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On 20 June 1942, the SS guard stationed at the exit to Auschwitz was frightened. In front of him was the car of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of the infamous concentration camp. Inside were four armed SS men, one of whom - an Untersturmführer, or second lieutenant, was shouting and swearing at him.

"Wake up, you buggers!" the officer screamed in German. "Open up or I'll open you up!" Terrified, the guard scrambled to raise the barrier, allowing the powerful motor to pass through and drive away.

Yet had he looked closer, the guard would have noticed something strange: the men were sweating and ashen-faced with fear. For far from being Nazis, the men were Polish prisoners in stolen uniforms and a misappropriated car, who had just made one of the most audacious escapes in the history of Auschwitz. And the architect of the plot, the second lieutenant, was a boy scout, to whom the association's motto "Be prepared" had become a lifeline.

Almost 70 years later, prisoner 918 is holding forth in the home of the scouting association, Baden Powell House in London. At 91, he is impeccably dressed, with a face as wrinkle-free as his well-ironed shirt. As he accepts the ceremonial neckerchief from a shy girl scout from Lancashire, he is as straight-backed as any of the teenagers on parade. In the UK as the guest of a British singer, Katy Carr, who has written a song about his experiences, he is thrilled when the scouts and guides join her to sing for him. Yet in between the traditional trappings of a jamboree, Kazimierz Piechowski, or Kazik as he likes to be called, will tell them a story few in the UK have heard - how, during Nazi occupation, scouts their age were murdered in the streets, while others like him were sent to concentration camps to witness the horror of Hitler's Final Solution.

Piechowski had a happy childhood in the town of Tczew, swimming with friends in the nearby river Vistula or playing with bows and arrows in the park with his two brothers. His family were middle class and his father worked on the railways. When he was 10, Piechowski decided to join the scouts - an act that would alter his life for ever. The youth association was flourishing in Poland, a newly independent state set up after the first world war, with a strong focus on patriotism, "toughness" and brotherhood. "I joined because I was patriotic," he remembers. "And when I arrived home, my mother was crying a little bit and said to me: 'I am so happy you are on the right way.'"

When the Nazis invaded the country nine years later, in 1939, the scouting movement was seen by the invaders as a symbol of nationalism - and a potential source of resistance. "I was 19 when the war broke out," Piechowski says. "Four days after Germany declared war, they arrived in Tczew. They started shooting the scouts." Among those rounded up and killed were Piechowski's childhood friends, and the teenager was terrified. "I knew that, sooner or later, I would also be killed," he says, "so I decided to run away."

He tried to flee across the Hungarian border, a route used by other scouts making their way to France to fight in the Free Polish forces there, only to be caught at the crossing. After eight months in various prisons he was sent to Auschwitz.

"We were only the second transportation to the camp," Piechowski says, "and we had to help build it." The old collection of buildings that made up the original concentration camp was not big enough to house all those caught in mass arrests, so inmates were forced to work 12- to 15-hour days to construct a new camp next door that would become notorious as the Nazis' biggest death camp.

"For the first three months, we were all in complete shock," says Piechowski. And it just got worse. From June 1940 and all through the first six months of 1941, the SS were keen to kill inmates - beating them to death with batons - as the simplest way to cope with the camp's overcrowding. Today, the starvation, unimaginable brutality and physical labour that made the concentration camp a living hell are well documented. But the details of Piechowski's memories still have the power to shock. Inmates were each given a spoon and a tin bowl - not just to eat and drink from, but also to urinate in at night. "If you lost your spoon, you ate from the bowl like a dog," he says quietly. "If you lost your bowl, that was it; you did not get any soup."

Sometimes the guards would murder just to get a holiday, he says. "When an SS man was bored, they would take off a prisoner's cap and throw it away. They would then order the prisoner to fetch it. As the prisoner was running, the officer would shoot them. Then they would claim the prisoner was trying to escape and get three days off for foiling it."

How did people cope? "Some prayed, but some who had prayed before they arrived would say: 'There cannot be a God if Auschwitz exists.'"

For six weeks, Piechowski was set to work carrying corpses after executions. "The death wall was between blocks 10 and 11. They would line prisoners up and shoot them in the back of the head." At the end there would be a pile of naked corpses and Piechowski would take the ankles, while another man held the arms, and throw them on to carts, to transport them to the crematorium. "Sometimes it was 20 a day, sometimes it was a hundred, sometimes it was more. Men, women and children." He looks at me fiercely. "And children," he repeats.

Yet he did not think of trying to escape until a friend's name appeared on a death list. Like many of the boy scouts in Auschwitz, Piechowski joined the resistance movement in the camp. As many of the scouts spoke German, they found useful positions - some were even among the prison police and were able to access the prisoners' files. One day, a Ukrainian friend, Eugeniusz Bendera, a gifted mechanic who worked in the camp's garage, came to him. "He had been told by those who had access to his documents that he was going to be murdered. I was devastated," Piechowski says. The germ of an escape plan formed.

"He said he could organise a car, but that was not enough." The men were being held in the main camp, Auschwitz I, where the fences were covered in electrified barbed wire and there were guards every few metres. The escapees would have to make it through the infamous Arbeit macht frei gate (the legend meant "Work sets you free"), and also break out of the outer perimeter of the complex.

Yet Piechowski could not dismiss his friend's plea. "When I thought that they would put Gienek [Bendera] against the wall of death and shoot him, I had to start thinking." It helped that Piechowski was now working in the store block, where the guards' uniforms and ammunition were kept. Slowly an idea took shape. But holding him back were the consequences for other prisoners. "In the speech the deputy commandant gave when a new transport came in, he would say: 'If anyone thinks of doing something stupid like escaping, let them know this: we will kill 10 people for each person who escapes from a work group or [housing] block.' It was like a cup of cold water hurled over my head."

So that the Nazis would not hold their real working group responsible, Piechowski and Bendera formed a fake group of four, recruiting another boy scout, Stanislaw Gustaw Jaster, and priest Józef Lempart for their "spectacular escape".

On 20 June 1942 - two years to the day after Bendera entered Auschwitz - the conspirators met in the attic of a half-built block to run through the escape plan for the last time. It was a Saturday, when work stopped at midday and the store rooms and motor pool would be unmanned. Before they left they said a prayer for their families, and agreed that if the attempt failed they would shoot themselves. "What was really encouraging us and pushing us on was that if we did not do this Gienek would be killed. "Until the last moment we weren't sure. But we said: 'We have to do this, we have to believe.'"

Picking up a rubbish cart containing kitchen waste, the four started walking towards the Arbeit macht frei gate. Here Piechowski told the guard he was part of a squad taking the rubbish away, praying the guard would not check to see if they were registered. Their luck held and they were able to walk freely out of the main camp and towards the store block. How did it feel? "I did not think about anything," Piechowski says. "I was just trying to pass this final examination. From that moment we did not only need courage, but intelligence."

At the stores, three of them made their way to trap doors covering chutes to the coal cellars. That morning while at work, Piechowski had unscrewed a bolt keeping the doors locked so they could climb in. They made their way to the second-floor store room, broke down the door and dressed themselves in officers' uniforms. Meanwhile, Bendera got into the garage with a copied key and brought round the car.

The mechanic had picked the Steyr 220 - the fastest car in Auschwitz, there for the sole use of the commandant. "It had to be fast, because he had to be able to get to Berlin in a few hours. We took it because if we were chased we had to be able to get away."

They drove to the main gate - passing SS men who saluted them and shouted Heil Hitler. But for Piechowski, the biggest test was still to come. "There was still one problem: we did not know whether, when we came to the final barrier, we would need a pass. We just planned that I would play the role of an SS officer so well that the guards would believe me."

Yet as they approached the barrier, the guard did not move. As he describes what happens next, Piechowski looks away as though he can see the last obstacle before him. "We are driving towards the final barrier, but it is closed . . . We have 80m to go, it is still closed . . . We have 60m to go and it is still closed. I look at my friend Gienek - he has sweat on his brow and his face is white and nervous. We have 20m to go and it is still closed . . ." Bendera stopped the car and as Piechowski stared blankly ahead, not knowing what to do, he felt a blow on his shoulder. It was Lempart. "He whispered: 'Kazik, do something.'

"This was the most dramatic moment. I started shouting." The SS guards obeyed and the car drove to freedom - allowing the men to become four of only 144 prisoners to successfully escape Auschwitz.

The Nazis were incensed, says Piechowski. "When the commandant heard in Berlin that four prisoners had escaped he asked: 'How the bloody hell could they escape in my own car, in our own uniforms, and with our ammunition?' They could not believe that people they did not think had any intelligence took them [for a ride]."

Keeping away from the main roads to evade capture, they drove on forest roads for two hours, heading for the town of Wadowice. There they abandoned the Steyr and continued on foot, sleeping in the forest and taking turns to keep watch. Lempart became ill and was left with a parish priest, while Jaster returned to Warsaw. Piechowski and Bendera spent time in Ukraine before Piechowski returned to Poland, joining the partisan Polish Home Army and spending the rest of the war fighting the Nazis.

In revenge, Jaster's parents were arrested and died in Auschwitz, and there were serious consequences for the remaining prisoners. "A month after we escaped, an order went out that every person must be tattooed [with their prison number]. The Nazis knew that an escapee's hair would grow back, and that the partisans would make new documents for them. But when people saw the number, they would know that they were from Auschwitz. No other camp used numbering - it was our escape that led to it."

Although they were never recaptured, Piechowski relived his time in the camp in flashbacks and nightmares. And his problems were not over. When Poland became a communist state in 1947, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for joining the Home Army, serving seven. "When I finally came out of prison I was 33 years old. I thought, 'They have taken away my whole youth - all my young years.'"

Later, he became an engineer and when the communist regime fell in 1989, he took to travelling the world with his wife, Iga. He has written two books about his experiences, and tries to ensure no one will forget what happened in Auschwitz. Does he mind reliving his terrifying past? "I am a scout so I have to do my duty - and be cheerful and merry. And I will be a scout to the end of my life," he says simply.
Additional reporting Christina Zaba For details of Katy Carr's 'Escapologist Tour', which will include screenings of the short documentary Kazik and the Kommander's Car, visit katycarr.com Topics

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On 20 June 1942, the SS guard stationed at the exit to Auschwitz was frightened. In front of him was the car of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of the infamous concentration camp. Inside were four armed SS men, one of whom - an Untersturmführer, or second lieutenant, was shouting and swearing at him.

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My first lesson in faith and loyalty came when I was almost three years old. Clearly I was too young to comprehend the full significance of what was happening, but having lived through it, and having heard the stories repeated, it was ingrained in my psyche.

Saved by an Angel

I was born in April 1937 in Antwerp, Belgium. Most of my family lived there, and we were all involved in the diamond and jewelry business.

Hitler, the megalomaniac, was steadily gaining power in Germany,They were out-manned, out-gunned, and out-tanked starting in 1933-1934. In his quest for European, perhaps even world, domination, he brought the full force of his ever-growing military conquests against the nations of Europe.

We Belgians thought that our country and the Netherlands, both being neutral, would be exempt from the onslaught of the Nazis. But of course, that was not to be. During the first few months of 1940, the Belgian army, with the help of the British, put up a furious fight to save Belgium from the Nazis. But they were out-manned, out-gunned and out-tanked. The British finally pulled out, and to save Belgium from total destruction, King Leopold surrendered to the Germans on May 28, 1940.

A strategic port city, Antwerp was one of the first cities to be taken by the Germans. On the Friday night before the invasion of Antwerp (it was more of a German victory march), a car and driver came to our house to rescue us-my parents, grandparents, my brother Joseph and me. The driver was supposed to take us out of immediate harms' way into France. But, amid the chaos, my grandmother boldly stated, "We're not going."

There was a moment of silence, and then, "What do you mean, we're not going? The Germans are coming on Sunday, and who knows what will happen?!"

My righteous grandmother replied, " M'tur nisht fuhren oif Shabbos . One doesn't travel on Shabbat."

