Jewish children during the Holocaust. Scary facts about children during the Holocaust
On the night of November 10, 1938, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria were burned or destroyed. This tragic event is known in history as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. At least 91 Jews died, and tens of thousands were taken captive to be sent to concentration camps later. This event marked the beginning of one of the worst genocides in world history - the Holocaust.
In response to the Nazis' actions, British Jews and Quakers filed an emergency appeal with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain asking for temporary admission of Jewish children into the country without parents or other attendants.
The bill was adopted urgently. Within a few days, representatives of the British community were sent to Germany and Austria to arrange a safe passage for Jewish children at risk of persecution. The media dubbed the rescue operation Kindertransport.
January 11, 1939. A mentor at the Dovercourt refugee camp rings the bell to announce the start of dinner.
On November 25, British citizens heard on BBC radio an appeal from Herbert Samuel to take temporary care of Jewish children. Nearly 500 proposals soon came in, and RCM volunteers began visiting potential foster homes and compiling reports on living conditions.
Three weeks after Kristallnacht, the first group of 196 Jewish children, mostly from the burned-out orphanages in Berlin, arrived in the UK. In the next 9 months, until the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, almost 10,000 children from 3 to 17 years old, left without parents or guardians, were transferred to the United Kingdom from Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
1939 Temporary documents for Kindertransport refugees.
December 1938. Jewish woman of German origin.
December 1938. Refugees arrived in places of temporary residence.
December 1938 Refugees' first lunch at Dovercourt Coastal Camp.
December 1938. Lunch attendants at Camp Dovercourt.
December 1938. A Jewish boy rings a bell to announce the start of dinner.
December 1938. Lunch at the Dovercourt Rest Camp.
December 1939 Refugees rest after arriving at Camp Dovercourt.
March 24, 1939. These four guys and 250 other refugees arrived in Southampton on the Manhattan liner.
January 1939. 11-year-old Otto Busch with his adopted family - Mr. and Mrs. Guest.
The children were placed in foster families, which they had to leave after the end of the war in order to return home. Many of them never saw their families again.
Among the children rescued during Operation Kindertransport were future Nobel laureates: astrophysicist Arno Penzias, physicist Walter Kohn - and many others who, despite the fact that they lost their home and family, became an outstanding politician, scientist or artist.
February 16, 1939. Refugees play at Dane Court Farm, which Sir Edmund Davies has turned into a temporary home.
1939 Jewish refugees at Harris House, Lancashire. The house was closed in 1940 because the British authorities feared a security risk for Jews over the age of 16.
March 24, 1939. Refugees arrive in England on the American ocean liner Manhattan.
And the cartoon "Despicable Me" was invented in the White House to resist fascism
Users claim that the Minions, the little yellow creatures from the Despicable Me cartoons, were based on Jewish children tortured by the Nazis during World War II.
According to this version, in suits with a small hole for the eyes, children were sent to the gas chambers, where they cried and asked for help in Yiddish. Because of the suits, their words became completely indistinguishable, and the resulting thin sound greatly amused the "experimenters".
And since the resemblance of the Minions to the people in the photo is obvious, many began to argue that Obama instructed Hollywood to create this cartoon specifically (!) To remind people of the dangers of fascism and prevent such horror from happening again.
Each such post receives many comments full of regret and sympathy.
This is wrong!
In fact, this photo was taken at the beginning of the 20th century and there are no children in it. These are just the first divers in wetsuits - the crew of a submarine in spacesuits, 1908.
Here's how wetsuits have evolved since then.
In 1914, Chester MacDuffee built the first diving suit with ball bearings to keep the joints moving. The invention was tested in New York at a depth of 65 meters.
1926 Neufeldt-Kuhnke's P-7 metal diving suit is tested in France.
November 30, 1925. Inventor J.S. Peress explains how his new stainless wetsuit works at a shipping show in London. It weighed almost 250 kg and could dive to a depth of 198 m.
August 15, 1931. American inventor H. L. Bowdin with his deep-sea diving suit with 1000-watt lamps mounted on his shoulders.
June 23, 1933. A group of guys from Los Angeles in diving helmets made from parts of water heaters and other parts.
Memories of childhood are often brighter and more unusual than memories of adulthood. From these stories it becomes clear what touched the deepest feelings of a person. The actions of the child directly reflect his feelings.
In addition, the attempts of adults to survive in the inhuman circumstances of the Holocaust usually resulted in some kind of action. Children, most often, could not change anything, but their opposition to evil carried great moral strength.
In my work, I used the handwritten memoirs of Galina Abramovna Gorokhova-Kostelyanets, the article by Tatyana Samoilovna Bebchuk “One and a half years in occupation”, the diary of Anna Frank “Shelter”, an interview with Yakov Itskovich Sokolover, an interview with Isabella Nikolaevna Obraztsova.
Of course, memories are highly dependent on the age of the person, so I divided them into age groups. The youngest group are children of seven or eight years old, the next are teenagers from nine to fourteen, and the oldest are boys and girls from fifteen to eighteen years old. It is clear that the younger a person is, the less interested he is in the real military situation, and the more difficult it is to understand him from a rational point of view. Therefore, I will start with the older ones, who are more like adults, who are closer and more understandable to us, and I will move on to the youngest.
