Historical Footnotes for the Holocaust and THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE

Additional:

***

In Diane Cole’s June 10-11, 2023, Wall Street Journal review of Joseph Berger’s 2023 biography ELIE WIESEL: CONFRONTING THE SILENCE there is this interesting mention:

Fair-minded throughout, Mr. Berger doesn’t shy away from reporting on those critics of “Night” who questioned various details that Wiesel included … The biographer tracks down the historical record to confirm that the atrocities Wiesel describes did indeed occur.

Why is this mention so significant? And why would anyone doubt Elie Wiesel’s eyewittness accounts?

Because Auschwitz, the “Holocaust by bullets” or any other aspect of the extermination of six million Jewish men, women and children along with millions of others — including Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, political dissidents and Jehovah’s Witnesses –was not monolithic.

One example:

The transports from the Czech ghetto of Terezin (Theresienstadt in German) to Auschwitz had selections for the gas chambers as the Jews were off loaded from the trains. Yet at least two separate transports from Terezin did not go through immediate selection. Instead they were imprisoned in what was called the Czech family camp — until they were also exterminated.

Whatever we think we know about any aspect of the Holocaust may only be accurate for one day, one transport, one anything. And to clarify information when possible, this historical footnote section has been added to the THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE theater project.

Clarification of well-known photos (and newly discovered film footage) of trains from Bergen-Belsen en route to Terezin:

From the Yad Vashem website:

Between 6-10 April 1945, days before the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, three trains were sent from the camp with some 7,000 Jews on board, bound for the Terezin ghetto. The first train was liberated by the Allies [on 13 April 1945]. The second train reached Terezin on 21 April, and the third, later known as “The Lost Train”, never reached its destination. After a journey of approximately two weeks, the train was stopped on a destroyed bridge on the Elster River, and on 23 April, it was liberated by the Red Army on the outskirts of the German village of Tröbitz.

The survivors in this well-known photo were on the first train –liberated April 13, 1945. The survivors portrayed in the 2022 feature film LOST TRANSPORT were on the third train — liberated April 23, 1945.

Why in both cases were the survivors wearing this own clothes in the liberation photos and film footage?

As explained in this Yad Vashem article — Bergen-Belsen had a:

“Dutch Camp” (“Star Camp”) … inmates who had foreign citizenship or permits, and were slated to be handed over to the Allies in exchange for German POWs.

As explained in this article from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum:

Prisoners in the “star camp” were not required to wear camp uniforms, but instead had the Star of David sewn onto their clothing (hence the camp’s name).

Clarification of well-known film clip of Jewish children being liberated from Auschwitz:

The cover of this 2017 nonfiction book is a smaller section of what often appears as a larger group of very young children being liberated from Auschwitz. The film clip is frequently used in documentaries and seems very much at odds with the minute chances of survival of young children at Auschwitz.

The book SURVIVORS CLUB: THE TRUE STORY OF A VERY YOUNG PRSIONER OF AUSCHWTIZ explains that four-year-old Michael Bornstein had survived with his paternal grandmother, both having gone to the infirmary with a sick Michael just before liberation by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945. Before then he had been hidden by his grandmother in a women’s barracks:

Three or four more days passed [after liberation], and then one morning the Soviet soldiers called some of the survivors into one area and told us we needed to put on our old striped prisoner uniforms.

The Soviets explained that they just wanted to film us exiting the camp, to record the moment in history. They had not rolled cameras the day they arrived to liberate us.

It was the dead of winter and very cold outside, so we were allowed to wear many layers under our uniforms. [Contributing to the false conclusion that the children looked well-fed.]

They lined up a group of small children — a few dozen who had survived the largest and most notorious death camp in history. ‘Pull up your shirtsleeves and show us your numbers,’ a Soviet soldier directed.

I didn’t realize then, but that footage would eventually remind millions of people around the world of the atrocities of the Holocaust. One day I, too, would watch those images on a screen and be stunned at seeing myself, dressed in prisoner stripes amid a tiny club of Auschwitz’s best hiders.

Clarification of dates from the testimony of Lithuanian Jew Judith in THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE:

I am Judith and I am eight years old, the youngest of three children, when the Russians occupy my hometown in Lithuania at the start of World War II in 1939. My father had died in 1938. He did not live to see the Nazis invade western Poland, followed by the Russians occupying eastern Poland.

Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact right before the Nazis invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. After the Nazis quickly overcame Polish armed resistance, the Russians, by agreement with the Nazis, moved into occupying Eastern Poland. Yet it was not until several months later that the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania. As the Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports:

“The Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in June 1940 and annexed the country in August 1940. By 1941, the Jewish population of Lithuania swelled by an influx of refugees from German-occupied Poland to reach about 250,000, or 10 percent of the population.”

What Judith’s fate would have been if she and her sister had not escaped from the death march:

In the book ONE VOICE, TWO LIVES: FROM AUSCHWITZ PRISONER TO 101ST AIRBORNE TROOPER by Cantor David S. Wisnia there is the following paragraph which relates to Judith and her sister’s death march from Stutthof:

During that month [January 1945], the Germans also began to empty the Stutthof camp complex — a network that at the time held 47,000 prisoners, over 35,000 of them Jews, most of them female. A total of 7,000 Jews, 6,000 women and 1,00 men, were force-marched for ten days. Seven hundred were murdered en route. Those who survived the march itself arrived at the Baltic Sea on January 31. That very day, the Nazis pushed the remaining prisoners into the sea and shot them — only 13 survived.

It is very unlikely that Judith and her sister would have survived.

Clarification of dates from the testimony of German Jew Elfriede Morgenstern in THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE:

I am Elfriede Morgenstern, and I am nine years old in Frankfurt, Germany, the morning after Kristallnacht. My mother’s parents, Jews born in Poland rather than Germany, have already been taken by the Nazis and shipped back to Poland to be murdered in the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz.

Kristallnacht was the night of November 9-10, 1938, a little less than 10 months before the Nazis started WWII on September 1, 1939. In speaking about her maternal grandparents, Elfriede would be referring to this action explained by Wikipedia:

“In October 1938, about 17,000 Polish Jews living in Nazi Germany were arrested and expelled. These deportations, termed by the Nazis Polenaktion (‘Polish Action’), were ordered by SS officer and head of the Gestapo Reinhard Heydrich. The deported Jews were rejected by Poland and therefore had to live in makeshift encampments along the Germany–Poland border.”

Wikipedia also explains about Auschwitz: “A former World War I camp for transient workers and later a Polish army barracks,” in 1940 it became a quarantine camp for Polish prisoners. Subsequently Auschwitz was expanded to include a killing center for Jews, Roma and other undesirables.

While murder in Auschwitz was the final fate of Elfriede’s maternal grandparents, from the time they were dumped over the German border in October 1938, they would have endured a variety of miserable conditions until their ultimate murder.

Countries smashed and overrun by Germany:

In war correspondent Virginia Cowles’ 1941 memoir LOOKING FOR TROUBLE she writes:

To-day, it is no exaggeration to claim that out of the eleven countries smashed and overrun by Germany, half of them were destroyed, not by tanks, but by propaganda.

Besides the relevancy of this statement to contemporary political maneuverings, the question arises to which 11 countries she is referring in 1941. It seems likely that she means Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, France, Greece, Yugoslavia. And this is all before the Nazis broke the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union in June 1941. See this entry from Wikipedia for more information on countries occupied or controlled by Nazi Germany.

French roundup of Jews in Paris as described in the play THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE:

July 1942, Paris. French policemen are reported to have rounded up Jewish men, women and children. These Jews have been temporarily interned for several days in a cycling stadium without food or water before deportation to their deaths in Auschwitz.

Portuguese diplomat rescues Jews in France from the Nazis:

Tattooing of numbers on the arms of inmates in concentration camps:

Although the tattooed numbers are often associated with inmates in Auschwitz, not all inmates in Auschwitz received tattoos on their arms, and, as Judith in the play recounts, she was not tattooed at Auschwitz but was later tattooed at Stutthof. (The men, women and children sent directly from the deportation cattle car trains to the gas chambers did not get tattoos.)

For example, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s 2003 documentary UNLIKELY HEROES includes a segment on French Jewish child survivor Robert Clary, who says in the documentary that he arrived in April 1944 in Blechhammer, the camp where he got tattooed.

