Child Survivors of the Holocaust: The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience

Child Survivors of the Holocaust

Child Survivors of the Holocaust

The Youngest Remnant and the American Experience

Beth B. Cohen

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cohen, Beth B., 1950– author.

Title: Child survivors of the Holocaust : the youngest remnant and the American experience / Beth B. Cohen.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey ; London : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017033849| ISBN 9780813584973 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813596525 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813584980 (epub) | ISBN 9780813584997 (Web pdf) | ISBN 9780813596532 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Jews—United States—History—20th century. | Jews—United States—History—21st century. | Holocaust survivors—United States—Attitudes. | Holocaust survivors—United States—Rehabilitation. | Jewish orphans—United States—Attitudes.

Classification: LCC E184.355 .C64 2018 | DDC 940.53/18092273—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033849

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Beth B. Cohen

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

To my parents and my parents-in-law, in loving memory:

Dian Berkofsky, zt˝l and Louis Berkofsky, zt˝l

Beverly B. Cohen, zt˝l and Leo A. Cohen, zt˝l

who taught me about parents and children in their own inimitable ways.

Contents

List of Acronyms

Prologue

Introduction

1 Liberation: Battles after the War

2 Our Greatest Treasures: America Responds

3 In America: War Orphans Find Home

4 No Happy Endings: Postwar Reconstituted Families

5 Growing Up in America: Lingering Memories and the US Context

6 Where Was God? Child Survivors and Jewish Identity

7 Finding a Voice for Our Silence: Claiming Identity as Child Survivors

Conclusion: The Road to Repair

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acronyms

ADL Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith

AJC American Jewish Congress

CLI Central Location Index, Inc.

CTI Central Tracing Index

DP(s) Displaced Persons

EJCA European-Jewish Children’s Aid

GJCA German-Jewish Children’s Aid

ITS International Tracing Service

JDC American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee or The Joint

JCCA Jewish Child Care Association

JFCS Jewish Family and Children’s Services

JLC Jewish Labor Committee

JTA Jewish Telegraphic Agency

NCJW National Council of Jewish Women

NYANA New York Association for New Americans

OSE Oeuvres de Secours aux Enfants

UJA United Jewish Appeal

UNRRA United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

USCOM United States Committee for the Care of European Children

USHMM United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

USNA United Service for New Americans

WFJCSHD World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Their Descendants

WJC World Jewish Congress

Prologue

In the summer of 2015 child survivors of the Holocaust gathered to celebrate their friend Natalie Gold’s seventy-fifth birthday. After the attendees toasted the honoree, the youngest among this tight-knit group of aging survivors, Natalie’s daughter invited those present to offer reminiscences. A woman stood up and expressed her birthday wishes, which included an anecdote about Natalie’s beloved father, Leon, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto who had recently passed away at the age of one hundred and one. Then the guest said something startling. Unlike so many of us, you had your father, she began. But for the rest of us, he became a father figure, too, and as we grew older and he aged, we were able to imagine our own fathers at different stages of life.¹ Around the room, heads nodded in agreement. It was a compelling moment that provided insight into the absences that define many child survivors’ lives. It also underscored the fact that even more than seven decades after the Holocaust, the event and its aftereffects persist, intrude, haunt.

It has been a long road for Natalie and other child survivors, who came to the United States and settled in cities and towns all over America. For many the aftermath of the war did not signal peace or tranquility but profound rupture, anguish. Liberation meant reunions with parents who were strangers—or a life with no parents at all. It included being used as pawns in inter-Jewish fights over the youngest survivors, or leaving beloved rescuers for unknown US relatives. It was the revelation, for some, that they were Jewish. For many it meant that everything, everyone, familiar and loved was gone. It marked a series of moves and adjustments to a new family and culture. Starting over was not a fresh beginning but a complicated, often bewildering piecing together of fragments. And the initial help promised to them by American Jewry was often inadequate. The postwar era ushered in a time when, many emphasize, they survived the Shoah only to find their real battles just beginning. Said one child survivor, "I lived Les Misérables after the war."²

Child survivors have lived the majority of their lives after the war. Even as children left the physical place of their trauma and moved away geographically and temporally, challenges pursued them. So did their childhood memories. They grew up in America, and have now grown old. At every turn of their lives, the reminders are there. At the same time they became part of US society, and their experiences blended with the larger American context. These combined factors shaped them.

