The file is 14.2 MB, fyi.

When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children.

Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as “parasitic vermin” worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. All of Europe’s Jews were slated for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religiously orthodox and converts to Christianity, the aged and the young, even infants.

Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, however, many because they were hidden. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas, and danger. Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.

When World War II began in September 1939, there were approximately 1.6 million Jewish children living in the territories that the German armies or their allies would occupy. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, more than 1 million and perhaps as many as 1.5 million Jewish children were dead, targeted victims in the Nazis’ calculated program of genocide. As Warsaw ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in 1942, “Even in the most barbaric times, a human spark glowed in the rudest heart, and children were spared. But the Hitlerian beast is quite different. It would devour the dearest of us, those who arouse the greatest compassion—our innocent children.” Liberation from Nazi tyranny brought no end to the sufferings of the few Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. Many would face the future without parents, grandparents, or siblings.

Persecution

The Nazi persecution of Jews began in Germany in 1933. By 1939, the country’s Jews had been systematically deprived of their civil rights and property and ostracized from the national community. German conquests in Europe after 1939 led to the implementation of antisemitic policies in the occupied territories. Though the pace and severity of persecution differed in each country, Jews were marked, vilified, and segregated from their neighbors. “…HAVING TO WEAR THE YELLOW STAR WAS THE MOMENT WHEN DEEP FEAR AND MISERY FINALLY TOOK HOLD.” — Beatrice Muchman, Jewish child, Belgium

In eastern Europe, the Nazis generally isolated Jews in ghettos, which often were established in the most desolate sections of a city or town. In western Europe, internment camps, many of which had been set up earlier to house refugees and enemy aliens, served as detention centers for Jews. Such policies of isolation aided the Nazis when they began mass shootings and deportations to the killing centers.

Death

Hitler made the decision in 1941 to carry out the systematic mass murder of Jews. Mobile killing squads followed the German army into the Soviet Union in June 1941, and by the end of the year, murdered almost 1 million Jewish men, women, and children. That December, the Chelmno killing center began operation. During 1942, the Nazis established five more death camps to carry out the gassing of Europe’s Jews. All Jews were targeted for death, but the mortality rate for children was especially high. Only 6 to 11% of Europe’s prewar Jewish population of children survived as compared with 33% of the adults. The young generally were not selected for forced labor, and the Nazis often carried out “children’s actions” to reduce the number of “useless eaters” in the ghettos. In the camps, children, the elderly, and pregnant women routinely were sent to the gas chambers immediately after arrival.

Liberation

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the world learned of the staggering human toll of the Holocaust. Few Jewish children survived. In killing centers and concentration camps across Europe, systematic murder, abuse, disease, and medical experiments took many lives. Of the estimated 216,000 Jewish youngsters deported to Auschwitz, only 6,700 teenagers were selected for forced labor; nearly all the others were sent directly to the gas chambers. When the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops found just 451 Jewish children among the 9,000 surviving prisoners. Soon after liberation, Jewish agencies throughout Europe began tracing survivors and measuring communal losses. In the Low Countries, perhaps some 9,000 Jewish children survived. Of the almost 1 million Jewish children in 1939 Poland, only about 5,000 survived. Most of these youngsters survived in hiding.

The vast majority of Jews in German-occupied Europe never went into hiding, for many reasons. Hiding meant leaving behind relatives, risking immediate and severe punishment, and finding an individual or family willing to provide refuge. Many Jews, no doubt, held out the hope that the threat of death would pass or that they could survive until the Allied victory. Sadly, the willingness or ability of the non-Jewish populations to rescue Jewish lives never matched the Nazis’ vehement desire to destroy them. Even in countries where hatred for the German occupiers ran deep, anti-Nazism did not necessarily generate aid for Jews. The Nazis portrayed the Jews as carriers of contagion, as criminals, or as “Bolshevik” agents anxious to subvert European society. The Nazis further discouraged rescue by threatening severe penalties for those caught helping Jews.

Parents, children, and rescuers faced daunting challenges once the decision was made to go into hiding. Some children could pass as non-Jews and live openly. Those who could not had to live clandestinely, often in attics or cellars. Children posing as Christians had to carefully conceal their Jewish identity from inquisitive neighbors, classmates, informers, blackmailers, and the police. Even a momentary lapse in language or behavior could expose the child, and the rescuer, to danger. Living as a non-Jew required false identity papers, which were difficult to obtain in German-occupied Europe and were subject to frequent review by the authorities. Over the course of the war, children often had to move from one refuge to another. For the children who had to leave their parents behind, the emotional pangs of separation were constant and the worries many.

False Papers

For Jews to pass as “Aryans,” it was essential to have false identity papers, which were often gained through contacts with the anti-Nazi resistance. Using forged or acquired papers, such as a birth or baptismal certificate, Jews sometimes could obtain legitimate documents under an assumed name from the authorities. These ruses posed great risks to the bearer since the Germans and collaborating police forces closely examined identity documents in their frequent searches for Jews, resistance members, and individuals evading conscript labor. “I HAD TO KEEP MY JEWISHNESS HIDDEN, SECRET, NEVER TO BE REVEALED ON PENALTY OF DEATH. I MISSED OUT ON MY CHILDHOOD AND THE BEST OF MY ADOLESCENT YEARS. I WAS ROBBED OF MY NAME, MY RELIGION, MY ZIONIST IDEALISM.” — Regine Donner, Jewish child in hiding in Belgium

Hiding Places

Not all Jewish children could pass as “Aryans” and enjoy relative freedom of movement on the outside. Those who “looked Jewish,” did not speak the local language, or whose presence in a rescuer’s family raised too many questions had to be physically hidden. Children were kept in cellars and attics, where they had to keep quiet, even motionless, for hours on end. In rural areas, hidden children lived in barns, chicken coops, and forest huts. Any noise—conversation, footsteps—could arouse neighbors’ suspicion and perhaps even prompt a police raid. During bombings, Jewish children had to remain hidden, unable to flee to the safety of shelters. Under these conditions, the children often suffered from a lack of human interaction and endured boredom and fear.

Circumcision

In a tradition dating back to the biblical patriarch Abraham, infant male Jews have been ritually circumcised as a sign of the Jewish people’s covenant with God. Even during the bleakest days of Nazi persecution, Jews tried to observe this practice. Because non-Jews in continental Europe generally were not circumcised, German and collaborationist police commonly checked males apprehended in raids. For boys attempting to hide their Jewish identity, using a public restroom or participating in sports could lead to their discovery. More rarely, they underwent painful procedures to disguise the mark of circumcision or even dressed as girls.

Hiding under a Different Religion

Thousands of Jewish children survived the Holocaust because they were protected by people and institutions of other faiths. Dozens of Catholic convents in German-occupied Poland independently took in Jewish youngsters. Belgian Catholics hid hundreds of children in their homes, schools, and orphanages, and French Protestant townspeople in and around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered several thousand Jews. In Albania and Yugoslavia, some Muslim families concealed youngsters. Children quickly learned to master the prayers and rituals of their “adopted” religion in order to keep their Jewish identity hidden from even their closest friends. Many Jewish youngsters were baptized into Christianity, with or without the consent of their parents.

Multiple Rescuers

Finding a rescuer was quite difficult, particularly one who would take care of his or her charges for a period of years. Some individuals took advantage of a persecuted family’s desperation by collecting money, then reneging on their promise of aid—or worse, turning them over to the authorities for an additional reward. More commonly, stress, anguish, and fear drove benefactors to turn out the Jewish children from their homes.

Organized rescue groups frequently moved youngsters from one family or institution to another to ensure the safety of both the child and the foster parent. In the German-occupied Netherlands, Jewish children stayed in an average of more than four different places; some changed hiding places more than a dozen times.

Separation from Family

Among the most painful memories for hidden children was their separation from parents, grandparents, and siblings. For a variety of reasons—the lack of space, the inability or unwillingness of a rescuer to take in an entire family, or the decision of the parents not to abandon other family members in the ghetto—many Jewish children went into hiding alone. In France, for instance, the OSE (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, “Children’s Aid Society”) was able to smuggle children, but not their parents, out of internment camps. Separation tormented both parents and children. Each feared for the other’s safety and was powerless to do anything about it. Youngster and parent often had to bear their grief in silence so as not to jeopardize the safety of the other. For many hidden children, the wartime separation became permanent.

Security

A hidden child’s safety and security demanded strict secrecy. Foster families created elaborate explanations for the presence of a new face in their home, identifying the child as a distant relative, friend, or surviving member of a bombed-out household. Convents and orphanages withheld youngsters’ Jewish identities from documents, classmates, and staff. Organized rescue groups frequently moved children around and kept records in code to prevent their charges’ discovery. In some rescue networks, parents were not permitted to contact their children or know their whereabouts. The children themselves well understood the need for security. They kept away from situations where their true identity might be exposed, held fast to their false names and religion, and avoided mannerisms or language that might be construed as “Jewish” or foreign.

