What has become of them?
Photo: Fritz Schumann
When the Red Army troops reached the camp of Auschwitz and Birkenau on January 27, 1945, the SS awakened had already fled, in the barracks around 7000 people-women and men who were too weak to be driven to the death marches . There were also around 650 children among them. Liberation? From the daily pain, strikes and threatening death, maybe of the mental consequences – never. Auschwitz doesn’t stop.
Dead silence in Birkenau
Photo: Fritz Schumann
It is common to organize festive events on the rounds of the year, to highlight special features and to celebrate them. Villages, municipalities, cities and even states celebrate the x-TE, hundredths, five hundreds or thousands of year of their existence. Events are celebrated that no living can remember. Events that became stories in the course of history and reinterpreted and reinterpreted a few times.
But how do you meet the anniversary of a liberation from hell? The anniversary of a turning point from death to life? From survival back to life? An anniversary of which only a few contemporary witnesses can report? Today only people who have already lost in early youth and childhood, which generations and afterborn considered to be a matter of course and consider: a future.
In the past decades since the January of 1945, many showed: January 27th was only a formal turning point. In reality from life, it did not take place.
The actual turning point had occurred to the camp in the months and years before deportation. Was over European families with the inventory of the Wehrmacht, with the violence of war over them. In Czechoslovakia, in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Romania and Italy … CVs were brutally ended and changed wherever the German soldiers appeared in the wake of the German soldiers.
“We lived in a wealthy family in Kolozsvár,” Menashe Lorenzi recalled in an interview with the author of these lines. The entrepreneur, who was now in Netanya in Israeli, was born in 1934 as András Lörincz, his twin sister was called Lea. Her father ran a foreign trade business with one of his four brothers. The mother’s family was also numerous, she had three sisters and four brothers. Family celebrations, Jewish holidays, the turn of the year – as this was always committed in a large community. But then the war came. The German crew put an abrupt end to peaceful life. In March 1944 the family was deported to Auschwitz. They owed a special fact that András and Lea survived:
When arriving on the ramp in Birkenau, the SS doctor Josef Mengele sorted the twins for his experiments. All other family members immediately came to the gas chambers. Lea got the number A-7059, András the number A-122090 tattooed into the left forearm. Months of agony and the pain followed. The two are one of the few survivors of the murderous doctor. They counted ten years on the day of the liberation from Auschwitz. After slow recovery in a hospital, they returned to their city, which was now in Romania, which was now called Cluj. “But hardly anyone came back from the people we knew. And of the few survivors we met, we were always compared with their children: ‘My daughter would now be so old, my son now so big. ‹We could no longer endure this and went to Israel in 1951.« From András Lörincz Menashe Lorenzi. He and his sister founded families and got children and grandchildren.
The situation was similar to Eva and Miriam Zeiger, Judith Csengeri, Anita Franková and Helga Weissová from Prague. Eugeniusz Dabrowski and Jadwiga Gontarek from Warsaw, but also Ludmila Botscharowa from Sambor in Ukraine. These are just a few of the children of Auschwitz, of a total of 180, which were captured by Soviet front camera venues four weeks after the liberation on celluloid.
The children had survived, attended schools, studied or completed vocational training. And they were silent about what they had experienced. To have survived from shame. They were silent to displace the nightmares that were pushing to sleep night after night, not to have the days mastered. Silent in believing that nobody would believe them anyway.
In 1987, when I did research on the fates of the children of Auschwitz, I met Eugeniusz Dabrowski in his Warsaw apartment for the first time. It had long been persuaded by his friends from the “Club of the Children of Auschwitz”, which had been founded in the Polish capital. Finally he agreed to talk. However, his wife and the now adult children had to stay in the kitchen, isolated from our conversation. It was the first time after the liberation that he talked to an outsider about Auschwitz-Birkenau, said Dabrowski.
I met him and his family again for the 50th anniversary of the liberation in 1995. They were happy to see me. Because our meeting would have opened a lock: After the conversation with “the German”, the daughter had insisted on the fact that it was now time that the father also opened up towards the family. And this would have helped everyone to be able to explain many peculiarities that occurred in living together.
The trauma of the children of Auschwitz remained and remains – not with them alone. Children and grandchildren of the survivors feel the fears and unrest of the parent generation. They worry about mothers and fathers, want to know what was and is. But they want to protect their descendants and do not burden them with what they have experienced. It is often only perceived after many psychological conversations and therapies that this rifle would like to turn into a oversighting and burden the children.
Speaking often helps to be able to deal with trauma better. According to experience and scientific studies, many fears are also transferred to the following, the second and third generations. And often the pain increases with a time distance. If the first decades after the war were still filled with teaching, studying work and family, the time of thinking and memory occurred with retirement. The pain for the lost parents, siblings, relatives and friends returned with force.
And the fears returned. Return to the extent that right -wing forces are established everywhere in Europe. Forces that rely on hatred, racism and anti-Semitism that want to fuel foreign or xenophobia not only from political calculation, but rather institutionalize.
They were silent to displace the nightmares that were pushing to sleep night after night, not to have the days mastered.
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