One of the most difficult problems for older boys and girls was the fear of being superfluous. Yakov Sokolover, who was eighteen years old during the war, later spoke about his life. He lived with his family in the Warsaw ghetto. Some time after its formation, he wanted to escape from there and go to the Soviet-German front. In the end, he succeeded, albeit with great difficulty. Why did he want to run away, leaving his family in the ghetto? Although he believed that he was going to certain death, and in the ghetto there was still a chance to survive. The fact is that he felt like a burden to the family. He already knew a lot, but knew very little, and in the conditions of the ghetto, skill was the main thing. His parents really did not want to let him go, as it seemed to them, to certain death. However, it was too hard for Jacob to feel completely useless. Despite all the persuasion, he left:
“... My whole shirt was wet from my grandmother’s tears, she would like to keep me, protect me from front-line fire, but she felt that I would leave anyway. I felt that I was dying internally in the ghetto, where I could not find a place for myself. I decided that it was better to die fighting than to hang like a heavy stone around the neck of my parents ... "1
We encounter the same inner problem of feeling worthless in the story of the war by Nyusya Weissman from Kyiv. She turned seventeen in 1942. She also wanted to get rid of this feeling by going to the front:
“I met the commander of the unit stationed there, begged to take me with me, I felt that my parents and I could not leave. It is better to die at the front, to benefit the Fatherland, than to be shot and strangled by the Nazis. 2
Unlike Sokolover, she failed to do so. She realized that her parents needed her:
“I sobbed bitterly, realizing the hopelessness of our situation. I could not know then that fate would decide in its own way and in the terrible heat of the war we would survive. And, perhaps, precisely because we will be together, with our breath we will save each other. 3
She constantly looked after her parents, kept house, tried to get food somewhere. But as soon as she fell ill with typhoid fever and stopped doing anything, she felt like a terrible burden for her parents and began to succumb to despondency:
"Evening. Freezing. Goes to sleep. Ugly and dreadful life. I lost myself, I melted into time. I want to find myself. Send me, life, a person who would help me find myself, wake up dormant strings, so that my soul does not die out and I would move away from this abomination ... To space, to freedom, and I could stretch out my hands towards a great, necessary cause. 4
Galina Abramovna Gorokhova-Kostelyanets, a sixteen-year-old girl during the war, lived with her family in the Minsk ghetto. Her family consisted of her father, mother, grandparents. The paradox of this story lies in the fact that in the harsh conditions of the war, her father and mother, who seemed to no longer love each other, began to relate to each other in a completely different way. The girl reacted to their unexpectedly flashed love rather strangely:
“In me, the radiation emanating from my parents who fell in love again with each other caused a grim condemnation. I hid from myself when my mother, who never knew how to control her eyes, watched in fascination as my father ate. All this caused me a dull annoyance. ” 5
She was not happy with the harmony that had appeared in the family, on the contrary, it annoyed her. She believed that the war was not the right time for lyrics, we must act. At the same time, her father did not tell her anything about the war or about partisan detachments in the forest, he tried to protect her from all this. The girl could not do anything, she could not stand the state of "gracious ignorance" in which her father kept her. She wanted to understand what was happening in the ghetto, she wanted to participate in an underground organization, to participate in at least something:
“The state of half-asleep apathy, caused by the hourly understanding of the hopelessness of our situation, led me to a dangerous line, remaining for a long time at which a person dies not physically, but spiritually.” 6
Her dream was originally to go to the partisans. After two years of living in the ghetto, she succeeded. It was then, oddly enough, that she began to have serious moral difficulties. The girl knew almost nothing. Among the partisans, where everyone knew their place and their duties, she felt useless and unnecessary.
She was constantly looking for her job, and when she found at least something that she did well, she did it as well as she could:
“My vanity suffered mercilessly, and, out of an old childhood habit, I uttered a long internal monologue about the imperfection of urban education and for some reason remembered my enraged grandfather when he hit me with Kiselev’s geometry on the head and shouted: “Cudgel!” ... I fiercely took up the laundry. I did it! So I worked until lunch. My hands buzzed, my back ached, but my heart felt better - at least I can do something. 7
She was quite educated, but in the conditions of a ghetto or a partisan detachment, practical skills were more important than knowledge. And in the ghetto, and in the forest, among the partisans, the girl tried not only to find a job in which she was needed, but also looked for support in people, as a rule, her peers:
“It was a little easier for me with the boy Zola. Zolka childishly tried to stir me up. He and I climbed into the attic, where he had a household - some kind of coils, wires from which he dreamed of making a radio receiver. He was interested in everything. I revived a little from the genuine delight in his brown eyes when I told him another book. Very stung by my superiority in mental development, Zolka compensated for this terrible shortcoming of his with a deft ability to roll cigarettes and smoke his infernal mixture in a puff and without coughing. 8
If boys and girls treat everything that happens almost like adults, that is, they try to do something, change the situation, then teenagers, as a rule, hide from the external situation in themselves. They are little interested in the military situation, much more interested in their personal, teenage problems. A very common option for avoiding terrible reality is study, books.
