Young People and the Holocaust

An Interview with Helen Birenbaum,

Forum, 28 May 2001

I told myself: deportees were lying in a classroom just like this one. Sick, swollen from hunger, the living and the dead - together. That place had been a school once. Today these sit in this classroom learning and playing, and those other ones -- that had been a place for finishing people off, a place to die even before the resettlement began. All of a sudden, I felt the whole enormity of that horror, that longing for life and the impossibility of life as I faced their laughter and uproariousness. I thought that the other thing had been so enormous -- why should I be afraid of them? Who are they now? I started talking to the ones sitting in the first rows.

Forum: What were your first meetings with children and young people in Israel like, and when were you first invited to talk about your experiences? How did they react, what did they want, and what was the atmosphere of these meetings like?

Halina Birenbaum: My first meetings happened completely by chance. One did not talk about the Holocaust at that time in Israel. The predominant opinion then was that we had been cowards, that we hadn't fought to defend ourselves, and that these stories could destroy the fighting spirit among our young people. This subject was not touched on. But then, accidentally, my son's teacher in the third grade of elementary school found out that I had survived the Holocaust. She invited me to school. She said that there would only be one group of children from the third grade.

I did not yet know Hebrew well then, and I had never before spoken about my memories to a larger audience. I had indeed told my friends who I was, who my parents were, what I had been through... but never publicly. Yet the teacher invited me there, telling me not to be afraid and that she would help me. I thought that she would do the talking and I would only add a word or two, and then she would comment on it ...etc. But she gathered three groups of children together - the third, fourth and fifth grades. Small children crowded in because there wasn't enough room, they yelled and made a lot of noise. They had no idea what it was all about. Watching them screaming and frolicking, I felt that my story would never get through to them. This was such a different world, even the light was different - a brilliant blue sky full of sunshine. And back there, things had been gray and the sky gloomy. What was I really to tell them about, what it had been like there? Suddenly everything disappeared from before my eyes and I only felt fear. They were yelling and would not let me speak. The teacher told them I was a hero, but the more she praised me, the noisier they got. I thought that I would never get a chance to speak, and finally realized that no one was going to help me. So I pulled myself together, and swallowed that fear-later, I got a stomach ache. And I told myself: deportees were lying in a classroom just like this one. Sick, swollen from hunger, the living and the dead - together. That place had been a school once. Today these sit in this classroom learning and playing, and those other ones -- that had been a place for finishing people off, a place to die even before the resettlement began. All of a sudden, I felt the whole enormity of that horror, that longing for life and the impossibility of life as I faced their laughter and uproariousness. I thought that the other thing had been so enormous -- why should I be afraid of them? Who are they now? I started talking to the ones sitting in the first rows. I told them: I am no hero, I was a child just like you are, maybe even younger then you are now, when it all started, and I just wanted to tell you how I had managed to survive. And then suddenly there must have been something in me, something sublime, some emotion, something profound, because these children noticed something in my eyes, in my face. And this first row fell silent and the other children did not know what had happened, so they became quiet too. And suddenly I began to talk to them as if I was facing a single person. How they listened! Sometimes I didn't know a Hebrew word and they would tell me what to say. They were simply there with me. When the bell rang for recess, no one wanted to get up. No one wanted to go outside.

For the first time in my life, I was telling my story to children. It was they who taught me how to talk about it. They listened with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks. The way that they were together with me, opened me up. I was talking about it in such a way, I think, as I had never done before. The next day, they called me and asked me to speak to the whole school. Everybody listened to me. Afterwards, they told me that even first-graders could have listened to me because I had talked about it in such a human way. But there were also some teachers who complained: The way you talk about these things, these children will not be able to sleep at night. They will be terrified, they'll become neurotic! Yet I felt that I had got so close to them, and they had become so involved in my recollections, that it had been fine. On the other hand, I felt ashamed and humiliated. Perhaps I was really doing them some harm, and that it was shameful to tell my story. Perhaps I would create complexes in the children- I could not cope with that.

And were there any complexes? How did they react?

No complexes. Many years later, I met these children when they were already grown up, in the army. One day, I met some of them at an airport, and they told me, Halina, we'll never forget the things you told us. And all of a sudden it became so human, that all shame disappeared. Their questions - Why didn't you defend yourselves? Why didn't you do something? -- were no longer addressed to me. In the press in those days, you could read all the time about how our young people did not want to hear about it, and that they shouldn't be told about it. But the children didn't want to let me out of the classroom, saying Tell us more and more. And so it has gone on until today. A few days ago, there was a group of sixty high school seniors at Auschwitz. I talked to them for three hours. The longer I spoke, the more they concentrated on what I was saying, and the more interested they were and the closer they were to the things I was talking about. They told me that it had sometimes seemed to them that humanity had been killed in Auschwitz, but after my story they understood that humanity can never be killed.