Abuse

Jewish children who lived in hiding generally were treated well by their rescuers. But not all youngsters had such experiences. Because they could not turn to local authorities for help or were afraid of being turned out, some children had to endure physical or sexual abuse by their “protectors.” Studies conducted in the Netherlands estimate that more than 80% of the hidden children interviewed were treated well by their rescuers, while 15% were occasionally mistreated, and some 5% were treated badly.

The ruthlessness of Nazi rule and the barbarities of war forced some children to mature beyond their years. One child survivor described them as “old people with children’s faces, without a trace of joy, happiness, or childish innocence.” Adapting to their abnormal circumstances, Jewish boys and girls in hiding improvised games, took advantage of the scant educational opportunities available, and eked out a precarious existence through their own labor. The daily experiences of hidden children varied, depending upon whether they could live openly and perhaps attend school and socialize with others their age, or had to be physically concealed. For those who were not permitted to journey outside, life in hiding was often filled with pain, torment, and boredom. Reading, playing, and creative expression could help to fill seemingly endless hours and temporarily divert the child’s attention from his or her desperate situation.

Toys and Play

Play is an essential part of a child’s life experience, fostering creativity, social interaction, and mental development. Even in the ghettos and concentration camps, Jewish children sought solace in games. For hidden children who often had few personal belongings, toys took on special meaning. They could help forge a bond between the children and rescuers or reaffirm a tie to their missing parents or family. Just as importantly, playthings and games helped to restore some semblance of normal childhood to youngsters living under abnormal circumstances.

Education

Since ancient times, education has been an important element of Jewish culture. As Germany took control of Europe, however, opportunities for Jews to attend schools and universities were initially limited severely and eventually eliminated entirely.

For “Aryan”-looking school-age children in hiding, the routines of going to class and studying helped to restore some sense of normality in their lives, and perhaps their new-made friends gave them much needed solace. Children who were physically concealed had few opportunities for formal study, but when possible, they too tried to educate themselves through reading and writing.

Work

Jewish hidden children frequently shared in their foster families’ household chores and work responsibilities. In rural areas, they often tended animals and helped with planting and harvesting crops. In urban settings, Jewish children worked in factories or sold foodstuffs or other items on the open and black markets. In some cases, older youths fled to the forests to eke out an existence or to join the partisans in combating the Nazis.

Clothing

As Jews were forced to move into ghettos or were deported to concentration camps, the Nazis deprived them of most of their possessions by drastically limiting the amount of moveable property that they could take. Once the Jews were moved, the Nazis then restricted the flow of goods to them.

Children who went into hiding had to move quickly and inconspicuously and as a consequence, were forced to leave behind even the few possessions they owned. Most took little more than the clothes on their backs. Due to wartime shortages, obtaining new clothing was generally difficult, so rescuers made children’s clothing from scraps or dressed the youngsters in hand-me-down garments.

Throughout the Holocaust, Jewish artists and writers poignantly documented their experiences in camps, ghettos, forests, and hiding places. While the opportunities and materials to express their joys, pain, longings, anger, and sorrows in literary and artistic creations were severely limited, an impressive body of work, done by adults as well as children, has survived, even if the creators did not. Though it will never be known how many Jewish children recorded their thoughts in writing, art, or music, dozens of diaries, hundreds of drawings, and some poems and songs have been preserved to provide a tiny glimpse into their personal worlds, leaving a lasting legacy of both their oppression and resilience.

Artwork

Jews of all ages across Europe produced thousands of paintings, drawings, and collages during the Holocaust. Works were made at the behest of Nazi overlords or initiated by relief agencies in internment camps or by Jewish functionaries in the ghettos. Many were secretly done in concentration camps. The resultant artworks reflect the Jews’ life experiences and are infused with despair, anger, or more rarely, hope. The drawings displayed here are a study in contrasts. One set of images was created by a boy living as a non-Jew in France, where he was able to sketch nature and town in situ. For the second, a girl hidden in a Lvov apartment drew from her memories or from the glimpses of life she witnessed through her window.

Diaries

Diaries, among the most intimate forms of writing, record innermost thoughts, hopes, fears, and aspirations. They generally are not meant for the public or prying eyes. For a hidden child, however, a diary’s personal nature presented a serious danger. A detail about one’s real family or identity could betray its author as well as his or her rescuer. While not all hidden children were able or allowed to keep diaries, those that exist offer a fascinating glance into the mind and experiences of these youths.

Life in hiding was always hazardous. Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Nazis made a concerted effort to locate Jews in hiding. German officials and their collaborators harshly penalized those who aided Jews and offered rewards to individuals willing to turn in Jews. Beginning in March 1943, the Gestapo (the German secret state police) granted some Jews in Germany reprieve from deportation in exchange for tracking down their co-religionists who had gone underground. By spring 1945, when the Nazi regime lay in ruins, these informers had turned in as many as 2,000 Jews. In other countries, neighbors betrayed others for money or out of support for the regime. In German-occupied Poland, blackmailers squeezed money or property from Jews by threatening to turn them in to the authorities. “THEY ARE LISTENING FOR US. … THE DOG SNIFFS AND SNIFFS AND EVEN STICKS ITS HEAD INTO OUR TENT. … WE LIVE THROUGH HOURS OF TERROR.” — Otto Wolf, September 10, 1942

Jews in hiding were discovered by chance during raids seeking conscripts for forced labor, resistance cells, black marketers, or by random searches of documents. A slip of the tongue, improperly prepared false documents, or gossip could lead to arrest and deportation.

When the war ended in 1945, the surviving remnant of Europe’s Jews immediately began the difficult and painful search for family members. Parents sought out the children they had placed in convents, orphanages, or with foster families. Local Jewish committees in Europe tried to register the living and account for the dead. Tracing services set up by the International Red Cross and Jewish relief organizations aided the searches, but often the quests were protracted because the Nazis, the war, and the mass relocations of populations in central and eastern Europe had displaced millions of people. The quest for family was much more than a search for relatives. It often involved some traumatic soul searching for children to rediscover their true identity. Those who had been infants when they were placed into hiding had no recollection of their biological parents or knowledge of their Jewish origins. The only family that most had known was that of their rescuers. Consequently, when relatives or Jewish organizations discovered them, they were typically apprehensive and sometimes resistant to yet another change. “I HAD BEEN SEPARATED FROM MY MOTHER SO LONG THAT MOTHER DIDN’T MEAN ANYTHING TO ME.” — Renee Fritz, Jewish child hidden in Belgium

When the war ended in 1945, the surviving remnant of Europe’s Jews immediately began the difficult and painful search for family members. Parents sought out the children they had placed in convents, orphanages, or with foster families. Local Jewish committees in Europe tried to register the living and account for the dead. Tracing services set up by the International Red Cross and Jewish relief organizations aided the searches, but often the quests were protracted because the Nazis, the war, and the mass relocations of populations in central and eastern Europe had displaced millions of people.

The quest for family was much more than a search for relatives. It often involved some traumatic soul searching for children to rediscover their true identity. Those who had been infants when they were placed into hiding had no recollection of their biological parents or knowledge of their Jewish origins. The only family that most had known was that of their rescuers. Consequently, when relatives or Jewish organizations discovered them, they were typically apprehensive and sometimes resistant to yet another change.

“I HAD BEEN SEPARATED FROM MY MOTHER SO LONG THAT MOTHER DIDN’T MEAN ANYTHING TO ME.”
— Renee Fritz, Jewish child hidden in Belgium

Search for Family

As areas were liberated from German rule, Jewish organizations rushed in to locate survivors and reunite families. In place after place, they faced the devastation wrought by the Holocaust. In Lódz, Poland, for example, the Nazis had reduced a prewar Jewish population of more than 220,000 to less than 1,000. Following the war, Jewish parents often spent months and years searching for the children they had sent into hiding. In fortunate instances, they found their offspring with the original rescuer. Many, however, resorted to tracing services, newspaper notices, and survivor registries in the hope of finding their children. Time and again, the search for family ended in tragedy. For parents, it was the discovery that their child had been killed or disappeared. For hidden children, it was the revelation that there were no surviving family members to reclaim them.