Fourteen-year-old Inna Berkovich from Bessarabia, who lost her family at the very beginning of the war, walked through the destroyed houses and read abandoned books. She writes about this in her diary:
“And when I had a free minute, I continued to read books, often lying around in abandoned, robbed houses. Turgenev, Goncharov, symbolist poets, beloved Pushkin. But cover it all real life couldn't." 9
Books are a departure to another world where there is no war and hunger. Withdrawal into oneself, into imagination, departure from reality. They helped to take a break from everything seen during the day. In addition to books, she was helped by the fact that she kept a diary in which she poured out all her experiences and thoughts. She herself said that he helped her keep her sanity:
“I didn’t expect anyone to read these pages, I didn’t show them to my father or mother, to anyone. But I had to pour into them everything that had accumulated in my soul, otherwise one could probably go crazy. 10
The situation is very reminiscent of the famous story of Anne Frank, who was thirteen at the start of the war.
Consider her diary:
“We always look forward to Saturdays because that's when the books arrive. Just like little children waiting for a gift. Ordinary people don't know how much books mean to the imprisoned." eleven
Books help to distract from everyday problems. When there are no friends around, books introduce someone else's inner world.
They replace parents, and friends, and school, and all other activities. They take a teenager into an imaginary, unreal, acceptable world for him. For example: “The only thing that distracts me is classes, and I study a lot.” 12 If for teenagers of 13-14 years old reading is an immersion in oneself, then for younger children it creates the illusion of pre-war life and norms. For them, books are a temporary return to normal life.
Teenagers who cannot find support in their families most often find them in books and textbooks that help them escape from everyday problems and terrible events around. However, they cannot completely close real life, only distract.
Children experience war in a very special way. There is a feeling that children simply refuse to perceive what is happening around them. It is expressed very differently. Now I want to talk about the two most striking ways to protect against reality that I met during my work.
One of the exits was found by an eight-year-old Jewish girl, Inna from Kursk, who was saved by her friend Bella and her father. The most amazing thing in this story is that the girl never hid. Neighbors knew about her existence, informed the Gestapo several times, but Isabella called her her sister, and she was released. Perhaps the astonishment of the Gestapo helped her survive. After all, the Jews always hid, tried to escape from places where they were known, and did not live on an equal footing with everyone. In addition, the girl showed extraordinary resilience. It is not clear what she hoped for with her Jewish appearance, living in an occupied city and not even trying to hide. Most likely nothing. She simply could not imagine another life for herself, did not understand why she should hide.
Innina's unconditional support was Isabella, who went everywhere with her, taught her to read and write, and explained why her neighbors did not like her. But Bella only supported in her her own inner confidence that she was the same as everyone else and should not live differently. Even after several "travels" in the Gestapo, Inna did not begin to hide. Apparently, her childish, most likely unconscious feeling that she was not to blame for anything overcame her fear: “She asked me several times what it means that she is Jewish and why they want to take her away. I replied that it was all because of the war. I will always remember her answer one day when we were returning from the Gestapo.
She suddenly looked at me and said with disgust in her voice:
You know, this is very stupid.
- War." 13
From a rational point of view, the girl behaved incorrectly. Why intentionally put yourself in harm's way when you can hide? She had almost no chance of survival. However, by some miracle, she was able to escape.
From the girl's point of view, it was completely correct behavior. She is the same person as all the people around her. Why would she hide? She didn't do anything wrong. This stupid war has nothing to do with it. That is, it turns out that behavior that is irrational from our point of view, from the point of view of the child, is understandable and correct.
Another case is the child's ability to turn everything into a game.
Alexander Gelman from Bershad tells about him. He was seven years old when he and his whole family were taken to the ghetto. Most of all, he recalls about death and about the game:
“And everything was fine with me. All these years I was there, in the ghetto, constantly playing something, especially a lot and diligently, with inspiration I played war. I lived in my imagination, and not in this terrible reality ... I was enthusiastically, continuously playing something. It turned out that for this it is not at all necessary to run, jump and yell, as happened in Donduseni. I learned to play silently, to myself. 14
He played war, knowing that he was a Jew and that the Germans were his enemies. It didn't matter. In his imagination, he could become both a German and a Jew:
“Did I understand that I am a Jew, that all Jews are here and therefore we are punished? Yes, I understood. But in the games I ceased to be a Jew, Jews did not participate in many games, they did not serve in my troops, there was not a single Jew in my headquarters. I became a Jew only in the pauses between battles, when I temporarily left the role, but these pauses did not happen often and very briefly. 15
There were no "friends" and "strangers", there was only war. He did not understand its causes and purposes, did not know what it really was. He perceived the war as a game where he was invariably the main one and emerged victorious from every battle:
“I included in my games real military forces that moved along the highway, I turned them in the direction I needed, they unconditionally carried out any of my commands. Anything could happen in my war: for example, Ukrainian partisans could fight under the command of German officers against Romanian gendarmes. I was in turn a German, a Russian, a Romanian general. I knew little about the real war, and did not want to know - I was interested and fascinated only by my imaginary war. 16
The game was a defense against a terrible reality that the child cannot understand, since understanding would be an irreparable blow to his psyche.
