Holocaust survivors' stories

[Behind the Aegis]

As the number of survivors in the UK dwindles to 5,000, Stuart Jeffries commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day by hearing the stories six of them have to tell.

Sixty-five years ago tomorrow, the largest Nazi killing camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was ­liberated by the Soviet army. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust will celebrate the anniversary of that event. So what, you might be thinking. Another anniversary, ­another wall of newsprint. What, really, is the point of continuing to commemor­ate­ something that happened a lifetime ago? There are three good reasons. One is, as all the survivors of the Holocaust I interview in the following pages told me, that the slogan "Never again" has become a sick joke, degraded by the genocides in Cambodia (1975-79), Bosnia (1992), Rwanda (1994) and Darfur (2003- today). We have learned too little and let people die en masse not for what they did but for who they were – just as happened in the Nazi death camps.

Second reason: this is one of the last years we are going to have many Holocaust survivors in Britain to share with us what they went through. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust estimates there are 5,000 survivors left in the UK. It's urgent that we hear their – often ­incredible – stories before they die. When the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, there were 200,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, according to one source (Zoe Waxman's 2006 book Writing the Holocaust, Oxford University Press).

But Jews weren't the only victims, nor the Holocaust's only survivors: the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, for instance, defines Holocaust survivors as "any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who were refugees or were in hiding." The museum has a registry that includes more than 196,000 records related to survivors and their families. Any estimate of the number of Holocaust survivors immediately after the war, though, is likely to be wrong, not least because no one then had as their first priority counting up the number of people who survived the death camps.

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'We saw the chimneys. Rumours said it was a crematorium. I didn't know what that meant'

One morning after war broke out in September 1939, Zigi Shipper woke up to find his father standing by his bed. "He told me the Germans were coming and he had to go away." How could he leave you, I ask? "Like a lot of people in Łódz , he thought the Nazis would only be after men of fighting age, not children and women. Nobody thought they would want to kill all Jews. How wrong we were. But still, my father ran away to Russia, thinking that was the right thing to do."

Zigi (short for Zygmunt) was nine. "That was the last time I saw my dad," he tells me in his living room in Bushey, Hertfordshire. His father ­returned to Poland later in the war but could only get as far as the Warsaw ghetto. What happened to him? "I ­presume he died. I have been to all the museums and I can't find a trace of him. He might have died in the Warsaw ghetto or Treblinka . Finding ways to die was not difficult for a Jew."

Zigi was raised by his grandparents in the ghetto in Łódz that the Nazis ­established in November 1939. His mother, divorced from his father before the war, had moved to Belgium. "I presumed she was dead." He was wrong.

Food was so scarce in the ghetto that Zigi's grandfather became weak and died. Death was everywhere: "When I was 10 I stepped over dead bodies in the ghetto without much feeling." Ghetto life took on a routine for him and his grandmother. He worked in a metal factory producing munitions. But the routine was broken when, in 1941, the Nazis began to round up Jews for what they called "resettlement". On one of these raids, Zigi was slung into a lorry. "I managed to jump off – I ran and ran and luckily, no German saw me."

Memories of the Holocaust: Zigi Shipper

'When someone fell, you felt lucky you were next to him. The dead always had something useful'

Towards the end of the war, Harry Spiro was walking one day with 3,000 other Jewish prisoners from ­Rehmsdorf labour camp to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia when he dived into a ditch to avoid ­allied bombs falling from the sky. This was one of several so-called death marches that took place between April 1944 and April 1945 when prisoners were driven by their captors to avoid the British and American allies ­approaching from the west and Soviet troops from the east.

Why was it called a death march? "Three hundred people out of 3,000 who set off arrived at Theresienstadt," says Harry. "The majority were killed because they couldn't walk. If you fell over, the SS man would very calmly say, 'Get up, otherwise I'll shoot you.' And then if you repeated it, they would shoot you."

As Harry lay in the ditch, he noticed that there was something in the field he could eat. "They were white beetroot or ­turnips and I got one and put it in my pocket. One boy came up to me and said, 'Give me a piece.' I said, 'No.' He said, 'If you don't, I will tell everyone what you've got and they will crush you to death.' I cut off a piece and gave him it. He kept coming back for more. The third time, I told him, 'Ask again and I'll give you a knife, not beetroot.'"