"Yes, we all know," everyone pleaded, "but we don't know if we will even survive. What we do know is what's happening in Poland and Germany. This is a matter of life and death!"

But one didn't argue with my grandmother. So right or wrong, in this terrifying moment, we turned away what was possibly our only salvation, and resigned ourselves to praying and hoping for the best.

For the next 24 hours we tried to remain calm. We went to synagogue, prayed, hugged each other and discussed the precarious future in whispered tones with our family and friends. We knew that whatever happened, even if we could make it out somehow, we would have to leave behind our belongings, businesses, property and all sorts of valuables.

To our great astonishment and disbelief, the same driver returned after Shabbat. We didn't know who he was; he never told us who sent him. Was he an angel sent by G‑d to to save us? Did my grandmother earn G‑d's protection because of her unflinching resolve? Was it her faith and loyalty?

Also, I'm convinced that G‑d looked down upon me and told His angel, "We must save that child, because his bride will be born a year from now, and I don't want to disappoint her."

(Fast forward 22 years and 3 months ... on Saturday night of the Labor Day weekend, I stepped into my friend's car and saw his date, Ahuva [it was a double date]. We locked eyes and souls, and I met my bride whom G‑d had promised to me many years ago.)

The driver brought us across the border to France, to a small town called "La Panne," dropped us off at the train station, and we never saw him again. We are forever grateful, and thank G‑d every day for sending one of His angels to my family.

Stuck in France

We began planning our escape to England. As it was almost impossible to get transportation, my father bought a pushcart for his very sick father, and we walked for hours until we reached Dunkirk. There, the nuns of a convent gave us shelter.

The next morning, we were astonished to see a devastated town. We realized we had slept through a huge bombardment. The fatigue from the previous day's journey, and the convent's thick walls, had given us the respite we so badly needed. Staying in the convent had saved our lives. Our angel was still with us. But the nuns were told the Germans were coming to search the area, and they could not provide for our safety any longer, so we had to leave Dunkirk.

With some friends and family we found in Dunkirk, we hired a fishing boat with our collective, quickly-disappearing funds. However, while we were on the English Channel, German planes strafed us with bombs and bullets. The captain had no choice but to sail back to port. Sadly, my grandfather Jacob of blessed memory, was too weak to take this punishment and didn't make it.

The German propaganda machine issued proclamations saying that everyone should go back home (there were hundreds of thousands of refugees on the roads). "Everything will be like it was before, no one should worry, no one will be hurt."

The Germans, of course, wanted the roads open so that their army could advance without interference. As my father's mother had a son in the Belgian army, she decided to go back to Antwerp, in the hope that he would come home. (Uncle Emil did come home, and lived with his wife and three daughters until his untimely death from cancer. Grandma Reizel also survived the war, and came to New York for my bar mitzvah in 1950. Fearing the Korean War might develop into another world war, she stayed with us for the rest of her years.)

Meanwhile, back in France, we redoubled our efforts to leave theWe redoubled our efforts to leave the madness of Europe madness of Europe. Our immediate destination was Marseilles, then the largest French port city on the Riviera. We boarded a train traveling south. About an hour into the ride, a German plane roared overhead and began to strafe the train. The train stopped, and the conductor ordered everyone to get off and run. While most of the people were terrified, screaming or praying loudly, my brother and I were having a grand time, innocently unafraid, lying on the ground, giggling and following the bombs with our outstretched arms, as they whistled their way down.

There were some injuries, but only a little damage, and after a few minutes, the pilot either ran out of ammo or gas, or got bored and left the area. We all hustled back on the train, and the rest of the trip to Marseilles was uneventful. Was the same angel protecting us from the Luftwaffe, or was this a different angel?

As you can imagine, six Jews arriving at Marseilles with nothing but a small suitcase and some money tucked away was a daunting experience. Luckily, my mother spoke French, which somewhat eased the constant confrontations with the haughty French bureaucrats. We first contacted the local synagogue, where assistance was gladly given.

We all settled into a small apartment, and made inquiries about the next boat to the U.S. At that time, there were a few countries accepting refugees from Europe (this too was to change in the following years): Cuba, Venezuela, China, Japan, Canada and America. Some of our family members chose Cuba (but that's another story). My mother's three brothers were clever enough to foresee the future, and had made their way to New York in 1939. Clearly, they would vouch for us, which would ensure our entry to the U.S.

My parents had already decided that America was to be our only destination, and waiting for news of a boat with passage for our family was excruciating.

Arrested!

Meanwhile, the French were becoming more aggressive in their eagerness to please the inevitable invaders from Germany. They began a "stop and search" routine to ferret out the Jews, which resulted in the capture of my father.

We were stopped by the French police, and my father was taken into custody, stripped of his Belgian passport and put in jail.

By some extraordinary planning, my parents had worked out a scenario that if either one was detained, the other would wait for contact at a specific café, between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day. My mom and my grandma took turns vigilantly. They couldn't take the risk of Papa Chiel (Grandpa) being caught and thrown in jail as well.

How they survived the anguish and anxiety of not knowing what had become of my father is a testament to the human spirit.

One day, a few weeks on, a stranger approached my mom at the café, and asked her if her name was Guis? At once, my mother knew that this was a message from my father. "Yes," the stranger said, "he's fine. I'm on a weekend pass. The French police don't want to spend every day of the week in their jail, so they are giving some of us a pass, in order to allow just a skeleton crew to be on duty on the weekend. Of course, they hold our passports as collateral. Your husband asked me to find you and tell you that you don't have to wait here every day. The only way he'll ever get out is if they give him a weekend pass. So you need to be here only on Saturday and Sunday." And, abruptly, the man left.

Another angel?

And so the vigil continued-that awful state of mind of not knowing what the next minute would bring, the stress of trying to create a normal atmosphere for the children while in the midst of uncertainty, and yes, mental terror. Unless you walk a mile in those shoes, you cannot fathom the emotional drain. One day after another, one week after another.

And then, on a late Friday afternoon, when hope was becoming a thing of the past, Mom (who decided she would add Friday to her vigilance), looked up from her coffee cup, and there was my dad walking towards her. The reunion was exhilarating, the relief beyond description. They actually gave Dad a weekend pass, but with the warning that he must return Monday morning or he would forfeit his passport. Ha! Let's see, forfeit my passport or forfeit my life? Tough decision!

The waiting for a boat continued, the tension ever-mounting.

Dad had become a target for the Marseilles police, who were now activelyAfter an agonizing moment, the cop blinked a few times, and turned away searching for him. On one of the necessary bus trips back home from the docks, Dad noticed a man staring at him. Yes, it was the same cop who had taken him away many weeks ago.

It was approaching evening. Father held his breath. The policeman must have been on his way home. He looked straight at Dad, while Dad lowered his eyes to the floor. Then suddenly after an agonizing moment, the cop blinked a few times, and turned away.

Did he not recognize my dad? Did he not want to spend the next few hours with an arrest, going back to the jail, with all the paperwork involved? Did he just want to go home and spend a nice quiet evening? Or did our angel once again intervene on our behalf?

This episode brought home to my parents that it was no longer safe to wait in Marseilles. Drastic measures had to be taken. Some of the fleeing Jews were traveling to Portugal, for several reasons: To get as far away from Germany as possible, and because Portugal was neutral and not anti-Semitic. Additionally, word was that more boats were available out of Lisbon.

Flight to Lisbon

We heard of a guide, who for an exorbitant amount of money, would take you out of France, across the border to Spain, over and down the Pyrenees and into the nearest big city.

With no other option, we found and hired him, but he was only willing to take my older brother, Joseph, who could make the walk, and not me, who would have to be carried most of the way. So I stayed behind with my grandparents, who had somehow gotten documents that would allow them to travel to Lisbon, where we all planned to meet.

Did I have feelings of abandonment? Did I think I might never see my parents again? Or was I too young to comprehend what was happening? And imagine my mother having to leave one of her sons and her parents, not knowing if she would ever see us again.

My parents gathered whatever they could carry, with the understanding that my five-year-old brother might also have to be carried. The guide took most of what was left of our money (we were now almost penniless, and one adult didn't have papers), and they took off at dusk.

The "savior" drove them close to the border of Spain and stashed the car in the woods, and that's when the hiking began. To avoid the checkpoints on the border, they walked mainly in the woods. Not at all easy for my mother, who was for the most part a stay-at-home mother. My dad was a fervent Maccabi soccer player, so it was easier on him.

I'm not sure how many hours it took them to get to where they were going, but the guide said, "We're not stopping. Either we keep walking, or I leave you here." So on they trudged.

The later it got, the crankier my brother became. Then he started whining and crying. He was exhausted, and wanted only to lie down and sleep. Finally the guide told them that it was too risky for him to take them any farther. "If the child's cries were to be heard, we would all be thrown in a Spanish jail." He made an about-face (naturally keeping all the money), and left them in the middle of the night, atop the Pyrenees Mountains, with no food, little money and dwindling hope.

They rested for quite some time, and in the end, on their own, my parents chose the correct and safe path down the mountain into Spanish civilization. My parents and brother made their way to Madrid, only to find all the hotels and inns guarded by German police and soldiers. To get a room, you had to hand in your passport, which my father didn't have, or face arrest. Food and board became an interesting game.

Here's where the story becomes hazy. I don't remember if my brother and I were ever told how we all managed to get to Portugal intact, or perhaps it was too painful to store in my memory, having been separated from Mom and Dad. But, indeed, eventually we were all reunited in Lisbon, to my parents' great relief, and everlasting thanks to G‑d.

More Waiting for Passage

There was a community of Jewish refugees gathered in Lisbon, all helping each other with lodging, food, and most importantly, information. We needed to know when a boat was leaving, what its destination was, was there space available, and how to book passage with a minimum of funds. The Portuguese government was very sympathetic to the plight of Jewish refugees, so they helped in every way possible.

Unfortunately, my brother contracted scarlet fever during the wait for passage. Try as they may, my parents could not avoid the inevitable, and I caught it as well. Clearly, they could not risk the health of their children, or the safety of the other passengers on board. So Lisbon was to be our home for a further six weeks, until we were both disease free.

Dad somehow managed to acquire identity papers, and booked passage on the " Serpa Pinto," which was bound for Canada. The journey was not smooth sailing either. During oneThe journey was not smooth sailing particularly heavy storm, a chandelier crashed down, just missing my father. There were also U-boat scares and other weather-related perils.

Finally, in January 1941 we landed in the safe haven of North America. We made our way south through "Rouses Point" (on the Canadian/U.S. border) to New York, where my uncles were thrilled to see their parents, sister and brother-in-law, plus two thin but healthy nephews.

My father became established as a diamond sawyer and cleaver on 47th Street. Mom sent us to a school called "Children's Colony," which was geared toward easing us into learning English, as we spoke only French. So, teachers with heavy German accents taught us English with a touch of French and German

The eight-month ordeal had been difficult and terrifying, but with faith and loyalty on our side, and the indomitable spirit of loving parents and grandparents, we pulled through with flying colors.

We pay tribute to the many who suffered far greater and longer than we, and bless the memory of those who joined G‑d before their time.

I personally thank G‑d for 54 years of blissful marriage, and all the blessings and dividends that He has bestowed on us: good health, children and grandchildren. And I pray for us and all of Israel, that G‑d continues to look upon us all with favor, kindness, sweetness and peace. May He grant us the music of laughter, the ease of friendship, the warmth of love-with the knowledge that we will repay Him in kind.

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The later it got, the crankier my brother became. Then he started whining and crying. He was exhausted, and wanted only to lie down and sleep. Finally the guide told them that it was too risky for him to take them any farther.

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The working day began at 4:30 in the summer and 5:30 in the winter. The prisoners got up at the sound of a gong and carefully tidied their living quarters. Next, they attempted to wash and relieve themselves before drinking their "coffee" or "tea." At the sound of a second gong, they ran outside to the roll-call square, where they lined up in rows of ten by block. The prisoners were counted during roll call. If the numbers did not add up, roll call was prolonged. This could be especially tormenting for the prisoners, particularly in bad weather. Finally, the order came to form up by labor details. The prisoners walked out to working groups, with musical accompaniment in the form of marches played by the camp orchestra.