But we know that children play, and not only during the war.
For what? On the one hand, this is, of course, entertainment, but the role of play in a child's life is much greater.
Play is a way of learning, learning something new. The game helps to understand something or accept something that the child cannot understand yet. The game adapts existing facts to the mind of the child. For example, during an imaginary fight, a child can be anyone, can win, or die. Even if he dies, he will still be alive. It turns out that death is not so scary. It turns out that in fact, neither death nor war exists for a child. In any case, not in the sense in which we are accustomed to understand it.
Again, from our point of view, this boy acted like a lunatic. It is not normal to fantasize that you are a German general when the Germans are your enemies.
From the point of view of the boy himself, this is the best way out of the situation. His psyche refuses to accept the whole the world the way it is, but transforms it from horror to fun. War is not perceived as death and famine, they just fade into the background. The main thing in the war for a child seems to be its colorfulness, brightness, it captures the imagination. The war did not affect the child personally, he himself invented it the way he wanted to see it, and therefore it was beautiful and attractive for him. Thanks to this, the child retains his mind and, perhaps, even life:
“We must not forget that, compared with pre-war life, the war was unusually spectacular, interesting, multifaceted: tanks, cars, troops marched. Everything around was noisy, buzzing, rumbling. We were kids – we needed something “interesting, dangerous, breathtaking.” 17
In addition, we must remember that the boy is only eight years old, the war took up a third of his entire life. She became the norm for him. He doesn’t understand anything, he doesn’t know anything other than war, so why not play war, as we once played mother and daughter?
“I never even dreamed of pre-war life. The only thing that has passed from that life into this one is the game, the spirit of the game ... Adults remember some kind of past, they imagine some kind of future. But children during wars lack all this. Children can't even think of anything. For example, I did not understand at all who was fighting with whom and why. I clearly remember that, being in the ghetto, I did not know, did not remember and did not expect any life, except for the one that was there. I was sure that it would always be like this, forever.” 18
From what has been said, it is clear that children find support in themselves, and not in outside world. They find something that allows them to completely close reality for themselves and live what they invent for themselves. This allows them not to try to understand what they cannot understand yet, but simply to accept it in a form adapted to themselves.
Death occupies a very important place in the mind of a child. This topic occurs to everyone, regardless of age.
Each of us has a fear of death. But for us, it is the fear of our own death. Neither these teenagers, nor almost adults have any fear of their own death. It is very important that death is perceived not as one's own, future death, but as the death of people in general, the amount of death around. Galina Kostelyanets, 16 years old:
“There was no fear for my life, apparently, the psychological shock of the beginning of the war was so strong that it destroyed, exterminated the natural thirst for life in me.” 19
All of them basically talk about the death of loved ones, acquaintances, just people around. Inna Berkovich, 14 years old:
“March 16, 42. The mother of Gilda, this wonderful, poetic girl, died, the baker and many others are dying, there is no end in sight. Where, when is the end?! May 26 42. And I read. I got on one of the volumes of Leonid Andreev. There are wonderful things there: "Judas Iscariot", "On the Seven Hanged", "Abyss", "07" ... The experience of people of various strata of society before death made a strong impression. 20
Alexander Gelman, 7 years old:
“None of my relatives were killed - they themselves died. From hunger, from cold, from a terrible situation, from heartache from hopelessness. From everything together." 21
Death for a child is especially striking. Before the war, he probably never even met her, and suddenly she appears in such huge quantities. He does not even know what it is, but he is already forced to comprehend it somehow. It is clear that the meeting with death greatly changes a person, we usually get to know it gradually, get used to it, put up with it. During the war, this happens very quickly, so the severity that suddenly collapsed on a person can severely cripple him:
“Death is not just present in my childhood, death walked around my childhood like a complete hostess and did whatever it wanted with my soul, I don’t even really know and don’t know what she did to her ... What is war for me, ghetto, what does it mean to me to be a Jew? What is my biography, my life, my soul, my consciousness, my thinking for me? This is, first of all, the relationship of my childish soul with death. 22
Most often, children's consciousness simply refuses to accept death. Death is ignored, accepted not as a misfortune, but as an event, a fact. This is a defense against what he does not yet need to know, but is forced to:
“One of the first to die in this semi-basement was my mother. I lay on the bunk next to her body, shoulder to shoulder, for a whole week. I slept next to me, I ate something next to my mother's corpse. Five days. Or four days. Or six days. As she lay next to me alive, so she continued to lie dead. The first night she was still warm, I touched her. Then she became cold, I stopped touching her. Until they came and took them away.” 23
Death was the very burden from which it was necessary to defend oneself, under which people bent down and began to look for a foothold. This is a constant that exists in the life of everyone who has gone through the war, and especially a child, because this is his first acquaintance with it.