Custody Battles and Orphans

In hundreds of cases, rescuers refused to release hidden children to their families or Jewish organizations. Some demanded that the child be “redeemed” through financial remuneration. Others had grown attached to their charges and did not want to give them up. In the more difficult cases, courts had to decide to whom to award custody of the child. Some rescuers defied court decisions and hid the children for a second time. The future of the thousands of orphaned Jewish children became a pressing matter. In the Netherlands, more than half of the 4,000 to 6,000 surviving Jewish children were declared “war foster children” (Oorlogspleegkinderen), and most were placed under a state committee’s guardianship. The vast majority were returned to a surviving family member or a Jewish organization, but more than 300 were given to non-Jewish families.

Torn Identity

Parents, relatives, or representatives of Jewish organizations who came to reclaim the children often encountered ambivalence, antagonism, and sometimes resistance. After years of concealing their true identity, Jewishness for some hidden Jewish children had come to symbolize persecution while Christianity stood for security. Some children even repeated antisemitic phrases learned from classmates and adults. Those who had been too young to remember their parents knew only their adopted family, religion, and often nationality. Many truly loved their foster families and refused to be given into the arms of a “stranger.” In a few instances, some youngsters had to be physically taken from their foster families. For a number of hidden children, the war’s end did not bring an end to the traumatic experiences.

Preserving Memory

Immediately after the war, Holocaust survivors began to document the Nazis’ crimes against the Jewish people, record their experiences, and memorialize those who were killed. The efforts were often painful journeys into the recent past. By 1948, Jewish organizations in Poland, Hungary, and Germany had compiled more than 10,000 written testimonies.

Hundreds of former hidden children recounted the especially difficult pain of their survival. Many sought to recover a past that the Nazis had stolen from them—families they had never known or were only distant memories, even their own given names. Others were shocked to learn of being Jewish. By delving into the shadowy recesses of their former lives, these special survivors preserve the memory of parents who bore them, rescuers who saved them, and a time that threatened to engulf them.

Quest for family (Exhibition video)

***************

The Final Solution

HOLOCAUST – Source

The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous” groups either as part of the “racial struggle” or as a measure of preventative security. The Germans and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.

The Germans and their collaborators killed as many as 1.5 million children. This number included over a million Jewish children and tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children, German children with physical and mental disabilities living in institutions Polish children, and children residing in the occupied Soviet Union. Some Jewish and some non-Jewish adolescents (13-18 years old) had a greater chance of survival, as they could be used for forced labor.

The fates of Jewish and non-Jewish children can be categorized in the following ways:

1) children killed when they arrived in killing centers
2) children killed immediately after birth or in institutions
3) children born in ghettos and camps who survived because prisoners hid them
4) children, usually over age 12, who were used as laborers and as subjects of medical experiments
5) children killed during reprisal operations or so-called anti-partisan operations.

In the Ghettos

In the ghettos, Jewish children died from starvation, exposure, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to this mass death. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities generally selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.

In the Killing Centers

Camp authorities sent the majority of children directly to the gas chambers upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers. SS and police forces in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union shot thousands of children at the edge of mass graves.

Sometimes the selection of children to fill the first transports to the killing centers or to provide the first victims of shooting operations resulted from the agonizing and controversial decisions of Jewish council (Judenrat) chairmen. The decision by the Judenrat in Lodz in September 1942 to deport children to the Chelmno killing center was an example of the tragic choices made by adults when faced with German demands. Janusz Korczak, director of an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, however, refused to abandon the children under his care when they were selected for deportation. He accompanied them on the transport to the Treblinka killing center and into the gas chambers, sharing their fate.

Non-Jewish Children

Non-Jewish children from certain targeted groups were not spared. Examples include Romani (Gypsy) children killed in Auschwitz; 5,000 to 7,000 children killed as victims of the “euthanasia” program; children murdered in reprisals, including most of the children of Lidice; and children in villages in the occupied Soviet Union who were killed with their parents.

In Concentration and Transit Camps

The German authorities also incarcerated a number of children in concentration camps and transit camps. SS physicians and medical researchers used a number of children, including twins, in concentration camps for medical experiments that often resulted in the deaths of the children. Concentration camp authorities deployed adolescents, particularly Jewish adolescents, at forced labor in the concentration camps, where many died because of conditions.

The German authorities held other children under appalling conditions in transit camps, including Anne Frank and her sister in Bergen-Belsen, and non-Jewish orphaned children whose parents the German military and police units had killed in so-called anti-partisan operations. Some of these orphans were held temporarily in the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp and other detention camps.

In Occupied Poland and the Occupied Soviet Union

In their “search to retrieve ‘Aryan blood,’” SS race experts ordered hundreds of children in occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union to be kidnapped and transferred to the Reich. The children were to be adopted by racially suitable German families. Although the basis for these decisions was “race-scientific,” often blond hair, blue eyes, or fair skin was sufficient to merit the “opportunity” to be “Germanized.”

“Race experts” also determined whether a child would have sufficient German blood. This occurred in situations where female Poles and Soviet civilians who had been deported to Germany for forced labor became pregnant after sexual relations (often under duress) with a German man. If the “race experts” determined that the child would not have enough German blood, the women were forced to have abortions or to bear their children under conditions that would ensure the infant’s death.

Resistance and Rescue

In spite of their acute vulnerability, many children discovered ways to survive. Children smuggled food and medicines into the ghettos, after smuggling personal possessions to trade for them out of the ghettos. Children in youth movements later participated in underground resistance activities. Many children escaped with parents or other relatives—and sometimes on their own—to family camps run by Jewish partisans.

Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) was the informal name of a rescue effort between 1938 and 1940 which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children (without their parents) to safety in Great Britain from Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories.

Some non-Jews hid Jewish children and sometimes, as in the case of Anne Frank, hid other family members as well. In France, almost the entire Protestant population of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, as well as many Catholic priests, nuns, and lay Catholics, hid Jewish children in the town from 1942 to 1944. In Italy and Belgium, many children survived in hiding.

After the War

After the surrender of Nazi Germany, ending World War II, refugees and displaced persons searched throughout Europe for missing children. Thousands of orphaned children were in displaced persons camps. Many surviving Jewish children fled eastern Europe as part of the mass exodus (Brihah) to the western zones of occupied Germany, en route to the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine). Through Youth Aliyah (Youth Immigration), thousands migrated to the Yishuv, and then to the state of Israel after its establishment in 1948.

*************

This Orphanage Did More Than Find Homes for Children of the Holocaust. It Helped Them Reclaim Their Humanity

Run by the United Nations, Kloster Indersdorf took a revolutionary approach in caring for its charges

By Carrie Hagen SMITHSONIANMAG.COM
MARCH 14, 2017

In the last days of World War II, as Allied forces pushed further and further into Nazi Germany, Erwin Farkas awoke alongside his brother inside a village barn —his first shelter in weeks—to a commotion. Outside, near the German border with Czechoslovakia, American tanks rumbled over a nearby hill. Nazi officers were nowhere in sight. Erwin ran toward the tanks with others, scrambling to catch chocolate that the American soldiers threw towards them. General George S. Patton’s troops had arrived.

For Erwin and his brother, Zoltan, freedom brought uncertainty. “What we wanted,” remembers Erwin, now 88 and a retired clinical psychologist living in Minnesota, “was to get out of Germany. It was a dark place for us.”  Hungarian fascists had deported their father, a leader in their Transylvanian village, and the brothers became separated from their mother and younger sisters at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1944.  They assumed the Nazis had killed their family. Erwin and Zoltan – ages 15 and 17, respectively – moved as forced laborers to Buna, Oranienburg, then Flossenburg before the SS forced them and thousands of others on the Death March to Dachau.  For weeks, the brothers marched at night in lines of five across as officers shot those too exhausted, ill, or hungry to carry on. During the day, they had to hide in the woods, or in their case, an abandoned barn.

But even with freedom, they still had no parents, no possessions, and no place to call home. Millions of displaced children, teenagers and adults shared their predicament, but Erwin and Zoltan were fortunate, finding hope at a place called Kloster Indersdorf, a unique orphanage that became a model for how to humanely treat those who had witnessed humanity at its worst.

******

In 1943, the United Nations estimated that 21 million people were displaced in Europe and established the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to assist the refugees driven from their homeland either by force or necessity. Coordinating with the Allies, UNRRA sent more than 300 teams of skilled workers and volunteers throughout European and Asian territories to seek, organize and care for those displaced populations.

As liberators and relief workers encountered refugees, they placed them temporarily in Displaced Persons camps, where survivors of all ages sought out family members, if they were still alive, and identified where they might live next. Between 1945 and 1948, UNRRA repatriated approximately 6 million displaced people from Central Europe, including about 50,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.

In April 1945, the first UNRRA team entered the American zone of Germany, where agency representatives would eventually register between 6,000 and 7,000 displaced children, teenagers, and young adults considered “lost” amidst the ravages of war. Both Jews and non-Jews, the “unaccompanied” included survivors of concentration camps, forced child laborers, and children taken from or abandoned by forced adult laborers.  Most of these young people lived among adults in Displaced Persons camps, but the Farkas brothers, were fortunate to find a much more suitable temporary home in Kloster Indersdorf.