Didn't this make them hate the Germans? The perpetrators?

No. They asked me whether I felt hatred and the desire for revenge. I told them that I didn't. I was asked (by Poles and by Germans) How is it that you talk about such difficult problems, about such suffering, and yet still have such a kindly smile, such kindness? Don't you wish you could take revenge? Don't you feel hatred? I said, No, I don't feel hatred. I feel pain that such things happened. I miss those who were taken from me, but I could not watch any defenseless person suffer anything like what I went through. I have always identified with the side that suffers.

You accompany groups of young people from Israel to Poland. To Auscbhwitz, to the Museum and to other places. How do they react? They are often so tense, that they come here with a fairly strange attitude. What happens afterwards? What is the result? Do they want to learn more? Do they want contact with people?

First of all, they used to not want to know about what had happened. The fact that they are finally coming here is already great progress. They want to come and see, to find out about things. Further contacts emerge in spite of everything. There was a Polish guide, a Polish driver, and he taught them a song, and then he sang a Hebrew song. Relations formed spontaneously. The last group I came with had such a kind, friendly driver! As we traveled together, he took the time to read my book. I was reading another Hebrew book and managed to tell him about it. On the road, I translated from Hebrew into Polish and from Polish into Hebrew, and I explained to them what they didn't understand. They knew a lot about anti-Semitism and very little about the help offered to Jews by Poles. Towards the end of our stay, our guide, a young Jewish man from Morocco, very well educated and interested in these matters, but not knowing them from his own experience, said, Tell this man, the driver, that we would like to say farewell to him as a very patient and excellent driver. We thank him for his patience, for having heard us out and for being such a wonderful man.” And this was after they had been taught that they would be under special protection because each one of us could be attacked or killed at any moment, and that if anything happens the exit is over there and that we are to escape that way, and here are the phone numbers, etc.

And in the meantime we went to Zakopane. Pretty Polish girls were walking past (our boys are quite handsome, too), and one of them came up to us, and then another one: Why don't we take a picture together. We took a raft trip down the Dunajec. There was a highlander there who started to joke with one of the girls, and they all laughed, and I translated, and it was great... But they did not know about everything. Especially this last group. There were moments when they said Auschwitz was just a museum, that it didn't make any impression on them, it didn't tell them anything. They had told that it was so awful, so terrible, and they couldn't see it. That was before I told them my story. And then Father Piotr from the Center for Dialogue invited us all for a free dinner. And after all these stories that the Poles are this or that, they found themselves in a Catholic home where a cross was hanging, and they are welcomed so warmly and had such a wonderful dinner. The priest said that whoever shares food shares much more. He said that the things that had been most important for me, Halina, when I was a prisoner here, should also be the most important things for them-that was the sense of our encounter. It was so beautiful, that they would never forget it. And they haven't.

But Auschwitz is too much of a museum for them. Those barracks, that hair. It's like a museum. I ask them What do you expect? These same barracks were here, but there was electric current in the barbed wire, and the lights were turned on, and there were machine guns sticking out of the guard towers. And there was horror. And the awareness that you could never go back outside through that gate. And there was the smoke coming out of the chimney and the stench of burning human flesh. Do you want that, too? That can't be shown to you! You have to understand that, you have to imagine it. Besides, to whom are you complaining? Right after the war, no one was interested in this. People came here -- somebody needed a brick, somebody else a wooden plank, so they came and took it. Then the first Polish prisoners, like Kowalczyk, Barański, or Albin from Warsaw came, and they started collecting all the relics. They began demanding that the state should watch over and protect it. They organized the library. I learnt this from them, and I read books about it. And you never even visited this place for fifty years. So what are you complaining about, and to whom?

Later on we were in Majdanek. We went into the gas chamber and I told them how I had arrived there, how I had spent the whole night there when they ran out of gas. That stunned them, because I recounted it in great detail. Then the deputy director of the Museum, Anna Wiśniewska, walked in and hugged and kissed me. A few moments later, two teachers and some students from a high school that I had visited in Lublin the previous year joined us. When they came in, we embraced and they took pictures of me. The young people from Israel knew that there were security considerations, that they should be afraid of Poles -- and suddenly they saw a delegation coming from a school to bring me lovely flowers, and pictures being taken together. They saw that this was something completely different. Then they went into one of the barracks in Majdanek, saw a picture of me at eighteen, and heard my recorded voice. Then they said Halina, that's you talking! So I wasn't such an enemy, if they recorded my voice and preserved it on tape. I was telling how I went into the baths, and suddenly my mother was no longer with me, I was left alone. We lighted some candles near the crematorium and stood there in our white blouses. We all stood there singing in Hebrew. We sang the Hebrew anthem and we all kissed each other.