So, it turned out that a young man, a teenager and a child in an unthinkable situation, when their familiar world, all their close people are dying, are saved precisely by the features of his age psychology.
Boys and girls tend to be active. Teenagers, with the help of books, move away from reality for a while, go into themselves. Small children do not want to understand the world around them. They abstract from hunger, death around them. For them, all this is not important, what is important is their imagination, their game, their personal reality.
These age characteristics form part of what philosophers call "human nature." And, apparently, she is invincible.
Notes
1 From an interview with N. Zhuzhleva and N. Solovieva.
2 "Last Witnesses" / Collection of memories. Manuscript. M., 2003. S. 91.
4 Ibid. S. 101.
5 Archive and Museum of the Holocaust Foundation, Ghetto collection, op.1, single ridge 24.1, l. 122–123.
6 Ibid. L. 124.
7 Ibid. L. 188–190.
8 Ibid. L. 125.
9 "Last Witnesses" / Collection of memories. Manuscript. M., 2003. S. 70.
10 Ibid. P.102.
11 Shelter. The Diaries of Anne Frank in Letters. M., 1999. S. 90 12 Ibid. P.125.
13 From an interview taken by N. Zhuzhleva and N. Solovieva.
14 "Last Witnesses" / Collection of memories. Manuscript. Moscow, 2003, pp. 110–111.
15 Ibid. P.111.
17 Ibid. P.112.
18 Ibid. pp.111–112.
19 Archive and Museum of the Holocaust Foundation, Ghetto collection, op. 1, unit ridge 24.1, l. 124.
2 0 "Last Witnesses" / Collection of memories. Manuscript. M., 2003. S. 101.
21 Ibid. P.110.
2 2 Ibid. P.107.
JANUARY 27 IS THE INTERNATIONAL DAY OF MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST. The Nazi regime sentenced Jews to death - men and women, old people and children. No one was spared: women were used for sterilization experiments, they were raped and beaten, their children were taken away.
Like men, women fought against inhumanity and oppression. Some were participants in the resistance and took part in armed uprisings, others tried their best to save the lives of themselves and those around them. We tell the stories of three brave women.
Stefania Vilchinskaya
The name of the Polish teacher, doctor and writer Janusz Korczak is well known to everyone, but few people know that for more than thirty years he was accompanied by a woman in all his affairs - Stefania Wilczynska, or Mrs. Stefa, as her pupils called her. In stories about the tragic episode in which Korczak refused rescue so as not to leave the children alone on the way to the gas chamber, Stefania is rarely mentioned among those who calmed the children in the last hours. Meanwhile, she had a huge impact on the life of Korczak and the Orphanage he created. “It is difficult to determine where Korczak ends and Wilchinska begins. They are twins who are destined to merge into one soul, one idea - to love children, ”says Emmanuel Ringelblum, creator of the Warsaw Ghetto archive.
Before meeting Korczak in 1909, twenty-three-year-old Stefania had already earned a reputation as a talented young teacher. Behind the shoulders of the Polish Jewess was a private school in her native Warsaw and higher education in the field of natural sciences at the universities of Belgium and Switzerland. Polish researchers note that after she, a lonely girl, due to prejudices, she could not open her practice as a doctor or continue traveling around Europe. Then Stefania returned to Warsaw and, through the acquaintances of her parents, got a job as a volunteer in a small shelter for Jewish children, where she soon took a leadership position. One day, Janusz Korczak came to them - either to watch a play staged by the children, or to evaluate an exhibition of their works. One way or another, biographers believe that it was then that Korczak decided to devote himself to raising children - Stefania became his comrade-in-arms.
In 1912, with the money of philanthropists, a unique orphanage for Jewish orphans was opened in Warsaw, where the personality of the child was at the forefront. Janusz Korczak became the director, Stefania Wilczynska became the main educator. They introduced a system of self-government in the orphanage with a constitution and a court, before which both children and adults were equal, and lived with the pupils as parents. The orphanage was managed by Stephanie - she organized order in the house, communicated with lawyers and sponsors, monitored the appearance of the children and their activities. “She got up before us and was the last one to go to bed, she worked even when she was sick. She was with us during meals, taught us how to make bandages, bathe children, cut hair, everything. Tall, in a black apron, with a short male haircut, always caring and vigilant, she thought about every child even during her holidays, ”her pupil Ida Mertsan recalled Stefania.
To the first world war Janusz Korczak went to the front as a doctor, and all worries about the shelter fell on Stefania. One of the letters has survived, where she complains of terrible loneliness and fear of not coping with responsibility. These fears were in vain: all memories of Stefania describe her as a talented organizer, the best partner for Janusz Korczak, who devoted more time to activities with children, and sometimes forgot to take a handkerchief when he went out with a cold. In 1928, Panna Stefa - she was addressed as an unmarried woman - wrote on the board in the classroom: “From now on I will be called Pani Stefa. It is indecent for a woman who has as many children as I have to be called panna.