In July, not far from the Dachau death camp, 11 United Nations workers established a pilot project: the first international displaced persons camp devoted to children in the American zone of Germany.  In a former monastery (Kloster) in the village of Markt Indersdorf, the Sisters of Mercy of Saint Vincent de Paul had operated an orphanage until the Nazis commandeered and closed the facility. The UNRRA charged its own Team 182 with reopening Kloster Indersdorf with the expectation that they could help 75-100 youth.

Within two months of operation, however, the team had already hosted double that number. Between 1945 and 1948, the International Displaced Person Children’s Center at Kloster Indersdorf  as it was officially named, would become home to more than 1,000 child and adolescent refugees.  Team 182’s methodology and level of care was so successful that Kloster Indersdorf served as a model center for at least five others like it in Europe.

*****

Anna Andlauer, a German Fulbright fellow and retired teacher, has spent nearly a decade tracing the orphans of Kloster Indersdorf. She has found over 50. In her book The Rage to Live, she tells the history of the children’s center, detailing the UNRRA team’s commitment “to give each child a feeling of security along with an understanding that he or she was desired and loved.” Andlauer’s research has brought particular attention to a post-war hero, a social welfare officer named Greta Fischer.

Under Fischer’s eye, Team 182 organized the orphans into surrogate families “by development stage and need and attention for care.” One adult, acting as a parental figure, led each group of 12-15 children with the help of assistants. “Fischer knew that intense devotion is required most urgently during the first years of life to ensure a healthy development of basic trust,” writes Andlauer. When more refugees arrived than anticipated, the UNRRA team recruited older refugees to help younger ones. They also invited the Sisters of Mercy of Saint Vincent de Paul to return to their former home.

Fischer was 35 years old when she arrived at the orphanage in 1945. The youngest of six children born to a Jewish Czech family, she escaped the Nazis by immigrating to London in May of 1939. Her parents, who wanted to stay in their native Czechoslovakia, were murdered in 1943.

While in London, Fischer’s job as a social worker put her in touch with Anna Freud, daughter of the famous Austrian psychologist, who was in London to work with child survivors of the German Blitzkrieg. Freud provided a then-progressive type of therapy: listening to children’s stories. When Greta Fischer left London for Kloster Indersdorf in 1945, she brought Freud’s ideas with her.

Children of all ages came to the doors of Kloster Indersdorf. They arrived accompanied by Allied forces, UNRRA team workers or nobody at all. They included malnourished infants, toddlers with scabies who screamed at the smell of food, Polish teenagers conditioned by pro-nationalist adults to hate Jews, and Jewish teenagers who hoped that a parent might be looking for them.

“The first thing was to give them food, plenty of food, to give them clothing, and listen to their stories,” Fischer said in 1985. (Much of what is known about life at Kloster Indersdorf comes from Fischer’s papers and interviews.) “We listened to their stories days and nights. It had to come out. And sometimes it took us hours to sit with them. You could not interrupt.”

The Farkas brothers were part of that flood of children with stories to tell.

*****

After Patton’s troops had found them, the brothers walked until they came across a German POW camp, where liberated Serbian Jews gave them medical help.  Over a month later, they found work—and substantial meals—with a nearby U.S. Army attachment. The American military put them in touch with UNRRA.

The Farkas brothers arrived with the first wave of refugees. Social workers and nurses greeted them with food, new white sweaters, hot baths, medical checkups and their own beds. During the day, they took classes in English, German, and, as staffing increased, their native Hungarian. They took gym class and art, played sports during their free time, and perhaps most importantly, trained in a particular trade like tailoring, a discipline that would give them self-sufficiency once they left the orphanage.  

Tibor Sands (born Munkacsy), a 92-year-old retired cameraman who lives in New York City, vividly remembers UNRRA’s insistence on manners during mealtime.   Sands, a Hungarian refugee, evaded the Nazis three times before they captured him and placed him on a cattle cart to Buchenwald on his 19th birthday. He hated having to watch starving children grab at food “like animals.”

“[UNRRA workers] civilized eating by using knives and forks,” he recalls. During the family-style meals, Sands and other older refugees reassured younger ones that they would have plenty to eat. “Some of the kids, they were worried that there wouldn’t be any bread the next day,” he remembers, “so they would grab food and take it to their bunk beds.”

No problem, however, posed as challenging as resettling the children in new homes and families. At first, UNRRA tried to create a detailed dossier on each child, complete with accompanying photos that would help officers reunite orphans with family members and/or send them to safe locations in their home countries. That was more complicated than workers anticipated, especially when it came to young refugees whose ages and even names could not be verified.

Children who came from deplorably run Nazi orphanages (Kinderbaracken) had no surviving records of identity. Others were so traumatized that they forgot their birthdays, their names, and the location of their homes. Many older orphans had grown used to lying about their ages, at first to survive selection lines in concentration camps and then later when they learned their ages needed to align with immigration quotas.

“You must understand,” said Fischer in an interview, “those who survived, and especially the Jewish children, were really extraordinarily strong people. Their will to survive and their rage to live had blocked out absolutely everything else.”

Representing foreign governments in the repatriation process, national liaison officers refused to approve the re-entry of children who did not have enough identifying factors, like names, birthdays, and hometowns. Team 182 searched the clothing the children had arrived in, listened carefully to their accents and worked to gain the orphans’ trust so they could help resurface memories and details that would ensure success in finding a new home.

In October 1945, the U.N. commissioned American photographer Charles Haacker to take a picture of each orphan holding a nameplate. UNRRA hoped its Central Tracing Bureau could use these photos to match children with family members throughout the world.

Twenty-six of Haacker’s photos now hang from fabric banners in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, where an exhibit titled “My Name Is… The Lost Children of Kloster Indersdorf” runs through April 30. Accompanying narratives tell each child’s story of their lives before and after arriving at Kloster Indersdorf.

In their headshots, many of the children are smiling, their sad yet confident eyes staring into the camera. “The children projected the hopes onto these photos that, if they were still alive, their relatives would be alerted to their whereabouts by the picture and would rush to Indersdorf and pick them up there,” writes Andlauer. “In a few cases, this actually happened, but within most of the Jewish children dark suspicion grew gradually into horrible certainty, that from now on each was all alone in the world.”

Like many of the orphans, Erwin and Zoltan wanted to go to America. A fellow refugee had alerted their father’s siblings in the Bronx that the boys had survived, and the family sent care packages to Indersdorf, informing UNRRA that they wanted the brothers in New York. But the United States, like the U.K. and other Western nations, had quotas. Even orphans like the Farkas brothers, who had family and a place to live, had to wait a long time for the appropriate visas.

“Nobody really wanted the children,” said Fischer in a 1985 interview. “Nobody really wanted the refugees. The world did not believe the stories.” The child survivors of the Holocaust faced a world with rapidly filling quotas and fears of irreparably damaged, dependent refugees. “The world was closed, the world was absolutely closed and in everybody’s mind the question always was ‘where can we go?’”

For some children, that question was never answered.  In August 1946, the UNRRA team moved from Markt Indersdorf to a larger space about 80 miles away in Prien on Chiemsee, and the slow work of repatriation continued. Meanwhile, the “International D.P. Children’s Center” became the “Jewish Children’s Center Kloster Indersdorf,” a home for Jewish children from Poland, Romania and Hungary.

Within two years of UNRRA’s initial intervention into the refugee crisis, the estimated number of displaced persons in Europe had risen from 21 million to 40 million. Two years later, by 1947, UNRRA had employed over 14,000 workers and spent over $ 4 billion in relief efforts. In 1948, the International Refugee Organization, UNRRA’s successor, helped relocate the remaining child refugees at Kloster Indersdorf to the newly formed state of Israel.

In October 1947, Lillian Robbins, Kloster Indersdorf’s first director, asked the U.S. in an address to the American National Federation of Settlements to lift restrictions and bureaucracy in order to provide for orphans of war. “That child knows the result of exploitation, of national greed, of war,” she said. “He can grow up [to become] a bitter, disillusioned, selfish adult, interested only in what works to his own advantage. But such a child can also become the most important contributor to building a new world, where international cooperation is the cornerstone.”

Today, says Andlauer, the more than 50 orphans she has traced into adulthood have realized the potential that Fischer recognized in them over 70 years ago.

