Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
By November 1943, Kaminski and his prisoners had progressed some 300 miles west into Belorussia, where, for the winter, the captives were put into a snowy barbed-wire enclosure with no permanent shelters and little food. A partisan raid enabled Nikolai and many other children to escape. Not all survived in the wintry forests, but Nikolai, with his mother and siblings, managed to find his way to a well-established partisan group. Here the little boy attached himself to one of the leaders and went with him on raids to steal salt from German Army supply depots. At the end of the winter Kaminski’s brigade attacked the partisans again, and Nikolai, recaptured, continued to serve as a human shield until, still not quite eight years old, he was liberated by Soviet troops near the Polish border.
139
For children who were sent across that border and farther into Poland the war would last much longer. Anti-partisan operations had been particularly intense in the region around Vitebsk in northern Belorussia. A large number of children were processed through a filth-ridden transit camp in Vitebsk known as the “Fifth Regiment” after the former military installation in which it was located. From there, trainloads of Russians were sent principally to Auschwitz and Majdanek, where men and older boys were separated from the women and children.
140
At Majdanek an estimated 5,000 children, some with their mothers, were put in Feld V, the new section that had been built for them. Groups from particular villages were kept together, which made things marginally more bearable. During the day, the mothers were sent out to work in the fields. Some little children went with them and pulled weeds near the electrified fences. Very small ones huddled together trying to keep warm.
Sick children were taken to the “hospital,” which was often a death sentence. The morning after her three-year-old sister had gone to the infirmary, nine-year-old Elena Putilina and her mother, working in the fields as usual, heard the little girl call their names. Looking up, they saw her in a wagon full of children being taken to the crematorium. Elena remembered that her mother started to scream but “immediately began to be beaten by an overseer with a whip.” They never saw the child again. For healthier little ones, at both Auschwitz and Majdanek one good use was found: they were an excellent source of blood, which if not pure enough to allow them to live in the Reich, was apparently acceptable to save the lives of German soldiers.
It soon became clear to the Nazis that the mothers would work more efficiently if the children were not with them, and a separation was decreed. By the fall of 1943, in response to Himmler’s orders, the Polish children’s camp at Lodz-Konstantynow, to which the Zamosc children had been sent, had been enlarged to take the Russians, and another facility had been prepared in a castle at Potulice, near Bydgoszcz (Bromberg).
The scenes of separation were horrendous. The Jewish children who had been swept along with the rest in the partisan operations were taken away first, but, as their compatriots once again witnessed, they did not go to Lodz: “They put us in the barracks so we wouldn’t see, but we could observe that all the [Jewish] children were put in cars … they took [them] to the crematorium.” This led many mothers to think that all the children would suffer the same fate, and some women went mad with grief as the loaded trucks drove off. Even babies were taken away, and during the first night, many of the separated children, sure they were about to be shot or burned, cried until daybreak.
The Russian children were not killed at this point but were taken off to the new camps. The majority ended up at Lodz-Konstantynow, where they would join the Lidice children, a few Rhineland Bastards, and other “useful” children from all over the Reich. At Lodz, following Himmler’s directives, blonds were separated from dark-haired children. Blood continued to be taken. The few “Germanizables” were given better treatment. The camp had both German and Russian directors, the latter being quite humane at times. There was a little more food and clean uniforms were issued, but discipline was military and everyone had to work making straw shoes, sewing buttons on uniforms, and doing other tasks involving military equipment. Quotas were established and failure to fulfill them caused meals to be withheld. Four- and five-year-olds, some so young they did not even know their last names or where they were from, polished floors, carried
small objects around, and worked in the kitchen. For the privileged there was even some fun and “education.” Classes in German were given so that the children would understand orders; there were some sports and even the odd
gemütlich
songfest, all aimed at preparing a new generation of obedient and docile slave labor. For the “dark” un-Germanizables there was only misery, as one boy, twelve when he entered the camp, recalled:
We swelled everywhere because of undernourishment, which also affected the nerves, on top of which there was the cold, the blows, and the exhausting labor. Many went out of their mind.… The children were given blankets that were as thin as spider’s webs and the temperature fell to minus twenty degrees in winter. During the night they froze. Next morning we had to use picks to cut the stiff bodies away from the plank beds.… We flung them into a mass grave … sometimes they were not quite dead.… On an average 120 of the 3–4,000 children died every day.
