creative writing on concentration camps

Winning essays from the Eva Lassman Memorial Creative Writing Contest

Easton benson, university high school, elizabeth palmer, sacajawea middle school.

creative writing on concentration camps

Becca Jacobson, Lewis and Clark High School

Bryn hines, lewis and clark high school, shilo stuart, freeman middle school, ellie huffmanparent, homeschooled.

Though being a child on the Kindertransport was difficult, I got through. It hurts me so much when I think about how Hitler could be so horrible, hurting and killing so many innocent people just because they were different than him. The Holocaust is never going to be forgotten. I’m thankful for the people that helped the Jews including the sponsors for the Kindertransport, the people that helped hide the Jews, and all the people that died trying to aid us.

Salmon and farmers are on the same side

In the hottest year ever recorded, another wheat harvest is wrapping up.

Chronicles of Love & Resentment by Eric Gans

creative writing on concentration camps

How to Write about the Holocaust

creative writing on concentration camps

No. 410: Saturday, June 25th, 2011

As in many other things, not being an “authority” on the Holocaust makes it easier for me to formulate some basic ideas about it than for those whose lives and careers are directly dependent on it. I recently read Alvin Rosenfeld’s The End of the Holocaust (Indiana UP 2011), which is mostly devoted to noting the failures of Western culture’s memory of the Holocaust. While I sympathize with most of the views the author expresses, and certainly share his concluding apprehension concerning those in Iran and elsewhere who are happily dreaming of annihilating Israel in a “second Holocaust,” I would like to suggest a different, less polemical perspective on the subject.

The Holocaust provides an extreme version of the paradoxes that arise whenever we attempt to react as individuals to any real-world event. To simply take the event as a given is to abdicate our human responsibility to assign meaning, yet to insist on finding for it a “personal” meaning is to make our own judgment the measure of social value. The Holocaust poses this paradox in a maximally urgent manner because while it presents a spectacle so morally repugnant that we feel obliged to invent a personal way of “testifying” to it, it is a thing of the past that all our acts of repentance and charity cannot redeem. Hence it arouses reactions of denial, minimization, focusing on minor “positive” elements, de-Judaizing, attacks on the “Holocaust industry,” etc., as ways of reducing it to more tolerable dimensions; and at the other extreme, it inspires the suicide of survivors who cannot bear the guilt of having been “chosen” over so many others, coupled with the sense of irredeemable violation that suggests one no longer deserves to live.

But the intensity and frequent moral inadequacy of these responses testifies to the fact that the Holocaust’s historical impact goes well beyond the realm of direct reactions and their exploitation in rhetoric and imagery. To take a controversial example, when “happy” stories of the Holocaust such as Schindler’s List are accused of emphasizing cases that are in fact statistically trivial, I think a point missed is that the “happy ending” reflects not in fact the story of the Holocaust itself but of what is hoped to be its place in history—as the source of a new sensitivity to oppression, including but not limited to the Jewish resolve that has sustained Israel. For the justification for Schindler’s List as “the story of the Holocaust” includes as well the postwar liberation of the European colonies and the Blacks in the American South. Here and in general, I find it more useful to judge such works in their overall historical context rather than as attempted revisions, or re-visions, of the Holocaust. For the real story of the Holocaust cannot be made into a meaningful fiction, since the vast majority of its characters, those whom we desperately wish to memorialize, were not actors at all, only victims.

My thesis has long been that reaction to the Holocaust lies at the origin of the whole victimary trend of modern thought, in both what I consider its praiseworthy accomplishments and those I admire less—although like nearly all political actions ( except those that can be defined in terms of the Nazi-Jew paradigm of the Holocaust, which is why this very designation is, unsurprisingly, paradoxical) these are subject to the Hayekian principle that the “market” is smarter than its participants, so that a policy that may strike me as unjustified may in fact turn out to have a salutary effect on, say, the achievement of racial equality.

On the level at which this thesis is situated, specific reactions to the Holocaust as a historical event are no longer at issue; the question becomes how to understand the overall movement of thought that we claim this event brought about. To answer those who contest this claim, we must define victimary thinking and show how its categories can be conceived as reactions to the Holocaust. The point of such a discussion is not to prove that those who have made use of victimary categories in political and social thought “had the Holocaust in mind,” nor is it useful to argue with someone who denies either the Holocaust’s reality or its significance. The burden would rather be on such a person to provide an equally coherent alternative model, and only at this point would argument become productive.

