Judith Kerr Obituary by Janie Hampton

photo: Rex Shutterstock

Judith Kerr, esteemed writer and illustrator of children’s and young adult books, died last week aged 95. I had two memorable phone conversations with Judith. The first was when I was researching my book on Girl Guides and the Second World War, which included Jewish Girl Guides coming from Nazi-occupied Europe to Britain. Judith told me about her arrival from Germany in London, aged 13 in 1936. She was born in Berlin, where her father was a well-known German-Jewish journalist who openly criticized the Nazis. In 1933 he was warned that his passport might be confiscated, and he fled Germany, just a day before he would have been arrested. Shortly afterwards his wife, Judith, and her brother followed. The family travelled via Switzerland and Paris and settled in London.

Judith had left school when the Second World War began. By now speaking perfect English, she worked first as a secretary and then volunteered for the Red Cross, before being awarded a scholarship at the Central School of Arts in London. Later, she described an air- raid in London as vividly as a picture: ‘The sky was red, reflecting the fires on the ground, and in it hung clusters of orange flares which lit up everything for miles around. They looked like gigantic Christmas decorations floating slowly, slowly down through the night air. In the distance, yellow flashes like lightning were followed by muffled bangs – the anti-aircraft guns in Hyde Park. Suddenly a searchlight swept across the sky. It was joined by another and another, crossing and re-crossing each other, and then a great orange flash blotted out everything else.’ Judith met her future husband, television scriptwriter Nigel Kneale, in the school canteen where she was teaching, and he suggested she join the BBC as a scriptwriter.
The second lively conversation I had with Judith was when I was writing about the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. I was searching for other cultural events that year, and Judith told me about her work at the BBC television studios in Lime Grove. Nigel Kneale, known as Tom, was writing a science-fiction television serial when he, Judith and their colleagues watched the coronation on a black and white television. The Quatermass Experiment was to be about an alien arriving on Earth, but Kneale could not decide where the alien should land. As the coronation reached its climax, he realised that most television viewers had now seen inside Westminster Abbey: this would be the perfect place to first see the alien. ‘There was neither a budget nor the possibility of filming in the Abbey, so we bought a guide book, which included a photo of Poets’ Corner,’ Judith told me. Making television drama in 1953 required ingenuity and imagination. They photographed the guide book’s photo, blew it up and pasted it onto a canvas panel. ‘Then I put on a pair of wash-leather gloves, while Tom stuck bits of curled wire and twigs onto them. We cut a slit in the backdrop, and Tom put his hands through, wearing the gloves. He waggled his fingers very slowly. That was the scariest moment of the drama – when ‘the vegetable’ first appeared, this creep-crawly alien thing with tendrils which had absorbed the bodies and souls of two astronauts. The cameras could not move, and the cameraman saw everything upside down and back to front. It was all filmed live for the television, while another camera showed the actor in terror.’

Mog the Cat. copyright HarperCollins

Judith and Kneale were married in 1954 and had two children. When they complained that children’s books were boring, Judith told them stories about ‘Mog’ the cat. Later she wrote and illustrated the stories, and the series of 18 titles about Mog were published from 1970 to 2015. ‘Cats are very interesting people,’ she later said. After 30 years she wrote Goodbye Mog in which the cat died, a brave step for a children’s writer.

The Tiger who Came to Tea. copyright HarperCollins

Probably her best-known book was The Tiger Who Came to Tea, which also began in order to liven up her children’s day. Asked by BBC presenter Emily Maitlis if the tiger symbolised the the overturning of suburban life during the 1960s sexual and social revolution, she simply replied, ‘No, it was about a tiger coming to tea.’ Kerr’s ability to see the world from a child's perspective enabled her to write and draw exactly what a child wants to see, not what an adult thinks they should. She never wasted their time by repeating in words, what was already in the illustration. The illustrations were clear and simple, with only the essential people and objects in them. Published in 1968, the book has never been out of print. 