After arriving in America in December 1946, Erwin went to live with his uncle’s family in the East Bronx and Zoltan with his aunt’s family in West Bronx.  Finding a new home in their close-knit Hungarian community, they worked in the Garment District for an uncle who was a furrier and took accelerated night courses. Both went to college after obtaining their high school diplomas – Erwin to Cornell, and Zoltan to City College of New York. Both brothers later served in the American military, graduated from college, and entered successful careers. A retired clinical psychologist, Erwin lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Zoltan resides in California, where he spent much of his professional life as a scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.  The brothers – neither of whom had children — stay in touch.

Periodically, the refugees of Kloster Indersdorf gather at their old orphanage (now a school) to remember the short time they spent with a group of aid workers who validated their voices and reminded them of their humanity.

“My quest will not end,” Andlauer says today, “until I have found as many children from Kloster Indersdorf as I can, to let them all know that they are cherished, that they are remembered, that their names mean something to others.”

Reflecting back on his death march experience from 73 years ago, Erwin certainly doesn’t consider himself damaged by the Nazis.

“We were in a labor camp. We were on a starvation diet but we were not abused or tortured,” he reflects. “We recovered physically and psychologically.” The true devastation, he says, was “the destruction of life that we had before.”

***********

Tracing the children of the Holocaust

After World War Two, the BBC attempted to find relatives of children who had survived the Holocaust – they had lost their parents but it was believed they might have family in Britain. Seventy years on Alex Last has traced some of those children and found out what happened to them.

It all began with a rare recording of an old radio broadcast, which starts with the words: “Captive Children, an appeal from Germany.”

One by one, for five minutes, the presenter asks relatives of 12 children to come forward. With each name comes a short but devastating summary of the child’s ordeal under the Nazis.

“Jacob Bresler, a 16-year-old Polish boy, has survived five concentration camps, but has lost his entire family…

“Sala Landowicz, a 16-year-old Polish girl, who’s in good health after surviving three concentration camps…

“Gunter Wolff, a German Jewish boy, now stateless. The boy is 16 years old and has experienced the ghetto at Lodz, and the Buchenwald concentration camp…

“Fela and Hana Katz, their father and mother have died, they have lost track of two brothers and three sisters.”

And so it went on.

This broadcast went out on the BBC Home Service after the news, at 6:10pm, on 5 August 1946. It is the only one of the series of five episodes that has survived in the BBC archives.

When I heard this recording, I instinctively wanted to know what happened to these 12 children. Did they find who they were looking for? Did they find anyone? So 70 years on, I began to search for them, and in the end I met four of the children.

In May 1945, a year before the broadcast was made, Jacob Bresler was dying. He was on a train near Munich in Germany, locked in a cattle wagon full of fellow concentration camp inmates, many of whom were already dead. The SS were moving the prisoners away from the advancing Allied armies.

“We had been dragged around for two weeks without food or water. I weighed about 60 pounds (27kg). When I was liberated by the Americans we crawled on our bellies, because we could not walk, and kissed the tracks of the tanks,” he says.

Around the same time, hundreds of miles to the north, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 12-year-old Fela Katz and her 14-year-old sister Hana were desperately trying to keep their mother alive.

They were all that remained of a family of 10, from Lodz in Poland. Their father was dead, their brothers and sisters had disappeared after being taken away by the SS. But Fela and Hana had managed to stay with their mother through the horror of the camps – they had stopped calling her mum, in case someone overheard, and separated them.

Now their mother was sick with typhus and she was dying, weeks after Belsen’s liberation by the British army.

“My sister all the time tried her best, [saying] ‘Keep strong, you will see it’s going to be OK,'” says Fela.

“They didn’t cure her properly, she didn’t get care. No-one got special care. It was very hard to deal with it.” Their mother died in Belsen on 15 May, one week after VE day.

Meanwhile, Sala Landowicz and her two younger sisters, Regina and Ruth, also from Lodz, were alone in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. A year earlier, they had lost their mother and a younger sister in Auschwitz, when their mother had refused to be separated from her youngest child and went with her to the gas chambers.

Now, in Theresienstadt, they were barely alive. Then they head the rumble of soviet tanks at the gates of the camp.

“I went out and I saw a Russian tank, and I jumped on the step of the tank and the solider gave me bread. Then everyone came out, and everyone wanted the bread, and I fell down and everyone was stepping on me,” says Sala.

Unknown to Sala, a 16-year-old German Jewish boy, Gunter Wolff, was also in Theresienstadt that day, watching the Soviets arrive.

“I remember when I first saw the Russians. They were all singing and they were throwing food at us. They had never seen such starving people,” he says.

Gunter was alone too. He’d lost both his parents in Auschwitz. He’d survived several concentration camps, and death marches through the snow, before ending up in Theresienstadt. While other prisoners collapsed and were shot by the SS, he kept going by reciting a poem he’d learned in school back in Germany before the war: “No matter how much winter, throwing storms of snow and ice, spring will be coming.” It had become his mantra. After watching the Soviet troops liberate the camp, he finally collapsed.

Gunter, Sala, Fela and Jacob were without parents, without homes, and they were all near death.

Most were moved to one of the hundreds of Displaced Persons (DP) Camps which sprang up across Europe. Some were created in former concentration camps, others were parts of towns, which had been requisitioned by the Allies.

Sala and her sisters were taken from Czechoslovakia to the Landsberg DP camp in Bavaria. Jacob Bresler, who had been freed from the cattle wagon by the Americans, ended up there too. It was a town within a town, and became one of the largest DP camps for Jewish survivors.

“We were like zombies,” says Jacob. “We were fed, we were free, sort of, but we couldn’t comprehend, because we were too damn young. What could a boy of 16 know of life, even though we had lived three lifetimes?”

As the children recovered, their first thought was to start looking for their missing families.

“In Landsberg there was a bulletin board, where every day there were postings of people looking for people. I did not find anybody,” says Jacob.

Jacob came from a family of eight, which had lived in the small town of Uniejow in Poland. He’d been separated from his parents and sisters earlier in the war, but had stayed with his brother Josef through the Lodz ghetto, and the Auschwitz and Kaufering concentration camps. Then in late 1944 they were separated too. Jacob saw his brother one last time as their work parties crossed paths.

“I urged him to keep going, and he said to me, ‘I’m not going to survive… I don’t want to live this way.’ And he didn’t. I was different, I had to survive. I have done everything, I stole, I did everything to survive.” By the end of the war, Jacob was the only one of his family who remained alive.

Gunter Wolff began searching too. He had recovered from typhoid fever and decided to set off for the village in Germany where his mother had been born – the agreed rendezvous point if any of the family survived. He got there and waited for two months, but no-one else showed up.

While there, he met a British soldier who was eating a slice of white bread – whiter than any bread Gunter had ever seen. He stopped and stared. The British soldier offered him a slice and they got talking.

“He said, ‘Oh my God, where are you going to go?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I came here looking for my parents.’ He took one look at me and realised, we’ve got to do something.”

I learned very early the only reliable person is you, yourself – I still have that todayGunter Wolff, Holocaust survivor

The soldier introduced him to a dynamic woman from the UN, Regine Orfinger-Karlin. And Gunter became her project. She managed to get him on a children’s transport leaving Belsen for the UK.

It was at about this time, that the children turned to the names and addresses of relatives overseas. These details had been drilled into them by their desperate parents before the families were torn apart, and later collected by aid organisations in the camps.

This is where the BBC broadcasts came in… and yet for some children, the relatives did not turn out to be the lifeline you might have expected.

When Gunter had arrived in the UK from Belsen he had immediately been diagnosed with tuberculosis and placed in a sanatorium. But he remembers meeting a cousin of his father’s on the platform of Waterloo station.

“He looked more English than the English, with a bowler hat and umbrella. I said ‘Uncle Theo!’ and he said, ‘We don’t speak German here, we only speak English!’ And still at Waterloo station he said to me, ‘I just want you to know, your father and I never got along.’ He lived in Golders Green. I went to his house, and the first thing I remember, he took out his keys and locked up every cabinet in the house while I was there.” Gunter decided he would not stay.

“I learned very early the only reliable person is you, yourself,” he says. “I still have that today.”

For two years, Gunter stayed in the UK. A business friend of his father’s arranged for him to receive a stipend, for which he felt enormously grateful. Only when it suddenly ran out was he told the money had actually belonged to his father in the first place – part of an arrangement he had made in case anyone survived. But while in the UK, Gunter had made contact with relatives in New York and through them he got papers to go to the US.

“You think that now we get to the Garden of Eden. No, no, no. I get to America. This woman picks me up, and I know they are well-to-do. And she says, ‘Today is Thursday, we’ve got you a job starting Monday, and you can sleep in my husband’s waiting room, he’s a doctor and you can sleep on his couch.’

