was

primarily based on oral histories and interviews with survivors who had been up to

sixteen years old during World War II, with references to the Holocaust works of Susan

Zuccotti, Leni Yahil, Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedlander, Hannah Arendt, Yehuda Bauer, and

Christopher Browning to situate survivor testimony.

Another author to look closely at children and their experiences, is independent

researcher Lynn H. Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa. In her book Cruel World:

The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web, Nicholas interprets the lives of children of both

perpetrators and victims during this time. Although the book analyzes the experience of

all children who were under the auspices of the Nazi Party, only an all too brief look is

given into the life of the Jewish child. In the five part, seventeen chapter book, there are

two chapters which feature more of a Jewish child presence–“Bad Blood” and “Arbeit

6 Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1991), xxi.

7 Ibid, xvii.

7

Macht Frei: Forced Labor”–but even those two chapters are composed with information

about Polish, Danish, and Dutch children, to name a few. To note is the fact that children

and their plight during this, the Second World War, are being focused on, for even the

children deemed to be of Aryan perfection led troubled lives in Europe during this time.

Lynn states that from the first, Hitler “recognized the importance of children in his

scheme. The state must ‘declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people.’

But not all children. They must be healthy ‘Aryans,’ free of ‘hereditary weakness,’ and

they must also be properly educated.”8 Many of those children had to be trained in the

ideology of the Nazi party, to follow the policies of the Reich as a normal part of life.

While there is currently more and more scholarship being produced about

children who survived the Holocaust, much of it is focused on hidden children.

According to Dwork, roughly 11% of Europe’s Jewish children alive in 1939 survived

the war. Because children were not as meticulously accounted for during this time, there

is question as to how many children were murdered in the camps and how many

survived. Those who were in hiding or immigrated to other countries are also part of the

statistic for survival. Another issue with the scholarship of child survivors of the

Holocaust is the separation of children who were hidden versus those who were in

ghettos or camps. Diane Wolf, a sociologist and professor at the University of California,

Davis, argues that the trauma suffered by child survivors who were hidden was of

considerable consequence. In Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar

8 Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 2005), 6.

8

Families in Holland, Wolf explores the different experiences of hidden children.9 Time

after time in interviews, hidden survivors recall traumas of all kinds, from leaving their

birth families, having to leave their foster families, living in group homes, and a variety

of experiences in between. Very few historians have created secondary scholarship

which encompasses the experiences of all Jewish children, be they hidden, living with a

false identity, or experiencing life in the ghettos and camps. As there are more children

who survived through hiding, the experiences of hidden children are much more visible,

traumatic or otherwise.

Scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman asks important questions such as “What is a

generation? What is a child? Are there in fact generations of the Holocaust, and in

particular a generation of child survivors?” in the psychoanalytic journal American

Imago.10 During the academic year of 2009-2010, Suleiman was the Shapiro Senior

Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S.

Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Not only does she bring up

interesting questions regarding children and their Holocaust experiences, but she touches

on the very difficulties that have plagued historians covering any type of event where

upon children are involved. Suleiman points first to the difficulty in generational ages

with regards to their ages. According to the National Association of Jewish child

Holocaust Survivors (NAHOS), members are defined as those who were children or

9 Diane Wolf, Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2007).

10 Susan Rubin Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the

Holocaust,” American Imago Vol. 59, No. 3, (Fall 2002), 278.

9

teenagers during 1938 to 1945, “which would allow for a range of birth dates from

around 1920 to 1943.”11 However, Suleiman also points to Children with a Star to

indicate the problem with identifying children by stating, “Dwork uses 1933, Hitler’s

accession to power in Germany, as the starting date for such effects, which leads to a

range of birth dates from 1917 (those who were sixteen in 1933) to 1945 (the newly born)

for members of the child generation in her study.”12 It is generally understood that

children at different stages of childhood (in this case, I am using the definition provided

by the United Nations of a child being anyone from birth to eighteen years of age) have

varying levels of cognition, thusly, a child who lived through a traumatic event at five

versus one who lived through it at fifteen would have been affected by their experiences

in different ways. Additionally, the time they spent in “normalcy” prior to the war would

have marked their experience as well. Some survivors only remember the beginning of

their childhood through the lens of war. The historiography of child survivors, thus, is

sparse but wide reaching–what qualifies as a child is one question, what part of childhood

“counts” with regards to experience with the war in another. If a child was born at the end

of the war–however unlikely that would have been in an actual camp–are they not

survivors as well? As time has passed, children continue to be a subject of study, but the

historiography of child Holocaust survivors has not produced one specific focus or

viewpoint thus far.

11

Ibid, 281.

12 Ibid.

10

Finding Testimonies

In the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History archives, there are currently 51,352

testimonies of Holocaust survivors provided by the actual USC Shoah Foundation.

Additionally, there are 2,466 testimonies that can be accessed via the Visual History

Archive (VHA) that come from outside collections from Houston, Florida, and Canada,

to name a few. Out of those 53,904 testimonies, only 51,333 are from Jewish survivors

and of those, 18,277 were children born between January 1, 1927 and the end of the war

in May of 1945. The number, when asked to exclude anyone who went into hiding,

dwindles down to 7,741. From there, I looked for male and female survivors who were

born between 1927 and 1945, who experienced time in both a ghetto and a concentration

camp, and who provided testimonies in English. The numbers yielded me with sixty-nine

males and sixty-seven females. These search terms are not perfect, of course, but did

help to narrow my testimonies down to seven males and seven females. In order to

narrow the list, I closely examined the index terms for these child Holocaust survivors

and attempted to find survivors who spanned different countries of origin, years of birth,

had siblings or not, socio-economic classes, and those with a varying degree of affiliation

to Judaism. The goal was to incorporate the stories of a broad span of children from this

time period, although, there was difficulty in acknowledging how many children’s stories

were just as valid but could not be focused on at this time. In addition to fourteen child

survivor interviews that I have chosen to spotlight, my research also draws from written

accounts such as memoirs.

11

Structure

The structure of my thesis is laid out in three chapters. The first includes the

legacy that child survivors are hoping to leave to their loved ones and the world, why

they feel it important to give their testimony and accounts of the Holocaust, and the

efforts they have made to that effect. The second is a look at childhood from many

different fields. The concept of childhood is one that has been explored from

sociological, psychological and anthropological fields for years, and continues to do so as

the world becomes a more globally connected place with all that this entails, including

advancements in medicine and technology. The final chapter includes the experiences of

child Holocaust survivors as they lived through their time in both ghettos and camps.

The thesis is structured in such a way as to get an understanding of the adults as they

were, and what message and life experiences they wish to leave behind as their legacy.

From there, the reader-in exploring childhood as a whole-can get a better understanding

for the position of children in society at this time period. In placing the chapter of

experiences at the end, one can focus on the children and their unique, yet similar, paths

to survival. As previously stated, less than 11% of children survived World War II and

the atrocities it brought to many. The percentage of those survivors who did so after

experiencing the ghettos and camps remains unknown; their testimonies do not. They

bear witness to the events of the Holocaust, adding a perspective of a historically

marginalized group, children.

12

CHAPTER 2

LIFE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST

“For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for

the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective

memory. To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”13

Never Forget, Never Again

As the years have passed, survivors of the atrocities of the Holocaust have

dwindled. Those that are left today are very often survivors who were children or

teenagers during World War II, or who–against all odds–were born during this time.

There are also second-generation survivors, the children of survivors that have spoken

out about the tragedies of the Holocaust and the experiences of the survivors in their

lives. The experiences of the younger generation of Holocaust survivors are markedly

different than those of their adult counterparts. For example, very few, if any, of these

survivors became Nazi hunters, such as Simon Wiesenthal, or testified at the Nuremberg

Trials after the war. The voices of the young did not resonate as deeply immediately

after the war, but today they stand as a crucial, remaining reminder of that time.

Child survivors of the Holocaust come in different forms. Some Jewish children

who lived under the shadow of the Third Reich, and whose lives were immediately

affected by the policies of that government be it in Germany or other European nations,

13

Elie Wiesel, Night, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958, 2006), xv.

13

experienced much more disruption of their daily lives than others. Some children

escaped early on, either with their families or alone to countries around the world. Others

were hidden for years, either privately–where they saw very little of the outside world–or

publicly–where they were able to interact with others under an assumed identity or false

papers. Just because a child was hidden, however, did not ensure a life free of trauma;

accounts are found of how hidden children were abused mentally, physically or sexually.

A child being completely ignored except for being given food once a day, or more if they

were lucky, also affected their psyche and development. Children who likewise suffered

trauma were those who were unfortunate enough to be ordered into ghettos, and later,

into one of the various concentration camps of the Nazi government. Children from all of

these areas have spoken about their lives and experiences, occasionally with more focus

on the lives of their parents but often with a look into how World War II affected them

directly.

While many point to a dearth of survivor testimony immediately after the war,

there are various testimonies and written works that demonstrate that silence after the war

was not exactly the status quo. For the most part, these came from the adults who had

survived the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich. However, the testimonies of

children in the years immediately following World War II, when child survivors were

either still young children or adolescents, are all too few. Ewa Stańczyk, lecturer at the

University of Amsterdam agrees, stating, “Yet it is the children’s stories that remain

largely untold, making these young victims somewhat elusive and susceptible to being

defined by adults. Accounts such as The Diary of a Young Girl are few and far between,

and this lack of direct records constitutes the main obstacle to commemorating and

14

writing credible histories of children.”14 Those that are available present readers with a

small glimpse into the confusion these children felt after their lives were upended and

how they attempted to deal with the trauma they had experienced. Many examples come

from Maria Hochberg-Marianska and Noe Gruss’ The Children Accuse, a book which

documented over fifty written accounts taken from children about their experiences in

ghettos, camps, resistance groups, and/or in hiding. Sixteen year old Lidka Stern, Polish-

Jew recalled, “I do not know if anyone who has not experienced the hell of the Aktions

can understand me; but I, who many times experienced them personally, and who was

directly affected by the loss of those dearest to me, today–for the deaths of my father and

brother and for the torment of six million of my brothers and sisters–a hundred times

over, I accused the German nation.”15 This is just one example of survivor testimony that

was collected shortly after the war, 1945 and 1946 for these specifically. However, of the

55 testimonies given by children, only twelve are from children speaking about their

experiences in ghettos and camps; the rest were provided by children who were hiding in

plain sight on the Aryan side, or being hidden from the world in a literal sense. In the

1980s, child survivor testimony became a field all its own, thanks in part to growing

interest in the experiences these now-adult survivors had lived through. More

testimonies and memoirs became available after that decade than any before it. Too,

children of survivors (adult and child alike) became a subject of interest as time

14

Ewa Stańczyk, “Commemorating Young Victims of World War II in Poland: The Forgotten

Children’s Camp in Litzmannstadt/Łódź,” East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 28, no. 3

(2014); 614.

15 Maria Hochberg-Marianska and Noe Gruss, eds., The Children Accuse (Portland: Vallentine

Mitchell, 1996), 19.

15

progressed, and they have also provided the world a way to comprehend the lasting

effects of intolerance.

It is estimated that roughly 1.5 million Jewish children were killed during the

Holocaust.16 According to Deborah Dwork, only 11 percent of children alive in 1939

survived the war.17 Of those 11 percent, many have been active in testifying all that they

remember from their childhood so that people of the future do not forget the events of the

Holocaust. As child survivor Stephen Nasser said, “In recent years, it has become

popular in certain political or even intellectual circles to refute the existence of the

Holocaust altogether. As has often been said, however, those forgetting history are

doomed to repeat it. Make no mistake: the Holocaust is history. I know. I was there.”18

Child survivors such as Nasser bore witness to the events of the Holocaust in a variety of

ways. Some have written memoirs or children’s books, other have given talks or

lectures, other still have formed groups or organizations that have aimed to educate as

many people as possible about their experiences. Their childhoods, which were in all

cases interrupted, stand as an example that children are amongst the most vulnerable

when political and/or ethnic conflicts erupt.

16

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Children During the Holocaust,” Holocaust

Encyclopedia, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142 (accessed June 1, 2014).

17 Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1991), xi.

18 Stephen Nasser, My Brother’s Voice: How a Young Hungarian Boy Survived the Holocaust: A

True Story (Las Vegas: Stephens Press, 2003), 5.

16

Representation of Jewish Children Post-War

There are certainly iconic representations of child victims of the Holocaust today,

such as Anne Frank, or perhaps the little girl with the red coat in Steven Spielberg’s film

Schindler’s List. One child survivor of the Holocaust who is well-known is Elie Wiesel,

a professor, novelist and political activist who continuously spoke out about the

Holocaust and other issues which affect the Jewish community at large.

Of all victims of the Holocaust, it is without a doubt that Anne Frank is amongst

the most recognized. Anne Frank continues to be a focus of study, with a vast amount of

scholarly articles and books either discussing her in part or in whole, either as an

independent figure or as a representation of all Jewish children during this time period.

Among the articles in scholarly journals are those which discuss German guilt, a look at

South African apartheid, and the misrepresentation of Dutch citizens saving many of their

Jews; all through the lens of Anne Frank. Although she did not live to see the end of war,

Frank’s life and diary provided readers around the world a look at the life of an

adolescent whose childhood was fraught with danger, but also approached with as much

normalcy as was possible in that situation. For many eighth grade students in California,

reading the Diary of Anne Frank is a requirement and the topic of children in the

Holocaust is introduced to them by this young girl. While her life is a testament to the

strength and resiliency of children and teenagers as they live through harrowing yet

quotidian experiences, Anne Frank gives a unique voice to child Holocaust victims in that

so much of her experience was documented by her in real time, but leaves questions as to

how she fared at Bergen-Belsen, and how–if at all–her years spent in hiding would have

prepared her for living life in a concentration camp.

17

The identity of the girl in the red coat in Schindler’s List appeared to be mystery

for some time; a character in film who may or may not have existed in reality, but who

has come to represent the children of the Holocaust in a way that was accessible to a

broader public. For many of the general population, this film was among the first to

show children undergoing this traumatic event. With regards to the girl in the red coat,

Roma Ligocka (nee Liebling) of Poland was surprised when she saw Schindler’s List,

because “in the death-ridden slums, she had been known for her red winter coat.”19

While the girl in the red coat, by virtue of being the only one to appear in color, is

striking and memorable, so too are the young children Danka, Olek, and Adam–all of

whom present the plight of children who lived through the Shoah. For people who are

not engaged in the study of history, and more specifically, focused on European, World

War II, or Holocaust history, Schindler’s List and the Diary of Anne Frank stand as the

two sole representations of what life during the Holocaust must have been for children.

Elie Wiesel is perhaps the most notable child survivor of all time. In the foreword

to his memoir, Night, Nobel laureate and French novelist Francois Mauriac recalls the

experiences and losses Wiesel experienced, remarking, “I shall allow readers–who should

be as numerous as those reading The Diary of Anne Frank–to discover them for

themselves as well as by what miracle the child himself escaped.”20 Even in 1958, the

year of the original publishing of Night, the impact of Anne Frank’s diary resonated. In

this period of time after the war when there was, on the whole, a scarcity of Holocaust

19

James Hopkin,“Real Lives: Little Girl Found,” The Guardian, October 16, 2002, https://search-

proquest-com.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/docview/245902352?accountid=9840 (accessed December 19, 2015).

20 Francois Mauriac, “Foreword” in Night, 2nd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958, 2006), xv.

18

scholarship, people were aware of this hidden child who did not survive. Originally

published in Dutch in 1947, Anne Frank’s diary was translated to English in 1952,

inspired a play in 1955 and a film in 1959. Mauriac’s hope is that the readers of Night

would be plentiful because he maintains that this “personal record, coming as it does after

so many others and describing an abomination such as we might have thought no longer

had any secrets for us, is different, distinct, and unique nevertheless.”21 Wiesel himself

remarked in 2006 on the fact that since the original publication, Night has been added to

many high school and college curricula, giving testimony to so many more young people

than he could have ever imagined. As a result of his experiences during the Holocaust,

Wiesel felt strongly that there must be testimony of this event, but that there should also

be something to be learned as well, stating, “The witness has forced himself to testify.

For the youth of today, for the children who will be born tomorrow. He does not want his

past to become their future.”22 However, it is not his memoir alone which gave Wiesel

his renown, but rather all of his contributions to mankind, his visible fight against racism,

violence and oppression of any one. The world does not see Elie Wiesel as a child, but

rather, as a man who stood in the face of injustice. His experience as a child and young

man impacted the rest of his life; that is evident.

Living Through Traumatic Events

Traumatic events can be painful to recall even after years or decades have passed.

In the case of child survivors of the Holocaust, there was cause for their silence after

21

Ibid, xviii.

22 Wiesel, Night, xv.

19

war–this event had been unlike any other in history, the systematic killing of millions of

people had left many more millions of people affected from young to old. Child survivors

in many cases lost beloved extended family members, such as aunts, uncles, cousins and

grandparents, as well as parents and siblings, usually the more traumatic of losses. Along

with the fact that so many people had perished, was the displacement of the many

survivors. What would happen now to the “walking skeletons” who had managed to

survive against all odds? It is one thing to experience and live through a traumatic event,

but was happens in the aftermath, the recovery, so to speak, needs to be handled

delicately. With the aftermath of the Holocaust, an event unlike any before it, there was

the question of how to continue. Adults of family units who survived had to worry about

where they would live and how to reintegrate themselves into a normal life when what

they had lived through was anything but normal. They had not only–likely–lost many

family members, but chances are high that they were first hand witnesses to how those

family members met their fate. Were they worked or beaten to death, outright shot, or

taken on a transport never to be seen again? Did they stay with their families until the

very end, or was it a perceived temporary separation where they would be reunited if they

just “followed the rules” and did as they were asked? In so many different situations, the

traumas inflicted on child and adult survivors by the Schutzstaffel (SS) officers, the

paramilitary organization which carried out the actions of the ghettos and camps, were

one of a kind.

Trauma in general elicits different responses in people, and as such responses to

the Holocaust from children varied as well. Many studies have been done with regards to

trauma, distress and coping in children after such experiences, and some have also been

20

done with regards to Holocaust survivors. From one psychological study we see, “When

faced with the death of a loved one, people respond in highly individualized ways. For

example, some bereaved children find comfort in openly talking about the deceased,

where as other prefer to maintain their memories in a more private fashion.”23 For child

Holocaust survivors, however, the grief they faced was on a mass scale and not

something that just affected them, but all members of their fractured families. A different

study focused on intrusive memories, or rather, “unbidden and unwanted reminders of

traumatic events that may appear in situations that bring these events to mind (Horowitz,

1993). Intrusive memories may last for decades (Horowitz, 1993) and are very pervasive

among Holocaust survivors, with 83% of them reporting suffering from these

phenomena.”24 Many of the child survivors mention that the sound of heels clicking on

the ground, or dogs barking will trigger memories of their times in the ghettos or camps.

Sometimes it is something such as large crowds that have them looking for the quickest

exit, to remove themselves as fully as possible. Delving into this discussion, however, is

not the focus of this work, but it is noted that there is a large scholarship pertaining to the

effects of traumatic events, as well as a focus on how children react to trauma. The

emphasis on children, however, might not be as widely felt as noted in an article by a

group of psychologists in Psychological Bulletin where they state, “A little more than a

23

Michelle Y. Pearlman, Karen D’Angelo Schawlbe, Marylene Cloitre, eds. Grief in Childhood:

Fundamentals of Treatment in Clinical Practice (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association,

2010), 6.

24 Sonia Letzter-Pouw and Perla Werner, “The Relationship Between Loss of Parents in the

Holocaust, Intrusive Memories, and Distress Among Child Survivors,” American Journal of

Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 82, No. 2 (2012); 201.

21

decade ago, research on coping in children and adolescents was in its earliest stages

(Compas, 1987). Most conceptualizations of coping at that time were based on models of

coping in adults and lacked a strong developmental component.”25 While trying to gauge

the effects of traumatic experiences on children may be a relatively younger field of only

a few decades, it helps to put into perspective that there is a difference.

For many child survivors, the grief they were about to embark on pre-Holocaust

was something that was never explained to them. Understandably so, how can a parent or

caregiver prepare a child for the horrendous losses they were about to encounter when

even those adults did not have a full realization of what the Holocaust would bring? In

discussing anticipatory grief, Therese A. Rando, clinical psychologist and traumatologist,

states, “it must be remembered that this is a child whose whole world has been

dramatically altered, and who–depending upon developmental age, prevailing illness, and

family-related circumstances–is totally depended upon that world which is now so

chaotic.”26 For Jewish children in Europe, the chaos that confronted them was unrivaled.

Emerging from this chaos after the war, many child survivors were not granted

opportunities for discussing what they had lived through.

25

Bruce E. Compas, Jennifer K. Connor-Smith, Heid Saltzman, Alexandra Harding Thomsen,

and Martha E. Wardsworth, “Coping with Stress During Childhood and Adolescence: Problems, Progress

and Potential in Theory and Research,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 127, No. 1, 87.

26 Therese A. Rando, “Anticipatory Grief and the Child Mourner,” in Helping Children and

Adolescents Cope with Death and Bereavement, eds. David W. Adams and Eleanor J. Deveau, vol. 3 of

Beyond the Innocence of Childhood, ed. John D. Morgan, (Amityville: Baywood Publishing Company,

Inc., 1995), 21.

22

Silence After War

For the most part, the immediate decades after World War II were void of mass

survivor testimony. According to Donald L. Niewyk, “The delay was understandable.

Some survivors did not then want to talk about what they had gone through, but those

who did had trouble finding a sympathetic audience. After the initial shock and outrage

over the revelations of Nazi atrocities wore off in 1945, the world consciously tried to put

the war behind and concentrate on reconstruction.”27 Similarly, David Cesarani states

that:

“In the mid-1990s, a comfortable consensus existed among historians concerning

post-1945 responses to the wartime persecution and mass murder of Europe’s

Jews. They agreed, more or less, that the liberation of the concentration camps

and the trials of the Nazi leaders had attracted a flurry attention in 1945-46, but

with the focus of Western Europe and within the narrative of war. The identity of

the Jewish victims was often blurred or ignored. Partly thanks to the skewed focus

of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, the massacre of the Jews in

Eastern Europe and the death camps remained shrouded in mystery. In any case,

soon afterwards the world lost interest in what had happened to them.”28

Overall, however, little was heard from survivors until the trial of Adolf Eichmann in

1961-62. Again, the examples of child survivor testimony for the general public were

also minimal. Wiesel’s statement regarding his own book supports this, “The subject

was considered morbid and interested no one. If a rabbi happened to mention the book in

his sermon, there were always people ready to complain that it was senseless to ‘burden

our children with the tragedies of the Jewish past.’”29 It seemed that people were

27

Donald L. Niewyk, ed., Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill:

The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 1.

28 David Cesarini, “Introduction” in After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence, eds.

David Cesarini and Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Routledge, 2012), 1.

29 Wielse, Night, xv.

23

expected to pick up what they could of their lives and attempt to adjust their lives back to

“normal”, whatever that meant. Children were expected to complete–or in some cases,

begin–their education and to focus on the future. Many child survivors noted that their

adults, in many cases, were close-lipped about their experiences, preferring to look

forwards and not backwards.

Child Survivors Emerge

In 1983, Dr. Sarah Moskovitz, a developmental psychologist, published a book

entitled Love Despite Hate: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and their Adult Lives.

Moskovitz’ work provided twenty-three child survivors the opportunity to explore their

childhood experiences from the distance of four decades. According to Dr. Robert Krell,

himself a hidden child survivor of the Holocaust, it was the first time child Holocaust

survivors met in the Los Angeles area. He states, “There was uncertainty among the

participants as to why they should meet, to what purpose, for what objectives. It was

unclear as to who was a child survivor and what, if any place, existed for this ‘being.’”30

For so long, much attention had been given to adult survivors, those who could and did

speak out with voices that resonated around the world, Krell and other child survivors did

not feel their experiences merited equal attention. Additionally, some who discovered

that Holocaust survivors were children when the events unfolded could not believe that

these witnesses of the past could remember everything as clearly as adults; rather that in

some instances, a child’s imagination could have seen things where none existed. In fact,

many child survivors themselves initially down played their roles in history, as Krell

30

Robert Krell, ed., Child Holocaust Survivors: Memories and Reflections (Victoria, British

Columbia: Trafford Publishing, 2007), vii.

24

remembers decades ago, “It is only the children, now in their mid-forties to mid-fifties,

who protest that their stories are not particularly important or that they have forgotten too

much, or that their experience does not really compare with the ‘real’ survivors, namely

those in concentration camps.”31 Krell speaks of child survivors in general, saying, “Of

all voices of the Holocaust, we have been perhaps the most silent, the least noticed, or if

noticed, not identified as the children.”32 This is a reflection that is heard time and again

by child Holocaust survivors, the silence. Through Moskovitz, however, they were finally

offered a place in which to come together, and share their memories with people who had

experienced almost the same.

Moskovitz’ work is separated into two sections. The first gives a background of

the child survivors and where they came from, how they lived during the war, and

information about their upbringing in a group home setting. The second is composed of

the interviews she conducted with twenty-three of those child survivors. In one interview

with Zdenka Husserl, Moskovitz is asked if she will be using their real names in the

book, to which Moskovitz replies that she will do so only if that is agreeable to her

interviewees. Husserl replies that she wouldn’t mind because she feels it would be a

credit to Alice Goldberger, the woman in charge of the group home, stating, “I mean, we

have nothing to hide, really. After all, we can’t help what has happened to us, and I feel

there’s no one better than Alice, why not?” To this, Moskovitz replies, “Or better than

you . . . in terms of knowing your experiences. There has been lots writing about adults

31

Ibid 1.

32 Ibid.

25

who survived camp experience, but hardly anything about the children.”33 As a result of

this work, Moskovitz along with Dr. Florabel Kinsler, helped to organize the first formal

child survivor organization, Child Survivors of the Holocaust, in Los Angeles, California

in 1983. This remains the “largest international group of child survivors with a

membership of more than 500.”34 The child survivors were silent no more.

Bearing Witness

When discussing why he wrote his work on child survivors, Dr. Paul Valent,

himself a hidden child survivor, stated “Sometimes it is worth observing in depth a period

of history or a group of people because they reflect more starkly than usual general

human tendencies. Not only do our child survivors alert us to similar groups of children

who suffer major trauma, but they alert us to our own broader humanity.”35 For the

purposes of shining a light on child survivors and their experiences, the survivors that I

have chosen to write about are the following, with their birth place and year:

Females Males

• Gabriele Silten–Germany, 1933 Martin Weiss–Czechoslovakia, 1929

• Paula Lebovics–Poland, 1933 Moshe Taube–Poland, 1927

• Mary Natan–Poland, 1929 Michael Honey–Czechoslovakia, 1929

• Rena Finder–Poland, 1929 Peter Hersch–Czechoslovakia, 1930

• Celina Biniaz–Poland, 1931 Thomas Schwartz–Hungary, 1936

• Eva Kor–Romania, 1934 Erno Abelesz–Hungary 1930/33

• Clare Parker–Hungary, 1932 Peter Daniels–Berlin, 1936

33

Sarah Moskovitz, Love Despite Hate: Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Adult Lives

(New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 118.

34 Marie Kaufman, ed., How we Survived: 52 Personal Stories by Child Survivors of the

Holocaust (Los Angeles: Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Los Angeles, Inc., 2016), xix.

35 Paul Valent, Child Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1994), 7.

26

These 14 survivors all experienced time in both ghettos and camps and came from all

walks of life; lower income to homes of much wealth, smaller villages to thriving urban

center, happily married parents to single mothers, practicing religion to barely observant.

In hearing about their experiences, one can grasp even clearer the totality of destruction

these events attempted to provide and, which they overcame.

