UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES Children and the Holocaust Symposium Presentations W A S H I N G T O N , D. C. Children and the Holocaust Symposium Presentations CENTER FOR ADVANCED HOLOCAUST STUDIES UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM 2004 The assertions, opinions, and conclusions in this occasional paper are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council or of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. First printing, September 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Susanne Heim, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Sara Kadosh, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Barbara Engelking-Boni, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Lisa Anne Plante, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Evelyn Zegenhagen, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Radu Ioanid, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Daphne L. Meijer, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Hagit Lavsky, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Copyright © 2004 by Menachem Z. Rosensaft, assigned to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Contents Foreword.......................................................................................................................................... i Paul A. Shapiro Immigration Policy and Forced Emigration from Germany: The Situation of Jewish Children (1933–1945).....................................................................................................................................1 Susanne Heim Heroic Acts and Missed Opportunities: The Rescue of Youth Aliyah Groups from Europe during World War II..................................................................................................................................19 Sara Kadosh Childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto...................................................................................................33 Barbara Engelking-Boni Transformation and Resistance: Schooling Efforts for Jewish Children and Youth in Hiding, Ghettos, and Camps.......................................................................................................................43 Lisa Anne Plante Facilities for Pregnant Forced Laborers and Their Infants in Germany (1943–1945) ................65 Evelyn Zegenhagen The Destruction and Rescue of Jewish Children in Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transnistria (1941–1944)...................................................................................................................................77 Radu Ioanid “Unknown Children”: The Last Train from Westerbork ..............................................................93 Daphne L. Meijer The Role of Children in the Rehabilitation Process of Survivors: The Case of Bergen-Belsen..103 Hagit Lavsky Bergen-Belsen: The End and the Beginning................................................................................117 Menachem Z. Rosensaft Appendix: Biographies of Contributors.......................................................................................137 Foreword Well over a million children were murdered in the Holocaust. In addition to Jewish children, Romani children, institutionalized children, and handicapped children also were killed. Among Jews, the toll on children was particularly heavy. Although all Jews were marked for death, only six–eleven percent of Jewish children survived versus thirty-three percent of adults. Children, like their families, were persecuted for racial, religious, or political reasons in ghettos; concentration, transit, labor, and extermination camps; foreign lands to which they escaped, often without their parents; and in hiding. Although their young voices were silenced forever, we can still hear some of these children through the rare bits of writing they left behind. Such is the case with fifteen-year-old Dawid Sierakowiak; an October 1939 entry in his Lodz ghetto diary notes: “The work at the square was supervised by a single soldier…with a big stick. Using rude words, he told me to fill puddles with sand. I have never been so humiliated in my life as when…I saw the happy, smiling mugs of passersby laughing at our misfortune.”1 The last entry in Dawid’s diary, after over three years of grueling decline into starvation and disease, reads as a deadly premonition: “There is really no way out of this for us.”2 Dawid Sierakowiak died in the ghetto in August 1943. None of his family survived. More often, the words detailing the fates of children came from their murderers. At the end of October 1941, the Romanian Military Commander of Chisinau (Kishinev), Bessarabia, reported to the Military Governor of the province: “I have the honor to inform you that on October 31 the last major transport of Jews (from the Chisinau ghetto) was dispatched. The orphanage with 38 children, including four still at the breast and the rest from one to six years old, will be evacuated on Monday, the 3rd of November.”3 They were sent to Transnistria. Only an echo of their existence remains. On September 4, 1942, Chaim Rumkowski, Elder of the Jews in the Lodz Ghetto, delivered one of the most infamous speeches of his or any other time: “Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!”4 Almost all the Lodz ghetto children under the age of ten were taken away and murdered. ii • FOREWORD Not all of the story was taking place in Europe, however. Between January and July 1939, the United States Congress debated legislation introduced by Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York and Representative Edith Rogers of Massachusetts; it would have authorized the admission of 20,000 additional Jewish children to the United States, beyond the immigration quota for Germany. The legislation had the support of leading Catholic and Protestant clergy, the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, the Quaker community, Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Alf Landon, Rabbi Steven S. Wise, Eddie Cantor, and others. A week after the May 17 issuance of the British “MacDonald” White Paper, which effectively closed the door on Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine, the following exchange occurred before the House Immigration Committee in Washington. The chair of the committee was questioning a journalist who had reported from Germany during and following the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom and who had witnessed the arrival of Kindertransport in Britain: Dickstein: Do you contemplate that there will be another pogrom? Reynolds: I not only contemplate it. I am confident that the complete pogrom is not very far away. Dickstein: In other words there will be a new slaughter? Reynolds: Yes…. Dickstein: Annihilation? Reynolds: Yes, a complete pogrom.5 The Wagner-Rogers bill languished for several weeks, while Jewish children under the age of fourteen, who might have been rescued under the proposed law, were labeled by one congressional witness as “thousands of motherless, embittered, persecuted children of undesirable foreigners.” When the president of the University of North Carolina, Frank P. Graham, testified that the proposed legislation was consistent “with the American tradition of offering haven to religious and political refugees,” the committee chairman responded, “[t]hat is our form of government, but as a matter of fact, we have never done the things we preach.”6 No action was taken. Principle—and the children— were abandoned to the Holocaust. Despite this failure of public policy, approximately 1,000 European Jewish children were rescued, brought to the United States, and placed with foster parents through the efforts of dozens of private organizations and hundreds of private FOREWORD • iii individuals between 1934 and 1945. Some other European Jewish children also survived through luck or initiative, in hiding or passing as Aryans. Their fates varied extraordinarily according to where they were, when they were brought face-to-face with Nazi intentions, how old they were, how healthy they appeared, what they looked like, whether they were boys or girls, who cared about them or was able to help, and what avenues of escape or survival opened up for them. After the war, those who survived struggled to reunite with family members. Many had to face the fact that they were now orphans and, in some cases, the only surviving members of their entire families. In the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, however, children were central: “children…came as some consolation, some replacement for the million and a half children murdered in the Holocaust….Around them and their families the whole social and cultural system was built.”7 Those children predominantly made their way to Palestine, and then the State of Israel, or to the United States. Why organize a symposium on children and the Holocaust? Because we were all once children. We all, somewhere, remain children. If the Holocaust has universal implications, that reality is felt nowhere as strongly as when one considers the children. Children and the Holocaust was organized by the Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (CAHS) as part of its continuing symposium series to draw together Holocaust scholars to share research results and encourage networking, collaborative research, and discussion of research methodologies.