Holocaust Remembrance, Part One
Apr. 24th, 2020 12:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ndrosenMidday Thursday, I watched and listened to a an hour dedicated to Holocaust remembrance; after an introduction by Andrei Iancu, the director of the USPTO, we heard Wendy Doernberg, herself the granddaughter of a survivor, interview Dr. Steven Fenves, a survivor of the camps. He was born in Yugoslavia, to Hungarian-speaking Jewish parents; he spoke Serbian in school, and learned German from his German-speaking governess.
After the Hungarians (German allies) invaded, his father lost his job at a newspaper; his mother was an artist, doing both commercial and fine art. For a while, with no income, they lived by selling off possessions, including Steven’s prized stamp collection; then they were ordered out of their apartment and into the ghetto, and as they left, there was a person on each step of the staircase, spitting them as they went, and waiting to plunder their apartment. One of these was his mother’s former cook, who saved the cookbook, his mother’s diary, some prints, and a chest of drawers with his mother’s artwork; she returned these to the Fenves survivors in 1945, and they gave them to her in 1947, when they departed Yugoslavia again; in the 1960s, the loyal cook got them to the family in Chicago.
On July 27, 1944, the mother and children were packed into boxcars, and sent on a hellish train journey to Auschwitz, the father having been deported several weeks earlier. The people were packed in the train for days, and the latrine bucket soon overflowed.
An SS man sent Steven to one side; although he did not know it at the time, being sent to the other side would have been immediately fatal. The Germans used German criminals, sent from jails to Auschwitz, as Kapos to tyrannize over the prisoners. Later they set “politicals”, mostly Poles, over the Jews. Steven didn’t speak Polish, but he knew another Slavic language, as well as Hungarian and German, so he volunteered to be an interpreter, and lived. There was an underground, and Steven was part of it. He met his sister; his mother had died, and his sister was to be sent elsewhere, so he liquidated his assets (acquired by black market dealings), to buy her a sweater.
The underground smuggled him out by getting him sent on a train going elsewhere; first the adults drilled him on how to respond to questions he was likely to be asked. The train journey was not as bad as the trip to Auschwitz; at least the prisoners were allowed out once a day when the train stopped, to relieve themselves and stretch their legs. They arrived at a German village, where there was a subcamp of Buchenwald.
To be continued.
After the Hungarians (German allies) invaded, his father lost his job at a newspaper; his mother was an artist, doing both commercial and fine art. For a while, with no income, they lived by selling off possessions, including Steven’s prized stamp collection; then they were ordered out of their apartment and into the ghetto, and as they left, there was a person on each step of the staircase, spitting them as they went, and waiting to plunder their apartment. One of these was his mother’s former cook, who saved the cookbook, his mother’s diary, some prints, and a chest of drawers with his mother’s artwork; she returned these to the Fenves survivors in 1945, and they gave them to her in 1947, when they departed Yugoslavia again; in the 1960s, the loyal cook got them to the family in Chicago.
On July 27, 1944, the mother and children were packed into boxcars, and sent on a hellish train journey to Auschwitz, the father having been deported several weeks earlier. The people were packed in the train for days, and the latrine bucket soon overflowed.
An SS man sent Steven to one side; although he did not know it at the time, being sent to the other side would have been immediately fatal. The Germans used German criminals, sent from jails to Auschwitz, as Kapos to tyrannize over the prisoners. Later they set “politicals”, mostly Poles, over the Jews. Steven didn’t speak Polish, but he knew another Slavic language, as well as Hungarian and German, so he volunteered to be an interpreter, and lived. There was an underground, and Steven was part of it. He met his sister; his mother had died, and his sister was to be sent elsewhere, so he liquidated his assets (acquired by black market dealings), to buy her a sweater.
The underground smuggled him out by getting him sent on a train going elsewhere; first the adults drilled him on how to respond to questions he was likely to be asked. The train journey was not as bad as the trip to Auschwitz; at least the prisoners were allowed out once a day when the train stopped, to relieve themselves and stretch their legs. They arrived at a German village, where there was a subcamp of Buchenwald.
To be continued.
