Children in the Holocaust

Children were especially vulnerable during the Holocaust.  The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous” groups in accordance with their ideological views, either as part of the “racial struggle” or as a measure of preventive security.

The fate of Jewish and non-Jewish children can be categorized in several ways children killed when they arrived at the camps; children killed immediately after birth or in institutions; children born in  ghettos  and camps who survived because prisoners hid them; children, usually over age 12, who were used as laborers and as subjects of medical experiments; and those children killed during reprisal operations or so-called anti-partisan operations.

In the ghettos, Jewish children died from starvation and exposure and lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to this mass death because they considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.”

Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers, the camp authorities sent the majority of children directly to the gas chambers.  SS and police forces in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union shot thousands of children at the edge of mass graves.  Sometimes the selection of children to fill the first transports to the killing centers or to provide the first victims of firing squads resulted from the agonizing and controversial decisions of Jewish council (Judenrat) chairmen. The decision by the Judenrat in Lodz in September 1942 to deport children to the Chelmno killing center was an example of the tragic choices made by adults when faced with German demands.  Janusz Korczak, director of an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, however, refused to abandon the children under his care when they were selected for deportation.  He accompanied them on the transport to Treblinka and into the gas chambers, sharing their fate.

Finding a rescuer was quite difficult, particularly one who would take of children for a period of years.  Some individuals took advantage of a persecuted family’s desperation by collecting money, then reneging on their promise of aid—or worse, turning them over to the authorities for an additional reward.  More commonly, stress, anguish, and fear drove benefactors to force the Jewish children from their homes.

Organized rescue groups frequently moved youngsters from one family or institution to another to ensure the safety of both the child and the foster parent. In the German-occupied Netherlands, Jewish children stayed in an average of more than four different places.  Some changed hiding places more than a dozen times.

Among the most painful memories for hidden children was their separation from parents, grandparents, and siblings.  Separation tormented both parents and children. Each feared for the other’s safety and was powerless to do anything about it. Youngsters and parents often had to bear their grief in silence so as not to jeopardize the safety of the other.  For many hidden children, the wartime separation became permanent.

These children were tortured, starved, beaten, and killed for no reason other than hatred and evil. In (Mark 10:14) we read: But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased and said unto them,”Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.”  His heart was grieved just as ours should be because of the treatment of His children.  Let us pray for the peace and protection of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6) that this will “never happen again”.

To read more about children during the Holocaust please see United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem..

The Warsaw Diary of Mary Berg

At least 1.1 million Jewish children were murdered during the Holocaust. Of the millions of children who suffered persecution at the hands of the Nazis and their Axis partners, only a small number wrote diaries and journals that have survived.  The diary of Miriam Wattenberg (“Mary Berg”) was one of the first children’s journals which revealed to a wider public the horrors of the Holocaust.

Miriam was born in Lódz on October 10, 1924.  She began a wartime diary in October 1939, shortly after Poland surrendered to German forces. The Wattenberg family fled to Warsaw, where in November 1940, Miriam, with her parents and younger sister, had to live in the Warsaw ghetto. The Wattenbergs held a privileged position within this confined community because Miriam’s mother was a US citizen.

Shortly before the first large deportation of Warsaw Jews toTreblinka in the summer of 1942, German officials detained Miriam, her family, and other Jews bearing foreign passports in the infamous Pawiak Prison near the center of the ghetto, while most of the rest of the inhabitants were deported to their deaths.

She watched them leave from the prison windows. “The whole ghetto is drowning in blood.  Sometimes a child huddles against his mother, thinking that she is asleep and trying to awaken her, while, in fact, she is dead” she wrote. “How long are we going to be kept here to witness all this?” German authorities eventually transferred the family to the Vittel internment camp in France, and allowed them to immigrate to the United States in 1944.

Published in 1945 under the pseudonym “Mary Berg”, Miriam’s diary was one of the very few eyewitness accounts of the Warsaw ghetto available to readers in the English-speaking world before the end of World War II.

Mary Berg’s Warsaw Ghetto became known worldwide.  Over the next two years, translated versions appeared in five countries and Berg became a New York celebrity.  She marched on City Hall with signs demanding action to save Jews still alive in Poland.  She gave talks before audiences and interviews on the radio.

Most early reviews of her writings wanted to transform it into a heroic story.  Berg did not want to be a hero.  She wrote, “We, who have been rescued from the ghetto, are ashamed to look at each other.  Had we the right to save ourselves? Here everything smells of sun and flowers and there—there is only blood, the blood of my own people.”  