Today child survivors are the last witnesses, the final link to a twentieth-century genocide that has continued to cast a pall over the twenty-first century. They are the voice of the Survivors and they will soon be gone. Yet, in the canon of Holocaust literature, the story of how wartime experiences informed and molded the children’s postwar experiences has been largely overlooked. This study addresses that omission by bringing their voices—front and center—to the post-Holocaust narrative.

Child Survivors of the Holocaust

Introduction

War Orphans Find Home: Children from France Arrive in Decatur, announced the Decatur Review. Above the headline, a photograph captioned Dreams Come True depicts two smiling and scrubbed youngsters, newly attired in their American clothes. The article declares that the fondest dreams of a million European war orphans are today coming true for Mary and Alfred Frydman.¹ This moment in Mary and Alfred’s life captures just one of the early encounters between child survivors and the United States that symbolized the youngsters’ fresh start. US newspapers in every corner of the country featured many of these initial arrivals in ebullient terms: the youngest survivors of Hitler’s tyranny finding a new home on American soil. Could any resolution to the horrors of World War II be more comforting?

Such photographs of war orphans embraced by American families abounded and provided heart-warming imagery to a public eager for happy endings to the war and encouraging beginnings for these innocent victims of genocide. It seemed the media did not miss any opportunity to tell the stories of these most sympathetic newcomers in an effort to evoke compassion from a reluctant American public. And while the coverage was largely optimistic, reporters did not omit mention of the youngsters’ traumatic past. In fact, journalists wrote graphically—and not always superficially—about their recent experiences. In one, seventeen-year-old Morritz Frischmann, survivor of three camps, described how fierce dogs had torn his fellow inmates to pieces.² These details were, by and large, the backdrop for the stories’ redemptive message: the children had known brutality and hatred but with the proper care, they would be restored. Noted an United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) welfare officer, They react to that highest type of doctor—human kindness.³ This simple prescription, however, would prove difficult to follow once the eager anticipation of first American encounters faded.

Images of children in the postwar media pushed me to learn more about children like Mary and Alfred. In this work, I scrutinize those like the Frydmann siblings who came to the United States. What brought them from Europe to America rather than Israel, the destination of the majority? How did the unique political and social context of mid-twentieth-century America affect them? And how did the children’s wartime years affect their adjustment? How did they come to claim a unique identity as child survivors? These questions propelled my work. I soon learned that child survivors’ experiences and perceptions both during and after the war were vastly different from those of adults and worthy of a closer and more nuanced look.

Definitions and Demographics

First of all, how do I define a child survivor? Recognizing that this designation was largely determined by age, I turned to the collective for confirmation. Child survivor organizations put the age limit at those who were seventeen years old in 1945, and it is generally the standard used in this work. Nevertheless, this delineation demands some qualitative fluidity. For example, one who was eighteen years old in 1945 but twelve years old when the war started is considered a child survivor in this study. And the individuals who fall into this group generally identify as such, too.⁴

Just as the definition of survivor has expanded beyond concentration camp inmates to include a range of wartime experiences, so has the meaning of child survivor, to include, for example, those who went to Great Britain on Kindertransporten. However, in this study I draw on the experiences of those who lived the war years in Nazi-occupied Europe through 1945 and after, until they left for the United States. In addition, although the term child survivor originated in the 1980s and is not contemporary to the period after World War II, I use it in analyzing the postwar experiences of children.⁵

