Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Bargain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother
224
Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Bargain That Broke Adolf Hitler and Saved My Mother
224Hardcover
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Overview
Seven years after the death of his mother, Malka, Stanley A. Goldman traveled to Israel to visit her best friend during the Holocaust. The best friend’s daughter showed Goldman a pamphlet she had acquired from the Israeli Holocaust Museum that documented activities of one man’s negotiations with the Nazi’s interior minister and SS head, Heinrich Himmler, for the release of the Jewish women from the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. While looking through the pamphlet, the two discovered a picture that could have been their mothers being released from the camp. Wanting to know the details of how they were saved, Goldman set out on a long and difficult path to unravel the mystery. After years of researching the pamphlet, Goldman learned that a German Jew named Norbert Masur made a treacherous journey from the safety of Sweden back into the war zone in order to secure the release of the Jewish women imprisoned at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Masur not only succeeded in his mission against all odds but he contributed to the downfall of the Nazi hierarchy itself. This amazing, little-known story uncovers a piece of history about the undermining of the Nazi regime, the women of the Holocaust, and the strained but loving relationship between a survivor and her son.
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781640120440 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Potomac Books |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream"
August 24, 1944 / Auschwitz
On August 23, Nazi control of both Romania and Greece had been overthrown. On August 25, the German garrison in Paris would surrender. The hegemony of the Third Reich was rapidly shrinking, but Stalin had just ordered his army to halt its advance into Polish territory, where Auschwitz was located, so that German soldiers and local Polish resistance fighters could continue to kill each other, thereby diminishing both of the Soviet Union's rivals for future control of the nation.
There was no one to rescue or offer hope to my mother. Her name was Malka, and she was one of a thousand young Polish Jewish women who waited. They had arrived in the camp a week before on one of the Lódz Ghetto transports. Having been processed together, they were now supposed to die together. Five hundred women ahead of Malka were led into a chamber and did not return. Now at the front of this bewildering line, she was next. Years later, her closest friend, who sat in that line with her, described to her own daughter what it had been like: "We were shaved. We were naked. We're not crying. We didn't know what crematorium means. You don't know where you're going. So I ask a woman guard and she says — 'You see the chimney with the smoke, you are going to come out there.'"
These waiting women were still alive while most of their friends and loved ones had already been murdered or died from the deprivations or diseases that plagued their subjugated population. In the ghetto from which they had recently arrived, none had escaped malnutrition as they lived under the daily threat of selection for transport to unknown destinations like this camp. Interviews with the survivors of the group confirmed that, until they were actually there, they were unaware that a journey to Auschwitz was a sentence of death. Such knowledge had been successfully kept from the isolated Jews of Lódz.
If it had not been for her father growing homesick in America, Malka would not have been subject to a regime whose central creed called for her execution. Just after the end of World War I, hoping to eventually send for the rest of his family, my maternal grandfather, Samuel Repstein, traveled to New York City, where his eldest son had already settled. Even with the company of his firstborn, this new life was just too different. In his Polish shtetl (small town), Biala Rawska, seemingly untouched by the passage of time, he had been a respected tailor of men's suits who knew and was known by everyone. Lonely for home, he abandoned the dream and left his adult son in America and returned back across the Atlantic. Neither in the metropolis of New York nor in the shtetl of Biala Rawska was the danger to the entirety of European Jewery obvious in those first years of the twentieth century. A quarter of a century later, my grandfather's choice cost the lives of eight of his children and all of their descendants. Other than her eldest brother in America, my mother was the lone survivor of her entire family.
What the German Knew
As a seventeen-year-old bride, Malka, who was the ninth of ten children, moved from the village where she had grown up to the nearby city of Brzeziny, where her new husband was able to obtain work in the city's flourishing garment industry. In the late nineteenth century, Russian Jews had begun a migration to this city and its surrounding areas, making it a center for the tailoring of men's suits and coats. Like the other women in her community, Malka expected her life would be lived there as homemaker and mother, and eventually grandmother.
Within a few days of their September 1, 1939, assault on Poland, the Germans bombed and invaded Brzeziny. By the beginning of 1940, the entire Jewish population was crowded into a small section of the city and then circled by barbed wire. The Germans put the Jews of this ghetto of tailors and seamstresses to work making military uniforms. Useful laborers were compensated with the barest subsistence of food. It was in this ghetto that Malka, her first husband, and their young son and daughter spent the first half of the war.
The lives of the Brzeziner Jews paralleled closely those of the Jews living in the nearby and much larger ?ód? Ghetto, twenty-one kilometers away. Conditions were harsh, and life was terrifying for these Jews, who could be pulled from their homes or randomly stopped on the streets by guards to be "beaten or humiliated." The occupants were forbidden, under penalty of death, from venturing outdoors unauthorized after 4:00 p.m., with soldiers patrolling daily to ensure proper order and that no one dared to attempt escape.
The Germans burned the town synagogue and then blamed the fire on the congregants and their rabbi. As punishment for the ghetto's alleged crimes of smuggling in food and other essentials, ten residents were selected and executed. One tragic innocent, who had the misfortune of being one of the ten, announced from the gallows that he was dying for his community. He was right.
