Diary of a death camp childhood

This story has been taken from an article in the Guardian and any quotations, unless stated otherwise, are from the Guardian.

'In 1944 Helga Weiss came to terms with the idea of dying - with one important condition. She was only fourteen years old and had never been strongly religious, but as she waited in queue at Auschwitz she prayed she wouldn't die after her mother. She couldn't face being left alone.'
 

She was one of only 100 children out of 15,000 to survive Auschwitz that were sent there from Terezin.

The diary Helga wrote during
her time at Terezin

Helga Weiss was sent to four concentration camps in her early childhood. She started to write a diary at eight years old documenting, in words and pictures, her life during the growing Nazi threat and her and her mother's journey through the concentration camps. They were sent to four concentration camps between 1941 and 1945; Terezin, Auschwitz, Frieberg and Mauthausen.
 The first few pages of her diary recorded the growing threat of Nazi domination with air raid alarms, arrests, the expulsion of Jewish children from state schools, adults losing their jobs, yellow Stars of David being sewn onto clothing and the constant, claustrophobic talk of 'transports'. Her father was one of those who lost their jobs.
In December 1941 the authorities came for Helga's family, she was just twelve years old. They were sent, first to Terezin, a walled 18th century garrison town. It was also known during the war by its German name: Theresienstadt.

 'The first was Terezin, where they spent three years, sleeping two or three to a bed that was really too small for one, with little to eat and to keep out the cold.'  

They had only one blanket but they covered themselves with their coats.

"We were together and it was a great help."
 

Many of Helga's relatives were also sent there; it was essentially a large transit camp. Tens of thousands of Jews passed through there on their way to either Auschwitz or Treblinka. When Helga and her mother arrived there they thought that the war would soon be over and had no idea of what lay ahead.

"We were allowed 50kg of luggage so we took just our clothes and something important to us. I took two very small dolls, a pad, watercolours and crayons."
 

Helga Weiss

When they arrived Helga stayed with her mother whilst her father Otto Weiss went to the men's barracks. Later Helga moved to a Kinderheim- a children's home- where she was with people of her own age. Conditions there were marginally better and the group organised dances, celebrated birthdays and religious holidays. Helga continued to sketch and write in her diary and one of her happier sketches are of the girls gathering around a food parcel, jostling to see the contents. The first drawing she did was a picture of two children building a snowman; she managed to smuggle it through to her father who sent back the message: "Draw what you see".
She began to sketch life in the camp. Some of her drawings show queues for food, a bleak, basic washroom, a girl ill with tuberculosis, the crowded waiting room in the emergency clinic, people on stretchers and bread transported in a hearse bearing the message " Welfare for the young". Another drawing shows the birthday of one of her friends, Franka.

'The girls had been born in the same maternity ward, 1929, in their shared bunk bed in 1943, and in 1957, wheeling prams together. The last drawing is accompanied by a note to say that Franka died in Auschwitz before her 15th birthday.'
 

Despite the starvation rations, disease, the lice and bed bugs that crawled across their faces at Terezin, there was a thriving cultural life. Another of her sketches shows families gathered around a trio of violinists giving a concert in a dormitory.

'I don't  know if it was luck, fate,a miracle. I was together with my mother'
 

Whilst at Terezin Helga met her first boyfriend, Ota who was an orphan and a chemistry student. He was in his mid-twenties, she was not yet fifteen.

"It was a half-childish love", she says. "We walked together and held hands... and I remember the exact place in Terezin where we first kissed." She beams. "But nothing more happened than kissing."
 

When the Germans announced, in September 1944 5,000 men would be sent to build a new ghetto, Helga's Uncle Jindra was among those in the first group. Her father and Ota were in the second. Helga describes the day that her father left in her diary;

'the corners of his mouth twitching as he tried to smile, hands shaking as he held her. Then he was gone.'
 

Helga with her father, Otto
in 1930

Irena, her mother, and Helga left Terezin three days later. It was at the last minute that she managed to smuggle her diary and a novel and some poetry that her father had written to her Uncle Josef who worked in the records department at the camp. He bricked them into a wall for safe keeping.
Helga and her mother were moved to Auschwitz where, as soon as they arrived, they joined the notorious queues; older women and mothers with young children to the left and those deemed able to work to the right. If you wanted to survive you had to be on the right. Prisoners who knew the fate that awaited those who went to the left whispered warnings:

"Don't say that you are too young, don't say you are ill - say you are able to work. Don't say you belong together, that you are mother and child"
 

Helga was determined to say that she was older than her fourteen years and her mother younger. However, they weren't asked any questions but directed to the right queue. Helga wrote;

"I have friends who are still alive - they are the same age as I am - but their mothers were sent to the left. So I was lucky twice. Not only that I was not sent, but that I was together with my mother."
 