Then we went to Warsaw. The grave of Henryk Grynberg's father is in the Jewish cemetery there. The story about Henryk Grynberg, the film, has been shown in Poland twice, recently once again, and in Israel several times. The film is about how his father was killed. I read Grynberg's book many years ago. I think it was in 1967, when it was published by Czytelnik under the title The Jewish War. What I remember most is the story about his mother, who gets on a tram with her child and rides and rides because she has nowhere to go. Finally the curfew is approaching and the tram has to go to the tram barn. The last passenger takes her and her child home. He hides her and keeps her there. Then he helps her to get to the countryside where she finds work as a teacher, overcomes various difficulties, and survives. Why do they show only the murdered father, and not tell about that tram? I told them about it. It's a good thing I remembered it. And they accepted it. That was a group which wanted to accept it.

One more thing. The last time, I came with a very religious group. These were only girls, because in that tradition boys and girls stick to separate groups. They wore long skirts and were not allowed to wear trousers. I didn't want to stand out, so I wore a long skirt, too. Their guide was determined to tell stories about evil Poles. These seventeen-year-old girls were listening to him saying that children who had gone to school together, played each other, and been friends-that later, when the war came, they stopped speaking, denounced them to the Germans, and didn't want to help. I kept quiet at first. The guide really didn't want me to say anything to the girls. But one of them stood up and said, I don't believe it. I think that if I had been friends with a Polish girl like that, she wouldn't have denounced me. It turns out that there are some things you cannot hammer into people's heads. With some, you can, but not with everybody. Later, a problem came up: should they doubt the existence of God bear great resentment towards Him? How could He have allowed something like that to happen? This guide was very religious (he was also an inspector of religious schools). He said that they were free to have such doubts and had the right to discuss them . But he didn't explain anything to them. I explained. I am different. I believe more in people than in the things people believe. I said something like this: If you believe, then the Holocaust should not shake your faith, first of all because the Germans wanted to kill the spirit. If they succeeded, that would be a victory for them. If you have faith, then it is your treasure, it is in your hearts and nobody can destroy it because it is in you. Suffering, sickness, accidents -- all this exists. But if you blame God, then you cannot believe. And if you have faith, it is within you. Not because somebody will reward you or punished you, but simply because you believe and have something that you can lean on. Something that fills you. Something profound. I also told them that I had wandered far from all traditions and religion, because I was ten when the war started and thirteen when I got to Auschwitz. From the time I was thirteen until I was fifteen, I breathed the stench of burning people. I saw the people when they were still alive, I saw the fire burning, and I sorted clothes that were still warm from being taken off, and I was thinking to myself then, Aside from all this evil, what is left of the things my parents believed in? This made a big impression on them.

We went to Leżajsk with this religious group. The grave of the tzaddiq Eli Melech is there. He differed in his faith from everyone else. The difference concerned poor Jews, who were not then admitted to the prayer house in those days because they did not have the conditions for learning the Torah. And if they did not know the Torah, they were not worthy to stand next to it and pray. Rabbi Eli Melech said that it is enough to love life, to take joy in one's life. To be happy and sing to the glory of life. That suffices for entering the prayer house and praying.

His walled grave, in fact the sort of little house that the Jews call a tent, is in Leżajsk. The girls and I went inside together. They had guitars. They formed a circle around the gravestone, singing and dancing around it, and they took me into their circle. I started to cry. Now, talking about it, I am crying too. I suppressed my tears as I danced with them. Later on, in the bus, one of them came up to me (they had taken a liking to me) and asked, Halina why were you crying when we were dancing? I replied, You know, I would like to tell you -- not only you, but everyone. And when the guide finally agreed to give me the microphone (he was afraid I would say something he wouldn't approve of), I said, Listen, my grandparents and my parents were like you, very religious, and they believed in all these things you believe in and they kept the traditions. I left that behind. And it seemed to me that I knew everything already, and that I had learned everything through Auschwitz - more particularly, in Auschwitz, and later. Now, when you were dancing, I felt that I left something behind, and that you have something that I have lost. It hurt, a lot. That's why I cried. And that's true. Because I don't have it any more. And that is some sort of sign. It belonged to my grandparents, to my parents, but not to me. In me, there is Auschwitz. Back then, the trains deprived me of what those girls have today.

