A Train Near Magdeburg

by Matthew Rozell

  About six weeks after this incident, my Uncle Max's exemption expired, as all exemptions and deferments eventually did in Westerbork. My uncle, aunt, and Alfred's names were on the list to be sent east to one of those ‘work or resettlement’ camps. I spoke to my cousin before he left and I said to him, ‘I will see you soon.’ I believed that my sister and I would probably follow them, being sent on a later transport. Alfred seemed to have a premonition that this would not happen. He was crying and said, ‘I don't think so.’ Unfortunately he was right; as I found out after the war, they were deported to Sobibor and killed in the gas chambers on July 2, 1943.

  Even though he would never know, my uncle's maneuvering had succeeded in keeping us off those trains to Sobibor and Auschwitz and allowed us to stay in Westerbork. We could remain in Westerbork for the time being, as we apparently were considered ‘Foreign Nationals’ because our mother was living in Leeds, England, as an au pair, a foreign maid. We would now live in the orphanage of Transit Camp Westerbork, which was still under the jurisdiction of Kommandant Gemmeker.

  *

  The Orphanage

  The orphanage in Westerbork was established in 1939, by Mr. Jehoshua (Otto) Birnbaum, an educator from Berlin with six children of his own. By the time my sister and I came to the orphanage it was crowded with orphans. Sometimes the Gruene Polizei, police in green uniform, in the bigger cities, especially in Amsterdam, would pick up Jewish children on their way to or from schools, without their parents! Also many times children in hiding with non-Jewish families were betrayed and these too would arrive in Westerbork without parents.

  Mr. Birnbaum was allowed to take children up to the age of fifteen. A lot of very young children lived in the orphanage. Mr. Birnbaum had access to the lists being prepared every week for deportation east because the Jewish Camp Council prepared these lists. If he found the name of any of ‘his’ children on the lists, he would run to the German Kommandant Gemmeker and plead with him not to deport the children. Birnbaum would tell Gemmeker that the children were much too young to go to a work or resettlement camp in the east and that he would take care of them. So, for a while, the Kommandant relented and took the children off the lists. The Jewish Camp Council created special exemption lists for the children; they were put on the so-called Palestine lists, Jews selected for possible exchange with the British for German Nationals. If chosen, these Jews would later immigrate to Palestine.

  This was the situation in the orphanage, and it continued for several months. It was a safe haven for us; I got used to the life there. We received a little more food than the rest of the camp, and we were allowed to receive parcels from the outside. We received non-perishable food parcels from Dinxperlo, from Mimi Otten, who was working for the resistance. My uncle had given her money before we were deported to send the food to us. We shared our parcels with the other children. Also many prominent professors, teachers, and musicians came to help in the orphanage, before they were themselves deported. The one I remember best was Mrs. Clara Asscher Pinkhof, a well-known Jewish Dutch author of children's books. She was the widow of the rabbi of Groningen and became an author after his death. I remember her especially well because she was a good storyteller.

  Then came November 16, 1943. The camp was very crowded, with about 25,000 people. It was Monday evening and the train stood ready to go east the next morning. About 2,500 Jews were supposed to be deported that day. However, nearly everybody in the camp had some sort of exemption. So this time there were not enough people to fill the train. The head of the Jewish council, Kurt Schlesinger, went to Gemmeker and told him, ‘There are not enough people without exemptions.’ Then the Kommandant canceled all exemptions, including most Palestine lists. This meant that nearly all the children of the orphanage were put on the deportation lists, despite Mr. Birnbaum's efforts. Most of the children in the orphanage, many of whom were very young, went on this train to Auschwitz and to the gas chambers. Many people working in the orphanage, including Mr. Birnbaum, volunteered to go with the children, even though they were not on the deportation list; they wanted to take care of the children once they had arrived at these resettlement or work camps. The Kommandant would not allow Mr. Birnbaum to accompany the children. So he stayed behind, as did Edith and I, among the few other children who were left. But my sister and I were saved, I assume, because my uncle, at the last moment, had changed his mind, as noted earlier, and had decided not to put us on that Weinreb list, but instead to stress the fact that our mother was in England.