Judith Kerr at work

Judith’s son was eight when he saw the film The Sound of Music and commented, 'Now we know what it was like when Mummy was a little girl.' Judith was determined that he, and other children, should know what life was really like and so wrote the semi-autobiographical Out of Hitler Time trilogy. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Bombs on Aunt Dainty (originally published as The Other Way Round) and A Small Person Far Away, describe childhood among of the rise of the Nazis in Germany, life as a refugee in Britain during World War II, and the post-war years. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit won the state-funded Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Children's Literature Award) in 1974 and became a set text in German schools. In 2004, she said, 'I think of the business of the Holocaust, and the one and a half million children who didn't get out as I got out, in the nick of time -- I think about them almost every day now, because I've had such a happy and fulfilled life and they'd have given anything to have had just a few days of it. And I hope I've not wasted any of it: I try to get the good of every bit of it because I know they would have done if they'd had the chance.'
After the death of Nigel Kneale in 2006, Judith found writing and drawing even more important and continued publishing books into her ninth decade. Over 50 years, she published more than 30 books. Her publisher at HarperCollins, Charlie Redmayne, said she was 'a wonderful and inspiring person who was much loved by everyone. She was a brilliantly talented artist and storyteller. Always understated and very, very funny. She loved life and loved people - and particularly she loved a party.'

photo Daniel Sambraus/AP

Judith Kerr was awarded an OBE in 2012 for services to children's literature and Holocaust education. A year later, the ‘Judith Kerr Primary School’ in London opened as Britain’s first German-English state bilingual school. Just a week before she died, Judith was nominated at the British Book Awards as Illustrator of the Year. She leaves her son Matthew Kneale, a prize-winning novelist and author of ‘The English Passengers’ and daughter, Tacy, who designs special-effects for films.

Anna Judith Gertrude Kerr, 1923 -2019. 

www.janiehampton.co.uk 

Living Memorials: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp by Catherine Hokin

And I know one thing more - that the Europe of the future cannot exist without commemorating all those, regardless of nationality, who were killed at that time with complete contempt and hate... Andrzej Szczypiorski, Prisoner 

The above quote appears on the wall at Sachsenhausen, a

 Sachsenhausen main gate

concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin whose liberation took place seventy four years ago today, on the 22nd April 1945. I visited the camp a few months ago as part of a research trip. It was, of course, a deeply unsettling experience - like any of these facilities, no matter how much you read before you go, you are not prepared for the emotions they engender.

The first thing that is difficult to comprehend about Sachsenhausen strikes you before you get to it: this is no isolated space tucked away from prying eyes. The camp is situated in the small town of Oranienburg, 22km or less than an hour's train journey from the centre of Berlin. High-ranking officers lived in mansions around the perimeter and a large SS housing estate bordered the camp - local girls married the men who served there and families lived backing onto the walls and within earshot of the camp's brickworks and shooting gallery. Prisoners were marched through the town between the camp and forced labour details and there are accounts of the residents closing their doors and shutters at the sound of marching feet. The Camp Commandant's office was landscaped with trees and a duck pond and the barracks for the guards were surrounded by gardens. It is almost surreal how much part of the local fabric the camp was and how much of a village feel was created for the men who ran it. 

 Plan of the camp showing its triangular shape

Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 and was initially used to imprison "undesirables" during the prettifying of Berlin that formed the background to the 1936 Olympics. Between then and 1945, over 200,000 people were interned there, including Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, “career criminals” and “antisocials”. By 1944, about 90 % of the internees were non-Germans, primarily citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland. The camp quickly became the model of what the National Socialists believed a concentration camp should be: an expression of absolute power. The barracks' triangular placement, fanning out from the parade ground, means that every aspect was overlooked by a huge machine gun set on top of the gate. If the prisoners faced the other way they were confronted by a gallows and the roll-call area is bordered by a running track where shoes were tested on a variety of materials, including cinders and cracked stones, by men carrying heavy packs of sand on their backs. Few survived this treatment for more than a matter of days. Visitors (including the industrialists who used its forced labour) were offered tours, the SS were trained there and, in 1938, the “Inspection of the Concentration Camps”, the central administrative office for all concentration camps in the territories controlled by Germany, was moved here.

Due to its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen was a key

 Memorial to the dead

forced labour camp. As well as the details in the camp itself, prisoners made up the workforce for the massive Klinkerwerk brickworks on the nearby lock, as well as the munitions factories operated by AEG and Siemens. By 1942, more than 100 satellite details and satellite camps worked out of Sachsenhausen. Tens of thousands of internees died from this forced labour, or from hunger, disease, and the medical experiments which were a feature of the site. In addition many were deliberately murdered, either in a specifically-built  “neck shot unit” (the fate of 13,000 Soviet POWs in 1941) and, from 1943, in a purpose built gas chamber. When asked at his trial why he introduced the mass extermination facility, Commandant Anton Kaindl responded "because it was a more efficient and more humane way to exterminate prisoners." On a busy day with school parties everywhere on site I have never been anywhere so silent as the remains of that chamber.