Prisoners laboring in places several kilometers distant did not participate in the roll call-they left for work earlier. Nor did the prisoners from such internal labor details as the hospital, kitchen, or orchestra attend roll call. Morning roll call was abolished in February 1944, in order to maximize the time spent laboring. From then on, the second gong was a signal to form up by labor details.

Prisoners performed various kinds of labor inside and outside the camp boundaries. From the end of March 1942, the minimum working day numbered 11 hours. This time was extended in the summer and shortened in the winter. The break for the noon meal lasted from 12 until 1 o'clock. Depending on the time of year, it might be extended to 2 hours or shortened to half an hour. In the early days, a roll call followed the noon meal, but this was abandoned over time.

Prisoners returned to the camp under SS escort before nightfall. They frequently carried the corpses of those who had died or been killed while laboring. The evening roll call began at 7 o'clock and, as in the morning, could be prolonged by discrepancies in the number of prisoners. After roll call, the prisoners received their evening bread with its accompaniment. They had free time after the evening meal. Until the first gong, the signal for everyone to return to their quarters, prisoners waited their turn for the washrooms and toilets. They could also receive mail (and, after 1942, parcels) or visit acquaintances in other blocks. The second gong, at 9 o'clock, announced the nighttime silence.

Prisoners did not have to labor at all on Sundays and holidays, which they spent tidying up their quarters, mending or washing their clothes, or shaving and having their hair cut. They could also attend concerts by the camp orchestra and, every other week, send official letters to their families.

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The working day began at 4:30 in the summer and 5:30 in the winter. The prisoners got up at the sound of a gong and carefully tidied their living quarters. Next, they attempted to wash and relieve themselves before drinking their "coffee" or "tea."

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Survival of Jews during the Holocaust: the importance of different types of social resources

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Survival of Jews during the Holocaust: the importance of different types of social resources

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Abstract

Background Of the Jewish inhabitants of Amsterdam 25.9% survived the Holocaust. However, different cultural and socio-economic groups within the Jewish community may have had different social resources and different chances of survival.

Method To determine social resources by studying a random sample of 7665 Jews living in Amsterdam on the eve of the destruction of Dutch Jewry. Binary logistic regression models are used to test several hypotheses and express odds ratios. As some types of social resources may be interrelated, multivariable analyses are used.

Results There were basically two ways of avoiding deportation to the death camps: going into hiding or acquiring protected status. The latter option was open chiefly to Jews having German nationality. In the analyses a higher survival rate correlates with holding German nationality, however is not significant when job status is included. Survival correlates strongly with having relations with non-Jews. The results were controlled for marital status, number of children, age below 15 years and gender. Standard errors and P-values were adjusted for family relationship by using robust standard error analyses.

Conclusion Survival correlates most strongly with having close social ties with non-Jews. Although Jews could sometimes acquire protected status, this was no more than temporary. In order to survive, Jews needed someone who was a non-Jew to hide them and provide support.

Several studies have demonstrated that Holocaust survivors show a higher incidence of psychological disorders. The question of why they survived, however, has received little attention, as the focus has been chiefly on differences in the death rates of Jews living in different countries. Differences have mainly been ascribed to cultural and demographic variation, the degree of anti-semitism and the type of Nazi occupation regime. As Nielsen et al. concluded, socio-economic indicators are rarely taken into account when studying complex emergency situations (CES). During a CES, the risk of death may not affect all cultural and socio-economic groups equally.

Although the Holocaust may be an incomparable tragedy on its own, Jews had to decide on their survival strategy to escape Nazi persecution. Jews in The Netherlands who faced Nazi persecution during 1940-45 themselves referred to what they called the essential 'Vitamin R', or having the right relationships. Varese and Yaish showed that Jews who asked for help directly had a better chance of receiving help. Moreover, they concluded that Jews were more likely to ask people whom they knew and trusted. Although their data are biased as they missed unsuccessful stories of rescue, their results do indicate the importance of specific types of social resources.

Social resources indicate that certain actors are connected to others in some way. Portes distinguished family support as well as extrafamilial support. These connections and social support constitute much of the actors' social capital. As Szreter and Woolcock incorporated different perspectives of social capital into a more comprehensive theory of bonding, bridging and linking, Putnam posited the tautological connection in the predicted statement of what explains and what is supposed to be explained. Moreover, Putnam argued that it is more important to investigate how different forms of social capital differ from one another in ways that are relevant to their consequences. 'Brittle' hypotheses, as Putnam called them, or falsifying hypotheses to use Popper's term, are needed in order to test which social capital is important. Not all actors have access to the same social ties and resources, and not all types of social resources provide the same kinds of support. In this study the importance of different types of social resources possessed by Jews will be tested in terms of the chance of survival of Jews living in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation.

Two ways of avoiding deportation to death camps

Historical descriptions suggest that in The Netherlands there were two main ways of avoiding deportation to concentration and death camps, when regular deportations started in July 1942: one way was to go into hiding and the other was to exploit the Nazi bureaucratic system by acquiring protected status. Jews had to rely above all on non-Jews to find refuge as well as food and falsified documents. Empirical evidence suggests that around one in five Jews in The Netherlands attempted to go into hiding, and that more than half of these survived. The majority, however, did not attempt to go into hiding. There were some important constraints that could have prevented Jews from going into hiding. First, some Jews failed to find anyone willing to take them in. Second, going into hiding could break up families, and the strength of family ties prevented some Jews, especially those with children, from doing so. Last but not least, money was often needed in order to acquire and retain a hiding place. Despite these constraints, however, 'going underground' offered an important opportunity to escape Nazi persecution.

The second possibility for avoiding deportation was to exploit the Nazi bureaucratic system by claiming or acquiring a status which provided protection in the short or long term. Before the Nazis occupied The Netherlands, many Jews having German nationality worked at the Dutch Committee for Jewish refugees in the 1930s. During the occupation, this Committee became part of the Jewish Council. This Council had the power, acting on behalf of the Nazi occupier, to exempt Jews temporally from deportation. Jews having German nationality and their relatives received more of these exemptions, possibly allowing them more time to find a place to hide.

In Westerbork-a transit camp which was the departure point for deportation trains leaving for the death and concentration camps-weekly deportation list were drawn up. Jews holding administrative positions in this camp had some influence over the names placed on these lists. They included a relatively high proportion of Jews having German nationality; so the relatives of these Jews were more likely to be (temporarily) exempted from deportation. Moreover, deportation at a later time increased the likelihood of being deported to more 'favourable' camps than Auschwitz or Sobibor, and therefore increased the chance of survival.

Hypotheses: types of social resources and survival of the Holocaust

Jews wishing to go into hiding generally needed the help of non-Jews. Jews who were married to gentiles naturally had non-Jewish relatives, who could provide the support needed to help Jewish family members. The first hypothesis is that Jews who had non-Jewish family members had a higher chance of survival. Secular Jews were probably less focused on the Jewish community and were more likely to have non-Jewish acquaintances than Jews who were members of the Portuguese and Dutch Israelite Congregation ('Israelites'). The second hypothesis is that secular Jews had a better chance of survival than Jews belonging to the Israelite Congregation. Converts from Judaism were especially well placed to meet non-Jews, if they visited religious services. A third hypothesis is that converts from Judaism had a higher chance of survival than Jews belonging to the Israelite Congregation. Jews who were in employment were more likely to meet non-Jews among colleagues or customers. The fourth hypothesis is that Jews who had a job had a higher chance of survival than jobless Jews. Children and the elderly did not have employment. However, the job held by the head of the family could be a form of social resource for them as well. The fifth hypothesis is that Jews living in a household where the head of the family had a job had a higher chance of survival. A relatively high proportion of Jews holding German nationality sat on the Jewish Council and held administrative positions at the Westerbork transit camp. They were accordingly in a position to acquire exemption themselves and to grant exemption to their relatives. The sixth hypothesis is that Jews having German nationality had special opportunities that protected them from deportation, and had a higher chance of survival than other Jews.

Data and method

The Nazi occupier published an administrative decree in January 1941 ordering Jews living in The Netherlands to register with the authorities. Supplementary legislation to the Nuremberg Laws defined Jews as persons having three or four Jewish grandparents, or persons having two Jewish grandparents who were themselves members of the Israelite Congregation or who were married to a Jew. Grandparents were Jewish if they belonged to the Israelite Congregation. The original register of Jewish residents of Amsterdam in 1941 has been recovered. More than half of all the Jews in The Netherlands lived in the capital. The Amsterdam list contains 77 252 Jews and provides information on first, family and maiden name, date and place of birth, marital status, address, number of Jewish family members (including children), religion, nationality and occupation. Including all the registered Jews, a random computer sample counted 7665 Jews. The characteristics of these Jews are given in Table 1.

To determine who fell victim to the Holocaust, these Jews were compared with Jews in In memoriam-Lezecher, which mentions all Jews who lived in The Netherlands and died in Nazi camps. Of the Jews living in Amsterdam, 25.9% survived the Holocaust. Jews who died during the Nazi occupation were coded as '0' and those who survived as '1'. A logistic regression model will be used to measure the strength of the effect of different types of social resources on the chance of survival, expressed in odds ratios (ORs) with a 95% confidence interval (95% CI). Standard errors and P-values were adjusted for family relationships by using robust standard errors, taking into account the covariance between family members. Robust standard error analyses were performed using Stata SE8 software.

As non-Jews were not mentioned on the register, Jews living at an address where there was just one Jewish married person listed are coded as having non-Jewish family. This information is used to test the first hypothesis. Religion tells us whether Jews were member of the Israelite Congregation, converted from Judaism, or did not belong to any religious congregation. This information is then used to test the second and third hypotheses. Occupation and nationality are used to test hypotheses four to six, respectively. The variables used to test hypotheses one to five are indicators for being related to non-Jews. The variable used to test hypothesis six is an indicator for acquiring protected status. All these variables are considered to be intermediaries, as is shown in Figure 1.

In the analysis of the strength of the effects of different types of social resources, an adjustment is made for characteristics which might influence the correlation between social resources and survival. Lack of money and the strength of family ties could prevent someone from 'going underground'. Being married and the number of children in the family are used as an indicator for the strength of family ties. Occupations are coded in accordance with the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO) scores and then classified into social classes, with the assumption that higher social classes have a higher income. As it was mainly men who had a job, and as during raids in Amsterdam in February and June 1941 several hundred Jewish men were caught and subsequently killed in a 'labour camp', gender could influence the results. A person's first or maiden name is used as an indication of their gender. Children younger than 15 did not require an identity card bearing a 'J' inscription after June 1941, and Jewish children younger than six did not have to wear a yellow star after May 1942. The absence of these 'Jewish marks' might have made it easier to go into hiding. Using date of birth information could indicate who was younger than 15 years.

Results

As some types of social resources may be interrelated, all the indicators were combined in a multiple logistic regression in order to investigate their joint effect. The first multivariable model in Table 2 shows that all the indicators for different types of social resources, except for having a job, increased the chances of survival.

In the second multivariable model, the job of the head of the family was categorized by social class. Heads of families who had no job are taken as a reference category. Jews who lived in a family whose head had a job in one of the five highest classes had a higher chance of survival; Jews living in a family where the family head had a job in the lowest class had a lower chance of survival.

As all variables are dichotomized into values of 0 and 1, the size of the OR in the last model indicates which type of social resource is most important. Having non-Jewish family members shows the highest OR for survival, at 4.26. Converts from Judaism also had close contacts with non-Jews; and this is reflected in an OR of 3.43 in favour of survival. Members of the Portuguese and Dutch Israelite Congregation were less closely connected to non-Jews than secular Jews. Secular Jews had an OR of 2.87.

Discussion and conclusion

Virtually no attention has been devoted to which Jews survived and how they managed to do so. Yet knowing who survived and how might be important in dealing with traumatic Holocaust experiences, following the reasoning of Davidson who hinted at the mitigating influence of social supportive bonds during times of severe stress. Cultural and socio-economic groups may not run the same risk of dying during a CES. Though the Holocaust may be an incomparable tragedy on its own, this study formulated testable predictions of the effect of different types of social resources on the survival of the Holocaust on the eve of the destruction of the Dutch Jewry.