I got a letter back telling me I had to stand on my own two feet, and that kind of annoyed me, this attitudeRuth Landowicz, Holocaust survivor

“So I go to work on Monday, I don’t like it very much, but then it’s pay day. And I get 11 dollars and 60 cents. And I get a pay cheque, and I say to her, ‘Here’s my pay cheque can you cash it for me?’ and she says ‘Sure’. And she gives me back 7 dollars and 60 cents. And I said, ‘I think there’s been an error, the cheque was 11 dollars.’ But she says, “Yes but you have been sleeping on the couch!'”

Within a week he moved out.

Sala Landowicz and her sisters, Ruth and Regina, in the Landsberg DP camp got a response from the cousin they sought in London – a hospital doctor. But it was not what they expected.

“I got a letter back telling me I had to stand on my own two feet, and that kind of annoyed me, this attitude. So I wrote him, he needn’t worry, I won’t come to him for anything, that I will stand on my own two feet because I had a good teacher and that was Hitler. And he taught me a lot,” says Ruth.

It’s hard not to be shocked by such stories. We don’t know the full circumstances, but for whatever reason no-one came forward to help most of the 12 children – and they alone had to decide what to do next.

Sala Landowicz met and married a fellow Holocaust survivor in the Landsberg DP camp. Her sister Ruth got married too, and through their spouses, they got sponsored to go to the US. Their sister Regina was devastated to be left behind, but ended up joining them a few months later.

After the death of their mother in Belsen, Fela Katz and her sister Hana had been moved to a Jewish children’s centre at the Zeilsheim DP camp near Frankfurt. While there, Fela decided she wanted to go to Palestine, while her sister Hana wanted to go to the UK.

“I said Hana, you are coming with me – I was not fair to her about it,” says Fela.

In 1946, they were among a group of thousands of Jewish children who were given permission by the British government to go to Palestine. They were sent to a kibbutz and there Fela was given a new Hebrew name, Zippora. Then one day, someone came looking for them.

“We had exercises outside, and suddenly I saw from a distance two boys, and they came closer and closer and, suddenly I saw one of the boys was my brother, Israel. We fell one on the other, and this was the greatest thing that happened after the war.

“He’d had a very hard time. He was looking for us everywhere because he heard that we had survived, me, my sister and my mother. He was overjoyed but straight away he said, ‘Where is mummy?’ And our faces fell. We said, ‘Mummy survived the war, but she passed away.’ We went to a place to sit down and talk. It wasn’t easy but we thought now we are almost a family. Three people, it is a family. But how long did it last? Nothing. He was called to go to the army, and he was killed.”

Their brother, who’d survived the Holocaust, was killed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Jacob Bresler spent two years in the Landsberg DP camp in Germany, until one day in 1947, on the notice board, he found a message for him from a “Mr and Mrs Samuels from New York”. He had no idea who they were. It turned out they’d been friends of his parents, and had seen his name in a list of survivors in a Jewish newspaper. They invited him to come to the US.

To this day, I do not have the words to express my gratitudeJacob Bresler, Holocaust survivor

“I arrived in New York on the 25 December 1947. I will never forget the day as long as I live. It was very, very euphoric for me but also very tragic. Not knowing what awaits me, not knowing the language, not knowing the people I was going to meet. What am I going to do? I stood on the railing all night long. It was not a very happy time, It should have been euphoric but it wasn’t, because I was alone.”

The Samuels family turned out to be Jacob’s saviours, however.

“Mr and Mrs Samuels were more than lovely. And they became my parents, practically, for the rest of their lives. They were angels. You don’t meet people like this today, and if you do, you should carry them on your hands, and celebrate them as the most fantastic human beings that were ever alive. To this day, I do not have the words to express my gratitude, and they really loved me, and I loved them.”

In the US, Jacob Bresler became Jack Bresler. He went on to serve in the US Army before moving to Vienna to study opera. He’s worked as a TV producer, restaurateur and businessman. He’s now 86 years old, and has been married to his wife, Edith, for 55 years. He has a daughter and grandchildren. He remains very close to the Samuels family.

Gunter Wolff became Gary Wolff. After arriving in the US he worked all day and went to college at night, until he suffered a relapse of tuberculosis. He spent two years in hospital and had a lung and seven ribs removed. He eventually got married, and started a successful property business. Now 86, he too lives in Los Angeles with his faithful dog Teddy, and is very close to his two grandchildren.

On arriving in the US, Sala and her husband changed their names. She became Sally Marco. She still lives near her sisters, Ruth and Regina in Los Angeles. They all have children, and grandchildren.

Fela Katz, now Zippora, and her sister Hana got married and started families of their own. Hana died in 2008, and is buried in Israel close to the brother who found them after the war.

In the end I found traces of 11 out of the 12 children from the broadcast. Most are no longer alive. All had taken different names. Seven had emigrated to the United States, four had gone to Israel. All had families of their own.

And was the BBC appeal for relatives successful at all? Well, documents from the BBC’s own archives, reveal that there was a huge response from the public to the broadcasts. In total, contacts for 15 of the 45 children named across the series of episodes were found directly from the BBC appeals. In some cases the relatives were desperate to look after the children, though it’s not clear how many of these offers were taken up.

My search took three months, and is now over. But many survivors of the Holocaust and their relatives have not stopped searching.

The International Tracing Service, set up by the Allies after the war to help reunite the millions of displaced, still gets 1,000 enquiries each month.

“I am still looking today,” says Jack Bresler. “I even look at films from those days, maybe I will find somebody I will recognize, maybe someone from my family. But I doubt it, it’s now 70 years since the war, and if they haven’t given a sign of their lives – they are not alive.”

---

The search

Finding these children was not easy. The first stop was the International Tracing Service in Germany. It holds files from the Nazi era, as well as post-war files. They had documents on almost all the children and even had some post-war correspondence. It was through them that I got a contact for Gunter Wolff. I found a contact for Jacob Bresler via an Austrian academic who had written a foreword for a memoir Jacob had written in the 1980s. But I also realised that some of the children would have gone to Israel. So I got in touch with the Central Zionist Archive in Jerusalem, which holds documents on Jewish emigration and runs courses in Jewish genealogy. They put their top man on the job, Gidi Poraz, who is an expert in tracing people. He organised an online community to help with the search, which grew from 20 volunteers to more than 600 in the space of three weeks – and they found details of six of the children, both in Israel and the US, including Fela Katz, and Sala Landowicz.

Gunter Wolff, Sala Landowicz, Jacob Bresler and Fela Katz tell their stories on The Documentary: Lost Children of the Holocaust. Click here to listen to the programme now, or tune in to the BBC World Service from 1805 GMT on Saturday 9 May.

************

Nicholas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children From Holocaust, Dies at 106

By Robert D. McFadden

Nicholas Winton, a Briton who said nothing for a half-century about his role in organizing the escape of 669 mostly Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II, a righteous deed like those of Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg, died on Wednesday in Maidenhead, England. He was 106.

The Rotary Club of Maidenhead, of which Mr. Winton was a former president, announced his death on its website. He lived in Maidenhead, west of London.

It was only after Mr. Winton’s wife found a scrapbook in the attic of their home in 1988 — a dusty record of names, pictures and documents detailing a story of redemption from the Holocaust — that he spoke of his all-but-forgotten work in the deliverance of children who, like the parents who gave them up to save their lives, were destined for Nazi concentration camps and extermination.

For all his ensuing honors and accolades in books and films, Mr. Winton was a reluctant hero, often compared to Schindler, the ethnic German who saved 1,200 Jews by employing them in his enamelware and munitions factories in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and to Wallenberg, the Swedish businessman and diplomat who used illegal passports and legation hideaways to save tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary.

Mr. Winton — Sir Nicholas in England since 2003, when he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II — was a London stockbroker in December 1938 when, on an impulse, he canceled a Swiss skiing vacation and flew to Prague at the behest of a friend who was aiding refugees in the Sudetenland, the western region of Czechoslovakia that had just been annexed by Germany.

“Don’t bother to bring your skis,” the friend, Martin Blake, advised in a phone call.

Mr. Winton found vast camps of refugees living in appalling conditions. The pogroms of Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass,” had recently struck Jewish shops, homes and synagogues in Germany and Austria. War looked inevitable, and escape, especially for children, seemed hopeless, given the restrictions against Jewish immigration in the West.Searching for Children Rescued by Nicholas WintonDo you know someone who was saved by Nicholas Winton? The New York Times would like to hear from you.

Britain, however, was an exception. In late 1938, it began a program, called Kindertransport, to admit unaccompanied Jewish children up to age 17 if they had a host family, with the offer of a 50-pound warranty for an eventual return ticket. The Refugee Children’s Movement in Britain sent representatives to Germany and Austria, and 10,000 Jewish children were saved before the war began.