In the 2021 short documentary NO GOODBYES about homosexual love in a concentration camp — at the end of the film during the credits David Lenga, a Holocaust survivor who plays a role in the documentary, talks about his father getting a tattoo when he arrived at Auschwitz in 1942 although David Lenga himself, arriving in 1944, did not get tattooed — he only got a number attached to his camp uniform.

Identification symbols Jews were forced to wear:

Many people know that Jews in Nazi-occupied lands were forced to wear yellow stars on the front of their clothes and sometimes also on the back of their clothes. In some places Jews were forced to wear white armbands on one arm with a blue Jewish star on the armbands.

Also, while many people recognize the stiped uniforms that concentration camp inmates wore, as reported in Shlomo Venezia’s biography INSIDE THE GAS CHAMBERS: EIGHT MONTHS IN THE SONDERKOMMANDO OF AUSCHWITZ: When he arrived in Auschwitz on April 11, 1944, “We had to wait for the clothes that were to be handed out to us. For some time now, new prisoners had not been given striped uniforms. Instead, we received disinfected clothes left by the prisoners who had arrived before us.”

If you have seen films of the liberation of some camps with prisoners wearing regular clothes with a large X marked on their backs, that was to make it even harder for them to escape because the X would immediately identify who they were.

Accuracy of dates in THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE:

As with other historical facts of WWII and the Holocaust, dates must be considered in context. For example, while the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto was announced in October 1940, the Nazis did not seal off the ghetto from the rest of the world until November 1940.

Spelling of names in THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE:

Names of people and places change from language to language and from time periods. When possible, THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE endeavors to use the English language spelling at the time the historic events transpired. For example, Babi Yar is used as the spelling for the infamous killing ravine in Ukraine in 1941 even though people now spell it Babyn Yar.

Clarification of terms “concentration camp” and “crematorium”:

One of the difficulties when reading or viewing material on the Holocaust is the use of terms interchangeably that may actually mean different things. Here is a Times of Israel blog post that explains some of the differences in the terms “concentration camp” and “crematorium.”

As this blog post explains, in death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau the gas chambers used to murder the Jews and others were different than the crematoria used to burn the bodies. Yet, as noted in many memoirs of Auschwitz, the gas chambers were often generically referred to as the crematoria.

(Historical correction: Note that in the podcast interview that accompanies this Times of Israel blog post there is a mention of a gas chamber being built at Theresienstadt late in the war. There appears to be no evidence of this. WWII/Holocaust educator Matthew A. Rozell visited Theresienstadt and then wrote this blog post in July of 2014: https://teachinghistorymatters.com/2014/07/10/theresienstadt-spa-town-the-real-holocaust-hoax/)

Selections at Auschwitz-Birkenau:

Without going into details, although film clips and descriptions of transports arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau usually talk about the immediate selections that took place as the prisoners unloaded from the train cars, this was not always the case. There were transports that, for various reasons, did not go through selections upon immediate arrival. These transports then entered the camp directly.

In a related note, there are many descriptions of the processing at Auschwitz-Birkenau of Jews initially selected to work rather than be immediately gassed. In many of these descriptions there is information about the uniforms the prisoners were given. Even this information is dependent on when prisoners arrived. In the children’s book ALL ABOUT ANNE there is a description on page 30 of Anne’s arrival at Auschwitz in early September 1944 that includes this information:

“… they were given random clothes and shoes, because there were no more striped prison clothes available.”

Clarification of term “kindertransport”:

Confusion can arise when kindertransport (German for children’s transport) is used generically for all humanitarian efforts to evacuate at-risk (mostly Jewish) children from Nazi-occupied countries BEFORE September 1, 1939, the start of WWII when the borders were closed. Other times the term is used for a specific evacuation effort.

Here is the Wikipedia entry for German Jew Norbert Wollheim who helped organize the transports of Jewish children to Great Britain and Sweden.