With each new atrocity perpetrated by their captors, the Jews hoped that they had experienced the worst the Germans had to offer. How much suffering were human beings capable of inflicting upon others? No matter how horrific their conduct, however, the cruelty of the Nazis never stopped growing ever more unimaginable.
In the early part of 1942, Malka was walking with her seven-year-old son Archie when a German officer stopped them. The soldier simply looked down at the handsome little boy and asked if he was a Jude. When my mother answered that he was, the officer put his hand on my half-brother's golden blonde hair and remarked that it was a shande (a shame). Only later would Malka understand that the German had likely known a truth that she and the other Jews of Brzeziny were yet to learn: the fate awaiting the youngest amongst them.
About fifteen years later, when I was seven or eight years old, my mother and I began boarding a crowded bus heading eastbound down Pico Boulevard in Los Angeles. As I got on just ahead of her, the harried and inattentive driver closed the door between the two of us and started to drive off, leaving my mother behind. She screamed and, running frantically down the street, pounded on the glass door until the bus stopped. She dragged me off and, while crying uncontrollably, did two things, neither of which she had ever done before, nor would ever do again — She spanked me until I cried from the pain, and when she had finished hitting, she squeezed me tightly against her. I was confused why she was punishing me for the bus driver's mistake, but even then I understood she had been frightened that I would be driven away, never to be seen by her again. What I didn't know at the time was that it had happened to her before.
A few weeks after my mother's street encounter with the German officer, the Nazis came and took her children — everyone's children — all the children too young to work. Archie and his eleven-year-old sister Genya had been in bed when soldiers ordered them to prepare to leave. The young ones, they said, were being taken to a village where they would be safe. The Jews were told that the transports on which their children were to be taken were already full and would return later for the parents. The adults cried and begged, but all pleas were rebuffed.
The children of Brzeziny were packed aboard trucks and delivered to a camp centered in an unoccupied castle along the Ner River at Chelmno about thirty-five miles northwest of Lódz. Established in late October or early November 1941, the Chelmno camp carried out its first gassings of Jews on December 8 of that year. The airtight cargo spaces of the trucks had been converted to gas chambers. As many as 150 human beings packed aboard at a time could be asphyxiated within five to ten minutes by simply pumping in the diesel engine's exhaust. This would soon be the fate of not only the vast majority of Brzeziny's children but also hundreds of the ghetto's adults judged by the Germans as unfit for work.
Attempting to remain detached so not to feel the enormity of what she was about to say, my mother once described to me how that night my seven-year-old half-brother had "dressed himself perfectly" and was led away in the care of his only slightly older sister, Genya. It was to be the last time my mother would ever hug either. She never saw her son again.
Though Chelmno was a death camp from which no one seems to have emerged, my mother always maintained that about two and a half years later, and soon after her arrival in Auschwitz, she saw her daughter in the distance and shouted out to her. The child, hearing the name Genya, turned, looked at my mother, and called back as guards quickly forced the girl to move on. If true, this would be the last time Malka would ever see or hear her daughter. Like her younger brother, she would be lost to a Holocaust that was to take 1.5 million Jewish children.
For almost two decades after the war my mother suffered from prolonged, debilitating, and frequently recurring headaches, which first appeared the year after the war. In a time when doctors made house calls, our family physician would arrive in the evening seemingly almost once a week to administer an injection, putting her to sleep for a few hours. I was always relieved to see him. Without the medicine, the groans could go almost unabated throughout the night, sometimes lasting two or even three days.
During those days and nights of her illness, my father would insist that I be very quiet. With the sound as low as possible, I sat right up against the television screen, which I was allowed to watch while the rest of the apartment remained in all but complete darkness because even the slightest light could exacerbate her pain. Having studied to be a doctor in the old country, my father always believed that there was some medically curable physical source of her problem that the doctors had yet to uncover.
I had learned about my mother's two lost children while eavesdropping on my parents' conversations when I was a child, and by the time I was nine or ten, I was convinced that their deaths were the cause of her agony. One evening I told my father that I knew why she was getting the headaches; but when he seriously asked me what I thought, I was afraid to answer because I wasn't supposed to know anything about my lost siblings and I feared getting in trouble for listening to things I wasn't supposed to hear.
My mother was blessed or cursed with an extraordinary memory. She could unerringly recall the birth dates of my friends despite having heard me mention them years before and only once. Ironically, however, she could not remember her own. If she had ever known it, the war had wiped it from her mind. When required for official documents, she had simply selected March 20. It was not a random choice. March 23 had been the day that she had given birth to her daughter. While it would have been too painful for her to have designated that exact date, she picked the twentieth as a reminder of the child's birthday. It proved an unnecessary prompt; the twenty-third was a date she would never forget.
My mother seemed never to have lost the need to atone for having been left alive when, by any realistic estimate, she should have vanished with those whose faces haunted her. Nearly half a century had passed when she admitted to me that she had never again been able to see a young child, particularly a small boy, without feeling grief. The emotion had been there even when she had looked at me. It is a dark inheritance that, for decades now, when I see a little child I often cannot stop myself from thinking of the Nazis.
