Children in the Holocaust - The Holocaust Today

Around one and a half million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust. The figure includes children of Roma and Sinti families, the children selected for the T4 euthanasia programme and its successor child-killing wards, and the children of Soviet prisoners of war who were murdered with their parents. The Jewish figure alone, the figure of one and a half million, is the figure that has carried the weight in the postwar memory. Eleven memorial sites display the figure on their walls.

The catastrophe killed Jewish children disproportionately because the Final Solution was indifferent to age. The death camp selections at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the gassings at Belżec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chełmno took children straight to the gas chambers. The Einsatzgruppen massacres in the east in 1941 and 1942 took children at the pit edges. Some pits, in the words of the Soviet investigators of 1944, were filled with children alone after the adults had been shot. The German municipal records of the major eastern killings, Babi Yar in Kiev, Ponary outside Vilna, the ravines around Riga, the Romanian-organised killings at Bogdanivka and Domanevka, all show that the children went with the parents and that no separate accounting was kept because none was needed.

The Theresienstadt children’s home, the Heim, was the largest concentrated population of Jewish children kept alive for any length of time. Around fifteen thousand children passed through Theresienstadt between 1941 and 1945. Around one hundred and fifty survived. The teachers in the children’s home, including the artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, ran an underground curriculum of drawing, music, mathematics and Hebrew. Dicker-Brandeis taught the children to draw and saved their drawings in two suitcases in the attic of one of the children’s blocks. After her own deportation to Auschwitz in October 1944, where she was murdered, the suitcases were preserved by other inmates and recovered after the war. Around four thousand of the drawings survive. They are held now at the Jewish Museum in Prague and have been exhibited around the world. The drawings are the most direct surviving record we have of the inner lives of children in the catastrophe.

The Hidden Children, the Jewish children placed by their parents with non-Jewish families or in convents and monasteries to escape deportation, may have numbered as many as ten thousand across western Europe. The Netherlands had the largest single hidden-children network, organised by the Dutch student resistance, the Westerweel Group and the LO, the National Organisation for Help to People in Hiding. Around four thousand Jewish children were placed in Dutch hiding addresses; around three thousand survived. France had a smaller network organised by the OSE, Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, which placed around five thousand Jewish children in convents, farms and Protestant villages, including Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Belgium ran a similar network. The children survived the war and then faced, in many cases, a second catastrophe: parents who did not return, false identities they had absorbed, religious conversions that some had embraced and that their parents, if alive, would not accept.

The Kindertransport from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to Britain in late 1938 and 1939 brought around ten thousand Jewish children to safety in the months between Kristallnacht and the outbreak of war. The British government had agreed to admit the children on temporary visas without their parents, who in most cases were not given visas. Most of the parents were murdered. The Kindertransport children grew up in British foster families, hostels and farms. Some, including Lord Alf Dubs, became prominent in postwar British public life. The case of the Kindertransport is, by some way, the largest single rescue of Jewish children in the Holocaust. Britain admitted them. The United States, which considered a similar programme in the Wagner-Rogers Bill of 1939, did not pass it.

The medical experiments of Mengele at Auschwitz used children, and twins in particular, as a regular subject group. Around fifteen hundred sets of twins, almost all Jewish, passed through Mengele’s hands. Around two hundred and fifty individuals from those sets, mostly children, survived the war. The accounts of those survivors, given in adulthood, are some of the worst documents in the literature of the catastrophe.

The diary of Anne Frank, written between June 1942 and August 1944 in the secret annexe in Amsterdam, has become the single best-known document by a child of the Holocaust. The diary is the case where a single voice has carried the catastrophe to a worldwide audience. Anne Frank died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in late February or early March 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated. She was fifteen. The diary’s reception is not a substitute for the catastrophe itself; if anything, it has become, for some readers, a way of feeling that the case has been understood when in fact it has barely been opened. The other one and a half million children left no diaries. They are the silent ones. The Theresienstadt drawings, the testimony of the hidden children, the post-war searches for the parents who never came, are the small body of work that stands in for the much larger absence.

See also

Sources

Debrá ka Hahnov́ a et al., eds., I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942, 1944, Jewish Museum Prague, multiple editions
Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, Yale University Press, 1991
Anne Frank, Het Achterhuis, Contact, 1947; The Diary of a Young Girl, Doubleday, 1952
Eva Mozes Kor, Surviving the Angel of Death, Tanglewood, 2009, on the Mengele twins
Bertha Leverton and Shmuel Lowensohn, eds., I Came Alone: Stories of the Kindertransports, Book Guild, 1990
Mark Jonathan Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, Bloomsbury, 2000
Sarah Pinchas, The Hidden Children: The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust, Penguin, 1994