Stefania Vilchinskaya
and Janusz Korczak
did not agree to leave the children, although friends
from the Polish underground offered them to flee.
They got on the train
to Treblinka, where
upon arrival together with the children were sent
into the gas chamber
Stephanie rarely left the children. But in 1935 she went to Eretz Israel, from where Korczak had recently returned, and several times over the next four years she returned to live in a kibbutz. On the eve of the war, when the situation in Europe was becoming increasingly difficult, Stefania returned to Warsaw. She met the German invasion of the city in the Orphanage. In the basement of the building, Mrs. Stefa organized a first aid station, where, together with the children, she took care of the wounded and the homeless. Soon Warsaw surrendered, and the Nazis established their own rules in the city. Mass executions of resistance members began, anti-Jewish laws were introduced. Despite the difficult situation, Stefania refused to leave Warsaw, although friends from the kibbutz offered to help her do this. In April 1940, she wrote to them in a postcard: "I didn't come because I can't leave the children." Shortly thereafter, the Orphanage was transferred to the ghetto.
Before the war, the Jews of Warsaw made up about 30% of the city's population, there were 350,000 of them. Almost everyone was herded into an area less than three and a half square kilometers, which occupied only 2.4% of the area of the capital. People huddled in rooms of six or seven people, hunger and unsanitary conditions reigned. Under these conditions, one hundred and seventy orphans found themselves under the care of Janusz Korczak and Stefania Wilczynska. When they were transferred to the ghetto, all the stored food was taken away from the Orphanage, protesting Korczak ended up in prison, and for the first months all worries about survival fell on Stephanie. For two years, Korczak and Wilczynska took care of the children in the ghetto. Stefania organized rooms for the sick in the basement of the house, afraid to send them to the local hospital. In July 1942, the first deportations from the ghetto to Treblinka began. Stefania believed that the children would not be touched - after all, the Orphanage was a well-known and respected institution in Warsaw. But in August, an order came to liquidate the shelter. Then everyone in the ghetto already knew that they would not return after deportation.
On August 6, 1942, a procession of children moved to the Umschlagplatz, the deportation square. They lined up in fours, all neatly dressed, and each carried a bag on his shoulder. Behind appearance Pani Stefa was responsible for this stately procession: she instructed the children to put their best shoes under the bed, and their clothes not far away, so that they would be ready to go out at any moment. Stefania led the second group of children, the first was led by Korczak, followed by other educators and orphans. "I will never forget it... It was not a march to the train - it was a silent protest against banditry!" - recalled eyewitness Naum Remba.
Neither Janusz Korczak nor Stefania Wilczynska agreed to leave the children, although friends from the Polish underground suggested that they run away. They took a train to Treblinka, where on arrival, together with their children, they were sent to the gas chamber and killed.
Christina Zhivulskaya
Facts and fiction in the history of this heroine are intertwined: in different sources, the year of her birth is either 1914 or 1918, and she managed to live under at least three names - she was born Sonya Landau, worked underground under the name of Zofya Wisniewska and was imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp as Christina Zhyvulskaya. Under the latter pseudonym, she published her most famous book, I Survived Auschwitz. Kristina, or, as her friends in the camp called her, Krista, survived the only one from her transport - one hundred and ninety women brought to the concentration camp from the Warsaw Pawiak prison. There, Kristina Zhivulskaya managed to hide her nationality, and even in the book - a kind of chronicle of the death factory - she did not mention her connection with the Jews, the destruction of which she observed daily. Her whole past was dangerous.
Kristina grew up in the Polish city of Lodz, studied at a Jewish gymnasium, but the family was secular. Like many secular Polish Jews, her father and mother celebrated some Jewish holidays but did not go to synagogue. After graduating from school, Christina went to Warsaw to study law, working part-time in law offices, but did not finish her studies: in September 1939, Germany occupied Poland. The girl returned home to her parents and younger sister. The persecution of Jews in Lodz intensified, a ghetto was created, and the family decided to flee to Warsaw, hoping to get hold of forged documents. In the capital, it was not possible to avoid the fate of the rest of the city's Jews: in 1941, the Zhivulskys ended up in the ghetto, where Kristina spent almost two years in inhuman conditions. Every day her mother put a pot on the stove, although there was nothing to cook - but she tried to support the household with the appearance of dinner, boiling and serving water on the table.
In 1942, when the threat of deportation or death from starvation seemed imminent, Kristina managed to escape from the ghetto with her mother. She joined the Polish resistance and began preparing false documents for Jews, Home Army soldiers and German deserters. The Nazis, who persecuted members of the underground, called her "blonde Zosya." They managed to catch the underground worker in 1943. The girl presented documents in the name of Kristina Zhivulskaya. Thanks to her appearance, similar to the ideas of the Slavic, she managed to pass herself off as a Pole. After being interrogated by the Gestapo, the newly minted Christina was sent to prison, and two months later in cattle cars to Auschwitz. “We all imagined this place in different ways. Each had its own associations, its own random information. How it really is - we did not know and did not want to know. Only one thing was well known to all of us - they do not return from there! - this is how Christina described the mood of her neighbors in Pawiak.