But in fact the very notion of victimary thinking has no equivalent in everyday discourse, and not surprisingly there really are no other universal explanatory models. Most intellectuals reject the very idea of “victimary thought” and see themselves rather as defending the oppressed against their oppressors. In contrast, those who accept the idea of the victimary and who are generally critical of the phenomenon it designates are not wont to seek justifications for it in history.

Victimary thinking may be defined without circularly referring to the Holocaust. It is the way of thinking for which any difference between ascriptive or “objective” groups that can be understood as imputing values of superiority and inferiority is absolutely condemned as immoral and inhuman. In this context “ascriptive” may be taken broadly to include sexual orientation and religion as well as the usual categories of race, gender, nationality, social class, etc.

Let me now outline, as I have done in a number of Chronicles (e.g., 90 , 287 , 337 , 380 , 385 ,  392 , 399 …) a skeleton history of postwar victimary thinking. In the first phase, which in the United States was the era of “Civil Rights,” the form of victimization that was condemned was de jure inequality, whose obvious parallel with the Nazi-Jew relationship was rarely stated and, I imagine, seldom thought. The point is not that the living memory of the Holocaust was instrumental in creating a sense of repugnance, but that the Holocaust was experienced historically as a demonstration of the evil of differential relationships on racial lines. No doubt the Holocaust itself took place at a moment of history in which a certain (notably anti-colonial) struggle had already begun and must be understood in part as a reaction to it, as a strong assertion of the validity of “racial superiority” at a moment when this notion, so unproblematic in the previous century, had begun to come under fire. But in the next turn of the dialectic, the horror of Nazism itself, even independently of the still little-mentioned specifics of the Final Solution, was sufficient to fuel what turned out to be successful struggles for racial equality and colonial liberation. This phase of history, whose last triumph was the demise of apartheid in South Africa in 1990-91, is to the extent that historical developments may be so considered, relatively unproblematic; today only a tiny fringe would find acceptable, let alone prefer, the racial/colonial hierarchies of an earlier era.

The “Jewish question” was relatively absent from the vision of Nazism that provided the impetus for these developments, which focused less on the six million than on the general horror of Nazi racism and tyranny. In this period the Jews, rather than insisting on their role as victims, tended rather to be ashamed of it; the question commonly asked of survivors was, “why didn’t you/they fight back?”

It was only in the second, mature phase of postmodernism that victimary thinking fully came into its own. At much the same time, the idea of “the Holocaust” acquired currency, along with the now-familiar images of piles of bodies and suitcases, emaciated prisoners, the Warsaw Ghetto in flames, “selection” on the Auschwitz ramp… as well as the iconic and much-abused figure of Anne Frank, to whom Rosenfeld devotes two full chapters of his book. In this second phase of victimary thinking, those who claimed to be or defend victims learned a new rhetoric of results . It was not enough to demand equal rights; to obtain full equality one had to be compensated for past ills, to be granted a “level playing field.” Victimary thinking has operated ever since with this expanded model, with which is associated a deconstructive theory of history. In this perspective, giving Blacks or women equal rights today cannot suffice to reverse not so much the direct results of past discrimination as the mind-set, indeed, the shared ontology of a world that affirms racial and gender superiority/inferiority. Although the domination of many areas of the university system, corporate hiring, etc., by such considerations has provided victimary groups with considerable financial and other advantages, victims are not expected to be satisfied simply to have acquired “rights” and advantages in the present. On the contrary, they are called as witnesses to the applicability of the Nazi-Jew model to human society in general. For from the beginning, the ethical and intellectual values of these societies have been complicit in the oppression of peripheral victims for the benefit of central authority.