Barbara Winton’s biography of her father — IF IT’S NOT IMPOSSIBLE … THE LIFE OF SIR NICHOLAS WINTON — describes her father’s efforts that saved 669 children (the largest group was to leave Prague on September 1, 1939, just after the borders had been sealed; these children were not evacuated). She writes in the book (boldface mine):

The rescue of children from the Nazi threat in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia before the Second World War is known as the Kindertransport (Kinder being “children” in German). Around 10,000 children were rescued from Austria and Germany by a group of Jewish and Christian agencies, which formed the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany [this included Austria], later known as the Refugee Children’s Movement. Many determined humanitarian people were involved in this undertaking, but its remit did not extend to Czechoslovakia.

Nazi slogan “Arbeit macht frei”:

Arbeit macht frei was the title of a 19th-century novel about a slacker finding virtue through work. In 1936, the Nazis turned it into a slogan for the gateway to Dachau, their first concentration camp, and a staff training center. Many Nazis cut their teeth there before going to other camps across Germany and Europe. Some took the slogan with them. It appeared at the gateways to Flossenbürg, Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, and Sachsenhausen, among others.

The slogan wasn’t used at the four extermination camps — Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, and Treblinka — whose only purpose was to murder Jewish people. Evidently, the Nazis didn’t consider it relevant to that purpose. A photo of Sobibor discovered in 2020 shows a jerry-built gateway that simply says SS Sonderkommando, “SS Special Unit.” The slogan also wasn’t used at the two hybrid camps that conducted extermination and slave labor, Birkenau and Majdanek. And, of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, nearly two million died at the hands of the Einsatzgruppen. These mobile killing units generally shot their victims into mass graves in the remote countryside, far from any kind of camp.

— “Arbeit macht frei” information by Luke Berryman of www.theninthcandle.com

Also, a photo of that slogan over an entrance is often shown as if it were at the entrance to the Large Fortress at Terezin (Theresienstadt in German) in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia — where the Jews were imprisoned. In fact, that photo is from the Small Fortress in Terezin (and actually inside the Small Fortress), which was used as a prison of the Prague Gestapo for the opponents of the Nazi regime from 1940 – 1945. (Some Jews from the Large Fortress were sent to the Small Fortress for punishment that would kill them.)

At the Buchenwald concentration camp the inscription at the entrance read “Jedem das seine” — “Every man to his own fate.”

Romanian Ruth Kluger and Austrian Ruth Kluger:

Romanian Jewish rescuer Ruth Kluger (1910-1980) is in the THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE (SCHRITTE IN DEN ABGRUND). She was one of 10 original members (the only woman) of a Zionist group dedicated to helping Jews escape the Holocaust in Europe. Fluent in nine languages, she raised funds and helped organize ships to carry Jewish refugees to the land of Israel, which at that time was controlled by the British.

This is not the same person as Austrian Holocaust child survivor Ruth Kluger (1931-2020), who became a recognized authority on German literature.

Both women are authors of nonfiction books about their experiences during the Holocaust.

Cattle cars to the extermination camps:

The survivor and savior firsthand accounts in the play THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE are personal accounts, which means they do not represent the entire range of experiences. One area that needs to be clarified is how many days and nights were spent by victims crammed into sealed box cars with no water, no food, no toilet facilities except sometimes a single bucket for hundreds of people, and very little air.

While in the play Judith tells of riding all night before arriving at Auschwitz, this “short” period of time is because her deportation starts close to Auschwitz. Jews deported from farther points suffered (if they even survived the cattle car transportation) for much longer times.

Due to the horrendous conditions in the cattle cars, people often died before reaching the extermination camps. The bodies piled up in the cattle cars or were thrown off.

In addition, near the end of the war starting in early 1945, the Nazis transported many concentration camp inmates in cattle cars into the interior of Germany as the Allied armies advanced from two directions. Allied liberators discovered cattle cars filled with corpses as well as cattle cars with some people barely alive.