In 1945, with the war nearing its end, Sachsenhausen,

 Prisoners, Sachsenhausen

along with the rest of the camps, was cleared. In February an SS special unit headed by Otto Moll murdered 3,000 internees who were considered dangerous (which could mean because they had military training) or were declared unfit and another 13,000 were taken to be killed at Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen. On the 21 April more than 30,000 remaining internees were marched off on Death Marches towards the north-west, the intention, according to Kaindl's trial transcripts, being "to drive them onto barges out to sea and let them sink." The number who died remains unknown. On 22 April 1945, units of the Soviet and Polish armies liberated the 3,000 prisoners left behind due to sickness. 300 of the camp’s former inmates did not survive their liberation and died, and are buried, there.

 Soviet barracks for German prisoners

This, however, was not the end of Sachsenhausen's story. From August 1945, Sachsenhausen became Special Camp No 7: an internment camp for German officers and political prisoners held by the Soviet Union. By 1948, the site, by now renamed Special Camp No.1, was the largest of three special camps in the Soviet Occupation Zone which together held over 60,000 prisoners. Information at the site describes the conditions during this period as inhuman: "Hunger and cold prevailed in the Special Camp. The inadequate hygienic and sanitary conditions and the insufficient nourishment led to disease and epidemics." By 1950 when the camp closed, another 12,500 men were added to the role of Sachsenhausen's dead.

The first memorial at Sachsenhausen was inaugurated in 1961

 The red triangle memorial

by the pre-reunification East German government. In line with their thinking, the main emphasis then was on the role of political resistance. An obelisk was erected in the middle of the site which carries 18 red triangles, to commemorate the 18 nationalities of the political prisoners held there between 1936-45. Post reunification, along with other sites of this nature, the emphasis was on the victims who suffered and died. That two systems remembered Sachsenhausen in different ways caused problems for the site and how it was to be used and there are still visitors today who find the juxtaposition of Soviet and German memorials complicated. It is, I think, to the site's credit that the question of what it exists for is still under scrutiny. The historian Gunther Morsch, a previous director of the Sachsenhausen memorial and museum, has been very vocal about the need to re-examine how we approach these places, particularly in a political climate which is seeing a rise in populism and the right. "We want to keep honoring the victims. And most exhibitions are about their fate. But it has become clear that the emphasis must be shifted to the perpetrators' motives and the structures that enabled these crimes to be committed. More and more visitors were rightly asking, "How could such a thing happen?" and "Is it possible today?" Unfortunately, the second question had to be answered in the affirmative, because "National Socialism actually showed in its most radical form what people are capable of – even today." 

Sachsenhausen does not shy away from exploring the systematic extermination policy of the Nazis and its impact on individuals. The site is full of personal testimony which makes the numbers real and an art exhibition by former inmates which is both heart-breaking and hopeful. It is a brave place to visit - both for what it is trying to tell and what it demands from its visitors. If you go, don't take a tour - they'll whisk you through and serve you a potted version. Get the train from Berlin and walk from the station, it's horribly close. I spent a day there, too much in some ways, not enough in others. I wish I could go back and drag everyone who doesn't get the need for humanity and a united Europe with me. I defy even the toughest nut not to crack.

The Opposite of Historical Fiction - by Gillian Polack

One of the reasons I went to France earlier this year was to check for myself what happened in the Somme region after World War I. I read many accounts, but they couldn’t tell me what I needed to know. What did I need to know? The cultural impact of war.

Historical fiction builds culture. It gives so many of us pathways into understanding how our world sees its past and how people might have lived in it. As fiction, it has fuzzy boundaries, and this is an important part of creating that wonderful past. Some writers use the fuzzy boundaries to create adventure, and some use it to create small private worlds that readers feel they can step into. Some use it to create trauma and let us see the horror of the past. Whatever the writer chooses, they are adding to culture.

I used to think that war added to culture, too. This is because some aspects of war do precisely that. We’ve just had a flurry of memory of poets who died in World War I. Those terrible, beautiful, simple rhymes came from horror and represent death. Exquisite and agonising, they are a core part of how we see that war.

There is a Somme tourism that specialises in military matters. In July, I met a few of the tourists along the Somme, they followed the routes and visited the sites and the museums. There were so many Australians. I talked with some of them. A few were there for family who died. They wanted to see a piece of paper or find out more about a man or where he died. Another group was there because they want to commemorate the war in this hundredth year. A few were there to remind themselves that they vowed “Never again.”