But there was no comparable mass-rescue effort in Czechoslovakia. Mr. Winton created one. It involved dangers, bribes, forgery, secret contacts with the Gestapo, nine railroad trains, an avalanche of paperwork and a lot of money. Nazi agents started following him. In his Prague hotel room, he met terrified parents desperate to get their children to safety, although it meant surrendering them to strangers in a foreign land.

As their numbers grew, a storefront office was opened. Long lines attracted Gestapo attention. Perilous confrontations were resolved with bribes. Eventually he registered more than 900 children, although he had names and details on 5,000. In early 1939, he left two friends, Trevor Chadwick and Bill Barazetti, in charge in Prague and returned to London to find foster homes, raise money and arrange transportation.

He and a few volunteers, including his mother, calling themselves the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, Children’s Section, enlisted aid from the Refugee Children’s Movement, had photos of the children printed and appealed for funds and foster homes in newspaper ads and church and synagogue bulletins.

Hundreds of families volunteered to take children, and money trickled in from donors — not enough to cover all the costs, but Mr. Winton made up the difference himself. He also appealed to the Home Office for entry visas, but the response was slow and time was short. “This was a few months before the war broke out,” he recalled. “So we forged the Home Office entry permits.”

In Prague, Mr. Chadwick quietly cultivated the chief of the Gestapo, Karl Bömelburg — they called him “the criminal rat” after his inspector’s rank of kriminalrat — and arranged for forged transit papers and bribes to be passed to key Nazis and Czech railway officials, who threatened to halt trains or seize the children unless they were paid off. The Gestapo chief proved instrumental, clearing the trains and transit papers, Mr. Chadwick said.

Mr. Winton and his colleagues later arranged for eight more trains to get the rest of the children out, crossing the Third Reich through Nuremberg and Cologne to the Hook of Holland, then across the North Sea by boat to Harwich, Essex, and on by British rail to the Liverpool Street Station in London. There, he and the host families met the children. Each refugee had a small bag and wore a name tag.

But only seven of the eight trains made it through, the last in early August, bringing the total rescued to 669. About 250 children, the largest group, were on board the last train out, on Sept. 1, 1939. On that day, however, Hitler invaded Poland, all borders controlled by Germany were closed and Mr. Winton’s rescue efforts came to an end.

“Within hours of the announcement, the train disappeared,” he recalled. “None of the 250 children aboard was ever seen again.” All were believed to have perished in concentration camps.

Nearly all the saved children were orphans by war’s end, their parents killed at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen or Theresienstadt. After the war, many remained in Britain, but others returned to Czechoslovakia or emigrated to Israel, Australia or the United States. The survivors, many now in their 70s and 80s, still call themselves “Winton’s Children.”

A Scrapbook in the Attic

Among them are the film director Karel Reisz, who made “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1981), “Isadora” (1968) and “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960); Alfred, Lord Dubs, who became a member of Parliament; Joe Schlesinger, a Canadian broadcast correspondent; Hugo Marom, a founder of the Israeli Air Force; Vera Gissing, the author of “Pearls of Childhood” (2007) and other books; and Renata Laxová, a geneticist who discovered the Neu-Laxová Syndrome, a congenital abnormality.

Mr. Winton was born Nicholas George Wertheim in London on May 19, 1909, one of three children of Rudolf and Barbara Wertheimer Wertheim. His parents were of German-Jewish origin but converted to Christianity and changed the family name to Winton. His father was a merchant banker, and Nicholas and his siblings, Bobby and Charlotte, grew up in a 20-room mansion in West Hampstead, London. He and Bobby were skilled fencers and late in life established the Winton Cup, a major British competition in the sport.

Nicholas attended Stowe School in Buckingham, was apprenticed in international banking in London and worked at Behrens Bank in Hamburg, Wassermann’s Bank in Berlin and Banque Nationale de Crédit in Paris. He was fluent in German and French when he returned to London in 1931 and became a stockbroker.

He was a Royal Air Force officer in the war and later worked for refugee organizations and the Abbeyfield Society, a charity that assists the elderly. He raised more than £1 million in one fund-raising drive. In 1983, he was made a member of the Order of the British Empire for his charity work.

But for 50 years he said nothing of the children’s rescue, not even to his wife, Grete Gjelstrup, a Dane he married in 1948. They had three children, Nicholas, Barbara and Robin. Robin died at age 7 in 1962. Mr. Winton’s wife died in 1999. The Rotary Club of Maidenhead said his daughter, Barbara, and two grandchildren were at his side at his death, but complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.

After finding his long-hidden scrapbook — crammed with names, pictures, letters from families, travel documents and notes crediting his colleagues — his wife asked for an explanation. He gave her a general idea, but said he thought the papers had no value and suggested discarding them.

“You can’t throw those papers away,” she responded. “They are children’s lives.”

“I did not think for one moment that they would be of interest to anyone so long after it happened,” Mr. Winton recalled later.

But he reluctantly agreed to let her explore the matter. She gave the scrapbook to a Holocaust historian. A newspaper article followed. Then a BBC television program featured the story of his rescues, and the publicity went worldwide.

He was showered with encomiums: the Czech Republic’s highest award, honorary citizenship of Prague, an American congressional resolution, letters of appreciation from President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, former President Ezer Weizman of Israel and people around the world, and a nomination by the Czech Republic for the Nobel Peace Prize. His scrapbook went to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel. Streets and schools were named for him. Statues went up in Prague and London.

Incredulous at Fame

Why did he do it?

He never really explained, though he offered a bare rationale in an interview with The New York Times in 2001: “One saw the problem there, that a lot of these children were in danger, and you had to get them to what was called a safe haven, and there was no organization to do that. Why did I do it? Why do people do different things? Some people revel in taking risks, and some go through life taking no risks at all.”

Ms. Gissing, in her book “Nicholas Winton and the Rescued Generation: Save One Life, Save the World” (2001, with Muriel Emanuel), said Mr. Winton was incredulous at his fame. “Winton still shakes his head in bewilderment and disbelief when compared with Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg,” she wrote. “I try to make him realize that his contribution to the human race is immeasurable.”

The rescues were explored in three films by the Slovak director Matej Minác: the fictionalized “All My Loved Ones” (1999); a documentary, “The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton” (2002); and “Nicky’s Family” (2011), and in Mr. Minác’s book, “Nicholas Winton’s Lottery of Life” (2007).

On Sept. 1, 2009, 70 years after the onset of the war halted the rescue operations, a special train with a locomotive and carriages from the 1930s left Prague to re-create the perilous 1939 journeys. On board were some of the original Winton’s Children and many of their descendants, whose numbers now exceed 6,000.

They were met at Liverpool Street Station by Mr. Winton, who had recently turned 100.Correction: July 3, 2015

An obituary on Thursday about Nicholas Winton, a Briton who rescued hundreds of children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, referred incorrectly to the honor bestowed on him in 1983. He was made a member of the Order of the British Empire; he did not “receive” the Order of the British Empire. The error also appeared in an obituary on May 14, 2014, about the British planetary scientist Colin Pillinger and in an article on May 19, 2014, about the death of Louise Wilson, one of the world’s pre-eminent instructors of fashion design.

**********

Children of the Holocaust: A Discussion Guide

Bias, Discrimination & Hate Genocide & Holocaust Jewish Culture & Anti-Semitism

GRADE LEVEL: Middle School, High School

Discussion Guide 664.33 KB

Beyond Secret Tears by Lili Silberman 168.76 KB

Krystyna’s Story by Krystyna Chiger 169 KB

My First Kaddish by Alexander Kimel 119.83 KB

About Hidden Children 92.46 KB

The Survivors Speak. We are the youngest survivors of the Holocaust. We eluded the Nazi’s plan for the annihilation of all Jewish children by hiding in convents and orphanages, in haylofts and attics, in cellars and sewers, on farms and in woods, in villages and cities far from our homes.

We are the “lucky” ones—the last survivors to bear witness to the Holocaust.

This discussion guide recounts the war-time experiences of three child survivors. These survivors speak for their friends and siblings—the one-and-a-half million children who were murdered during the Holocaust. The stories of the survivors are resources and activities for middle and high school students that will help in increasing their awareness of the Holocaust and how it affected the children.

*******

Children were especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust.

The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous” groups either as part of the “racial struggle” or as a measure of preventative security. The Germans and their collaborators killed children for these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.

Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish children and tens of thousands of Romani (Gypsy) children, 5,000–7,000 German children with physical and mental disabilities living in institutions, as well as many Polish children and children residing in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Jewish and non-Jewish adolescents (13–18 years old) had a greater chance of survival, as they could be used for forced labor.