The power of the Holocaust model is simple and absolute. If one wishes to claim, for example, that certain social roles are better fitted to men than women—or, say, that marriage should be restricted to that between a man and a woman—the implicit Nazi analogy renders these judgments as ugly as the caricatures in Der Stürmer . It is of great significance that anti-Jewish prejudice, unlike the standard racial variety, is based on the denial of what is generally an objective superiority— one that can be traced back to the Hebrews’ firstness as the inventors/discoverers of monotheism. The Nazi-Jew paradigm colors all other victimary oppositions with an undertone of envy. Whatever the value of the evidence that, say, Blacks are less intelligent on average than Whites, or women less gifted in the sciences than men, there is certainly no evidence that Jews are less intelligent or gifted than non-Jews— au contraire. If victimary groups are persecuted ultimately for their superiority, then no discrimination of any kind can be objectively justified. Hence the existence of statistical differences between groups with regard to success in any given endeavor (unless the victimary group actually does better, as with Blacks on basketball teams or women in college admissions) is considered prima facie evidence of discrimination.

At this point victimary thinking becomes problematic, for it incorporates two contradictory principles derived from the originary moral model. On the one hand, the firstness of the first user of the sign is not allowed to confer an advantage when it comes to distributing the products of the sparagmos; the exchange of signs, and of the things that are ritually distributed as a result of the exchange of signs, is in principle perfectly symmetrical. On the other hand, in more advanced societies the different roles are expected to be distributed according to the ability to perform them and not by victimary categories. The creation of such categories in the postwar era, however obviously necessary they may appear to us, is a radically new development that is best understood as the legacy of the Holocaust. It is in effect the extension of the Holocaust paradigm to the whole ensemble of social relations. Nothing like “affirmative action” had ever existed, even among persons with great sympathy for groups that are today considered victims and that in the past were simply thought of as deprived of equal rights, such as slaves in the South or women not given the vote. Needless to say, this new victimary consciousness has not done away with social hierarchy, but it has eliminated many selection criteria previously considered “objective,” such as aptitude examinations for civil service work, and spawned affirmative action programs of various kinds, not always in compensation for past prejudice.

Rosenfeld’s material offers confirmation of my assertion that results-oriented victimary thought is a product of the Holocaust, not merely in the broad sense that victimary thinkers make abundant and often reckless use of Holocaust analogies, but more specifically that the very outrageousness of the Holocaust metaphor is essential to creating and imposing the new victimary paradigm on human relations.

Let me take as an example a passage quoted by Rosenfeld from Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique , the key manifesto of American postwar feminism. This passage can serve us as a test case of “how to talk about the Holocaust,” since it lends itself admirably to Rosenfeld’s critique at the same time as its very enormity justifies my argument that the paradigm inaugurated by the Holocaust is at the heart of modern victimary thought.

[T]he women who “adjust” as housewives, who grow up wanting to be “just a housewife,” are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps—and the millions more who refused to believe that the concentration camps existed. In fact, there is an uncanny, uncomfortable insight into why a woman can so easily lose her sense of self as a housewife in certain psychological observations made of the behavior of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. In these settings, purposely contrived for the dehumanization of man [sic], the prisoners literally became “walking corpses.” Those who “adjusted” to the conditions of the camps surrendered their human identity and went almost indifferently to their deaths. Strangely enough, the conditions which destroyed the human identity of so many prisoners were not the torture and the brutality, but conditions similar to those which destroy the identity of the American housewife. . . .

It was said . . . that not the SS but the prisoners themselves became their own worst enemy. Because they could not bear to see their situation as it really was—because they denied the very reality of their problem, and finally “adjusted” to the camp itself as if it were the only reality—they were caught in the prison of their own minds. . . . All this seems terribly remote from the easy life of the American suburban housewife. But is [not] her house in reality a comfortable concentration camp? (48, quoting p. 305-07)

Here is Rosenfeld’s reaction to this passage:

“In reality,” her house is nothing of the sort, and a clear-thinking person knows that the comparison is a foolish one. . . . [W]hat we confront in Friedan’s book goes beyond merely hyperbolic thinking to something close to the shut-down of thought itself. For no one who thinks at all lucidly can possibly see a connection “in reality” between the situation of middle-class American housewives of the postwar period, no matter how bored they might be, and the wartime condition of inmates in the Nazi camps. (48)

In the paragraphs that follow, Rosenfeld attempts to explain Friedan’s use of this comparison, using ideas from Christopher Lasch and Tzvetan Todorov. But at bottom his “explanation” is simply a restatement of the facts. Rosenfeld alleges that “a politics of suffering and victimization has been developing within American society over the past several decades . . . whose proponents draw on the pervasive presence of Holocaust images in order to garner for themselves a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy in our society.” Well, yes, but explaining the use of victimary imagery by “a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy” is mere tautological wordplay.