For many of these child survivors, telling the world, an audience, or even a spouse

or children was a hardship. Gabrielle Silten, for example, remembers actively avoiding

Holocaust survivors who were adults because they would often say, “You were just a

child, what do you know anyway? You were much too young, you don’t remember

anything, your memories are all wrong.”36 Similarly, Eva Kor remembers, as she

searched the very little evidence regarding Mengele twins, adults saying, “Well, you

probably don’t remember, you were just a little child.” She states, “I hated that

patronizing, because there is a problem. Many grownups, even today, survived, ‘Oh you

couldn’t possibly remember, you were just a child.’ I was 9 or 10 years old, I could

definitely remember what I’m talking about.”37 It was the mid-1980s, and especially in

the 1990s, when so many of the adult Holocaust survivors and child survivors opened up

and started retelling their experiences and participating in events which helped foster the

teaching of the Holocaust. After the war, many countries focused on establishing or

rebuilding their governments and recuperating economically. David Cesarani explains

36

Gabriele Silten, interview by Dana Schwartz, Interview 1213, Pomona, CA, February 22, 1995,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

37 Eva Kor, interview by Doris Lazarus, Interview 1917, Terre Haute, IN, April 2, 1995,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

27

that–while the Eichmann trial was pivotal in sparking interest in the Holocaust once

again–many historians feel that the end of the Cold War opened the way for Holocaust

survivors and studies to emerge in droves. He, however, feels that is not the case,

arguing instead that interest in the Holocaust and survivors had been increasing since this

trial. While he does not disagree with the theory that the end of Cold War along with the

political ramifications of this event influenced the trajectory of Holocaust studies and

interest, he notes that “all of these developments were taken up and amplified by the new,

diverse and much ramified global media. History and the experience of the survivors

became commodities for the ‘infotainment’ industry.”38 Globalization has undoubtedly

played a large part in creating an accessible view of events to wider audiences. While

some events are homogenized and presented as “one story”, others push for the individual

stories and the everyman is a potential hero who has overcome adversity.

One of the largest digital archives in the world is the USC Shoah Foundation

which was founded by Steven Spielberg after filming of Schindler’s List in 1994. As he

filmed on location in Europe, many Holocaust survivors approached him with their own

testimonies. Spielberg states, “I remember talking to a lot of survivors during the

production, it was one of the first moments that made me realize that there were many,

many stories that needed to be told. That’s how the USC Shoah Foundation began, my

wanting to continue Schindler’s list.”39 While the Holocaust is not the only genocide that

is documented in the USC Shoah Foundation, it is by far the most expansive with about

38

David Cesarani, After Eichmann: Collective Memory and the Holocaust since 1961 (New York:

Routledge, 2005), 11.

39 Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg (1994; Universal City, CA: MCA Universal

Home Video, 2014), DVD.

28

55,000 testimonies making up a large portion of the archive. This archive is where the

testimonies of my fourteen child survivors are housed. The difficulty of using these

interviewers is that–with so many survivors being interviewed in different languages and

countries–one is at the mercy of the questions the interviewer chose, as well as their

penchant for asking survivors to elaborate some portions of their testimony while

neglecting to explore other courses as they spoke. Some interviewers were more

withdrawn and allowed the survivors to tell their story with little prompting or

questioning, while others spoke too much, occasionally distracting the survivor from

recounting one event to speak of another. While it is clear there are many disadvantages

with interviews such as this, those are clearly overridden by the value of having a

recorded testimony in the first place. These survivors, and especially child survivors, take

ownership of their own story and present it to the world as best they can, and do not

allow for historians to look back and tell their story for them as one general history of

widespread suffering and devastating loss.

Legacy

At the end of all USC Shoah Foundation testimonies is a portion of recording

where survivors are shown with either their spouses or family members and/or share

photographs and documents which they have possession of that help tell their family’s

story during this time. As previously stated, all people react differently to trauma.

Additionally, all people live with or overcome the trauma differently as well. In some

cases, interviewers for the USC Shoah Foundation asked survivors about their legacy,

what message they wanted to leave to their family or even to the world in general; some

did not. The responses of the men and women who were asked cover a wide range, from

29

believing the experience did not affect their lives too much, to those who cannot let go of

the painful childhood they experienced. Of the survivors examined in this thesis, many of

the males responded with information about what they feel the legacy of the Holocaust is,

or their reasoning for wanting to share their testimony, while many of the females, did

not share that information. Be it because of their own personal reticence to sharing or

because it was not brought up by the interviewer, it is hard to know. In terms of studying

the legacy that these specific child survivors are providing future generations of their

families and the world at large, there is much to consider; these survivors are presenting

researchers and the population at large who can now view their testimonies, a real life

view of the Holocaust through the eyes on an “ordinary” person–they are someone the

viewer can make a connection with. As such, it is important to look at what they feel the

message or legacy of the Holocaust should be–in their own words– to the world and to

their families. Because of the focus of the Holocaust, religion factors in as well. For some

survivors, their faith in God and their experiences with religion prior to the war

influenced their experiences and inarguably went through changes inasmuch as survivors

themselves were indelibly changed by their experiences. The outlook that child survivors

had after the war, additionally, is an aspect of their legacy, as the viewer can put into

context how someone can not only live through a horrific event such as this was, but also,

how they continued on with life after the fact. Very few survivors referred to older or

adult survivors in their testimony and their influence in their lives. Others spoke about

their experiences and their decisions whether or not to speak of these events with their

children. These last two viewpoints were not explored to a further extent, but were noted

as the interviews closed or when meeting with other family members at the end.

30

Perhaps with regards to the message to humanity or the world at large, no child

survivor better than Elie Wiesel can express it. In his acceptance speech for the 1986

Nobel Peace Prize, he remembers his younger self and imagines his younger self ask him,

“Tell me, what have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?” To

which he responds:

And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have

tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are

accomplices. And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did

know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and

wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.40

This message is not unique in that survivors of conflicts worldwide have lived in

the hope that whatever atrocity befell them will not be experienced by others. Wiesel

stands out, however, because of his persistence in defending others who are suffering and

because he was so vocal about fighting oppression. Likewise, Thomas Schwartz (b.

1936, Hungary), Rena Finder (b. 1929, Poland) and Eva Kor (b. 1934, Romania) provide

messages for the general population just as eloquent as Wiesel. Gabriele Silten (b. 1933,

Germany) offered in her testimony, not so much a message in the same vein as Wiesel

and the others, but an important message to adults dealing with children who are

experiencing an upheaval in their lives.

Thomas Schwartz was an only child born to a watchmaker father and housewife

mother in the small village Tótkomlós, Hungary. Although a majority of the small town

was comprised of gentiles, there was still heder for him to attend. Additionally, because

the village was smaller, he attended Hungarian public school in a town away from his

40

Wiesel, Night 118.

31

village, and there it was known that one could not dress in their village attire lest they be

bullied or beat up by the other kids. Some of the orthodox families did not allow their

children to attend this school. Schwartz remembers his father as being very religious,

who would go to the synagogue every morning and Friday. Prior to the onset of war,

Schwartz remembers some antisemitism in his village when growing up, in the form of

the fascist Arrow Cross gangs harassing Jewish people and drawing graffiti around the

village. A few months before his family went into the ghetto, his father left to work for

the Hungarian Army. He did not return.

Both he and his mother, along with his maternal grandparents, aunt, and uncle

survived the war. Just after 1948, he immigrated to the United States as an orphan, as he

had been rejected from immigrating to Canada with his mother and her boyfriend because

of scarring on his lungs. Upon arriving in the U.S., however, he was almost adopted. At

this point he confessed that he was not an orphan and that his mother lived in Canada.

Somehow, coming from the U.S., the scarring on his lungs was not a deterrent and he was

reunited with her. As a child, he used to believe that people died because they didn’t do

the right for God. However, Schwartz now knows that is not true. For him, it is

important that:

People should realize what happened, and that we human beings are capable of

such despicable and unbelievable cruelty to each other. And I want people to

know this so that they can guard against this in the future. And that maybe they

can cure the whole milieu of human beings of these types of feelings that we are

capable of. I don’t think it is possible to do it yet. Maybe in the next two

centuries, perhaps, it will happen, but until then you have these atrocities, just like

in Sarajevo and you have it in Rwanda, and these people killing each other, like, I

mean, it’s unbelievable. I told you what happens after you kill twenty-five, or

fifty people, it’s already, it’s, you’re used to it, it’s like nothing. That’s what we

have to be cured of because there’s a streak in us that can awaken this

unspeakable cruelty. This is the thing that I want people to realize and to guard

against.

32

Ultimately, his final message that people need to have empathy for one another and need

to work harder to connect to humanity at large:

Have, try and feel what the other person feels when you are doing something to

him, or when you talk to him, have empathy. I think that’s one of the most

important things. Do unto other what you would do, in other words, don’t do unto

others what you would do badly, in other words that’s what I want, empathize

with other people. Once you know how the other people, other person feels, you

can’t possibly go wrong. And that’s what we don’t do because it’s very hard to do

it and it’s a very heavy thing to do. It’s a lot of work and we are lazy. Inside we

are lazy. We are lazy when it has to do with emotional things, when it has to do

with relationships, we are lazy. We are lazy to talk, we are lazy to bring it up, we

are lazy to confess to ourselves, and to confess to our person who is close to us.

We are lazy, we are afraid and that’s because we are human.41

His words, possibly, simple, and yet in the face of so many atrocities that have

occurred since the Holocaust, one that needs to be heard more often if humanity is to

learn the lesson.

Rena Finder was a member of Schindler’s list and was born in 1929 in Poland to

mother Ruza and father Monjack. Due to her father’s job as a salesman for surgical

supplies, Finder spent most of her time with her mother and nearby family. Her childhood

was very loving, tightknit, and participated in conservative, more Orthodox Judaism. She

attended an all girl’s public school because it was closer to her home, and her mother

could watch her from their 4th floor apartment. She was liberated in Brinnlitz along with

her mother and grandfather and the three made their way back to Krakow and waited to

see who else had survived. Although some cousins and one aunt made their way to

Krakow, there was still rampant antisemitism and the Polish had pogroms. After a while,

41

Thomas Schwartz, interview by Fran Starr, Interview 1029, Thornhill, Ontario, Canada,

February 16, 1995, videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute,

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

33

they heard of a displaced person camp in Linz, Austria, and headed that way. Along the

way, Finder’s mother met an old friend whom she wanted to marry. In Linz, Rena found

work as a clerk for in the United Nations’ relief and rehabilitation office in the

displacement camp and as an interpreter. She met a fellow refugee, Mark Finder, while

in Linz and married him shortly thereafter. In 1948, Finder and her husband immigrated

to the United States. Both she and her husband worked in factories. In 1991, she

connected with Facing History and lectures in schools and colleges, churches and temples

because she feels:

“That we must tell our story again, and again, and again, so it will never be

forgotten. So it cannot happen again. And I feel very strongly when I speak in

schools to make a point that everyone of us can make a difference. That Oskar

Schindler and Emilie Schindler are proof that one person can make a difference.

That you have to be involved, that you cannot be a bystander, that you cannot

really sit by and listen to somebody call somebody else racial slurs. You have to

stand up. When you see somebody painting a swastika on a church or a temple or

wherever, you really have to stand up and tell on the person. You cannot cover it.

It has to be investigated. The perpetrator has to be punished, they have to be

taught that hatred and prejudice has never bought us any happiness, has never

brought us any riches, and I think that the only hope for mankind is if we really

learn how to live with each other. Otherwise I see no future for my grandchildren

and those yet to come. And I try to explain to the people who listen to me, what

hatred and prejudice has done, when the whole world stood by and did nothing

and allowed innocent people to be slaughtered. Nobody said anything. Everybody

said there was nothing I could do, and that’s a lie, because there’s always you can

do.”

Finder points out that survivors are aging, and every day the number of them are

dwindling. Furthermore, she is afraid that Holocaust deniers will one day be given

credence. If these deniers were to be believed, she can’t imagine a greater tragedy,

because it would be like killing them all over again.42 Finder understands that testifying

42

Rena Finder, interview by Paula Saltman, Interview 21482, Framingham, MA, October 23,

1996, videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

34

to the events she lived would stand up to the so-called revisionist “scholars”–so many

testimonies recorded cannot be denied. The number of those who will never be able to

record their testimonies, glaring.

Eva Kor is perhaps one of the most controversial of survivors as she is known for

having forgiven Dr. Mengele and the Nazis for their atrocities. As a result, her message,

which today resonates, is one that does not fit so much with the messages of other

survivors, but rather goes beyond to what some survivors would agree is an

unconceivable level. Eva was born and raised in Portz, Romania along with her twin

sister Miriam. Her parents, Alexander and Jaffa, were landowners in a village which

housed roughly one hundred families and had one very long, dusty road running through

it. The village was very primitive, by her account, as it had no electricity, no running

water, and no paved roads. Her family, which also included her older sisters Edith and

Eliz, was one with lots of land and a very big, active and wealthy farm. Kor recalls that

her family was extremely religious. To that effect, they would spend Saturday doing the

entire prayer book praying for a brother. This memory is a memorable and humorous one

for her, but not one which overshadows the more turbulent memories of her youth. As

early as first grade, she recalls acts of antisemitism that she and her sister experienced at

school, as well as her mother telling them that they were very young and would have to

deal with it. As the only Jewish family in the village, Kor recalls that she could not

comprehend that there were people who could teach or endorse hatred towards others. As

the restrictions to their family increased, and things continued to worsen, her family but

especially her father continued to pray for a miracle that would save them. This miracle

never arrived.

35

Kor and her sister were sole survivors of their immediate family, their only saving

grace being that they were twins and thus–upon arrival at Auschwitz–were selected to be

a part of Mengele’s special experiments. Months after liberation, and after making their

way back to Romania, the twins reunited with an aunt and her new husband. Within a

short period of time, Eva and Miriam adjusted to life and school and were made leaders

of the communist party of their class. Communism was growing in Romania, and their

uncle was taken for questioning and put in jail. Prior to this, in 1948, the four of them

applied for a visa to Israel. After some time, their visa was approved, but the wait to

leave Romania grew long. 1950 left Kor eager to leave Hungary and ready to start a new

life in Israel, a dream that was realized that same year. After spending two years in a

youth Aliyah and going to school, Kor joined the Israeli army in 1952. After a few failed

engagements, she met and married an American journalist who had also been a survivor

of the Holocaust and had been in Israel visiting his brother and sister-in-law. They

married, and after leaving the army, leaving her sister in a difficult marriage with a new

child and obtaining a visa to go to the United States, she arrived in Indiana.

Her life in the United States was difficult. She had no family or friends, her

husband had many psychological issues from his experiences in the Holocaust, she had

two children and one miscarriage, and eventually she had a nervous breakdown. At

various times, she made up her mind to get a divorce and raise her children on her own,

but knew that without working full time, that would be difficult. Throughout this time,

she was also fighting for and continued to look for any medical records that Mengele and

his doctors had left behind to see exactly what had been given or done to her and Miriam.

She wrote to countless newspapers, political leaders and television stations for help in

36

getting her story out there, while also looking for other Mengele twins. After the airing of

the docudrama Holocaust in 1979, she called the local NBC station asking if they had any

documentary material of the actual camps that she could see, again, in her attempt to

locate other Mengele twins and meet up with them. She naively thought she would be

able to find the others and they could meet, akin to a high school reunion. While they did

not, they did ask her to come in for an interview on air after the final episode was shown.

After this moment, she was sought out to speak about her experiences.

Eva Kor became instrumental in opening the world’s only museum focused on the

Holocaust’s twin victims and survivors of Dr. Mengele’s experiments. During her USC

Shoah Foundation interview, she expressed her wish to open a Holocaust museum or

center, thinking that someone might one day say she was doing a good job and give her a

check for $100,000 so she could continue educating others about the Holocaust and

continue looking for Mengele’s twins and files.43 In 1995, her dream of opening a center

was achieved and Terre Haute became home to the only Holocaust museum and center in

the state, which she called Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center, with

Candles being an acronym for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment

Survivors. In 2003, the museum was destroyed by an arsonist, but this did not deter Kor

from continuing in her mission of educating others. Kor stated, “You may have

destroyed some photos, but you didn't destroy our story. You may have destroyed some

exhibits, but you didn't destroy our spirit. You may have destroyed a building, but you

didn't destroy our community. Light prevails over darkness, and love will always conquer

43

Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

37

hate.”44 In 2005, Candles reopened. To date, Kor continues to lecture, and travels with

groups to Auschwitz and Romania on separate trips to continue teaching others about her

experiences and the Holocaust. Although she has had other incidents of controversy,

such as protesting in Washington D.C. at the Yom Hashoah in 1986 where dignitaries

including Elie Wiesel were present and where she was later detained by police, as well as

going on a hunger strike in Israel in 1988, the most significant to date continues to be her

offering amnesty to the Nazis for their crimes.

While preparing for a conference with a professor, Kor was asked if she knew of a

Nazi doctor she could bring. She was flabbergasted, replying, “You think I have the

number of Nazi doctors?” He told her to think about it, which she did. Tenaciously

continuing to fight for the location to Mengele’s file, Kor applied the same tenacity to

this idea. Via a documentary, she was able to find and get in touch with Dr. Hans

Münch, asking him to meet. She states that he was “very receptive, very caring. I found

him to be a human being, which was unusual for an SS even now to be a human being.”

As they communicated, she stated that she would like for him to go to Auschwitz with

her, to testify and document that the gas chambers and experiments had occurred as so

many deniers were coming out and saying these events did not happen. Initially, Dr.

Münch declined, but after some time agreed. When Kor informed the Israeli twins of

what she was planning to do, they allegedly said, “What? An SS at our 50 year? Not on

our celebration, he is going to take away some of our limelight and we don’t want to

share it with him.” Kor, however, is very much her own person, direct and to the point

44

Eva Kor, “Who We Are: Story,” Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center, accessed

January 13, 2017, https://candlesholocaustmuseum.org/who-we-are/.

38

she responded, “Tough luck because I’m taking him anyway.” In this way, the meeting

between the two, which formed the basis for the documentary entitled Forgiving Dr.

Mengele, was arranged. Kor and her children traveled to Auschwitz for the International

Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 1995. And the two discussed the events in

which they had both participated, one unwillingly a victim, and the other knowingly a

perpetrator. At Auschwitz, Kor received her documentation from Dr. Munch, a signed

letter testifying to what had occurred there. After this, she signs a letter of amnesty to

him and all Nazis, including Mengele, the so-called angel of death. That moment, she

recalls, released her from any kind of pain, “Something else. For the first time, I was in

charge of my feelings towards the SS. No longer did I have to struggle with the

emotions, I was free of all that, it made me feel very magnanimous but at the same time,

free, a freedom that I have never experienced before from all the trauma of the past. It

doesn’t mean that I forgot.” At this point in her Shoah Foundation testimony, Kor’s idea

of the museum is given life and her view on forgiveness of these events is explained:

The center would have to be about teaching the world how to deal with prejudice

and hatred, she would love to be able to be the survivor who somehow who starts

an idea as a springboard for action, that dealing with old pain and old wounds, it’s

not by holding onto them and passing them onto their children and the next

generation like some genetic disease. It’s letting go. Learning from it, to become a

better person, and she thinks they ought to start dealing with the idea of forgiving.

Many people think this is strange, they have not thought about it, have not talked

about it, and they have not tried, and she says, until you haven’t tried it, you have

no idea what you are missing.45

Clearly, her act of forgiveness is not a common or popular one, as survivor and former

Mengele twin, Jona Laks remarked, “It’s improper. It’s improper that she be permitted . .

45

Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

39

. how can she speak in the name of the people who are not alive anymore? I mean, it’s . . .

I-I shiver when I think of it.”46 Kor’s declaration of personal amnesty against those who

murdered her family and so many others, was also seen in 2016, when she testified in the

case against Oskar Groening, a former Auschwitz guard and so called “Accountant of

Auschwitz”. Afterwards, Kor personally extended her forgiveness to Groening, where he

pulled her in for a hug and kiss. Almost fearlessly, Eva Kor continues to stand by her

actions, stating in 2016, “My forgiveness . . . has nothing to do with the perpetrator, has

nothing to do with any religion, it is my act of self-healing, self-liberation and self-

empowerment. I had no power over my life up to the time that I discovered that I could

forgive, and I still do not understand why people think it's wrong.”47 While this may

seem unconceivable to others, survivors or not, for Kor, this is what has helped her to

continue onward.

For one child survivor, a fact that remains glaring is that many children were

never clearly given an explanation, either in what was happening or why they needed to

behave in certain ways. Gabrielle Silten was the only child of a pharmacist father, Fritz,

and a housewife mother, Ilse. Although not as outspoken as Eva Kor, Silten, who has

written many books about her experiences, offers with her testimony a unique point of

view. Her life was a happy one in Germany prior to the war, and even with relocating to

Holland when things seemed to escalate in Germany, life seemed to go well for her. She

46

Jona Laks in Forgiving Dr. Mengele, directed by Bob Hercules, New York: First Run/Icarus

Films, 2005.

47Eva Kor, interviewed by Arun Rath, “’It’s For You To Know That You Forgive,’ Says

Holocaust Survivor,” May 24, 2015, in All Things Considered, MP3 Audio,

https://www.npr.org/2015/05/24/409286734/its-for-you-to-know-that-you-forgive-says-holocaust-survivor.

40

had her parents, and eventually her paternal grandmother joined them. She adjusted to

the new country, started to learn Dutch, and made friends in the neighborhood. Her

parents and she not only survived the war, but came to live again in the flat in Holland

where they had lived prior to deportation. Their upstairs neighbor friend, Carla, had also

kept Silten’s beloved stuffed teddy bear, Brunette safe. When asked what she would say

to people a few hundred years from the interview, she replies that it is hard to answer.

However, she elaborates,

“I think one of the things, apart from the horrors of war, for which people don’t

need me–all you have to look, is look at Bosnia–apart from that, I think one of the

most important things that did not happen to me, and that should have happened

to all children, is a lot more explanation and a lot more telling by adults, parents

or otherwise. ‘We are going here for such and such a reason, we are doing this for

such and such a reason. You must not say so and so because, and so on,’ instead

of just saying, ‘do it.’”48

This is significant, as traditionally children were not regarded as people who

could understand the severity of the situation they were forced to live through, but rather

people who had to be protected from reality. Many child survivors mentioned seeing their

adults stressed or worried, knowing that their situation was getting worse, and yet nothing

could be done. While the adults may have attempted to keep the horrors and reality at bay

for the children, Silten’s statement offers the opposite perspective; getting a

straightforward explanation of their reality as they knew it–because much of the

Holocaust was unknown until it was too late–would have been a better course of action.

Comparably, one child survivor, Marion Stokvis-Krieg states, “My parents went [to

work.] Nobody told us what they were going to do, nothing, we didn’t know anything.

48

Silten, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

41

And in the concentration camp, there was no one . . . who could comfort me a little bit or

tell me what was going on.” It isn’t until later, when the seven year old girl in Bergen-

Belsen meets up with two of her best friends that had been taken to the camp before her,

that she was able to feel ease as “they could tell me everything I wanted to know.”49

Children, just as adults, are curious beings. While Silten’s message is not one that can be

conveyed to the past, it is something to note for the future, especially for adults who are

experiencing life altering events and have children going through the same.

Born in Krakow, Poland, Celina (Karp) Biniaz was the only child of Ignati and

Felicia Karp, accountants. Her early childhood was a good one, as she recalls. Since both

of her parents worked, Biniaz spent most of her time with her nanny. She lived in a

mixed neighborhood that was roughly 75% gentile, and attended two years at a mixed,

secular school. Both she and her parents worked for Julius Madritsch, and through him

were placed on Schindler’s list near the end of the war. At the end of the war, both she

and her parents walked back to Krakow. After experiencing more antisemitism, the

Karps made their way to Bratislava and from there smuggled onto a Russian truck to

Prague. They walked to the American sector from the German-Czechoslovakian border.

From there, they spent time in a displaced persons camp. Her parents felt they had spent

too much time in camps, and this was not the way to live, so they went to Mindleheim,

Germany and found a room to rent from a widow. After some time, her parents were able

to secure passage via an uncle in Iowa, to the United States. At 16 years old, Biniaz

arrived in New York with her parents, met her uncle, and the group headed to Iowa after

49

Dwork, Children with a Star, 142.

42

a few days in New York. For her children and grandchildren, she has a simple yet

profound message: “Don’t hate. Try to live with your neighbor. Accept people for what

they are. Everybody has something to offer. Nobody is better than anybody else. I mean,

those are my feelings, you know? Try to see the good in people. Whether they can

achieve it, I don’t know, but, you know, that’s–it’s the way.”50 She is one of the few to

leave a message directly to her posterity. For her to even have the ability to discuss her

experiences, she credits Steven Spielberg. In a 2017 interview stating, “I always tell

Steven Spielberg that he gave me a voice. I say, ‘You are my second Schindler. He gave

me life, but you gave me a voice. Because for 40 years, I never was able to talk about it

because I didn’t think that anyone would understand.”51

For some of the survivors, such as Erno Abelesz (b. 1930/1933, Hungary), Peter

Hersch (b. 1930, Czechoslovakia) and Moshe Taube (b. 1927, Poland), their experiences

in the Holocaust left them to remain strong followers of Judaism. Thomas Schwartz also

contributes some of his survival to God and his faith. For others, such as Clare Parker (b.

1931, Poland) and Peter Daniels (b. 1936, Germany) religion was not a factor at all,

perhaps due to the fact that they were not raised in a household of strong faith, perhaps

because they lost their faith through the ordeal. For many, the events they lived through,

the horrors they experienced on a daily basis for no other reason than their religion and

ethnicity, religion and belief in God ended when the Nazi reign did.

50

Celina Biniaz, interview by Carol Stulberg, Interview 11133, Camarillo, CA, January 25, 1996,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

51 Jane Ulman, “Survivor Celina Biniaz: The youngest of Schindler’s Jews” Jewish Journal,

March 28, 2017. http://jewishjournal.com/culture/lifestyle/survivor/217308/survivor-celina-biniaz-

youngest-schindlers-jews/ (accessed February 28, 2018).

43

Erno (Kalman) Abelesz grew up in a smaller town, Kapuvar, Hungary, with his

father, David, a grocery wholesaler, mother, Helen, a housemaker who assisted his father

as needed, and siblings Benjamin, Moses, Moshe, Elizabeth and younger brother by three

years, Erno. When he illegally emigrated from Hungary in 1949, he took his brother’s

documents so that he would be regarded as a minor and, if caught, would face easier

punishment. Since that time, Kalman continued to use it as his own. His childhood

before the war was a happy one, the family and extended family being very close.

According to him, his family was orthodox but not extreme Hassidic, and, although he

attended a Jewish school there was little in terms of Hebrew studies because they were a

state school. He immigrated in 1949 to England because communism was erupting in

Hungary. He finished school and worked in printing and at 28 decided it was time to get

married. Abelesz met his wife while in Israel when he was there visiting his brother.

They married and returned to London where he worked in property management. When

asked what message he would like to leave to the world or his family, his message is:

I’m not being an ideologist, just an ordinary person, all what I can tell them is be

very staunch to our religion. And with all the difficulties, I, I feel as everyone has

survived is a victory over Nazism, over Hitler, is a victory for the Jewish nation

and for the Jewish faith. And if we don’t keep to our faith then, end of the day is,

the victor is again Hitler, not us. And this is very important. And I try to bring to

the children they should be loyal to the Jewish beliefs and practice and thank God

I’m very successful.52

Peter Hersch, born Pinchas Herskovics, lived in Loza, Czechoslovakia with father

Ephraim, mother Rachel, three brothers and two sisters, as well as his paternal

grandparents. In his smaller town, Hersch lived what he calls a harmonious life in a

52

Erno Abelesz, interview by Dana Schwartz, Interview 1213, Pomona, CA, February 22, 1995,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

44

religious little town. His father was a businessman and was on the road a lot selling

goods, but he did go to the synagogue ever morning and afternoon. He recalls life as

being very harmonious between gentiles and Jews, with no antisemitism until the

Hungarians came in. Hersch attended heder before and after going to a secular school.

Only he and one sister survived the war, although he did not discover she survived until

well after the war, once he was settled in Australia and she in Israel. In Australia, he

learned cutting and designing of fabric, and pursued this in college as it prepared him for

a career in fabric. Hersch feels that it was both fate and a miracle that he survived the

Holocaust, where so many others perished, however, his practicing of Judaism is not one

of blind faith. As he looks back on his life, during the interview, just sixty-five years old,

he feels, “God was good to me. If you believe in God, there you are . . . That kept me

going too because we believed, we never gave up, but I do ask questions, where was

He?”53 This is a question that often times survivors of the Holocaust and other conflicts

have pondered; if there is a God, where was He when this befell our people? Mary

Omartian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide questions this as well, saying, “If there

is–If there is God in the heaven, someday we are going to ask question to Him. Why?

What did we do that You caused the whole trouble?”54 These types of questions will

never be answered.