This is also cultural creation. These personal reactions to damaged lives and to a damaged landscape are part of our healing, and we talk about that, but they’re also part of the act of cultural creation. We create a culture of memory when we engage in war tourism. We’re remembering the war and giving it sets of values. Culturally, it’s how we connect past to future. 

This doesn’t simply roll into historical fiction. Most historical fiction writers will take the emotions that rise from seeing death and the culture we use to explain those emotions and that death and will weave it into the fabric of their novel. Thus one type of cultural creation feeds into another type. It can be beautiful. It can be sensible. It can be tragic. From any direction, however, it’s cultural creation, often of a powerful kind. It has the power of drawing from several cultural elements and bringing them together and triggering emotions.

None of this is the opposite of historical fiction. The opposite of historical fiction is not the scarred landscape, nor is it the scarred lives. We’ve given them story. We’ve created culture for them and we’re very busy creating culture for them every day.

The opposite of historical fiction is the past that never makes it into story. One of the reasons humans commit genocide is to wipe the stories of people, their cultures, their memories, their very existence from the planet. This is an aspect of culture that’s so hard to talk about that we often dump the story and add numbers together to turn it into data. 

This is a terribly difficult subject, for so many reasons, so I’m going to give you just two examples of how these things are the opposite of history. If there’s enough interest, I can post more on it, for it’s part of my research into cultural fabric. Only if there are readers who want, however, for it’s a difficult subject to write about.

My first example will concern World War I and my second, World War II.

In and around Amiens, I talked with people and I took pictures of places and I visited museums. I needed to understand how families from the region recovered after the war. A man I spoke to was from a town that no longer exists. He told me that his family lost everything and that, a hundred years ago, they moved to Amiens to start again. He is a ceramicist and I bought a salt shaker to remind myself that every single bit of the physical culture for that family had to be re-created. 

We don’t think of locals who never travel more than 20 miles from the place of their ancestors as refugees, but some of the losses the ceramicist's family suffered are the same as the losses refugees suffer. The family didn’t lose their country, or their language. Some of the culture could be re-created and all the oral culture and the cooking and the family stories survived… unless they were linked to physical items. The destruction of private property was so immense that families are still trying to rebuild their physical heritage. They will never get all of it back. It's gone.

Local heritage for that region has big holes. The opposite of historical fiction. Not lack of evidence. Destruction of all the objects that link us to the past. If someone had a mourning brooch… it’s gone. If someone had a chair passed down from the Middle Ages and carefully preserved... it’s gone.  No number of salt cellars can replace the loss of the family kitchen, in the house the family had lived in for as long as records exist. The house itself is gone.

This is not restricted to the Somme. It’s everywhere where towns are destroyed and people are forced to move. Culture is simplified in a brutal way and when it is rebuilt, it’s not the same.

My second example is represented by the one book I hoped was stolen when 1209 books were taken from me by thieves. It’s the cookbook I’ve not had the courage to cook from. 

We all know stories about World War II. We (the broader cultural 'we') don’t tend to read a lot about the women sent to the concentration camps and the death camps. Several groups of women, historians have discovered, sat around talking food. We know (for historians have investigated) that some of these women starved to death while they were remembering recipes and dinner parties.

How do we know they were talking food? There are manuscripts, written down on whatever material they could obtain and hidden so that even if they died, people would know who they are. So that their families might have their recipes. So that there was memory. So that their history lived.

I can give you any number of reasons why the recipes might have been written down in such terrible circumstances, but that’s guesswork. That’s me trying to re-create the culture that has been destroyed. All we have are the recipes and any notes the recipe-writers gave us.

One of these collections has been translated into a cookbook. In Memory’s Kitchen. This is the book I needed to understand. The one that hurts when I see it. 

It hurts right now, because it’s on my desk because researching the Somme and writing this blogpost has brought me to a realisation. When the recipes of these murdered people sit unread on shelves in libraries, they’re part of the culture death those who killed them so desire.

We know that Jewish women on the verge of death wrote down their favourite recipes. That’s all we take into our culture. 

Yet these amazing women gave us a gift. Something that ought to be wiped from the planet with the women's lives sits right now on my desk and tells me, “We do not have to accept such destruction. We can remember this group of women through what they have given us.” 

I need to make something from that cookbook, soon. I need to remember these women and their culture and not share in the erasure of people from the planet.

