Interned, starved, murdered


To avoid death, many children took on the role of provider in their families. There were numerous children begging in the streets of Warsaw. When even that no longer brought in enough money, they risked their lives smuggling food into the ghetto from the part of the city that had been declared »Aryan« – knowing full well that they would be shot if they were caught.

What the children experienced in the Warsaw ghetto has been handed down in the documents of the Ringelblum archive. The historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-1944) and his helpers collected a wide variety of documents in order to inform posterity about the Nazis’ policy of extermination and the hardship in the ghetto. Part of the archive is an essay by the then 13-year-old Zanwel Krigman. In 1942, the boy wrote about the subject of »How our family fared«: »Once a gendarme wanted to take my provisions away and asked me what I would prefer: 30 beatings or giving up the smuggled goods. I replied, the 30 hits – he released me.« Zanwel took care of his mother until she died »of starvation in March 1942«. “And this hunger in Warsaw, and the transition to the ‘other side’, always these shots, the Junaks, the Germans, there was enough fear.”

How the »Birkenau Boys« Survived Auschwitz

From 1942, the Germans began deporting people from the Warsaw, Theresienstadt and Łódź ghettos to extermination camps. In one of the overcrowded wagons was Yehuda Bacon, then 14 years old. In 1943 he was taken to the so-called “family camp” of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a propaganda model camp for Czech Jews from the “Theresienstadt ghetto”. Once there, the families initially stayed together. But it was only a brief respite: after six months, most of the inmates were murdered in the gas chambers.

© WHA / United Archives / picture alliance (detail)

Help | When a man collapsed in the middle of the Warsaw ghetto, a boy rushed to help. The photo was taken in 1941.

Bacon, who is a well-known artist today, survived Auschwitz and the death march to the west – by chance and through close ties in a group of boys of the same age from Theresienstadt who were later named the “Birkenau Boys”. Bacon says: »We were like brothers. If one was weak, two of us would grab him under his arms because whoever got stuck and fell behind was shot.” ​​What gave the boys the edge, Bacon says, was their mutual support in a hostile environment where otherwise everyone fought for themselves.

How should one imagine Auschwitz in the eyes of a child? The sources for this are thin. It was almost impossible for the children in the concentration camps to keep a diary or write letters. However, the later narratives of inmates like Bacon provide insight. In an interview with the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem, he described the following: »The children had fun looking at the numbers [der Häftlinge] to notice. You know, even under these conditions, kids are still kids, with humor and all that.”

Just as the children integrated the horrifying reality of the Warsaw ghetto into their games and imaginations, the youngest in Auschwitz also transferred their experiences into imaginary worlds. According to reports, the smaller ones played »gas chamber« for example. To do this, they threw stones into a pit designed to represent a gas chamber and then imitated the screams of the people. In the game of roll call, the older ones slipped into the roles of SS or kapo and hit the younger ones because they claimed they had collapsed. They mimicked doctors stealing food and refusing to help inmates because they couldn’t pay the doctors. Yehuda Bacon and his friends outdid each other at the sight of the crematoria with seemingly fearless, death-defying remarks, commenting over white smoke: “This time it’s fat people.”



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