53

Peter Hersch, interview by Ruth Osborne, Interview 3658, Rose Bay, Sydney, Australia, July 2,

1995, videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

54 Mary Omartian, interview for World News Tonight, The Century: “The Armenian Genocide,”

ABC, April 30, 1999.

45

A strong faith to Judaism was important for survivors, such as Moshe Taube, as

his upbringing and experiences further reinforced that living a moral life is important.

Taube lived in Cracow, Poland with his father Manuel, mother Regina, and had one

younger sister, Nina. He describes his upbringing as being traditional. He lived in a

Jewish community, was a member of a Zionist secular organization, Akiba, at age 9, and

attended heder after putting in a day at a secular school. Taube and his father were saved

largely in part due to Oscar Schindler’s list. After the war, he and his father, the sole

survivors of their family unit went back to Poland where his father met his second wife.

Taube immigrated to Israel with his father and stepmother. There he completed his

studies in cantorial music and arts, served in the Israeli Army where he engaged in battle

in 1947 and 1948, and worked in a government office and was a cantor in Haifa and Tel

Aviv. In 1957, he moved to the United States and served in a congregation for over thirty

years. Taube was convinced that there was some divine intervention with his survival

because of a blessing. While in Plaszow, there had been a rabbi by the name of

Klingberg who, as Taube recalls, was regarded as a saint; he admired him greatly and

saw him as a role model, as a symbol of strong spiritual guidance. In March or April of

1943, Klingberg was very ill, and Taube visited him as a token of appreciate and

reverence. At this time the rabbi told him, “Moshe, I am telling you now that you are a

son of the world to come.” Although Taube did not understand the blessing at the time,

he feels that this, with the spiritual lessons he learned of Jewish trials and tribulations

while still rising from the ashes, helped mark him for survival. It was not until years later

that, in encountering the son of the rabbi, the blessing was explained. “Through this

blessing you will be successful in life,” he was told. As a result, much of his life after the

46

war was one where faith was central. His message is, “It is incumbent upon the Jewish

people, to live in a way, to merit, God’s care. To observe the mitzvot, to observe the

mitzvot of the Torah, to live by Torah, because this is the only way that the Jewish

existence and continuity can be assured.” The mitzvot, plural of mitzvah, refers to the

613 commandments which were given at the Torah at Mount Sinai. He further adds, on a

personal level, “Everyone, every Jewish man, woman, child, has a destiny. A destiny that

is fulfilled by God’s grace, a destiny that one can alter, even, for the good by good deeds .

. . by repentance, by prayer, and by charity.”55

Schwartz feels that his faith is the same as before, and attributes much of his

survival to God, who he feels helped bring him luck. The war changed him as a person,

without a doubt, as he now feels that he is frugal with many material things, but also with

emotion. However, he believes, “God is a friendly God, who is a funny God, He is so big

that He doesn’t really know–He’s aware that you are there, but you have to help Him so

that He can guide you.” To him God is a big brother, who is always there, but not always

watching over people, and thus one can die and God would treat it as a matter of fact,

saying, “Oh, he’s dead. Oh, that’s too bad.” Taube knows that there is much God has to

look after and notes that this is likely different from how others see God. During his time

in the camp, his mother helped sustain him, but he felt that his faith was stronger during

his time in the Holocaust and this was a factor to his survival as well.

Clare Parker, however, is an example of survivors who became less religious

because of their experiences. Parker was born to a father who owned a metal polishing

55

Moshe Taube, interview by David Brotsky, Interview 13063, Pittsburgh, PA, March 7, 1996,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

47

business, Janos Hochhauser, and mother Magda Hochhauser, in Budapest, Hungary in

1932. She was the only survivor in her family. After the war, Clare was taken to an

orphanage in Hungary and eventually started working in a factory. She married a young

man, but didn’t see him often as he had joined the army. He aimed for getting a higher

title in the army so that he could leave Budapest, but she did not want to do that. It is

unclear whether she or her first husband filed for divorce, or if he left Budapest at all.

The exact dates are also left unclear. During the uprising in 1956, she wanted to escape

the violence and so she and some friends left Hungary via Austria, where the Red Cross

waited to help people leave the area. She wanted to go to England, since she figured

English would be easier to learn, and had no way to contact the distant relatives she knew

she had in Ohio. In England, she worked at various places and remarried and had two

children, a son and daughter.

When Sharon Tyler, interviewer, asked her how she felt after the war had ended

and after she arrived at an orphanage, Parker began to cry, saying, “I tell you that, I said,

‘I’ll never pray again, I’ll never put my feet into a synagogue, I’ll never tell anybody I’m

Jewish.’ And I have no–um, I don’t believe in a God who allowed that to happen. I’m

afraid it’s still with me, yeah, I can’t help it but that’s the way I am. It is terrible. When

the people, very religious people, were talking about the Messiah, but if He hadn’t come

when it was needed, don’t bother to come now, it’s too late.”56 More to the point, Parker

admitted to being a member of a synagogue solely so that she could be buried there, but

she made it clear to the administration that she wouldn’t participate in the faith. She

56

Clare Parker, interview by Sharon Tyler, Interview 17543, London England, July 20, 1996,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

48

cannot understand how so many religious people, including her grandparents, prayed and

kept their lives according to the faith, and yet, they still died. Ultimately, however,

Parker is not opposed to religion and embracing Judaism–when she feels comfortable.

She has told her children that if they wish to embrace the religion that they should, but

that they should not allow what happened to her to affect their lives. As far as Judaism,

Parker participates in many survivor groups and finds comfort attending these talks and

socializing with them.

The experiences Peter Daniels demonstrate that for some child survivors, because

of the hardship of their pre-camp childhoods, the camp experience was not as horrible to

them as the public may expect. When I interviewed him, Daniels said being away from

his mother while at Theresienstadt was no great hardship, even at a young age. He was

born in 1936 in Berlin, Germany to a single mother. Daniels likes to call himself a love

child, as he was the result of a brief love affair between his parents. His childhood was

lonely, having been born during the time that Hitler already had power, because he was

rarely allowed out of the flat he shared with his mother. He recalled spending the time

when she was at work on his own, with food left for him as well as assignments. Because

his mother was a Mischling, or what the Nazis considered half-Jews, he was spared from

earlier deportation to a ghetto or camp. Both he and his mother survived the Holocaust.

While at Theresienstadt, his mother had begun a relationship with a Jewish man. At

some point the man was sent to a different camp, and thus at the end of the war, he and

his mother were alone. After some time, his mother was able to connect to this man, and

she and Daniels went to a displaced person’s camp in Southern Germany to be with him.

49

They spent a couple of years at this camp, and were able to arrange for emigration to the

United States.

By the time they arrived in New York City, Daniel’s mother had married and he

was sent off to upstate New York for some time at Eddie Cantor’s summer camp. He

feels that many mothers would not have wanted to separate from her children after what

they had experienced during World War II, but then his mother was not overly maternal

towards him. “I was not the great joy of her life,” he recalls. After experiencing physical,

emotional, and psychological abuse at her hands, Daniels ran away only to be returned

home by police officers. After some time Daniel acclimated to the United States. He

attended school with a tutor, learned English, and did some side jobs in the neighborhood

to save money. Around age 13 or 14, he had enough to get him further out of the area

and packed a bag and bought a ticket to Fort Worth, Texas from New York City. Due to

not having a strong upbringing of faith–as his childhood was entirely lived during and

after the war–Daniels does not relate to his heritage much. Interviewer Mark Rothman

asked Daniels that it seemed as though being Jewish had been a source of torture in his

life, so why would he continue to be Jewish. To this Daniels replies,

“First of all, I have no choice. I mean, I truly do not have a choice. I mean, I’m

Jewish because the world says I’m Jewish. I went through it, I went through

because I was Jewish. It was not my choice. On the other hand, the more I learn

about it, the more I read about it, and more people that I meet, I find there’s a lot

of pride in it. Sometimes I’m a little bit uncomfortable with an overabundance of

Jewish pride, I don’t, I feel sometimes, personally, it’s a little overbearing when I

hear people say, well, ‘Look at this brilliant scholar, I mean, he’s Jewish, of

course.’ Deep down inside, I feel great, I feel wonderful, because I feel I’m part

of that, I feel great because our values are wonderful.”

50

He further explains that his mother helped him to become self-sufficient and at

least taught him the importance of education.57 Although he spent most of his teens doing

odd jobs and being a self-proclaimed hobo as he traveled around the country, Peter

eventually worked to complete his high school studies while in the Navy and went on to

university for a degree in business. When I interviewed Peter, he mentioned also that

something that is great about Southern California is that it is a place that has been

influenced by many immigrants and is hospitable to immigrants, especially Jewish

people. Many people in Southern California seem to know of one another’s holidays and

tradition, even if they don’t quite celebrate them.58 Perhaps due to his life experiences

after the war, being on his own as he traveled the United States, Daniels considers

himself 85% American, not so much Jewish or German. While he feels his mother’s

influence was not a strong one, she did impart the importance of being well-behaved,

being a stickler for punctuality, and the value of education.

For some, the act of speaking about their experiences was too much to bear.

Survivor Paula Lebovics, who survived Auschwitz with her mother, was one of those.

Lebovics was the youngest of six children, three girls and three boys, born to Israel and

Perla. Her father was very religious and the family was considered wealthy in Ostrowiec,

Poland. Only she, her mother, and her three brothers survived until the end of the war,

through different means. After liberation from Auschwitz, both Lebovics and her

mother, with help from one brother, managed to get to the American sector of Germany.

57

Peter Daniels, interview by Mark Rothman, Interview 1721, Los Angeles, CA, April 11, 1995,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

58 Daniels, Lawrence de Graff COPH interview.

51

Only she and her mother stayed in a displaced persons camp after the war in Fohrenwald,

Germany and lived there for six years. There she got an education, learned Hebrew, and

had survivors teaching them. While staying in Krakow immediately after the war, she

was interviewed by a Red Cross interviewer. She remembered sharing the information,

until she had to get to the part where her brother was a policeman. She knew that others

who discovered Jewish men collaborated as policemen for the Nazi officers were

sometimes caught by fellow Jews and killed for their betrayal. Although her brother was

only a policeman for a short time and, she says, very nice, she panicked and ran out of the

room screaming. She did not talk about her experiences for another twenty years.59

Although she does not state in her recorded interview, when she began to share her

experiences or what motivates her to continue doing so, Lebovics has given lectures and

interviews on television. In 2014, while attending a conference on Holocaust Studies at

the University of Southern California, I had the opportunity of hearing her speak about

her war experiences. She continues to work with the USC Shoah Foundation as well.

Many of the child survivors continued to share their testimonies at museums, centers,

schools and religious establishments and others such as Paula Lebovics and Eva Kor

continue teaching younger generations by traveling with them to Europe and retelling of

the events they lived through and survived.

Descendants of Survivors

Children of survivors have also spoken out about life with their parents, and how

that affected them in the long term, such as Art Spiegelman, author of the graphic novel

59

Paula Lebovics, interview by Donna Kanter, Interview 1415, Los Angeles, CA, March 16,

1995, videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

52

series Maus. In other disciplines, especially psychology, an interest has been found in

second generation survivors and there has been exploration in the far-reaching effects of

the Holocaust.60 Dr. Robert Krell, hidden child survivors and psychologist, along with

Peter Suedfeld and Erin Soriano, conducted one study with regards to survivors and their

children. Ultimately, the study found that there are four paradoxes found between child

survivor parents and their children with regards to behaviors, and the expectations of

those parents had of their children. Because of the ages of all Holocaust survivors, the

ages of second generation survivors, i.e., their children, at the time of their study in 2004

ranged from the mid-20s to the mid-50s. As such, “There is some evidence that, because

child and adult survivors were at different developmental stages during their experiences

of persecution, those younger than 12 years may have benefited from the ‘protection’

offered by the limitations of cognitive development, namely the inability to accurately

assess the degree of vulnerability.”61 Some of the survivors’ interviews from the USC

Shoah Foundation had family, both older and younger, with them after sharing their

testimony who answered questions posed by the interviewers. Others still mentioned their

relatives, again older or younger, and how those family members felt about their sharing

their experiences or just living with those memories in general. Among these are Celina

Biniaz, Peter Daniels, Michael Honey, Martin Weiss, and Mary Natan.

60

Additional studies with regards to second generation survivors born to child Holocaust

survivors include: Letzter-Pouw, Sonia E. and Perla Werner, “The Relationship Between Female Holocaust

Survivors’ Unresolved Losses and Their Offspring’s Emotional Well-Being,” Journal of Loss and Trauma,

18 (2013): 396–408. As well as: Sagi-Schwartz, Abraham, et al., “Attachment and Traumatic Stress in

Female Holocaust Child Survivors and Their Daughters,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 160 (2003):

1086–1092.

61 Robert Krell, Peter Suedfeld, and Erin Soriano, “Child Holocaust Survivors as Parents: A

Transgenerational Perspective,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 74, No. 4 (2004): 503.

53

Celina Biniaz had her mother, Phyllis Karp, and husband, Amir Biniaz, present at

the end of her testimony. Not many survivors, especially child survivors, were fortunate

enough to have their parents, either one or both, survive the events of the Holocaust. Mrs.

Karp expounded on how great a daughter Celina was, saying that she and her husband

may not have had the quantity but they had the quality. When asked if the Holocaust

shaped how she and her husband raised Biniaz, she answered no, that the Holocaust had

no influence. That instead, they could not do enough for their daughter, but they felt she

did it all on her own–she was their pride and joy. With regards to her sharing, Biniaz felt

that it was hard to talk about because people could not comprehend what she had lived

through. After Schindler’s List, however, she feels that people now have enough

background knowledge to ask questions or at least have obtained a glimmer of

understanding so that they can comprehend the incomprehensible events that civilians

like she faced during World War II. Biniaz did not share her wartime experiences with

her children until they were 8 and 12 years old, as she wanted them to have a happy

childhood and wanted them to form their own opinions about the war and Germany. She

did not want them to hate. Her daughter has been to Germany, studied there and made

friends, and– Biniaz feels–has no baggage towards or against Germany. Whatever her

opinions of the country and people are, her daughter has formed them on her own.62

Both Peter Daniels and Michael Honey refer to survivors who were hidden during

their testimonies. Daniels was married twice; he had a son with his first wife, and helped

his second wife in raising her three children, whom he considers his children as well.

62

Biniaz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

54

During one interview, he mentioned that his wife’s three children were influenced more

by his experience than that of their biological father, as that man had taken more of a

victim mentality after the war and is more negative in terms of his experience and life

afterwards.63 After marrying into his wife’s family, he began to speak out more about his

experiences. It was in fact his wife, Joanne Daniels, not a survivor who had discovered a

child survivor group and encouraged him to attend and who had helped him to be more

open. As a result, he feels that the children all knew about the Holocaust more as a

history lesson; it was something he was open and honest about, and thus, for the children

it was more of a history lesson.

For some, like Michael Honey, the experiences in the ghettos or camps can be

discussed in a straightforward fashion, although others in the family may be put off by

their constant sharing and opening of this time period in their lives. Honey was born in

Moravia, Czechoslovakia to Schlomo and Tsela. His father was an importer of furs, and

his mother took care of the household and six sons. Prior to moving into the ghetto and

afterwards, the camps, Honey’s father was able to leave to England where he attempted

to get his family. Unfortunately, he was not able to. Only one other brother had survived

the war, and that because he had gone to Palestine for a youth Aliyah in 1937. After the

war, he made his way back to Moravia to see if any of his family had returned to their

hometown. In July of 1945, he realized that he was alone, that any other family member

who had survived, would have returned by then. A friend who knew his father tried to

help him locate his father in England, and Michael started to make his way to Prague,

63

Daniels, Lawrence de Graaf COPH interview.

55

after taking the advice of one of his brother’s friends. From there, with more connections

thanks to his brothers’ older friends, he is able to find transport to England and finally

reunited with his father. At the end of Honey’s testimony, he appears with his wife, son,

daughter-in-law and granddaughter. In asking the family about Honey’s experiences, the

interviewer Susan Fransman gets mixed responses. Daniel Honey, his son, says that his

father had always talked about his experiences and that he listened because he had to.

Occasionally, he felt as though there was a feeling in the house of some big, bad secret,

but it came and went infrequently. Honey’s daughter-in-law, Michelle, responds that she

finds it interesting that he want to talk about it, while her mother-in-law does not.

Honey’s wife, Eve, was a hidden child survivor. She herself does not like to speak about

her experiences, and both she and her mother are against her father writing down their

experiences in hiding. With regards to her husband, Eve Honey feels that speaking out

about his experiences has not helped him at all. She says,

“It hasn’t done Michael any good. As we said, we’ve been married 41 years, and

he was much happier and jollier person before this started. So, I can’t see any

benefit that has happened to him since he got so busy with it. And all these

interviews just regurgitate the same old story. Can’t change the past, and might as

well look into the future. So, I shall never agree with these things, but I’m always

somehow roped into it.”64

Survivors react in different ways, and Eve Honey is no different. Likewise, for

some survivors, speaking about their experiences is something they put off for decades

until finally they were ready to speak about what they lived through. There are no

guaranteed timetables for this or any other trauma.

64

Eve Honey in Michael Honey’s USC Shoah Foundation interview.

56

Both Martin Weiss and Mary Natan approached telling their children in different

ways. Weiss’ children on one hand, feel a stronger affinity to their Jewish heritage as

well as find themselves addressing injustices when they happen upon them, while

Natan’s son feels more than average curiosity when hearing of things afflicting the

Jewish community, but does not identify strongly with his Jewish heritage. Weiss was

born in Polona, Czechoslovakia in 1929, to Jacob, a butcher, and Golda a homemaker.

He had eight siblings, and lived in a smaller town which was most gentile with some

antisemitism, but not much violence. After the war, only two of his five sisters and one

of this three brother survived. After making their way to a displaced person camp, he and

one sister made their way to the United States where they settled in New Jersey. Weiss

seemed more pragmatic, and recalled never talking to his children about his experiences

at all. In fact, he did not even talk to his siblings about their experiences after liberation.

With regards to his children, Weiss felt telling them about what he had gone through as a

child would be burden to them and that in the grand scheme of things, the childhood he

had experienced was not relevant to their lives. They are aware, now that they have

grown, of his having survived the Holocaust and heard bits and pieces growing up, but

have not been told a detailed account. All three of his children were present at the end of

his testimony. His daughter, Rochelle, and sons Michael and Philip agreed that, although

not knowing much of what their father went through, leastwise in detail, they have felt

some positive and negative effects. On the one hand, they are wary of outsiders, as they

know that there is evil in the world and that not all people can be trusted. On the other,

they are very aware of justice and injustice and that his legacy is one of courage and the

57

fighting spirit. Through their father’s turmoil, his daughter states, they have a strong

Jewish identity.65

Mary Natan was born in Lodz, Poland in 1929 to a well off and assimilated

family. Natan’s father, Szaja was a dance hall owner and her mother, Bertha assisted him

in the business and helped raise their five children. She remembers being closer to her

father than her mother, and going to a public school with a mix of Polish and Jewish

students. Little more is told of her upbringing. At the end of the war, Natan and her four

siblings, although separated throughout the war, survived and reunited. Through

sponsorship by Eleanor Roosevelt, both Mary, sixteen at the war’s end and her eighteen

year old brother were brought to the United States. Five hundred children were “adopted”

by Mrs. Roosevelt, however, right before leaving Natan decided she would refuse to go

since she did not want to go along. Mrs. Roosevelt had her brother’s age changed to

sixteen so that he would be allowed to travel with her. In her testimony, Natan appears

with her second husband, Jerry Natan–her first husband of thirty-three years had passed

away, her son, Ronnald, and her daughter-in-law Joanna. Ronnald is asked about his

mother’s experiences and how that affected him. He replies that his earliest memories

related to his friend’s remarking on his mother’s accent. Although he remembers hearing

about her experiences, he state, “Of course, you’re hearing it after the fact, and many

years after the fact, and you don’t really relate to it the same way you would as if you

yourself had been through it.” From there, Dana Schwartz, interviewer, asks him if

affected his life very strongly at all. To this he replies:

65

Martin Weiss, interview by Dina Cohen, Interview 46187, Bethesda, MD, September 28, 1998,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

58

“That’s a tough question. Personally I’m not a practicing Jew, I’m not an

observant Jew. I have some, um, predilection to enjoy, the, the traditions, shall

we say. But as far as feeling an affinity, for instance, to Israel, in all honesty I’d

have to say no, it didn’t really affect me all that much. But I am concerned, I pay

perhaps much, much more attention than the average American Jew when I hear

about things like what happened in Argentina last week, and what happened the

day after in London the day after. My ears prick up a little bit and I pay a little bit

more attention, perhaps, but I wouldn’t say I’m paranoid about it.”66

Not all children of Holocaust survivors, it seems, can relate to the events their

parents lived through and not be affected. Ronnald Gelfman is a good example; although

he says he does not feel he was really affected, he notes that he is a little more attentive to

news that relates to events with the Jewish community, such as the bombings at the

Israeli embassies in Argentina and London.

All child survivors of the Holocaust were affected by spending part of their

childhood and development under duress. Understandably, they expressed a range of

emotions; they expressed sadness, laughter, tears, bewilderment, funny anecdotes and

anger. Most of the child survivors appeared calm and relaxed as they spoke of their

experiences. Some, such as Peter Hersch felt that, “What he Germans did to us, I can’t

forget. I still can’t, for the life of me, understand how it could have happened. I don’t

know, I just don’t know. And yet, I can’t blame all the Germans, and the young

generation, how can I say, it’s their fault too? I can’t. But it’s a . . . I’ve never been back

to Germany.”67 Peter Daniels, on the other hand, worked for some years in Germany and

Holland. Sometimes, with younger people he would share information about his being

66

Mary Natan, interview by Dana Schwartz, Interview 56, Los Angeles, CA, August 10, 1994,

videotaped interview, University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.

67 Weiss, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

59

born there and having been in the camps, but he found that no one would admit to

knowing about the camps. In Holland, he felt a “cold shoulder” attitude from shopkeepers

he dealt with who were over fifty years of age because of their negative feelings towards

Germans as a result of the destruction that the Nazis had inflicted on their homeland.

Appearing to be a native German, Daniels encountered some difficulty in his business

dealings. Once he told them he was an American, he notes, they were friendlier. Using

his American nationality to his benefit, he would just state that he was American born

with parents of German descent.

Conclusion

It is often said that children are much more resilient than they are given credit for.

Another common phrase is that time heals all wounds. For some children who survived

the Holocaust, either or both can be true; for others, none. In either case, it is important

to explore children overall, and with as much depth as possible, to attempt to understand

just a bit how an event like the Holocaust could and did affect their Sphysical, mental or

emotional development. As the number of child survivors who remember the Holocaust

continues the dwindle, it remains just as important to comprehend what their quotidian

existence was like in order to reach a better understanding of that indelible event. In the

introduction to his work, Dr. Robert Krell explain, “This book is mean to speak to you,

the children of the Shoah. And to anyone interested in us–our spouses, our children, our

friends and healers and researchers. Get to know us. We have emotions and thoughts so

unique that often we feel alone except in the company of others with similar

60

experiences.”68 Child survivor and lead editor of How we Survived: 52 Personal Stories

by Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Marie Kaufman states, “This anthology is a gift to

you, the reader, the student and the teacher. You are now the keepers of our story. You

are our witnesses and the guardians of our legacy. It is our hope that you will pass on the

lessons that these stories tell.”69 Essentially, as we continue forward in time, the number

of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust has dwindled, but that does not diminish the

importance of this history.

The 1980s brought many changes to the lives of child Holocaust survivors. With

the exception of people like Wiesel, most child survivors had spent most of their post-war

life focusing on the future, in most cases, obtaining an education, getting a job, starting

families, and other milestones. In this time period, the definition of who a survivor was

broadened to include them. This, along with the work of psychologist Sarah Moskovitz

and her foundation of a child survivor group gave their experiences validity as well as a

platform from which to speak with one another as well as those outside their unique

group. Their responses to the Holocaust varied, with some becoming more religious and

others less; some willing to forgive the Nazis and most not; and some, but not all, able to

talk about their experiences to their children. Overall they add to our understanding of

the Holocaust itself and to the impact of trauma on children more broadly. The next

chapter will take a closer look at the concept of childhood and what these survivors can

tell us about it

68

Krell, vi.

69 Marie Kaufman, ed., How we Survived: 52 Personal Stories by Child Survivors of the

Holocaust, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Los Angeles, Inc., 2016), xxi.

61

62

CHAPTER 3

CHILDHOOD

“The important thing that this grown-up and now old girl discovered is that her future would not

make much sense, would not be satisfying or filled with hope and possible adventures, if she didn’t

remember or understand her past.”70

Childhood Throughout the Ages

According to psychoanalyst Martha Wolfstein and anthropologist Margaret Mead,

“Although each historical period of which we have any record has had its own version of

childhood . . . childhood was still something that one took for granted, a figure of speech,

a mythological subject rather than a subject of articulate scrutiny.”71 The concept of

childhood is rather modern when compared to the history of the human race. Initially,

the child was regarded as a small person who had high mortality rates and whose parents

rarely took the time to name before a certain age. If said child succumbed to death, it was

buried with varying degrees of ceremony depending on the culture. Childhood has

evolved to the point where children, once largely tolerated as a biological product, are

recognized as small beings that need nurturing from their earliest moments and which

most Western societies agree also need protection from a world fraught with danger. In

70

Helena Ganor, Four Letters to the Witnesses of My Childhood (Syracuse: Syracuse University

Press, 2007), 142.

71 Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, Childhood in Contemporary Cultures (Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1954), 3 as quoted in Chris Jenks, Childhood (New York: Routledge, 1996), 52.

63

order to understand the experience of children of the mid twentieth century, it is

important to establish what childhood is and how children are significant contributors to

history. In 1990, Swedish reformer Ellen Key “claimed that the 20th century would be

the "century of the child,” 72 and indeed, it became a century in which the political and

social rights of children had been created or reformed to a level far exceeding those of

past times.

Children of early hunting and gathering societies were considered burdens until

they reached an age where they were no longer dependent on their parents or could play a

significant role in the economic life of their group. Small children needed to be

constantly looked out for in order to avoid falling victim to the elements or prey to the

predators their fathers hunted. Since children were seen as a hindrance rather than a

benefit, many parents of these societies kept the number of offspring to a minimum with

prolonged lactation and/or deliberate infanticide. As a result, “the limitations of

children’s utility shaped these societies in distinctive ways; this may help account, also,

for the relative infrequency of representations of children in primitive art.”73 As the

human race progressed, the role of the child continually evolved as well.

Children born during the classical age to Roman or Greek parents found their

station in life shaky at best. During this time, there were higher rates of infanticide and

abandonment while at the same time children enjoyed some semblance of familial love.

72

Heather Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on

Children’s Lives (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 1.

73 Peter N. Stearns, Childhood in World History (New York: Routledge, 2006), 9.

64

According to social historian Hugh Cunningham, the experience of children during this

time has been historically represented at both ends of the spectrums as the historiography

on childhood increased.74 Lloyd De Mause, psychohistory professor and president of the

International Psychohistorical Association, argued that child rearing during the classical

age was in the “infanticidal mode” up until the 4th century AD.75 While there is no

concrete data or evidence to show the extent that parents of this time killed their children,

there is no doubt that many children were abandoned to the elements at higher numbers

than those in modern times.76 According to historian John Boswell, it is likely to assume

that perhaps of all women who reared more than one child abandoned at least one. For

many reasons, girls were more likely to be affected by abandonment. As a result, many

Roman men who visited brothels expressed the fear that the prostitute could be his own

daughter, as she could have been rescued by a foster family.77 Boswell states that

roughly 20 to 40 percent were children who were abandoned––and, while some survived,

no figures are given for this. Cunningham thus infers that survival must have been in the

higher numbers, stating “parents knew this to be the case, otherwise there would have

been no cause for fathers to fear incest in the brothel, nor for the anxiety, widely

74

Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Pearson

Education Limited, 1995, 2005), 23-25.

75 Lloyd de Mause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), 51.

76 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 19.

77 John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe

from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 1-4, 107.