Hilberg divided the process of the destruction of the Jews into several stages. The information presented related to the first phase, the registration of Jews, and the final phase, deportation and killing in concentration death camps. Between these events, Jews were economically stripped and socially isolated. Of the various routes to escaping persecution, the two main survival strategies were being given protection status and going into hiding.

Jews holding German nationality were in a position to obtain protected status. In the multiple regression analysis, Jews having German nationality have a survival OR of 1.30 (CI 1.07-1.58; P = 0.007). This OR reduces to 1.18 (CI 0.97-1.51; P = 0.096) when job status is included. The heads of Jewish families with German nationality had a different job status (Pearson Chi-square 222.904; DF = 9; P  = 0.000). A relatively higher proportion of heads of Jewish families having German nationality had a higher job status, whilst at the same time relatively more of this group had no job.

Comparing OR of different types of social resources, survival shows the strongest association with having close relationships with non-Jews. Family relationships, which are of course very intimate and confidential, were the most important. During the occupation the Nazis changed their policy with respect to intermarried Jews living in The Netherlands several times, thus giving these Jews more time to 'go underground'. Another group of Jews who were not the first to be deported were those who had converted from Judaism. They also had more time to find hiding places, and moreover they had close contacts with members of their congregation during religious meetings. Converts from Judaism were in fact a small group, however ( Table 1); and care is therefore needed when interpreting their high OR. There was no distinction in the timing of deportation between secular and religious Jews; but secular Jews still had a better chance of survival. Secular Jews were less focused on the Jewish community and were more likely to have non-Jewish acquaintances.

Naimark concluded that forced deportation and intentional killing remained a remarkably constant phenomenon in the 20th century, giving us no reason to hope that it will not occur again in the 21st century. Ethnic cleansing, genocide and the Holocaust must not be trivialized as a CES. However, the empirical analysis of the Holocaust in this article might shed some light on the conditions surrounding today's complex emergency situations or future CES; especially those which tend towards ethnic cleansing or genocide. In peacetime, members of ethnic or religious groups may have different kinds of social resources. During a CES, civilians whose pre-CES social resources are concentrated within their own ethnic or religious group are more vulnerable. A higher death rate may be expected as societies become more socially divided along ethnic or religious lines. In this light, the safety of the Sunnis in the newly sectarian Iraq after America withdraws its troops is a point worthy of consideration.

Acknowledgement

The recovered register of Jews living in Amsterdam in 1941 was first used in the thesis by M. Croes and P. Tammes 'Gif laten wij niet voortbestaan'. Een onderzoek naar de overlevingskansen van joden in de Nederlandse gemeenten, 1940-1945. ['The poison will be eradicated'. A study of the survival chances of Jews living in Dutch municipalities, 1940-1945]. For a secondary analysis, the author upgraded the data set by filling in place of birth and other blanks in the database and by coding social resources, occupation and adjusted variables including family relationships. The author is today a scientific researcher in the Participation and Government department of the Social and Cultural Planning Office of The Netherlands (SCP).

Conflict of interest: None declared

On average 25.9% of the Jews in Amsterdam fell victim to the Holocaust. Jews may have had different social resources and therefore different chances of survival.

Social resources were needed to find places to hide or to acquire protected status. Jews had to rely on non-Jews to find refuge. To acquire protected status was open chiefly to Jews having German nationality. Survival rate correlates weakly with holding German nationality and strongly with having close social ties with non-Jews.

The empirical analysis of the Holocaust might shed some light on the conditions surrounding today's or future conflicts which tend towards ethnic cleansing or genocide. A higher death rate may be expected as societies are more socially divided along ethnic or religious lines.

References

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Survival of Jews during the Holocaust: the importance of different types of social resources

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Abstract. Background Of the Jewish inhabitants of Amsterdam 25.9% survived the Holocaust. However, different cultural and socio-economic groups within the Jewis

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In addition to forced labour, the Nazis used prisoners incarcerated in camps as live test subjects for medical experiments. These experiments were usually extremely painful, debilitating, and in many cases, lethal.

The experiments had various purposes: experiments attempting to prove the supposed superiority of the ' Aryan ' race, experiments to try and find solutions to military or common war related injuries, and or experiments to further individual doctors' research interests.
Experiments attempting to prove the superiority of the 'Aryan' race
Just six months after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, on 14 July 1933 the Nazis passed their first sterilisation law, which forced people with certain hereditary conditions to be sterilised by law.

Following the mass imprisonments after the start of the Second World War, the Nazis escalated this sterilisation policy and also targeted other racial enemies such as Jews. The Nazis conducted a number of experiments on concentration camp prisoners in an effort to discover a method for mass sterilisation. These experiments primarily took place on women prisoners at Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.
Experiments to find solutions to military or common war related injuries
The start of the Second World War also led to a number of medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners in attempts to discover new, cheaper and quicker treatments for common military injuries. Some examples of these experiments include hypothermia experiments at Dachau, which attempted to discover ways to quickly reverse the effects of hypothermia. This set of experiments forced inmates to be submerged in cold water. Out of the 300 inmates involved, between 80-90 died - typically of heart failure. Other experiments at Dachau involved attempts to make seawater drinkable, in case troops were marooned with no running water, attempts to find a similar drug to penicillin, which involved infecting prisoners with sepsis, and attempts to find a cure for malaria. Almost all of these experiments resulted in a significant number of deaths or physical and mental deformities among the prisoners tested on. Prisoners were typically given little to no pain relief during experiments, and the Nazis saw their deaths as inconsequential due to their inferior status.

Dachau was not the only site of war-related medical experiments on prisoners. Experiments to find a cure for typhus also took place at Natzweiler and Buchenwald (where 154 inmates out of the 729 used died, in addition to 120 carrier patients who died whilst being used to keep the infection alive so it could be further tested). Hepatitis experiments took place at Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler, and bone, muscle and nerve regeneration experiments took place at Ravensbrück.
Experiments to further individual doctors' research interests
Concentration camp inmates were also used as live test subjects in individual doctors research experiments. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was the experiments performed by Dr. Mengele on inmates of Auschwitz. Mengele was particularly interested in twins, people with different colored eyes, and people with physical impairments. Mengele did not spare any thought for the wellbeing or health of the inmates subject to his experiments, and many of them died or were purposefully killed so that their corpses could be examined.

Another example of medical experiments on inmates driven by personal interest was the Tuberculosis experiments carried out by Dr. Kurt Heissmeyer in June 1944 in Nuengamme. Heissmeyer hoped that his experiments would find a cure for tuberculosis. All of Heissmeyer's experiments failed. Despite the lack of positive results, Heissmeyer continued his experiments, and started new rounds on children in 1945. All of the inmates involved in the experiments either died as a result of them, or were murdered on Heissmeyer's orders directly afterwards.

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In addition to forced labour, the Nazis used prisoners incarcerated in camps as live test subjects for medical experiments. These experiments were usually extremely painful, debilitating, and in many cases, lethal.

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The reasons for the epidemics and contagious diseases that prevailed in Auschwitz concentration camp included the dreadful living conditions, which varied during the years that the camp operated, and were different in each part of the camp. In Auschwitz I, prisoners lived in old brick barracks. Several hundred three-tier wooden bunk beds were installed in each building. The overcrowding in Auschwitz I forced basements and lofts into use as living quarters, as well.

Two types of barracks, brick and wooden, housed prisoners in Birkenau concentration camp. The brick buildings were erected in great haste, without suitable insulation, on marshy ground. More than 700 people were assigned to each barrack, although in practice the figure was sometimes higher. These barracks lacked any true heating; nor did they contain sanitary facilities.

The second type of accommodation for prisoners at Birkenau consisted of wooden stable-barracks (Pferdestallbaracken). The interiors, designed to hold 52 horses, were partitioned into stalls. The stalls contained three-tier wooden bunks. Several hundred prisoners lived in each such barrack.

Dampness, leaky roofs, and the fouling of straw and straw mattresses by prisoners suffering from diarrhea made difficult living conditions worse. The barracks swarmed with various sorts of vermin and rats. A constant shortage of water for washing, and the lack of suitable sanitary facilities, aggravated the situation.

Living and sanitary conditions in Auschwitz III (Monowitz) concentration camp and the several dozen branch camps resembled those described above.

Currency

One Auschwitz survivor described the cigarette currency used in the camp: "We had our own currency, whose value no one questioned: the cigarette. The price of every article was stated in cigarettes ... in 'normal' times, that is, when the candidates to the gas chambers were coming in at a regular pace, a loaf of bread cost 12 cigarettes; a 10 ounce package of margarine, thirty; a watch, eighty to 200; a 0.25-gallon bottle of alcohol, 400 cigarettes!"

Feeding the Prisoners

Prisoners in the camp received meals three times a day: morning, noon, and evening. Factors influencing the nutritional value of the food included the official nutritional norms in the Nazi concentration camps. In practice, Auschwitz prisoners with less physically demanding labor assignments received approximately 1,300 calories per day, while those engaged in hard labor received approximately 1,700. After several weeks on such starvation rations in the camp, most prisoners began to experience organic deterioration that led to the so-called "Muzulman" state, extreme physical exhaustion that ended in death.

Order of the Day

At Auschwitz, as in other concentration camps, the order of the day was strictly established. Prisoners spent over ten hours per day working, and the rest of the time was taken up by long roll-call assemblies, lining up for food rations or a place in the latrines or the washroom, removing dirt and pests from clothing, and disinfection.

A WVHA decree of March 31, 1942 established a minimum working day of eleven hours in all concentration camps. At Auschwitz, labor was one of the means used to destroy prisoners. They labored in various sectors of the economy. Initially, they worked at building the camp: leveling the ground, erecting new blocks and buildings, laying roads, and digging drainage ditches. Later, the industries of the Third Reich made increasing use of cheap prisoner labor. The pace of the work, the starvation rations of food, and constant beatings and abuse exacerbated the death rate. The German IG Farbenindustrie cartel, which built the Buna-Werke synthetic rubber and fuel factory at Monowice near Oswiecim, had priority in obtaining prisoner labor. The majority of the Auschwitz sub-camps were located near the mills, mines, and factories of Silesia. Prisoners dug coal, produced armaments and chemicals, and built and expanded industrial plants.

Executions

Executions were one means of physically liquidating prisoners and people brought from outside the camp. At first, people were shot to death in the pits near the camp from which gravel had been dug. From the autumn of 1941 until the autumn of 1943, most of the executions by shooting took place in the courtyard of Block No. 11 in the main camp. Most of the victims here were Poles, who received sentences of death by shooting from, for instance, the Gestapo summary court.

Soviet prisoners of war were also executed at Auschwitz concentration camp. Beginning in September 1941, executions were also carried out using poison gas.

At least 2,000 Soviet prisoners of war were put to death in this way. After the dismantling of the Death Wall in 1944, larger groups of Poles sentenced to death by the police summary court were executed in the gas chambers. Executions by hanging were carried out sporadically in the camp. As opposed to shooting or killing in the gas chamber, hanging was public. It was carried out in front of other prisoners, usually during roll call. The goal was to intimidate the witnesses, and the victims were most frequently prisoners caught trying to escape, or suspected of aiding escapers.

Sources: The State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Reprinted with permission;
Yuval Noah Harari,Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, (NY: Harper Perennial, 2018).

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Living Conditions, Labor & Executions at Auschwitz-Birkenau

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Encyclopedia of Jewish and Israeli history, politics and culture, with biographies, statistics, articles and documents on topics from anti-Semitism to Zionism.

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Escape from German occupied Europe United states holocaust museum 

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Escape from German occupied Europe United states holocaust museum 

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ESCAPE TO NEUTRAL COUNTRIES Close to 30,000 Jews were admitted into Switzerland, although an estimated 20,000 were turned away at the Swiss border. Spain allowed almost 30,000 Jewish refugees to enter, primarily from 1939 to 1941. These refugees, mostly from France, were permitted to cross Spain on their way to Portugal.