  This was a terrible night for all of us. Many of the children were very young, and all of us were unhappy. We did not know what their fate would be. In the morning, the train left with most of the children packed into cattle wagons. Those of us left behind felt very sad, as we had lost most of our friends. Despite the circumstances, we had been like one big family. Upon arrival in Auschwitz, all the children, with the people accompanying them, were sent to the gas chambers. There were no known survivors.

  *

  Exchange Camp

  After November 16, 1943, there was a short pause in deportations to the east. No transports left until January 11, 1944, when the first transport from Westerbork went to Bergen–Belsen. After eight months in Westerbork, Edith and I were placed on this transport. While we were walking towards the train, we saw Kommandant Gemmeker standing there. Usually he came only when the transports were about to depart. This time he was standing there from the beginning, telling everybody who walked past him, ‘You people are lucky. You are going to an exchange camp in Germany called Bergen–Belsen.’

  We noticed that the train was not the usual boxcars or cattle wagons but a regular, if very old, passenger train. We arrived at the railroad station of Bergen early in the morning. I was almost twelve years old. SS guards, yelling and screaming, stood on the platform to receive us. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder holding big dogs. Yet, I don't think anybody dreamed of escaping; we knew that we were in the middle of Germany, somewhere between Hannover and Hamburg. Even though Westerbork was not a concentration camp, food had been sparse, and we looked pale and thin, sickly. I am sure the local population would not have been friendly to anybody trying to escape.

  We had to walk to the camp, several kilometers away, under the watchful eyes of the armed SS guards who threatened us with their rifles. This frightened me, and I am sure also the other children from the train. The parents tried to comfort some of the smaller children who were crying. Some of the young men and women also tried very hard to comfort the children, especially my sister and me because we were without parents. We were made to stand for roll call several hours, awaiting our assignment to the barracks. All the time, there was the sound of rifle fire in the background, seemingly coming from one of the many watchtowers around the camp. I was very concerned that they were aiming at us and maybe wanting to shoot some or all of us. After a while, we found out that they were not firing directly at us; they were shooting to scare us. This was our reception at Bergen–Belsen and it caused me nightmares for many weeks later.

  Our segment of the camp was called the exchange camp by the Germans, but Sternlager, or Star Camp, by the rest of the inmates. In the Sternlager, we wore our own clothing, by then more like rags, with the Jewish star sewn on.

  In February of 1944, the Birnbaums and the few other children remaining at the orphanage arrived in Bergen–Belsen. Hannah Goslar and her little sister Gabi, then four years old, came with them. I had first met Hannah at the orphanage in Westerbork where she had occupied a bunk right next to my sister Edith and the two had become very friendly. By the fall of 1944, the first transports arrived from the east because the Germans were evacuating the eastern camps as the Soviet army advanced across Poland. Several transports of women, about 8,000 from Auschwitz-Birkenau, arrived at the end of October or the beginning of November. They were put into tents next to us. However, the tents collapsed because of the strong autumn winds. Therefore, half our barracks was taken away to accommodate them. Barbed wir
e was put up to separate us. We were forbidden to talk with them.

  As I found out years later from my friend, Hannah, or Hanneli, as she was known in Anne Frank's diary, her friend, Anne Frank, and Anne’s sister, Margot, were among those women. I never knew that Hannah had been Anne Frank’s close friend and had lived close to her in Amsterdam. I also did not know at the time that Hannah had talked with Anne several times in Bergen–Belsen. Hannah had been surprised and shocked when she found Anne and Margot among the women who had arrived from Auschwitz-Birkenau. She had been under the impression that Anne and her family were safely in Switzerland, a rumor circulated by the Franks when they had gone into hiding in the Annex. [*]

  It is still difficult for me to comprehend what happened, how it was possible that people could be so cruel and utterly inhumane, to allow tens of thousands of people to die of starvation and disease, cooped up behind barbed wire, living under the most terrible conditions.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Hungary is Judenrein’

  By the summer of 1944, the time American soldiers had fought their way ashore at Omaha Beach and beyond, the net had closed in on Hungary’s Jewish population. By the time the Allies crossed over into Germany itself, most of Europe’s Jews were dead.

