(Author: Don Krausz, Vol. 72, #3, Chanukah, 2017)
I have carefully arranged all the fairly innocuous experiences of Westerbork together. We will now come to the real purpose of that camp, starting with a glimpse into the future. For several weeks I had the job of working in an empty barrack as f loor washer and general factotum. The barrack leader was a kindly Jewish lady, a refugee from Germany, who made sure that I did not lack food. One day a transport arrived from a small Dutch concentration camp called Ellekom, which was a training camp for the Dutch SS. The inmates, all youngish men, had been brutalized, starved and were skeletal, almost too weak to stand. I was horrified, although such a spectacle was to become very familiar to me.4
The barrack leader managed to obtain cakes for these men, something that I had never seen in Westerbork. She then decided that I was the most suitable person to distribute them, little realizing what would happen. So, all of thirteen years old, I took my box of cakes and stepped into that barrack.
The men saw me coming. They all rose slowly and came towards me, a mass of skeletons with open mouths, staring hollow eyes and pathetic hands outstretched. They did not rush me, did not attack me or try to take my box from me – I don’t think that they had the strength. I tried to satisfy them as best I could, but the impact was such that I have never during all these years been able to speak or write about it without weeping or feeling terribly sad. They were put on the next transport to Auschwitz.
Westerbork was a transit camp. Its purpose was to rail 1000 Jews a week to the Death Camps in Eastern Europe. Their destination was no secret – boldly displayed on the trains were the names Sobibor or Oswiecim or sometimes its German equivalent, Auschwitz. Where these places were or what they stood for nobody seemed to know. All that we knew for certain was that 1000 men, women and children were sent there every week and that they never came back. No letter was ever received from there, no message delivered.
And so there was a terrible fear of those transports, the fear of the unknown. Nobody wanted to be sent there, and if you were, then you tried your utmost to be exempted. But was this possible? We shall soon see.
Every Tuesday morning at 1.00 am, the lights would be turned on in our barrack and the barrack leader would come in with a list. In a harsh, grating voice, perhaps to hide his emotion, he would read out names from that list, names of the people in his barrack who were being sent to the East that day. He would be listened to in total silence, except that as a name was called out you would sometimes hear a cry or a sob. The people so listed would have to leave on the train by eleven o’clock that morning.
So what did people do when their names were called out? Some were just stunned, staring in front of them, not moving. Some were crying. Mothers got up, woke their children and dressed them, prepared them for the journey and tried to find food. There were no shops in Westerbork and the only food on the train was what one could bring oneself.
They did not have many belongings; their remaining time would be spent writing a letter, saying goodbye, and sometimes just quietly weeping. The vultures would arrive; people who would go from person to person, inspect his or her belongings and then say, “You don’t really need this, do you?”
But for a very few there was something that could be tried. The Germans wanted us to believe that we were being sent to a labour camp. If you were sick then you could not work, and Westerbork had an outstanding hospital. My father and some of his brothers suffered from stomach complaints, perhaps ulcers, perhaps gallstones. Three weeks after our arrival at the camp we were put on the list. My father managed to have himself admitted to the hospital for treatment. My mother, Irene and I were consequently exempted as well.
There was one snag to these exemptions: one thousand people had to leave on the train that morning. If your name was removed from the list, then somebody else replaced you. For that reason we never went near the train, not even to say goodbye, for if at the last moment it was found that the tally was short, then the Jewish camp police would grab anybody, young or old, sick or otherwise and shove him or her on that train. Their and their family’s exemption from the transports depended on it.
A while later we found ourselves in the same quandary. This time the hospital treatment could not be tried – it had been used already. But Jews ran the complete administration of the camp. So my father contacted a relation of his at the hospital, a Dr Haasz, and they both spent the night going from office to office, clerk to clerk, to try and get our names removed from the list. On a “Day of Transport,” as we called Tuesdays, the administration would work throughout the night. Dr Haasz was not on the list – he was merely doing my father a favour. By 9.00 o’clock that morning, eight hours later, they finally succeeded, whereupon my father returned to our barrack to tell my mother that she could relax. Dr Haasz’s nightshift at the hospital ended at 7.00 a.m. so he went to his barrack.