65

expressed, that freeborn children might be being reared as slaves.”78 Added to this was

the power of the father, or patria potestas, which was an example of the absolute

government in which Roman families lived. This stated that fathers, or the oldest living

male, had total control over the lives of children and family members. It was “he who

decided whether a baby should be exposed, and it was he who could sentence and execute

his own child.”79 Rarely, however, were the powers of life and death used, but the idea

that the family should be patriarchal with absolute power remaining in the father’s hands

were accepted well into the modern age.80 While these appear to be valid concerns of

the classical age, Cunningham notes that recent scholarship has shown that childhood in

ancient times were likely not as dreadful as initially reported. Currently, infanticide has

been found to be minimal at best, “the horrors of abandonment have been explained away

by the ‘kindness of strangers’, patria potestas has become a mere theory which neither in

practice nor advice writings precluded loving relationships between fathers and children,

and the family has been portrayed as often a haven of affectionate relationships.”81 In

Greece, children were not held in high esteem, often “regarded as physically weak,

morally incompetent, mentally incapable.”82 Research into classical childhood has not

78

Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 19.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid, 22-23.

82 Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore: John Hopkins

University Press, 1990), 5.

66

produced as much concrete evidence as those in modern times where historians can

access many more primary and secondary sources than in previous times. Some ancient

historians have noted that changes in attitudes and treatment of children and childhood

are difficult to note. Most will agree, however, that as more people converted to

Christianity, the child attained a higher status in the family as children were seen as being

closer to divinity than adults.

Christianity was said to have begun in earnest in the Roman Empire after the

conversion of Constantinople, although it would not be until 100 years later that

Christianity was seen as the official religion of the state. Once Christian ideas of

morality and right and wrong were accepted by most in the Roman Empire, infanticide

became a crime, even as it contrasted with the Twelve Tables, which stated that any

deformed child should be put to death.83 One of the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not

kill,” clearly held that killing children was no longer socially, morally, or legally

accepted. Likewise, the idea of exposing or abandoning children became less popular.

Roman emperor “Valentinian ruled in 374 that all parents must support their children,

and that those who abandoned them should be subject to the penalty ‘prescribed by law.’

But it is not clear what the penalty would have been, and the law seems to have had no

impact on the practice of abandonment.” Cunningham notes that as most Christians were

supposed to follow the doctrine of love thy neighbor, children who were abandoned were

83

Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 25.

67

more likely to receive sympathy and charity, although specifically how is unknown.84

Children were thought to be closer to the divine world as evidenced by Matthew 18: 1-6,

“At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in

the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a little child and had him stand among them.

And he said: ‘I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little

children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever

humbles himself like this child, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And

whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if

anyone causes of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for

him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the

depths of the sea.”

Thus, Christian children were said to have a soul that needed to be brought before Christ,

and although not universally accepted at first, baptism was generally regarded as an

appropriate initiation to a healthy Christian life.85 The commandment of “honor thy

mother and father” put focus on the significance of children adhering to the will of their

parents who would help lead them towards righteousness. Proverbs 23:24 states “The

father of a righteous child will greatly rejoice, And he that begetteth a wise child shall

have joy of him.” There are many other instances in the Bible where the importance of

educating children to lead good, moral lives are evident, giving any historian of classical

times the impression that children were significantly important when compared to

children of prior societies. Additionally, the relationship between children and parents,

but especially the father, were of worth just as it was identified in the classical age.

Monotheistic religions alike emphasized the importance of children. “The religions that

sprang from the Middle East–Christianity and Islam, but also, earlier, Judaism–all

84

Ibid.

85 Ibid.

68

highlighted the pride and responsibility of parenthood, and particularly fatherhood

(though Christianity, uniquely, also had the strong image of the loving mother of

Jesus).”86 There were slight changes in the role of children after the fall of classical

empires, but notable changes were noted as the world approached modernity.

The Middle Ages, roughly the 5th to 15th centuries, was a long period during

which, it was initially reported, childhood did not exist. This false claim was given by

Philippe Aries in L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Regime published in 1960 and

all scholarship since then has set out to prove this statement incorrect. His work was

translated into English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood, and was recognized as the

preeminent source for the history of childhood which “launched the debates on the

history of children and childhood which have lasted to the present day.”87 Among other

criticisms that have arisen since his work was published, Aries’ use of pictorial evidence

to show the lack of childhood in medieval times is one of the most remarked upon.

Arguments hold that Aries focused on the lack of children in the early middle ages in art

to back his claim; however, medieval art historian Ilene H. Forsyth argues that, “children

do appear in early medieval art and that their portrayal there, which is often handled with

wit and understanding of a dramatic, even poignant sort, reflects a particular awareness of

this phase of life and a keep rapport with its special qualities.”88 In more recent times,

86

Stearns, Childhood in World History, 35.

87 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 4.

88 Ilene H. Forsyth, “Children in Early Medieval Art: Ninth through Twelfth Centuries,” Journal

of Psychohistory, 4 (1976), 31-70 quoted in Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western

Society Since 1500 (London: Pearson Education Limited, 1995, 2005), 28.

69

scholars have argued that the changes witnessed in medieval art are not so much a

reflection of the concept or attitudes towards childhood in and of itself, but rather

changes in either art or theology. Theology, because the infant Jesus was the child most

depicted during this era. Although Aries argued that childhood did not exist during the

early Middle Ages, he claimed that there was indeed a growth in the concept in which

children came to be the center of the modern family, however, this occurred in the early

modern era. Israeli historian Shulamith Shahar’s Childhood in the Middle Ages, shows

that contrary to Aries’ claims, “medieval children were perceived as different from adults

and that parents made an emotional investment in their children–directly counter those

put by Aries’ in 1960.”89 Shahar and other historians are able to show evidence of adults

interacting positively with children, of parents grieving over the death of children, and of

society embracing children as shown by popular preaching manuals during the 11th and

13th centuries which stressed a child’s need ‘of loving-kindness from others, of

gentleness, mercy, cheerful address, charitable patience, and many such-like

comforts.’”90 During this time period, the lives of some children did undergo some

notable changes. First, children of wealthier families began to attend cathedral schools as

opposed to partaking of apprenticeships. Aries considered this an important change,

however, he emphasized that by entering school children were immediately initiated into

the world of adulthood, whereas today childhood and school are more synonymous. This

89

Sharon Farmer, “Childhood in the Middle Ages by Shulamith Shahar,” Journal of Social

History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1992), 198.

90 Jenny Swanson, “Childhood and Childrearing in ad status sermons by later thirteenth century

friars,” Journal of Medieval History, 16 (1990): 309-31, quoted in Hugh Cunningham, Children and

Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (London: Pearson Education Limited, 1995,), 30.

70

process was not finalized according to Aries until the late 18th century, giving more

support to his claim that childhood is an early modern concept.

As is evident, changes did not occur smoothly in the development of childhood

and the role of children. As the world entered the early modern era, childhood began to

shift in subtle ways yet again. A noticeable starting point for two of these differences

from the way previous people viewed children was the Renaissance and was evident by

the humanist approach to childhood. One change was the role of the parent. Prior to this

time, mothers were primarily responsible for children under the age of 7 or 8, as younger

children were thought to be too immature or fanciful to take seriously the responsibilities

and/or lessons required of them. During the Renaissance, however, the role of the father-

although in past times, undisputedly the figure of utmost authority-came to have more

significance in a child’s life. “The father-child relationship vied with if it did not replace,

the mother-child relationship as the most intense of all relationships.”91 A second

significant change was the emphasis put on early learning. Soon after weaning, young

children were encouraged to learn their letters, often with rewards, and-as time

progressed-with decreasing amounts of corporal punishment. Of the most noted

supporters of the use early education and of gentleness as opposed to abuse to ingrain

lessons was the Dutch Desiderius Erasmus. In 1497, he wrote, “a constant element of

enjoyment must be mingled with our studies so that we think of learning as a game rather

than a form of drudgery, for no activity can be continued for long if it does not to some

91

Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 42.

71

extent afford pleasure to the participant.”92 Harkening back to medieval times when

children were thought to be malleable, Renaissance parents and thinkers looked towards

this time as optimal for instilling the mores, values and character needed to produce a

worthy adult citizen. As time advanced, the Catholic and Protestant reformations also

influenced the course of childhood, “the balance shifted from the family to the Church,

and its schools as the primary institution for rearing good Christians.”93 The shift was

complete by the time of the Enlightenment in Europe, but once again, the concept of

childhood found itself the topic of discussion and change of thought.

With regards to the Jewish views on childhood, overlap occurs among the Judeo,

Christian, and Islamic communities, as the three groups share Abrahamic origins. In both

the Christian and Jewish faith, there is the understanding that God created man and

woman, and they were expected to procreate. In Genesis 1:28, a book featured in the first

book of the Jewish Bible, the Tanakh and the first book of the Christian Bible, it states

“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’.” In

accordance with this, children, according to Dr. Elisheva Baumgarten, “can be expected

to be central to the social organization of the Jewish people.”94 In Children and

Childhood in World Religions, Baumgarten presents religious and legal texts which refer

92

Desiderus Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus Vol. 25, trans. and ed. Richard J. Schoeck

(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 114.

93 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 57.

94 Elisheva Baumgarten, “Judaism,” in Children and Childhood in World Religions: Primary

Sources and Texts, eds. Don S. Browning and Marcia J. Bunge (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

Press, 2009), 15.

72

to children in Jewish communities, noting however, that because of the proximity to other

ethnicities, “Jews were part of their surrounding cultures, absorbing and transforming

ideas they learned from their neighbors and reinterpreting and explaining their traditions

in light of the values they discerned around them. The Jewish tradition in its turn also

helped shape neighboring religions and cultures, with constant dialogue between Jews

and their surrounding cultures existed.”95 The Jewish regarded children as important

members of society, as exemplified in various religious texts which comment time and

again the importance of Jewish men and women to have children. Here Baumgarten

refers to the fact that with regards to young children, “The main directives that appear

deal with two issues: feeding them and initiating them into Judaism and religions

education.”96 In The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion, a section on the child in

general, focuses mostly on a Christian viewpoint, with very little mention to other faiths

or groups based on region. Judaism is not mentioned in this larger portion. In the

separate section pertaining to Judaism, however, the idea of Jews holding essentially

similar views with regards to children as their neighboring cultures is reinforced, stating,

“Jews have been a minority community participating to varying extents in the wider host

or territorial culture.”97 As time progressed, however, “during the Jewish Enlightenment

(Haskalah) in Europe, as Jews increasingly had opportunities for citizenship, many young

95

Ibid, 16

96 Ibid, 21.

97 Ayala Fader, “The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion,” in The Child: An Encyclopedic

Companion, ed. Richard A. Shweder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 523.

73

people abandoned the ways of their parents and became immersed in European

intellectual and national culture.”98 Often, the national cultures in which they were

immersed were predominantly of Christian faiths.

Of the periods during the early Modern era, the Enlightenment has historically

been regarded as one of great change in ideas. As the rearing of children had shifted to

the Church, the “parent-child relationship became more distant and formal, only for this

in turn to be set aside in the second half of the 19th century with the triumph of the view

that childhood was not only a separate stage in life, but the best of those stages.”99 This

shift, of children once again being the focus in homes was influenced by political, social

and economic changes as leading Western nations entered the period of the Agricultural

Revolution and later, the period of industrialization. Contrary to the societies before

them, families of agricultural societies intentionally expanded their families at higher

rates in an effort to provide a low cost labor force. Having more children did not always

guarantee a large, healthy labor force, however. Children of these societies were exposed

to a variety of diseases and subject to the forces of nature, which could often bring

famine or drought.100 Nevertheless, even though the chance of a child finding death

before maturity was present, the chance was less than those of children who had lived

centuries earlier. As the economic influence of children expanded, “it was by no means

98

Ibid.

99 Cunningham, Children and Childhood, 58.

100 Ibid, 12.

74

certain that children would be working in their own homes or with their own family. In a

sense they became available to earn some portion of a living wherever it could be

found.”101 Often times, surplus children would take positions of servitude in households

of the wealthy or found jobs in cottage industries. The textile industry in particular

benefitted from a larger supply force that drew workers from children. The expression,

“It takes a village to raise a child” rang true during this time, as more children made up

part of agricultural societies than any previous society. Larger communities formed in

which the child took a slightly more central position in society because of their larger

influence on the economy. Children were often kept under control by the community

who had knowledge of nearby families and of the expectations of all members of their

society, young and old alike. As family size increased, communal supervision was

necessary to help integrate children into society.102

With the rise of industrialization, notions of childhood faced another significant

change. With the emergence of the middle class in industrial societies, children who did

not need to work to provide economic support for their families needed something to

occupy their time while their parents worked. At this point, education took a larger role

in the lives of children. According to Cunningham with regards to Philippe Aries, it “was

changes in ideas about childhood which, in his view, had been central to the making of

the modern family. Crucial in this was the development of the idea that children should

101

Ibid, 87.

102 Ibid, 98.

75

have an education.”103 Through societal mores and religious advisors, parents were

given to understand that school was a necessary institution to prepare the young for

adulthood. “Many historians see compulsory schooling as the end point of a journey in

which children and their families had moved from a peasant economy, often via a proto-

industrial one to an industrial one.”104 Initially, it was the children of middle class

families who had access to schools or an education. As time advanced, and campaigns

against child labor succeeded, more and more children of all stations attended schools

and the demarcation between adult and child was clearer.

From the 15th to 19th centuries there were two larger issues surrounding children

in the Western world: what to do with orphaned or abandoned children, and idea that

school should be accessible by all children. As industrialization increased, so too did the

demarcation between the classes. Those in upper classes found targets for philanthropic

campaigns widely available. Children were more often than not recipients of charities,

and those who found themselves with no adult found either clothing, food, schooling, or

shelter bestowed upon them by religious or wealthy benefactors. As for education,

schools were affected by industrialization as well and their impact on the lives of children

served more than one purpose. The expansion of cities contributed to a weakening of

community ties. Cities exposed adults and children alike to a fast paced way of living in

which all family members needed to work to provide housing and other amenities for all.

In Western nations, the period between 1750 and 1860 brought the peak-at the time-of

103

Ibid, 5.

104 Ibid, 81.

76

greater government involvement in the lives of children via programs and, in many cases,

the enforcement of compulsory education. With increased government involvement in

schools, schools began to offer more secular curriculum. Schools during the nineteenth

century, however, were still a source of religious education. “We can gauge something

of the demand for this kind of education form the response in the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries to the English Sunday schools; it is estimated that a very high

proportion of English working-class children attended.”105 During the Industrial

Revolution it was vital for nations to produce citizens who, even with rudimentary

literacy skills, could yield the most economic value. As economic hardships or job

opportunities increased, school attendance decreased. Few children attended more than

three years, and most attended less than that. Schools were also useful for providing

child care while parents worked. Payment of fees kept many lower class children out of

schools initially; charitable endowments as well as work schools created by industries

who “attempted to finance themselves out of the industrial labor of children.”106

However, there were further developments regarding childhood. Cunningham put

it best, stating that “The construction of childhood is of course a continuing process:

‘childhood’ is never fixed and constant.”107 About the same time as industrialization was

at its peak in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, changes in puberty occurred in the

105

Ibid, 99.

106 Ibid, 100.

107 Hugh Cunningham, The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the

Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 7.

77

development of children and adolescence became a noticeable stage in between

childhood and adulthood. According to Peter Stearns, “Along with the emphasis on

loving innocence and the complicated signals about sexual restraint, the West introduced

a final basic innovation into its approach to childhood in the nineteenth century: the idea

of adolescence.”108 Adolescence became a new transitional stage between childhood and

adulthood in which a person began to prepare for impending responsibilities of an adult.

“In the past, children moved from a sort of limbo status to adulthood very quickly-

perhaps as young as age 7 or 8. Since then, particularly with the ‘discovery’ of

adolescence, the age at which children are thought to become adults has increased, but

has also become increasingly unclear. Part of the problem is that the age at which

children cease to be regarded as children varies according to context.”109 As humans

continue into a digital age, the line between children and adults is further blurred by

adolescents having easier access to worlds that were previously strictly for adults.

Clearly, even in the 21st century, historians and scholars of other fields will continue to

study the concept of childhood with perhaps just as much perplexity as those who came

before them studied the children of their own eras.

Childhood in Other Disciplines

The fields such as anthropology, sociology, or psychology have added a great deal

to our understanding of childhood in general and of child Holocaust survivors in

particular, as well.

108

Stearns, 61.

109 Ed Cairns, Children and Political Violence (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 9.

78

Anthropological studies on children have been on the rise in the last three decades

but have been evident for over quite some time. Social anthropologist Heather

Montgomery states in the introduction to her work, “There have certainly been influential

books and articles which have discussed ideas about children and childhood, as well as

seminal monographs on particular aspects of children’s lives, but when I started to write

this one there had not been a book that placed these within the history of

anthropology.”110 In many circles, the study of childhood has not been regarded as a

serious focus for anthropologists. Anthropologist Elizabeth Chin concurred that “despite

anthropology’s strong-although uneven-tradition of studying children (or more

commonly, childhood), children are a topic that is both overtly and covertly regarded as

less than serious.”111 Early research into children and childhood was done in the age of

imperialism during the 19th and early 20th century. Of the minimal early sources found,

the consensus was that children were like savages, and that as they grew into maturity,

they paralleled the evolution of the human race. C. Staniland Wake, developed a

“complex theory of the stages of human evolution that corresponded directly to the

observable stages of development in children.”112 His third stage of development likened

the child to the Negro race claiming that a child is “a creature of passion, which leads him

to abandon himself to sexual excesses, and an indulgence in intoxication . . . he has a

110

Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood, 2.

111 Elizabeth Chin, “Feminist Theory and the Ethnography of Children’s Worlds: Barbie in New

Haven,” in Children and Anthropology: Perspectives for the 21st Century, ed. Helen B. Schwartzman

(Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 2001), 134.

112 Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood, 19.

79

disregard for human life, and when his passions are around he is utterly careless about

inflicting pain.”113 While statements like this were commonly found during the era of

imperialism and the peak of thinking in terms of racial superiority, they have lost validity

in more recent times. “Indeed,” Montgomery presents, “Laurence Hirschfeld has

suggested that because of the offensive early parallels drawn between savages and

children, anthropologists have been reluctant to look at childhood for fear of resurrecting

these embarrassing antecedents.”114 While children were regarded as savage and not

exactly contributing members to societies at large, anthropologists were able to

“domesticate ideas about savages.”115 These racial theories were discredited in the early

20th century through the work of other anthropologists and the move away from racial

thinking emerged with regards to children.

Franz Boas, German-American anthropologist who is known as the father of

American anthropology, used his studies on child development to challenge ideas such as

those of Wake. Boas argued that the environment played a role in childhood and

important differences between children of the world were not necessarily biological or

racial in their origin, as he showed with his study of immigrant children of Eastern and

Southern European descent to the United States. He found that when comparing these

immigrants to Americans born of the same origins, there were “observable differences”

113

Charles Staniland Wake, The Evolution of Morality (London: Trubner and Co., 1878) as

quoted in Heather Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on

Children’s Lives (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 19.

114 Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood, 20.

115 Ibid, 21.

80

in which he “demonstrated how phenotypes such as face shape changed.”116

Psychologist G. Stanley Hall argued that adolescence was the transitional stage between

childhood and adulthood, and that all adolescents-because of the biological changes they

are undergoing-exhibited specific traits and behaviors. In describing these changes that

were out of the control of adolescents, he wrote that “every step of the upward way is

strewn with wreckage of body, mind and morals. There is not only arrest, but perversion,

at every stage, and hoodlumism, juvenile crime, and secret vice.”117 When applying this

idea to adolescence, Boas’ student Margaret Mead-through her own case study with

Samoan girls-also concluded that the environment in which children are raised help to

develop them into cultural beings. She “rejected the idea that adolescent was necessarily

a stressful and disruptive experience for both the child and the society and claimed that

behavior in adolescence was caused by cultural conditioning rather than biological

changes.”118 When compared to American girls, Samoan girls showed a less stressful or

chaotic entrance into adolescence because the environment they were raised in was one

which offered less choices for behavior and a strong code of conduct that was impressed

to them by the adults in their culture.

This is just one example of how anthropologists agree the definition of child

given by the United Nations is not, on the whole, very helpful at all in identifying what a

child is. For many cultures and societies, a child is classified as one until they reach

116

Ibid.

117 G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Anthropology, Sociology,

Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1937), xiv.

118 Montgomery, An Introduction to Children, 22-23.

81

different markers in life, be they menstruation, marriage, or economic independence.

Montgomery, in attempting to provide an anthropological history of children and

childhood states, “Studying childhood is also a way of studying change, and it is often

through looking at children’s lives that these changes become more apparent. Political

upheaval, globalization, economic development, and the spread of education and human

rights have all had an impact on the ways in which children are understood and how they

are treated.”119 Children of the 21st century are being given more attention not only

anthropologically but especially politically. Anthropologists, such as Montgomery and

her colleagues, are attempting to address the issues of children who do not comprise the

ideal child as per the United Nations’ definition. Children who are soldiers, prostitutes or

street children, thus do not fit the mold of the idealized UN child, that is, a child who is

centered in the family, and has the right to an education and to not labor until they reach

their late teenage years, but most specifically one that is innocent of violence or sexuality.

To this effect, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Howard Stern have argued, “It is the ‘bad’

(i.e. impulsive, lazy, aggressive, sexual) children who are being disciplined and purged

(to a great extent representing the young members of already stigmatized and therefore

suspect and vulnerable ethnic, racial, and class minorities), and it is the ‘good’ (i.e. the

innocent, asexual) children who are understood as being rescued.”120 As such, “The

importance of an anthropological perspective on children’s lives is that it shows so

119

Ibid, 234.

120 Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Howard Stein, “Child Abuse and the Unconscious,” in Child

Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children, ed. Nancy

Scheper-Hughes (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1987), 346.

82

clearly that the concept of the innocent child, so important to national and international

legislation, is but one cultural construct among many others. There is nothing natural in

how children grow up, what they know, or the choice of topics from which they must be

protected.”121 In order to better understand childhood, there is no doubt that children of

specific countries, religions, and societies need to be studied. Because of the disparity in

the lives of children who hail from non-Western or non-industrialized countries, there

seems to be a general consensus among anthropologists that generalizing childhood and

the lives of children would be detrimental to children worldwide, however, without

having a starting point such as the one provided by the UN, and without referring to the

few studies done prior the 1980s, the task would be daunting.

The sociology for childhood was in nascent stages in 1990 and it would not form

a noticeable field until the mid-1990s. In 1997, Allison James and Alan Prout stated that

“The traditional consignment of childhood to the margins of the social sciences or its

primary location within the fields of developmental psychology and education is, then,

beginning to change: it is now much more common to find acknowledgement that

childhood should be regarded as a part of society and culture rather than a precursor to it;

and that children should be seen as already social actors not beings in the process of

becoming such.”122 Just as in history, the dearth of research on childhood in sociology is

due to the fact that-for a majority of time-men took center stage. “Children (like women)

121

Montgomery, An Introduction to Childhood, 236.

122 Allison James and Alan Prout, eds., Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood:

Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (Washington, D.C., Falmer Press, 1997), ix.

83

were seen as peripheral to the global systems under study or simply taken as future

replacements for their adult members. Little attention therefore was devoted to children,

who were not accepted as significant members although they did occupy their ‘proper

place’ (again like women) in the lives of the more significant ones (men).”123 When

regarding children in general, Chris Jenks, states simply, “the child is familiar to us and

yet strange; he or she inhabits our world and yet seems to answer to another; he or she is

essentially of ourselves and yet appears to display a systematically different order of

being. The child’s serious purpose and our intentions towards him or her are dedicated to

a resolution of that initial paradox by transforming him or her into an adult, like

ourselves.”124 Sociologists have come to agree that childhood is best understood as a

social construct, and that it is based on natural development rather than biological factors

such as age or gender. Children and their ways of socializing are symbolic of the

developmental process of humans at large. Like anthropologists, sociologists agree that

the way childhood is understood varies in different societies. There are two distinct ways

in which children are talked and thought about. These are presented by Chris Jenks as

two mythological universal children: the Dionysian child and the Apollonian child as a

way to address that children can, and have been historically, seen as examples of either

mythological character.

The Dionysian child is based on the idea that children are born with evil

tendencies and otherwise corrupt behaviors. While children of this type have the

123

Leena Alanen, “Rethinking Childhood,” Acta Sociologica Vol. 31, no. 1 (1988), 53.

124 Chris Jenks, Childhood, (London: Routledge, 2005), 3.

84

potential of wrong doing, they can–through adult guidance–be saved. “Such children

must not fall into bad company, establish bad habits or develop idle hands-all of these

contexts will enable outlets for the demonic force within, which is, of course, potentially

destructive to just of the child but also of the adult collectivity.”125 This view of the child

is seen in history throughout the 16th and 17th century, to wit parenting was forced to be

one of hardness. Parents needed to be able to beat the child in order to break the

selfishness and immorality that lay within. This mentality towards children is a reflection

of Proverbs 13:24, “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves

their children is careful to discipline them.” This image of the child was a reflection of

children in pre-modern times, as was seen in their social status. That is, they were not

special in any way, and thus protection from work or abuse was not necessary. By

contrast, the Apollonian child was seen as the innocent and “good” child. “This does

appear to be, much more, the modern, Western, but only ‘public’, way of regarding the

child. Such infants are angelic, innocent and untainted by the world which they have

recently entered.”126 This child, whose image was manifested in Jean Jacques

Rousseau’s Emile, needed to be lovingly guided and protected from the evils of the

world. These children should not be beaten or forced into submission, but are instead

“encouraged, enabled, and facilitated.”127 By using these two images of children, Jenks

attempts to explain how children have in the past and present times been addressed. He

125

Jenks, Childhood, 63.

126 Ibid, 65.

127 Ibid.

85

states, “Yet these images are immensely powerful; they live on and give force to the

different discourse that we have about children; they constitute summaries of the way we

have, over time, come to treat and process children ‘normally’. What I am pointing to

here is that these images are informative of the shifting strategies that Western society

has exercised in its increasing need to control, socialize and constrain people in the

transition towards modernity.”128 Sociologists argue that children are not merely

witnesses to how societies work, but rather are active agents in society. Their lives are

impacted by the policies and practices of the adults in their lives, but even at present,

their voices remain muted, much like most women were until the mid-20th century.

While children have been impacted by current laws which aim to protect them, they have

no input or say in the laws and how they are created. Berry Mayall suggests that “one

may raise the status of childhood through arguing for and demonstrating children’s social

responsibilities; improved status may lead to respect for their rights.”129 Allison James

and Alan Prout have identified similar problems with the concept of childhood as

regarded through the lens of sociology: “Sociological accounts locate childhood in some

timeless zone standing as it were to the side of the mainstream (that is adult) history and

culture. Childhood appears to be, so to speak, lost in time: its present is continuously

banished to the past, the future or out of time altogether.”130 Sociologists struggle to

address the many issues they encounter with children in society, and how they have been

128

Ibid.

129 Berry Mayall, Towards a Sociology for Childhood: Thinking from Children’s Lives,

(Philadephia: Open University Press, 2002), 164.

130 James and Prout, Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, 234.

86

historically represented in their field and in general, but that has not deterred them from

facing the challenges head on and have continued to contribute to the topic with case

studies regarding children who do not fit the “norm” in most areas, including but not

limited to terminally ill children and children who have been sexually abused.

Childhood has a longer connection with the field of psychology and much more

research can be found in this area. Research into children’s cognitive development has

existed for over a century. According to sociologists, some of the problems with

psychologists and their study of children center around issues such as “the perception that

a focus on development has led to the neglect of the quality and meaning of children’s

present lives, the search for ‘universal’ laws of child development, the assumption that

child development is ‘natural’ (biologically based), a view of children as passive, and a

focus on age-related competency/deficits rather than on subjective experience.”131

Credited as the one of the founders of developmental psychology, namely that of

childhood and adolescence, G. Stanley Hall worked towards seeking the answer to how

children think, and how that varies at different stages of their lives. To this effect, he

created the questionnaire to discover those thoughts. Sigmund Freud, neurologist, also

helped towards an understanding of the child with the use of psychoanalytic theory to

help map out human development on the whole. By listening to many patients describe

experiences in their lives that they found noteworthy, Freud establish that over the course

131

Diane Hogan, “Researching ‘the Child’ in Developmental Psychology,” in Researching

Children’s Experience: Methods and Approaches, eds. Sheila Greene and Diane Hogan (London: Sage

Publications, 2005), 23.