141
The camp at Lodz held only a fraction of the Soviet young people conscripted. Tens of thousands more were taken from all along the long front from the Baltic to the Black Sea and sent to work camps in the smallest corners of Germany. The journeys to the camps were hardly ever direct, but were often made up of exhausting and picaresque wanderings. Nikolai Dorozhinski, fourteen, began his odyssey to a concrete factory near Erfurt in Germany with a trek through Moldavia, Romania, and Bessarabia. On the way he escaped once and was taken in by a Jewish tailor and his family who were in hiding. Recaptured by the Romanian police, he and the tailor’s son were handed over to the Gestapo and transferred to a satellite camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, near Vienna. Nikolai told the Nazis that the Jewish boy was his brother, thereby saving his life. From Vienna Nikolai was finally sent to Erfurt. At the concrete factory he was the youngest of 150
Ostarbeiter
, who would remain there until the war ended.
142
The Erfurt camp was quite civilized compared to Dachau, where twelve-year-old Ivan Stepanov was part of a detail that had the job of collecting the bodies of those who had died of typhus. The children, chosen for this duty because they were thought to be less susceptible to the disease, had to remove the bodies and bedding from the bunks, stack them on a cart, and take the gruesome cargo to the crematorium. The camp authorities were appreciative: on the days the Russian children had such duty they were given a nice dessert in the evening.
143
The Nazis never gave up their enslavement operations. Even in mid-June 1944, Army Group Center, still clinging to a salient centered on Minsk in Belorussia, announced that it “had the intention to apprehend 40,000 to 50,000 youths at the ages of ten to fourteen” in its area of control, because the youths, who had lost their parents to labor conscription, were causing “considerable inconvenience” in the battle zones. Later in the long memo announcing this
Heu-Aktion
, or Operation Hay, it becomes clear that there are other issues. The children must not be allowed to fall into the hands of the Soviets, as that would “amount to reinforcing the enemy’s potential war strength.” The operation also must be “strongly fortified by propaganda under the slogan ‘Care of the Reich for White-Ruthenian Children,’ ” a process already begun by the youth organization set up for them, which had by now sent more than 28,000 teenagers to the Reich factories and military service in the SS and other formations.
144
Alfred Rosenberg of the Ostministerium, clearly worried by now about his postwar fate, raised objections to the last-ditch project: the operation, especially where children under fifteen were concerned, not only would have “unfavorable political consequences” but also would be seen as “child abduction.” These quibbles were dismissed by the SS, which now admitted that the operation was also aimed at “the reduction of [the enemy’s] biological potentialities as viewed from the perspective of the future,” ideas that had been “voiced not only by the Reichsführer SS, but also by the Führer.”
145
On July 26, 1942, the Jewish Council in the Netherlands, like its counterparts in the East, was informed by the director of the Office for Jewish Emigration in Amsterdam that all Jews between the ages of sixteen and forty would be taken to “labor camps” in “Germany.” The council was responsible for notifying the deportees and processing the complex paperwork. They could not know that these deportations were only one part of the massive “resettlement” operations initiated for all of Europe at the infamous Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942, where plans were made for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” or that between January and June, in a hasty building effort, four new extermination camps had been constructed in Poland at Birkenau, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka to bolster the inadequate killing capacities of those already functioning at Chelmno and Auschwitz. Coordination of the transport of groups from so many different countries was crucial and dependent on very specific logistics, most important of which, here as in the East, was the availability of trains.