But the basis for my remark that it is tautological is precisely my theoretical claim that it is truly the Holocaust that is the source of this rhetoric, which is not always as clearly derivative of its model as this particular example. And this means that calling it “rhetoric” and emphasizing as Rosenfeld does the “images” of the Holocaust in Friedan’s passage in fact obscures the real impact of the Holocaust on victimary thought. For these vocabulary elements need not be present in the text, and indeed, the course of victimary rhetoric has been to abandon the Nazi image, except to the extent it can be associated with the “West” and particularly with Israel. When Edward Said proposes “Orientalism” as the model for the West’s dismissive and ultimately oppressive attitude toward its “other,” the last thing he wants us to think of is the West’s oppression of its internal other, the Jews. In principle, at least, Rosenfeld should be happy with this development, as indeed he might be if it were not the flip side of Muslim-inspired neo-antisemitism that reviles Israel while reprinting Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion . But precisely, the filiation of victimary thought with the Holocaust is not one of images but of paradigms, and the paradigm of oppressor vs. oppressed race/social group/gender/etc., is far more durable and significant than images of stacked bodies and false shower rooms.

What we observe in Friedan is an early, and for today’s reader strikingly naïve, use of this paradigm. But let us note how she uses it, before the Berkeley uprising of 1965, before the campus/French revolt of 1968, at a time when “affirmative action” (which dates—dixit Wikipedia—from a JFK Executive Order in 1961) was in its infancy and “diversity,” which college presidents today cannot form two consecutive sentences on any subject without mentioning, was as yet unknown. Friedan cannot claim that her housewives suffer physically, nor even that they are mentally tortured by… whom exactly? The SS is mentioned only to be dismissed, since not even the most uncompromising feminist could find an analogy between these women’s poor husbands and the SS. The real point is that the prisoners themselves became their own worst enemy , that the housewives/prisoners internalize their oppression and adjust to it. Today such language might be accused of “blaming the victim”; it is made palatable only by the extreme nature of the overall model, which allows the assimilation of the housewives’ oppression to Nazism on the condition that it be a Nazism without Nazis.

For the fact that the women’s material conditions are at the antipodes of those of Auschwitz inmates, far from leading us to dismiss Friedan’s comparison as “the shut-down of thought itself,” is precisely meant to caution us against rejecting it. Adjustment is the real problem, and although in the housewives’ world no oppressor is indicated, it is the system of oppression that is at fault. The point of this analogy is that any acquiescence in an oppressive system is the virtual equivalent of accepting the role of the oppressed in the Nazi-Jew model, something that no self-respecting human being should react to with anything but outrage, even unto death. But as Adam Katz would point out, and as the partisans of victimary thinking prefer to ignore, this analogy is only useful to the extent that it is being offered in a social context where it is not valid, where it can have an impact on us precisely because we are not Nazis and are shocked by the accusation that our notion of normality is “really the same as” Auschwitz.

Although Friedan isn’t proposing here anything like “affirmative action,” she clearly shows us where the Holocaust paradigm is going. This is no longer Civil Rights language; it is the language of absolute oppression, a pre-philosophical form of deconstruction, for which any acceptation of differential status—such as adjustment to a preestablished gender role—is equivalent to assuming the zombie-like status of prisoners who go unresistingly to their deaths. This is, to use a word that would have a considerable fortune a few decades later, the state of abjection.

However tasteless its rhetoric, Friedan’s book was instrumental in kicking off a neo-feminism that fifty years later has led American women to attend college in considerably higher proportion and with considerably greater success than men, to run for president, and to enter and in some cases dominate formerly male-dominated professions. Thus in condemning Friedan’s rhetoric for its wild reference to the Holocaust, we risk failing to notice what the outcome of reaction to the Holocaust through the mediation of such rhetoric has really been, leading both to the creation of a more gender-equal world and to the problematization of all remaining areas of non-reciprocity, justifiable or not. It is possible to feel disgust with the assimilation of suburban housewives to Nazi prisoners and yet to understand that Friedan’s overall (and generally valid) point in encouraging suburban housewives to look beyond their current roles is an example of the historical power of the Holocaust to generate victimary thought, independently of Friedan’s or anyone else’s specific use of Holocaust metaphors or images.