There’s a Jewish festival that starts tonight. This is a good moment to make that impossible step and to move one small part of a destroyed past into living culture.

Walking the Krakow Ghetto by Catherine Hokin

Some places, for example Bruges, immerse the visitor in history as if you were walking through a film set. Others, as I discovered in the area which once housed the Krakow ghetto, take you down ordinary streets and trip you up with the weight of what they once held.

 Entrance to the Krakow Ghetto 1941

The ghetto in Krakow was one of 5 major metropolitan Jewish ghettos created by the Nazis during the occupation of Poland in World War Two. It was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943 with most of the inhabitants being sent to the nearby forced labour camp at Plaszow, or the extermination camps at Belzec and Auschwitz. It was set up in the suburb of Podgorze rather than the traditional (and still very vibrant) Jewish district of Kazimierz because its architect Hans Frank (Hitler's personal lawyer) felt Kazimierz was more significant to Krakow's history. That Kazimierz is far more central to the city and thus harder to hide away must have played a significant part in that decision. The Krakow ghetto was a closed ghetto: it was physically cut off from the surrounding area and access was restricted; the suburb of Podgorze is across the river from the main city and can only be reached by bridge or boat.When first formed, 15000 Jews were crammed into an area meant for 3000 people; the size of the ghetto was reduced once deportations began.

 Ghetto Memorial Krakow

Like the majority of people with an interest in  history, we usually research our trips before we go. The Krakow trip, however, was a last minute short break and, beyond the salt mines (which I can't recommend highly enough), the Schindler Factory and Auschwitz, we hadn't looked at much in advance. Consequently we stumbled into the ghetto en route to the Factory without realising where we were. It was an eerie experience. The square we came into was quiet and empty, which is not the norm for Krakow squares. It was only when we stopped and looked closer that we realised we were looking at rows of deliberately empty, some small and some over-large, identical chairs. It's not easy to find, but there is a plaque on the kiosk at the square's edge - this is Heroes Square, the central point of the ghetto, and the 33 large chairs and 37 small ones made from iron and bronze are a memorial to its Jewish victims. It's a very poignant place and hit us all hard with its simplicity. The plaque contained a map and little else (there is no background explanation to the memorial) but it did direct us to the far corner and one of the best museums I think I've ever visited.

 The Under the Eagle Pharmacy

The Apteka Pod Orlem, or Under the Eagle Pharmacy, was run by Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Roman Catholic Polish pharmacist and was the only pharmacy which continued to operate during the period of the ghetto. Pankiewicz chose to decline the Nazi (or Hitlerist as they are often referred to in Krakow) offer to relocate his premises and continued to supply medications throughout the ghetto's operation. More than this (which was brave enough), he and his staff helped smuggle food and information into the ghetto and helped hide many of those facing deportation. Pankiewicz's memoir (which is on sale in the tiny ticket office three doors down) talks about supplying hair dyes for changing identity and tranquilizers to keep children quiet during Gestapo raids. Because of his work, he was given the title of Righteous Among the Nations in 1983. The pharmacy has been completely refurbished and makes use of videos and testimony to tell its often heartbreaking stories. As many people will be aware, in February of this year the Polish government passed a law that outlaws blaming Poland for any crimes committed during the Holocaust. This museum puts the blame squarely where it should go but makes no attempt to wipe away the locals who participated - their, named, stories are presented along with those of the victims and survivors. It is an intelligent, even-handed account of a terrible period and deserves visiting.

 Ghetto Wall Krakow

We now had our bearings so decided to make the half-hour walk to the Plaszow concentration camp. It's a roadside, not very scenic walk and there is a tram that takes you there (we used it on the way back) as well as the innumerable little tourist road trains but walk, for two reasons. Firstly, if you don't you will miss the unbearably moving stretch of the old ghetto wall, now sitting very incongruously beside a children's playground at the back of a primary school. Again the plaque is tiny and it isn't marked on any map we had. This section is one of only two that survive and stretches up into the old quarries and the cemetery. The original encircling walls were 3m high and there were only 4 gates in. One of the most disturbing features is its shape: the wall is deliberately built in the shape of the tombstones that you will find in the sixteenth century Jewish graveyard in Kazimierz. The Jewish men forced to build it can have been left with no illusions.