While the memories of those events that make us happy too often fade away, those that break our hearts seem to unceasingly abide; and so even in her later years, she never spoke of her dead children except to describe their final partings, and I always lacked the courage and the cruelty to probe. I am therefore left with very little information about either of them. For example, though I know my half-sister's given name was Genya, I only know my half-bother by my mother's nickname for him — Archie. I waited too long to ask. The stories of their lives now lie only in a grave, and I must someday there, perhaps to learn them.
There was, however, one other story she did once tell me about her first son. In 1937 or 1938 my mother was journeying with three-year-old Archie to visit her sister, who had moved to Belgium earlier in the decade. Knowing that they would be traveling through German territory, she bought her little boy a red ball. As guards passed through the train compartment, she told him to look down at his new present and not look up at the men. For good reason, she was frightened even then. It was a fear that would never entirely subside. Long after the Nazis had been subdued, the threat remained.
Night terrors involving the shades of their former oppressors are common among survivors, and sixty years after she boarded that train to Belgium, my mother would often awake from nightmares, calling out to her caregiver. Disoriented, with glazed eyes, in a breathless attempt to focus her gaze around the bedroom, she would ask a bit sheepishly yet unsettlingly, "Are there Gestapo?" Then, regardless of the time of day or night, she would call me.
She was calling not because she was afraid for herself, rather she was checking to make certain that I was safe. Because there was no reason for the unforeseeable horror that had taken her first two children, she could never be convinced that it could not happen again. To her, the chaos of tragedy was ever lurking. Even after I had grown into middle age, if she did not know where I was every night, she could be thrown into a panic. She once confessed to me that the only time she ever felt I was truly safe was in those months just before my birth. Only then was I always with her so that she could protect me. I would be born to a generation of loss, and it is not surprising that extraordinary and pathological over-protectiveness would come to dominate our relationship.
The End of Brzeziny
What the Germans perceived as the economic justification for the continued existence of Brzeziny ended in April of 1942 when manufacturing orders ceased. In mid-May the ghetto was officially closed. Malka's first husband, Wolf Hamel, was one of a few hundred men chosen to clean the evacuated areas of Brzeziny. Those selected were told that after their work was finished they would be joining their families in Lódz. A surviving eyewitness who had somehow hid from the Nazis told a different story. Once these laborers completed their assignment they were taken outside the city to a nearby village and shot.
Approximately four thousand Jewish workers were moved by train and wagon to Lódz. Even though the distance was short, it was so arduous a journey my mother told me that some died en route. Little more than half of Brzeziny's original Jewish population of seven thousand had survived the two-and-a-half years under Nazi rule to arrive in the larger Ghetto Lódz where, when put to work in still-active factories, they would be given the chance to live a bit longer.
CHAPTER 2"Salvation through Labor"
Before the war, Lódz had been second only to Warsaw as the heart of Jewish life in Poland. Located in the country's northwestern Warthegau area, it was a major textile production center in which a quarter of a million Jews, a third of the city's entire population, lived as an organized and distinct religious and national minority. Jews and Christians shared one city and yet lived in two different communities with their own hospitals and clinics, secular and religious schools, theaters, public libraries, and publishing houses.
At the end of 1939, the conquering German army ordered the Jewish organizations disbanded and forced the Jews into less than four square kilometers of the city's dilapidated northern district. When my mother spoke of life within this circumscribed ghetto it was about the incredibly overcrowded block on which she resided and where, at the peak of the ghetto's population, several thousand families lived.
Given the region's substantial prewar population of ethnic Germans, the city was officially annexed to the Reich and renamed "Litzmannstadt," after the German general who had conquered it during World War I. Streets were assigned German names, and, once the more desirable Jewish neighborhoods were emptied, apartments were given to ethnic Germans arriving from territory under Soviet control. All of this was consistent with the Nazi obsession with what they designated Lebensraum (living space) — the need to eliminate indigenous populations so that the land could be occupied by more deserving Aryans. The Nazis saw large spaces in which their own kind could move around as encouraging the fulfillment of their race's physical potential, while in contrast, congested ghettos seemed to them appropriate for Jews. Some thirty-five years earlier, when Germany still ruled Namibia (known as German South West Africa at the time), the African population had been subjected to the twentieth century's first genocide as German forces attempted to "exterminate two rebellious ethnic groups (the Herero and Nama)" in an effort that included concentration camps. One hundred thousand Namibians would die. No longer in control of overseas colonies, like those still ruled by Britain, France, or Belgium, the Nazis would try to create their own in Europe.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Stanley A. Goldman.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface Part 1. Malka’s War 1. Left to the Mercy of a Rude Stream 2. “Salvation through Labor” 3. A Minor Clerical Error 4. A Führer of Industry 5. The Children of Luck Part 2. The Jew Who Met Himmler 6. The Last Party of the Third Reich 7. Meeting Himmler 8. Appointment with the Executioner 9. Trading for Jewish Lives 10. A True Believer 11. The Count of the Red Cross 12. The Buses Were White 13. Time Brings on All Revenges Part 3. Living with Survival 14. There Was No Returning 15. Memory 16. The Last Chapter Postscript Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index