In the autumn of 1943, when Christina ended up in Auschwitz, the complex was already fully operational. It consisted of three camps: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and Auschwitz III (Monowitz). It is often referred to in its entirety as Auschwitz after the nearest Polish city. It was the largest camp founded by the Nazis: more than a million people died in it, 90% of them Jews. In each large gas chamber, about two thousand people were killed at a time. Arriving at the camp, Christina did not yet know that most of the Jewish prisoners were immediately sent to death from the station, and the living conditions of the rest were so difficult that few survived. The new arrivals began to ask the first woman they met in the barracks why all of her group of ninety people died, to which she replied: “From death! In a concentration camp people die of death, do you understand?.. You don’t understand, you will probably understand when you die.”
One day, Christina's poems, calling for revenge, fell into the hands of the camp authorities - night
she spent
waiting for death
but the girl whose texts were found
didn't give it away
Christina had never written poetry before, but during many hours of standing on the apel (checking) she began to pick up rhymes. Her poems about life in the camp began to be memorized and recited by the neighbors. Among those who liked Christina's work was an influential prisoner, thanks to whom she did not work for long on the street and soon ended up in a block where newly arrived prisoners were taken care of. Running to her friend in revir, a block of patients, Christina contracted typhus. She tried to endure the disease on her feet, but still ended up in a barracks, where “naked creatures sat on all the beds, bald, covered with spots, abscesses, covered with plasters, scratching furiously.”
Following them, Christina also caught scabies. A few months later she managed to recover - by this time she was already the only survivor of her transport. With the assistance of the same influential prisoner, Christina, after leaving the revir, reached the “top of the camp career” - she ended up in a team that selected and stored the property of prisoners. She had access to things that could be exchanged for food, and parcels from home helped to feed herself. Despite all the privileges, she had to work near the crematorium. Pipes were visible from the office, and the smell of burning seeped through the closed windows. Often she happened to communicate with those doomed to death, who asked what awaits them next, and Christina did not know how to answer. One day, her poems, calling for revenge, fell into the hands of the camp authorities - Christina spent the night waiting for death, but the girl whose texts were found did not betray her.
At the end of 1944, rumors reached the camp that the Soviet army was approaching, and the prisoners both hoped for the end of Auschwitz and feared that the Germans would cover their tracks and kill those who remained. Christina, along with other girls from her team, expected death from day to day - after all, they had access to a filing cabinet. Once, in the shower room, they even imagined that the gas had been turned on. A few days before the arrival of Soviet troops, the Germans announced the evacuation of prisoners to German territory. It was called the "death march": people walked on foot in the cold, those who lagged behind were shot. Christine managed to get out of line and hide in a haystack. For several hours she lay without moving, even when a German soldier sat down on a haystack. Finally she managed to escape and reach the Polish village. Christina hid from the peasants until her release. After the war, she lived in Poland, became a writer, composed plays and poems for songs. In 1970, Christina moved closer to her sons, to Düsseldorf, where she lived until 1992.
Fanya Brantsovskaya
At ninety-five, Fanya Brantsovskaya (Yoheles) tells the story of her life to full halls, standing up and without a microphone; she is an active member of the Vilnius Jewish community, still works as a librarian and teaches Yiddish to young people. Today, Fanya is the last partisan of the Jewish combat detachment in Lithuania, who went through the ghetto and hid from the Germans in the forests for a year.
Fanya spent almost her entire life in Vilnius - she was born in Kaunas, but in 1927, when she was five years old, the family moved. Vilnius was one of the spiritual centers Jewish culture in Europe, it was called "Lithuanian Jerusalem". About a quarter of the city's population were Jews, there were Jewish hospitals and schools everywhere, Yiddish newspapers were published, and there were more than a hundred synagogues - now there is only one left. Fani's family was not religious, but celebrated holidays and tried to light candles on Shabbat. Before the war, Fanya managed to graduate from a Jewish gymnasium and went to study in Grodno. When the USSR annexed Lithuania, Fanya joined the Komsomol and began teaching at a school in a Belarusian village.
The German invasion in the summer of 1941 found her in Vilnius, where she came for the holidays. Soon after the city was occupied, the persecution of the Jews began. By August, about five thousand people were shot in the forest near the village of Ponary near Vilnius. All the inhabitants of the street where Fani's friend lived were sent to Ponary, because at night the corpse of a German was planted there and it was announced that the Jews had killed him. Half an hour - so much time was given to Fanya, her parents and sister, when in September 1941 they were sent to the ghetto. It was only necessary to cross the street, but another life was already beginning there - the gates were closed behind the Jews and isolated from the city. Fanya left the ghetto only for work; outside she was forbidden to walk on the sidewalks or talk to her acquaintances.
In the ghetto, Fanya, an “active girl,” as she called herself, entered the underground: “It was not a hope of survival, but a certain revenge and [a way] to feel like a person.” By September 1943, extermination actions became more frequent and it was clear that the liquidation of the ghetto was coming. Then Fanya, on the instructions of the underground, among six pairs of girls, fled the city and went to the partisans - she saw her parents and sister for the last time before leaving; liquidation began on the same day. On the way, the girls got lost, miraculously hid in the village and, with the help of the local population, went out to the partisans.
