Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum #90250, courtesy of NARA.
Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum #69136, courtesy of Israel Press Office.
The ITS collection includes hundreds of books like these -- called blockbücher -- that list the blocks, or buildings, where each concentration camp prisoner lived. In volume after volume, they record where prisoners were bunked or transferred and where they were sent for slave labor.
The time has gone very quickly here in Bad Arolsen – curious, because this is a really quiet German town. We’ve all spent our time actively exploring the ITS collections, meeting and speaking with ITS staff, and getting ready to report. This occurs tomorrow, then Thursday will be our last day with a final discussion, and we will then head in different directions. I go on to Buchenwald, where I will lecture to archives and museum staff and meet with the documents and photo archivists on Friday.
I want to say something about whether the ITS archive is a Holocaust archive or not. It is and it isn’t, but I’ve been in some sharp discussions today with colleagues who say it is not. Theirs is a curiously truncated view of the Holocaust – or an expansive view of the archives as a window into 1940s Europe. Let me say that my view is that the ITS archive is extremely relevant for Holocaust study in two ways: first, it captures in documents the experiences of the many scores of thousands who at Auschwitz and elsewhere were selected for slave labor and entered into the Nazi concentration camp system; second, there are trace elements in the camp records of what happened to the family and relatives of those who were sent to be exploited and worked to death. In each camp, new prisoners were asked who and where their parents were. Often the answers were general or vague, but these records are not yet tapped. Such names are not even in the 17.5 million names in the ITS central names register.
Some colleagues desire in the best sense to stress that the bulk of the collection is not about the Holocaust or about European Jews. They point out correctly that the majority of the prisoners in the Nazi camp system were non-Jews, a variety of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, French, Dutch, Belgians, Danish, and many others, and a majority of the displaced persons were also non-Jews. This is an archive then that documents the coerced movement and forced exploitation of a large share of the European population, not just the targeted groups of the Holocaust. It is also an archive that focuses on the apparatuses of persecution, from Gestapo surveillance and imprisonment practices before the war to Nazi terror and recruitment of prisoners into complicity and the terrorization and dehumanization of prisoners thereafter.
Today, I wrapped up a few items in my own research. I focused in particular on the youngest three boys, looking for clues and insights again in the records for where they were sheltered in the camp and by whom. Idele Henechowicz, whom I have mentioned earlier, was sent out to Bergen-Belsen and liberated there. He was not yet three years old at liberation. Stefan Jerzy Zweig and Josef Schleifstein (Janek Szlajfsztajn) were in Buchenwald with their fathers but appear to have been specially helped by elements of the Communist-led underground. They were each four years old at liberation. During late September 1944, Stefan Jerzy Zweig was protected against transport to Auschwitz by being shot up in the hospital with typhus vaccine to spike a fever and was removed from the transport list. Another boy was sent instead. Stefan was thereafter moved about in hiding in the camp, watched over by underground activists. Janek Szlajfsztajn, who arrived in mid-January 1945, may have been sheltered with his father for a time but he was also listed as an inhabitant of children’s block 66 with perhaps 900-1000 other boys. These young boys are still alive and well, mature men today in their mid 60s.
I also focused on a group of teenage boys from Lodz, who in early fall 1944 had contiguous numbers at Auschwitz and in late January 1945 were in Buchenwald. These were among the first inhabitants of the children’s block 66, where they remained until liberation. Finally, I read through changes in the block lists at Buchenwald during early 1945. Block transfers made the camp a more kinetic place than I imagined, and prisoners came and went in significant numbers in block 66 in the winter of 1945. That is, the block not only grew in numbers but also changed in composition. I also looked for what I could find on Gustav Schiller, the deputy block elder of the barrack, who was a mentor to many of the boys, and a tough, uncompromising figure. He had been in Buchenwald since 1940, and was a brick mason tied to the underground and probably a former Polish Communist. Many boys I’ve interviewed talk about “Red Gustav,” as does Elie Wiesel in Night.
Tomorrow I’m talking on “Moving from Genealogy to Social History: Doing Social History inside the Concentration Camps.” I will explain to staff and press how social history that focuses on groups differs from genealogy, which focuses on individuals and families, but these different disciplines draw on remarkably common kinds of records. I will talk about immigration history as a form of social history. I will then explore how the records in the concentration camp section resembled records we use in immigration history and how, if bundled and linked appropriately, they can be used to get at the social history of the camps. I will show the audience examples of transport records that carry information similar to turn-of-the-century ship manifests carrying immigrants to the New World, and examples of spatial records (what blocks or commandos the prisoners were placed in) that resemble census manuscript returns. I will show how samples of people from similar towns, or of similar background, or of people of specific categories, like children and youths, can be traced inside the camps and questions asked about whether these people were all alone or with and reliant on others, and whether they had space in such arrangements to exert agency and make their own narrow choices about adjustment and coping strategies in the effort to endure. I think the answer is yes, that even in the belly of the Nazi beast, amidst “the order of terror,” prisoners remained human to an extent, banded with limited others, and sought to hold on and survive.
Kenneth Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany
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