Harry chuckles and his wife Pauline does too. We're sitting at the couple's dining room table in Radlett, Hertfordshire. The beetroot story has an ­unexpectedly happy ending. "That boy was Harry Balsom and after the war we became business partners and friends. He was Harry, so was I. He got married to a woman called Pauline, and so did I. We ran a firm of tailors ­together."

Memories of the Holocaust: Harry Spiro

'We ran because we heard the ghettos were being liquidated and that lorries were coming for the Jews'

Sabina Miller never did find out what happened to the young woman she only knew as Ruszka. They both spent the winter of 1942-43 ­sheltering in a hole in the forests of northern Poland. It had been dug earlier by partisans and was the best ­accommodation the two women could find. "We couldn't go home because we had no home and we felt safer there in the woods than risk being betrayed to the Germans."

Sabina fled the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto in her teens; later she ended up working on a farm run by a Lithuanian man. He used to horsewhip the Jewish women labourers if they didn't work hard enough. There she met Ruszka, and together they finally ran away, to shelter in the forest. "We ran not ­because of him but because we heard that the ghettoes were being liquidated, and we heard that lorries were coming for ."

We're sitting over tea and cakes in Sabina's warm kitchen in the flat in west Hampstead, London, where she has lived for nearly 50 years. What was it like in that freezing hole? "You couldn't walk into it. You slid inside and then tried to keep as warm as you could. I think we had pinched a blanket from somewhere that kept us warm. But we were frozen and lousy. We looked like animals. My feet were so swollen I couldn't wear boots." Sabina nods towards her feet. "Later I had to have an operation on my foot. They amputated part of my toe."

The only thing that Sabina had to ­remind her of her past life with her family in Warsaw was a little washbag containing a few photographs and a postcard from her sister. The postcard, Sabina believes, had been thrown by her sister from a train heading towards a death camp and was picked up by someone who posted it to the farm. "I don't know that for certain. Maybe she jumped from that train. Maybe she's alive." All that seems unlikely, Sabina admits. But, nearly 70 years after the card was, perhaps, thrown from the train, she holds on to that hope.

Memories of the Holocaust: Sabina Miller

'When I heard what happened to my father, I was alone. I cried for 24 hours'

One morning, four days ­before Christmas in 1942, Nazi soldiers went to the synagogue in the Polish town of Piotrków, where 560 Jews were crammed, and ­demanded that 50 strong men ­accompany them to the woods. The men were told to dig five pits and then shot. In one week in October, 22,000 Jews (out of a population of 25,000) had been sent from Piotrków to the Treblinka gas chambers, so the men were under no illusions what they were digging.

The following morning, the SS took the rest of the people in the synagogue in groups of 100 to the woods. They were told to undress next to the pits and then they were shot. Among the victims was Ben Helfgott's 37-year-old mother and his eight- year-old sister, Lusia.

Twelve-year-old Ben was working in a glass factory outside the ghetto and so regarded as "legitimate" by the Nazis. His 11-year-old sister, Mala, somehow escaped the roundup and his father had a permit to live in the Piotrków ghetto. But his mother and Lusia were seen as illegals and so went into hiding, fearing that they would be ­murdered. Then the Nazis offered illegals like Ben's mother asylum. It was a ruse, but she and Lusia came out of hiding and were held in the ­synagogue. It was hardly a place of sanctuary: for amusement, guards would shoot in through the windows, killing and wounding people.

Ben's father managed to get a permit for the release of his wife, but could not organise one for Lusia. He begged his wife to come home, but she refused. She wrote to her husband: "You look after the two children and I will have to look after the youngest one."

Nearly two years later, with the ­Russian army advancing across Poland, Ben and his father, along with 300 other Jewish men, were taken from ­Piotrków to Buchenwald concentration camp. It was the first of three concentration camps in which Ben was held during the war. Ben was 14 when he saw his father for the last time, before he was transferred from Buchenwald to Schlieben concentration camp, where hand-held anti-tank weapons were produced.

Memories of the Holocaust: Ben Helfgott

'They looked like ordinary railwaymen cramming people in. Why were they doing that?'

