South Carolina Voices: Lessons from the Holocaust

Teaching Lesson Five

(This lesson is divided into two parts because of space restrictions.)

Materials: Handout 5A: Rudy at Auschwitz, Handout 5B: Ben at Auschwitz; Handout 5C: Pincus at Auschwitz; Handout 5D: Renee in a Work Camp; Handout 5E: Bluma in a Concentration Camp

Key Terms: Auschwitz, concentration camp, killing center, barracks

PROCEDURE

Motivate: Draw a continuum on the chalkboard: at the left write TOTAL ACCEPTANCE; in the middle, PREJUDICE; and at the far right, TOTAL REJECTION/DEATH.

Explain that the term "Total Acceptance" describes a society in which the poorest, least powerful people and the highest, most powerful people in the society are all subject to the same laws. In such a society the civil and human rights of all individuals are equally respected. At the other end of the continuum, the term "Total Rejection" describes a society in which the state is all-powerful and individuals have no rights. The midpoint on this line is "Prejudice," where the rights of minorities begin to suffer.

Have volunteers draw X's at the points on the line where, in the 1990s, they would put their own community, South Carolina or the United States. As a variation on this lesson allow all the students to make a human continuum by standing in front of the three terms, Total Acceptance, Prejudice, or Rejection/Death, either written on the board or on construction paper taped to a wall or board. Or have the students work together in groups to reach a consensus conclusion. One student from the group can stand to create the human continuum or place the group's X on the board. Have students give reasons for their or their groups' choices.

Develop: Then focus on Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Have volunteers locate on the continuum where such actions as the Nuremberg Laws, Kristallnacht, and ghettoization of the Jews fall on the continuum. Emphasize that Hitler's treatment of the Jews was not an abrupt move from protection of human rights by the government to genocide. It was a steady progression from laws limiting civil rights, to ghettos, to the Final Solution, a plan for the complete annihilation of the Jewish people. Along the way, the Nazis skillfully built popular support by playing on existing fears or hatred of Jews.

In Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe, the Nazis could count on age old anti-Semitic feelings. Nazi propaganda was used to justify mass murders of the Jews with claims that the Jews were a threat to national security, that the extermination of the Jewish race would preserve the racial purity of the Aryan race or claims that the Jews were criminals who threatened public safety.

Although this lesson focuses on how the Nazis carried out mass murders, discussion should also focus on why the Germans were able to carry out this program which required enormous manpower and cooperation from local populations. Divide the class into five groups. Give each group a different handout. Before starting, have each group locate the places named in its readings on a map of Europe. If a detailed map is not available, you may want to look at the maps in Martin Gilbert's The Macmillan Atlas of the Holocaust, available in many public and college libraries.

Next, have groups read and prepare a group reaction statement expressing their feelings about what they have read. The reaction statement might take the form of a poem, picture, or an audio or video sound or sight collage using passages from the readings. Encourage students to be creative in their responses. After all groups have shared their reaction statements with the class, use the following questions to compare handouts:

1. What part did Auschwitz and other concentration camps play in Hitler's Final Solution?

2. What evidence can you find that the Nazis tried to hide what they were doing at these camps from both the prisoners and the outside world? Why do you think they tried to hide their actions?

3. What kept most people from trying to escape from the trains going to the camps? From the camps? How successful do you think escape attempts were?

4. Why do you think there was "the selection"? When did it take place? What was one punishment for hiding food?

5. What parts of this experience seemed to be most unbearable for the survivors whose testimonies you have read? What parts do you think would be most terrible for you? Other members of your family?

6. In his testimony about life in the death camp, Pincus said, "To survive in Auschwitz, you had to get a break." What did he mean? What was his break? What helped some of the other victims survive? (Among the things students might mention, are personal courage, the help of others, religious faith, resourcefulness or cleverness, determination to survive, luck, or the ending of the war. In the case of Bluma, having her sister to care for helped her survive.)

7. In what ways were the experiences of the people you have read about alike? (Students might suggest that all of these people had lost their homes, jobs, personal possessions, their identity, and all control of their lives. They all lived in fear and uncertainty, but tried, in accordance with their abilities, to react in a way that would help them survive.)

Extend: In 1992, newspaper and news magazine accounts of events in the former Yugoslavian republic of Serbia suggested parallels between Serbian treatment of Muslim minorities in that country and Germany's treatment of the Jews. Have several volunteers read and report to the class on these more recent events.

After students' reports, discuss reasons for the comparisons and compare and contrast the response of the international community to these two events.

HANDOUT 5A: RUDY AT AUSCHWITZ

(Rudy and his family stayed in the Theresiendstadt ghetto for almost two years. Then in 1944, they were told to prepare to move. In the selection below, Rudy describes what happened next.)

In March or April, 1944, we got the dreaded notice that we had been selected for resettlement farther east. The train cars they took us in were actually cattle cars. We entered the cars and sat on our baggage. There was not very much room between us and the roof of the cattle car. Our car had from 80 to 100 people in it so it was quite crowded. We were sitting tight on tight. We had some water and some food but no comfort whatsoever. The cars were sealed. We could not open them from the inside. The windows were small, open rectangles. Perhaps we could have jumped off the train and run into the countryside, but we did not know if anyone on the outside would help us. We thought most civilians would probably turn us in. We could not speak the Czech language. It seemed better to go along with the SS and do what they wanted. By that time the war had been going on four or five years. We thought the end might be in sight and we would be liberated.

