The Youngest Witnesses
DICKSTEIN, LORE
The Youngest Witnesses The Boys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors By Martin Gilbert Hemy Holt. 511 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Lore Dickstein Contributor, New...
...These were the last words of the eminent Jewish historian, Simon Dubnow, spoken just before he was shot in December 1941 as the Nazis emptied the Riga ghetto...
...It is now over 50 years since the concentration camps were liberated, yet the volume of Holocaust material, much of it new, steadily increases...
...Originally created as a charitable organization for needy members, the society publishes a newsletter and holds annual reunions...
...As I neared the two highranking SS officers...
...Filthy, infested with lice, their clothes in tatters, they were eventually taken in by a woman who then sold them to farmers in exchange for food...
...The Germans were separating people into two rows, one row going to the left, the other to the right...
...Located in London and named after its telephone exchange, the club served as a social center and meeting place where "the boys" could eat, play chess and volleyball, and dance...
...From his vast knowledge of the period he fills in the larger historical context, defines Yiddish words and explains Jewish religious practice...
...from the ultraOrthodox to religious Zionists to Socialist Zionists...
...A number of groups...
...With tremendous firepower and speed, they overwhelmed the Polish Army and quickly reached deep into Polish territory...
...by October 1946, over ?? 125,000 ($3 million at today's value) had been donated to house, clothe and feed the refugees...
...It was, one claimed, a "substitute for a lost family...
...Just a few years later, during the 1948 War of Independence, about 40 of them served in the Israel Defense Force...
...Originally from Piotrkow, a town south of Lodz, Poland, he survived the Piotrkow ghetto, a slave labor camp in Schlieben and the Buchenwald and Theresienstadt concentration camps...
...hundreds of others, whose lives we do not know, did not respond to his request...
...The number six million has become a rallying cry at Holocaust memorials, an emblem of the magnitude of the genocide...
...Malnourished, sick with typhus and tuberculosis, they sat on the floors of RAF bombers still outfitted for battle...
...were nine or 10 years old when Germany invaded Poland in 1939...
...Ben Helfgott, the current chairman of the '45 Aid Society and a retired clothing manufacturer, convinced Gilbert to write this book...
...Hanka Ziegler and her brother Zigmund returned to the Lodz ghetto one evening with a sack of potatoes and some flour for their mother, only to find that it had been sealed in preparation for a deportation...
...that epitomized England's green and pleasant land...
...even the footnotes are informative...
...Most of these children...
...This is due, in part, to the institutions those who stayed in Britain created...
...the survivors were given pocket money and second-hand bicycles...
...They miraculously survived...
...the boys" were issued two-year visitor visas, permits de s?©jour, that forbade employment of the now-teenaged survivors...
...although they refer to themselves as "the boys," there were about 80 girls...
...A number recall watching the European countryside pass from the transparent gun turrets...
...Write and record...
...Gilbert claims that only three of the boys required long-term institutional psychiatric care, although it is not clear if this reflects postwar British antipathy to psychiatry, the stoical British stiff upper lip in the face of adversity, or an unwillingness on the part of the survivors themselves to dwell on the past...
...Gilbert acts as the filter, the medium through which the narrative unfolds...
...While the Kindertransporte of 1938and 1939, which evacuated 10,000 young Jewish German and Austrian refugees to Britain, are well documented, this Kindertransport of 732 child survivors of the concentration camps brought to Britain after the War has, until now, been known only to those involved...
...This effort was financed entirely by private funds...
...by luck and wit...
...Most were originally from Poland and Hungary...
...What is most striking about "the boys" is their continuing feeling of group solidarity...
...Many of the children had wanted to go directly to Palestine, not Britain, but the British had issued only a paltry 1,000 adult survivors certificates of passage...
...It is hard to imagine how anyone, let alone children, could have lived through the relentless Nazi brutality...
...In both The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (1985 (and in this extraordinary new book, TheBoys: The Untold Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors, Gilbert has used individual testimony, the words of the survivors themselves, to tell the story...
...The resilience and wiliness, the physical and mental strength that had helped them survive against all odds, allowed a quick, seemingly happy integration into normal society...
...The Palestine White Paper of 1939, which restricted Jewish emigration to Palestine, was still operative at the end of the War...
...Hanka was nine years old, her brother, 14...
...Helfgott was 15 years old when the War ended and among the first "boys" brought to Britain...
...But starting with the Nuremburg Trials in 1946, which produced volumes of testimony, the survivors of the Holocaust...