Two young Dutch men walked into a nursery school in Amsterdam one day in 1944 and asked for Martin Stern. The teacher told them he hadn't come in that day. "I put up my hand and said: 'But I am here.' Stern, now a retired immunologist, is recalling that fateful moment as dusk gathers outside his sitting room in Leicester. "The poor woman was trying to protect me. I'll never ­forget the look on her face as I was led away." He was ­arrested, aged five, ­because his father was a Jew.

Martin and his one-year-old sister Erica were taken to Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, where they were housed in wooden huts, each one crammed with as many as 800 people. "The food consisted of vegetables unfit for sale. Old runner beans that hadn't been stringed were nicknamed 'barbed wire' by the boys I was with because they were painful to eat."

Martin's parents were Germans who had fled to Holland before the war. His non-Jewish mother died in hospital shortly after giving birth to his sister. His father was hidden by courageous farmers near Amsterdam airport after the German invasion of Holland, only to be captured by Nazis after a shoot-out in which he apparently killed two of them. There is a photograph of ­Martin's father on the sitting room wall, taken before he left Germany. It shows a young, smartly dressed man with, you might think, a bright future. "As you can see, he was well-to-do," says Martin. "He died a skeleton of a man on 25 March 1945 in Buchenwald."

Martin and Erica were looked after by two separate Dutch families for two years before they were arrested. "I lived near the Anne Frank house," he says. After Martin's abduction from nursery school, Cathrien and Jo (short for ­Johannes) Rademakers, who had looked after Martin, were themselves arrested. For the crime of caring for a five-year-old Jewish orphan, Jo was sent to Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg, where he died. All his wife got back were his spectacles.

Memories of the Holocaust: Martin Stern

'We were prepared to die there but it turned out to be a mock execution - a piece of Nazi cruelty'

In Birmingham, after the war, ­people would ask Auschwitz ­survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon about the tattoo on her forearm: "Is that your boyfriend's telephone number?" "People simply knew nothing," says Kitty. "If I did say what happened to me and my mother, ­people would say: 'That sounds far fetched.' I would explain that I saw thousands walk into a gas chamber and never come out. But they could not get their heads round it. They found it impossible to comprehend that there was massacre on a huge scale, that thousands were murdered deliberately."

What was worse was that no one wanted to know. She and her mother had arrived at Dover in late 1946 to be met by her uncle, the husband of her mother's sister. "He said: 'I don't want you to talk about anything that happened to you. I don't want to know.' My mother and I became very angry at being silenced."

Did you ever receive counselling? Kitty favours me with a justifiable ­sardonic look as we sit in her living room in Harpenden, Hertfordshire. "Counselling? No. My mother and I sorted ourselves out by countless ­discussions about what had happened to us." Kitty wrote two books about her experiences: I Am Alive (1961) and Return to Auschwitz (1981). She also has made award-winning films about her return to the death camp and about her time after Auschwitz. Kitty, a ­retired radiographer, has been speaking for decades in schools, colleges, ­universities to all who are prepared to listen. In 2003 she received the OBE for her work on Holocaust education

She was born Kitty Felix in 1926 in ­Bielsko, a Polish town where Jews, Czechs, Poles and Germans mixed. She recalls a blissful sporty childhood with her brother Robert – hiking in the mountains in summer and skiing in winter. She was educated by nuns and was oblivious to antisemitism until she and her Jewish swimming team were stoned during a competition. A few days prior to Hitler's invasion on 1 September 1939, Kitty's family fled eastward to elude the Wehrmacht but were overtaken by the Nazis and became trapped in the Lublin ghetto. After many attempts, the family escaped and obtained non-Jewish documents.

Memories of the Holocaust: Kitty Hart-Moxon

[Liberation Angel]

1. never forget k&r

nt

[Skittles]

2. .

:cry:

(When I was a very young girl in England)

I was shopping with my grandmother and the lady in front of
us in line had a tattoo on her arm - I whispered to my grandma
Look! That lady has a tattoo! My grandmother dug her fingers
into my arm and dragged me away from the checkout and hissed
at me THAT LADY WAS IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP! This greatly
confused me as I thought of CAMP as, well, like SUMMER CAMP.

So grandma bought me the book of Anne Frank's diary - OMG it
made such an impression on me. When I asked her how people
could be so cruel she said, "I don't know. But we must never
forget." I think it is important that these stories get
recorded, lest people ever do forget. I think about it every
time I hear someone say, "If you're doing nothing wrong you
have nothing to worry about."