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Holocaust survivor Esther Bem describes the people in Northern Italy who protected her and her family during World War II.

Many Jews went into hiding to avoid capture by the Nazis and their collaborators. Some concealed only their Jewish identity and continued to live in the open, using false identification papers. Others physically hid in attics, cellars, or other shelters. For most, hiding was a difficult decision that involved extraordinary risks. Many families, like Anne Frank's, attempted to hide together. But often children were sent into hiding first because more people were willing to take in a child than an adult.

Nearly all Jews who went into hiding relied on others to help them, and they often felt that they were totally dependent on their helpers-for food and water, for news from the outside world, and especially for a willingness to continue to keep their secret. Usually, those in hiding gave their helpers money to pay for food and other supplies and to reward the helpers for making such a dangerous commitment. Sometimes Jews were hidden by neighbors or former employees whom they knew, and sometimes they were helped by strangers, but the risks of hiding changed the nature of even the closest and most trusted relationships.

Otto Wolf was 15 years old when his family went into hiding in the forest of a small Moravian town called Tršice, in occupied Czechoslovakia. In the summer of 1942, the Wolf family was ordered to report to a nearby city for deportation, but they chose not to do so. With the help of a family friend named Slávek, who was in love with Otto's older sister Felicitas (known as Lici), they lived in shelters built in the woods near the town. Over the next three years, the family moved from various shelters in the forest to the homes of acquaintances, as each location became dangerous. Otto kept a diary throughout this period.

September 19, 1942, Saturday, 13th week. We sleep until ten, and then pray. We have bread with jam for lunch. I and Lici go for water. We are depressed, wondering how things will go. Who will give us sanctuary? [. . .] We have cheese and bread for dinner. They go to the bushes at 8 P.M. and wait for Slávek until half past ten, but in vain. Slávek does not come. We don't know why, and hope that he will come tomorrow.

July 6, 1943, Tuesday, 55th week. We return to the forest at half past three. [. . .] Around five-thirty in the afternoon, we hear rustling. I climb a little higher up and see a person. He straightens up and sees me. When he recognizes me, he comes straight to us. It is Pluhař. He promises not to tell anyone, not even his wife. Then he leaves. We theorize extensively, and are really concerned that he went to turn us in. We wait to see what will happen next. The women are down below, and Dad and I go into the clearing. We hear more rustling around 8 P.M. and conclude that he is returning with a policeman. What a surprise! He comes with a loaf of bread and a little schmaltz [chicken fat]. He is assuming that we are hungry. What an outstanding deed! Dad gives him his black pants, and he is very happy. He says that he will return in the morning and bring milk and cigarettes. We are overjoyed and thank God that that's the way things turned out. At ten, we go cooking. There is bread as well as laundry soap there. We make caraway soup with bread. The sky is glowering.

In early 1945, the Wolfs moved to a hiding place in the home of Mařenka Zbořilová, who had been their maid before the war. Her husband was uncomfortable that they were there.

March 4, 1945, Sunday, 141st week. Mařenka brings us breakfast upstairs, and we eat. Mr. Zbořil is carrying on like a madman: he does not want us here, and so forth. He goes to church, and we venture downstairs. For lunch, we have noodle soup. Mr. Zbořil comes home at noon, raging. He looks like a beast. We therefore think it wiser to retreat upstairs. Mařenka goes out to borrow a newspaper. When she returns, he rips the paper out of her hand and bellows that we had better be gone by morning. He even comes up to the attic to tell us that we must go, everyone in all the huts allegedly knows about us. [. . .] We can't even eat dinner. Tonight, I sleep with my parents. During the night, Mr. Zbořil was out in the yard three times, cursing like a sailor.

On April 18, 1945, Soviet prisoners of war who were helping the German army conducted a raid on the village where the Wolfs were hiding. Searching for resistance fighters, they captured Otto Wolf and 22 other men. Otto's family left the village to hide in the forest. His sister Felicitas immediately took over writing in the diary, believing that Otto would one day return.

April 20, 1945, Friday. We wake up at quarter after five and go to a clearing to move our feet a little since it has been dreadfully cold during the night. We have no blankets. We then pray: it is Yom Kippur Qatan. We fast until 1 p.m. At noon, I take the basket and go back to the Oheras' for the most indispensable of indispensable items. When I get there, I find Mrs. Oherová running around as if she had lost her mind. She says that I must leave right away, that the criminal police have already been here twice and that they had left just before I arrived. [. . .] Each one of us has a tiny piece of bread with a little shmaltz for dinner. Before noon, an old woman roaming around the place scared us. We go to sleep at seven.

After liberation, the remaining members of the Wolf family learned that Otto had been killed after a local man revealed that he was Jewish. Otto was tortured by the Gestapo but never revealed where his family was hiding or the names of the people who had helped them. Felicitas eventually emigrated to the United States and donated the diary to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Connection Questions

1. How do these diary entries help you understand the challenges of surviving in hiding? What needs did the Wolf family have? How did they find ways to meet their needs?

2. How do Otto and Felicitas describe the intense stress that hiding created for their family? How did they cope?

3. Who were some of the people the Wolfs encountered while in hiding? How do you account for the range of responses to the Wolfs?

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Holocaust survivor Esther Bem describes the people in Northern Italy who protected her and her family during World War II. Many Jews went into hiding to avoid capture by the Nazis and their collaborators. Some concealed only their Jewish identity and continued to live in the open, using false identification papers.

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The man who lived through the Nazi death camp.

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The man who lived through the Nazi death camp.

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A Holocaust survivor who cheated death in eight Nazi concentration camps during World War Two has recalled his experiences, 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.

"We arrived at 12 o'clock at night. It was dead quiet, and frightening to look at," Chaim Ferster says, remembering his first impressions of the notorious death camp.

"We could see from a distance that there were flames coming out from four chimneys. I didn't realise that this was the crematorium."

He had arrived in the middle of two-year ordeal, during which he endured horrific labour conditions, malnutrition and typhus, before finally being freed at the very moment he and his fellow prisoners had been rounded up to be shot, when Allied forces broke into the camp.

Born into an orthodox Jewish family and raised in the Polish town Sosnowiec, Mr Ferster was 17 when war broke out in 1939.

The great-grandfather remembers the rising fears of Jewish communities, as news of the German military expansion began to filter through.

Now aged 93 and living in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, where he settled in 1946, he said: "You could see planes flying over. [The Nazis] came over to Sosnowiec very fast.

"I remember the Jews were very concerned. Very, very concerned about what was going to happen."

Then came the rationing, widespread hunger and illness in the ghettos and, later, the transportation of thousands of Jewish families.

Mr Ferster said: "We'd got ration cards, and there wasn't much food in the shops to fulfil these rations cards.

"We had no medication. People were dying and life was very difficult. Then they assembled various leaders from town and they shot them, just like that."

In 1943, at the age of 20, Mr Ferster was forced from his home. Amid the chaos he had avoided being taken away a year earlier, when his mother and sister disappeared, and his father, Wolf, had died of pneumonia in 1942.

It was widely accepted that people picked up by the Gestapo never returned, Mr Ferster said.

With this in mind, a relative urged him to learn a skill that would make him useful to the Germans, prompting him to learn to fix sewing machines, becoming classed as a "mechanic" as a result.

Between 1943 and 1945 he was moved between eight different camps across Germany and Poland, enduring terrible conditions, in which many died.

At one stage Mr Ferster remembers being forced to shift blocks of cement from a wagon, in freezing weather.

"It was very, very cold, about minus 25 or minus 26," he said.

"The soldiers started beating us and shouting and saying you're not going fast enough. A lot of them couldn't stand it. They got pneumonia. Some of them died."

Towards the end of 1943, Mr Ferster fell seriously ill during an outbreak of typhus in one particular camp. Large numbers died.

Once again though he managed to survive, but describes a horrific scene that remains vivid in his memory.

"There were bodies lying on pallets, six one way, six the other way," he recalls. "There were many many pallets with bodies, very, very high."
Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp Life in the city of Auschwitz The Holocaust year by year Why did ordinary people commit atrocities in the Holocaust?

Construction began in 1940 on site that grew to 40 sq km (15 sq miles)

About one million Jews were killed at the camp

Other victims included Roma (Gypsies), disabled people, homosexuals, dissidents, non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners

Eventually, Mr Ferster found himself moved to Auschwitz.

He remembers the infamous shower rooms, and the prisoners who were sent there.

"They put us into a block. All of us, one particular large block. Then the following morning, a selection of that block went into the shower room," he said.

"We went to the shower room. It's the same shower room that other people went in and the gas came in. But we got the water that came down and we washed ourselves."

Mr Ferster was one of the few who survived Auschwitz, which was eventually liberated in January 1945.

But in the spring of that year, with Germany losing the war, the Nazis accelerated the programme to liquidate Jewish prisoners.

As a result, Mr Ferster was among a group of prisoners who were marched across Germany to another notorious death camp - Buchenwald.

It was there that Mr Ferster believes he came closest to dying.

Prisoners were being summarily executed from day to day, and the very morning after he arrived Mr Ferster himself was rounded up with a group of fellow inmates, expecting a similar fate.

But, just as he and the others were gathered together, the camp was liberated.

"All of a sudden, the American planes were there and all the German soldiers ran away," he said.

"And after half an hour or an hour, an American tank drove through the gates and the soldiers were shouting, 'You're free, you're free!'."

He later discovered only two other members of his family survived the Holocaust - his sister Manya and cousin Regina.

Through tears, Mr Ferster added: "I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it."

After emigrating to England, he worked for a sewing machine repair business before later setting up a series of successful businesses.

Chaim Ferster's story features in Inside Out North West, which will be broadcast at 19.30 BST on Monday 5 October.

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A Holocaust survivor who cheated death in eight Nazi concentration camps during World War Two has recalled his experiences, 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz. "We arrived at 12 o'clock at night. It was dead quiet, and frightening to look at," Chaim Ferster says, remembering his first impressions of the notorious death camp.

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This photo shows a hiding place that an undesirable would hide in during the Holocaust.

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The Holocaust showed the horrors humans can inflict on one another. Yet the resilience displayed by those who lived through the Nazis' brutal reign shows the strength of the human spirit. Those who escaped the Holocaust did so through cunning, daring, and the sheer unwillingness to give in to the evil around them.

10Kazimierz Piechowski

Around 1.1 million people were killed in the Auschwitz concentration camps between 1940 and 1945. Though the Nazis were murdering hundreds of people each hour, only 144 were able to escape during the camp's five years of operation. Among them was Kazimierz Piechowski, whose breakout with three other men reads like a Hollywood drama.

Piechowski had already tried to flee from his native Poland when the Nazis arrived in 1939. The 19-year-old was caught on the Hungarian border on his way to join resistance forces. Eight months later, he was one of the earliest people shipped to Auschwitz, on the second-ever transport.

Piechowski was forced to build parts of the camp. He was also among the workers forced to move the bodies of men, women, and children shot by the SS. The prisoners were forced to work for up to 15 hours each day. Some of the prisoners were given work that granted them access to the list of planned executions. One of Piechowski's friends, Eugeniusz Bendera, learned that he was scheduled to be shot. Bendera told Piechowski he could organize a car to escape, but a car wasn't enough.

They had access to the storerooms, where everything from uniforms to ammunition was kept. One morning, Piechowski loosened a bolt on a trapdoor into the storerooms' coal cellars. It was June 20, 1942, a Saturday-there were fewer Germans around on the weekend. The four plotters gathered containers of kitchen waste and told a guard that they were tasked with taking the waste away. The guard waved them out of the main camp.

The four men stole four SS uniforms. Bendera used a copied key to get into the camp's garage and stole the fastest car in Auschwitz, which happened to belong to the camp's commander. They drove for the main gate but didn't know if they would need a pass to get out. As they approached, the gate remained closed. It fell on Piechowski, in the most senior officer's uniform, to do one of the most fateful impersonations in history. In his best German, he yelled at the guard to open up, threatening retribution otherwise. The scared guard obeyed.