A drawing by Helga of women
queueing for food

The women were addressed in German when they lined up for roll call the next day. When Helga asked her mother to translate she said: "Oh, he says we are in an extermination camp." When they had first arrived, and up until this point, Helga and her mother hadn't known about the gas chambers. "We arrived and saw smoking chimneys - we thought it was a factory." They were told by others that the smoke was actually rising from the camp crematorium.
They were told to strip naked and had their heads shaved. Helga only recognised her mother when she heard her speak.
Helga's ten days a Auschwitz were worse than her three years at Terezin but she think that it was harder still for her mother.

From Auschwitz Helga and Irena were sent to a sub-camp of Flossenburg concentration camp called Freiberg. They worked there for five months in slave labour polishing aeroplane parts. Then they were sent on a sixteen day transport by rail to Mauthausen in Austria.

'Irena was so weak that she could hardly stand and both suffered from frostbite, lice and constant, raging thirst.'
 

Some women escaped when rumours started about the war ending but Helga wasn't sure that her mother was well enough to try. During one four-day period they had nothing to eat except two potatoes, half a cup of tea and two spoons of sugar. Along the way the news arrived that Berlin had been taken. They went without food for five days at Mauthausen.

 'Had there been just one more day before peace was declared, Helga suspects that her mother would not have survived. Days later, on the 5 May 1945, the camp was liberated by the Allied forces.'
 

Irena and Helga returned to their previous home in Prague where they began to look for Helga's father Otto. The only camp registration list his name appeared on was Terezin. The certificates were sent out after a year although Irena didn't want him to be declared dead. They found it unbearable to be alone together in the flat for the first few months because they were surrounded by memories of the life they had had before the war.


Helga Weiss today

Helga continued the diary she had started before Terezin, writing down everything that had happened after they had left. The diary was published as she wrote it in the 1940's although she claims that the writing is childish and naive.

Irena and Helga lived together after the war until Irena died aged 84. When Helga married her husband came to live with them in the flat. Helga's husband was called Jiri Hosek, he was a double bass player with the Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra. Her son, also named Jiri is a cellist along with her granddaughter Dominika. After the war Helga became an artist and there are numerous paintings situated around her flat to commemorate her career.

Sources:

• The Guardian
• http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02482/Helga-drawing-1_2482663b.jpg
• http://images.twomillionbooks.com/9780670921416.jpg
• http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/2/21/1361461612720/Helga-Weiss-father-011.jpg
• http://newsletter.pamatnik-terezin.cz/wp-content/uploads/Z1-2012/foto_5.jpg
• http://www.jewishbookweek.com/sites/default/files/styles/event_node/public/Picture%202.png

 

Playing to Death's tune

Music was heard in many of the concentration camps and ghettos throughout Nazi Europe. It was used as a symbol of comradeship amongst the Jews throughout the extreme poverty, depression and the death that surrounded them. Ghetto songs could be used as a diversion from reality and to keep traditions going.

Though songs from before the war were still sung, life in the ghettos and concentration camps led to new songs usually with no accompaniment. Many Jewish musicians had sold their instruments for money or food in and before they were moved to the ghettos and many instruments had been stolen by the Germans. These songs were often inspired by the latest gossip and news. However some of the songs were personal experiences that often included the death of friends or family or of their treatment by the Germans.

However, some instruments were played in the ghettos. Though not as common, classical music and instrumental work was also composed and performed in some ghettos and labour camps.  For many of the Nazi victims, music was an important means of preserving their humanity. This music is a form of audio historical documentation telling of the emotions and events that their authors experienced.

Street songs were a style of  ghetto music, emphasising four dominant themes: hunger, corrupt administration, hope for freedom, and a call for revolt. A majority of ghetto street songs were sung to preexisting melodies, a technique known as contra fact. Contra fact became necessary because composers couldn't generate new music fast enough for all of the lyrics being written.

At some of the death camps the Nazis created orchestras of prisoner musicians, making them play while their fellow prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Many musicians were forced to watch as their friends and families walked past them to their death. Auschwitz alone had six orchestras, one orchestra was thought to contain 100-120 musicians.

Resistance songs:

Out of all the songs sung in the ghetto the song of the Partisans by Hirsh Glik was the one that spread like wildfire. "Zog nit keynmol az du geyst dem letstn vet" ("Never Say that You Are Trodding the Final Path"). This song became one of the official resistance hymns of the Eastern European partisan  brigades. It was translated into Hebrew, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Romanian, Dutch, and English. It was a well known song in many of the concentration camps.

One member of an Auschwitz woman's orchestra was named Fania Fenelon. In her book 'Playing for time' she describes that though she had clean clothes and daily showers, she was made to play "gay, light music and marching music for hours on end while our eyes witnessed the marching of thousands of people to the gas chambers and ovens."