Berg published her diary as a call to action. “I shall do everything I can to save those who can still be saved,” she wrote. “I will tell, I will tell everything, about our sufferings and our struggles and the slaughter of our dearest, and I will demand punishment for the [Germans]….who enjoyed the fruits of murder….A little more patience, and all of us will win freedom!”  But, alas, not all of them did.

Imagine the nightmares that the survivors of the Holocaust had to face every day even after being released from prison camps, ghettos, as well as concentration camps.  Children were alone without their parents, parents could not find their children and others had lost every family member. Let us pray that these atrocities never happen again. As we do, our prayers must be for the peace and protection of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6).

To read more about Mary Berg please see Tablet and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Set Free to Suffer

The Allied invasion of Normandy and the Russian victories on the Eastern front signaled the coming demise of the Nazi war machine in World War II.  Hope began to stir again in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of Jews imprisoned in concentration camps.  Unfortunately they would discover that their freedom would be more costly than they had imagined.  It’s part of the untold story of the Holocaust.

The Death Marches
As the Russians advanced, Himmler issued orders to evacuate the concentration camps.  The troops were to march the inmates westward so as to be able to continue to “exploit the Jewish labor force until the last possible moment.”  For the Jews who walked out of the gates and from behind the fences, it may not have represented complete freedom, but it provided at least a small taste of it.

Unfortunately, the annihilation of the Jews was still part of the Nazi plan.  The Jews were forced to march without food or drink.  To make matters worse, the guards who escorted the Jews were in a hurry to get as far away from the Russian army as quickly as they could.  Therefore they had no problem shooting and killing those prisoners who lagged behind, or just shooting them en masse.  Some 200,000 to 250,000 inmates died during the marches.  Yad Vashem reports that “After the war, hundreds of mass graves with the corpses of tens of thousands of inmates . . . were found along the routes of the marches.”

The Surviving Remnant
Those who made it through the war, whether released from the camps or coming out of hiding, began the process of returning to their homes or emigrating to Aliyah Bet or elsewhere.  Around 100,000 chose to relocate to North America, Latin America, and Australia.  Those who chose to repatriate to Russia and Poland were in for a big surprise.  Their dreams of a friendly welcome faded into a reality of rejection and hostility.  Many of the residents of their old communities feared that the Jews would retaliate when they found that their former “friends” had sacked their homes and stolen their property.

They also soon discovered that the end of the war did not spell the end of anti-Semitism.  Some 1,500 Jews were murdered by anti-Semitic gangs in Poland in the first few months after the war.

Officially known now as Displaced Persons (DPs) with no homes to return to, hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors were sent to DP camps, right back into a stark lifestyle, as it were, of imprisonment, except without the killings.  There, however, they were able to create a sense of community until places could be found for them to live.  There was even a quota on how many were allowed to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine.  As horrible as it sounds, the fact is that 52,000 who had managed to make their way to the future Israel were rounded up and deported to detention camps in Cyprus where they once again found themselves fenced-in and waiting to be released to legally return or arrange to find a home elsewhere.

Even in the face of fresh freedom the Jews were still considered a problem.  Even today, the world in general looks at them no so much as a nation, but as a nagging problem.  Governments either want to pressure them into an untenable peace or to annihilate them.  Yet the Bible indicates that God wants us to bless them (Genesis 12:3) and to pray for them (Psalm 122:6).  It sounds like He wants us to love them.  We at the Jerusalem Prayer Team do.  We will continue to stand and to pray for the state of Israel and the peace of Jerusalem.  Will you join us?

Source material for this article is available at Yad Vashem.

All I Remembered Was My Name

Hitler’s armies had not yet reached Hungary.  But he had sworn to destroy every Jewish man, woman and child who lived on the face of the earth.  My mother was young, not much more than a girl, and I had just been born.  Forgetting all her troubles, she waited eagerly for the nurse to bring me to her.

A nurse delivered me to her.  “Oh, give her to me!” my mother cried. “Please, let me hold her!”

“Take her,” she said, dumping me roughly at the end of the bed. “I don’t know why we have to bother with these Jewish brats.  They are a waste of time and money.  Hitler will take care of all of you before the year is out.”

My mother couldn’t answer her. She just held me tight in her arms and cried
.
The woman in the next bed said, “Honey, don’t let that old witch upset you.  Let me take her. Why should she die, the innocent babe?  I swear to you, I will care for her as if she was my own.  I never had children.  Give her to me.  That poor babe hasn’t got a chance.  There won’t be any Jewish kids left when Hitler gets here.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Mother answered uncertainly.  ”This is not the first time they have tried to destroy us.  In every generation they have risen up against us to destroy us, and God has always saved us from their hands. And He will again!”