The allocation of vast transportation facilities to this racial cleansing when Germany was struggling in its war with the Soviet Union is truly remarkable. Nazi race officials knew that the trains would not be available for long. To make sure they would be full, agencies responsible for Jewish affairs in each area would be responsible for producing fixed quotas of human beings at the precise moment the trains were ready to leave.
1
Woe betide the Nazi official who failed in his quotas. Adolf Eichmann, in charge of the whole Western operation, is said to have personally telephoned the officer in charge of the French deportations in a rage when one train was canceled because it could not be filled, fuming that he had lost prestige vis-à-vis the Reich Transportation Ministry.
2
As we have seen, the deportation of Jews from the West had begun somewhat chaotically in Vienna in 1939 and had had to be delayed. But by the fall of 1941 things were more organized, and much more territory, far from prying eyes, was available for the disposition of those transported. In October, while tens of thousands were still simply being shot in the USSR, massive deportations began from such major Reich cities as Frankfurt and
Vienna. As the new and theoretically more efficient killing centers came on line one by one in March and April 1942, these transports increased, while tens of thousands more would begin to be taken from the Polish ghettos. With this amount of traffic, it was little wonder that the rail line leading to Sobibor soon needed major repairs, forcing temporary closure of its facilities. Undeterred, the Nazis rerouted their cargoes to the other camps, and by late July 1942, the trains would also begin to roll from Western Europe.
Things did not go smoothly at first in Holland. The Jewish Council there reported that it could only come up with 350 or so deportees a day. By now it was clear that conditions in the so-called labor camps were brutal and many Jews did not respond to the summons to present themselves to the authorities. Thousands more negotiated temporary exemptions as essential workers or war veterans, while others, like Anne Frank and her family, went into hiding. To fill his quotas, therefore, SS Lieutenant Colonel F. H. Aus der Fünten, Eichmann’s deputy in Holland, had to take Jews from their residences or from the streets. The process was facilitated by the fact that the Jews had been concentrated in Amsterdam and by the requirement, finally instituted on May 2, 1942, that all Jews over the age of six in Holland wear a yellow star. Family members were gathered from wherever they might be; once the parents were in hand, their children were even collected from their classrooms. The first big roundup, or
razzia
, took place on July 14. By the end of July some 6,000 people had been sent to the former refugee camp at Westerbork, now transformed into a transit camp to the “East.” By the end of November 1942 it would be a staggering 36,000, which would mount to 103,000 by 1944.
3
To even out the flow, another holding area was established in the Hollandsche Schouwburg, a theater in Amsterdam where those to be deported stayed for hours, days, or weeks to await their turn to be funneled into the deadly pipeline.
There was only one sure method of exemption for full Jews in Holland, and it would not come into force until May 1943. The estimated 8,000 Jews in mixed marriages could, by agreeing to “voluntary” sterilization, avoid deportation and remove their stars, recover their assets, and be eligible for certain jobs. “Voluntary” meant choosing between “going to Poland” or undergoing surgery, which, cynically, would be performed by Nazi surgeons at the Jewish hospital in Amsterdam. This was necessary, as the Nazis knew full well that such procedures would cause an uproar at the regular hospitals. But as news of this measure inevitably leaked out, there was an uproar anyway. Only days after the sterilizations were instituted,
the major religious denominations sent Nazi commissioner Seyss-Inquart a joint letter telling him he would be called to account before God, and that “sterilization means bodily and psychological mutilation … as well as a violation of both God’s commandments and human law. It is the final consequence of an anti-Christian and nation-destroying racial doctrine.” Seyss-Inquart replied that the sterilizations were voluntary and told the churches to talk to the SS. There is some evidence that the ruling was too much even for some Nazis. The German doctors assigned to sterilization duty soon resigned, and the SS doctor charged with deciding who should be sterilized seems to have certified that surgery was unnecessary due to impotence in an unusually high percentage of cases. But most of those given this awful choice simply did not respond to the offer.
4