87

of a human’s development “there must be important milestones . . . that all people

share.”132

While there is a plethora of scholarship and theories regarding children, it is

important to highlight on a few of the larger ideas so as to not overwhelm the topic at

hand. Psychologists such as Hall and Freud, as well as other notable figures such as Jean

Piaget and Erik Erikson, have helped to provide adults with a better understanding of

children behave, learn and think133. Psychologists have worked together and individually

to provide students of their subject with universal stages of human development, and

have spent as considerable a time focusing on the early stages as adulthood. Childhood

can be divided into two separate stages of development: physical and mental. In the

physical, humans are said to develop in three major periods: “the first baby-and-toddler

phase when the child is still entirely surrounded by the parental home and when ‘under

mother’s wing’; a second phase, when he takes a step further into the world, and school

as well as home becomes a part of his life; and a third phase, following the primary

school period, which is devoted to preparing for a future career.”134 With regards to

mental development, this occurs differently depending on sex, and is largely influenced

by environment and stimuli provided by the society in which the child finds itself. Piaget

132

David R. Shaffer, Developmental Psychology: Childhood and Adolescence, (Pacific Grove,

CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co., 1993), 13.

133 A notable book by Jean Piaget include The Psychology of the Child. Erik Erikson’s works

include Childhood and Society: The Landmark Work on the Social Significance of Childhood as well as

The Life Cycle Completed.

134 Bernard C.J. Lievegoed, Phases of Childhood: Growing in Body, Soul, and Spirit, trans. Tony

Langham and Plym Peters (Edinburgh: Floris, 2005), 21.

88

contributed most to the view of cognitive development by helping to provide insight into

the different levels of intelligence children exhibit at different stages of their lives. He

stated that “The child is of considerable interest in himself, but interest in psychological

investigations of the child is increased when we realize that the child explains the man as

well as and often better than the man explains the child. While the adult educates the

child by means of multiple social transmissions, every adult, even if he is a creative

genius, nevertheless began as a child, in prehistoric times as well as today.”135 The

information provided by psychologists branches further into the emotional well-being of

children, and how they are affected by trauma as well as how they are able to deal with

harrowing events.

Children and War

Without a doubt, war affects everyday life. The level to which citizens of warring

countries are affected vary greatly: those near the violence of battles or bombings have

higher chances of incurring loss of home, family, health or life; those who are located

further from the carnage will likely be affected by limited availability to goods and

resources, as well other restrictions inflicted on them by government officials. There are

many ways that children experience war, as a result, and many ways which they

internalize what is happening in their surroundings. Children throughout history have

experienced war in the role of soldiers, veterans, casualties, and survivors. World War II,

with its high death tolls for civilians and military personnel, brought death closer to

children than ever before. For Jewish children, life between 1933 and 1945 was

135

Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Psychology of the Child, trans. Helen Weaver (New

York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969), ix.

89

tumultuous at best and temporary at worst. Jewish children were affected at increasingly

alarming rates as restrictions on their lives caused them to lose any rights they may have

had to citizenship, socialization with others, and freedom. Although “Nazis wished to

liquidate all Jews, they especially targeted the children, who represented the future and

the potential of Judaism.”136 Unfortunately during war, children, i.e. the future soldiers

of an enemy, do not inspire a protective instinct, but rather a destructive one.

In her work with wartime nurseries in England, psychologist Anna Freud wrote,

“War conditions, through the inevitable breaking-up of family life, deprive children of

the natural background for their emotional and mental development.” Further, she adds,

because of the disruption of everyday life, the “lack of essential foods, vitamins, etc., in

early childhood will cause lasting bodily malformation in later years, even if harmful

consequences are not immediately present.”137 The Jewish children of this war were

perniciously persecuted, however, many did escape the fate that was designed for them.

Conditions in the ghettos and camps of the Holocaust were abhorrent and inhumane, and

yet, even with any adverse effects to the emotional and mental psyche of these children,

many became survivors, providing testimonies so that future generations and scholars

alike can understand the resiliency of children.

Children and Trauma

136

Eric J. Sterling, “Rescue and Trauma: Jewish Children and the Kindertransports during the

Holocaust” in Children and War: A Historical Anthology, ed. James Marten (New York: New York

University Press, 2002), 63.

137 Anna Freud and Dorothy T. Burlingham, War and Children (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press,

Publishers, 1943), 11.

90

War creates chaos in the lives of children, and in many cases, children who are

exposed to war violence for a prolonged period of time are at a higher risk of suffering

trauma from their experiences. “The trauma of war can affect children in insidious and

psychologically violent ways; memories can be blurred by age or manipulated by

governments and individuals. Yet these impressions form an important part of the way

children experience war.”138 In order to best address issues of trauma, a closer look is

given to psychology and in the ways that it addresses childhood trauma. According to

psychologist Cynthia Monahan, “Trauma occurs when a sudden, extraordinary, external

event overwhelms an individual’s capacity to cope and master the feelings aroused by the

event.”139 Naturally, child survivors of the Holocaust would have been exposed to either

one or, most likely, all of the following traumas: physical, emotional, or psychological.

The extent of trauma, however, is difficult to measure. Children react to trauma

differently, and their reactions vary greatly depending on age, cognitive development,

and sex. Two children similar in age, gender, nationality, and religion who undergo the

same trauma, such as was found in the ghettos and camps of the Holocaust, will likely

respond to said trauma in different ways. According to Kathleen Nader, “more study is

needed to determine clearly the variations in traumatic reactions at different

138

James Marten, ed., Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York: New York

University Press, 2002), 13.

139 Cynthia Monahan, Children and Trauma: A Guide for Parents and Professionals (San

Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997), 1.

91

developmental stages.”140 Although psychologists have a longer history with children

and childhood, the legitimacy of the study of children as victims of trauma is rather

recent. Rather, prior to the late 1970s and early 1980s, it “was difficult for professionals

to accept that traumatic events, caused by fellow humans, in the lives of children might

color and shape their lives for years to come.”141 As with the complexity of childhood in

general, the effects of trauma in children are difficult to comprehend due to the fact that

some effects can emerge later in a survivor’s life.

For Jewish children, the experiences of trauma ranged broadly and, for some,

traumas occurred over an extended period of time. Children went into hiding with family

and with strangers, children were forced to live under false identities, children saw their

family members and loved ones killed-either immediately or through a slow process

including starvation and excessive work expectations, but children also survived and

carried the burden of the trauma experienced by their elders being expressed to them

through emotional and/or physical abuse. “Jewish survivors were additionally exposed to

destruction of their own community, fragmentation of the community, and ultimate

dehumanizing experiences during the war.”142 For all children, overcoming a trauma can

take some time. While it may seem that a child is unaffected, the grief over a trauma can

140

Kathleen Nader, Understanding and Assessing Trauma in Children and Adolescents:

Measures, Methods, and Youth in Context (New York: Routledge, 2008), 142.

141 Elissa P. Benedek, “Children and Psychic Trauma: A Brief Review of Contemporary

Thinking,” in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Children, eds. Spencer Eth and Robert S. Pynoos

(Washington D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1985), 4.

142 Maja Lis-Turlejska et al., “Jewish and Non-Jewish World War II Child and Adolescent

Survivors at 60 Years After War: Effects of Parental Loss and Age at Exposure on Well-Being,” American

Journal of Orthopsychiatry 78, no. 3 (2008): 369.

92

be triggered by later in life, even decades after the events themselves occurred. Monahan

explains,

“Mild or severe, a traumatically frightening event matters deeply to a child. Even

when parents wish to forget what has occurred to their child, the child remembers.

In fact, the child needs to remember-over and over, detail by detail-as part of the

healing process. Children remember through retelling, through play, and through

their post-traumatic fears, dreams, and unusual behaviors. These memories

intrude unwelcomed; the child has not the least wish to remember. All of these

varied forms of remembering are indications of the trauma’s force but also part of

the child’s internal struggle to heal and master the trauma.”143

The adage that time heals all wounds would appear to be especially applicable to children

due to the fact that they typically have longer lives ahead of them, and the time in which

to conquer the traumas is thus longer. While initially many psychologists felt that

children were very resilient and therefore capable of mastering their traumas, researchers

in recent decades have begun to question that children have better resiliency skills than

adults.

Children and Resiliency

The study of children and resiliency dates back to the Second World War. As this

war was one which affected more civilians on the whole due to the mobility of the

enemies’ armies, it is safe to assume that children were affected at a larger rate as well.

Anna Freud and others remarked on the resiliency of children in London during air raids

and other forms of war violence. She states, “It is with this situation which led many

people to expect that children would receive traumatic shocks from air raids and would

develop abnormal reactions very similar to the traumatic or war neuroses of soldiers in

143

Monahan, Children and Trauma, 7.

93

the last war.”144 While spending years with the children of the war time nurseries, she

noticed that, for children who had not faced physical harm or been buried by debris, “If

these bombing incidents occur when small children are in the care either of their own

mothers or a familiar mother substitute, they do not seems to be particularly affected by

them.”145 Additionally, after observing the children and reading and listening to reports

by caregivers, social workers, or nurses of the children, Freud stated, “It is a common

misunderstanding of the child’s nature which leads people to suppose that children will

be saddened by the sight of destruction and aggression.”146 Other psychologists and

specialists on children have established that, just as with trauma, resiliency in children is

a varied and complex issue. A child’s resiliency depends on a broad range of factors.

“Some of the variables that influence how violence affects children’s long-term

development are the nature of the violence; the protective mechanisms in place before,

during and after a child experiences violence; and the extent to which a child can assign

meaning to his or her experience.”147 Unfortunately, with reactions to trauma being so

complex, there is no singular “cure,” as it were, for children who have experienced

trauma. There is, however, growing interest in understanding resiliency and the

challenges faced by children today in an effort to promote a “resilient mindset” in them

144

Freud, War and Children, 20.

145 Ibid, 21.

146 Ibid.

147 Barbara Magid and Neil Boothby, “Promoting Resilience in Children of War,” in Handbook of

Resilience in Children of War, eds. Chandi Fernando and Michel Ferrari (New York: Springer, 2013), 41.

94

which can help them overcome challenges and/or traumas.148 Ultimately, the child

survivors of the Holocaust whose stories I am examining are a shining example of the

resiliency of children.

For child Holocaust survivors, there are a variety of methods to help children

overcome trauma and create a stronger sense of resiliency. For many children, the adults

in their lives contribute to a feeling of normalcy and stability, which can include but is

not limited to immediate, extended and foster families. An adolescent survivor of the

Holocaust, Joseph Gourand, credits his father with his survival and resiliency as a result

of “the promise that I had made my father before his death which no one could make me

abandon, namely, to hold firm, to take care of my sister, and to make sure that, from just

one root, our family line continued.”149 Play can also help children to face a traumatic

event and to perhaps eventually overcome the event. Resiliency is difficult to measure,

just as it is difficult as gauging how trauma affect a person, however, play is recognized

for its curative properties. For some children of the Holocaust, play-even with rocks, dirt,

or twigs found on the floor- was a way to cope with the stressful situations they were

living in. “Perhaps the most mystifying thing about play is that, on the one hand, it is

supposed to be disengaged from reality in a variety of ways, while at the same time it is

148

Sam Goldstein and Robert B. Brooks, eds. Handbook of Resilience in Children (New York:

Springer, 2012), 3.

149 Joseph Gourand as quoted in Jacques Lecomte, Recovering from Childhood Wounds, trans.

Andrew Weller (London: Free Association Books, 2006), 70.

95

credited with a great number of useful real-life functions.”150 During the Holocaust, “it

became an instinctual form for understanding the absurd and for accommodating the

irrational. Play, with its unique conflict-resolving qualities, also provided the children

with a mental mechanism that facilitated their ability to cope with the psychological and

physical environment.”151 Eisen explains that, although for some, the idea of play during

the Holocaust might seem irrelevant or even impossible, play was found during this time,

and it was helpful in creating a form of normalcy for children even in the shadows of

death. “Finally, resilient people quite often say that religion is a supportive element . . .

In the eyes of numerous religious people, God is a loving father who replaces the one

who should have played this role.”152 Not all children who suffer trauma turn to religion

after traumatic experiences, but many do find solace in the idea of a God who accepts

them, even with a flawed past. Jewish children who were affected by the Holocaust were

exposed to and practiced different levels of religious belief and upbringing prior to

entering ghettos and camps, as can be expected. While in these locations, religion

officially ceased to exist, although some survivors do speak of practicing either through

prayer or observance. Upon liberation and in maturing into adults, child survivors did not

always return to the level of religious beliefs they were raised with.

Conclusion

150

George Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows (Amherst: The

University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 5.

151 Eisen, Children and Play in the Holocaust, 122.

152 Jacques Lecomte, Recovering from Childhood Wounds, trans. Andrew Weller (London: Free

Association Books, 2006), 26.

96

The history of children is an important and burgeoning body of scholarship. Most

disciplines will agree that in order to provide an accurate representation of a society, the

voice of all members should be heard. For some time, women’s histories were

marginalized in favor of those of men. Just as this has changed as time has passed, so too

children’s voices are beginning to clamor for attention. Lloyd de Mause stated, “The

history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken.

The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the most likely

children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.”153

Although conditions have generally improved for children throughout time, children of

populations deemed inferior by the National Socialist Worker’s Party were unfortunately

subject to one, if not all, of those fates during the span of the Holocaust. Children of

Jewish descent who lived while Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party were in power were

given little choice as to their future. They were permitted four different experiences:

killed immediately, a fate which generally befell children who were too young or sick to

be any of any viable use; hidden, if a parent or family was lucky enough to secure a

gentile family willing to risk their lives for said child; living under false papers, another

high risk situation which more often than not included separation from one’s family; and

lastly, allowed to live. There was not a set formula that guaranteed a lengthy life for

children in the last group. In some cases, children of all ages emerged upon liberation,

indelibly affected by their experiences which would stay with them until they passed

from this world.

153

De Mause, ed., The History of Childhood, 1.

97

CHAPTER 4

HARROWING EXPERIENCES

“Death is a given. How to live in the interim was not.”154

Life for Jewish Children in Nazi Ghettos and Camps

Much has been written about the experiences of adults while in ghettos and

concentrations camps; however, the voices of children who lived through similar

experiences have been overpowered by their parents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives

with more knowledge of how the world functions. Children are under auspices of the

adults in their lives, and as such their thoughts and words have historically been

marginalized. Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum was intrigued by the idea of

“living in the interim” when interviewing Marek Edelman, a Jewish officer involved with

the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The world has only an inkling of what living in the interim

was like for children during the Holocaust. The most notable exception, of course, comes

from Anne Frank, who spent some time in hiding during which she kept a diary that

provided the world with a look into what it was like to live during war while one is

persecuted. Although hers is the most recognized around the world, it is not the only one.

Many child survivors wrote diaries, journals, or memoirs during and after the war.

Chances were higher that written works of hidden children survived more than those in a

154

Michael Berenbaum as quoted in Eric J. Sterling, ed., Life in the Ghettos During the

Holocaust (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), xi.

98

ghetto or camp, who more often than not, had no time, resources or spirit to write about

their uprooted lives and the traumas they experienced. Additionally, some children spent

the years they would have learned to read and write in ghettos and camps–certainly not

places that fostered academic pursuits. For other children, the abnormal situations they

found themselves living day to day–where situations could turn for the better or worse in

the blink of an eye–were something they considered normal, and so, not of particular

interest for them to document. Even adults such as Chaim Kaplan, a Warsaw educator,

found difficulty in recording his time in the Warsaw ghetto, writing, “In my

psychological state it is hard to hold a pen in my hand, and my pen is not the one to

describe what befell us,” and a few days later, “It is difficult to write, but I consider it an

obligation and am determined to fulfill it with my last ounce of energy.”155 If adults were

feeling difficulty to this extent, one can imagine that children without coping or defense

mechanisms formed throughout life, were also subject to the same.

Ghettos

The idea of the ghetto was one which did not originate with the Third Reich, just

as “the Europe that permitted the Holocaust was not created in 1933.”156 Historians place

the origins of the ghetto circa the middle ages, with the Jewish ghetto in Venice being

among the most recognized. The development and growth of ghettos during the 16th and

17th centuries in cities including, but not limited to, Frankfurt, Rome and Prague, were

the creation of “various officials, ranging from local municipal authorities to the Austrian

155

Chaim Kaplan, as quoted in Dwork, Children with a Star, xxix.

156 Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 2002), 4-5.

99

Emperor Charles V.”157 With the growth of “assertive central governments in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” many medieval notions began to wither away in

favor of “universal laws and universal conditions.”158 The Enlightenment ideas of

Voltaire, Rousseau, and others, spread through Europe, suggesting that the most logical

and modern way for countries to base their society should be based on homogenization;

society should be of a classless nature, and that there should be universal access to

progress.

How Jews would fit in with this changing Europe was unclear at first. That

question was somewhat answered in France. With the French Revolution came the

message that “Jews were welcome as individuals to join the new society that France was

to be, but not as members of a traditional religious community.”159 This did not

guarantee immediate equality for Jews, nor did it eliminate anti-Semitism in France, but

it did help to foster an environment that was accepting to the notion that all humans

should be treated equally. As time progressed, the relationship of European Jews with

their home countries evolved as well. Initially not all Jews were open to Enlightenment

ideas, especially as these ideas rebuked the traditional organized religions such as

Christianity and Judaism because they were thought to hamper free-thinking. However,

by the latter half of the 18th century, the number of Jews who embraced the idea of social

equality had grown. This did not imply a rejection of Jewish culture and life; on the

157

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Ghettos.” Holocaust Encyclopedia.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005059 Accessed Nov. 21, 2014.

158 Dwork and van Pelt, Holocaust: A History, 10.

159 Ibid, 11.

100

contrary, like “their Orthodox brethren, enlightenment Jews were determined to preserve

their identity as Jews.”160 As Jews had spent much time isolated from the majority of the

people in countries in which they resided, it was important to them to keep close to the

community which fostered their growth. Certainly, Jews interacted with the gentile

world, but at the end of the day, orthodox or not, they returned to their Jewish

communities. Additionally, they “wished to establish a new relationship with the gentile

world, to be citizens of the country in which they lived. Emancipation was their goal.”161

German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, however, felt strongly against allowing Jews

gaining total emancipation and citizenship to the country in which they resided, stating to

his fellow Germans, “Are you not reminded here of a state within a state? Does the

obvious idea not occur to you that the Jews constitute a state to which you do not belong,

a state that is sounder and stronger than yours? If you grant them civil rights in your

states as well, they will trample all your other citizens underfoot.”162 During the 18th and

19th centuries, the issues of Jews in Europe persisted. Fichte’s posit was the result of a

new form of anti-Judaism, one “rooted in political rather than religions terms, and it was

taken up with alacrity.”163 While Europe continued on the path of progress and

modernization in the late 19th and early 20th century, it appeared that Jews–while

perhaps not welcomed with open arms–were tolerated in all aspects of everyday life.

160

Ibid.

161 Dwork and van Pelt, Holocaust, 11.

162 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb as quoted in Dwork and van Pelt, 16.

163 Ibid, 16.

101

As Yehuda Bauer explains, World War I “marked a crucial landmark in Jewish

history . . . The war released aggressions and revealed potentials for mutual mass

annihilation that had been undreamed of in previous generations.”164 As the war began,

many Jews found their lives fraught with hostility. Due to starvation, disease,

emigration, and pogroms in areas throughout Europe, Jews were constantly surrounded

by insecurity. As the world attempted to recover and move forward after the Great War,

so did many Jews; this was difficult as the world was gripped in a deep recession after the

war. Bauer states, “By the early thirties, Jewish powerlessness was compounded by the

Great Depression: Jews had little or no economic clout and less political influence,” and

as such, “by 1933 Jews were finally seen by Western governments as what they were: an

unpopular minority whose moral claims on the conscience of the West–a conscience

formed to no small degree by Jewish values–stood in inverse proportion to their real

influence.”165 This opinion of the Jewish population in Europe resounded deeply in

Adolf Hitler and his fellow Nazi colleagues. From the beginning of the Third Reich,

anti-Semitic propaganda filled German newspapers, businesses and advertisements,

foreshadowing the future of too many Jews in Europe.

For adults and children alike, the changes that were imposed on their public and

private lives were vast during the time the Nazi Party was in power. Christopher

Browning explains, “In the brief two years between the autumn of 1939 and the autumn

of 1941, Nazi Jewish policy escalated rapidly from the prewar policy of forced

164

Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982), 53.

165 Ibid, 72.

102

emigration to the Final Solution as it is now understood–the systematic attempt to murder

every last Jew within the German grasp.”166 The adaptation of the ghetto for Aryan

purposes fit within this timeframe as well, although the purposes of ghettos were not

clearly identifiable, even to those who were in charge of these establishments. Hermann

Goering, second in command to Adolf Hitler at the time, and in discussion with other

Nazi authorities shortly after Kristallnacht stated, “But my dear Heydrich, you will not be

able to avoid having ghettos in the cities on a really big scale. They will have to be

established.” To this Reinhard Heydrich, first Director of the Reich Main Security Office,

was resistant, rebuffing with, “As for the matter of ghettos, I would like to make my

position clear right away. From a police point of view, I think that a ghetto, in the form

of a completely segregated district with only Jews, is not possible. We would have no

control over a ghetto where the Jew gets together with the whole of his Jewish tribe.”167

Heydrich was hesitant to put so many Jews together, fearing that they could create a

formidable group to resist Nazi oppression. It would be difficult to control a mob if so

many of their police forces were spread around the ever-growing Nazi territory.

Roughly a year later, however, with the war already underway, the leaders of the Nazi

party realized that establishing themselves deeply within Jewish segregated areas yielded

them further opportunities for oppressing and controlling these so-called enemies of the

166

Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish

Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), 1.

167 “Stenographic Report of the Meeting on the Jewish Question – November 12, 1938” in

Yitzhak Arad, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds., Documents on the Holocaust: Selected

Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union (Jerusalem:

Yad Vashem, 1999), 110-111.

103

state, especially as they arrived in ghettos usually with nothing more than what they

could carry and dwindling hope.

Ghettos varied in many aspects, not necessarily having a standard mode of

operation other than concentrating a number of Jewish citizens for eventual deportation to

the labor or extermination camps that were simultaneously being built. Larger ghettos

such as those in Warsaw or Łódź, have come to represent the over 1,000 ghettos that

existed while the Nazi government reigned in Germany during the Second World War.

However, the myriad of ghettos that existed in predominantly Eastern Europe ranged

from small to large, and its occupants lived there for days, weeks, months–and in the case

of Łódź–years at a time, awaiting final deportation from what could be once familiar

territory to inhabitance in hostile territory.

Prior to the beginning of war, German troops relocated thousands of Jews from

Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia “to the Polish-German border and forced [them] to

enter Poland at gunpoint.”168 These now stateless Jews were at that point under the

auspices of Poland and shortly thereafter, of the Judenrate, or Jewish Councils, which the

German government demanded be established in order to carry out their orders. Initially

after the outbreak of war, German troops “aimed at provoking the mass exodus of as

many Jews as possible from occupied Poland, chiefly to the Soviet Union . . .

Nevertheless, it was clear from the outset that many Jews would remain.”169 As such, the

168

Eve Nussbaum Soumerai and Carol D. Schulz, eds., Daily Life in the Holocaust: Second

Edition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), 85.

169 Dan Michman, “The Jewish Ghettos under the Nazis and Their Allies: The Reasons Behind

Their Emergence,” in The Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos During the Holocaust, eds. Guy Miron

and Shlomit Shulhani (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), xx.

104

SS and police decided their only recourse and path to successfully controlling the Jewish

masses that remained in Poland and other larger cities across Europe, would be to

infiltrate the head of these communities. The policy was officially outlined in “the well-

formulated Schnellbrief that Heydrich distributed among the leaders of the

Einsatzgruppen on September 21,” which called for Jewish councils to be created to act

as intermediaries between the Third Reich and displaced Jews.170 It was expected that

“these councils be composed of influential persons, rabbis and other community leaders,

whom the people could be expected to follow,” however, in some cases members of the

Judenrate were chosen at random by Jews hoping to avoid retribution from Nazi officials

for not adhering to these orders with efficiency. 171 With the official formation of ghettos,

the noose surround European Jews tightened as these locations ultimately facilitated the

ensuing genocide.

For a variety of reasons, the ghettos signaled the imminent end to the former way

of life for Jews in Europe. Oral or written testimonies of life in the ghettos leave nothing

to the imagination; conditions were appalling and most adults knew that the ghettos were

most definitely a grim interim for death. Historian Michael Berenbaum, in the foreword

to the Encyclopedia of the Ghettos, explains that “while many students of the Holocaust

mistakenly believe that the story of the ghettos is well known and the fate of each ghetto

was the same, the devil is in the details and the truth of what happened during the Shoah

170

Ibid.

171 Soumerai and Schulz, Daily Life in the Holocaust, 86.

105

is found in the particular, town by town, community by community, city by city.”172 His

point is valid. Not all ghettos followed similar structures, least while not in the manner

that the larger concentration camps were similar in how they brought in inmates,

processed them, worked them and ultimately ushered them to the end of their lives. Due

to the nature of the Holocaust, it is, unfortunately, quite simple to generalize the events

that occurred in the ghettos; there are millions of accounts of life in the ghettos, but no

two are the same.

Experiences of Children

It is clear that the Nazis planned to eliminate the Jewish population by any means

necessary, to eliminate the future by targeting the children was a clear goal. For these

children, of course, the imminent war was unimaginable; what child can conjure the

brutality of war and the relentless persecution that targeted them and their families, all

innocent of anything but being Jewish? For the adults, worrying about their fate was all-

consuming and explaining the rumors that could not possibly be true to the children was

not a pressing matter. Michael Honey’s father had gotten his family a way out to meet

him in England, but for reasons beyond his knowledge, Honey, his mother and his

siblings did not make it. He guessed that it had to do with the fact that his mother, made

the decision of her own volition, thinking perhaps that the situation that they were living

at the time could never be as bad as rumors had it. He recalls, “I mean, you couldn’t

discuss that with my mother because children were, you know, children are seen and not

172

Berenbaum, Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghettos, viii.

106

heard and things are not discussed with young children.”173 Celina Biniaz, a Schindler’s

list survivor, at the beginning of the war remembers “there was a feeling of not

understanding what was happening, but feeling that something was ominous because

everybody was concerned, you know. The older people were concerned, and talked in

hushed tones, you know.”174 Likewise, for six-year-old Gabrielle Silten, the approaching

war remained a mystery. She recollects, “Everybody was nervous because of the

impending war, or at least, unrest was everywhere to the extent that even I noticed that

something was wrong. I didn’t know what was wrong. But obviously, my adults were not

quite themselves.”175 For these children, moving in the ghettos provided a little more

clarity as to the reality they would be living.

The ghettos were where many child survivors were faced with the callousness of

Nazi policy–more so than the social restrictions on themselves and their family, and the

need to wear, in some cases, a symbol indicating their Jewishness. Here they experienced

hunger, loss, confusion and began to realize that the Nazi officials or collaborators were

more dangerous than perhaps first assumed. Historian Eric J. Sterling, in discussing the

Holocaust and Jewish plight as a whole, contrasted the freedom and autonomy with

which most Jews lived prior to the war with the utter horror that befell them in the camps

in the book he edited, Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust. He states, “But in

between these two radically demarcated types of life–freedom and imprisonment–there

173

Honey, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

174 Biniaz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

175 Silten, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

107

existed a transitional life in the ghettos, where many Jews maintained their hope, their

faith, and their culture while enduring harsh and atrocious conditions.”176 For some

Jewish children, their time in the ghettos was the first time they were hidden, separated

from family, and ultimately lost family members. Various children recalled stealing or

smuggling items into and out of the ghetto, always at great danger. A few can recollect

this time period where they played, trying to keep themselves busy and out of the way of

adults of the ghettos, both in administrative and familial capacities. A constant of the

ghettos, however, was the hunger that existed daily–however, only a few child survivors

focused on that aspect of their ghetto experience in their testimonies. One survivor

mentioned schooling during his time in the camps. For others, the experience brought

illness. During their stay in the ghettos, for some no more than a few weeks, for others,

much longer, children dealt with religion, privilege or being saved, coping with this new

imposed lifestyle and having to work. For all survivors of the ghettos, young and old, the

experiences here signaled that things were going to get much worse than anticipated.