  Hungary’s Jews had been spared the horrors that unfolded as German troops moved into conquered territory, as the Hungarian government had made an alliance with Hitler in 1938. Antisemitic legislation began in earnest in 1939, but many of Hungary’s Jews saw this only as a measure to appease Hitler. The Hungarian Army joined the attack on the Soviet Union, but their commitment began to waver after heavy losses in early 1943. On March 19, 1944, the German Army occupied Hungary, with SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Adolf Eichmann arriving with his orders to make Hungary ‘judenrein.’ The swiftness of this action was stunning: by the middle of the summer that had brought American, British, and Canadian liberators to the continent, 440,000 of Hungary’s Jews had been rounded up and deported, most to be murdered immediately at Auschwitz.[35]

  Leslie Meisels was born in 1927 and was just entering his teenage years when the changes began.

  Leslie Meisels

  My childhood in my hometown of Nádudvar felt normal, unmarked by special events, although being Jewish meant certain differences. While my neighbor’s children were spending their time in whatever way they wanted, from the age of five I attended cheder[*] several times a week to learn about being Jewish, our history, and how to pray. At cheder, the teacher taught us to read Hebrew and explained, in Hungarian, the basics of the five books of Moses. When I turned six, I attended public school, as did other Jewish children, because with so few of us, there was no Jewish school.

  In such a small town, everybody knew all the Jewish people, and all the Jewish people knew, if not by name, by face, most of the people in town. When I was growing up, we identified ourselves as patriotic Hungarians who practiced the Jewish religion. I felt like our Jewish community was entirely integrated, accepted, and respected in town. However, there were times that I was on my way to or from school when a child, who might have been angry with me, called me a ‘dirty Jew.’ It was unpleasant, but it didn’t go any further than that.

  [A turning point came] in 1939, one year after the first anti-Jewish law that the Hungarian fascist government, which politically supported the German Nazi regime, had independently implemented. The law restricted the number of Jews who could participate in businesses and commercial enterprises. In spite of this, my family and I were not yet experiencing any major changes, but on May 5, 1939, the government issued a second, more severe anti-Jewish law that further restricted the number of Jews in certain professions, restricted admission to higher education, and forbade Jews from operating large businesses. They could only continue working if they officially transferred management of their businesses to non-Jews. Although Jewish businesses and tradespeople in Nádudvar suffered from these laws, many had trustworthy gentile friends and acquaintances who allowed their names to be used for the government requirements, sometimes for a fee, allowing the Jewish owners to continue managing their own businesses. That same year, government-organized anti-Jewish propaganda suddenly started to appear everywhere. Although we were afraid to a certain extent, we still thought that nothing worse than the curtailing laws would happen to us. We considered ourselves to be patriotic Hungarians first and Jews second, [having lived here for generations]. Soon enough, though, we found out that our beliefs were just sweet dreams. In the regime’s eyes, not only were we not Hungarians, our lives were not worth anything.

  The atmosphere in Nádudvar began to change. The town electrician was also the local leader of the Nyilas, the Arrow Cross party, which was the Hungarian version of the German Nazi party. The Arrow Cross had adopted Nazi beliefs, although in its early days, its followers only verbally abused Jews in confrontations on the street; their actions didn’t go any further until later.