After that, we went to Treblinka, and finally to Starachowice. The family of one of the girls came from Starachowice. We went to the house they used to live in and there was such poverty there... We went into one of the flats, the one that the girl's family had occupied. I went in first because I speak Polish... A very old woman, completely toothless, answered the door. I hugged her and told her as warmly as I could that my name was Halina, and that there was a girl with us whose parents were born there. This poor old woman remembered a Jewish man named Szymon, who loved her very much once. She had been too young to marry him. Szymon was even prepared to convert for her sake, but she couldn't marry him. And she started reminiscing about her first love. She was moved, and invited us inside .We went in. They were terribly poor. Her son was sitting there. He looked sickly and miserable, and one could sense a great loneliness in both of them. I approached him with so much friendliness and sincere warmth that he pleaded, Don't go away, stay with us. The girls felt this special atmosphere and were caught up in it. We were really together.

Then we went to Zakopane and went rafting on the Dunajec and the girls fell into the tourist trance. Afterwards, we set off for Treblinka. We got there, looked around, and did what we usually did during each visit. We had a discussion. Again, somehow, they could identify with it. Through me, they understood something, but it did not really get through to them. And Treblinka was the nightmare of my life. When we were in the Warsaw ghetto, that was the place that was waiting for us all. Everybody went there. I somehow managed to avoid it: one more day, one more month, one more week, one more. Then I was there, with those girls. The silence, the green grass. They could not identify! I felt that everything was boiling inside of me. I stood on the railway tracks and asked the guide if he would let me say something. He agreed. I told them what I felt. I said it with tears. I felt and said at that moment that I would give up everything, everything that I had at home in Israel, everything that was there now, everything that I had built there, that I had created and embellished there, everything that I remembered and that hurt me, or brought me joy-I would give it all up if I could be left alone in peace there, once and for all, with those ashes. And as I was saying this, I stood on the railway tracks, no longer looking at them. I told them, Don't try to share this feeling with me, don't try to join me. They could not feel it, they could not identify with it. Don't try, because I am not connected with myself, I'm disconnected, and you certainly won't connect with what's inside of me. That's what I told them. The only thing I want is for all of you to leave me in peace. Take what I have, take what's at home in Israel, and leave me here with those ashes. That's all. Everyone I loved is here, except my mother, who died in Majdanek, and my brother and his wife, who died in Auschwitz. My father is there, my uncles, my grandparents, my friends with whom we used to daydream about what it would be like after the war. My teachers, who used to teach me, and all the best and most famous people from Warsaw, and all the worst and most wicked ones are here, these are their ashes and I would want to stay here. And in this you cannot join me, because this is mine. This is a part of me. They all cried. And I told them one more thing: I'm going to read something about my father to you. I talk least of all about my father. I was most of all attached to my mother -- a little girl with her mommy. With my father, somehow, not so much... I have a long poem about my father that I never translated into Polish. My father liked to read poetry very much, but I didn't understand it because I was still very small. I remember only his emotion, his elation -- I will always remember his elation. He prayed. I never understood those Hebrew prayers, but the way they fascinated and moved him remains alive in me. Later, when we were already in the ghetto and so many people were swollen with hunger and dying in the streets, I got tickets to the theatre for the operetta The Czardas Princess, which they were putting on in the Femina theatre, in the Leszno quarter of the ghetto. My older brother, who was a student of medicine, brought the tickets for this performance from the hospital. My father never forgave me for going: How can you go to the theatre when people are dying in the streets?

My father loved through poetry, through prayers. My mother loved through peace, through courage, through accepting what life brings. Both of them perished. But they are alive through me. And they will live through you, I added, although it is not in the poem. They really got involved in my story. Only then they did they really get involved in Treblinka, in the Holocaust. They will never forget it now. I felt that I had done something powerful. I know that I was very moved. I could have hidden my emotions, I could have gone off and cried it all out in a corner, but I simply and deliberately -- maybe it wasn't right on my part--wanted to pass something on to them, so that it would finally get through to them and so that they would really go through that emotional experience. At that very moment, Father Piotr called me as if he were my guardian angel. A Catholic priest! And I told him, Listen, I'm in Treblinka now, so it's like I don't exist at all. Later, I called my younger son and told him, Do you know what, I feel like I would like to just lie down here and never come back. How I want you all to come here and be with me one day! Only then would I really feel sure that I had been through all this, if you could just stand here beside me, without saying anything, just be here with me in this place where it all happened, where everything was taken away from me. And that younger son of mine said, Mom, this will all happen, I promise you. I said the same thing to my husband and he replied, If you ever tell me anything like that again, I'll forbid you to go to Poland.

Were you able to meet with the Germans after what you had been through? Wasn't that the most difficult thing?