 

Sources:

fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/arts/MUSVICTI.htm

Picture-Mauthausen Concentration Camp orchestra

Safe houses

The Secret Annexe used by the Frank and
Van Pels families along with Fritz Pfeffer

These were houses that people were hidden in when they were trying to escape persecution. Normally they were taken there by someone else who then brought food and other necessary items like; blankets, warm clothing and news from the outside world. If you lived in a safe house then you, normally, had to be very quiet and you couldn't go outside for fear of recognition. If you were hiding in an enemy area and your neighbours realised you were there then they would often call the enemy troops who would then either kill or arrest you.
Some houses were only temporary; somewhere for the refugees to stop for the night on their way out of the country, others were more permanent but they sometimes changed due to the position of enemy forces and conditions.
Food was often in short supply and there was always a risk that you would be discovered. When that happened people would either give themselves up or sometimes, commit suicide. This meant that the enemy wouldn't be able to subject them to torture or gain any information from them.

Link: http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/timeline.html#top

Sources: http://www.annefrankguide.com/en-gb/content/achterhuis.jpg

The Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz

When the Ovitz family arrived at Auschwitz, the SS Guards were astounded. Seven people were lifted off the train one by one, five were women, not much taller than a girl of 5, yet they wore elegant dresses and make-up which made them look like painted dolls. They huddled in a circle where they made no attempt to join the other passengers being rounded up. Instead, one of them started handing out autograph cards for they were the famed Lilliput Troupe known for their variety shows.

Like most of the Hungarian Jews, they had been on the train which took 3 days to arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but the dwarfs had no idea that they had just been deposited in the Nazi's most notorious extermination camp.

One of the SS officers went over and established that they were all siblings from the Ovitz family. Immediately, he gave the order to call Dr Mengele: "Wake the doctor!"

It was nearly midnight on Friday, May 19, 1944, and Dr Josef Mengele was asleep in his quarters. All the troopers on duty, however, were well aware of his passion for collecting human ‘freaks’, including hermaphrodites and giants.
Meanwhile, the dwarfs watched the rest of the passengers — including their aunts, uncles, cousins and friends — march towards a building with two chimneys that ceaselessly poured out smoke and flames.

Perla recounted many decades later;
 

"each flame looked like a human being, flying up and dissolving in the air. We went numb, then started thinking about the unknown man we were waiting for — if this was a graveyard, then what was a doctor doing here?"

Mengele whispered orders to the officer in charge. Remarkably, not only were the seven dwarfs, their two normal-sized sisters, sister-in-law and two of their children saved from the gas chamber that night, but so were the families of their handyman and neighbour — who insisted they were close relatives.
Only three hours had passed since the arrival of their train and most of the passengers — 3,100 out of 3,500 — were already dead. The dwarfs were lifted on to a truck and driven away.

Like all the other prisoners, they lived in a barrack and ate the same watery soup, but it was clear that they’d been set apart.
Instead of having to use the latrines, they were given the potties of dead babies. There was also an aluminium bowl in which they had to wash every day, as Mengele was obsessed with hygiene. On the day they were summoned to Mengele’s lab, the women carefully made up their faces and put on their best dresses. To the emaciated inmates who saw them led to a truck, they must have seemed like a bizarre hallucination. The lab looked like any ordinary clinic, with staff in white coats. All they seemed to want at first was to take blood samples, which seemed a small price to pay for their lives.  But the blood-letting was repeated week after week, along with dozens of X-rays. "The amount of blood they took was enormous and, being feeble from hunger, we often fainted" recalled Perla. "That didn’t stop Mengele: he had us lie down and when we came to our senses they resumed syphoning our blood."
"They punctured us carelessly and blood spurted. We often felt nauseous and vomited a lot. When we returned to the barrack, we’d slump on the wooden bunks — but before we had time to recover, we’d be summoned for a new cycle."


Over a long period of time, the family were tested, experimented on and studied. In 1949, after their horrific adventure and the liberation of the camp, the family emigrated to Israel, where they spent several years touring with their stage show until ill health forced them to retire. By the time Perla told her incredible story of The Seven Dwarfs of Auschwitz, the rest of her family had died.

Mengele, who had escaped justice by fleeing to South America,  is believed to have drowned in 1979. Had he been caught, Perla said she doubted he would have apologised for what he did to her family.

"But if the judges had asked me if he should be hanged, I’d have told them to let him go."

"I was saved by the grace of the devil — God will give Mengele his due."
Perla died peacefully, aged 80, on September 9, 2001.