After two hours driving on back roads through the forest, the four men abandoned their car and set out on foot. Piechowski and Bendera joined the Polish Home Army to fight the Nazis. According to Piechowski, their daring breakout led to one of the most iconic images of the Holocaust-numbered tattoos so that inmates could be permanently identified. According to Piechowski, "No other camp used numbering-it was our escape that led to it."

9The Stermer Family

In 1962, Frenchman Michel Siffre set a world record for time spent living underground. Yet Siffre's 205 days had already been beaten by more than a dozen women and children. Starting in 1943, 38 Jews hid beneath the wheat fields of Western Ukraine. They were there for 344 days, but the story remained untold until 1993, when American caver Chris Nicola uncovered it.

Nicola was exploring Priest's Grotto, the world's 10th-longest cave at 124 kilometers (77 mi) long. The humidity is 90 percent there, and the temperature hovers around 10 degrees Celsius (50 °F). This was supposed to be a largely untouched spot, but Nicola noticed shoes, buttons, and other signs that people had lived there. Locals said that the items had been there for decades.

Nicola investigated further and encountered the Stermer family, who revealed that they and several other Jewish families had taken refuge in the cave during World War II. They'd been fortunate to find an underground freshwater lake, but food was more difficult. The men of the group had to go above ground to bargain for grain or steal vegetables. Dough and roots were almost their entire diet. They set up a kitchen underground and even a millstone for grinding flour. The hideaways suffered from scurvy and lost up to a third of their bodyweight. Miraculously, no one got seriously ill.

Gathering firewood was most dangerous. The men had to chop down trees in the dark, but it was noisy. One day after getting grain, some of the Jews were followed back to the cave by Ukrainian police. They were saved by a sack of food lodged in the cave entrance. The authorities believed the Jews were armed and had multiple entrances, so they just waited. No one left the cave for six weeks, and the Nazi collaborators eventually gave up.

When the Germans were forced away by the Red Army, one of the group's surface helpers dropped a note in a bottle into the cave entrance. "It was unbelievable to think that I could go outside, go around in daylight, and nobody was going to kill me," said Shulim Stermer, who was in his twenties at the time. All of the 38 people that entered the cave came out alive.

8Leo Bretholz

Leo Bretholz was 17 when he was forced to flee from his home in Austria. It was 1938, and Jewish men were being arrested daily by the Nazis. Bretholz's mother bought him a train ticket to Trier, near Germany's border with Luxembourg. The young runaway forded the Sauer River to escape Germany and crossed to Belgium. But that was only the start of seven years of extreme running, hiding, and a lot of escaping.

Bretholz slept in ditches, found refuge in monasteries, and hid with his people in Jewish ghettos. He was arrested in 1940 and escaped by digging under a fence. He was captured by the Nazis a further six times, but he made his most spectacular getaway in 1942. On November 5, he was crammed into a cattle car on a Nazi train headed for Auschwitz. Along with another man, he spent the day prying at the bars of his cell. Then, when darkness fell, he leaped from the moving train. He needed to wait for the train to slow on a bend and avoid the searchlights operated by Nazi guards at those points in the track.

In the late 1940s, Bretholz joined a Jewish resistance group fighting the Nazis, forging IDs, and hunting down German troops. He moved to the US after the war and became a key witness in lawsuits aiming to get compensation from the French rail company that had been complicit in transporting Jews to their deaths. He wrote a book with a title inspired by his great escape, Leap Into Darkness.

7The Sobibor Breakout

One-third of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust died in three camps in east Poland between March 1942 and October 1943. At one of these, Sobibor, victims were shipped in on a train and were told they were being showered to prevent disease. The prisoners would often celebrate this news after so many hours crammed into a rail car. Then they were led into a gas chamber.

The Nazis kept 600 "work Jews" alive, but they would continually kill and replace these men to prevent a chance at rebellion. By the summer of 1943, the Soviets were nearing the camps, and Himmler wanted to erase all trace of them. The Jewish workers realized that their deaths were inevitable when trains stopped arriving. Some managed to make a run for it, but 10 Jews were executed for each escapee. A minefield was laid around the camp. A mass outbreak was the only option left.

The Jews made a plan to break out in October when the camp's toughest SS officer was on leave. At 4:00 PM on October 14, the schemers lured 11 guards into individual traps. The camp's phone lines were cut. But as the daily roll of the prisoners was being called, a guard found one of his dead colleagues and raised the alarm. One of the leaders of the rebellion leaped on a table and told everyone to run, telling the crowd to "let the world know what has happened here."

During the escape, 250 people were killed by the Nazis. Among the 58 that survived was 16-year-old Thomas Blatt, who was shot and left for dead by a farmer during his escape. He moved to California and has published works and given interviews about his experiences. He testified in 2009 against one of the camp guards, Jan Demjanjuk, and also became one of the few survivors to privately interview someone behind the atrocities.

6The Arshanskaya Sisters

In the winter of 1941, Nazi troops invaded the Ukrainian city of Kharkov. Many Jews died, some hung from lampposts. The soldiers forced thousands to march 20 kilometers (12 mi) out of the city. The Arshanskaya sisters, 14-year-old Zhanna and 12-year-old Frina, were among 13,000 people crammed into an old tractor factory designed to house 1,800.

The girls' father bribed a Ukrainian guard with a golden pocket watch to secure the release of one of his daughters. He told Zhanna to run, since the older girl had more chance of surviving. Zhanna never saw her father again but was reunited with Frina within a few days. The younger girl never revealed how she was able to get away. The sisters found their way to an orphanage, where the staff created fake identities for them.

Zhanna had been playing the piano since she was five. When a local piano tuner heard her play, he offered the two girls a place with a musical troupe that entertained the occupying Nazi forces. The girls began hiding in the spotlight, providing entertainment for the people who had tried to condemn them to death. " We were a precious commodity for the Germans," Zhanna later said.

Their value to the Nazis saved their lives. They were ratted out as Jews, but the soldiers declared that there was no proof and kept the girls around. By the end of the war, the musical troupe was taken to the Nazi heartland of Berlin.

When the liberators arrived in 1945, the girls were taken to a camp run by American officer Larry Dawson. His brother was an accomplished musician, and the Holocaust was no barrier to love stories. Zhanna married David Dawson after moving to the United States. She has one memento from her life before the Nazis arrived: a sheet of her favorite music. Zhanna grabbed it and kept it with her when her family was forced from their home. It is kept in a safety deposit box, as a treasure for future generations of her family.

5Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

The Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec was a journalist working in Poland when the Nazis invaded. He tried to flee to Romania but was caught and wound up at the Ternopil concentration camp, where he was led into the woods, given a shovel, and forced to dig his final resting place.

The guards who had taken Lec became bored and hungry. One of them was forced to stand with the prisoner while the rest left to get supper. Lec waited until the right moment and killed his captor with a blow to the neck. He later captured the moment with the following poem:
He who had dug his own grave
looks attentively
at the gravedigger's work,
but not pedantically:
for this one
digs a grave
not for himself

Donning the dead man's SS uniform, Lec made his way to Warsaw, where he met members of the Polish resistance. There, he put his literary skills to use publishing underground newspapers. He was also fluent in German and wrote leaflets for the resistance. He ended the war as a major in the Polish army and fought in battles pushing back against the Nazis.

4Yoram Friedman

Yoram Friedman was five years old when Nazi troops arrived in his Polish hometown of Blonie. It was 1939, and within three years, Friedman and his family were forced into the infamous Warsaw Ghetto. About three-quarters of the 400,000 Jews who lived in the Ghetto were killed by the Nazis. Yet Friedman was smuggled out, leaving him to try to keep himself alive in Nazi-occupied Poland at the age of eight.

He initially joined a group of Jewish orphans who survived by raiding farms, but that didn't last. Alone again, he knocked on the doors of Polish farmers to beg for help. After being rejected and beaten, he was taken in by a Catholic woman named Magda. She taught Friedman Catholic prayers, renamed him, and warned him never to urinate around Poles because it would reveal that he was circumcised. Local villagers nonetheless suspected that Magda was housing a Jew and reported her to the SS. Her home was burned to the ground, but Friedman was able to get away.

He lived in the wild, tying himself to branches high in trees to sleep. He ate wild berries and whatever animals he could catch. A seemingly miraculous chance meeting with his father lasted only moments, when the elder Friedman was caught by Nazis and shot in a potato field.

Friedman resumed his Catholic identity, going by the name of Jurek, and he found work on a farm. His arm got caught in a wheat grinder one day, and local doctors refused to treat him when they realized he was Jewish, so he lost his right arm entirely. Yet Friedman overcame even this, finding a place in an orphanage when the Soviets arrived in Poland.

Three years later, he was found by a Jewish agency and arrived in Israel. Despite being illiterate at that point, teenage Friedman went on to earn a master's degree in math and spent his life as a teacher. In 2013 a film, Run Boy Run, was produced based on his story.

3Rolf Joseph

The Joseph brothers, Rolph and Alfred, had everything against them. They were teenagers in a Jewish family when Hitler came to power, and they lived in Berlin. Their father had fought for Germany during World War I, so they clung to hope that the family would be okay in his home city. But by the 1940s, the boys were left on their own, their parents arrested and shipped away by the Nazi regime.

No one who knew the brothers could shelter them together. So they lived separately but met every Wednesday at 11:00 AM, until one morning in 1942. Rolf was accosted by a German soldier and was taken away for interrogation. He was locked in a cell by the Gestapo and whipped for hours to reveal his hiding place and the whereabouts of his brother. Rolf held out, and he was on a train to Auschwitz the next day.

Rolf grabbed a pair of pliers from a toolbox in the van that transported him to the train station. He used them to work himself out of his handcuffs. Rolf and his fellow prisoners were able to break a plank away from the side of their cattle car and jump from the train.

Yet Rolf's freedom was short-lived. On the way to Berlin, he was betrayed to the Gestapo and arrested again. He was beaten so severely that he developed epilepsy. But Rolf was unbreakable, and he hatched a plan. When he was left alone, he scratched himself and convinced his guards that he was suffering from scarlet fever. The Germans, fearful of catching something, moved Rolf to a hospital. A guard stood outside Rolf's third-floor room, so he jumped out of the window.

Despite breaking part of his spine, Rolf crawled through the city to his old hiding place. His brother was there, and the old woman who had taken them in moved them to some land she owned in Berlin's outskirts. The brothers were liberated by the Soviets in 1945, and Rolf went on to become an engineer.

2The Chiger Family

Photo credit: Zebra Films

One of the largest Jewish ghettos created by the Nazis was in Lwow, Poland. When the Nazis invaded, 200,000 Jews lived in the city, half of them refugees from Germany. In June 1943, the Germans liquidated the ghetto, killing thousands of Jews in the process. Weeks before, a small group led by a man named Ignacy Chiger had dug their way through the floor of their building, using only cutlery. They wanted to find a place to hide, but before they could find a new home, they were found by Polish sewer workers. Among them was Leopold Socha, chief supervisor of the city's entire sewage system.

Socha was sympathetic to their plight, but surviving in the sewers was hellish. The city's sewage system drained into the fast-moving River Poltwa. Early in their 14-month stay underground, the children's uncle slipped into the river and was washed away to his death. The sewer was shared with the city's rats, who tried to steal the group's food. Five weeks into the stay, the group was discovered by unfriendly workers and had to run into the darkness. They were lucky enough to bump into the workers who knew them, who guided them deeper to a new hiding place.

When it rained heavily, their area of the sewer would flood and leave only a few inches of space. The parents held their children with faces pressed against the ceiling to breathe. Krystyna Chiger developed a phobia of rain. "I would sit and listen to hear if it was raining, and panic as soon as I heard rain drops," she said later. Both her children developed measles, but both miraculously survived. One of the women was pregnant when they entered the sewers. When their baby was born, its cries threatened to give away the group's existence. Giving testimony in 1947, Krystyna described how "they covered this child with a washbasin. It suffocated and was thrown into the Poltwa."