Also important is the fact that child survivors, despite their distinctive stories, identify themselves as a collective. They call each other family, siblings. Whether she was liberated in Bergen-Belsen or retrieved from a Belgian orphanage, whether he was an orphan, half-orphan, or had two surviving parents, the majority generally identifies as a child survivor and accepts others who identify as such. Because their perspective is central to this work, I use this framework for my analysis.⁶

How many Jewish children survived? Soon after World War II ended, the extent of the genocide became increasingly clear to the larger world, with the accompanying realization that child mortality was especially high and few children were still alive. Along with the uncertainty in 1945 of Jewish statehood, a bleak future for European Jewry seemed inevitable. One observer in Europe called the implications for the Jewish people a disaster unparalleled in Jewish history.⁷

The early statistics on surviving children grimly reinforce this pronouncement. Close to 1.5 million European Jewish children had been murdered. A mere 150,000 had survived the Judeocide, a tiny shred of the Shoah’s surviving remnant.⁸ Before the war, Jewish children fifteen years old or younger comprised 25 percent of the overall Jewish population in Europe. After the war, the surviving children represented a tiny, precious fraction—less than 10 percent—of the small survivor community.⁹ The murder of approximately 90 percent of the prewar population of European Jewish children also highlights the devastation of prewar Jewish families—an intact family was a rare treasure. Surviving children deservedly took on symbolic proportions, which had a significant impact on their lives.

In 1946, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) issued a report that described the demographics of surviving Jewish children. The JDC study analyzes the population of approximately 130,000, almost 90 percent of the estimated surviving children. Thus, while the study is not complete it is, nevertheless, a substantial effort.¹⁰

Although exact figures are elusive, the analysis of number, location, age, and gender of child survivors from 1945 is vividly and tragically revealing, even if approximate. The evidence based on both prewar census figures and postwar figures from the JDC’s European representatives combined with testimony from Jewish community members in each country starkly highlights the devastating effects of the Third Reich on its most vulnerable victims—Jewish children.

These statistics are helpful in understanding where children were living soon after the war ended, thereby providing the general context and starting points for child survivors’ postwar journeys. They also are reflective of the overall genocide as influenced by space and time: all Jews in the Nazi web were slated for death but individuals’ paths varied depending on where they endured the war years. This was just as true for children as it was for adults.

The report draws on prewar census figures to put the postwar figures in context, starting with the larger Jewish communities in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Altogether this was a prewar total of about 1,000,000 children (nearly two-thirds of European Jewish children) out of a combined overall Jewish population in these countries of nearly 3,900,000.¹¹ Although Romania was not among the countries with the largest prewar populations of Jewish children, the report shows that it had the greatest number of Jewish children alive in 1945. This figure of 60,000 (out of an overall prewar Jewish population of 756,000)¹² represents approximately 40 percent of the total population of child survivors in Europe. Again, the author of the report warns that exact numbers are unavailable and the Romanian example is a projection based on prewar proportions of children to total population.

The numbers of child survivors by nation drop dramatically after Romania. There were 15,000 children alive in France (out of a total prewar population of 235,000).¹³ The prewar Hungarian Jewish population was 445,000 contrasted with 50,000 in Bulgaria. Despite the great difference between the size of the prewar communities in Hungary and Bulgaria, the surviving number of 12,000 children was the same for both locations. This reflects the varying impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish population in two different countries and confirms the low murder rate in Bulgaria, excluding Thrace and Macedonia.

Revealingly, even given the disparity in prewar Jewish populations, Poland (3,000,000) and Italy (48,000) both reportedly had 7,000 child survivors. Belgium and the Netherlands have similar figures of approximately 4,000 child survivors out of total prewar Jewish populations of 60,000 and 170,000 respectively.¹⁴ Again, these numbers remind us of the difference in murder rates, geographically, and raise questions about rescue and location. The child survival figures for Czechoslovakia are a broad range, from 2,500 to 4,500. The lowest number of surviving children according to the JDC figures is 2,400 (out of approximately 12,000 total survivors) in Greece out of a prewar population of 72,000 Jews.

