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Unanswered
Prayers: The Story of Children Holocaust Victims
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Think back to a time in history when madmen ran Germany and people were
brainwashed to feel prejudice towards others for their religion, personal
background, sexual preference, or worse yet, no reason at all. In this place and
time a generation was branded, kicked out of schools, spit on, yelled at,
beaten, shot, burned alive and murdered by the millions; some of which were
innocent children. Tom from their homes and parents, these helpless youngsters
were forced into concentration camps where they met unspeakable horrors. Many
knew their fate and accepted death, while others fought hard to make it through
and live to tell their own story of the holocaust. Children were delivered into the concentration camp, Buchenwald, in growing
numbers. The youngest, a three and a half year old polish boy, Stefan Zewig, was
smuggled into camp by his father. They were poorly clothed, insufficiently
nourished, and most had no blankets and no water for drinking or washing. These
children had been separated from their mothers and some had seen the murders of
their fathers right before their eyes. Many knew enough that their mothers,
brothers and sisters had met their ends in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and
that they were now homeless orphans (United States Holocaust Memorial Council
2). The ones that were old enough were sent to work detail, the others were sent
to the gas chambers. "Now and then a child managed to hide between the
bundles of clothing and piles of luggage. Freedom didn't last long, because the
next day at the latest the children were punished by being thrown alive into the
trenches between the corpses," said camp prisoner, Oscar Berger (Hackett
354). The Children Cry Out Children in Buchenwald met horrible deaths and severe punishments without cause - except for the pleasure it might give a camp soldier. "Seven young Polish prisoners were once suspended by chains from the bunk bed in their cell. They were fed only salt pickles and salt water, and the unbearable agony drove them to madness. All of them died in this manner. The sounds of their cries and shouts of pain for "Father" and "Mother" still ringing in my ears," observed a fellow camp prisoner, Richard Gritz (Hackett 198). One fifteen-year-old Polish comrade was hanged for tying to escape. He cried in despair, "Mother, mother, I am still so young, I don't want to die yet!" (Hacken 193). Even after children were evacuated from Buchenwald, they suffered. Many were
overcome with panic and took refuge in sewers where they were subjected to
extreme deprivation for days at a time. Constant nightmares plagued most of them
afterwards, "For a year I have dreamed about bad things, but if sometime my
mother wakes me up and calls to me 'Good morning, my son!' then I will no longer
remember the bad things," said a child observed by Dr. Jonas Silber
(Hackett 244-248). Death Doctor Murders Without Cause Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele was well known to use cruel and unusual forms
of medicine to 'treat' patients of his own selection. There have been numerous
accounts of his cruelty towards children especially. Herman Langbehn, a clerk at
Auschwitz, in an interview, spoke of an instance were Mengele came into the
children's block at Auschwitz to measure the boys' height. Mengele became angry
when he found many of them too small for their age. He made the boys stand
against a door post marked with nails for each group. If the boy's head did not
reach the proper nail, Mengele gave a sign with his riding crop. The child was
later taken away to the gas chambers. More than a thousand children were
murdered at that time (Snyder 241). "Another night,"described by
seventy-one-year-old Maximilian Sternol, "women and children were on their
knees before Mengele and (his co-death conspiratan) Boger, crying 'take pity on
us, take pity on us!' Nothing helped. They were beaten down, brutally trampled
upon, and pushed into the trucks. It was a terrible, gruesome sight"
(Snyder 241). Mengele was also accused of killing a fourteen-year-old girl with
a bayonet and even accused of supervising an operation by which two Gypsy
children were sewn together to create Siamese twins (Snyder 242). A Heroic Escape In a small town a few miles away from Berlin, lived a sixteen year old Jewish
girl by the name of Ruth Krumbein. In 1936 she read Adolf Hitler's book, Mien
Kampf, and believed every word of it. She was scared for her safety and
confronted her parents. She told them that they all had to get out of Germany
immediately. Since her father was a well known business man and mayor of the
town, he brushed off her warnings as nothing more then adolescent 'behavior' and
'silliness'. Ruth pushed on and would not stay; she was too scared. She knew of
relatives in Pensacola and asked if they would sponsor her. They said, 'of
course' and within two years she earned an American Visa. Her parents let her
go, not for her safety, but as a good learning experience. "You're
dreaming," they'd say. They didn't heed her countless warnings and so
didn't join her into the States. Her father use to say, "even if Hitler and
his gang wanted to hurt us, the foreign nations wouldn't allow it!" (Ruth
Krumbein, personal interview, 17 February 1997).
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The opinions, comments, and sentiments expressed by
the participants are not necessarily those of
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Her father
died before she left of natural causes, but her mother, brother, and sisters
perished somewhere in a concentration camp. All of her aunts, uncles, cousins,
and other family members were murdered. In her last year in Germany, 1939, she
noticed big changes in the way Jews were being treated. "The Germans would
go up and down the streets singing. They'd sing horrible songs that translated
to 'kill them, kill them all.' It was terrible!" (Ruth Krumbein, personal
interview, 17 February 1997).