Out of 21 who entered the sewers originally, only 10 survived. Krystyna was overjoyed when the Soviets arrived and she could leave the sewers. Brother Pawelek, too young to remember much of life out of the sewers, was scared of the light and people. He cried to go back underground.

1Michael Kutz

Michael Kutz was 10 when the Nazis arrived in Nieswiez, Belarus in June 1941. At first, they forced the town's 4,500 Jews to work. Kutz cleaned streets and toilets by day. At night he sneaked out and traded textiles for food, to feed him and his mother. On October 30, the Nazis made every Jew gather in the town square. Those who could work were placed in one group to be kept alive. The rest, including the children, were to be shot.

Nazi soldiers marched the condemned 5 kilometers (3 mi) into the countryside. Many were shot on the way. The Jews were forced to undress completely and lined up beside a mass grave. Yet the Nazis didn't shoot all of their captives before burying them. They ordered those remaining to jump into the pit to be buried alive.

Kutz hesitated, and an officer smashed his head with a rifle. The young boy fell in and was slowly buried beneath the dead and the dying. He later recalled. "I tried as a kid to throw away dead bodies, dead parts of bodies and everything, and to be able to breathe, and then it was quiet."

Kutz crawled up through the pit of bodies and saw that no one was there. He ran, still completely naked. He didn't stop until he reached a convent, where the nuns gave him clothes and some food. They were too fearful to harbor a Jewish runaway, though, and Kutz was on his own.

He eventually met up with some Russian resistance fighters, who were impressed by Kutz's survival of the pits. They spent the next three years living in the forest, fighting the invading force. Only 12 other Jews from his town survived.

Kutz wrote an autobiography, If, By Miracle. The title was inspired by the last words from his mother, whispered to him during their march to the death pit. "If, by miracle, you survive, you must bear witness," she told him. Through the hunger, rough sleeping, and difficulty of fighting, he says his mother's final words inspired him to go on.

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10 Amazing Ways People Survived The Holocaust

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The Holocaust showed the horrors humans can inflict on one another. Yet the resilience displayed by those who lived through the Nazis' brutal reign shows the strength of the human spirit. Those who escaped the Holocaust did so through cunning, daring, and the sheer unwillingness to give in to the evil around them.

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children.

Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. All of Europe's Jews were slated for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religiously orthodox and converts to Christianity, the aged and the young, even infants.

Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, however, many because they were hidden. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas, and danger. Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death.

Choices

The vast majority of Jews in German-occupied Europe never went into hiding, for many reasons. Hiding meant leaving behind relatives, risking immediate and severe punishment, and finding an individual or family willing to provide refuge. Many Jews, no doubt, held out the hope that the threat of death would pass or that they could survive until the Allied victory.

Sadly, the willingness or ability of the non-Jewish populations to rescue Jewish lives never matched the Nazis' vehement desire to destroy them. Even in countries where hatred for the German occupiers ran deep, anti-Nazism did not necessarily generate aid for Jews. The Nazis portrayed the Jews as carriers of contagion, as criminals, or as "Bolshevik" agents anxious to subvert European society. The Nazis further discouraged rescue by threatening severe penalties for those caught helping Jews.

Discovered

Life in hiding was always hazardous. Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Nazis made a concerted effort to locate Jews in hiding. German officials and their collaborators harshly penalized those who aided Jews and offered rewards to individuals willing to turn in Jews. Beginning in March 1943, the Gestapo (the German secret state police) granted some Jews in Germany reprieve from deportation in exchange for tracking down their co-religionists who had gone underground. By spring 1945, when the Nazi regime lay in ruins, these informers had turned in as many as 2,000 Jews. In other countries, neighbors betrayed others for money or out of support for the regime. In German-occupied Poland, blackmailers squeezed money or property from Jews by threatening to turn them in to the authorities.

Jews in hiding were discovered by chance during raids seeking conscripts for forced labor, resistance cells, black marketers, or by random searches of documents. A slip of the tongue, improperly prepared false documents, or gossip could lead to arrest and deportation.

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Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust

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When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. More than one million of the victims were children. Driven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as "parasitic vermin" worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale.

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Eva (Gryka) Kohan is a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor. During evening roll call in Auschwitz, they were each given one quarter of a slice of bread. Knowing they would not get another portion until the next evening, she and her sister put away half of their ration - a mere ⅛ of a piece of bread. They somehow controlled their hunger and saved the other half for the morning. The ration they had put aside gave them the strength to continue their work day.

Eva Kohan

Their friend Rachel, just a young girl herself, ate her entire portion every night. This left Rachel with nothing to eat the following day. Their friend became more and more emaciated and was ultimately sent to the gas chambers. Eva and her sister survived.

Eva does not attribute her survival to her own courage or discipline. "There were many times I was supposed to die, and my death just kept being avoided, miraculously. For example, once my entire group was written down to go to the gas chambers, and by a miracle, my number just wasn't there. Every other person around me was sent, but my number just wasn't written down on their sheet. It was not my strength, my smarts, or my connections. It was the hand of God alone."

Losing Everything

Eva was from a small town in Poland called Wohyn. Her father owned a grocery store next to their apartment which her mother helped run. Eva was the youngest of six children, and only she and her sister survived through the war.

"When I was 17 years old, on September 1, 1939, the war broke out. Eight days later, the entire Jewish area was firebombed, and every Jewish home was burned down. In moments, our lives were transformed drastically; people were lying on the streets, homeless. We had nothing."

The SS had picked up a maintenance guy that was always around Jewish people. He was friendly, and even knew how to speak the Jewish lingo. But he turned on the Jews, and showed the Nazis exactly where the Jewish area was and exactly which houses to bomb.

There were 50 cows living below us, and the stench was unbearable. We considered ourselves lucky.

Soon after the attack, the Nazis forced young people to perform Polish labor. "I was sent to work on a farm," Eva explained. "Eventually, we lived in the rafters of a barn. There were 50 cows living below us, and the stench was unbearable. My sister also worked on another farm. I had no family members with me. We considered ourselves lucky because getting jobs like these required connections."

The Nazis sent Eva's parents and brothers to the gas chambers of Treblinka.

Rose Kochan (Orlinsky) and Eva Gryka (Kohan). Rose bunked with Eva
who promised that if one of her brother's survived, she would set Eva up with him.

From the farm, Eva and her sister were taken to Majdanek, a concentration camp in Poland, near Lublin.

"My first memory of Majdanek was seeing a 16-year-old girl trying to run away. Right away, the SS wanted to show us that this cannot be done. They hung the girl in front of us, forcing us to watch. They let her body hang there overnight. She was such a beautiful girl.

"My brother, Moshe, was also in Majdanek. He was working with the commander, and somehow had a comb. He risked his life to pass the comb into my hand when the commanders passed by. It was not a regular comb; it could also take the dirt out of one's hair.

"One day in Majdanek, I saw a group of small children with barbed wire containing them in a small area. I thought to myself, 'I wonder if the children of my sister are there,' but of course, to no avail. A few days later, the whole group of children disappeared. We realized then that the barbed wire pen was a holding ground for the children until they had space for them in the gas chambers."

Eva and her sister were in Majdanek for about three months when the Nazis needed to liquidate. They were all sent to Auschwitz.

"I don't have to describe what happened in Auschwitz. They shaved our heads, tattooed numbers on us, stripped our clothing off. Then began the selections: Who will live, and who will die. They assigned us to a barrack. We were like sardines on the boards they called beds. It was just so cold; we could see the ice on the ceiling in the winter.

"Somehow I passed through lots of selections. It was as though their eyes were blind when they saw me. Twice, I escaped Josef Mengele. The first time I encountered him, he let me through. The second time, I was hiding in bed and the nurse didn't see me. I think she looked away purposefully when searching."

I was going to be killed but I didn't care anymore.

Headcounts became a daily part of life for Eva. "Every evening, they would count us to make sure no one disappeared. One time, I was so sick that I could not stand on my feet any longer. There was a chair up against the wall. If you were ready to die, you sat in the chair. The chair meant that you would taken be to the hospital, which was merely a holding ground until there was room in the crematorium. I went to the chair. I knew what was going happen. I was going to be killed but I didn't care anymore. So I sat and I knew my life would be over soon.

The wedding of Eva and Mendel, Rose's brother. To the right of Eva is her sister Miriam.
To the left of Mendel is his sister Rose.

"But that was not God's plan. It was meant to be that I would live. I went to the hospital, there was lice everywhere. I scratched my skin so much that it was maddening. I should have been sent to the crematorium but my sister had somehow made connections in the camp. Through the help of a nurse, she got me out. I would never have survived without my sister.

"In Auschwitz, if you got close to the gate, you were killed. A new transport of people were almost always waiting outside the gates to get in. The line was two blocks long, and they had no idea that they were next in line for the crematorium. They naively thought they were waiting to get jobs. The Nazi's couldn't burn us fast enough. There were too many Jews for the the amount of ovens, and people always had to wait.

"I had the the smell from the flesh in my nostrils for years and I could not rid myself of it.

"My dear friend Rachel, who ate her bread up quickly, slowly became sickly. She was such a beautiful girl. Her cheeks were pink and full of life, but slowly her cheeks started becoming purple. She couldn't help herself, regarding the bread; she was hungry.

"One day, the commanders were doing selections. They used a big barn with two doors. One side was the entrance, and the other was the exit. They stripped us, and we had to wait to see if they would write down our numbers. If they wrote my number down, I was dead. Sometimes, just because they didn't like the way a person looked, they would write their number, and that was it - they would go to the crematorium. Rachel went ahead of me that day, and when she came out, she called, 'Chava, Chava [Hebrew name for Eva], they wrote down my number!' I knew what would happen next, but I wanted to make her feel better, so said to her, 'Maybe this time they wrote numbers of the people who will survive.' But we both knew it was the end.

The reason my faith is strong is because I believed that it is because of God that I survived.

Rachel knew she would be summoned to death, so during roll call that evening, she hid under the bed. We stood in line for extra hours because she was hiding. If one person was missing from their records, they would make us all stand until the person was found. Eventually, they found her and she was never seen again."

In the end, Eva and her sister were transported to Bergen Belsen. Once there, Eva cleaned the toilets in exchange for another bowl of soup each day.

In Bergen Belsen, Eva saw a new transport of townspeople from Hungary who came in late 1944. They had bread in their baskets when they arrived. She called out from inside the gate to the entire group, "They are going to take everything away! Throw it here over the gate. I'm telling you, they are going to take it away from you anyway." Only one person threw bread over, and Eva grabbed it. The Gestapo at the gate saw that she picked up the bread and hit her in the head with his baton. "I fell to the ground and blacked out. When I woke up, my bread was gone. That hurt more than the injury itself. That was Bergen Belsen."

Finally, on April 15, 1945, the camps were liberated. The soldiers came in trucks and called through microphones "You are liberated! This is the English Army - now you are free!"

One woman was dying on the ground beside Eva. Eva kneeled beside her and said, "Look, take some coffee, put it in your mouth, you'll be okay," but she still died. People were dying left and right, from typhus, starvation, and other diseases, but her body was immune because she had contracted typhus a few years earlier. She walked out of the camp a free woman.

When asked how she had the strength to maintain her religious beliefs when so many survivors turned away from God, Eva explained, "The reason my faith is strong is because I believed that it is because of God that I survived. There was no other explanation. None. Not because I was smart or savvy, just God - it was all in His hands."
A version of this article appeared in The Jewish Home

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Eva (Gryka) Kohan is a 95-year-old Holocaust survivor. During evening roll call in Auschwitz, they were each given one quarter of a slice of bread. Knowing they would not get another portion until the next evening, she and her sister put away half of their ration - a mere ⅛ of a piece of bread.

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Parents, children, and rescuers faced daunting challenges once the decision was made to go into hiding. Some children could pass as non-Jews and live openly. Those who could not had to live clandestinely, often in attics or cellars. Children posing as Christians had to carefully conceal their Jewish identity from inquisitive neighbors, classmates, informers, blackmailers, and the police. Even a momentary lapse in language or behavior could expose the child, and the rescuer, to danger.