Life in the ghetto spanned many different aspects for Jewish children. After

finding a place to settle, either assigned by the regime or through their own devices,

families were then faced with survival. At different times, certain children were forced to

go in to hiding, were separated from their families, and/or lived through the loss of family

members in the various round ups and deportation of the ghetto. or young Paula

Levobics, the ghetto brought many changes. For one, Ostrowiec, her hometown also

housed an open ghetto, which meant she and her relatives were forbidden to enter certain

176

Eric J. Sterling, ed., Life in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, xxx.

108

parts of town, but for about a year they were free to move within the ghetto. Of this time

period, she has fond memories but also reveals some effects the Holocaust had on her:

“I actually liked the open ghetto very much. They put us into one big room in a

section of town which was around a big marketplace . . . and I had a chance to be

with everybody together. And it seemed like there wasn’t too much going on, so

everybody was home, and I had the attention that I really needed, I guess. It was

very nice. I got to sleep with my sisters and I got to be with everybody all the

time. I got to sleep wherever I wanted, actually. The only bad thing they really

didn’t want to sleep with me because I was still wetting. I did that throughout the

whole war. Um, later on it came back to me because I was just scared, all the

time. I hardly slept through a night without wetting.

For a good portion of her time in the ghetto, Paula was forced to hide. Early on, her

brother Herzl, who was at the time twenty and part of the Jewish police force, discovered

that there was going to be a selection, and so, he had planned to hide the entire family in

a bunker under a chicken coop. In this way they were spared from this first selection.

Lebovics also felt the pain of losing family members. Her second oldest brother,

Yonathan ran away to Latvia early on in the war. At one point, for him, the Red Cross

demanded to find their location and wanted to know they were safe. SS came to their

house and photographed the family. While Yonathan did not perish during World War II,

Lebovics faced her first loss in this way. After the initial selection, her older sisters–at

the time 16 and 19–figured they were strong enough to work and thus would not be

harmed. They did not return. For a time, Paula and one of her brothers were separated

from their parents and hidden. Perhaps because of his role with the Jewish police, her

brother Herzl had a little more insight into what would happen to them as time went on.

She spent time hiding between walls, remembering it was hardly big enough for her to

sit, as well in a room between some large, very cold pipes. It was in this room, as she

hid, that her brother–five and a half years older than her–went out and found work and

109

Lebovics was left alone. Another survivor, Mary Natan lost her mother during the

ghetto, during a selection. When the Germans yelled for everyone to stand outside, she

ran as her father instructed her to. She states, “By the time this was over, when I came

out, when the Germans left, my mother was gone. They took my mother. I always felt it

was my fault, I always felt my father worried too much about me, and didn’t worry about

her.”177 Understandably, she becomes emotional during this part of the interview. Even

as she is herself a mother and grandmother, it seems she cannot discern that her father

would have justifiably been more focused on his youngest child’s survival as opposed to

his adult spouse. Additionally, Natan knows what he remembers about this event, but

cannot speak to her father’s efforts in trying to protect his wife and his other children.

For many Holocaust survivors, the only way to obtain an adequate amount of food

in the ghettos was to participate in smuggling food obtained by the black market. Usually

these tasks fell to adults, but occasionally, to children. In comparison to the camps,

where prisoners were under closer scrutiny by camp officials, procuring food in the

ghettos from outside the ghetto was easier. This is not to say that this was without mortal

threat, as anyone caught smuggling food in the ghetto was just as likely to lose their lives

as someone in the camp who has stolen from the kitchen. Mary Natan was one child to

whom the task fell while living in the Łódź ghetto. Initially, Natan’s father was very

opposed to moving into the ghetto. His experience with Germans had been very positive

throughout his life, and he felt that there is no way a German person could be guilty of

what the rumors were accusing them of. Besides having had closer friends of German

177

Natan, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

110

descent, her father, Szaja Rybowski, owned a dance hall studio that–initially–helped

German troops find some respite. In one occasion, a German man who Rybowski owed

money to came in claiming he was still owed money. Natan’s father knew he had settled

the debt, but now this German was stating otherwise. This man left, saying “Wait until

Hitler comes.” Soon after, the German man came in with SS officials claiming Rybowski

had insulted Hitler and that he owed him money. The SS officers asked Rybowski to

explain, after which, they believed he was in the right and the debt had been paid fully.

After forcing the two men to shake hands, and taking their leave, Rybowski turned to his

family and said, “You see? There is nothing like a German person.” After all, he had

been a prisoner of war during World War I and the Germans had treated him much better

than the Russians had, and so, it was natural for him to respect Germans and accept that

they were very cultured and intelligent.

Although the restrictions to the Jewish in Łódź continued and there were soft

timelines for movement into the ghetto, Rybowski still was unsure that was the best

course of action for his family. The yellow armbands were ordered to be worn, then it

changed to the stars. Food was becoming scarce in the city, but as of yet, they had not

had to move into the ghetto. Through a special permit, her father continued to run his

business and the family lived anxiously; Natan’s mother insisting they should move into

the ghetto already. After a beaten man died in their kitchen, Rybowski conceded and the

family found themselves in a nice apartment, which was almost unheard of at the time.

Natan is unsure of how her father obtained it, nevertheless, those winter initial months in

the ghetto were “okay, not horrible.” By the winter of 1941, the cold was such that

people were breaking apart the apartment building and staircases to heat their living

111

quarters. At this point, Natan’s father found them a house on a corner that had been

abandoned by people who he was told had gone to Warsaw. At this time, the Germans

had built a wire fence around the ghetto, but for the most part, it was not difficult for a

Jewish person to sneak out of the ghetto, secure food, and come back. Natan states, “It

became a big thing . . . Almost everyone had someone in the family that was smuggling,

someone that didn’t look Jewish.” However, it did not take long for the Germans to

discover what was happening, and Natan did not realize at that point that she would soon

be that person for her family.

Natan’s experiences as a smuggler demonstrate that children at times had

advantages in doing this illicit activity that their adult counterparts did not. They could fit

through smaller places and draw on the occasional good will and sympathies of gentiles.

During one of her sister’s excursions, Natan’s family was told that the sister, Erika, had

been arrested. The entire family went down to the building where the Judenrat was in

charge, and tried to see what they could do about her getting released. Likely because of

her father’s influence, they were able to take her home. She had been so badly beaten,

however, that they needed to take her home in a stretcher. For three weeks, the family

cared for her as she recovered. This was the end of her career as a smuggler and Mary

Natan’s beginning. She told her brother that she wanted to go, and he agreed. He

instructed her on how to get out, how to obtain the food from a volksdeutsch, a friend of

the family, and how to return safely. As this family friend was located near the ghetto,

the risk would not be as great to almost eleven-year-old Mary. Once again, the German

guards were quick to realize what was happening and posted sentries on each corner. At

that point it became harder, as now there needed to be a system for getting back in to the

112

ghetto. In one incident while she was a smuggler, she saw some of her cousins who were

also smuggling, and a small group of Polish kids running after them and yelling, “Jew,

Jew, Jew.” The police arrived and arrested them.

This shook her up a bit, but she ignored the whole thing and tried to focus on

getting back into the ghetto. Her brother and she had a code–when they would give her a

sign, she would approach and they would help her in. Well, this time, they kept saying

no, so she kept circling around the ghetto and waiting for the all clear. As she waited, she

saw a German official and a German police man approaching her. They asked for her

papers in German, but she was wise enough to know that responding at all would indicate

she understood them, and she would have been outed as a Jew as the Jewish language

was such that many Jews at least understood German. A Polish woman tried to help her

by saying it was her sick neighbor’s daughter who had been sent food shopping. Natan

states, “I don’t know what happened, I just, I’ve tried to analyze it a million times, I

can’t. I just said, ‘no, I’m not Polish, I am a Jew’. It just came out of me, I don’t know. I

was just about to be saved, this woman was going to take me into the building. I said,

‘I’m not ashamed of it, I’m a Jew’.” No one really knew what to do with her at the

precinct she was taken to because she was so young, but she understood she would be

taken to the same place her sister had been beaten in. One policeman told another he

wanted some cigarettes to another as he lamented about the cold weather, and she quickly

offered the ones she had to the man. He was the one selected to transport her towards the

jail. As they walked on the same street she used to enter and exit the ghetto, it started to

rain. Her escort saw a sentry guard, and stopped to chat with him. As they chatted and

113

smoked with Natan standing there, the police officer decided to let her escape.

According to Natan, he said,

‘Why can’t I just let her go in here through the fence?’ So the other fellow says,

‘Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll turn my back and let her go.’ So I, I heard it, I

couldn’t believe it. So he said to me, ‘Okay, get going.’ So I run to the fence, but

I was so nervous and the fences were very tight, and I couldn’t pick it up to spread

it to go through because usually my brothers used to do that for me. So, he came

over and he spread it for me, and he said ‘My god how can you be a smuggler if

you can’t even pick up the fence?’ And he was laughing and he let me through.

Well, when I came home, it was like an unbelievable miracle happened because

my whole family–my father found out, because all this time my father didn’t

know that I was smuggling. My father thought that my brother was smuggling and

he would never allow me to do that. But, uh, at this point, my father found out,

my mother found out, they said, ‘never again, you’re not gonna go,’ but I

continued going because it was a necessity.

Natan continued because there was no other alternative method to obtain food.

After the edict went out that all smugglers would be shot, and after she was shot at, her

smuggling stopped. At this point, “there was basically starvation.”178 For citizens of the

ghetto, things continued to be precarious, but without the ability to bring in food from the

outside, not too much could be done.

For adults and children alike who lived during the war, there were likely few who

did not witness at least one atrocity. Similarly, violence was an everyday occurrence in

the ghetto. Few child survivors remarked on the violence they saw while in the ghetto,

specifically. This can be attributed to the length of their stay in the ghetto as well as the

extent they were allowed to go about the ghetto either on their own or with others.

Additionally, for most, the violence they saw in the camps exceeded their ghetto

experiences in many cases. Celina Biniaz was a witness to atrocities against children. At

178

Ibid.

114

the closing of the ghetto, she recalls, “The Germans, well I don’t know whether they were

SS, soldiers or whoever, took some of the children and absolutely knocked their heads on

the walls, they swung them on the wall and killed them that way. It was a horrible

experience.”179 Eva Kor’s father was a victim of violence while in the ghetto. Their

residence in the Ceheiu ghetto in Romania lasted roughly five weeks, and was unusual in

that the ghetto had no buildings other than one structure they were not allowed in. They

had to build their tents out of sheets, and when the commandant was feeling particularly

perverse, he would have them break the tents down, and set them back up on the other

side of the river that flowed through the middle of the ghetto. Remembering this, she

states, “I am convinced that all ghetto commandants had earned their right to be a

commandant by proving their cruelty, this one definitely proved his.” At one point, her

father was taken for interrogation, as all the adults were; they were all slated for transport

soon, and Kor reasons that the Nazi officers were likely looking to get what they could

out of these Romanian Jews. Her father was taken into the structure, and returned after

some time. According to Kor, “You could smell, all his fingernails and toenails were

burned with candles. They whipped him with a whip on his back, he had marks all over

her back.”180 A week later, they were sent to Auschwitz for processing.

Lebovics, in leaving one hidden spot to find another says, “I remember the snow

being all pink and red because there was so much blood on it, there was so many killings.

And everywhere you looked, everywhere you looked, the snow was all red. This is all I

179

Biniaz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

180 Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

115

remember from that selection.” She was a victim of violence while in the Ostrowiec

ghetto. During her last period of hiding, after her brother had left the large cold room

with pipes for work, she emerged from her hiding spot sick of being alone. She knew she

had to hide, but enjoyed being outside as it was springtime. As she looked for another

hiding spot–one she hoped to share with others to have human contact–she was

discovered by a Ukrainian guard and she knew her “goose was cooked.” The guard took

her to group of women who were leaving to go to the hard labor camp and identifying

himself to the SS. Her mother saw her and pulled her into the group. The guard looked

around for her, and the SS, started to beat the women with a baton in an effort to find

Lebovics. The SS hit her mother, grabbed her from her mother and threw her against a

wall. She says, “I don’t know how far that wall but it was very far away, especially for

me as a kid, because the next thing I knew, I must have passed out, because when I came

to, there was nobody there. I was all by myself with the SS.”181 After this event at age

eight, she entered the hard labor camp Ostrowiec, as the ghetto had closed.

Life in the ghettos was not one for fun and games, however, a few children found

time to play or at least to find things to occupy their time. Children spent their days on

their own, in many cases, in the ghetto. In some, so long as they stayed out of the way,

they could remain safe; in order cases, their very existence was resented or dangerous and

so, children such as Lebovics, were forced to hide to save themselves. Thomas Schwartz

spent roughly five months in the Szeged ghetto in Hungary. He states, “It feels like it

was four, five months, could have been even six months. But maybe not that long. But,

181

Lebovics, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

116

you know for a child, everything is long. I mean, even a day I mean, we couldn’t wait

until the day finished, ended.” During the day, he says “Well, for us kids, we used to take

sunbathing, you know, tanning, I used to get such burns. I remember I had a burn of my

life there once.”182 He laughs, remembering the time there as not so bad, because he was

with his mother, who provided an aura of safety, and they had sufficient food. Celina

Biniaz found some time for playing as well. She states, “As a child in the ghetto, at first,

it was not –for a child, we were then squished together in a tight place, but there were lots

of other children, so in a sense, there was more time to play. We didn’t have school.

There was more time to play, more time to visit with other people. At first it wasn’t so

bad, I mean, for a child.”183 Again, the aspects of life that children went through in the

ghettos highly depended on which ghetto they were living in at the time, and the amount

of time they spent there.

Access to food was a central issue for children in the ghettos. In some ghettos,

food was provided–rationed of course–or obtained through smuggling with people

outside the ghetto. Others attempted to grow their food as well, to some limited success,

and food was such a commodity that the theft of it was common. In the Łódź ghetto,

there were two separate incidents considering food and children that were noteworthy.

Per the Chronicles, the archives of the Łódź ghetto where Mary Natan stayed, there was

an account of an 8 year old informer who reported his parents for not giving him his

share of rations. Another, a five year old without adults who had been taken to the

182

Schwartz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

183 Biniaz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

117

hospital, refused to remove a little sack containing bread tied with a string and found

under his shirt. Even when he was promised he would be given more rations, the little

boy refused, making “it clear that the bread was his property, bought with his own

money.”184 Natan remembers eating just about anything, including European poison ivy,

which, cooked, is not poisonous. They would receive a ration of “coffee” which was in

actuality burned barley. They would eat the barley that was left, even though “it was

terrible because it had the husks on it.” Although initially she seems amused, recalling

the various things they ate, she states:

We were always hungry, always. There was never a day in the ghetto that I wasn’t

hungry. Uh, we found out, when we planted things we couldn’t wait ‘til it grew,

so we used to eat the leaves that came up. Before something develops in the

ground there are leaves, so we used to pick the leaves and eat them. It was, the

rations we got were, almost nothing. A piece of break, and a watery soup. How

can you survive on that? You know, either you suffer from malnutrition, or you

just find other things to each that you can get something from, and that’s what we

did. Whatever was edible, I think if there were any rats or mice in the ghetto we

would have eaten them but unfortunately there weren’t any because there was no

food. We tried to catch birds, but after a while, there were no birds. I-it never

dawned on me ‘til after the war, to, one day when I heard the birds singing, I said,

my god there were no birds in the ghetto. And I remember why. There was no

food. No animal would go where there is no food.

Hunger is a topic that has been covered in detail in other works, but it is of

interest to note that for some children, the lack of food while in the ghettos affected their

lives as well. For Natan, it forced her to leave the relative safety provided by her parents

and older siblings. For others, it was the primary cause of death. Rena Finder recalled her

ghetto diet consisting of mainly potatoes, stating that those who were working for

Schindler or Madritsch outside of Krakow were able to get more food provided or were at

184

Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941–1944, trans. Richard

Lourie, Joachim Neugroschel, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 26.

118

least able to trade with Polish workers outside the camp and smuggle food in. Rena

Finder says of her experience in the Krakow ghetto, “It was very meager, meager food,

meager rations. You had tried very hard to have a piece of bread last you, at least for a

day.” Many images have been released from ghettos which show emaciated children,

some deceased. In the Łódź Chronicles, time after time there are accounts of people

dying from exhaustion caused by/from hunger.

Children in the ghettos continued, in various ways, to receive an education. One

survivor, Thomas Schwartz recalled receiving an education while he was in the ghetto.

He recalled spending his days doing not so much, “then we had Heder, they kept us

teaching. Whatever a Jew does, the kid has to be educated so no matter what, what kind

of horrible situation we were in, they always made it a little bit worse for the kids. We

had to study while we were incarcerated”. At this, he laughs. Likewise, Michael Honey

recalls experiencing an education while in the ghetto. Michael Honey’s experience of a

ghetto was one that was slightly different because his ghetto experience was at

Theresienstadt. It was, per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website,

“Neither a ‘ghetto’ as such nor strictly a concentration camp, Theresienstadt served as a

‘settlement,’ an assembly camp, and a concentration camp, and thus had recognizable

features of both ghettos and concentration camps. In its function as a tool of deception,

Theresienstadt was a unique facility.”185 Adding to Theresienstadt’s uniqueness, was the

fact that there was an established Department of the Care for Children and Young People

in the ghetto. This department was in charge of keeping the youth occupied. Cultural life

185

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Theresienstadt,” Holocaust Encyclopedia,

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005424 (accessed February 19, 2018).

119

flourished in Theresienstadt, the so-called model camp, and education was a priority.

While in the ghetto, Honey received an education, he states, “ . . . we learned grammar,

history, all kinds of things.” He was in House 5, the Zionist room, Dror. He mentioned

how the word dror means freedom in Hebrew, but in Czech it means swallow/sparrow, so

that was their emblem for their football team. Honey states:

“But we knew it was freedom, so there was this sort of undercurrent that we were

in a prison. But, um, the objective of the teaching, of the whole games that were

arranged, football, sports, and so on, the whole policy was to remove the children

from the prison atmosphere, and to create an atmosphere in this school as if it’s a

public school, you’re boarding in a public school. And it was very formative, for

many of us, including me. We think of it fondly, and the girls as well, there were

two girl schools like this. You talk to the girls of these different jugenheims, and

you talk to the children who were not in the jugenheim, who were with their

parents, they were very much hard done by . . . The jugenheim was the place to

be, because it was, the other children that weren’t in the jugenheim envied us.”186

While no other survivors make mention of receiving an education while in the

ghetto, some written accounts make mention of education with regards to younger ghetto

occupants. In Theresienstadt, the education was organized, and the Nazis aware, while in

other ghettos education was either not a priority because survival was more important, or

because it was prohibited.

Children also had to contend with the same rampant illness as adults did. Being

enclosed to an area likely meant for a fraction of ghetto residents, and having to share

living space with–in most cases–at least one other family, meant that people were at

higher risk of catching communicable diseases and/or various illnesses. Exposure to, and

a proper lack of protection against the elements also played a hand in illnesses. Rena

Finder had pneumonia three separate times. She recalls, “One of my cousins brought me

186

Honey, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

120

lemon because, you know, vitamin C, and we didn’t have any medication.” When asked

if there was any medical attention for her ailments, she replies, “There were still doctors

in the ghetto, there was a hospital in the ghetto.”187 Whether she ever went to the hospital

for her pneumonia or any other ailments remains unclear.

While all Jews arrived at the ghettos with different levels of religious life, it is

safe to say that for many, practicing their religion within the confines of the ghetto was

dangerous. For some, this was seen as a form of resistance–although they had been

rounded up and placed in the ghetto for their religious beliefs and ethnic identity–it would

not be something that they would reject. It is difficult to say that children were actively

practicing resistance if they engaged in religious activities, or if this was just something

they had done their entire lives thus far, and so, did not see reason to alter or reject it.

Thomas Schwartz, who as an adult became a cantor, remembered that in the ghetto, “We

used to have prayers, you know, every night, that took time. Prayers twice in the

afternoon, prayers at night, prayers at Saturday, and so on.”188 He does not elaborate as

to whether this was something his mother insisted on, as by this point his father had been

taken, or if this was something born from him. For others, the opposite held true and

living their lives in the ghetto caused them to sever any religious ties they had come in

with. In the ghetto, Celina Biniaz was afraid. After witnessing the liquidation of the

ghetto in Krakow where children were swung by their feet and killed, she says,

The overwhelming emotion that has ruled my life has been fear. Fear of authority

and fear in general . . . not so much anger, but sort of a questioning, how could

187

Finder, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

188 Schwartz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

121

anybody do anything like that? I think it was at the age of twelve that I know I

lost my faith in God. Because I knew, I mean, the Jews believed that God–at least,

the explanation was that the reason things were happening to the Jews because of

the sins of our forefathers. And I simply couldn’t believe that any god would

allow a child to be killed. So, I had my doubts about it and I have not really

resolved them since.189

While the stay in the ghetto was temporary–in some cases lasting weeks, in others, years–

a personal embracing or rejecting of religion in the ghetto came with its own timetable.

A ghetto occupant might have considered themselves a believer or a religiously devout

person, but that could have changed severely as they spent time in the camps.

For some, being privileged was the only route to survival, in so much as someone

who has had their rights stripped away and their lives restricted can be considered

privileged. Those advantages came in all shapes and sizes, and were applied to ghetto

dwellers of all ages. Occasionally, Jewish men, women, or children were spared or saved

from certain death, regardless of status. Paula Lebovics’ oldest brother was a member of

ghetto’s Jewish police, and so, the family was always aware of selections ahead of time.

That is not to say this meant her family was always saved. After a selection, her

grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousin disappeared. During the final selection, after she had

been discovered by a Ukrainian guard, attempted to blend into a group of women where

she found her mother, and had been thrown against a wall by an SS man, Levobics

awakened to find herself alone with the SS officer who had physically harmed her. He

got her to stand, and took her around looking for people who were hiding. In some

places that she led him too, corpses were found, but no live person hiding. As they went

from place to place, he had dragged her around with a scarf that was around her neck. He

189

Biniaz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

122

took her back to the wall, told her to turn around and pointed his revolver at her. An SS

officer was passing by at the time, very drunk, and according to Lebovics said, “Are you

going to waste a bullet? She is going to be killed anyhow.”190 With that, the SS officer

put his revolver away and took her to the hard labor camp in Ostrowiec; the ghetto

experience for her ended at this point.

Honey’s oldest brother, Leo, a doctor, had been called up to help build/restructure

Theresienstadt for its Jewish inhabitants. There was an agreement that the families of

those men who went in the first transport would be protected. By the summer of 1943,

having spent a year in Theresienstadt, Honey’s sister-in-law was working in a factory that

made bindings for the German Army and because of that they got extra rations.

Additionally, Honey’s brother Milosh worked in the kitchen and so, this helped him to

get extra rations and Honey feels this was due in part to Leo’s status in the camp, such as

it was. On a different occasion at Theresienstadt, the family had been selected to go east

on a transport, were, in fact, on the ramp waiting to load when Leo comes bearing

paperwork stating that one of the families is contagious and needs to return to the ghetto

for quarantine. Honey, his brother Milosh, and their mother in this way are saved,

temporarily. Three days later, the three of them, including Leo and Leo’s wife, were on

a transport and heading to Auschwitz.191

While the idea of privilege was tenuous at best, some child survivors felt that they

were protected via their parents and their roles as they transitioned from their previous

190

Lebovics, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

191 Honey, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

123

normal life to this abnormal one. Erno Abelesz remembered the ghetto being primitive in

Kapuvar, Hungary but they did not stay for a prolonged period of time. The three weeks

they spent were mostly in large industrial buildings that were empty, and for most of the

time, they were outside in the open air. There was a communal kitchen that provided

food. His father was part of the Judenrat, although he is unsure if his father volunteered,

was chosen or forced to be part of this, and so, as the family headed to Poland, they were

in a comfortable wagon, seemingly referring to a train, with “water, and sanitary stuff,

bread.”192 Rena Finder, as well, was considered privileged as her father was a member of

the Jewish police while in Krakow. Because of his status, he was able to keep both her

and her grandparents in the ghettos, as well as other relatives, and friends of the family

permits to remain in the camp rather than being transported–rumor had it– to Germany to

grow food for the German army.

Coping with such an upheaval in life was a difficult prospect, especially as

children were forced to leave school, deal with anti-Semitism in full, forced to view

violence, and–in some cases–lose family through temporary or permanent separation.

Some children had the opportunity to cope with life by playing or at the very least, not

having to work; depending on the ghetto they were in, this was more possible than when

entering a camp. For Ruth Silten and her parents, the ghetto experience was at

Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands. While this was not a ghetto necessarily, this

was her first experience in being surrounded by other Jewish children and adults who had

been detained for simply existing. During those six months there, she also coped as best

192

Abelesz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

124

she could, recalling that, “For the children, there was literally nothing. We didn’t work,

there was nothing to do, there was no school, there were no books, there were no toys,

there was nothing, except what we had brought, like my doll. So mostly, we just hung

around and got into trouble, in one way or another.”193 For some time, Silten has a

friend, Werner who she talks with and makes up stories with, as playing was not forefront

on their minds, even if they were children. At one point they see her mother threatening

their next-bed neighbors with a wooden board. She writes, “So Werner and I pretend that

none of this exists and that all is normal–which indeed it is, for the place and

circumstances we are in, in which all things normal become abnormal and the abnormal

is an everyday occurrence.”194 Her doll Peter, became a confidante with whom she could

share all her feelings and helped her normalize the life she was living.

Michael Honey came to the realization while at Theresienstadt that he would have

to learn to cope with all the things he was now experiencing. Going into the ghetto, he

and his older brother by three years, Milosh, began to get along. Throughout his

childhood, Honey had felt that the second to last child resented having Michael as a

younger brother, as prior to that Milosh had been the baby. He recalls various “scraps”

they would get into, and remembers that he never felt his older brother loved him. At age

16, and with their father gone, and Leo now married, Milosh “felt himself beginning to be

a man. I was very much the younger brother, and he very much would look after me.”

Honey recalls, “The first time that I discovered, that I really knew that Milosh loved me,

193

Silten, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

194 R. Gabriele S. Silten, Between Two Worlds: Autobiography of a Child Survivor of the

Holocaust (Santa Barbara: Fithian Press, 1995), 96.

125

was when we walked from the station . . . to Theresienstadt . . . And I sort of stumbled,

and Milosh said, ‘It’s not much longer, you know. Keep it up,’ and from the tone of his

voice, I could see he loved me.” Additionally, Honey realizes that his mother is no

longer focused on her sons, but rather, on dealing with the situation on hand. On the train

to Theresienstadt, Milosh and Michael are separated from their mother. He makes his

way to where she is to let her know where they are.

“I went up to see if I could find my mother, and of course, my mother was

looking after the elderly, and, you know, there was this person crying and that

person crying, and my mother was busy. So I came, and I sort of said, ‘we are all

right, we are three carriages away.’ And she said, ‘fine.’ And, you see, that was

the first that I saw that my mother was beginning to regards us both as

independent of her, that she had other things to worry about, and I wasn’t the

priority suddenly. That’s sort of growing up, you know, that sort of realization.”

As he was part of the jugenheim, Honey coped by fraternizing with his fellow

“school” mates and getting into as much trouble as a young teenager can. Often, he

would leave school, played football, and used the excuse that he wanted to learn a trade

instead of learning history. If any place was able to provide a modicum of so-called

leisure time, it was Theresienstadt. By 1943, the fun and games were over as the family

was transported to Auschwitz. 195

Most child survivors of ghettos, however, did not have many opportunities for fun

and games. Very few of them were able to take toys, books, or other entertainment into

the ghettos with them, as there were limitations as to what they could take with them, and

in many cases, the important things to take were clothing, family heirlooms or pictures,

and anything that could be considered valuable enough to trade, for example, jewelry. For

195

Honey, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

126

Mary Natan, Rena Finder, Celina Biniaz, and Moshe Taube, the activity that took up

much of their “free” time, was work. Of these four children, the latter three not only

worked while in the ghettos and the camps, but they were fortunate enough to be placed

on Schindler’s list and were protected much more than the average Jewish child who had

worked during this time. Mary Natan, in the Lodz ghetto, had ceased being a smuggler

after getting shot at by a guard. From there, the family had no way to get food, and it was

“basically starvation.” In 1942, the ghetto was growing, and the food supply was low.