  I was scared of one of my classmates, a butcher’s apprentice. He was about two years older than me, six-foot-five and more than two hundred pounds, and a member of the Arrow Cross Party. Although he didn’t pay too much attention to me, he made it clear, often and vehemently, that he didn’t like Jews. I avoided stepping in front of him or provoking him, worried about being beaten up. One wintry Friday night, however, he decided to show off, saying, ‘Hey, guys, take a look. I’m going to scare the shit out of this Jewish boy.’ And as soon as these words were said, his butcher knife flew through the air and stuck into the top of my desk, vibrating, just inches away from my chest and face. He didn’t beat me up, but it scared me enough to want to stay as far away from him as possible. My tormentor was amused, and some of my classmates laughed, cheered, and clapped. Others kept quiet, and some expressed their disapproval and support for me by looks and later on by words, but they certainly didn’t do anything to stop him. The atmosphere in class was much divided—like the rest of Hungarian society—between verbal antisemites, sympathizers who didn’t act on their beliefs, and the majority who just remained silent. People let Jews be antagonized as long as they themselves were left alone.

  That winter, the butcher’s apprentice was part of something more deadly. One evening, when my old teacher from cheder was going home from the grocery store after work, carrying a bag of potatoes, he encountered the butcher’s apprentice, who stabbed him in the back with his butcher knife, killing him. His excuse was that a Jew was gathering food at night, taking it away from the gentile population. When the gendarmes[*] took him in, there was no question that he had committed a crime—he didn’t deny it and there were witnesses—but he had only killed a Jew. Although there must have been a trial, he wasn’t imprisoned. He may have received a warning but continued living in town as if nothing had happened.

  The Yellow Star

  Many Hungarian Jews were ordered up into labor battalions as the Hungarian government threw its lot in with Hitler’s forces in the June 1941 invasion of the USSR. After the crushing defeats suffered by the Hungarian Second Army at the end of the battle of Stalingrad in early 1943—out of 200,000 Hungarian soldiers and 50,000 Jewish forced-laborers, over half were killed[36]—followed by the defection of Italy in the summer of 1943, the Hungarian government began to make peace overtures to the western Allies. Incensed, Hitler immediately ordered the German army into Hungary.

  Leslie Meisels

  The German army occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. Within weeks, they decreed that Jewish people put a cloth yellow Star of David on their garments, which had to be visible so that everybody could see that we were Jews. My paternal grandfather, sadly, experienced this degradation. A Hungarian-looking gentleman whose forefathers were born in the town and who had lived respectful lives there, Grandfather said that he wouldn’t be humiliated; he wouldn’t wear the yellow star. He brooded about it for two days, not leaving the house. Then, he had a heart attack and passed away a couple of days later. He died without ever putting that symbol on his clothing. We were pe
rmitted to have a funeral; in April 1944, he was the last person buried in the Jewish cemetery of Nádudvar. After the war, my father erected a concrete cover on his grave that couldn’t be removed or destroyed. It was a good thing that he did because even today, with no Jews living in town, the grave is untouched. My grandfather’s death was our immediate family’s first real tragedy from the Nazi occupation.

  Irene Bleier Muskal was also born in 1927 and lived in the same small town in Eastern Hungary as Leslie Meisels, later moving not far away to the slightly larger town of Püspökladány, where her father could conduct business with less competition. She wrote her memoir in 1989, recalling her experiences and incorporating notes from diary fragments.

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  April 4, 1944

  The Hungarian government introduced a degrading law forcing us to wear a yellow star on the left side of our clothes. Whoever disobeyed would be punished. My father prepared perfect yellow stars for each of us. Sad reflections overtook his face as he worked.

  My father's instruction that I put on the yellow star filled me with enormous hatred and depression. We always showed great respect and love to both our parents—especially to our father—but now I had to refuse. ‘I cannot wear the disgracing badge,’ I told my father. My father answered that I should wear the star with pride. ‘Show them that you are proud to be a Jew,’ he said. ‘I am proud to be a Jew,’ I told my father. ‘But that pride does not mean that I will let them degrade me and make me a laughing stock.’ Those barbaric demands deeply hurt my self-dignity. The first day I wore the yellow star fell on my seventeenth birthday. Instead of marking the spring of life, my birthday turned into a dark omen for many more hopeless days that followed shortly.