...The survivors could not have found a better recordkeeper...
...almost all of them were orphans by 1945, and many witnessed the death of their parents...
...The Central British Fund, a Jewish charitable organization under the auspices of the British philanthropist Leonard Montefiore, convinced the Home Office in June 1945 to airlift 1,000 child survivors under the age of 16 to Britain...
...In 1985, on the 40th anniversary of their liberation, "in a symbolic act, the society donated 732 pounds to the Central British Fund, representing one pound for each of us who came here to England under the auspices of the Fund...
...To his horror, Arek was put in the left-hand row...
...Once the group homes were disbanded, "the boys" formed, in 1947, the Primrose Club...
...vied for "the boys'" allegiance...
...On September 1, vividly remembered as a brilliantly sunny day, the Germans invaded Poland...
...In a triumph of the will that makes one want to stand up and cheer, he represented Britain twice as a weight lifter in the Olympic Games...
...But Martin Gilbert, the British historian and official biographer of Winston Churchill, has brought the numbers down to a human scale...
...The teachers, matrons and counselors, most of whom were refugees themselves who left Europe before the War, seem to have treated the survivors with tremendous respect and gentle care...
...Reviewed by Lore Dickstein Contributor, New York "Times Book Review" Schreibt unfarschreibt...
...With the attention of our guards on this commotion, I instinctively stepped across the dividing line into the righthand row...
...Denied entry, they wandered the Polish countryside alone for months, pretending to be Christian and begging for food...
...I saw that the left-hand row was full of children and old people, and I knew I must avoid that one at all costs...
...beatings that left people near death, a daily diet that, at best, consisted of a corner of bread and some watery "soup," lice-infested clothing, backbreaking slave labor in icy weather, mass executions...
...TheBoys, as Gilbert indicates in the subtitle, is indeed an untold story...
...have testified and borne witness to the murder of six million Jews...
...Sports teams were organized...
...The litany of horrors in this book...
...The Nazi death machine, efficient and ruthless to the last days of World War II, had expected that not one Jew would be left alive to bear witness...
...By British stipulation, this "mission of mercy" did not guarantee permanent residence or foster homes...
...is bitterly familiar...
...Small Jewish children who were blond and spoke unaccented Polish could sneak out of the ghetto and bring back food...
...Once in Britain, they were initially housed in donated group homes...
...Starting in August 1945, from gathering points in Prague and Munich, "the boys" were brought to Britain in successive waves of transports...
...But here it is cast in a new light: This is testimony from children, survivors who were in their early teens or younger...
...Esther Zylberberg recalls the summer of 1939 as "that last, golden summer," "the last carefree days of my childhood...
...ghettos, slave labor camps, extermination camps, and death marches...
...Teachers recruited through ads in the Jewish Chronicle, the newspaper of British Jewry, gave instruction in math, history and the English language to survivors whose formal schooling had abruptly ended when war broke out...
...Nonetheless, a number of "the boys" prepared for aliyah by studying Hebrew and learning agricultural methods...
...His mother, younger sister and father were shot by the Nazis...
...There was a long concrete ramp leading from the station into the camp," Arek Hersh said in recalling the selection at Auschwitz he witnessed when he was 15, "along which streamed an endless line of people...
...Despite the fact that many of "the boys" lied about their ages, 1000 children could not be found...
...the Lake District, Scotland and Northern Ireland...
...The figure is so staggering, so large, it is almost impossible to assimilate...
...The sponsors had originally feared that these wild, orphaned children, who had spent their formative years in hell, wouldbe an ungovernable, criminal group, but this proved to be totally false...
...In their path they left destruction and death...
...The Primrose Club was succeeded, in the 1960s, by the '45 Aid Society...
...Suddenly behind us a commotion began...
...In this book, Gilbert dealt with testimony from 150 survivors...
...Seamlessly, he stitches together the eyewitness accounts and organizes them by time, place and common experience...
...Many of these grand, country mansions were located in bucolic settings...
...The result is a superb, accessible, vibrant historical text...
...Within weeks, 16,000 Jews had been randomly murdered, forced labor camps were instituted and the first ghetto was established...
...For the first time in five years, they received medical attention, dental care, decent clothing, beds, clean linen and, foremost for all the survivors, food...
...I drew myself up to my full height and tried to give an impression of strength and fitness...
...fewer than 100,000 people...
...His story epitomizes the journey "the boys" took...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 9