To conclude with an example of the persistence of this kind of rhetoric nearly fifty years later, here is an extract from the acknowledgement section of a 2008 UCLA doctoral dissertation.

I am . . . compelled to acknowledge the existence of demeaning plantation politics at UCLA, which also significantly and consistently contributed to my UCLA experience. While I carry a tremendous amount of resentment regarding experiences that can best be described as a new millennium form of Jim Crow, I have also gained a tremendous amount of strength from surviving, overcoming and conquering the demon of racism and the racist demons that exist and operate at the University of California Los Angeles.

The Nazis have been replaced by slave-drivers, but the rhetoric makes the same unbridled use of a stigmatized relationship of oppression to condemn phenomena that the author feels no need to describe in any detail. No doubt this example is more of an expression of personal hurt and resentment than an attempt to make other Black students conscious of their oppression. But this only makes it a more convincing illustration of the persistence of a model that, whatever the imagery used here, has its source not in American slavery but in the Holocaust, which brought forth a victimary paradigm that continues to dominate the postmodern era over 65 years after the end of WWII.

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Read these searing quotes from an Auschwitz survivor's essay on life in the camp

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A still from a Soviet film documenting the liberation of Auschwitz.

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day — a day on which it's worth taking some time to actually understand what happened during the Nazi slaughter. One of the best ways to do that is to revisit the writing of Primo Levi,  a Jewish-Italian Auschwitz survivor and one of the camp's greatest and most insightful literary documentarians.

Of Levi's work, his essay "The Gray Zone" — from The Drowned and the Saved , his final book before his 1987 suicide — really stands out. It's remarkable both for its unforgettable depiction of the routine brutality of life in Auschwitz and for its penetrating psychological analysis of the camp's inner workings. Here are nine of the most insightful, terrifying, and powerful quotes from Levi's essay — ones that best exemplify the core of the piece.

1) Here's how Levi describes the experience of entering the camp:

Kicks and punches right away, often in the face; an orgy of orders screamed with true and simulated rage; complete nakedness after being stripped; the shaving off of all one's hair; the outfitting in rags.

2) For Levi, this spoke to an underlying purpose of the camps:

Remember that the concentration camp system even from its origins (which coincide with the rise to power of Nazism in Germany), had as its primary purpose shattering the adversaries' capacity to resist: for the camp management, the new arrival was by definition an adversary, whatever the label attached to him might be, and he must immediately be demolished to make sure that he did not become an example or a germ of organized resistance.

3) The camps didn't just break prisoners' will in order to prevent rebellion. They did so, Levi believes, as yet another form of cruel punishment for the crime of existing:

It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims: On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself, and this all the more when they are available, blank, and lacking a political and moral armature.

4) No group better exemplified the way camps degraded their victims than the Sonderkommando (Special Squad). These overwhelmingly Jewish prisoners were given enough to eat for some time, but their task was horrible:

With the duly vague definition, "Special Squad," the SS referred to the group of prisoners entrusted with running the crematoria. It was their task to maintain order among the new arrivals (often completely unaware of the destiny awaiting them) who were to be sent into the gas chambers, to extract the corpses from the chambers, to pull gold teeth from jaws, to cut women's hair, to sort and classify clothes, shoes, and the content of the luggage, to transport the bodies to the crematoria and oversee the operation of the ovens, to extract and eliminate the ashes. The Special Squad in Auschwitz numbered, depending on the moment, from seven hundred to one thousand active members. These Special Squads did not escape everyone else's fate. On the contrary, the SS exerted the greatest diligence to prevent any man who had been part of it from surviving and telling. Twelve squads succeeded each other for a few months, whereupon it was suppressed, each time with a different trick to head off possible resistance. As its initiation, the next squad burnt the corpses of its predecessors.

auschwitz glasses

Eyeglasses, clothing, footwear and other personal effects taken from the prisoners before they were taken to the gas chamber, were found after the liberation piled up in the six remaining warehouses at the camp. ( United States Holocaust Memorial Museum , courtesy of Philip Vock)

5) Why assign Jews these tasks? For Levi, the answers have to do with the design of the camps itself.