← Fanya willingly shares her memories with young people visiting Vilnius on special programs dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust
Fanya joined the Avenger squad, whose fighters also mostly came from the Vilnius ghetto. Three weeks later, she went on her first task - to cut off the telephone connection between parts of the German troops. For almost a year, Fanya, along with men with a rifle at the ready, fought in a battle group. In the detachment, she met her future husband. One of Fani's last tasks in the detachment is to blow up the rails to make it harder for the German army to retreat. Returning from the operation, she found her comrades ready to return to Vilnius, liberated in July 1944, an empty, burned, destroyed, but hometown. “I lived in the hope that my loved ones would return to Vilnius, because some people were escaping,” Fanya recalled. Every day she went to the station, where trains from Germany arrived, and waited for her relatives. Later, she learned that her family, after being deported from the ghetto, died in the camps.
Fanya stayed in Vilnius. Together with other Jews, she visited the site of massacres in Ponary, where one hundred thousand people of different nationalities were killed, and achieved the erection of a monument. It was dedicated to the dead Jews, but two years later the Soviet authorities replaced it with a memorial, where only the death of Soviet citizens was mentioned. After Lithuania gained independence, Fanya, together with other caring people, ensured that on the monument to those shot in Ponar they wrote that seventy thousand Jews were killed here, and not only by the Nazis, but also by their local accomplices. Fanya always spoke openly about the fact that Lithuanians actively participated in the murder of Jews, which is why she periodically found herself at the center of scandals. When she was awarded the Lithuanian Order of Merit in 2017, some opposed it. She was reminded of the investigation into the attack by Soviet partisans on the Lithuanian village of Kaniukai. Fanya was summoned in this case as a witness. She claimed that she did not participate in this operation at all, but assumed that the partisans entered the battle because the villagers supported the Germans.
Fani now has six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. After her retirement, she became active in the community, founded a committee of former prisoners of the ghettos and concentration camps, and created a library at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University. Fanya willingly shares her memories with young people visiting Vilnius on special programs dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust: “I consider it my duty to tell. For people to know the truth and to pass it on and on.”
In the preparation of the material used: Muses, Mistresses and Mates: Creative Collaborations in Literature, Art and Life (Izabella Penier), The Rights of the Child and the Changing Image of Childhood (Philip E. Veerman), I Survived Auschwitz (Kristina Zhivulskaya ), essay "Stefania Wilczyńska - A Companion In Janusz Korczak's Struggle" (Elżbieta Mazur, Grażyna Pawlak), film "We Remain Human" (International Holocaust School, Yad Vashem)
A FOUNDATION FOR CHILDHOOD SURVIVERS OF THE HOLOCAUST HAS STARTED TO WORK.
Eligible Childhood Holocaust Survivors May Apply for a One-Time Payment of EUR 2,500
The Claims Conference approved the claims of 69,145 Jewish victims of Nazi persecution for payment from the Child Survivor Fund, and paid a total of about 185 million US dollars.
Application forms were mailed to Holocaust survivors,
who the Claims Conference believes may be eligible to receive payments from the new Childhood Holocaust Survivor Fund. The Claims Conference has collected information on these survivors from other compensation programs.
The fund will make a one-time payment of 2,500 euros (about $3,125) to eligible childhood Holocaust survivors.
This fund is open to Jewish victims of Nazism who were persecuted for their Jewishness, were born on or after January 1, 1928, and were subjected to one of the following types of persecution:
- were in a concentration camp; or
- were in a ghetto (or similar place of detention, in accordance with the German slave labor program); or
- have been in hiding or living under false names for at least 6 months in Nazi-occupied or Axis countries (according to the criteria established for the Article 2 Foundation/Central and of Eastern Europe(CEEF); or
- were in the embryonic stage of development during the period of time when their mother was persecuted as described above.
The foundation was founded to recognize the suffering of those who survived the Holocaust, having endured incredible trauma in childhood. These people have experienced unimaginable suffering: separation from their parents in childhood, the need to hide, flee, the horror of being caught, deprivation and abuse in the ghetto, and even the horrors of concentration camps, where very few of the children managed to survive.
The Claims Conference estimates that between 70,000 and 75,000 Jewish childhood Holocaust survivors living around the world today will be eligible for compensation.
Persons who have previously received or are currently receiving compensation payments, and Not If you receive an application form by mail, please fill in your details and the form will be mailed to you.
Other persons Not who received the application form by mail but wish to apply to the Foundation for Childhood Holocaust Survivors may
Applications must be submitted by Holocaust survivors themselves, not by their heirs. However, if an eligible Holocaust survivor dies after their application has been received and registered with the Claims Conference, the survivor's spouse is eligible to receive the payment. If the spouse of a Holocaust survivor who met the criteria is also no longer alive, then their child(ren) are eligible to receive the payment.