Around this time, “if you worked, you got soup,” so Natan, her sister, brother, and

mother went to work. While the soup was “mostly water”, once you got it, “you could

function, you had something to eat.”196 Once one has food, they can continue going,

even though the amount of food they were receiving was small, every little helped. Rena

Finder recalls, “Well, in the ghetto we all had to work, if you didn’t work, you didn’t

stay.”197 Her father, a career salesman of surgical supplies, and an uncle were part of the

Jewish police while in Krakow, which was useful because they had some clout and were

able to renew permits for Finder and her mother, as necessary, every few months. The

cut off age for staying in the ghetto was 12, and she was only 10, and so her birth

certificate had been changed to reflect this. According to Finder, her father was the one

that arranged for Marcel Goldberg to be part of the Jewish police as well. With his

influence, he managed to get Finder and her mother a job where they pressed paper

together into notebooks. Often, she worked the 6am to 6pm shift, although, even when

196

Natan, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

197 Finder, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

127

selected for the evening to morning shift, she was able to be home by 10pm, along with

her mother. Celina Biniaz, at first, remained in the camp while her parents went to work.

Her parents were both accountants; her parents worked for the Hogo factory which had

been given to Julius Madritsch and it went from making shirts to making army uniform

for the Wehrmacht. Her mother handled the books, and her father ran the factory because

“he sort of knew it, in terms of accounting, and being able to predict how to make money

out of this.”198 At first, she had been left behind as her parents worked, but as the ghetto

got smaller, it became evident that Biniaz would need to go to work with them. Her age

was falsified to reflect it as two years older so that she could get a blue card, and was able

to leave the ghetto with her parents to work for Madritsch. While there, she was put to

work on a sewing machine doing piece work that were used in the uniforms and thus was

able to continue living.

Children who not only spent time in the ghettos, but survived this phase of the

Final Solution and then went on to the next phase, the concentration camps, ran the

gamut of emotions and experiences. While some had the opportunity to do nothing, and

to spent time with others in the ghetto talking, catching up, or experiencing education or a

religious and cultural life, others did not. Some ghettos were primitive and very

temporary, some lasted for years before finally being liquidated of their population.

Others had much more of a presence of police, guards, and SS, making living in them a

fraught and tense one. In the end, just about every ghetto transported millions of Jewish

children to the concentrations camps where their survival rates were much lower–this

198

Ibid.

128

being the point were being essential was the utmost priority, especially in the bigger

death camps such as Auschwitz, and yet, from even here children coped, survived, and

emerged from the war to continue living in the best way they could.

Concentration Camps

In 1942, it was evident to the Nazi Party that the various methods they employed

the eliminate Jews would need to be channeled into one that was most effective at killing

a larger number within a shorter period of time, as well as one which would enable Jews

to dispose of the bodies, and in doing so free Nazi officers and guards to the other

responsibilities of running ghettos and/or camps. Concentration camps were the obvious

step after ghettoization, but in many cases, camps were not originally intended strictly as

death camps. At the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, various protocols were

established, including one which stated, “Under proper guidance the Jews are now to be

allocated for labor to the East in the course of the Final Solution. Able-bodied Jews will

be taken in large labor columns to these districts for work on roads, separated according

to sexes, in the course of which action a great part will undoubtedly be eliminated by

natural causes.”199 The first of these camps which were created as killing centers was

Chelmno. Raul Hilberg states, “Three vans were thereupon brought into the woods of

Kulmhof (Chelmo), the area was closed off, and the first killing center came into

being.”200 In the final states of this government policy there was a final destination:

199

Michael Berenbaum, Witness to the Holocaust (New York: Harper CollinsPublishers, Inc.,

1997) 167-168.

200 Raul Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews: Student Edition (New York: Holmes &

Meier, 1985) 225.

129

death. Very few children were able to escape this outcome because it was clear that to

leave children–hailed often as “the future”–would leave the basis for “a bud cell of

Jewish reconstruction.”201 However, there was no magic formula for survival, either for

adults or children; there was no rulebook that could ensure that one person could live if

they followed. The number of factors that determined how adults, let alone children

survived ghettos and subsequently, camps are infinite.

Experiences of Child Survivors

Bergen-Belsen, Mauthausen, Plaszow, Gross-Rosen, Gunskirchen, Brünnlitz,

Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, some of the many camps that

children were sent to. While a large portion of them lost their lives there, there were

those who were spared through a variety of ways, for different reasons; some left to

chance, others because of luck. Regardless of the reason, the children who survived–just

like in the ghettos–lived through many experiences. While in the camps, some had to

deal with the death of their parents and as orphans, their chance of survival diminished

significantly. Again, there were some that were privileged while in the camps, which did

not mean much in the camps, but nevertheless, moments of reprieve did occur. For some

children, their faith was made stronger for having survived what they did, while for

others, their faith was lost during this time, never to be recouped. In various ways, the

children who survived had to find ways to cope with the brutality of the environment

around them. Some were able to stay alive because of their being essential workers.

Those who worked for Oskar Schindler were given a certain measure of protection while

201

Berenbaum, Witness to the Holocaust, 168.

130

they lived in Krakow-Plaszow. A few children had encounters with Mengele, which

ranged from seeing him and being aware of his significance at Auschwitz, to being part

of his experiments on twins. For some, resistance was shown, sometimes in a small, quiet

way, other times more pronounced. Throughout all of these aspects of daily life in the

camps, there was always the inescapable violence and danger that being Jewish children

entailed. And yet, even with the danger that enveloped them minute by minute, some

children were saved by others, those who were Jewish and even those who were Nazis.

Transitioning from a ghetto to a camps, for some children, led to more a more

tragic reality: becoming an orphan. Although Paula Lebovics’ was not orphaned, she

recalls, “It was very difficult to survive as a child, because I didn’t know anything. The

only thing I knew is that if my mother is there, my father is there, it must be okay, then

I’m safe, then I’m okay.”202 For the following child survivors, that feeling of safety, that

comfort, was not an option once they were left without those important adults. Eva Kor

spent just a few weeks in a quasi-ghetto in Romania in early 1944. From there, the entire

family was transported to Auschwitz. As they reached their last stop, her father pulled

the family into the order and told them that if they survived, they needed to get to

Palestine, to an uncle there because he figured Jews could survive there. Then he opened

his prayer book and began to pray. Kor was angry, things looked so hopeless for them;

all they knew was that they had reached Auschwitz and then they were disembarking. At

this point, her father and two older sisters disappeared in the crowd, and “I never, ever

saw them again,” Kor states. Their mother was holding on both Eva, and her sister

202

Lebovics, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

131

Miriam. SS men were yelling as they ran up and down the platform, and their mother

held their hands tightly. One of SS men ask Kor’s mother if her daughters were twins

and she hesitates, not knowing if that is good or bad, so she hesitantly asked. He nodded,

and she replied yes. With emotion, Kor remembers, “At that moment, an SS came,

grabbed her to the right, we were pulled to the left. We were crying and screaming. And I

looked back, and I saw my mother’s hand stretched out towards us. I never said goodbye

to her, of course, I didn’t know that this was going to be the last time I would see her.”203

Eva and Miriam Kor were entering a new stage of life at Auschwitz as Mengele twins,

and now, orphaned.

Peter Hersch spent a few weeks in a ghetto of Czechoslovakia called Mukacevo

with his family when he was thirteen. The family was comprised of Ephraim and Rachel,

the parents, and six children. Prior to going to the ghetto, his eldest brother had needed

surgery but was not recuperating well and was sent home. Regardless, orders were that

they needed to go to the ghetto. As they took him out of the house, Germans came with

Hungarians and told the family to leave him in the garden. The family was told they

would take him to a hospital, but nothing was heard from this brother again. A few

weeks later, they left Mukacevo, unsure of where they were going. They arrived at

Auschwitz. Hersch’s mother, with the three youngest children were taken directly to the

gas chamber. From there, he and his father were together, unaware that his sister Helen

had been spared thus far. The group of men from his town were asked their jobs and were

selected for different work selections. He was there for a few day with him, when one

203

Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

132

day, his father asked him how much bread he had, and gave him his last piece of bread.

Hersch’s father says, “I’ve got some, you won’t have enough for today. I’ll see you when

I come back.”204 They kissed and that was it. He heard that his father was in the group

that blew up the crematorium, but he is unsure if this is true. What he does know, is that

this was the last time he saw his father. A few days later, he was off to Mauthausen alone.

Another child who was likewise orphaned in the camps was Clare Parker. Her

father had been taken for forced labor prior to her entering the ghetto with her mother and

grandmother. Once they arrived at Auschwitz, her grandmother was no long with them.

After a small amount of time there, they were transported to Mauthausen. Parker felt a

little more comfortable being separated from her mother at this camp, thinking that if

they were separated at least they were in the same area. In describing her daily routine,

Parker casually informs the viewer so her mother’s fate: “There were some German

women, I don’t know what they were doing. They were in uniform, but they weren’t

guarding us. And I remember one day in January that must have been the time that my

mother died, they told me I can be with them for a week in a nice, and warm place. They

were doing- some people were doing writing, and another was doing handicrafts.”205 That

is the extent of her discussing her mother from that point forward. Likewise, Erno

Abelesz makes a quick mention of his parents’ demise in his testimony. After roughly

three weeks in a primitive and temporarily established ghetto, the family of eight was

transported to Auschwitz. His youngest brother, mother and father were selected for the

204

Hersch, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

205 Parker, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

133

gas chamber at arrival. Separated by gender, his sister went a different way and he did

not know she had survived until after the war. Abelesz’s older brother went off to a labor

battalion and so they were not together during his camp stay. Only Erno and his older

brother by three years were together during their stay in Auschwitz. When asked if he

saw his father again after they were separated by Mengele at arrival, Abelesz replies,

“No, not my parents, not my younger brother, I didn’t see them again.”206 Martin Weiss

as well, became orphaned in the camp, losing his mother at Auschwitz upon arrival.

From there, his father, uncle, cousins and he were transported to Mauthausen for a “very

short time” before being send to Melk concentration camp. At this point, he and his two

cousins, who were brothers, were separated from his father and uncle. For some time, he

would see his father and uncle once or twice a week. By January 1944, however, his

father had passed, contracting pneumonia and dying soon after “unexpectedly.”207 Weiss

found out about this a week later when seeing his uncle.

Mary Natan’s mother had been taken while at the Lodz ghetto and was never

heard from again. The only thing the family received of hers when they went to

investigate what had happened to her, was a sweater. Leaving the Lodz ghetto in 1944,

the family of 5 siblings and their father arrived at Auschwitz. Natan remained in

Auschwitz with an older female cousin, and later they were sent Bergen-Belsen. She and

her siblings all survived in separate camps and found each other after the war. After the

war, she asked her brother, who she had last seen standing beside her father, “‘Where was

206

Abelesz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

207 Weiss, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

134

Daddy when we came off the train?’ He said, ‘He was right next to me.’ I said, ‘No, it

couldn’t be, I looked.’ He said, ‘You wouldn’t know because he turned white. He turned

completely white in one second.’”208 She stops, crying; this loss obviously painful as she

had been very close to her father prior to and during their stay in the ghetto.

Some children were able to draw on talents the authorities valued to try to prolong

their survival. There were some people–Jews and non-Jews alike–who the Germans

chose to handle jobs for them, but it was such a mercurial situation that those who were

granted privilege for whatever reason, could just as easily end up dead. Paula Lebovics

felt she had a modicum of privilege while she was at Auschwitz in because of her

singing. The block captain was a Czech woman who had been in the camp a longer time,

and felt that Lebovics and the women who had recently arrived, were privileged for

having spent time out of the camp. “She showed it to us that we were privileged. At every

appell, she would make sure that somebody got it good. She wasn’t very kind, she

wasn’t–she wanted to show the Germans that she had authority,” she remembered. At the

request of the women who slept near her in the bunks, Paula sang a song. The women

began to clap, but stopped suddenly when they saw their block captain in the room. This

woman clapped also, and asked Lebovics to her room. She states, “I went to her room,

and I became privileged. Very privileged. I got extra food.” Additionally, she was able to

get clothes for her mother and herself as she continued to sing for the block captain. At

one point, Lebovics was asked to sing for the Lageralteste, the Jewish head of the camp.

A day or two after that, the Lageralteste informed her she was going to take her and get

208

Natan, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

135

her dressed. Lebovics asked for clothes for her mother as well, and a few days later, she

was taken to a store room, and walked out as if she had left a showroom, dressed in a

dress, stockings, and shoes. It only lasted a few days, but in that time she had those

fancier clothes, she was taken to an interim block with a few other children that had white

linens, bedding, nurses, and were taught how to sing and dance some new things in

Czech, Polish and Germans. She later found out it was a performance that was put on for

the Red Cross and that particular stay and privilege lasted just a few days. Lebovics

recalls, “We got food served in different kind of containers. I mean it was incredible. It

was like we died and went to heaven somewhere.”209 After they left, the children were

separated from the adults, and taken to the Sinti and Roma camp. Her privilege ended.

Similarly, Mary Natan enjoyed a temporary reprieve via a little girl who was

under protection of the block captain. During their first night at Auschwitz, Natan and her

cousin were put in the higher bunk, “maybe two feet from the ceiling,” and for Natan, the

heat was unbearable, and breathing was difficult. She decided she would go down to the

oven in the middle of the barrack and lay in there. Her cousin warned her, and other

women in the barracks told her she would get beaten and killed. But then:

There was a little girl that came over and she was maybe six years and beau–to

me she was beautiful because she was chubby. And she yelled at them, she gave

them orders to leave me alone. And they listened to her, and I couldn’t understand

it. She said to me, ‘do you want to sleep here?’ I said, ‘yes.’ She said, ‘Well, I’ll

bring you a pillow and a blanket.’ And I looked at her, she acted so grown up.

And she asked me, ‘And are you hungry?’ and I said, ‘Yes, very.’ She says, well

I’ll bring you some food too, she says, and don’t go away from here, sit here.’

And she went away and she came back after a while, and sure enough she brought

a pillow and a blanket and she brought me a sandwich.’210

209

Lebovics, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

210 Natan, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

136

That particular privilege lasted only that night, as the next night she was told she

would need to return to the top bunk.

Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam had some privilege as Mengele twins. While

this did not guarantee that they would be safe, especially as they lived in similar

conditions in the barracks as just about every other inmate. Illness, due to the living

conditions or the experiments performed on them, was just as likely to infect them as the

next person. The Mengele twins were isolated in a separate barrack where Mengele

could access them easily, and she remembers, “We had a fenced in area by the barrack,

where we could sometimes supposedly play. Who wanted to play? Children who face life

and death situations are no longer children and they do not want to play, but it was an

area that we could sit around, watch the airplanes come.” In one way, however, being a

Mengele twin proved beneficial. After roll call every morning, two people were chosen to

fetch food for the twins. Kor had heard about stealing food, or organizing, as it was

called, because she knew that if she and Miriam were to survive, she would need to

become an organizer. The rumor was that if anyone was caught stealing in Auschwitz,

they would be hanged. While waiting for the food she and the other twin were picking

up, she saw and grabbed three potatoes from under the table. Then she felt someone

pulling her up by the arm and telling her it is not nice to steal. At that point, she recalls,

“I almost started laughing. I thought I was going to be marched out and hanged. I realized

then that to be a Mengele twin, only Mengele could touch us. No one else. So the next

day I came back, and this time I was not afraid anymore. And I became a very, very good

137

organizer. We had potatoes 3 or 4 times a week.”211 Such as it was, being a part of

Mengele’s experiments was beneficial in that aspect at least, as a group of them were able

to partake of extra food for some time. Although not in the same fashion, Martin Weiss,

in Melk, was able to get a bit of extra food. One of his cousins had been selected to be an

orderly for a kapo in the camp and was in charge of dispensing food. Food was just as

important in the camps, as those who continued to live were usually kept alive for labor.

Without the appropriate nourishment, the body cannot function, as recalled by Natan

while in the ghetto.

In camps, the child and adult prisoners were often times much more closely

guarded than in the ghettos and practicing one’s faith was strictly prohibited. Again,

there is no template, no formula for each person’s religious beliefs in light of what they

lived, and so, adherence or rejection of religion was another aspect of life these child

survivors had to face. To be sure, the level of violence they were exposed to, the constant

threat of death, affected both the faithful and non-followers alike. Of those who came

from homes they had deemed more conservative or orthodox, on the whole, living their

reality and realizing there would be no one to save them was sobering. When Eva Kor

and her sister arrived in the twin barracks, it was dinner time, and coffee and a small

piece of bread were handed out. Eva looked at bread and although they had not eaten in

four days said, “No, we cannot eat this bread, it is not kosher.” The girls offered up their

bread the other twins, who started laughing saying, “You are so stupid, you cannot be

211

Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

138

spoiled here. If you want to survive, you better learn to eat everything.”212 After learning

what happens in the camp, she makes a silent pledge that she will do everything in her

power to make sure she and Miriam survive–even if it means she needs to resort to

stealing food. In Melk, Martin Weiss, still with his father, uncle and cousins, dealt with

religion in his own way. He recalled the time they arrived at Melk as being bright, hot

summer around the Jewish holiday of Shavout. Remembering his father and uncle, he

states, “You know, shavout, shavout, you have to have services, you have to–So they

tried to, they knew some stuff by heart. But I remember by that time already I was

already out of it. I said, if I’m here I’m not gonna pray anymore. That’s it, I was just

plain mad. But, like my father, my uncle, they did, whenever they could.”213 For him,

adhering to his faith was not a priority. Likewise, Michael Honey, lost his religion while

in the camp. In Auschwitz, ninety-six boys were chosen to go to a different part of the

camp. Then their relatives were allowed to come and say goodbye to them. The relatives

who were left behind were going to be put to death, and all of them were aware of this.

Honey’s mother was the last one of his relatives left at Auschwitz, as brothers Milosh,

Leo and his wife had been sent to other camps. The thirty minute or so wait, was a tense

one for all the boys and their relatives. Honey recalls asking his mother, “‘How will we

get out of this?’ You know, making it seem as if we had a chance. And she replied in

Yiddish, ‘God will help us.’ I couldn’t ask her anymore, because I didn’t believe in God

then either. Uh, I don’t know how anyone can. I don’t know how my mother did. And so,

212

Ibid.

213 Weiss, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

139

we just stood there, and then we marched off, and that’s the last I saw her.”214 For others,

religion was not at the forefront, but rather, survival. Erno Abelesz mentions that his

brother traded bread for a prayer book. In his barrack at Auschwitz there was also a pair

of hand tefillin that someone had managed to bring, and people in the camp would take

turns using it to say prayers. For himself, however, Abelesz realized that, “the main aim

in life now is to survive, and anything else would be subordinate to that.” This meant that

even if he was offered food that was not kosher, he would eat it because “anything

spiritual comes after your survive.”215 Although he had doubts about this, he knew as a

fourteen year old that survival was utmost.

On the other hand, some child survivors embraced and continued to believe in

God through their trials and tribulations. For Thomas Schwartz, who was between the

ages of seven and nine as he spent time in Strasshof, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt,

religious observance surrounded him. At Bergen-Belsen, there was even a partial Seder.

He states, “You can’t believe this, but we made matzah for Passover. Not we, but there

were a couple of weirdos who kept things, who kept bread and they dried them, from the

Red Cross, they crushed them, they made flour from the bread again, they put it in water,

they rolled them and they made matzah.” They had a “sort of” Seder as much as they

could, at least the praying, the talking, the recounting, and the praying that they should be

“saved from this hell.” He recalls that there were daily prayers, and even a Hebrew

school was organized. Schwartz laughs at this, saying, “I mean, how much could a

214

Honey, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

215 Abelesz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

140

Jewish kid suffer already, right? I mean we suffered like crazy, and there was Jewish

school yet.”216 A rabbi taught them with an old, beaten up Torah, but every evening they

had their lessons. This religious exposure while in the camp must have impacted the

young Schwartz and helped with his future career choice as a cantor. Moshe Taube also

experienced the baking of matzah during the Passover of 1944, although he was in

Plaszow at the time. He recalled celebrating Yom Kippur as well as Rosh Hashanah in

the camp. The matzah was a memory he would never forget. At this camp, he had a role

model of spiritual guidance, a rabbi by the name of Klingberg. This man, upon his

deathbed, gave him a blessing that Taube believes is the reason he survived. Always

people were praying, he recalled. When the ghetto was liquidated and they were moved

into the Plaszow camp, he was able to sneak some tefillin in on his person, and he used it

every day to pray before going to work. The rabbis in the camp, he says “ . . . gave me

personally great encouragements, they gave me hope, they instilled in me faith in God

that nothing–that not everything is lost, that God will not let His people be completely

destroyed. He can punish His people, He can–devastate His people, He not totally

exterminate them or destroy them.”217 Once they moved on to Schindler’s camp, Taube

and the men there would share one tefillin that Schindler had brought in. Taube, like

Schwartz, grew to be a cantor. Peter Hersch was in Gusen II, when he and other younger

children worked in the kitchen peeling potatoes. There was a Spanish kapo there, who

went by the name Bomba, who was sadistic. He would hit them all the time, and then

216

Schwartz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

217 Taube, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

141

they all started to cry and pray. All of them could pray, and Hersch remembers, “And for

the first time we prayed. And he was standing, warming himself, I can still see the

situation, and suddenly he dropped dead, he had a heart attack. And we prayed for–that

something should happen to him, that God should help us, didn’t pray for his death so

much, as God should help us to–to, we couldn’t take it anymore.”218 This event gave

them all courage, he feels, because they felt that in this way God did help them. The kapo

that followed Bomba, however, was equally as mean. Adherence to religion, belief in

God, was different for all whose lives were affected in anyway by the Holocaust; some

children found solace in their beliefs, and others determined is was a useless endeavor in

the face of what they had lived through.

For many, just functioning day by day was were the focus was. Lebovics used

her mind to cope, saying “On the general, I survived for one reason is because I think I

was, I learned in my own head to transport myself how to transport myself out of there.

And I did. I did it daily. I did it all the time, and I learned how to physically help myself,

um, to survive, by a lot of little tricks that I learned being there. And, and sometimes, I

find myself even today, using it.”219 Similarly, Martin Weiss used his mind to cope. In

Auschwitz for a week, “ . . . it’s a very peculiar thing when you are in a case like this,”

Weiss states, “the psychological thing that it works on you. People never really talk about

that. That is really one of the things that really, uh, make you or break you. And forever

you have your own imagination and you have rumors, and they are never good, believe

218

Hersch, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

219 Lebovics, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

142

me.” For him, rationalizing each step of the way helped. If they were to be killed, why

would the Nazis bother transporting them? In this way, he continued to survive and cope

with camp life. During a forced march from Melk to Gunskirchen, weak from

malnutrition, he felt some hope, and some energy. For Peter Daniels, the ghetto and

camp experience were one and the same, at Theresienstadt from ages seven and eight.

While there, he was separated from his mother, which was not a hardship, as previously

mentioned, and spent his time in the children’s camp. Daniels recalled his time as such:

“We made do. It was very boring. Uh, we had very little food, we got two meals a day,

um soup and bread, bread and soup. And, uh, we tried to do some work. We tried to

volunteer to do some work.” He sums it by saying, “It was just like one day into another.

We were so hungry and a lot of the kids were so sick, they just weren’t thinking much

about the next day, they were just thinking about, well, I hope I survive today and you go

to bed and you go to your bunk . . . You go to bed and think, well, I hope I make, you

know, hope you make it to the next morning.”220 He spent much of his days on his own,

exploring areas of the camp, and not ever punished or beaten by anybody. Weiss

remembered seeing others die along the way, either from exhaustion or hunger, or being

shot. He says, “The funny thing is, you didn’t even bat an eyelash. You just continued

going, okay? And this is a curious thing, how you get like that. You . . . don’t feel sorry

for him anymore because he’s dead already. It may sound peculiar, but this is how you

get conditioned, you know, and now with hindsight I could philosophize, but at the time,

220

Daniels, COPH CSU Fullerton interview.

143

it was, you know, it just . . . in order words, his problems were over.”221 Mind over

matter, it seemed, was a coping strategy for so many child survivors. Rena Finder states,

“What happened was that we were so devastated and were also so hungry that the matter

of survival became a matter of hours, you know. You get up in the morning and you hope

you would have enough breakfast to last you through lunch, and that lunch last you

through the night, and that the night would pass without any patrols coming into the

barracks, and you would get up in the mornings.”222 Thomas Schwartz, seven, eight

years old, coped as well. His plan was, “Survive it, not to talk, not to get under some

guard’s skin, you know so we don’t get beaten up.”223 Peter Hersch, orphaned early on in

his camp experience felt a little differently; he felt annoyed. He says, “I made up my

mind, I’m going to survive the camps . . . I was so annoyed what they are doing to us,

that I wanted to go–to survive, because if you didn’t, if you gave in, you were gone. I’ve

seen that time and time again.”224 For children like Eva Kor, the way to cope was to fight

for survival when it was called for and to make her mind blank when the experiments

occurred for her and the other Mengele twins. Although she had silent pledge to keep

herself and her twin alive, one of Mengele’s experiments made her very ill. She

remembered, being taken to the hospital, or as she referred to it, the barrack of the living

dead. Kor was told there would be no food there. That same evening, Mengele came in,

221

Weiss, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

222 Finder, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

223 Schwartz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

224 Hersch, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

144

looked at her chart and said, “Too bad, she’s so young. She has only two weeks to live.”

This is when Kor made a second silent pledge: that she would do anything in her power

to survive and be reunited with her sister. In and out of consciousness for two weeks, she

remembered telling herself, “I must survive, I must survive.” Twice a week she saw

those who were closer to death be collected and taken away after being thrown on a

truck. She knew if she could show that her fever had broken, she would be able to leave.

Her pressing goal, to be reunited with Miriam, is what kept her going. Furthermore,

during experimentation on her person while at Auschwitz, Kor says, “So much of the

details of the experiments, I still do not remember because the only way I could cope

with it, is by blocking it out. I would let my mind just take off into other directions.”225

Because of the experiments performed on them, and the effects thereafter, blocking out

the events for Kor and other survivors was the best route to take.

More so than in the ghetto, essential workers were necessary. From the ghetto,

the transitional interim, there were choices, a person could be sent directly to a killing

center, or if they were able-bodied, off to a labor camp. In the ghetto, while children and

other non-essential people, the elderly and infirm, were removed, there was still a chance

that children could survive–that is, if they were able to survive the hunger and illness that

ran rampant, there was still some level of freedom, as Lebovics stated, the family could

be together and for the most part there was nothing to do. Of course, there is no point in

feeding masses of people that will be slated for death, and so, selections for transport

were one of the largest worries, as initially there was no clear answer to what the fate of

225

Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

145

those loaded on the trains would be. Rumors abounded, of course, but payments, letters,

messages or postcards that came from those who had volunteered and had already been

transported rendered those rumors perhaps not quite credible. Further still, this was a

modern century, the twentieth century, and so, who could imagine such a systematic plan

of annihilation could not only be dreamed of by a group of modern men, but also

implemented to the degree that this called for. Just about every child survivor worked and

had to work in order to survive because as soon as any person stopped being useful, there

was no point in keeping them around, much less alive. The jobs varied for all the

children. Some, such as Peter Daniels and Ruth Silten, both at Theresienstadt until the

end of the war talked about forming a chain with other children, and passing boxes from

one child in front of them to the other behind them. Although Michael Honey had spent

some of his time getting an education while in Theresienstadt earlier, he made no

mention of having to labor while in the ghetto-camp. The boxes Daniels and Ruth passed

along, held ashes of those who had died. According to Silten, the ground at

Theresienstadt was too damp to allow for bodies to be buried there. Occasionally, as

children over ten years old were required to work, she had other jobs such as being a

messenger and delivering notes or picking chestnuts. While she does not remember

picking any chestnuts, there is documentation, call up papers to report, and she says “If

there was a call up paper, I did it.”226 Lebovics recalled some of her time in Auschwitz

peeling potatoes, but that only lasted until she went into a children’s barrack, after which,

she stopped working. Likewise, Erno Abelesz at Auschwitz recalled working very little,

226

Silten, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

146

but did remember working in later 1944, when the war seemed to not be going well for

the Germans. At that point, orders came in to have the gas chambers destroyed and that

is something Abelesz recalled working on for a bit. Clare Parker spent some time

working on a machine that processed cotton and wool while she was in Mauthausen. For

her, it was difficult to work so many hours at night, however, there was hot and cold

water accessible and, when the German guards left for lunch, they could take turns

washing their bodies and hair. Parker had sent a little time at Auschwitz after leaving the

ghetto, but did not work there at all. After a quick stop, she and her mother were sent to

Mauthausen, where Parker remained until the war’s end.