When my father came to visit that afternoon her first words to him were,“Avrom, I know what our baby’s name will be.  She will be Esther, Esther Malka.  God will surely help.”

By the time Esther was two years old, her family was forced to leave their home, and live in the ghetto.  Young men like my father were marched out at gun point to work for the Nazis.  Otherwise no Jew was allowed to leave the ghetto walls.  Inside those walls we lived, crowded together – many families in one apartment.  We lived with cold, hunger and fear.  Many became sick and died.  Others were taken away by the Nazis and were never heard from again.

Then, every few days, German soldiers rounded up many of our neighbors and forced them into cattle cars.  They never returned.  My mother and father soon realized that they had to send me away to protect me.  They planned to smuggle me out of the ghetto and send me far away to the countryside to a little village so poor and small that it was important to the Germans. I was to live with a peasant family until the war was over.  My parents paid them with the last money they had, paid them to keep me.

After the war my parents my parents set out to find me.  They walked ten miles by foot.  As they walked, they prayed.  They knew that many villages had driven out the Jewish children that they had agreed to shelter.  Others had handed them over to the Nazis.  Some villagers had grown to love the children in their care and did not want to give them back to their parents.  The children themselves were often too small to remember that they had Jewish parents.

Suddenly, they caught sight of a child, a small, sunburned girl with matted brown hair and bare feet. She was playing in the dirt in front of a house. Their hearts leaped. “Little girl,” my father called in a trembling voice, “come here.”

“Ester’ke.  Esther Malka.  It’s Mommy and Daddy!  Don’t you remember us?”

I stared at them without moving.  Suddenly, it was as if I had awakened from a dream. Yes, I did remember!  With a little cry, I ran into my parent’s arms; the arms that longed to hold me tight.

I asked my mother, “How come I forgot everything – you, and father, and being a Jewish girl? I remembered only one little thing: my name!”

Later during Purim my mother was making preparations for our celebration. She rose to take out the spices, the Havdalah candle and the wine cup. “I guess,” she said, “I guess because a name, a Jewish name, is not a little thing after all.”

Just as Haman met his fate at the gallows which he planned for Mordecai (Esther 7:10) “So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then was the king’s wrath pacified”, so will those who seek to destroy Israel meet their destruction. The Jewish nation will never be destroyed or driven from her land again.  Let us pray for the peace and protection for Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6).

Excerpts for this article may be found in Chabad

Anna Sokolow, Lady of Dance

Anna Sokolow was born on February 9, 1910, in Hartford, CT.  Recent immigrants from Pinsk, Russia, the Sokolows had difficulty adjusting to life in America.  As Anna later recalled, “In the European Jewish tradition, the man was really the scholar, and the woman he married, and her family, took care of him and their children.  When they came here, a lot of them had to change … They learned to cope with the system and realized that they had to earn a living.  Well, my father was totally bewildered by it … Eventually my mother, with her great energy, stepped in and took over.”

Anna was a dancer and choreographer of uncompromising integrity.  Believing strongly that dance could be more than mere entertainment, she explored the most pressing issues of her day — from the Great Depression, to the Holocaust, to the alienated youth of the 1960s — and challenged her audiences to think deeply about themselves and their society.

A key figure in the development of modern dance in Israel and Mexico, Sokolow worked in numerous countries, from Holland to Japan.  She also worked with a variety of theater forms; in addition to regular involvement with Broadway and off-Broadway stage productions, she often experimented with combining dance, mime and the spoken word into a single piece.

Recalling her first visit to Israel, Sokolow commented, “I certainly didn’t expect to be affected so deeply, but the minute the plane landed I was overwhelmed with an indescribable feeling about being there.  I didn’t have any kind of strong Zionist background, but going there changed my point of view. [Israel] is now one of the deepest things in my life.”

Sokolow returned to Israel virtually every summer for decades, teaching countless groups of dancers and actors.  In the early 1960s, she created a new company, the Lyric Theatre, designed to bring theater, music and dance together.  Although the company survived only a few years, it helped Israeli modern dancers achieve professional standing and recognition.

Sokolow frequently found inspiration in Jewish history and culture.  Not only did her upbringing amidst the left-wing movements of New York’s Jewish immigrant communities shape her interest in social and political injustices, but Biblical and modern Jewish figures, Jewish rituals, and other Jewish themes formed the basis of diverse compositions.