The report also indicates that data from Germany, Austria, and Luxembourg is unavailable but indicates, based on observers in the Yiddish and English press, that there were some Jewish children alive in German camps. Not surprisingly, the number of children who survived concentration camp imprisonment was tiny—but not zero. Martin Gilbert analyzed the experiences of 732 young concentration camp survivors from various labor, concentration, and death camps in his work The Boys: The Story of 732 Young Concentration Camp Survivors.¹⁵ According to one observer, there was a group of about twenty children who were subjected to medical experimentation and survived in the Sachenhausen Camp, in Germany.¹⁶ Kenneth Waltzer has studied a group of 900 boys in Buchenwald who survived due to the efforts of a Czech non-Jewish political prisoner.¹⁷ Hagit Lavsky writes about 500 children who were found alive in Bergen-Belsen upon liberation, due to the vigilance of female prisoners and male inmates who smuggled supplies to them.¹⁸ A very few twins survived medical experiments in Auschwitz. These camp survivors underscore the fact that location of liberation does not accurately reflect the child’s country of origin and do not mirror the complexity of the child’s journeys. Irene Gutman Hizme’s travails exemplify this. As an eight-year-old twin, the Czech-born girl survived Auschwitz and, after a year with a Polish woman, then several Polish children’s homes, she ended up in a French orphanage before she was sent to America.¹⁹

A notable feature of the JDC study is that it goes beyond a country-by-country breakdown. To a degree it teases out age and gender, as well. Thus, it points out that although the number of male and female child survivors in the Netherlands and Greece were similar, significantly more girls than boys survived in Poland (4,000 and 3,000, respectively). This was probably due to the fact that it was easier to find hiding places for girls. To emphasize, these figures are an estimate.

The JDC study illustrates with statistics, as was its goal. It does not offer explanations for the varying murder rates of children across Europe. Nor does it personalize the horrific numbers. It glaringly depicts the loss that struck European Jewry and the world with the near complete killing of a generation. Even with approximations, it shows where and how many or rather how few Jewish children were still alive after the Holocaust.

How many of these surviving children immigrated to the United States? Just as there are no exact figures for surviving children, there are also none for those who came to America. There is no US census of victims of the Nazis or database of survivors to definitively answer that question. Yet, there are a few sources that have been helpful, even if not perfect, as they raise questions and offer approximations.

In arriving at an estimated but reliable figure of child survivors who came to the United States, I have worked backward. There are only early figures for orphans (1,000 under the Truman Directive and 3,000 under the DP Act of 1948) and total number of survivors, which is estimated at 140,000.²⁰ According to one relatively recent demographic study conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany (Claims Conference) in 2003, there were 170,000 Holocaust survivors residing in America at that time.²¹ Not only does this number seem inflated factoring in for mortality rates, it has not been analyzed by age.²² Another reliable but incomplete source, the Survivor’s Registry at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, indicates that there are 23,764 registered individuals who were born after 1928 and settled in the United States. However, not every survivor registered and of those who did register, 43,504 did not include birthdates. Still another incomplete source is the number of US survivors who have applied to the Claim Conference’s child survivors’ fund (which defines a child survivor as I do—one born in 1928 or after). That number is roughly 5,000—considerably lower than in the Survivor Registry—but this may be due to the fact that not every child survivor has applied for those funds.

Another more recent study, underwritten by the Claims Conference, projects numbers in order to assess the needs of an aging US survivor population, and it does factor in age and year.²³ This survey emphasizes that it is an estimate based on Jewish population surveys and statistical analysis. It arrived at the figure of 62,200 Holocaust survivors under the age of eighty-five (meaning born after 1930) for the year 2015. It indicates that there were 36,300 over this age in 2015, so presumably some of them were born in or after 1928. Thus, although I emphasize that this is an estimate, it is possible that there were about 60,000 child survivors in the United States in 2015. What this does not reveal is when the survivors immigrated to the United States. Were they orphans who arrived in 1946? Did they come with parents in 1949? After the Hungarian revolution in 1956? From Israel in the 1950s and 1960s? Or much later, in the 1980s, from the Soviet Union? Still, by 2015, they were residents of the United States.