Conceiving and organizing the squads was National Socialism's most demonic crime. Behind the pragmatic aspect (to economize on able men, to impose on other others the most atrocious tasks)...the institution represented an attempt to shift onto others — specifically, the victims — the burden of guilt, so that they were deprived of even the solace of innocence.

6) Levi recalls a soccer game between the Special Squad and their SS guards:

Nothing of this kind ever took place, nor would it have been conceivable, with other categories of prisoners; but with them, with the "crematorium ravens," the SS could enter the field on an equal footing, or almost. Behind this armistice one hears satanic laughter: it is consummated, we have succeeded, you no longer are the other race, the anti-race, the prime enemy of the millennial Reich; you are no longer the people who reject idols. We have embraced you, corrupted you, dragged you to the bottom with us. You are like us, you proud people: dirtied with your own blood, as we are. You too, like us and like Cain, have killed the brother. Come, we can play together.

7) Levi's intent is not to place the camp's inmates and guards on the same moral plane, or even to judge the Special Squad members thrown into an awful situation:

I do not know, and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators or truth.

creative writing on concentration camps

"Survivor," a portrait of Primo Levi by Jewish artist Larry Rivers. The painting superimposes the image of another survivor on Levi's forehead. (Santi Visalli/Getty Images)

8) Instead, Levi is attempting to explain how systems of domination corrupt even their victims — and to remind people to challenge them:

The ascent of the privileged, not only in the Lager but in all human coexistence, is an anguishing but unfailing phenomenon: only in utopias is it absent. It is the duty of righteous men to make war on all undeserved privilege, but one must not forget that this is a war without end. Where power is exercised by few or only one against the many, privilege is born and proliferates, even against the will of the power itself.

9) The essay concludes with a stark reminder that while Nazism has been defeated, the psychological forces that enabled its rise are universal :

We too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility. Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all inside the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and close by the train is waiting.

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creative writing on concentration camps

A Letter to Olivia

Dear Olivia,

Last month I met your dad at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. He was in the audience when I gave a talk about my family’s experience during the Holocaust. It was the first time he heard an account by an actual survivor of that terrible chapter in the world’s history. Afterwards he came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “I am a young father and have a one-year-old daughter. Who will tell her your story when she grows up?” He then asked whether I would write a letter to you that you could read when you are old enough to understand the history and the lessons of the Holocaust that I shared that evening.

The Holocaust, as you may have learned in school by now, refers to the persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 to 1945, but there were millions of other victims too. I told the audience at Old Dominion University that I could not possibly tell the story of what happened to all six million people. That is a story better told by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. All I could do, I explained, was to tell the story of one small family. And that story multiplied millions of times over, I said, would give them an understanding of what the Holocaust was all about. It’s not a pretty story, dear Olivia, but one that is important to learn if we are ever to have a world where all people live in harmony.

My parents were born in Eastern Europe and came to the Netherlands—sometimes called Holland—to escape antisemitism and to seek greater economic opportunities. They were married in The Hague in December 1932, just as Adolf Hitler came to power in nearby Germany, bringing with him his Nazi racist ideology that especially targeted Jews. But in Holland where Jews had lived for hundreds of years, my parents felt secure, and in July 1936 they celebrated the birth of my sister Eva and in November 1938, the birth of my sister Leah. 

But then, Olivia, early in the morning on May 14, 1940, my parents listened to the radio and heard that the Dutch port city of Rotterdam had been bombed by German planes and a few minutes later they heard Queen Wilhelmina announce that Holland had surrendered. My parents knew the terrible restrictions that had been placed on Jews in Germany and in other countries that Germany had invaded, and they began to fear for their lives and the lives of my sisters. And indeed, within a matter of days Jews were forced to take a new middle name, Israel for men and Sara for women, so they could always be identified as Jews. They had to register all their property so it could more easily be taken from them. And they were even forbidden from using public transportation or going into public parks.

Early in 1941, my mom found out that she was pregnant again. Her doctor ordered her to have an abortion. But in reading the biblical story of Hannah, a woman who was desperate to have a child, my mother decided against terminating the pregnancy. Her doctor fired her as a patient, and as a result, I was born at home with the help of a nurse on November 23, 1941. By the time I was nine months old, in August 1942, Jews were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Like many other Jewish families and like the family of Anne Frank, whose diary you may have read, my parents decided that we should go into hiding. My sisters Eva and Leah were placed with a devout Catholic woman, and I was taken in by a neighbor of my parents, Annie Madna. My parents then went into hiding in a hospital, my father pretending to be a patient and my mother a nurse.