Roundup of the Jews of Rome on Oct. 16, 1944:

In the play THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE there is a Roman Jewish child’s account of the roundup on that day in 1944. I heard this firsthand account in 2005 from a docent at the Great Synagogue in Rome. I have now watched on Chaiflicks.com the 60-minute documentary THE RAID (LA RAZZIA) in Italian with English subtitles that provides more details of this fateful day:

From Chaiflicks.com about the documentary THE RAID (LA RAZZIA):

On October 16, 1943, the Nazis arrested more than 1,250 Jews in Rome. The victims prepared their suitcases and abandoned their homes in a few minutes. On October 18th, they took them to the Tiburtina train station to be piled up in twenty-eight cattle wagons and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Only sixteen of them made it back home. Seventy-eight years after that raid, this documentary film traces one of the most tragic pages of Italian history through the voices of those who lived it and are now offering a precious and unprecedented testimony of this appalling event. (Best Documentary | Roma Film Festival | Directed by Ruggero Gabbai | Italy, 2018)

Clarification of the Baltics vs. the Balkans (the WWII/Holocaust history of both regions is very complicated)

For those of us for whom world geography is not at the forefront of our knowledge, it can be easy to get confused about some regions of Europe. For this reason I want to clarify the Baltics vs. the Balkans:

The Baltics in Northeastern Europe:

Going from north to south —

Estonia (bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland and to the west by the Baltic Sea); Latvia (where my maternal grandmother Fannie Dumes Fishman came from); Lithuania (where the character JUDITH in the play “Thin Edge of the Wedge” is from).

According to Wikipedia: “While the majority of the population both in Latvia and Lithuania are indeed Baltic peoples (Latvians and Lithuanians), the majority in Estonia (Estonians) are culturally and linguistically Finnic.”

The Balkans in Southeast Europe:

Wikipedia explains: “Historians state the Balkans comprise Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia. Italy, although having a small part of its territory on the Balkan Peninsula, is not included in the term ‘the Balkans.'”

Clarification of the number of Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis:

In the play THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE narrator PHYLLIS describes the bus tour to Mount Zion in Jerusalem that she and her husband took on their honeymoon in September 1969:

The tour group visited the Chamber of the Holocaust, Israel’s fist Holocaust museum. We walked through the series of cave-like rooms, the walls covered floor-to-ceiling with stones, each stone commemorating one of the more than 2,000 Jewish communities destroyed by the Nazis.

In an article of the Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 5, No. 10 – published on October 25, 2018, Dr. Gabriel Mayer writes:

…as relics and artifacts continued to make their way to Israel … a rather unique phenomenon started to evolve at the site. This was the bringing of commemorative stone slabs to [the Chamber of the Holocaust], where they began to collect and serve as a focus for members of specific communities to hold commemorative ceremonies on behalf of the perished martyrs and communities …. Over the years, well in excess of 2,000 individual stone slabs accumulated.

This number of slabs to commemorate over 2,000 vanished communities is not to be confused with the 5,000 Jewish communities as commemorated in Yad Vashem’s Valley of the Communities, inaugurated in October 1992 in Jerusalem.

From the Yad Vashem website:

The Valley of the Communities in Yad Vashem is a massive 2.5 acre monument literally dug out of natural bedrock. Over 5000 names of communities are engraved on the stone walls in the Valley of the Communities. Each name recalls a Jewish community which existed for hundreds of years; for the inhabitants, each community constituted an entire world. Today, in most cases, nothing remains but the name.

Were there occupied European countries that as a country saved their Jews from the Nazis?

In an April 17, 2023, Zoom talk in commemoration of Yom Hashoah with 8th grade students at the U.S. government Patch Middle School in Stuttgart, Germany, Phyllis Zimbler Miller talked about how the ordinary people of Denmark saved from deportation by the Nazis a remarkably high percentage of the country’s Jews. One Patch student asked if any other country had saved its Jews.

After a moment’s thought Phyllis answered Bulgaria — whose Jews were primarily Sephardic rather than Ashkenazic (most of the rest of European Jews at that time were Ashkenazic) — although the story of Bulgaria is a very complicated as well as controversial historic account. In this article about Sephardi Jews during the Holocaust is an explanation of which Jews Bulgaria saved — and which the country did not.

Read blog post “Holocaust Myth: Sheep to the Slaughter”

Read blog post “Putting Together the Puzzle Pieces of WWII and the Holocaust”

Read guest blog post “Getting Historical Facts Correct“

Timeline of the Holocaust. (Note: As with any historical record, there are discrepancies. For example, the date the Jews of Warsaw were forced to entered the Warsaw Ghetto area was earlier than the date that the Warsaw Ghetto was sealed off from the rest of Warsaw.)