Our train left the ghetto at six o'clock in the evening. At night as we traveled, we heard gun shots. We did not know why these shots were fired. After the war, I learned the SS troops were on the roofs of the cattle cars shooting past the windows to discourage people from sticking their heads out. The train was moving at a fairly great speed. We did not know what country we were going through. There was no stopping.

At four o'clock the next afternoon, we arrived in Auschwitz (Ow-Switch) in Poland. When the train stopped, we again thought of trying to escape. But we knew that in Germany most Germans would turn us over to the local authorities for a reward of money or food. We had no way of knowing if the Poles would be any different. Someone would have to hide us or bring us food. We had no money to pay for our keep. So in the end, to keep our family together, we dropped any plans of attempting to escape.

The doors of the cattle car were yanked opened. The first thing we heard was shouts of, "Out, as soon as you can, out. Your belongings you leave there!" Despite this we grabbed what we could and assembled outside. Before us stood an immense rectangle of land surrounded by electrically-charged barbed wire. This was the Auschwitz death camp.

We were assembled in long rows and marched between the troops of the SS special death-head division into the camp. We were marched up and down a broad avenue for four or five hours between posts of barbed wire with a huge sign, EXTREME DANGER, HIGH VOLTAGE ELECTRICAL WIRES. We saw guard towers high above us. We saw men with machine guns inside them, but even then we did not know that we were in a death camp. Back and forth and back and forth, they just kept us in motion. As it got closer to one o'clock in the morning, we were more and more desperate. You could hear more and more cries for food.

Finally they set out large boxes. Everybody had to put in their valuables. Women and men were forced to strip off their wedding rings and hand over their prized possessions like lockets of relatives no longer there. Whatever we had, we lost. Those who did not give up their possessions willingly or quickly were beaten. Then we were separated into male and female groups and walked to what they called the B camp of Auschwitz. The women's camp was separated from the men's camp by a wide road. There were about 24 barracks for men and the same number for women.

The men in charge were called barracks' elders or capos. They were German criminals taken from German prisons and sent to oversee the people in the barracks. They made us walk by a crate again and put in our valuables. The only thing I had that they wanted was a leather jacket. I told my father that I regretted having to give my jacket. He said, "Child, if we ever get out of here, I'll buy you ten of these."

The bunks we slept in were in three tiers, lower, middle, and upper. The mattress was just burlap filled with straw. We had not eaten at that time, and we were not to get anything to eat until the next morning.

In the morning we got metal cups and spoons. We were each given two slices of bread and sometimes a pat of margarine or a little bit of marmalade. The coffee was toasted acorns ground up. It tasted terrible. The midday meal was potato soup with maybe a little bit of meat. Potatoes were the main ingredient and the kind of beets you normally feed to cattle. We were already hungry in the Theresienstadt ghetto because we did not get enough to eat. In Auschwitz we were beginning to starve. In the evening we got another slice of bread, some coffee, no marmalade, no butter, no nothing.

Every morning we had the counting of the prisoners. We were arranged in groups of five with just small distances between us. The SS trooper would come by and start counting one, two, three, four, five. If he miscounted, he went over it again. Sometimes we stood there two hours. I kept wondering why none of us tried to overpower this lone guard who had just a small pistol. But what could we have done? There were guardposts on either end and high tension wires in between. We would all have been killed.

We did not know that Auschwitz was an extermination camp or that we could be put to death. We did know that there was always this sickly sweet smell in the air. We saw a large chimney belching smoke 24 hours a day. We saw German military ambulances with the Red Cross symbol on them going back and forth. The Germans had painted the symbol on the vehicles to hide their true purposes from the camp prisoners and from overflying airplanes. Much later we found out these ambulances were carrying military personnel or cyanide poison gas cannisters for use in the gas chambers.

We made the best we could of the situation. My younger brother had hidden a book by the German poet Goethe. We read it twice. We read it three times. We memorized it. We quoted from it. We had a deck of cards. We played card games. There wasn't anything else we could do. Eventually my brother got a job laying a stone road. They gave him a half a portion of food more. But the work was excruciating.

Nothing grew in Auschwitz. There was not a bird, not a living thing, no grass or anything. A drainage ditch ran through the B camp. Daily the SS guards sent prisoners from other camps to lay sod along the banks of this ditch. We were desperate for food. My mother remembered seeing in our small village the geese eating the wild grasses. She knew there were plants growing in the sod that we could eat. She gathered them and whenever we could we ate them. We were starving. We were dreaming of food. We were talking about food. We had not had enough to eat for three or four months already. Yet we hoped in 1944 that the end of the war was in sight.

At Auschwitz people died of huger because they had come to the camps already weakened. The people who had died were thrown or stacked at the very end of the barracks row underneath the watchtower. They were stacked like cordwood, naked, without dignity. Nobody to close their eyes. They were stacked four feet high. Every 24 hours a cart came. People were simply grabbed by the hand and foot and tossed on there. We knew they were taken to the crematory to be incinerated, but we still had no knowledge of the gas chambers and that people were killed or gassed in such numbers as they were.