Oral Histories and Archival Records

Having a good idea of how many child survivors came to the United States is important. This work, however, looks behind these figures. At every turn, I draw on child survivors’ experiences to add voice, texture, humanity to these statistics and to bring their accounts to the fore. It is important to give statistics a human face, and particularly vital in this case. Children are often left out of both historical sources and analyses, and the postwar Holocaust experience is no exception. Thus, oral histories and testimonies are fundamental to this work and to asserting personal experiences in the study of postwar lives. Thus, I have used a number of oral history archives: the USC/Shoah Visual History Foundation, Los Angeles; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Collection; the Kestenberg Archive of Testimonies of Child Holocaust Survivors, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and the Holocaust Oral History Collection at California State University Northridge (part of the Fortunoff Collection). I have also conducted my own interviews.

Whenever possible I draw on more than one source for the same individual. For example, a number of interviewees gave testimony to the USC/Shoah Visual History Foundation as well as to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and thus I was able to use both. At times I was able to interview people in person and also use their testimonies from archives. To the interviews, I add archival documents that anchor the testimony in the larger historical account. When I have drawn from archival sources such as case files, it is usually impossible to know the complete picture of what happened to the child later on in her life, and frequently leaves long-term questions unanswered. Nevertheless, these sources give a contemporary and generally detailed—and critical—look at how Jewish agencies and families interacted with child survivors. In the examples where I draw from case files, due to confidentiality issues, I do not use the individuals’ last names. The Kestenberg Archives uses initials to maintain the survivor’s anonymity. In order to personalize an individual’s oral history from the latter collection, I use a pseudonym that begins with the same letter as that of the interviewee’s first name.

Survivor testimonies illustrate that there is no one monolithic or typical postwar experience. Just as age, gender, geography, resources, timing, and luck figured into a child’s wartime path, these factors, by extension, influenced where a child was at the conclusion of the war. This, in turn, had an impact on his future direction.

Even as individuals’ histories are unique, at the same time, hundreds of child survivors’ accounts suggest patterns that ripple through testimonies and archival documents. Certain themes repeat across hundreds of survivor interviews that transcend disparate, individual narratives. What becomes clear is that children’s worlds changed radically when the war ended and not always, from their perspective, for the better. The intermediate period between liberation and immigration to the United States was generally chaotic and confusing; that temporal gap had repercussions. And once in America, children’s experiences were again complicated, compounded by new family situations and adjustments as immigrants. Trauma specific to the Holocaust reverberated across child survivors’ family groups both for those who were orphans and those in families composed of two generations of survivors. Wartime memories initially dismissed and later validated are also central themes in their postwar lives. In this work, I study some, but by no means all, key aspects of child survivors’ postwar lives. There is still much room for future research.

Overview

This is a thematic work. At the same time it follows a loose chronological though not necessarily linear structure beginning in 1945 and continuing to the current day. For example, chapters 1 and 2 overlap temporally but each focuses mainly on events in different places; that is, Europe and the United States, respectively.

Although Child Survivors of the Holocaust analyzes the American experience of child Holocaust survivors, chapter 1 begins in Europe as World War II ends. It highlights the fact that many steps preceded children’s arrivals in the United States. Firstly, all over Europe, children had to be found and reclaimed. This proved to be an enormous—and at times contentious—task. Once located, many went into homes or orphanages either because they were orphans, or their parents were ill or yet to be found. But from there the story grows murkier. Although survivors often comment, I went to my relatives in New York or I was sent to a family in Chicago, these trips were rarely direct. In fact, liberation marked an intermediate period of many months, even years before a youngster landed in her final residence. This gap, beginning with crossing the threshold from wartime to postwar and concluding with ultimate relocation and beyond, had significant consequences for the child. This prompted many to emphatically state that their war started at the conclusion of World War II.²⁴ It is shattering to confront the notion that the most vulnerable victims of the Holocaust survived only to struggle after the war, yet this idea, at the heart of this book, must be addressed in order to be true to child survivors’ accounts of the Holocaust.