Children performed difficult labor in the camps, but this work also made them

more useful to the Nazis and could help their survival chances. Peter Hersch was

orphaned at Auschwitz. His mother was immediately gassed with his younger siblings,

but he and his father remained together for a bit until his father was killed while away at

work. A few days later, there was a selection for transportation to another camp. Now

orphaned, Hersch wanted to remain at least with his townsmen, and he joined a line that

already had ten people. This was the maximum number per line when being counted. He

was shoved out of the line, but did manage to go this them to Mauthausen. A few weeks

later, they were transported to Gusen, and Hersch and others worked on getting Gusen II

constructed. During the day, Hersch also worked in mines. He recalled the work being

stifling and difficult, but at least they were provided with warm soup and bread, which

was something. In the mines, the workers and guards were spread out. Usually, there

were 2 workers to a room, and on one occasion, he and his partner decided to take turns

working and napping. The other man slept first, while he worked and kept a look out,

147

then Hersch took his turn. He remembers having a beautiful and vivid dream, then being

awakened with a punch–they had been called out to appell and Hersch was missing. He

was told he would be shot and likely killed for this transgression. After spending a day

standing in front of the electric fence, he was beaten, but not killed. His next job was

peeling potatoes under the command of a sadistic Spanish kapo. Soon after, there was

change of barracks and there were no longer jobs for younger people. Hersch says, “All

of a sudden, I noticed there was nothing, they didn’t assign some of us younger ones to

any work. I didn’t like that, there again I thought to myself, this is no good, they are not

going to let you do nothing. So I made myself busy.”227 He knew he needed to remain

essential and working, so he grabbed a broom and started cleaning in and around the

barracks and from that time, did whatever different jobs came up. A few children did not

spend much of their testimony discussing the work they did directly, and a few others

worked specifically for notable Nazis such as Julius Madritsch, Oskar Schindler, or Dr.

Josef Mengele.

For those who experienced the Holocaust in all aspects, from initial social

restrictions, to ghettos and camps, only a small number were fortunate enough to end up

working for someone who was able to protect them in some form or fashion, or at the

very least, the influence of certain employers helped them enough so that surviving the

Holocaust was at least possible. In the case of Celina Biniaz, Moshe Taube, and Rena

Finder, finding themselves under the employment of Julius Madritsch and Oskar

Schindler gave them a much better chance at escaping the Holocaust with their lives

227

Hersch, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

148

intact. All had parents or adults in their lives who had found work with Madritsch during

their stay in the Krakow ghetto. The young ladies, Biniaz and Finder, both had their ages

falsified to work in these factories. Moshe Taube easily gained employment through his

father, who was in charge of quality control of the German uniforms they were creating

in Plaszow. Through him, Taube was able to get a job sewing button holes on uniforms

once the ghetto was liquidated, and the inhabitants moved in to the nearby Plaszow camp,

they continued their employment, as Madritsch had a factory inside the camp. By 1944,

however, the order came down to close all factories in Krakow. At this point, Schindler

agree to take sixty of Madritsch’s Jewish workers with him to his new camp at Brünnlitz.

Rena Finder, her mother and grandfather, as well as Celina Karp Biniaz and her parents

were part of this agreement. Taube’s father had gotten “some pull” as he had a

relationship with Raimund Titsch, Madritsch’s Austrian factory manager. He took

advantage of that relationship to ask him to intercede and get them placed with Schindler

when Plaszow was closed. Prior to this, Taube did not know anyone who worked for

Schindler, but he knew that they were privileged and safe. Although he says he never saw

the list, he knows that there was one and, in his opinion, that Schindler “ . . . was given a

divine guidance in this. That he, himself, should not be killed, and consequently the Jews

should be saved.”228 For these children, leaving Plaszow and going to Brünnlitz with

Schindler’s workers played a large part in guaranteeing their survival those final months

of the war.

228

Taube, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

149

A few of the child survivors remember seeing Mengele while either passed

through or lived in Auschwitz, others had more of an interaction with him, as they either

worked for him or were used as medical subjects. Josef Mengele’s notoriety has lasted

long after his death. The many experiments that he performed on not just twins, but

dwarves, hunchbacks, and giants remain a mystery as no writing about his experiments

have ever been found229. For many Jewish people and other enemies of the state,

Mengele was a deciding factor in whether they would end up in the gas chamber, or be

allowed to live to work. Paula Lebovics, Mary Natan, and Erno Abelesz saw Mengele

while at Auschwitz. Michael Honey worked for him as a loafer, fetching and delivering

things to different parts of the camp. Rena Finder and Eva Kor were both used in his

medical pursuits, one to a much higher degree than the other.

Towards the end of the war, Paula Lebovics was separated from her mother and

put into a separate children’s barrack. While there, she was able to find that her brother

was still alive, as he was in the barracks in front of her, separated by a barbed wire. It

was comforting for her to know that her brother was nearby, and on occasion, she was

able to talk to him–although at great risk. One day, Mengele came into the camp and

asked the children to get in a circle around him. He told them that anyone who wanted to

be reunited with their family needed to step into the circle they had made around him,

and he would see to it that they were reunited. Right away, Lebovics stepped in. While

in the children’s barrack she had been with two other children from her hometown, one of

these girls, stepped in to the circle at the same time Paula did. Immediately, however,

229

Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

150

eleven year old Paula, wondered, how did Mengele know who her family was? What if,

by doing this, she was putting her family in danger? She quickly stepped back and out of

the circle, and tried to get her friend to step back as well. The other girl refused, her hope

at returning to her family’s side greater than any perceived danger. After liberation,

Paula and others saw the entire group of children shot, their bodies lying outside a pair of

gates she had never been through.230 At the time, she had no idea who Mengele was, but

was told by the other children who knew who he was. Whether those children had been

experimented on or not remains a mystery.

Michael Honey had lost his job in the children’s barrack making soup, and

decided he needed to stay busy. Upon seeing him doing errands, making soup, and

taking care of things in the children’s barrack, the blockalteste from the barrack across

from him, the Krankenbau or medical clinic, asked him if he wanted a job as a runner for

him. Initially, he answered no, but once he was fired by Freddy Hirsch, he immediately

went to see this man to see if the position was still available. There, he got an armband

and a nicer looking jacket. He was also able to get a ration of white bread and some

warm porridge that was better than the camp soup. Here he started in business: he would

trade his ration of white bread for three pieces of black bread from other prisoners, then

he would turn around and trade two pieces of black bread for one piece of the white bread

from the dysentery patients who were getting better and wanted more bread–even if it

was black. In this way, he sometimes came away with a whole loaf of bread. This he was

able to offer to his brother Milosh who was becoming emaciated because of his work

230

Lebovics, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

151

duty which was much more physically demanding. In the evening, Mengele came to the

krankenbau. Honey did not recognize Mengele at all, his name meant nothing to him.

Their first encounter is when Mengele comes in as an operation is about to start and

Michael faints. When he awakes, Mengele is holding him by the cuff of his jacket and

holding alcohol in front of him so that he can wake up. From then on, he would see

Mengele occasionally as he fetched things for him and a Jewish doctor, Dr. Heller, who

was respected by Dr. Mengele. Usually, prisoners, even those who worked for and with

the Nazi officers were called by their number. This is how Honey knew that Dr. Mengele

respected this doctor, because he would use his name. Eventually, after a selection where

Honey saw his mother for the last time, he and the Birkenau boys were moved out of the

family camp into the criminal block where he found many small jobs to keep him busy

and useful. Every once in a while he would still see Mengele, but no longer worked for

him. At one point, as he was returning from the Canada storage area where he had gone

to run an errand, he saw Mengele who asked Michael to follow him and a commandant

that he was talking with. Mengele asked a Jewish prisoner who was an artist to paint a

portrait of Michael and send it to him in Berlin. It was painted, but the artist burned his

paintings and killed himself. Shortly after this, Auschwitz was beginning to close, and

Honey volunteered for the transport to Mauthausen.231

Rena Finder had been put on Schindler’s list after the closing of the Plaszow and

boarded the train separately than her mother. Although she was right behind her when

the cattle cars were loaded, a German guard stopped her from entering the full car and

231

Honey, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

152

beat her towards another. This was an inauspicious start to the trip to Brünnlitz. As is

somewhat common knowledge today, that train full of women, some “belonging” to

Schindler as well as others, was routed to Auschwitz. Upon arriving, she called out to her

mother and was reunited with her as they encountered the chaotic scene at the camp.

They were ordered to run, always run, and told to strip while men shaved their hair off

completely. Finder recalls:

“The women didn’t look human, you know. When, when they shaved our hair,

when they shaved my hair and I looked at my mother and all the other people I

knew so well, I said that can’t be us, you know. We are already dead. We, we

can’t be alive anymore. We were so totally dehumanized, we were so humiliated

and, and traumatized. I mean, there is just, can’t imagine, they took my soul out,

that’s how I felt. Auschwitz was such a hell.”232

She spent three weeks in that camp. One day in those three weeks, they were in

line, waiting to be counted when Mengele came by and took her and another girl and led

them away to a little clinic. They laid down on a bed with white linens, and they took

blood from then. She was told they were going to make plasma to send to the front.

Every time she was taken, she was always terrified she would not find her mother when

she returned. While some lived in Auschwitz for much longer, those three weeks clearly

left a lasting impression on Finder.

Eva Kor, as a Mengele twin, however, had a much different experience with

Mengele. For the most part, Mengele never spoke to her–he spoke at her, about her, but

never directly to her. She knows from having talked to other twins long after the war, and

there were various types of experiments done on twins. Mengele tried to see if he could

change the sex of twins, to create certain features, type of hair, eyes, and so on. For the

232

Finder, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

153

most part, she doesn’t remember the specifics of what was done to them because, she

says, “I don’t think that anybody, even us in Auschwitz, wanted to feel like a piece of

meat and we have been reduced in this case to a mass of breathing, living cells.” There

were two different types of experiments that she and Miriam were exposed to often. The

day for all the twins would begin with waking up at 5am, cleaning their barrack and

lining up for appell by 6am. Roll call would begin, and they would be meticulously

counted; this could take anywhere from thirty minutes, to six hours. Once, the appell

took eight hours. Then they would all need to line up, “like little soldiers”233 in front of

their beds and wait for Mengele to come in to do his inspections. From there, they would

go off for experiments in either of two labs. In one lab, which she refers to as a blood

lab, they would try to see how much blood they could take in one arm before someone

died, while the other arm was used to inject them with various unknown germs and

chemicals. Kor believes it was during one of these sessions that she caught whatever

illness landed her in the hospital with a prognosis of two weeks to live. The second

experiment they took part of, was standing naked with ten other pairs of twins in one

room for six to eight hours while every part of their body was measured to compare with

other twins and growth charts. These were not deadly, per se, but were very difficult to

deal with. Sometimes they would be photographed or painted as they stood there. It is

Kor’s belief that Mengele was very interested in reviewing the autopsies of twins if one

died. For those weeks she lay in the hospital, death looming, her sister Miriam was taken

away, potentially to wait for her own death. As Eva continued to fight to live, Miriam

233

Kor, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

154

was sent back to the barracks. Upon recovery, the twins were reunited and the

experiments continued. Of this group of child survivors, Eva Kor was the most affected

by Dr. Josef Mengele. To this day, she fights to educate others, not only about

Holocaust, but also about effects of the experiments she, her sister, and other twins

suffered.

For children of this time, the typical societal role for them was to go to school and

behave. Playing, chores, religious classes, civic duties, all various activities that took up

the lives of children post-Industrial Revolution. For Jewish children, removal to

concentration camps ceased their typical childhood–no longer did they have a societal

role. Many children did their best to survive and continue going, even when orphaned, or

completely separated from their family members, unaware if they had family still alive.

On some occasions, however, children participated in acts of resistance. These were both

active and purposeful deeds of resistance, and less overt, passive, silent acts of resistance.

At times, the guards or officers in charge of these children perceived resistance where

none lay, for example when Rena Finder was accused of sabotaging a machine which

produced munitions and sentenced to death. Resistance took on different forms–

education, praying, singing, fighting back, running away, ignoring orders, or perhaps just

lying about one’s age. Ruth Silten–although not religious at all to the point where once

the Star of David is issued as a badge that must be worn, questions if her father even

knew who David was– recalled before going to Westerbork, “Of course at home they

were taught that lying was practically a sin. It’s not nice. At school they were taught that

155

lying was okay.”234 Lying about one’s age, as so many younger children and people did,

can be interpreted as an act of resistance as well. For some of the children, lying or

falsifying one’s age, as Rena Finder and Celina Biniaz had paperwork which identified

their age as a year or two older. Clare Parker was twelve when she arrived at Auschwitz,

and although she did not speak German, someone on the platform taught her to say

thirteen in German. Parker believes that is why she was spared, as everyone who passed

from the platform to the barracks was thirteen or older.235 Ruth Silten, Michael Honey,

and Eva Kor all admitted to stealing food, organizing, while in the camps. Of these, only

Kor continued it and benefited greatly, her role as a Mengele twin making it somewhat

easier for her, although just as dangerous. Silten and Honey, both who had either parents

or siblings with them while the in camps were told they could not and should not steal,

and ceased participating in those activities. Rena Finder, upon leaving Plaszow and

entering Auschwitz had brought in a small picture of her father, folded and held under her

tongue.236 Celina Biniaz recalled her act of defiance while working at Brünnlitz when

Amon Goeth came for a visit, saying:

“I remember we were lined up to greet him, and Schindler walked through with

Goeth. And of course n Plaszow you didn’t dare lift your eyelids to look at Goeth,

I mean, your head was always down. Well, we felt so protected by Schindler that,

uh, we looked at him. For the first time we looked in the guy’s face. And it just–it

was a good feeling, you know, to be able to look the monster in his face.”237

234

Silten, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

235 Parker, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

236 Finder, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

237 Biniaz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

156

For her and the others, looking at Goeth, knowing that in the past he could and did

kill people for something as trivial as this, was significant. Young Peter Hersch spent

time in Bergen-Belsen not only participating in education as much as could be arranged,

but also in religious activities such as praying and celebrating certain holidays to the best

of their ability–both activities which easily lead to immediate death in camps if one was

caught.

Three other children participated in active resistance: Michael Honey, Erno

Abelesz, Peter Hersch and Eva Kor. Michael Honey took part of some resistance where

he was aided by others and where he himself defied orders. Once he arrived at

Auschwitz from Theresienstadt with his family and was moved into the family barracks,

Honey and the group were lined up and the tattoo processing began. His mother was

ashen, he recalled, not wanting her son to be tattooed. The prisoner who was forced to

tattoo him did so lightly, and the SS overseeing them told him to strike it out and do it

again. Here, Honey received help from this prisoner, who gave the SS guard a bottle of

vodka as a bribe; yet another prohibited action. For Michael, “That’s the first instance of

that sort of altruistic help from grown-ups who see children being murdered daily. Never

tattoo children, and he’s doing a child, and he’s saying to the mother, don’t worry, I

won’t hurt him.”238 Having been moved with other Birkenau boys to Block 13, the

criminal area, Honey decided he needed to find something to keep him busy. For this he

went to the clothing department and asked the German guard if he could be a runner for

this department. The older man thought about it, and said, yes, he could use two.

238

Honey, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

157

Although there was little for him and the other boy to do, Honey felt the adults wanted to

have children around. Here, he and his friend, were allowed to grow their hair out as well

and, at one point, with prodding from another Jewish prisoner, the younger boys began

talking with girls separated from them in a separate section behind barbed wire. A guard

caught him, and beat him for engaging in “immoral behavior.” Their grown hair made

them easier targets, and after giving them a beating, he cut a swathe through their hair.

About this incident he was nonchalant, “We didn’t do anything. We stood in a place

where we were not supposed to be. We talked to other prisoners in another compound

which we were not supposed to do, but so what?”239

During a selection at Auschwitz the night before Yom Kippur of 1944, Erno

Abelesz was asked to stand under a pole. Those who did not clear the height, were asked

to stand to one side, while those who did meet or exceed the pole were on another. He

knew that he was on the wrong side when he did not clear the pole, and immediately

moved to the good or right side. Of course, he was seen and he started running. One of

the kapos ran after him and grabbed him, but told him in Yiddish to run away from him.

Erno did as instructed and ran away, but this time a German prisoner, “they were just as

wicked as the SS, he notices that I escape from this Jewish kapo and he runs after me.”

Luck was on his side, and Russian POWs stopped the German prisoner, and Abelesz

escaped. Although aided, he fights back in this way. In the same selection the next day,

they are ordered to line up, but this time, Erno finds a small brick to stand on to make his

height just a bit higher. The SS who saw this asked him to go to the side. At this point,

239

Ibid.

158

Erno started crying and saying, “I’m strong, I can work.”240 A German prisoner

Lageralteste slapped him on the face and told him to stop. For whatever reason, this

time, he is spared when the SS guard instructs the Lageralteste to leave him alone and

instead the boy next to him is taken. The problem was, one never knew when an act of

resistance could lead to a reprieve or to death.

Peter Hersch and his family arrived at Auschwitz and processed through selection.

His mother and the three youngest stood with his sister Helen. An SS guard indicated he

should go with them, and his father was directed to the other side. His father grabbed

him, and Peter was allowed to go with him, here aided in defying orders. After the

showers and getting their striped uniform, they were all brought out, and separated again,

men and women. While standing there, he hears his sister calling out for water and

recognizing her voice, thirteen year old Peter runs up to a woman who was walking with

the SS, and asks her for some water. He doesn’t remember how or where she got it, but

she hands him the water and he immediately took it over to his sister. He says, “Imagine,

I mean the risk I took? Another thing that I did without even thinking.”241 While his act

of defiance was not done with purpose, but rather came from a place of wanting to help

his sister, the fact remains that he broke protocol by addressing this woman, asking her

for something, and crossing over to the women without facing any type of punishment.

240

Abelesz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

241 Hersch, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

159

Eva Kor, having lost everyone in her family upon arrival at Auschwitz except for

her twin, resisted outright immediately. After the showers, and a haircut (their hair was

not all removed, but cut short), they were lined up for tattooing. Kor:

And when my turn came, I decided that I was going to fight back. That I was not

going to let them to do me whatever they wanted without fighting back. And so,

they started the number and I began screaming and kicking and my number never

came out clear. Four SS, four–two SS and two prisoner, women prisoners had to

restrain me. And I thought to myself, well, I need to find some kind of an excuse,

because nice girls do not do that, and I said, “I will cooperate with you if you

bring my mother here.” And I remember–they said, well you can see her

tomorrow. And I could think clearly, how on earth will they reunite us tomorrow

when they just ripped me apart from her earlier this morning? It seemed to be so–

such a bold lie that I couldn’t really accept it. Unfortunately, my poor sister

believed it, she kept waiting for us to see my mother. She never told me about it

until 1985.

She does not recall biting anyone, but later Miriam told her she had bit one of the

SS guard that was holding her. While there is a good chance her status as a twin

protected her, Kor was never guaranteed that she would be left alone no matter what

transgression she committed.

Children also, of course, witnessed and endured violence in the camps, more so

than in the ghettos. Although there were extreme levels of violence in ghettos, especially

when they were liquidated and people tried to hide or resisted leaving, the scrutiny in the

camps far exceeded conditions they had lived in previously. The closer watch, especially

by other prisoners who often times lived with them, made living in the camps more

precarious. Moshe Taube remembers seeing Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plaszow

camp where Taube went after the ghetto, shoot people with little restraint, and roaming

about the camp with his three dogs which he would order to rip people apart. His

160

nightmares continued into adulthood.242 Every child who went through a ghetto and camp

saw violence, in some form or fashion, and the fact that they continued to defy the odds

and live, made theirs a dangerous existence. Some children, however, were recipients of

being saved or given help or advice that they credit with saving their lives. Peter Hersch,

at Auschwitz, was asked his age by the woman who was walking with the SS and who

later gave him water. Although he was just thirteen, he was larger and taller than the

average boy his age. He answered truthfully, and she told him “Say you are

seventeen.”243 Clearly worrying about other things, his father, who was near him at the

time, missed the interaction, but immediately agreed that his son should lie. This, Peter

states, is what saved his life because there was no one younger than seventeen where he

was.

Other children, too, learned that lying about their age could save their life. In

Auschwitz, having been separated from the rest of her family with a cousin, Mary Natan

heard the blockalteste saying that anyone who was under eighteen should report, because

they would be getting special rations. Not yet wise to what was happening in the camps

and the different manipulations by the Nazis to trick the Jews, she reported saying she

was fourteen. A group of younger women were led away, Natan as part of the group,

when suddenly a young woman came up to her with buckets of human waste, grabbed her

arm and handed one to her and told her to follow her. They broke from the group, and

headed towards a gate, telling the German guard that they had been ordered to remove the

242

Taube, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

243 Hersch, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

161

waste. Once out of the gate and in another part of the compound, the young woman

pointed up at the chimneys telling her, “That is what I just saved you from.” From then

on, Mary knew she could never tell anyone her real age, if she was asked she would say

she was eighteen. This young woman, she did not know from anywhere, and could have

handed that bucket to any of the young ladies being taken to the gas chambers. Mary had

a sort of protector in this young woman.

For thirteen year old Celina Biniaz, the person who saved her was not a fellow

prisoner, but rather, a well-known Nazi, Dr. Mengele. Biniaz states, “I owe my life to, uh,

Dr. Mengele’s change of heart, you know.” Biniaz, her mother, and other Schindler Jews

had been sent to Auschwitz by mistake. After going through processing, there was one

moment, the only moment, where she and her mother were separated. Her mother and

about thirty-five to forty other women were taken away, purportedly to peel potatoes.

Instead, they were having blood taken from them. Those who were left behind were

taken out for a selection. They were told to strip and walk through. On the first run

through, Biniaz is pushed to the left with some older women. Then, “I don’t know what

happened, he had a change of heart and told everybody to go through again. Uh, and

when we went through again, I just–I don’t know how I got the nerve, but I looked up at

him and I saw three words in German, ‘Lassen sie mich,’” (Let me go), “And he let me

go, he let me go to the right, and I ran out like crazy, clutching my clothes in my hand, in

the nude, out.”244 Shortly after, the women were saved from Auschwitz by Oskar

Schindler.

244

Biniaz, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

162

The children who were saved near the end of the war, through working in

Schindler’s camp all had positive things to say about Schindler. This is no surprise as

they not only were spared from death, but so were some other family members. Rena

Finder stated, “He was hope, you know, he was life, he was maybe future, he was god for

us. And never a bad word to anyone.”245 However, while more of society can identify

who Schindler was because of Schindler’s List, as well as what he did, and how his

actions or the actions of his employees helped save over twelve hundred Jewish men,

women, and children, there were also countless others, such as Madritsch or Titsch, who

aided the Jewish prisoners who are not known to the public. Additionally, there were

countless average and ordinary people who did what they could, as long as they could, to

help their Jewish friends, neighbors, countrymen or women. But, for these children,

whose testimonies were often overshadowed by the adults in their lives, there should also

be a spotlight. Overall, they contributed to their survival, their instincts, their

observations, their rationalizing at such a young age gave them an advantage over so

many other children, who were not given any breaks or moments of reprieve, but instead

marched straight towards death.

Conclusion

Children have been seen as the future in many ways. Of the fourteen child

survivors whose interviews I examined for this study, ten were given by survivors who

appeared on film to be regular and almost average adults–they showed many emotions as

they recounted and relived their traumatic childhoods, but seemed to handle those

245

Finder, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

163

memories in stride, laughing, joking at times, and trying their best to put their

extraordinary experiences into a relatable experience. They make their history resonate

with anyone who has not only studied the events of the Holocaust, but also anyone who

looks for the triumph of the human spirit. One or two were mostly serious, with perfectly

good reason, as they recounted their lives, perhaps a little less inclined to joviality. Two

of the women, justifiably, came off a bit more stringent or morose, clearly more marked

by their experiences. As mentioned earlier, children develop in different stages, and for

some who were developmentally unable to cope with what they lived through, the effects

were greater as they aged. Some of the child survivors were and continue to be very

active in trying to teach others through telling their experiences in schools, museums,

houses of worship, and so on, while others did not mention their post-war activities with

regards to testimony.

For these children, who had had anything but a typical childhood, the order of the

day after liberation was getting back to a life they could hardly remember. Immediately

after the war, and back in Holland in a temporary shelter, a man tapped Ruth Silten on the

shoulder and gave her a small piece of something brown, something that resembled the

soap in Theresienstadt. He waited for her reaction, and as she remained puzzled, he

asked her, “Well, aren’t you going to eat it?” She said, “I can’t eat soap!” Her mother

had to convince her that this was chocolate. In another post-war incident, five years after

the war, seventeen year old Silten remembered walking with her mother in a marketplace

after the war, and pointing out something that looked strange. Her mother laughed

saying, “You are a typical war child. That is a banana.” These are a few of the

experiences that child survivors faced after the war, along with trying to get their

164

education back on track. In most cases, years of just basic knowledge were completely

gone. Silten sums it up nicely saying, “And these things kept happening, they still

happen. Somewhere along the line, and it probably goes, if not for all of us, for many of

us, nobody seems to have had time, after the war, to really have taught us the relatively

minor things that go with socialization.”246 Although she later became a professor at

Pasadena College she mentions that occasionally she does not know how to behave

socially, she cannot start small talk, because those things were not relevant for survival

while in the camps.

So many times, in the field of history the question remains, why do we care? Why

is this event significant? Irrefutably, the Holocaust is significant, was and is very

important today, because events such as these–which still occur today–were never before

so clinically mapped out and acted upon. Out of so many testimonies, autobiographies,

memoirs, lectures, documentaries and so on, the experiences of children and what

happened to them, whether they lived or died, continues to be particularly tragic. Scholar

Deborah Dwork has noted that scholars have often neglected the experiences of children

in the Holocaust because they view children as largely helpless and dependent. She

explains:

“The historians’ unwillingness to accept the murder of children is emotionally

different from their incomprehension of the genocide of adults, and so, like

everyone else, they have been loath to pursue the subject. While there are a

number of reasons for this sensitivity, the most important is that whereas adults

are never seen as totally helpless, children are (and are expected to be) utterly

defenseless and dependent.”247

246

Silten, USC Shoah Foundation interview.

247 Dwork, Children with a Star, 256.

165

My research has illustrated that children of the Holocaust and in its aftermath

were far from helpless and dependent. Rather, they employed remarkable survival

strategies and fortitude yet continue to be shaped by the traumatic experiences they had to

this day. Clare Parker, almost echoes Silten’s sentiment when she commented, “My

Holocaust experience keeps me a child because I had no childhood–you know, growing

up time, being a child. My life stopped when I arrived there. And suddenly I’m grown up,

without those years in between in which to grow up.”248 To better understand the children

who lived through these events, it is imperative to look at their experiences and

understand the world from their point of view, which in many cases might be that of a

child inside an adult’s body, with different pieces of wisdom that one collects as they live

life. Survivor Haim Ginott, who was just seventeen when the war started, went on to

become a well-known child psychologist wrote a letter to teachers:

“My eyes saw what no man should witness: Gas chambers built by LEARNED

engineers, Children were poisoned by EDUCATED physicians, Infants killed by

TRAINED nurses, Women and babies shot and burned by HIGH SCHOOL and

COLLEGE graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your

students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters,

skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are

important only if they serve to make our children more humane.”249

If children truly are the foundation of the future, their history must be validated, looked

upon, respected, to a much higher degree that has been seen in the past. As an adult in

the modern world, it is easy to fall in the frame of thinking of younger children and

adolescents as tech savvy and apathetic youngsters; all messages that are heard time and

248

Lyn Smith, Remembering: Voices of the Holocaust – A New History in the Words of the Men

and Women who Survived (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), 318.

249 Haim Ginott, Teacher and Child: A Book for Parents and Teachers (New York: Macmillan,

1972).

166

again in the media. Perhaps that can occur, over time, with all that children are exposed

to at much earlier ages, but educating children through the experiences of children such

as these Holocaust survivors can give them people, role models, that they can look up to

and can help them build a foundation that is focused more on humanity, on standing up to

do their part in supporting and protecting human rights across the world.

167

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