HANDOUT 5B: BEN AT AUSCHWITZ

(Ben Stern spent six months in the Kielce ghetto and then was taken to a forced labor camp called Henrykow. In 1943 the Kielce ghetto was disbanded and the people in it sent to concentration camps. In this reading, Ben recalls his experiences in the Auschwitz (Ow-Switch) concentration camp in Poland.)

I'd heard rumors that Jews were going to Auschwitz. But I didn't know what Auschwitz meant. I didn't know what "extermination camp" meant. People told me, but I couldn't imagine or understand it. We were rounded up and packed into cattle cars like sardines. We could not move our arms or legs. We traveled for two days—day and night. The heat was unbearable. Then one morning at dawn, we looked through the cracks in the cattle car. I saw the name Auschwitz or "Oswiecim" in Polish. I was paralyzed. I got numb. I didn't feel anything. When daylight came, they slid the car door open. All we heard was, "Raus, raus, get out of here, get out of here!" I had to crawl over people who had died from the heat and from lack of food and water.

When they opened the doors to the cattle car, we jumped off as quickly as we could because we were under orders. SS men with the skulls on their hats and collars stood in front of us stretched out at intervals about every ten feet. The SS officer in charge stood with his German shepherd. The officer had one foot propped up on a little stool. We lined up and filed by him. Right there the selection took place. As each person passed by him, he pointed left or right. The thumb left and right was your destiny. The people sent to the left went to the gas chambers, and we went to the right.

They told us we were going to be given some new clothing, but before that, we were sent into the showers. Luckily, when we turned the faucets we saw water instead of gas. We started washing ourselves. We got out and stood there. We were deloused because we had lice. One guard stood there putting some kind of a chemical on our heads. Another put it under our arms. A third one shaved our heads.

Then we were given some prisoner's uniforms, very similar to the uniforms a prison chain gang used to wear here. We got wooden shoes. We didn't get the sizes we normally wore. We had to make do with what we got. Then we were lined up again in single file and tattooed on the forearm. My number was B-3348.

We were marched to a barracks in Birkenau (Beer-Ken-Now). Birkenau was a part of Auschwitz. Above the entrance was an arch with an inscription which said in German, Work Makes Men Free, pretending that this was a work camp. There were two rows of barracks with a wide street between them. In front of us was a crematorium and gas chambers. We smelled the flesh of human bodies burning. We couldn't mistake that smell for anything else.

The Daily Routine

Every day we were awakened by a German prisoner who served as the block or barrack captain. He woke us at 5:00 or 5:30 each morning. We slept in beds stacked three high and about three feet wide and three feet long. We laid on straw. We were told to get out of the barracks as fast as we could. We lined up and everybody was counted. Then we stood there and did absolutely nothing for quite a while.

We got a little soup at lunch time, around twelve or one o'clock. We got soup or just plain warm water in a metal tin like a mess kit. It wasn't hot. We each had a spoon, and we were fishing all the time in the soup to see if there was anything in it to eat. Unfortunately we could never find anything in there. In the evening we got a slice of bread about a quarter of an inch thick. On Sunday we got something with the bread like a tiny piece of margarine and a slice of salami.

Sometimes I was too sick to eat my soup, but I treasured it so much that I hid that little soup behind my bunk. One day when there was an inspection, the guards found the soup I was hiding. We weren't supposed to have any soup in the barracks. They took me outside and beat me. I passed out after three blows. A friend gave me coffee. He saved my life because I felt so sick I couldn't even move. With the coffee I was able to stand up when the camp officials came into the barracks for the next inspection. Anybody who couldn't move from his bed was taken away.

During the day sometimes, German guards on trucks ran back and forth telling prisoners to jump on. One time I was taken to do a little work carrying steel beams. It was winter time, very cold. Fifteen or 20 guys were lifting each side of the beam because it was a wide beam. Eventually they told us to place it somewhere. But when we tried we couldn't tear away our hands from the steel because they were frozen to the beam. The skin came off and started bleeding. They didn't permit us to put any kind of cloth over our hands. We had to carry it bare. The next day we put this same beam back in the original spot.

We stayed there until the end of 1944 when the Russians started pushing the Germans from the eastern front back to the west. The SS loaded us into cattle cars and took us to a forced labor camp in western Germany called Sachsenhausen. There was no crematorium, so it was by far a better feeling. I was there about a month or six weeks.

At the end of 1944 I was moved again. This time I went south to a German concentration camp called Dachau (Dock-ow) closer to the Austrian border. By this time I was just a skeleton. Shortly after I arrived, camp officials decided it was time to leave. We could hear the machine guns and the heavy artillery booming and they told us to march. The Allies were getting closer. I marched for about five kilometers to Allach which was a tiny little camp. Then I fell. I couldn't walk anymore. The rest of them continued walking. The Germans killed all the people who kept walking. That was the death march. I survived because I could not walk.

Teaching Lesson Five (cont.)