Yom Hashoah
In this issue: Holocaust Remembrance Day
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day and I want to take more than a moment to remember. Recently I’ve realized - albeit I don’t base this on any scientifically rigorous content analysis of materials - that referring to the Nazis and their treatment of Jews is a very often cited but too often miscited historical reference. And one wonders, perhaps it’s still better that we remember at all. But is it enough to just remember vaguely and misrepresent, or should we be better about remembering more accurately? That’s all just some food for thought on this day.
In the US, the Holocaust often seems more distant than it should. One doesn’t walk the streets where people experienced the horrors. Moreover, survivors are depicted as part of a distant past. I recall in college an event organized for those whose grandparents were survivors of the Holocaust. But what about our parents? Why make it seem as though it was so long ago that our parents couldn’t be survivors as well? Some of them are, like my father, and I think it’s important to remain conscious of that fact.
Today, I share with you some relevant links. Also, below, I share some book related excerpts. Recently, my brother read a description of events in 1944 Hungary that is precisely about why some of my family survived. We knew about some of this, but it’s interesting to see it written up. It descibes the reasons why the train that my father, uncle, grandmother, great-uncle, great-aunt and great-grandmother were on changed route from Auschwitz to a camp in Vienna and ultimately allowed them to survive. (My grandfather had already been killed by then in a labor camp so he was not part of this journey.) I share with you this excerpt. But then, to offer
some context to its concluding thoughts (”On the whole they were often treated quite humanely”) I also share with you some snippets from my uncle about his experiences when he was 11 in the camps published in my father’s recently completed book. I wrap up the excerpts with a bit about my father’s visit last year to the camp he’d been in and how poor the
rememberance is there.
So I invite you to join me today in thinking about some of these things, whether it is the suffering to which people were subjected or the grand apathy of so many, there’s lots to remember and lots from which we can learn.
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
http://www.vhf.org/
The Holocaust History Project
http://www.holocaust-history.org/normal-index.shtml
Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority
http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/
Some pictures of present-day Auschwitz
http://www.merengo.hu/galeria/?id=340
Pictures of Auschwitz/Birkenau, 1978-1981
http://www.remember.org/jacobs/
—
Excerpt from
“The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary”
Condensed Edition
Randolph L. Braham
Wayne State University Press (in association with the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Detroit, 2000
Original book published at Columbia University Press, 1981
Chapter 7: Deportation
pg. 147-149
The Strasshof Transports
The Jews who lived in Gendarmerie Districts V and VI fared relatively better than their counterparts in the other provincial gendarmerie districts. This was due to a combination of good luck and a new element introduced in the so-called blood for trucks negotiations between Rudolph (Rezso) Kasztner, the leader of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest (Vaadah), and the SS. On June 14, during the deportations from Zone III, Eichmann unexpectedly informed Kasztner that he was willing to allow thirty thousand Hungarian Jews to be “laid on ice” in Austria as a demonstration of his goodwill. He demanded, as counterdemonstration of goodwill, an immediate payment of five million Swiss francs. Since the Jews of Carpatho-Ruthenia and Northern Transylvania had already been deported, Eichmann insisted that only Jews from Trianon Hungary could be considered for the transfer. He
referred to the former as “ethnically and biologically valuable elements,” whom he would not allow to remain alive. As originally envisioned, half of the thirty thousand Jews were to come from Budapest and half from the provinces. Kasztner revealed the details of the new Eichmann offer to the Jewish Council that very day.
Eichmann’s offer was based on instructions he had received from Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The head of the RSHA, as the evidence reveals, was besieged by Austrian entrepreneurs operating war industries and by government officials, including SS-Brigadefuhrer Karl Blaschke, the mayor of Vienna, with requests to provide them with desperately needed slave labor. Since Hungarian Jewry was at that time the one still relatively untapped reservoir of Jewish labor, Kaltenbrunner requested that Eichmann have a few transports of deportees diverted to Austria.