[Behind the Aegis]

9. Thank you for sharing your story.

When I was 9, we lived in Florida for a few months. We lived in a "hotel" (there are long-term hotels in FL). I was swimming one day and the older neighbor man was swimming too. I saw his arm and asked him what his "number" meant. He told me I should ask my parents and if they said it was OK, I could ask him again. My parents said I could ask him, but I had to listen and not ask questions until he was done talking. I knew about the Holocaust, but I really didn't know about the "tattoos." There were things never discussed in my family; that was one of them. So, Jim sat with me and my brother (my parents in the background), and he told me...

...when I was 11, they (the Nazis) came into my village (in Czechoslovakia). They started pulling villagers into the street and shooting them. They were Jews. I saw my neighbors, my friends, die in the street. My mother hid us. They left. Two days later, they came back. They killed more people. They came into our house. They took me, my sister (his sister was older), my mother, my father, and my grandfather (I think, I can't remember if it was grandfather or grandmother). We were loaded onto a train.

At this point, I interrupted him, and said "but you aren't Jewish." My mother yelled at me; "Shekehed!" It means "be quiet!" Though I knew not all victims were Jewish, I, at 11, assumed they were.

He continued, "We were taken to a camp, they made the boys go in one line, the girls in another. I never saw my mother or sister again. My father and I worked for two years before my father died. (I don't recall how he died.)It was another year before the Americans came. I got this number in that camp. Many people died there.

I can't remember which camp it was. I am not sure he even told me, but I knew what a "concentration camp" was. Jim was Catholic. The first Holocaust tattoo this young Jew saw was on the arm of a Catholic. There are many of us who are well aware that Jews weren't the only ones in the Holocaust.

[Skittles]

10. wow

incredibly compelling story - your parents very wise, like my grandmother - they didn't just brush us off - they mad sure we were educated. That man will forever be a priceless memory for you.

[Behind the Aegis]

11. Yes, he will be. And not just for that story.

Jim is also the one who introduced us to Walking Horse, his upstairs neighbor, a Cherokee (Seminoles are more prominent in FL, but he was there on a job). Jim told Chris (I think that was his American name) we were learning about history. That is when I learned the real history of "Indians" in this country. I got in trouble a few times in middle school in Georgia when I challenged what we learned about the "savages." Of course, I had NO idea at the time that I was 1/16th Cherokee. I didn't discover that fact until last year (adopted, in sorts). At least now I know why I have olive-colored skin (though, light). :)

[Skittles]

14. again, wow!

very interesting!

[Jim Sagle]

3. K & R.

[jonnyblitz]

4. K & r. nt

[Warren DeMontague]

5. K & R.

[Violet_Crumble]

6. An article and survivor accounts that everyone should read...

Thanks for posting it...

[Hekate]

7. KnR, Aegis. Thank you so much for this. nt

[KharmaTrain]

8. Thank You For Posting This...

I lost family in the Holcoust. In 1974 my mother went back to the little town in Poland where her mother had grown up. A century ago, population records (Russian) showed there were 20,000 Jews in the town...when my mother visited, there were only 2 left. I also have a large book of letters between my grandmother and her father, brother and aunt who had remained...the letters went from 1910 and then abruptly ended in 1939...none of them were ever heard from again.

In an earlier post, I noted that my grandmother once said "the Poles have anti-semetism in their mothers milk"...a cruel statement, but one from a person who witnessed Cossacks and her Polish "neighbors" regularly pillage her town. A major reason she fled for her life (getting repeately raped is no fun) and her hatred lasted the rest of her life...and this was before the Holocoust.

Yes, there were Catholic Poles who ended up in concentration camps, as well as Roma (Gypsies) and any and all political opponents. It's a crime that is still felt by millions of families all these years later. Sadly there have been other holocousts since and to dismiss any is to dehumanize the victims past and present.

This Bishop was caught talking "out of school", but also echoing a sentiment that some still hold in that and other countries...a combination of deniers and those who feel the Jews "deserved it". Not sure which one he is...not that it matters.

:hi:

Cheers!!

[demoleft]

12. k&r. to always remember. n/t

[H2O Man]

13. Recommended.

Thank you for posting this.

