Horror and Hope: Studying the Holocaust

Bad Arolsen Journal

June 22, 2008

Today we took a day off from work in the ITS archive and traveled north to Bergen-Belsen, former Nazi concentration camp site, where a new museum opened this past fall. We were greeted and introduced to the museum, then given an overview of the site. After walking around the now-barren area viewing the memorials, we returned to explore the very good and substantial exhibition inside the nicely designed, modernist cement museum.

The museum depicted the concentration camp as a growing, changing place, which at various times held Soviet prisoners of war, exchange prisoners, Italian prisoners of war, Polish uprising prisoners, and then thousands and thousands of women, men, and children who were evacuated from camps to the east—including Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, and others—and were dumped in this crowded, terrible place. It is said that the camp site holds 50,000 bodies buried in mass graves.

The exhibition also had an additional portion devoted to memorializing the "DP" (Displaced Persons) camp that arose on a site nearby where many Jewish survivors lived for a time in the post-war period, emphasizing the “return to life,” the rebirth of spirit and society in the shadow of the Holocaust. The museum was silent so far as I saw on the relationship between the camp and the surrounding German society.

I spent a lot of time looking for images of a kinderheim (children’s home) that came to exist in the last part of the war in a section of Belsen. It was presided over by three medical/nurse figures among the prisoners, and they were responsible for saving the lives of 90 children. While typhus ravaged the camp in the winter months of 1945, killing off Anne Frank and her sister Margot Frank, in this separate barrack the children had access to occasional milk and salamis and were reasonably cared for. Only one child, I believe, was lost to typhus. I know of the home because several boys from Piotrkow, near Lodz, who were brought to Buchenwald in December 1944, were in turn sent to Belsen in January 1945, ostensibly to die. This event had a marked effect on prisoner society inside Buchenwald. But at Belsen they were taken to this kinderheim, initially established to care for the Dutch Jewish “diamond” children, and they were cared for by Ada Bimko, Luba Tryszynska, and Herminie Katz, the three principal female figures. Luba was later dubbed “The Angel of Belsen” and honored by the Dutch government.

I found several images taken by a British soldier named Oakes on April 20, five days after liberation, of the children in the home—looking healthy and happy in their new freedom. A British film taken the same day that is in the Imperial War Museum in London, and which is shown as part of the exhibition, clearly shows the children lined up at a barbed wire fence, standing with Luba. I looked for the youngest child at Buchenwald, Idele Henechowicz, who—born in June 1942—had been two and a half years old when he entered Buchenwald and was registered as a prisoner. He was still not yet three when he was liberated with the other children by the British soldiers. A memoir sold in the Bergen-Belsen museum bookstore, by one of the former Dutch Jewish diamond children, Hetty Werkendam Verolme, recalls Idele, who was much attached to teenager Hetty, running, bringing up the rear, as all the children ran to meet their British liberators. Most of these children afterward were returned to Holland or, in the case of the Polish Jews, taken to Switzerland. Little Idele was adopted in Finland, studied in England, and today lives in western Canada and speaks about his experience to schoolchildren.

Kenneth Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany

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