Living as a non-Jew required false identity papers, which were difficult to obtain in German-occupied Europe and were subject to frequent review by the authorities. Over the course of the war, children often had to move from one refuge to another. For the children who had to leave their parents behind, the emotional pangs of separation were constant and the worries many.

False Papers

For Jews to pass as "Aryans," it was essential to have false identity papers, which were often gained through contacts with the anti-Nazi resistance. Using forged or acquired papers, such as a birth or baptismal certificate, Jews sometimes could obtain legitimate documents under an assumed name from the authorities. These ruses posed great risks to the bearer since the Germans and collaborating police forces closely examined identity documents in their frequent searches for Jews, resistance members, and individuals evading conscript labor.

I had to keep my Jewishness hidden, secret, never to be revealed on penalty of death. I missed out on my childhood and the best of my adolescent years. I was robbed of my name, my religion, my Zionist idealism.
-Regine Donner

Hiding Places

Not all Jewish children could pass as "Aryans" and enjoy relative freedom of movement on the outside. Those who "looked Jewish," did not speak the local language, or whose presence in a rescuer's family raised too many questions had to be physically hidden. Children were kept in cellars and attics, where they had to keep quiet, even motionless, for hours on end. In rural areas, hidden children lived in barns, chicken coops, and forest huts. Any noise-conversation, footsteps-could arouse neighbors' suspicion and perhaps even prompt a police raid. During bombings, Jewish children had to remain hidden, unable to flee to the safety of shelters. Under these conditions, the children often suffered from a lack of human interaction and endured boredom and fear.

Circumcision

In a tradition dating back to the biblical patriarch Abraham, infant male Jews have been ritually circumcised as a sign of the Jewish people's covenant with God. Even during the bleakest days of Nazi persecution, Jews tried to observe this practice. Because non-Jews in continental Europe generally were not circumcised, German and collaborationist police commonly checked males apprehended in raids. For boys attempting to hide their Jewish identity, using a public restroom or participating in sports could lead to their discovery. More rarely, they underwent painful procedures to disguise the mark of circumcision or even dressed as girls.

Hiding under a Different Religion

Thousands of Jewish children survived the Holocaust because they were protected by people and institutions of other faiths. Dozens of Catholic convents in German-occupied Poland independently took in Jewish youngsters. Belgian Catholics hid hundreds of children in their homes, schools, and orphanages, and French Protestant townspeople in and around Le Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered several thousand Jews. In Albania and Yugoslavia, some Muslim families concealed youngsters.

Children quickly learned to master the prayers and rituals of their "adopted" religion in order to keep their Jewish identity hidden from even their closest friends. Many Jewish youngsters were baptized into Christianity, with or without the consent of their parents.

Multiple Rescuers

Finding a rescuer was quite difficult, particularly one who would take care of his or her charges for a period of years. Some individuals took advantage of a persecuted family's desperation by collecting money, then reneging on their promise of aid-or worse, turning them over to the authorities for an additional reward. More commonly, stress, anguish, and fear drove benefactors to turn out the Jewish children from their homes.

Organized rescue groups frequently moved youngsters from one family or institution to another to ensure the safety of both the child and the foster parent. In the German-occupied Netherlands, Jewish children stayed in an average of more than four different places; some changed hiding places more than a dozen times.

Separation from Family

Among the most painful memories for hidden children was their separation from parents, grandparents, and siblings. For a variety of reasons-the lack of space, the inability or unwillingness of a rescuer to take in an entire family, or the decision of the parents not to abandon other family members in the ghetto-many Jewish children went into hiding alone. In France, for instance, the OSE ( Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants, "Children's Aid Society") was able to smuggle children, but not their parents, out of internment camps.

Separation tormented both parents and children. Each feared for the other's safety and was powerless to do anything about it. Youngster and parent often had to bear their grief in silence so as not to jeopardize the safety of the other. For many hidden children, the wartime separation became permanent.

Security

A hidden child's safety and security demanded strict secrecy. Foster families created elaborate explanations for the presence of a new face in their home, identifying the child as a distant relative, friend, or surviving member of a bombed-out household. Convents and orphanages withheld youngsters' Jewish identities from documents, classmates, and staff. Organized rescue groups frequently moved children around and kept records in code to prevent their charges' discovery. In some rescue networks, parents were not permitted to contact their children or know their whereabouts.

The children themselves well understood the need for security. They kept away from situations where their true identity might be exposed, held fast to their false names and religion, and avoided mannerisms or language that might be construed as "Jewish" or foreign.

Abuse

Jewish children who lived in hiding generally were treated well by their rescuers. But not all youngsters had such experiences. Because they could not turn to local authorities for help or were afraid of being turned out, some children had to endure physical or sexual abuse by their "protectors." Studies conducted in the Netherlands estimate that more than 80% of the hidden children interviewed were treated well by their rescuers, while 15% were occasionally mistreated, and some 5% were treated badly.

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Parents, children, and rescuers faced daunting challenges once the decision was made to go into hiding. Some children could pass as non-Jews and live openly. Those who could not had to live clandestinely, often in attics or cellars. Children posing as Christians had to carefully conceal their Jewish identity from inquisitive neighbors, classmates, informers, blackmailers, and the police.

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How Oskar Schindler saved so many lives.

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How Oskar Schindler saved so many lives.

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The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org

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The following are essays created by a class studying the Holocaust. If you'd like to send your comments, please contact the instructor, Jan Haswell

Oskar Schindler: The Man and the Hero

by April N. Aberly

The purpose of this paper is to shed a different kind of light on who and how we consider a hero. I've tried to express what kind of a life and person Oskar Schindler was, and I ask you to evaluate yourself and decide if you could take the kind of risks Oskar Schindler did. As you learn about a man full of flaws just like the rest of us, I know that you too will appreciate the fact that an ordinary man can do extraordianry things.

What is a hero? In my book, a hero can be any number of things. A hero can be someone who loves and cares for you, someone you look up to, or maybe someone ordinary who does the extraordinary. Many people think of their favorite athlete or rockstar. Some may think of a famous speaker or activist. Whatever the case may be, most everyone has a hero. Oskar Schindler is a hero to over 6,000 Jews currently living across the United States and Europe (Hertling, 1997). Schindler was an ordinary man with extraordinary power that he used to save 1200 human lives during the Holocaust of World War II. The question arises : Who was Oskar Schindler the man? Where did he come from? More importantly, what was his motivation for saving so many Jews? Mainly, though, why is Schindler considered one of the greatest heroes of this century?

Oskar Schindler was born on April 28, 1908 in Zwitlau, which is now part of the present day Czech Republic. His father and mother, Hans and Louisa Schindler, were deeply religious. This resulted in a strong Catholic household for Schindler and his younger sister Elfriede Schindler. The Schindler family was one of the richest and most prominent in Zwitlau and elsewhere. This was due to the success of their family owned machinery business ("Schindler's List," 1995).

Schindler himself was a very tall and handsome man. Needless to say, he was adored by all the young women. His fancy, though, fell for a beautiful young girl named Emily. After only six weeks of courtship, they were married. Sadly, after only a few months of marriage, Schindler began to heavily abuse alcohol. He also had several affairs resulting in two children out of wedlock. In 1929, during the Great Depression, the Schindler family business went bankrupt. At this time, Schindler's father left his mother, and she died soon after. Finding himself jobless, Schindler sought work in nearby Poland as a machinery salesmen ("Schindler's List," 1995).

The picture being painted of Schindler is not exactly one of high class and morals. Indeed, Schindler was an alcoholic and a womanizer. This leads many to think, how can this man be considered a hero? What would possess him, with all of his power and money, to risk his own life to save the lives of thousands of people he has never met? How did he do it? It was no easy task.

The saving of the first Schindler Jews began in 1939, when he came to Krakow in the wake of the German invasion. In Krakow, he took over two previously Jewish owned companies that dealt with the manufacture and sales of enamel kitchenware products. In one of the businesses, however, Schindler was merely a trustee. Looking more for his own power, he opened up a small enamel shop right outside of Krakow near the Jewish ghetto. Here, he employed mostly Jewish workers. This in turn saved them from being deported to labor camps. Then in 1942, Schindler found out through some of his workers that many of the local Krakow Jews were being sent to the brutal Plazow labor camp. This is where Schindler's connections with the German government were so useful. Using his know how, he convinced the S. S. and the Armaments Administration, who had set up the Plazow labor camp, to set up a portion of the camp in his factory. They agreed, and Schindler took even those unfit and unqualified for work. In turn, he spared 900 Jewish lives from this one action (Paldiel, 1982).

Then in October of 1944, this time with the approach of the Russian army, Schindler used his connections to receive permission to reestablish his once defunct business as an armament production company in Bruunlitz. After some negotiating with S.S. officials, he was allowed to take with him some Jewish workers form Zalocie. Schindler then succeeded in transferring over 700 Jews from the Grossrosen camp, and another 300 women form Auschwitz. Once in Brunnlitz, these workers were given the best food, clothing, shelter, and medical care that Schindler could afford.

After this successful operation in Brunnlitz, Schindler received word that a train of evacuated Jews from the Golezow camp were stranded in the nearby city of Svitavy. As he had done twice before, Schindler pulled some strings at the top and got permission from German officials to take his workers to the nearby station to rescue the stranded. Once at the station, they forced the doors open to the rail car and removed some 100 half frozen Jews. Schindler's wife Emile did her best to nurse the ill back to health. Those that did not survive were given a proper Jewish burial paid for by Schindler (Paldiel, 1982). Schindler spent infinite amounts of money not only paying for the upkeep of his workers, but paying the government. Schindler was arrested two times while trying to complete his saving operations. Each time, though, he found a new excuse, or paid a little more money. He risked his life, as well as his family's lives, to save a race of people he never even knew.

In all of this the question still remains, why? Why did he do it? The answer is that there is no answer. Schindler would never comment on what he did. He never truly gave an answer as to why he did what he did. Ludwik Feigenbaum gave the best description of Schindler that made sense of his actions. "I don't know what his motives were, even though I knew him very well. I asked him and I never got a clear answer and the film doesn't make it clear, either. But I don't give a damn. What's important is that he saved our lives. Another survivor, Johnathan Dresner suggests, " He was an adventurer. He was like an actor who always wanted to be center stage. He got into a play and he could not get out of it" ("Schindler's List," 1995).

No matter what anyone believes, the story of Schindler touched me. I think to myself, would I have the courage to give up my life for a bunch of strangers? Would I give up all of my comforts and riches with nothing in return? I am a bit bewildered by the story. I wish that I knew exactly why he did the things he did. Yet as the old saying goes, "Some things are better left unsaid." I think that is what Schindler believed. He saw no reason to give a why. I think that is why he is a hero. He did not want all the pomp and circumstance. He did not want the hero status. I think he saw no reason to brag about what he had done. Schindler knew what it meant to himself and those that he saved, and that is all that mattered. Saving those lives was his return for giving up all he had. He died without much fanfare. He was bankrupt and his last few years were rough. He gave up everything he owned, literally. Yet it did not matter. He gave an unselfish love, of sorts, to the Jews. Schindler is indeed a hero for many reasons. Most importantly, he helped to save a race of human beings, just like you and me.
Works Cited
Hertling, Victoria. "The Making of Schindler's List." April 4, 1995. http://www.unr.edu.80/chgps/makeschn.htm. (8 February 1997).

Paldiel, Mordecai. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler. 1982. "Schindler's List." 1995. http://members.aol.com/rockycd/obstacle.htm. (8 February 1997).

"Schindler's List." 1995. http://members.aol.com/rockycd/why.htm. (8 February 1997).

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Oskar Schindler: The Man and the Hero (Holocaust Essays) | The Holocaust History - A People's and Survivor History - Remember.org

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The following are essays created by a class studying the Holocaust. If you'd like to send your comments, please contact the instructor, Jan Haswell Oskar Schindler: The Man and the Hero by April N. Aberly The purpose of this paper is to shed a different kind of light on who and how we consider a hero.