 Plaszow 1941

The second reason for walking the route is to experience how (like Sachsenhausen in Berlin) short the distance is between slave camp and city. In another very deliberate gesture, Plaszow was built on the site of two Jewish cemetaries which were destroyed for the purpose - the shattered tombstones were used to cobble the roads. The camp was a forced-labour camp providing labour for the quarries and a number of armaments factories. By its height in 1944 it is estimated the camp held 25000 prisoners on the 200 acre site. Conditions were abysmal with deaths from typhus and starvation rampant. There is no museum at Plaszow and no guides. Since November of last year large information boards have been put in place describing the site and what happened there and these provide a kind of route through. The site is very beautiful - it is a wildflower filled nature-reserve - and that alone makes the whole experience of walking its paths a hard one. If you follow the numbered boards, you end at the Hujowa Gorka - this roughly translates as Dick Hill and is a play on the name of Unterscharfuhrer Albert Hujar, the man who turned this beautiful hill into a killing field. Some 8-10,000 prisoners were marched to a trench in this hillside, stripped and shot. In 1944, all the bodies were exhumed and burnt on a giant bonfire to hide the evidence. Witnesses have testified to seeing 17 lorry loads of human ash.

 The Memorial of Torn Out Hearts

The hill is dominated by a memorial which finally broke us all - me, the Jewish American OH and the 23 year old Berlin-living son. We'd all taken time out here and there, and there is something about Holocaust places that requires everyone to move in their own space, but this brought us all to tears and silence. This is the Memorial of Torn Out Hearts - you won't see the name (or any explanation) at the site but you'll have named it something similar already. This massive stone was designed by Witold Cęckiewicz and unveiled in 1964. It depicts five figures (representing the five countries of Płaszów's victims) with their heads bent under the weight of the massive stone block from which they're carved and a horizontal crack across their chests, symbolising their abruptly ended lives. Each face is different, each hand is different. I've never seen anything as moving. It dominates the skyline and, what you can't see from my photograph, is that the sky shows through the crack so the rip feels almost living. There are discussions currently being held about a permanent museum being built here, it doesn't need it - the monument and the boards and the beauty of the place tell all the stories that you need.

We didn't get to the Schindler Factory - the website to be honest is crackers, we couldn't book in advance and the daily allocation was done before we got there. It didn't matter, we had discovered our own history which then led us into Kazimierz and its wonderful synagogues. It was a short stay and we are leaving Auschwitz for another trip: our walk through the ghetto reminded us that these sites, which are so woven into the places that still bear their scars, take recovery and reflection time. The quietly demonstrative Krakow Ghetto made us remember and remember vividly; it did its job.

'The (Roma) Boy Who Lived' by Karen Maitland

Rounding up of Roma in Occupied Yugoslavia 

Between 1941-1944

Two of my medieval thrillers feature dwarfs as main characters. One is a natural-born dwarf sold by their family into a brothel, the other was artificially made into a dwarf as a baby so that he could be sold as a jester. Perhaps, that is why I was so moved when I came across the true story of a child who survived the holocaust by pretending to be a dwarf. The child in question was a Romani and today, 8th April, is International Romani or Roma Day, when our thoughts focus on the Sinti and Roma who perished in the Holocaust.

It is difficult to determine exactly how many European Roma were murdered between 1939 and 1945. Estimates range from 220,000 to 500,000. Proportionately, they suffered greater losses than any other group of victims except the Jews. The Sinti and Roma did not match the racial ideal of Aryan appearance and their itinerant lifestyle was considered ‘asocial,’ even ‘criminal.’ Ironically, pure-blood Roma were thought to be harmless by the Nazis, but the majority of the Roma community were believed to be of mixed race and therefore ‘degenerate’ and ‘dangerous.’ The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 aimed at the Jews were soon amended to include them.

Memorial to Sinti and Roma in Nuremberg near where,

on 15th Sept 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were adopted.

Photo: Aarp65

July 1942. Serbs and Roma being marched to Kozara and

Jasenova concentration camps.

As early as 1936, Roma were beginning to be sent to labour camps on the grounds of antisocial behaviour or ‘criminal tendencies’. After 1939, 30,000 Roma from Germany and from the German-occupied territories were sent to the Jewish ghettos in Poland including Warsaw and Lublin, where many perished within months from hunger, cold and sickness. Those married to Germans were exempt, but were sterilized, as were their children.

On 16th December, 1942, Himmler issued an order that all Roma were to be rounded-up and taken to the concentration camps. There were exemptions – those who could prove they had ‘pure gypsy blood’ dating from ancient times; those of Roma descent who had integrated into German society and did not ‘behave like gypsies,’ and the families of those who had served with distinction in the German armed forces. But in practise, local authorities often ignored these niceties during their raids. The police even deported Roma soldiers who were on active service in the German military, when they came home on leave.