Sources:

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGJf5WWZDtnYkuMYpa6q_UX83EaP5A5R_9n5_U-xNU8_6AoJYtz5Srctq9LqBhAr3s1mfW02AjX3PeTALyAVfRPX5GJ5PQ2VDYQ45inRJGoeF13GP4lyx0eCXiBr02OWF7tzBvalCjYuI/s400/ovitz.JPG

The Ovitz family on their arrival

 

Fight to the death; the Rwandan, Serbian and Nazi genocides

Similarities:

• They all focused on one group of people and made them scapegoats for all of the countries problems.
• The persecutors saw themselves as the victims of previous injustices at the hands of the group they were now targeting: Nazis blaming Jews for the 'stab in the back' of 1918; Serbians blaming Muslims for the destruction of the medieval Serb kingdom; Hutus blaming Tutsis raised above them by colonial rulers.
• The victims were displayed as sub or even non human.
• There was a lot of propaganda and media involved.



Nazi flag

Rwandan refugee camp

Differences:

• The Rwandan genocide was much quicker than the others. 8000 people were killed on average every day.
• Rwanda didn't create camps for people to be held in.
• Rwanda used machetes to hack people to death whereas in the other genocides shooting was the main method.
• The Nazi's were the only ones to use gas chambers.
• In Serbia and Rwanda there were UN troops overseeing and trying to keep peace.



A memorial to the victims of the Serbian genocide

Srebrenica was the biggest massacre in Europe since the end of the second World War. The town was declared safe by the UN so a lot of Muslims settled there  to avoid being persecuted by the Serbians . The town was being watched by some Dutch troops to keep the peace, but when the Serbian forces started to approach they had to make a choice: they could either stand their ground and die trying to save people that would be killed anyway or they could oversee people getting onto the buses and try to decrease the level of brutality used. The chose the latter. When the Serbian forces stormed the town they loaded the women, children, old men and the Dutch troops onto to buses and drove them away. They then put all of the boys over the age of ten or eleven and all of the men under sixty onto different buses. They were then taken into the woods and shot. About 7000 boys and men were killed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3582139.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13431486
Source - Professor J. C. Williams

Dr Mengele; man or monster?

 Dr Josef Rudolf Mengele  was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. Dr Mengele was one of the SS physicians who were in charge of the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to go into forced labour. However, Mengele is most infamous for his experiments on the inmates of the camp, including children, especially twins. On one day alone he killed fourteen twins. For this and much more Mengele became known as the 'Angel of Death'.

It is claimed he once drew a line on the wall of the children's section 150cm (about 5 ft) from the floor and decided that any children whose heads did not reach the line were sent straight to the gas chambers.

Dr Josef R. Mengele

He was particularly interested in identical twins and took a special interest in the camp inmates who were considered to have physical abnormalities. These included dwarfs, most notably the Ovitz family- seven of whom had dwarfism.

Mengele's experiments were  horrific . During 1943 Mengele performed certain experiments on female prisoners using shock treatments and sterilisation. Most of Mengele's victims died, either during the experiments or later as a result of infection.

Though the  people used for  Mengele's research were better fed and housed than other inmates, many of his experiments resulted in more painful deaths.When he visited the children on whom he conducted his experiments, he was known to call himself  "Uncle Mengele" and offer them sweets.

An Auschwitz prisoner doctor once said:

"He was capable of being so kind to the children, to have them become fond of him, to bring them sugar, to think of small details in their daily lives, and to do things we would genuinely admire.... And then, next to that,... the crematoria smoke, and these children, tomorrow or in a half-hour, he is going to send them there. Well, that is where the anomaly lay."

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gG2QaN_LUao

The Art of Auschwitz

During the mass killing in Auschwitz, inmates who produced clandestine artwork did so while risking their lives. The artists used their paintings to express their own humanity. Some inmate art was sanctioned by the camp or ghetto authorities. Nazi officials used talented artists to produce personal items for them. The picture above shows inmate David Olère adding flowered decorations to a letter for an SS officer.

The art was drawn by adults and children alike. Most were discovered at the liberation of the camp which found hundreds of pieces of artwork. Conditions in some German internment camps actually allowed artists freedom to continue working. Joseph Nassy, a black artist of Jewish descent, was able to produce more than 200 drawings and paintings during his three-year internment at Laufen and Tittmoning camps in Bavaria.

Lots of the art was drawn in secret, usually in washrooms or on ceilings. There aren't many  examples of this art, but there are a few here:

Sources:
http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/gallery/FWALL.htm
http://archiegirl28.tripod.com/id6.html

Interactive map of Auschwitz:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/animations/auschwitz_map/index_embed.shtml



Painting of the 'King's canal' on a ceiling. Painter unknown.




Camels and pyramids. Painting from block 14
in Auschwitz




Cherubs. Washroom in Auschwitz
block 7.

Horse back riders from the same washroom as
cherubs.