Yes, in my first meeting with Germans I wanted revenge above all, by telling them what I had been through. I'll open up and let them get a whiff of what it was like. That was my dream. Ever since they pushed me onto that train. I had four such train rides in my life. The first one was the train from Warsaw to Majdanek, where I became a thirteen-year-old prisoner, and my mother taught me to say I was seventeen. The second train was the one to Auschwitz, after spending the night in the gas chamber when they ran out of gas, and on that train we almost suffocated. The third train was the one I took after two years in Auschwitz, after the Death March, when we were loaded onto open cars in freezing temperatures. The air was so cold it cut like a knife. Finally, the fourth train from Ravensbrück to Neustadtgleiwe - a passenger train, a real human train that was even warm because it had heaters. Through the windows, I could see the beautiful German landscape, pretty little houses. I was fifteen then. My hand had been shot through and was paralyzed. I thought to myself: So this is where they came from and destroyed all we had and burnt everything we owned. This is where their wives and their children sleep. What do they know about all this? Oh God, I thought, if I survive, I want to come to their pretty little houses and tell them all about it. It happened in 1989. My book Hope Dies Last was published in Germany, a film was made in Israel, and I was invited to Germany. I was going to bring along the ghosts of their past. I intended to tell them about their own history, to teach them that history. Would they be willing to listen? Well, I guess they were, because they even paid my travel expenses, so maybe they did want to listen. Yet I still thought: I'm going to tell them! Let them feel it!

I arrived in Berlin. I was greeted by a young man called Fritz Miller from the Evangelical association of young workers. He gave me one red rose and invited me to his home. With him was a young girl who spoke Polish. She had learned Polish. I walked into the apartment and saw a big picture of Korczak. That made me feel a bit at home. Later, I was supposed to spend the night at this girl's place. In a German home. In a German bed. She said to me, Here is the wardrobe you can use. I was to hang my clothes in a German wardrobe, my clothes, which in Auschwitz had been so, so... Did I have the right?

Later on, they showed the film in the big Arsenal cinema in Berlin. I was seeing my home, my children, my son, who writes many lyrics for songs, and my rooms filled with the gold and platinum records he has made. And I was the one who was not supposed to exist. Here was my home being shown in Berlin, and no one was shouting Raus! at me or demanding that I show an ausweis to prove that I have the right to live. Germans were sitting there looking at my home, sitting there listening to my son's songs. I cried like I had never before cried in my life. Only then did the war end for me, there in Berlin. The lights came on. I thought, All my revenge is finished.

Before that, in the Martin Luther Church, that Hitler had wanted to rename after himself, I read one of my short stories in Polish, A Strange Night in May. I was describing how it was pouring down rain in Israel when the rain suddenly took me back to Auschwitz. We were standing in the rain, and they ordered us to kneel in the mud while holding up two bricks. People were falling into the mud and smoke was coming out of the chimney. Then I was back in Israel on a rainy night in May (it doesn't rain in Israel in May). I read it in Polish and they were crying. They understood it even though they didn't understand it. And then a woman came up to me and said that she wanted to confess something. She said, I had a father whom I loved like you loved your mother. My father was shot by the partisans and buried in a common grave. Not long ago this grave was discovered, and in it was that diary that he wrote, just as you write. I did not say anything to her. She was looking for consolation from me. I mentioned this in the cinema when the lights were turned on after the showing of the film about me. I said, A woman walked up to me, who had loved her father like I loved my mother. He had been killed. In those days, I prayed for him to be killed, because if he hadn't been killed, we would all have been killed and the whole world would have ceased to exist! And I was supposed to console her? That's what war does. We are all human. Everyone was crying. I said, Now we are all crying together, but that is already something completely different. I no longer felt that I should seek revenge. We just cried. I apologized to them for those tears. That was my first meeting with Germans.

What else would you like to say to young people, especially young people from the city of Oświęcim?

I was recently in a school in Brzeszcze near Oświęcim. This was an elementary school and a junior high school. They were wonderful. They listened and listened, and then there were a lot of questions. Usually few questions or none are asked at such meetings, but here there were suddenly so many questions. At the end, one girl asked, And what would you like to wish us after all this? I replied, I would like to wish you to be able to love and appreciate life when it gets difficult and when things are not working out for you, even though you had wished so hard for them to work out. I hope, of course, that everything turns out well for you, but it can't always be that way, so I wish you to be able to love and appreciate what you have, even when things go wrong, and always to believe that, one day, it will all work out.

Thank you for the interview and for the wishes.

Halina Birenbaum - former prisoner of the Majdanek and Auschwitz concentration camps, writer, now lives in Isreal.