Chapter 2 shifts largely to the United States and shows that Americans Jews immediately took a dynamic interest in the surviving children’s welfare. At the same time that child survivors confronted the end of the war and its impact, the American Jewish community was doing the same. Knowledge that a small fraction of Jewish children had survived the war moved numerous American organizations and many individuals to action. Here, too, varying organizational responses reflected divergent philosophies, which ultimately would have a profound effect on children’s lives. For example, Jewish agencies had fundraising campaigns around America that financed children’s homes in France, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands, and Sweden, often competing for funds from the American public. Not only did organizations raise money, but also they often directly decided with whom and where youngsters would be placed both in Europe and later in the United States.

Fundraising took a variety of creative avenues. A popular formula was the Adopt-A-Child model where potential donors were entreated to pay one dollar per day to support a needy child. But these organizations asked for more than money. To encourage an emotional and ongoing connection (and financial support), donors were allowed to choose a child from a collection of photographs and correspond with him or her. Gender also played a role in these campaigns. Jewish leaders specifically called on their women’s auxiliaries to help European Jewish children. Records show that all over the United States, Jewish women volunteered, soon taking the lead. Not only did they raise money, women also brought early awareness of the Holocaust and child survivors into their communities’ consciousness.

Americans expressed keen interest in adopting Jewish war orphans. At first immigration restrictions made this impossible. This changed after the Truman Directive of 1945, which allowed over 1,000 orphans into the United States beginning in 1946. The United States Committee for the Care of European Children worked with the European Jewish Children’s Aid (EJCA) to coordinate and follow the settlement of the orphans around the country, working with local Jewish communal agencies.

As the directive intended, most of the orphans who immigrated in 1946 did so through the sponsorship of US relatives. Although family, most were total strangers to the children. Chapter 3 shows that these encounters engendered tremendous challenges. Case files from Jewish agencies and academic studies of the late 1940s and early 1950s provide a window into early perceptions by and of the children. These sources show an unvarnished picture that reveals Americans’ perceptions of orphans and the latter’s earliest interactions with the US Jewish community, both on the personal and communal level. Child survivors’ later observations in testimonies expand earlier impressions and emphasize the gap between the documented welcome and the often bleak reality for the children. Studying this early phase of child survivors’ experiences offers a penetrating and often grim look at the ongoing complexity of their lives once they reached the United States. And it reinforces the notion that children’s postwar battles did not end once they arrived in America.

Though the US Jewish community responded with zeal to the plight of the vulnerable victims of Hitlerism from a distance, the reality of their reception once on American soil was mixed. Sometimes their relatives, foster parents, and communities welcomed them but, at other times, they did not. A contemporary article in a social work journal shows that foster care placements were problematic and had less than a 50 percent success rate.²⁵ Testimony from child survivors in Boston, Cleveland, Los Angeles, and other communities around the country confirm this dismal statistic.

In 1948, the DP Act allowed 200,000 refugees to enter the United States, which included another 3,000 orphans in addition to those children who came with family groups (some of these were orphans, as well).²⁶ Statistics show that, contrary to the prevalence in the media of war orphans, most child survivors had one parent; a rare few had two. These families, however, were reconstructed from fragments. As chapter 4 confirms, their prewar family life had, in one way or another, changed irrevocably—often irreparably. Coming to America was a beginning for all family members, but for the child it signaled the challenging start of life in an alien country with a new family often composed of their single widowed parents or stepparents and half siblings. Parents who were damaged physically and emotionally by the war further complicated this picture.

In instances where one or both parents had survived, children now were part of families composed of two generations of survivors under one roof.