But when Dr Haasz arrived at his barrack, he found that in the meantime his name and that of his wife and baby had been listed, probably by the same clerk that removed our names. That man had been obliged to replace us with another four people. The train was leaving in two hours’ time, and by now it was too late to attempt a rescue. This left us in the ironic and peculiar situation where we had to go and say goodbye to Dr Haasz, without whom this story would not have been written. I shall never forget the look of despair on that man’s face. We never saw him or his wife and baby again.
I last saw my father when I was thirteen years old, and so cannot say that I knew him well. I am certain, however, that he had no intention of sending anyone else to these places with the strange names, Auschwitz, Sobibor. I am also sure that he must have felt that his first duty was to his wife and children.
Not long after that, all Hungarian Jews were exempted from transport, and we did not have to worry about lists.
We had been in Westerbork about one year when my father took ill again. I think that he had gall stones or ulcers. In any case it was felt that the camp hospital was not equipped to handle such cases, and my father and his brother Sanyi, who had a similar complaint, were sent to a civilian hospital in the town of Groningen to be operated on and from whence they eventually returned.
This was not my father’s first venture outside the camp. Some time prior to this he had been allowed to leave and go to Rotterdam in order to settle his affairs. His friend van Hulten had begged him not to return to Westerbork and had promised him that he could be hidden. But my father well knew the conditions for being allowed leave from Westerbork: unless he returned by a certain date his wife and children would be put on the next train to Auschwitz.
These episodes also illustrate the difference between Westerbork and a concentration camp, where such granting of leave would have been unheard of. They also served to lull any suspicions that we may have had as to our fate.
here were other lists as well in Westerbork. From time to time word would spread that the Germans were going to exchange Jews for German nationals held by the Allies and that a list of names was being prepared. Such a list would only be for people who had a lot of money to spend or were famous and inf luential. The list would be drawn up, people would part with a fortune, some Germans and their collaborators would become very rich, and some months later all the people on that list would be put on transport, usually to a concentration or death camp.
The trains were not only there to take Jews away to unknown destinations. There were also trains I gladly went to meet; trains bringing friends and family to Westerbork. Little did I realize the full implication of what being sent to Westerbork meant. I remember the arrival of my uncle, Pityu, one of my favorites, and how happy I was to go and report this to my parents. They were less joyful; Pityu had been one of those who sent us food parcels.
Ravensbruck
In February 1944, after we had been in Westerbork for nearly a year and a half, the Hungarians were placed on transport. First the men were sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany. There were no scenes, I saw no tears. I don’t think that any of us realized that this was a final farewell. What did we know of concentration camps? Who in his worst nightmares imagined that there could be a ‘Final Solution’?
Yet the parting was a deeply felt occasion. I cannot speak for my mother; only she will know what she must have felt. Irene was eight years old; does she even remember the event? I had not yet had the opportunity to form a close relationship with my father, but I had a strong desire to give him something of mine, something that would indicate to him that I loved him. So I took my recently acquired silver barmitzvah watch and slipped it into the pocket of his overcoat when he was not looking. It was only when I was an adult that I began to realize the emotional impact that the discovery of the watch must have had on my father. Did he understand what this gesture was meant to convey? Did he perhaps think that I did not want his present?
Several days later the Hungarian women and children were put on a passenger train and taken to a concentration camp called Ravensbruck, 80 km to the north of Berlin. The fact that we traveled by passenger train rather than the usual cattle trucks led us to believe that perhaps we were still privileged. The adults amongst us may have read or heard about such camps; they could never have imagined the reality. Some 50 000 women and 20 000 men died in Ravensbruck (the precise number of women is still in dispute)1, and that is without there being a gas chamber, at least not while I was there.
It has been said that the death of one person is a tragedy; the death of thousands is a statistic. We cannot comprehend the enormity of such suffering. When speaking to schoolchildren I tell them that if I were to describe the death of one person in emotional terms, they might well weep. But I am not speaking of one person only – I am speaking of millions.
Our journey was fairly uneventful. I remember a young soldier with a submachine gun coming into our compartment and telling us that he and his ‘kameraden’ were there to shoot us if we tried to escape. I also remember thinking how stupid it was to say this to a group of women and children, of which the youngest were babies and the oldest child – me – just thirteen. We traveled via the blacked-out city of Bremen and were left in our train on the station while an air raid was in progress.
Of our arrival in Ravensbruck I don’t recollect much, except that all the adults had their civilian clothes taken from them and were given the now notorious grey and blue striped concentration camp uniforms. Luckily there were no uniforms small enough for us children, so we were left with all our civilian clothes. This was to play an important role in our and our parents’ survival, because winter temperatures in Ravensbruck were 28 degrees below zero, and without our woolen jerseys and Jaeger underwear, we and our mothers would have experienced the extremes of exposure from which we were to see the other inmates suffer.
We were each given a piece of cloth with a number on it to sew onto our clothes. With this number we lost our identity as individuals. Henceforth we would be called or referred to by number only. If someone in authority wished to report you for punishment, all they had to do was take down your number. And yet the number could not completely block out your identity. A low number meant that you had been there for some time and could well have reached a position of authority or inf luence. Those with the records or the memory to do so would be able to tell from your number on which transport you had arrived and thus guess at your background.
View of barracks, Ravensbruck concentration camp.
For further identification you were given a coloured triangle or a Star of David. One’s nationality was printed on the triangle, UNG for Ungar (Hungarian), SU for Soviet Union and so forth. The colour of that bit of cloth denoted the reason that you had been sent to a concentration camp. Red meant political, either Communist or resistance, Green was criminal, Pink homosexual, Black antisocial (usually prostitute) and Mauve Jehovah’s Witness. A Red triangle crossed with a yellow one to create a Star of David was the worst category of all: Jewish.
Our heads were examined for vermin, and great was the consternation and shame when one of our women was found to have lice and had all her hair shaved off. She literally could not hold her head up after this. We were sent to Barrack 23. Why do I mention this? Because Barrack 23 had a Czech barrack leader who was ‘political’, i.e. a communist and not a German criminal or prostitute who might have given us very short shrift.
Let me describe our barrack to you. It was made of wood with double walls and fiber glass wool in between. There were cold water washing facilities, but no baths or showers. There were toilets. One ate in a dining hall at wooden tables and benches and if you were lucky you found a three- legged stool to sit on. We ate from chipped enamel bowls and had spoons. The sleeping quarters consisted of wooden three-tier beds, about 60 cm wide, with straw mattresses and a straw pillow; each inmate was given a very poor quality blanket. The mattresses were lice ridden. We children slept five to two beds.
We were woken at half past three in the morning in summer and an hour later in winter. One was given half an hour to prepare oneself for ‘Appel’ – the roll call at which everyone had to appear to be counted in order to ensure that no one had escaped. If a person was missing then the whole camp had to stand there until the culprit was either found or apprehended.
The tally was compared with that of the previous day and had to correspond. The only way that could be was by bringing the corpses of those who had died in the barrack since the previous Appel to the following Appel to make up the previous total.
Let me dwell a little on the Appel. The uniforms that the women wore were made of cotton or a mixture thereof with artificial fiber. One could get splinters from it. They had no hats, no scarves or warm underwear, no jerseys, no gloves. They wore wooden sandals on their feet and I am not sure whether they wore stockings or not.
At a temperature of 28 degrees below zero one covers one’s mouth and nostrils with a cloth or scarf, as breathing becomes painful. We had no cloths or scarves. I have seen grown men cry from the cold during Appel. These poor, shivering women would huddle together like sheep so as to benefit from each other’s body heat. They were not allowed to bring their blankets. Appel never took less than one and a half hours. People used to collapse and die during Appel.
When Appel was over, everyone was marched back to the barrack. We children, however, would run on ahead in order to secure one of the scarce stools for our mothers. There were benches, but these would be crowded and difficult to get to. If our mothers arrived early, well and good. If not there would be stand-up fights for those stools after people had been standing for one and a half hours. The Polish women used to try and take our stools, cursing us children the while as ‘Zhid Pshakrev’. I don’t remember exactly what this term means, but it isn’t nice. I once hit one of these women over the head with such a stool after she tried to take it away from me.
Breakfast consisted of a mug of black liquid, coffee it wasn’t, and a slice of bread about four inches (10cm) square and one inch (2.4cm) thick. I called it bread, but it was said to consist partly of sawdust. It was said to weigh about 180 grams. With it one received a small piece of margarine, plus either jam, or a thin slice of sausage or cheese. Cheese? “Stink cheese” every one used to call it because of the smell.
That piece of bread had to last one the whole day; there was no lunch. This situation used to lead to weighty decisions: “Do I eat all of my bread now and starve in the afternoon, or do I save some for later and run the risk that somebody will rob me of it?” I was a child and might not have been able to defend my slice. I used to eat it immediately.
The women who left the camp to perform work did receive lunch of sorts.
After breakfast the women were marched off to do physically heavy labour. They dug trenches, they pulled enormous concrete rollers to make roads, all the while being beaten, cursed and humiliated if the Capo (prisoner overseer) or guard was dissatisfied with their progress; some were lucky and worked in nearby factories. In the evening upon their return to the camp they would be counted again, and then it was time for the evening meal.
The food would arrive in 72 liter canisters which were each dragged from the kitchen by eight women, one woman on each side to lift the thing and three on either side to pull her along. They would lift that extremely heavy weight, run a short distance with it at a trot and then put it down panting in order to rest.
Dinner consisted of one liter of boiled water containing dehydrated vegetables and pieces of Swedish turnip in it called a ‘Shteckrube’ in German. No meat, no potato, no fat, and the turnip was part of an enormous thing normally fed to cattle. Very good for cattle, but then so is grass. Actually, if one got any turnip one was lucky, because the practice was to let the canister stand for a while so that its vegetable contents could settle at the bottom. It was then opened and without stirring, the liquid would be ladled off the top of the canister, thus leaving the vegetables at the bottom for the barrack leader and her cronies. After a while we became wise, and starving or not, we would try to make sure that we were not amongst the first fifty people when a fresh canister was opened, because then you got boiled water. Each person received one liter of this ‘soup’. On such a ‘diet’, together with the conditions prevailing in German concentration camps, the average lifespan was three to five months. Can you see now why the allocation of a decent barrack leader was so important? Do you also now realize how at least 70 000 people came to perish in Ravensbruck? With such a starvation diet and those labour conditions a gas chamber was not needed.2
The barrack leader had life and death in her hands and there was no appeal. He or she was not there to look after you. She was not responsible whether or not you survived, and if you didn’t, no questions would be asked. If he or she did not like your religion, nationality, the reason that put you in the camp (political, criminal, Jewish, etc.) or even just the look of you she could beat you until you succumbed. Some of my most vivid recollections of that place are the sight and sound of women screaming as they were beaten with sticks. If your bed was not made absolutely straight and smooth you were beaten, if you talked after lights out you were beaten. If you had dysentery and could not get to the toilet in time you were beaten. Even if you got there in time your troubles weren’t over, because you were likely to find a woman there who was responsible for toilets, and unless you bribed her with food, she would assign you to a toilet where you had to wade to get to your destination.
Eventually, one became so weak that one would go down with one of the many illnesses prevalent in the camp: Typhus, tuberculosis, dysentery, ‘camp fever’. I had camp fever twice; it was never diagnosed and I was hospitalized for about a week in Westerbork and three weeks in Ravensbruck with it.
The hospital, known as the Revier, deserves a paragraph to itself. First of all you only went there as an absolutely last resort, in fact when they had to carry you there. I was taken there when I developed a very high fever and could neither eat nor walk. Hospital treatment consisted of not having to work, being given a two-tiered instead of a three-tiered bed and nothing else. During the three weeks that I was there I saw SS doctors walk around in their riding breaches and black jackboots, but they never saw me. Not even a nurse came near me. But then how did I get my food? Simple, I didn’t eat, only drank water except after I started recovering. I lay in my top bunk with high fever and diarrhea and would drag myself along the wall to the toilet. There I would suspend myself by my hands from a sling that I had made and wound through the handle of the door. One could not sit on that toilet, such was its filthy state, and then I would drag myself to my ward again and somehow get back into my top bunk.
The fate of those lying below a person with diarrhea I won’t even describe.
After some time I was transferred from the general ward to a smaller one with only two double tiered beds in it. Once again I was in the top bunk; a young woman who lay perfectly still and naked on her bed and was dying, occupied the one below me. I suspect that other inmates had stripped her of all her clothes. Next to her sat a few women chatting and laughing. The moment that the poor soul on the bed breathed her last, these women ran out of the room screaming, leaving me with the body. It was the first time that I had witnessed a death, let alone having been left alone with a corpse at the age of 13. I have never known of any reason to fear a corpse and found the behaviour of the women inexplicable. My only reaction was a great sadness for that young woman who had died so needlessly and I think that I was her only mourner.
People whom I knew were brought in unconscious. They were placed on the beds and promptly had all their possessions stolen. If they had food with them, which a new arrival to the camp might have, the nurses would sit down next to the unconscious owner and have a feast.
Once while in the so-called Revier, the hospital, my mother arrived and brought me chocolate. However, I was so ill that I could not touch it which upset her greatly. I could not imagine to what lengths she must have gone to obtain it.
I was transferred to a Men’s camp when I turned fourteen and so did not see my mother again until October 1945, after the war. I then asked her where she had managed to get chocolate in a concentration camp. She denied all knowledge thereof or of visiting me. I must have been delirious.
One day, when my fever had abated, I saw a woman scrubbing the f loor and she told me that she had suffered my symptoms. I asked her how she was cured and she told me that she had doctored herself with a medication called Tanalbin. I asked her to get me some, and that eventually cured my diarrhea.
One avoided the Revier because that place was not there to cure you, but only to get you back to work in as short a time as possible and with minimal expense. Hence the lack of medication. From time to time a selection was held and people who did not show signs of imminent recovery would either be given a lethal injection or sent on a transport never to return. When it became obvious that I might have to go to the Revier, inf luential friends of my mother first made enquiries to find out whether a selection was imminent. They then monitored my stay for the same reason. One of our group, a child of about six or seven, caught typhus and was sent to the hospital. Although still sick she was smuggled out through a window when it became apparent that a selection would be held.
Considering these circumstances, the inmates of the Revier must have lived in abject misery, in fear and tension and under conditions of utter degradation. I, however, was far too sick to experience most of these emotions. My main recollections are of being ill and the horror of the toilets.
When eventually I left the Revier and walked back into my barrack, the first member of our group of Hungarians who saw me covered her mouth and screamed. I had become emaciated.
What did we children do during the day? We were warned to keep out of sight of the area where the Commandant and his staff could see us. Not that he was unaware of our existence – every roll call would have reminded him. We were told to stay in a far corner of the camp. I remember some of the routines that we developed for our own safety. One was a popular tune that would only be sung when there was danger and every one had to be warned. This could happen when a person known to be an informer started speaking to one of the children. On one such occasion I asked the informer whether she knew our (warning) song and would sing it for us. She happily obliged and sang it out loud and clear.
Others to watch for were the prisoners who acted as camp police or any of the guards. One of the games that we would play was to find pieces of paper, crumple them into balls and throw them against the electrified barbed wire. A shower of sparks would result and the paper would burst into f lame. I think that this playground of ours must have been out of sight of the watchtowers, otherwise our little game would soon have been stopped.
Somebody had to be responsible for us and as my mother had been a teacher, she was put in charge. This meant that she did not have to go out and work as did the other mothers. Like any good teacher, she wanted writing materials and actually managed to see the camp commandant about this. He gave her such a reception, telling her that after six years of war they had other things to think of, that she was only too pleased to get away from him.
My mother did her best to try and alleviate the limitations of the camp as far as we children were concerned. I remember her reciting English poetry to me, i.e. “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” She would tell us of books that she had read, and when telling fairy stories to the little ones, who could not visualize a palace, she would describe it as three barracks one on top of the other. Many years later I heard from adults who had been children in that camp and who enquired after my mother; they told me that they still remembered the stories that she used to tell them.
She would do her utmost to shield us from the reality of a concentration camp. When brutal or ugly scenes presented themselves around us, or when the women in the barrack had been stripped naked for some reason, she would cover Irene’s or my eyes. At times she managed to obtain extra food for us, with the help of Czech friends.
I have a theory about the effect of preventing a young child from seeing reality. My sister Irene was five years younger than I, and my mother would usually prevent her from viewing and hearing the more brutal happenings in the barrack. I was left to see what went on and come to terms with it. Irene was still aware that she was prevented from knowing what was happening and it is possible that she imagined scenes that were far worse than what were actually taking place. That may well have had a more traumatic effect on her young, impressionable mind than what I witnessed.
Our arrival in Ravensbruck caused a great deal of emotion among the women there. Many had left their own children behind when they were incarcerated. The younger ones had not had any sexual contact with a man in years, and gave us older boys a lot of attention. But we also noticed that many of the women would weep when they saw us. I thought that this distress was caused by the aforementioned reasons, but the anguish seemed to persist with some of them. Then one day a woman told us that we were not the first children who had been in Ravensbruck, and that our predecessors had all been sent to Auschwitz.
Auschwitz? We knew the name from Westerbork, but why the tears? Then slowly the devastating, horrible truth was revealed about the gas chambers, and the whole genocide programme of Jews. Strangely, I do not recall a period of deep depression among our Hungarian women such as one would expect after hearing that in all likelihood all one’s friends and relations had been brutally murdered. Could they not absorb the enormity of such a tragedy? Did they shield themselves psychologically by saying, “This must be happening to someone else, but not to me”?
And what was my reaction? Throughout my stay in the camps I experienced some potentially very dangerous episodes and yet was never unduly perturbed by them. I had the conviction that nothing would happen to me, not even when it was made very obvious that we were going to be sent to the gas chambers within the next 24 hours and at least half our number actually disappeared. That does not mean to say that I did not live in fear and tension every day; it just indicates that despite the dangers, the humiliations, beatings and horror I did not doubt that I would survive. A safety mechanism, perhaps peculiar to children. At the same time my logic told me that my chances of survival as a Jew were minimal, and as a result I would take greater risks than other prisoners. I knew that I had nothing to lose.
It is also interesting that despite having been in Westerbork since September 1942 and aware that trains left for Auschwitz or Sobibor weekly, we Hungarian Jews from Holland did not discover the truth until 1944. Not that everybody knew except us children: news of that magnitude would not have remained hidden. This was not the case with Jews from other countries. When later on in the Men’s camps I met up with French Jews, they informed me that the BBC had been warning on the French broadcasts from 1942 onwards of gas in the Polish death camps.
Don Krausz has served as the chairman of the Association of Holocaust Survivors in Johannesburg (She’erith Hapleitah) since 1985. Over the past three decades, he has spoken to thousands of South Africans, Jewish and non-Jewish, including addressing many school groups, on his experiences during the Holocaust. The first part of this memoir appeared in the Rosh Hashanah 2017 issue of Jewish Affairs. This second part continues the narrative of the author’s detention in the Westerbork transit camp.
Part III of the author’s memoir will appear in the Pesach 2018 issue of Jewish Affairs.
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Don Krausz is the subject of the youtube presentation ‘Don Krausz Holocaust Survivor 91 in 2021. Courage, Resilience & Education for a better world’ by Carolyn Massey: https://youtu.be/SlKCjNeoWbI.
NOTES
- The Ravensbruck camp was intended exclusively to hold female inmates. A small camp for men was adjacent to it was later built.
- On a much-needed lighter note, I once described the aforementioned to a Scottish audience. They objected to my saying that Shteckruben were fed to cattle, saying that these so-called ‘Swedes’, Swedish turnips, were a regular part of their normal diet. I have always been particular that what I relate is truthful. Thereafter I would state that the Shteckrube in Europe is fed exclusively to cattle and Scotsmen.