[rasputin1952]

15. All of the stories need to be told...and more importantly read and understood...

The depravity that human beings can reach is astounding.

I knew Survivors when I was growing up in NYC; they rarely spoke of the horror, I believe they did not want to relive those days where mere seconds could mean life or death...and they lived through that every minute of every day.

Documentation of these horror is one way to provide a way to help make sure these atrocities never take place again, on any scale. Incredibly, in various nations, genocide is still going on and it will only expand if we do make a stand.

I stand by those who would put an end to these travesties, I stand by the living and the dead...for only by remembrance, can we even hope to ensure this will never happen again.

An extended version of "Somewhere"; I believe the youngster with his hands up survived, and heard he became the "rabbi in chief(?)", of the State of Israel in 1993...but when I see the pictures that accompany this video, I am haunted by the reality that they were heading into the maw of a death machine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WjBuMQNqxs

ETA: From Comments in the video above:

agoldman60 (6 months ago)

Mr. Diner,

Thank you for sharing this with all. This hits a sensitive spot for me. There is a picture of a man and two little girls at the 3:15 minute mark. The man was my Grandfather and the girls of course are my Mother and Aunt. We just lost my Aunt a few months ago... God rest her soul !!! The main characters in the movie, Voyage of the Dammed were my Grandmother and Grandfather in real life...

Thanks again!!!

dvdcnl (10 months ago)

The boy with his hands up at 6.06 was the chief rabbi of Israel; Rabbi Israel Meir Lau.


I posted in that Comment thread as well, I had forgotten what I had written:

rasputin1952 (10 months ago)

This is the most haunting of all of the renditions of this song. Last hopes, dashed; the return to a fate yet unknown.
We all know what happened, and it must never happen again. May we all learn to stand up against the evil that brings such things about. Remember, above all else, we are all human and when any human suffers, we all suffer. The world is only as good as we make it, or as bad as we allow it to get. Stand against the hatred, stand against the injustice.


Never Again!

[jacksonian]

16. i once saw the documentary "Shoah"

if anyone hasn't heard of this, it's a multi-hour film of stories by holocaust victims and other witnesses, very moving and highly recommended. One of the main features of the film was the filmmakers took several of the victims back to the sites of Nazi concentration camps to get their reactions.

It's been many years since I've seen the documentary, but one story and it's telling has always stuck with me. In one of the early camps in Poland, there was a young Jewish boy who managed to get trusted by the guards enough to be allowed into town regularly to get supplies. He would pole a raft down the river, and while he was doing this he would sing with a beautiful tenor voice. He made frequent trips into town, and everybody in the town knew about him and the singing.

When the Russians were about to liberate the camp, the Nazis took all the prisoners out and shot them, including the boy who was shot in the head but miraculously survived. Now living in Israel, the filmmakers took him back to the town in Poland. There is an amazing scene of the boy, now an old man, and a crowd of townspeople who were there during the camp's operation.

The filmmaker asks these townspeople if they remembered the boy who sang on the river. "Oh yes", everyone did, and people started talking about how they still recall him and how beautiful he was poling up and down the river. The filmmaker then introduces the man - "this is that boy, right here" - and they're all amazed, happy to see him, and eager to shake his hand.

After some more talk the off-screen filmmaker quietly asks a question of the townspeople - "Why do you think the Nazis did these things to the Jews?", and after some hemming and hawing it all started tumbling out. "Christ-killers", "evil bankers", etc. One man claimed that, just before the war, he had heard a rabbi speaking to Jews about how evil the Jews were, and how they deserved all these things happening to them because they hated Jesus. They were speaking to the camera and filmmaker, caught up in the moment and forgot this man was even there.

But he was. He stood in the center of the group stoically while this was being said, his eyes getting further and further away. The townspeople got quite passionate about the deservedness of Jewish pogroms, and you could just see the man dying inside with every word - it devastated me, but this man had more courage than I would have. He said nothing and let them talk. Afterwards the filmmaker re-introduced the man, and immediately all the cruelty was gone and once again everyone was jovial and glad-handed, as if nothing had happened. And that was the image that has always stayed with me, the man, once a boy, standing in middle of the crowd listening to all that caused the whole holocaust in the first place.

Without compassion, we are not human.

[emilyg]

17. Thank you.