Category:Czech Family Camp Auschwitz (subject)

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Czech Family Camp Auschwitz / The Birkenau Boys

Overview

In September 1943 five thousand prisoners were deported from the Terezín ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau in two transports.Unlike previous transports, they received unusual „privileges“: on arriving at the camp they did not undergo the usual selections, and families were also not divided up into various sections in the camp - hence the „family“ camp. The „privileges“ also included the fact that the Terezín prisoners were not subjected to the humiliating ritual of having their heads shaved on arrival, and that children were allowed to spend daytimes in a children's block. In December 1943 and May 1944, further large transports from Terezín brought a further 12,500 prisoners, who were placed in the family camp. While the first transports consisted exclusively of prisoners who had come to Terezín from the Czech lands, almost half the prisoners on later transports were Jews who had initially been deported from Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

In the family camp, labelled section BIIb in Birkenau, the prisoners had to live in a narrow, muddy strip surrounded by an electric fence. They suffered from hunger, cold, exhaustion, illnesses and poor sanitation. The mortality rate was no lower here than in the rest of Auschwitz. The children were allowed to spend the day in the children's block, where teachers led by the charismatic Fredy Hirsch engaged them in improvised lessons and games.

The unusual „privileges“ given to the prisoners in the family camp were a complete mystery to the members of the Auschwitz resistance movement. After a while, however, they managed to find out that the prisoners' personal papers contained the abbreviation SB and the period „six months.“ SB - „Sonderbehandlung,“ or „special treatment“ - was code in Nazi jargon for execution without verdict, in Auschwitz usually death in the gas chambers.

After exactly six months, all the still-living prisoners who had been deported to Auschwitz in September 1943 were told that they would be transferred to the „Heydebreck labour camp.“ Instead of going to this fictitious camp, however, the lorries of prisoners headed to the Auschwitz gas chambers, where on the night of 8 March they were murdered without selection. According to several eyewitnesses, before going to their deaths in the Auschwitz gas chambers they sang, as a sign of resistance, the Czechoslovak anthem, the Jewish anthem Hatikva and the Internationale. Members of the Auschwitz resistance organisation had warned Fredy Hirsch and other prisoners in the family camp that they were shortly to be murdered, and had appealed to them to rebel - however, there was not enough time to prepare and organise armed revolt. Fredy Hirsch, who had been expected to lead the rebellion, then died of an overdose of tranquillisers - it is probable that he committed suicide.

From that point on, the remaining prisoners in the family camp lived in permanent fear that after six months they would meet the same fate. At the beginning of July 1944 these fears were confirmed: unlike in March, however, the prisoners underwent selections, and some of them were sent to work in other concentration camps. By chance, Mengele was persuaded to carry out a selection of the boys from the children's block, which meant that some of them managed to survive until liberation. Approximately 6-7,000 prisoners remained in the family camp, and were then murdered over the course of two nights, from 10 to 12 July 1944. Of the 17,500 prisoners sent to the family camp, only 1,294 survived.

It is still not altogether clear why the organisers of the „final solution“ created the family camp, with its unusual „privileges,“ only to liquidate it several months later. All that seems clear is that this remarkable activity was connected with the Nazis' attempts to hide the genocide of the Jews to the outside world, and with the visit of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Terezín, for which Terezín's SS command ordered the ghetto to be specially embellished. The Terezín SS command then showed the Red Cross delegates a „Potemkin village,“ which had very little in common with Terezín's cruel reality. A few days before they were murdered, the prisoners of the family camp were ordered to write post-dated postcards to their Terezín relations from the „labour camp“ at Birkenau. The Terezín prisoners were thus meant to gain the false idea, ahead of the Red Cross commissioner's visit, that their parents, childrens and siblings in Birkenau were all right, and above all alive. Some historians also believe that the family camp was meant to be the target of a similarly-manipulated visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross, this time to Auschwitz.

The liquidation of the family camp on 8 March and 10-12 July 1944 was the largest mass murder of Czechoslovak citizens during the Second World War.

The Birkenau Boys

At the liquidation of the camp, Mengele selected several adolescents as "adults" for forced labor, some twins for his medical experiments, and a group of 89 boys as errand boys. They were hosted in a barrack in CAMP D.

In January 1945 the Birkenau Boys were evacuated. The first group to leave the camp included 20/30 boys (only two survived: Gerhard Durlacher e Toman Brod). Of the others 40 survived, which brings the total to 42.

Book : The Search by Gerhard Durlacher

Gerhard Durlacher. De zoektocht <Dutch> (Amsterdam : Meulenhoff, 1991).

English ed. The Search: The Birkenau Boys, trans. Susan Massotty (London ; New York : Serpent's Tail, 1998).

Also translated into German (Die Suche : Bericht über den Tod und das Uberleben, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1995).

"Gerhard Durlacher was stunned to discover that he was not the only survivor who was assigned to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. The Search follows his quest to find his fellow survivors and ends with a reunion of the Birkenau boys in Israel in 1990 ... A child survivor of the Holocaust, Durlacher long believed that he was the only person still alive from a group of 89 boys assigned to the Birkenau extermination camp in 1944. After he learned that he was wrong, he set himself the task of confronting his past by locating some of the others. As in many other Holocaust memoirs, the prose here is spare, and the lack of detail can be a little confusing. For example, the reader is thrown into the author's search without a description of the process that led him to take his journey. But some psychological truisms emerge in this gray travelogue that, while not fresh, are worth ruminating over. What the author, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam who died in 1996, finds is that even though the survivors shared a common experience, how they have coped with their wartime suffering differs. Some, in particular those who have moved to Israel, meet regularly with other survivors; others keep their harrowing past buried deep in their psyches. Equally diverse are survivors' personal outlooks--despite what they have gone through, some of the "Birkenau Boys" still call themselves optimists, while others possess the bitterness one would expect. Not surprisingly, Durlacher, who wrote two previous books on the Holocaust, enjoyed the company of the former much more than the latter."--Publisher description.

Gerhard Durlacher (1928-1996) was a Holocaust child survivor and writer.

The Children

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