The fates of Jewish and non-Jewish children can be categorized in the following ways:

• children killed when they arrived in killing centers
• children killed immediately after birth or in institutions
• children born in ghettos and camps who survived because prisoners hid them
• children, usually over age 12, who were used as forced laborers and as subjects of medical experiments
• children killed during reprisal operations or so-called anti-partisan operations.

In the Ghettos

Deportation of Jewish children from the Lodz ghetto

Deportation of Jewish children from the Lodz ghetto in German-occupied Poland during the “Gehsperre” Aktion, September 1942.

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jacob Igra
• View Archival Details

In ghetto settings, Jewish children died from starvation, disease, and a lack of adequate clothing and shelter. The German authorities were indifferent to the high death rates. They considered most of the younger ghetto children to be unproductive and hence “useless eaters.” Because children were generally too young to be used for forced labor, German authorities often selected them, the elderly, ill, and disabled, for the first deportations to killing centers, or as the first victims led to mass graves to be shot.

These trucks bode no good, I mean especially for the little girl. 
—Brigitte Friedmann Altman

Brigitte Friedmann Altman describes a roundup of children in the Kovno ghetto in March 1944

World War II began in September 1939. Brigitte and her family moved to Kovno, hoping to secure visas and passports for travel to North America. In July 1941, Brigitte and her family were forced to move into the Kovno ghetto after the Germans occupied Lithuania. Brigitte’s family survived the “Great Action,” but her mother died of illness in the ghetto. After a roundup targeting children in March 1944, Brigitte escaped from the ghetto with the help of a former employee of her father. Soviet forces liberated Kovno in August 1944.

• View Archival Details

Only later did I find out that my mother had gone out of the ghetto, sold a diamond and pearl ring to get me an orange. That was the last birthday gift from my parents.
—Gerda Weissmann Klein

Gerda Weissmann Klein describes her birthday celebration in the Bielsko ghetto

In 1939, Gerda’s brother was deported for forced labor. In June 1942, Gerda’s family was deported from the Bielsko ghetto. While her parents were transported to Auschwitz, Gerda was sent to the Gross-Rosen camp system, where for the remainder of the war she performed forced labor in textile factories. Gerda was liberated after a death march, wearing the ski boots her father insisted would help her to survive. She married her American liberator.

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection
• View Archival Details

In the Killing Centers

Jewish women and children upon arrival in Auschwitz

Jewish women and children deported from Hungary, separated from the men, line up for selection. Auschwitz camp, Poland, May 1944.

• Yad Vashem Photo Archives
• View Archival Details

Camp authorities sent the vast majority of young Jewish children directly to the gas chambers upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centers. SS and police forces in German-occupied Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union shot thousands of children at the edge of mass graves along with their parents.

Sometimes the selection of children to fill the first transports to the killing centers or to provide the first victims of shooting operations resulted from the agonizing and controversial decisions of Jewish council (Judenrat) chairmen. The decision by the Judenrat in Lodz in September 1942 to deport children to the Chelmno killing center was an example of the tragic choices made by adults when faced with German demands. Janusz Korczak, director of an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto, however, refused to abandon the children under his care when they were selected for deportation. He accompanied them on the transport to the Treblinka killing center and into the gas chambers, sharing their fate.

Non-Jewish Children

Non-Jewish children from certain targeted groups were not spared. Examples include

• Romani (Gypsy) children killed in Auschwitz
• 5,000-7,000 German children, the vast majority of them non-Jews, killed as victims of the Euthanasia Program
• Children murdered in reprisals, as in the destruction of the Czech town of Lidice; and
• Children shot as civilians in the German-occupied Soviet Union together with their parents.

In Concentration and Transit Camps

Theresia Seible and Rita Prigmore describe research on twins

Theresia Seible, Gypsy mother of twins born under Nazi doctors’ supervision, and Gypsy twin Rita Prigmore describe research on twins.

[Photo credits: Getty Images, New York City; Yad Vashem, Jerusalem; Max-Planck-Institut für Psychiatrie (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie), Historisches Archiv, Bildersammlung GDA, Munich; Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany; Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Vienna; Kriemhild Synder: Die Landesheilanstalt Uchtspringe und ihre Verstrickung in nationalsozialistische Verbrechen; HHStAW Abt. 461, Nr. 32442/12; Privat Collection L. Orth, APG Bonn.]

• View Archival Details
• View Archival Details

The German authorities also incarcerated a number of children in concentration camps and transit camps. SS physicians and medical researchers used a number of children, including twins, in concentration camps and killing centers like Auschwitz for medical experiments which often resulted in the deaths of the children. Concentration camp authorities deployed adolescents, particularly Jewish adolescents, at forced labor in the concentration camps, where many died because of conditions.

The German authorities held other children under appalling conditions in transit camps and concentration camps. They also interned non-Jewish orphaned children whose parents the German military and police units had killed in so-called anti-partisan operations. Some of these orphans were held temporarily in the Lublin/Majdanek concentration camp and other detention camps.

In Occupied Poland and the Occupied Soviet Union

Polish babies chosen for their “Aryan” features

Polish babies, chosen for their “Aryan” features, to be adopted and raised as ethnic Germans. Poland, 1941–1943.

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lydia Chagoll

In their “search to retrieve ‘Aryan blood'” in German-occupied areas, SS race experts ordered hundreds of children in occupied Poland to be kidnapped and transferred to the Reich. The children were to be adopted by racially suitable German families. Although the basis for these decisions was allegedly “race-scientific,” often blond hair, blue eyes, or fair skin was sufficient to merit the “opportunity” to be “Germanized.”

Resistance and Rescue

I was very lucky, and now and then I would bring a slice of bread, I would bring a carrot, or a potato, or an egg, and these were very, very great achievements. My mother made me promise that I wouldn’t do it anymore, but I disobeyed.
—Charlene Schiff

Charlene Schiff describes children smuggling food into the Horochow ghetto

Both of Charlene’s parents were local Jewish community leaders, and the family was active in community life. Charlene’s father was a professor of philosophy at the State University of Lvov. World War II began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Charlene’s town was in the part of eastern Poland occupied by the Soviet Union under the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Under the Soviet occupation, the family remained in its home and Charlene’s father continued to teach. The Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and arrested Charlene’s father after they occupied the town. She never saw him again. Charlene, her mother, and sister were forced into a ghetto the Germans established in Horochow. In 1942, Charlene and her mother fled from the ghetto after hearing rumors that the Germans were about to destroy it. Her sister attempted to hide separately, but was never heard from again. Charlene and her mother hid in underbrush at the river’s edge, and avoided discovery by submerging themselves in the water for part of the time. They hid for several days. One day, Charlene awoke to find that her mother had disappeared. Charlene survived by herself in the forests near Horochow, and was liberated by Soviet troops. She eventually immigrated to the United States.

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection
• View Archival Details

In spite of their acute vulnerability, some children discovered ways to survive. Because of their small size, children could smuggle needed food, medicines, and supplies from the outside into ghettos in German-occupied eastern Europe. Children in youth movements later participated in underground resistance activities. Many children escaped with parents or other relatives—and sometimes on their own—to family camps run by Jewish partisans.

Kindertransport (Children’s Transport) was the informal name of a rescue effort between 1938 and 1940 which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children (without their parents) to safety in Great Britain from Nazi Germany and German-occupied territories.

Jewish refugee children from Children’s Transport (Kindertransport) arrive in the United Kingdom

Jewish refugee children, part of a Children’s Transport (Kindertransport) from Germany, soon after arriving in Harwich. Great Britain, December 2, 1938.

• Wide World Photo

Some non-Jews hid Jewish children and, as in the case of Anne Frank, entire families as well. In France, almost the entire Protestant population of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, as well as many Catholic priests, nuns, and lay Catholics, hid Jewish children in the town from 1942 to 1944. In Italy and Belgium, many children survived in hiding.

After the War

After the surrender of Nazi Germany, ending World War II, refugees and displaced persons searched throughout Europe for missing children. Thousands of orphaned children and juveniles found themselves in displaced persons (DP) camps. Many surviving Jewish children fled eastern Europe with or without their families as part of the mass exodus (Brihah) to the western zones of occupied Germany, en route to the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine). Through Youth Aliyah (Youth Immigration), thousands migrated to the Yishuv, and then to the state of Israel after its establishment in 1948.

Sinaida Grussman photographed in the Kloster Indersdorf children’s center in an attempt to locate surviving relatives

Sinaida Grussman was photographed in the Kloster Indersdorf children’s center after the war. The picture was taken in an attempt to help locate surviving relatives. Such photographs of both Jewish and non-Jewish children were published in newspapers to facilitate the reunification of families. Germany, after May 1945.

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Last Edited: Oct 1, 2019Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC