Child of the Concentration Camp (Part V)

Repatriation

We were now interviewed by members of the Red Cross with a view to repatriation. Both Otto and I stated that we were Dutch. No one could argue with us – we had no papers and there were no witnesses. I don’t know what made us lie, other than perhaps maintaining the fiction that had enabled us to gain access to the Dutch barrack in Sachsenhausen. We realized that if any of our families had survived, they would try and return to Holland in the hope of finding someone or even something. It was as well that we did say that we were Dutch; one of the boys of our Hungarian group had become separated from his mother. When questioned after his liberation he told the truth, namely that he had Hungarian nationality. The authorities promptly sent him to Hungary and it took his mother two years before she could get him released by the Communists.

Knowing that we were soon to be repatriated we inquired as to conditions in Holland. It was then that we found out about the widespread starvation there. I, in the meantime, had acquired some souvenirs – German ceremonial swords, daggers etc. Had I been so inclined I could have brought a submachine gun or Luger pistol back with me; I was never searched. Under the circumstances I decided to get rid of all my loot and instead managed to exchange it with the American soldiers for six Red Cross parcels, returning to Holland carrying three in each hand. I will never know what excited my Auntie Lenke more when I arrived there, my survival or those parcels.

And so one day we left Lunenburg airport in a military Dakota, and in due course landed in Brussels on our way back home. We had some time to ourselves and wandered around the city admiring both the architecture and our freedom to do so. Suddenly we heard our names called in an excited voice and found ourselves confronted by Jacques. He was overjoyed to see us and lost no time in telling Otto and me that he was now the proud possessor of two houses, probably once owned by his parents. Otto and I looked at each other: “What has become of your mother, Jacques” I asked him. His eyes became evasive and he did not answer. “Your father and older brother were sent to Buchenwald” I persisted. Again he did not answer, but after a few seconds recovered his earlier enthusiasm and again insisted that we accompany him to see his houses. Saddened we walked away, leaving him standing there.

Holland

That evening I arrived with Nobel at his home in Rotterdam, while Otto went on to The Hague to find his uncle. Mrs Nobel was a dear woman and made me most welcome and after dinner I was shown my room. It had big featherbeds in it and I looked at them, felt them, felt the mattress and then burst out laughing. It took me some time to compose myself.

The following day, leaving my Red Cross parcels at the Nobels, I set out for Schiedam and the van Hultens. I arrived there in the afternoon and with trepidation knocked on the door. How had they fared since my father last saw them in 1943? Mrs van Hulten opened the door, looking the same as I had remembered her. For a moment she stared at me. Then she said: “It is Don,” and then, “We heard from your mother and sister this morning.”

Although the van Hultens and the Krausz’s had been neighbours for many years as well as friends and their children had gone to the same school, I was not surprised that Mrs van Hulten had not recognized me initially; I may have lost some weight and had a very different expression. By contrast, when I eventually saw the photos of my mother and Irene that had been taken upon their arrival in Sweden after having been liberated, I was amazed to see how healthy and well-fed they both looked. The food at the Siemens camp must have been adequate.

Some time after I had been transferred to the Men’s camp, my mother went to work at the nearby Siemens factory and with Riva’s help she managed to have Irene sent there as well. They stayed at the Siemens labour camp, not in Ravensbruck. The conditions in Siemens were better than in Ravensbruck; if I had still been with my mother and sister, then the transfer to that labour camp could not have taken place. My mother and sister were returned to Ravensbruck when the Siemens camp was evacuated.

Not long thereafter the Hungarian group was informed that they could choose to be sent to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp if they so wished. This episode was rather irregular. The Nazis were not in the habit of allowing one any choice – people were disposed of like so much cattle. The women knew nothing about the conditions in Bergen Belsen, except that it was in the west and therefore more likely to be liberated by the English or Americans than by the Russians. Nearly all the Hungarian women from Holland took this option.

My mother was not so sure. These could be life or death decisions and she had to consider the welfare of her child as well. So acting on intuition, she did something that was also highly irregular: She asked one of the SS guards for advice.

Now there was not supposed to be any civil contact between the SS guards and those whom they might be called upon to beat or kill at a moment’s notice. The man whom my mother selected was one of the very few whom she had not seen ill-treat a prisoner. My sister was a very beautiful child, allowing for concentration camp conditions. She was fair-skinned, blond and blue-eyed, the very epitome of a young Aryan girl. The guard listened to my mother and then looked at Irene.

“Is this your child?” he asked. Upon hearing the affirmation, he said, “Bleib hier” (Stay), and walked away.

This decision would be their salvation. The Hungarian group that went to Bergen Belsen found themselves in a camp rife with typhus and tuberculosis. Many became critically ill and some died, including Otto’s mother. When a barrack was infested with typhus it was not uncommon for 99% of its occupants to perish.

In March 1945 my mother heard of a list that was being prepared of all the English prisoners in Ravensbruck and she had her name and Irene’s entered on that list. Later, in April, the Red Cross evacuated them to Sweden and in due course my mother contacted the van Hultens.

A fellow prisoner drew my mother’s attention to this list. She was a Chinese lady called Nadine Wang who claimed to have been a colonel in Chiang Kai-shek’s army. Before the Swedish Red Cross evacuated the English prisoners, my mother and Irene went to take their leave of Nadine Wang and to thank her for what may well have been the gift of their lives. None of them knew what future lay ahead. Nadine Wang was not a young woman and had no children. She asked my mother that if all went well and Irene married and became a mother herself, that she should be reminded of what had happened on this occasion. If the infant were a girl, then Nadine Wang would appreciate it if Irene would name the child after her. Irene’s daughter is called Ronit Nadine.

I now began to alternate my sojourn between the Nobels, the van Hultens and my Auntie Lenke. I learned that Lenke and her husband Baczi had survived by being in hiding during the war. Holland was still in the grip of hunger, food was rationed and my Red Cross parcels were duly divided between those three families. I got on very well with all of them, although my childhood friend, Jan van Hulten, who was one year younger than I, would tell me years later that he felt that I was at least 25 years older than he when I returned. I still kept in touch with Otto and we would go for long walks together. His younger brother and sister had survived Bergen Belsen and were to join him in The Hague eventually.

Otto and his brother and sister did not remain in Holland. Their uncle and aunt decided that they could not cope with them. A Jewish Dutch family, who had all survived the war despite the husband having been in Auschwitz, then took in Otto, Rudi and Emmy. So grateful was this family for the miracle of their survival that they gathered orphans from all over Holland, giving them eleven children in all including their own. They immigrated to Israel when the state was established and were sent to the Kibbutz Givat Brenner. Otto changed his name to Menachem Kallus and joined the airforce. He was a member of the Israeli contingent in Uganda, became friendly with a major by the name of Idi Amin, and is now settled near Haifa as a businessman with his own family.

Mr. Nobel had meanwhile returned to his work as a police photographer in Rotterdam. I was staying with him when I saw him return from work one day with a large envelope. I asked him what was in there and he said that the envelope contained photos that he had taken in his line of work and that it was best that I did not see them. I replied that he knew very well that I was used to scenes of violence. Later that evening as we were sitting around the table having dinner, he got up and, approaching me from behind, he reached over my shoulder and put a photo in front of my face. It was the picture of an old lady sitting in her chair with her throat cut. I knocked it right out of his hand. I then began to realize that my reactions were slowly returning to normal.

None of the people that I stayed with thought it necessary to send me for a medical or psychiatric examination. I behaved normally, was not sick, and I suppose that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder had not yet been heard of. My uncle Pityu had meanwhile returned from the camps. He had no definite news of my father, nor of his other two brothers who had been in Buchenwald, but informed me that he did not believe that they were still alive. They had become too weak to work, had been put on a transport…. Some time after Pityu’s return my mother would receive confirmation of my father’s death through the Red Cross. Of the fifty relatives that my father had in Europe before the war only ten survived. This meant that I had lost my grandmother and nearly all my uncles, aunts and cousins plus my friends that I had known since early childhood.

The Germans kept records of the names and dates when people died or were murdered in the concentration camps but not in the death camps. In due course this information was computerized by the Yad Vashem institute in Jerusalem and became available to the public. These details not only served the purpose of ascertaining the fate of many of the missing people but also to gainsay the calumny that the Holocaust was a myth and that there had never been gas chambers. Neo Nazis would admit that Jews had died in concentration camps, but only as a result of diseases such as typhus which effected the German population as well.

I wrote this before the records of millions of concentration camp victims were discovered at Bad Arolsen. The record of my father’s death was among them and I received a Death Notice from the Red Cross stating that he had died of pleurisy.

As I am typing this I have in front of me a photostatic extract from the Yad Vashem records. It concerns the details of people by the name of Krausz, when and where they were born and died. It is by no means comprehensive: my father’s name does not even appear on it. That list shows the names of my uncle Jeno, his wife and two children, all perished on the same day, 13-3-1943 in Sobibor, and my aunt Etah and her twin children, all dead on 27-8-1943 in Auschwitz. When there are no battles or bombings and whole families die on the same day, then that is not disease, it is murder.

One day I was walking in Rotterdam when I saw the Italian boy Pietro whom I had rescued at school, the boy whose parents were Nazis. He gave a joyful shout when he saw me:”Don, you are still alive!” There was something in those words that touched a very raw nerve. “Yes,” I said, “I am still alive,” and walked on.

My memory of the Dutch people has been a very happy one. I lived there for twelve years and not once did I have an antisemitic experience or hear a derogatory remark for being a Jew. There are not many Jews of European origin that can say this. In 1980, my wife and I visited Holland and went to Amsterdam. I had learned that during the war the Nazis would concentrate the Jews of Amsterdam in a theatre called the Schouwburg and from there send them to Westerbork. This building had been converted into a memorial and I wanted to visit it. Despite having been given the address I could not find the place and eventually asked a man in the street whether he could direct me. That he did, and then suddenly took my arm and said, “I hope that you find what you are looking for.” He was not a Jew, and the empathy and compassion of his gesture nearly made me weep.

Here in South Africa we had a few Dutch people who rescued Jews. One was a most remarkable man named Jaap van Proosdij, who had been employed at the Gestapo headquarters and had used his official position there to rescue some 240 Jews. Had he been caught then I have no doubt that he would have been tortured and shot. As vice chairman of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Association I played a role in having him recognized officially as a Righteous Gentile and he received all the honour and rewards that come with such recognition.

Sometime thereafter our Holocaust survivors in Johannesburg had a reception for Jaap at which he addressed us. He was asked why he had risked his life, and became quite agitated. “If you see someone drowning,” he said, “Then what are you going to do? Just stand there?”

In my speech of appreciation I pointed out what actions such as his had meant to us. We were engulfed in the darkest of nights, hated, despised and abandoned by the whole world, condemned to terrible suffering and death. Suddenly there came a person such as he, like a shining light, risking his life to save ours. I also told him how much I envied him. In the Jewish religion the act of saving one person’s life is compared to saving the whole world; Jaap van Proosdij had succeeded in saving 240.

Epilogue

I had been lecturing at schools on the Shoah, and now determined to include German schools. The object was to acquaint them with their history without pointing accusing fingers or making them feel personally guilty. Children cannot be held responsible for the misdeeds of their elders.

Whether this effort bore fruit I only realized after a talk at the German school in Pretoria. I was already walking back to my car when a little German girl came running after me and simply said, “Thank you.” I don’t remember what I had said to that child but it must have had meaning for her.

So I know that in my face-to-face dealings with Germans I experience no hatred. And where they are less than forthright in condemning antisemitism I see them as victims of fear and indoctrination, even nationalism – people that need help and sympathy, not hatred.

And yet, and yet, I have had the experience of sitting in a restaurant and hearing a certain kind of German spoken at a table behind me. I began to feel ice cold. No, I did not turn around to look, just sat there amazed that after half a century my past experiences could still have such a hold on me.

I cannot vouch for always being right, but am convinced of this: The Holocaust was the result of fear and hatred. Hatred cannot be the antidote. So when I meet a stranger I look at that person’s face. If I like what I see then his or her accent, nationality, skin colour, religion or dress are no deterrent and I will engage that person as one human being to another. I can see no alternative.

Don Krausz served as the chairman of the Association of Holocaust Survivors in Johannesburg (She’erith Hapleitah) from 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.