Around 23,000 Roma from Germany and some parts of occupied Europe were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a special Roma ‘Family Camp’ was built. In Poland, many of those not sent to Auschwitz were shot by the local police, including nearly 1,000 in the Krakow district alone. Others from occupied Europe were dispatched to other camps including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, Ravensbrück and Treblinka.

Nazi doctors experimented on some Roma women, particularly when trying out barbaric methods of sterilization. And as he did with the Jews, the infamous Mengele selected Roma twins and dwarfs for his human experiments, including amputation of healthy limbs.

Monument to the memory of the Roma who were murdered
erected on the site of Nazi crimes, Borzencin Village, Poland.

Photographer: Zygmunt Put

In May 1944, the SS guards surrounded and sealed off the Roma ‘Family Camp’ at Auschwitz intending to liquidate all inside. But the Roma had been warned and had armed themselves with tools and iron pipes and refuse to walk out to their deaths. The SS withdrew. Over the next few months, around 3,000 Roma deemed fit for work were sent to Auschwitz I and to the German factories as slave labour, leaving the sick, the elderly and children in the family camp. Then in August, the SS rounded up the remaining 2,898 inmates. Most were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Then they systematically hunted down the children who had hidden during the operation and slaughtered them. It is estimated that around 19,000 of the 23,000 Roma sent to Auschwitz died in that camp either from disease, starvation or deliberate murder.

It was only in 1979 that the West German Federal Parliament recognised the Nazi persecution of Roma as ‘racial’, which allowed survivors to apply for compensation, but by then many had already died.

The larger the number, the harder it is to comprehend the full scale of the human misery involved in events like this, but in the end it is not so much the numbers that matter as much as the knowledge that each person who suffered and died was an individual human being who loved and was loved.

1941. Serbian Roma being taken to their executions. 

One such, was a little boy called Karl Stojka who was born in 1933 to Lowara Roma parents in eastern Austria. Little Karl had five siblings and spent his summers travelling in their caravan, as his family worked as horse-traders. But in March 1938, just before Karl’s 7th birthday, they were camped on their usual winter-site in Vienna when Germany annexed Austria. They were told they could not move on. Karl’s parents were forced to convert their caravan into a static wooden house, which the children found hard to cope with, unused to being caged within permanent walls. Karl’s father and oldest sister were recruited to work in a factory, and the children were sent to school.

Arriving at Auschwitz II - Birkenau Camp

Photographer: Lubomir Rosenstein

 

But if Karl felt trapped by walls, it was nothing compared to the barbed wire, guards and search lights he was about to face, for by 1943, the family had been deported to Birkenau camp. Having witnessed the death of thousands of fellow Roma, Karl, still only 10 years old, was one of 918 transported to Buchenwald as slave labour. But on arrival they went through another selection process, and the officers pulled out 200 deemed incapable of working, who were to be returned to Birkenau to be gassed. Karl was one of those chosen to be sent back to his death, because the officer thought him too young to be of any use. But his brother and uncle insisted that he was 14 years and just appeared short because he was a dwarf. That was quite a gamble as dwarfs were often used for barbaric experimentation, but he was kept as a worker.

Karl was eventually moved to Flossenbürg concentration camp, before finally being freed by American troops on 24th April, 1945.

More details of Karl’s young life can be found in 'The Story of Karl Stojka: A Childhood in Birkenau' (Washington, D.C., 1992), published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

March Guest Post - Georgia Hunter, We Were the Lucky Ones

Georgia Hunter, photo credit: Andrea Carson

When Georgia Hunter was fifteen years old, she learned that she came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Here she speaks to Charlotte Wightwick about her quest to uncover her family’s staggering history and how she turned this into her debut novel We Were the Lucky Ones.

Tell us a bit about We Were the Lucky Ones
My novel tracks my grandfather, his parents, and his siblings—a family of Polish Jews—as they scatter at the start of the Second World War, doing everything in their power to survive and to reunite.

The characters in the novel are based on your own family, but you didn’t know about this part of your family history until you were a teenager. Can you tell us about how it made you feel to discover what happened to them?