From the Germans’ point of view the deal with Kasztner offered several distinct advantages:
- It provided an opportunity for a demonstration of goodwill in the “blood for trucks” negotiations.
- It supplied the Austrian industrial and agricultural entrepreneurs and local government officials with needed slave labor.
- It enriched the coffers of the Sonderkommando.
The selection of the Jews for the Austrian transports appers to have been the responsibility of the Zionists or other well-known Jewish leaders in the concentration and entrainment centers in the affected zones, acting on instructions from Kasztner.
Kasztner had expected that the first trainload of Jews would be leaving from Gyor and Komarom, the areas from which Jews were being deported at the time. Although this plan reportedly had the approval of Eichmann, all the transports from Gendarmerie Districts II and III, including of course those from Gyor and Komarom, were routinely directed to Auschwitz, presumably due to the inertia of some of the officers in charge of the transports. (When the
Scharfuhrer responsible for the take-over of the transports from Gyor at Kassa noticed that the train’s number was not on his ledger, he called Eichmann for instructions. Motivated by a concern for efficiency rather than moral obligation, Eichmann apparently decided that as long as the transport was already at the Slovakian border it might as well continue on to Auschwitz.) Eichmann decided to compensate Kasztner with a transport from Zone IV.
It was during the deportations from this zone of anti-Jewish operations on June 25-28 that six or seven transports were directed to Strasshof, a camp near Vienna. The approximately twenty thousand Jews in these transports came mostly from ghettos in Gendarmerie District IV.
After their arrival in Strasshof during the first days of July, the Jews were sent to labor in industrial and agricultural enterprises in a number of communities in eastern Austria, including Gmund, Weitra, Wiener-Neustadt and Neunkirchen. Many of them worked under the auspices of the Todt Organization. Their treatment varied with the disposition of the individual employers and foremen. On the whole they were often treated quite humanely and about 75 percent of them, including children and the elderly, survived the war. Organizationally, they were under the control and command of a central office in Vienna headed by SS-Oberstrumbannfuhrer Hermann Alois Krumey, a leading member of the Eichmann-Sonderkommando in Hungary.
—
Excerpt from “Our Lives” by Istvan Hargittai [my father]
Chapter on Sanger
For Preface, see http://www.eszter.com/ol/
The Hungarian version of this book is out now. My father is still seeking a publisher for the English version.
[this quote in the book is from my uncle who was 11 at the time]
The first day after our arrival [in the camp] the people got their work assignments. Mother was directed to be helper to a roofing master who turned out to be a humane Viennese man. He often shared his sandwich with Mother who pretended to eat it and brought it back for us. Children younger than 10 years old stayed behind in the camp during the day. Children above the age of 15 were considered adults and went to work with the rest. Children between 10 and 15 years old formed a special labor unit. I was in this unit, which had about 20 children. We were taken to bombed-out buildings, immediately following the bombing. We had to reach places that adults could not have reached. We had to bring out cadavers and wounded people and all the valuables. If we found just limbs or other body parts we had to bring them out as well. It was a cruel and frightening job and dangerous too.
Falling down killed some of us. They were replaced then by younger children. The German guards were not brutal just for the sake of tormenting us, but they required unconditional discipline. When they ordered us to climb to a place, however dangerous it was or to walk on a beam however unstable it was, they expected blind obedience. When any of us appeared hesitant, they let out a round next to us from their machine guns to frighten us. I have sharp memories of various events. I remember when we were carrying a heavy container and when the guard sensed that I wanted to pause, he gave a round and I did not dare to stop. From the heavy weight and the fright I wetted my pants. It was so cold that the urine froze along my legs. I remember my shoes, which were in a terrible state and we did not have stockings and used newspaper pieces to wrap our feet. In one of the bombed-out homes I found a pair of shoes that would have fit me and I changed into them. Upon my return downstairs, the guard noticed this, he became very angry and ordered me to return and change back the shoes. This episode stayed with me more sharply than many more horrible events. I could not figure out why he did not let me have a better pair of shoes. At about that time, I started having dreams about Father. He came for us in my dream and engineered our escape. In other dreams, we went for long walks in the woods just as we used to when we lived back home and he was still alive. Such dreams I still have occasionally, and I am now 61 years old.