On several occasions, Sokolow’s strong interest in Jewish dance and Jewish themes earned her special recognition.  In 1975, New York’s 92nd Street Y presented her with an award for her contributions to the world of dance and to the Jewish people.  Eleven years later, a gala evening in Sokolow’s honor opened a three-day conference on “Jews and Judaism in Dance.”

Sokolow’s compositions were generally abstract; rather than following a narrative structure, they searched for truth in movement and examined a broad range of human emotions. Exploring as they did many of the social, political, and human conflicts that characterize life in the modern world, they often left viewers feeling shaken and disturbed.  But even when dealing with the darkest of subjects, Sokolow’s appreciation of the dignity of the human spirit and its resilience in the face of trouble and despair was evident.  As a reviewer wrote in 1967, “Miss Sokolow cares — if only to the extent of pointing out that the world is bleeding. I find hope in such pessimism.”

Sokolow never shrank from confronting her audiences with difficult realities. She searched for truth in movement, using dance to explore the broad range of human emotions and encouraging her audiences to think for themselves.  “My works never have real endings,” she said.  ”They just stop and fade out, because I don’t believe there is any final solution to the problems of today.  All I can do is provoke the audience into an awareness of them.”

The conviction that “art should be a reflection and a comment on contemporary life” shaped Sokolow’s entire career.  Always animated by an intense social consciousness, Sokolow believed strongly in the necessity of involvement with the world around her.  “The artist should belong to his society,” she wrote, ”yet without feeling that he has to conform to it…. Then, although he belongs to his society, he can change it, presenting it with fresh feelings, fresh ideas.”

As we remember and celebrate the life of Ana Sokolow, let us not forget the influence that Israel had on her as a dancer.  She felt as if she were portraying the very lives of the Jewish people and the everyday terrors they had to face in order to survive.  Pray for the peace and protection of Jerusalem (Psalm 122:6).

To read more about Anna Sokolow, please see Wikipedia, Jewish Virtual Library, and Jewish Women of Valor.

“Lady of the Cells”

Rita Levi-Montalcini and her twin sister Paola were born April 22, 1909, to a Jewish family in the northern city of Turin.  Her parents were Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and mathematician, and Adele Montalcini, a painter.

Levi-Montalcini, a biologist who conducted underground research in defiance of Fascist persecution and went on to win a Nobel Prize for helping unlock the mysteries of the cell, recently died at her home in Rome.  She was 103 and had worked well into her final years.
Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno called her death a great loss “for all of humanity.”  He praised her as someone who represented “civic conscience, culture and the spirit of research of our time.

Italy’s so-called “Lady of the Cells,” a Jew who lived through anti-Semitic discrimination and the Nazi invasion of Italy, became one of her country’s leading scientists.  During World War Two, the Allies’ bombing of Turin forced her to flee to the countryside where she established a mini-laboratory.  She fled to Florence after the German invasion of Italy and lived in hiding there for a while, later working as a doctor in a refugee camp.

During her research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, she discovered the nerve growth factor (NGF), the first substance known to regulate the growth of cells.  She showed that when tumors from mice were transplanted to chicken embryos they induced rapid growth of the embryonic nervous system.  She concluded that the tumor released a nerve growth-promoting factor that affected certain types of cells.  Her research helped in the treatment of spinal cord injuries and has increased understanding of cardiovascular diseases, as well as Alzheimer’s.

Her research contributed to a better understanding of many conditions, including tumors, developmental malformations, and senile dementia.  It also led to Stanley Cohen’s discovery of another substance, epidermal growth factor (EGF), which stimulates the proliferation of epithelial cells.  The two shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1986.
After retiring in the late 1970s, she continued to work as a guest professor and wrote several books to popularize science.  She created the Levi-Montalcini Foundation to grant scholarships and promote educational programs worldwide, particularly for women in Africa.

Levi-Montalcini never married and had no children, fearing such ties would undercut her independence.  “I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense,” she said.  ”My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely.”

An elegant presence, confident and passionate, she was a sought-after speaker until late in life.  “At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — more than when I was 20,” she said in 2009.

“It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain,” Dr. Levi-Montalcini wrote in her autobiography, “and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.”

Israel has suffered at the hands of her enemies, but she continues to survive and flourish, providing the world with professionals who are leaders in all fields of research and development.  As we pray for the peace and protection of Jerusalem Psalm 122:6, let us pray with thanksgiving for the special gifts and skills with which He has endowed His chosen people and for the contributions that they have made that make all of lives better.

To read more about Rite Levi-Montalcini please see articles in Wikipedia, New Zealand Herald, BBC, Reuters, New York Times.