It was mind-blowing! Growing up, I knew my grandfather not as Addy Kurc, but as Eddy Courts, and I assumed he’d been born in the States. I learned that he came from a town called Radom, Poland, and about his Holocaust-era past a year after he died, when a high school English teacher assigned our class a project in looking back at our ancestral roots. I sat down with my grandmother, Caroline, and it was in that interview that I discovered I was a quarter Jewish, and that I came from a family of Holocaust survivors. It was a shocking revelation, of course—one that sparked an endless array of questions, the first of which was why was I just learning this now?

How did you go about researching everything that happened to them?

I began researching We Were the Lucky Ones nine years ago, when I flew to Paris to interview two relatives—Felicia, who was a year old at the start of the war, and Anna, who’s mother Halina is also a main character in my story. From there I travelled to Brazil and across the States, meeting with cousins and friends—anyone with a story to share…Where there were gaps in my timeline, I looked to outside resources—to archives, museums, ministries, and magistrates around the world, in hopes of tracking down relevant information. Over time, I collected details from organisations near and far, including a nine-page statement that had been hand-written by my grandfather’s older brother, extensive military records for others, and (in perhaps my most treasured find) the first-hand accounts of three relatives who had since passed, captured on video by the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive.


Given the amount of research you did, and the accuracy with which you sought to portray your family, why did you choose a novel rather than writing a biography?
My goal, first and foremost, was to write a book that did my family’s story justice. It was important to me to tell it as truthfully as possibly. It was also important to me, however, that the story read less like a history lesson, and more like a novel: visceral and immersive. I wanted readers to understand, through the eyes of the Kurcs, what it meant to be Jewish and on the run during the Second World War… I wanted my ancestors to come across as human. And so, I allowed myself the creative license to dive deep into my settings and my characters’ psyches… In taking this route, it’s my hope that I was able, in the end, to bring the story even closer to the truth.

We Were the Lucky Ones is an amazing story of survival amongst unimaginable horror. Was there anything that you found out in the course of your research that you just couldn’t believe?

One of the first statistics I came across in my research that I found particularly shocking was that fewer than 300 of the 30,000 Jews from my family’s hometown of Radom, Poland, lived to see the end of the war. Knowing that the Kurcs made up a significant percentage of that 300 was an impossible truth to digest at first—we were, it seemed, a statistical anomaly.

It was also hard for me at times to wrap my head around the means by which my relatives were able to skirt death, over and over again.

One of the things that struck me in the novel was how quickly you portray things going from a normal, comfortable middle-class life to the ghetto, or to living outside the law. How do you think it was possible for things to change so quickly?

I, too, was struck by how quickly things changed for the Kurcs…I chose to open the book in the spring of 1939 for this exact reason—so I could depict what life was like before their worlds, like the worlds of so many other European Jews, were turned upside-down.

It’s hard to say how it was possible for things to change so quickly and drastically—I think that’s part of what makes the Holocaust so horrifying. I had to keep reminding myself as I wrote that, at the time, no one could foresee the atrocities that would unfold over the course of the war; that the Kurcs didn’t have the perspective we have now; that they were simply trying to survive from day to day, with no real concept of what was to come.

The other part of the book which I found fascinating, perhaps because I know relatively little about it, was what happened to the family after the war - their and so many others’ journeys to try and start better, safer lives. Can you say a bit about this?

It’s true that you don’t hear as many stories of how families and individuals, most of whom were left with nothing, were forced to start over after the war. I was somewhat surprised in my research to learn that my family’s narrative didn’t end on VE Day. The war was over, Allied victory had been declared, but the family remained scattered, with several relatives unaccounted for. Anti-Semitism was still rampant. Their lives were still at risk. They were homeless. And even when the Kurcs did finally find a safe haven in the States and in Brazil, life was far from easy… It would be years before they were able to put down roots. I talk about some of this in the “Since Then” section at the very end of the book.

Is there anything about the story that you don’t know, and which you wish you did?

I wish I could have asked my grandfather why he didn’t share this piece of his history with me when I was a kid. I don’t fault him for not telling me—I understand wanting to put this chapter of his past behind him—but I often wonder what reason, exactly, he’d offer. Would he tell me the period was too traumatic for him to relive? That he was trying to protect me? That he’d seen what being Polish and Jewish could have (should have, if left to the odds) done for his family and he didn’t want to subject his family to a similar risk? Or that he was far more consumed with looking ahead and ensuring a successful life for himself and his family than with rehashing the past? I’ll never know for sure, but I imagine his answer would have been some combination of all of the above.

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter is published by Allison & Busby at £12.99; you can find out more at http://georgiahunterauthor.com/