Istvan, who was 3 years old, was a good child throughout the deportation. He was quiet and withdrawn. When soldiers entered the room he always hid behind Mother.
The sick in the camp were moved to the attic. So was grandmother when she became sick. It was a final move because seldom did anybody return from the attic. Nobody tended the sick. Their meals were placed at the entrance to the attic and those in better condition among the sick distributed the food and reported in the morning about the recent dead. One morning then grandmother was among the dead.
[the chapter continues with my father’s return to the camp site in 2002, this is now my father’s voice]
Vienna 2002
In June 2002, I visited our former camp, Lager 12 at 10 Bischoffgasse in Vienna. It was my first visit to the former camp site and I am the only member of our family who has ever visited the place since World War II. There was no trace of the former camp there, outside or inside the school, as if the camp might have not existed. I almost felt embarrassed, but the director had vaguely heard about some camp. She showed me the school and took me to the attic, where they keep the old year books. In the one for the year 1944/45, there were only short notes, and not a word about the camp that operated on the premises of the school. I found that part of the attic to which a stair-case leads and which I recognized from Brother’s narrative. I was there, alone for a few moments in empty, dusty space, held up by heavy wooden beams, and I felt very close to my grandmother.
On that visit, I contacted the Research Center of the History of Jews in Austria and they sent me photocopied material of the trial of the Lagerfuhrer of Lager 12. There were about 130 pages, mostly testimonies of former inmates, that is, surviving Jews from Hungary, also, testimonies by Viennese people, who lived nearby, and could see some of what was going on in the camp. There were enclosures in the material, and I found my name in the listings as Stefan Wilhelm (Stefan is the German equivalent of Istvan). [my father later changed his name to Hargittai, this is explained in another part of the book]
The testimonies described how Franz Knoll, the Lagerfuhrer, beat not only the young but also 80-year-old people, how he locked people up in the cold cellar in wintertime without food, how he stole the rations and had them delivered to his home by the prisoners, and how he tried to hide his loot, from the prisoners, in three big boxes after the camp had been liberated by the Russians. He was characterized by former prisoners and neighbors as brutal, inhuman, ruthless, and sadistic. A former inmate described how she had to witness the slow dying of hunger of her infant son, her pleading in vain for help to the Lagerfuhrer, who then did not let her be there when her child was buried. Witnesses described how others, including children, perished in the camp. There were close to 600 grownups and about 60 children incarcerated there, and the Lagerfuhrer referred to them as if they were things rather than human beings in his testimony. He repeatedly referred to children as children only for the age group between 0 and 10 years old. [fn8]
Franz Knoll was born in 1894 in Vienna. He did not have much schooling, did not have any profession, and before the Nazis elevated him to positions of importance, he used to work mostly as a waiter. He joined the Nazi party in 1932, that is, long before the Anschluss. He was accused not only of the crimes he committed as the Lagerfuhrer of Lager 12 but also of other crimes committed during the preceding years in other positions.
I have no expertise in legal matters, so it is only my impression that the trial was meticulous, preceded by a meticulous investigation during Knoll’s long detention of about 22 months. Knoll pleaded not guilty, but the Court found him guilty and on August 20, 1948, it sentenced him to 18 months of imprisonment. The Court considered several mitigating conditions, among them his partial confession, the difficulty of his service, his reduced sense of responsibility, and his duties of supporting his wife and underage child. The Court also ordered to deduct Knoll’s detention from his prison term. Thus, when the sentencing was over, Knoll walked free.