Annie Madna had had some bad run-ins with the Nazi occupiers and was afraid that her house might be searched and that I might be discovered. She therefore passed me on to her 27-year-old sister, Yorina. But after three weeks, Yorina too got scared because she had a neighbor who turned out to be a member of the Dutch Nazi Party. Annie then handed me over to her former husband, Tolé Madna, a man born in what was a Dutch colony, Indonesia. Tolé Madna now became my father and the three Madna children, Wil, Dewie, and Robby, my sisters and brother. And it was their Indonesian nanny, Mima Saïna, who became my mother. Mima came from a very poor background and could not read or write and did not speak Dutch, only the Indonesian language. But she had a heart of gold and cared for me as if I were her baby. I slept in her bed and she kept a knife under her pillow to fight off any Nazi who might try to get me.

The Madna family and Mima risked their lives by agreeing to hide me from the Nazis. They also had to share whatever food they had with me. Food was severely rationed, and every food item they bought required a coupon, and there were no coupons for me since I was in the home illegally. A few years ago, I met a woman in Holland who told me, to my surprise, that I used to drink her milk. She then explained that during the war years young children were given a small bottle of milk every day in school and that her mother had told her to save half the little bottle for the baby next door. I was that baby. You see, Olivia, even a young girl maybe eight or nine was encouraged to do whatever she could to save a human life!

The few memories I have of being with the Madna family are happy ones. I wasn’t allowed to leave the house or even go near a window for fear that someone might spot a strange white child in a family that was darkskinned. My only view of the outside world was what I could see through a mail slot in the front door. From time to time I had to hide in a closet because the house was being searched. But that wasn’t so bad because I played with the Christmas decorations that were stored there. What I remember most was Papa—that is what I called Tolé Madna for the rest of his life—playing the piano and Mima singing an Indonesian lullaby. My favorite private space was to sit in the kneehole of Papa’s desk. The only bad memory I have is of being very hungry which must have been the last winter of the war when one of the few things left to eat in Holland were ground up tulip bulbs. You may have seen pictures of Holland’s beautiful tulip fields, but I am sure you never imagined their bulbs could possibly be edible!

While I was with the Madna family my parents were discovered and taken from the hospital where they were hiding and sent to a series of concentration camps, first in Holland and then to Auschwitz in Poland where they were separated. My mom was sent on to a camp where she performed slave labor in an electronics factory. After that factory was bombed by the Allies who were fighting the Nazis, Mom was sent on what was later called a “death march” because so many of the prisoners died of starvation and disease or were shot along the way, to a series of other camps. Fortunately, she survived the death march and was liberated early in 1945 at the Danish border.

In August 1945, I was three-and-a-half years old and was finally reunited with my mother. But I had no memory of her and to me she was a complete stranger. All I remember of that first meeting, Olivia, is that I had been asleep and cranky and was carried into the living room and passed from lap to lap but refused to sit in my mother’s lap and kept pushing her away. But after a short while I came to understand that that strange woman was my mom who loved me dearly. 

Sadly, Olivia, my sisters did not survive the Holocaust. The husband of the woman who had agreed to hide them from the Nazis, reported his wife to the Nazis for hiding two Jewish children. His wife was sent to prison but was eventually freed. But my sisters were sent to the Auschwitz death camp where they were killed. Eva was only seven and Leah was only five. Altogether 1.5 million children were killed by the Nazis.

My dad too did not survive. After Auschwitz and several other concentration camps, he was taken to Ebensee, a camp located in one of the most beautiful spots in Austria—maybe your parents will take you to an old movie called The Sound of Music , which was filmed in that area, to see what it was like—where he worked in an abandoned underground salt mine assembling rockets for the German Army without ever being allowed to see daylight and almost without food. He survived long enough to be liberated by the US Army but was so weak that he passed away two months later and was buried in the concentration camp, which is now a huge cemetery.

The story of my family, dear Olivia, brought tears to the eyes of your dad and no doubt will make you sad. But I reminded your dad, and also want you to remember that even when there was so much evil, there were people willing to stand up and do what is right, like the family that saved my life. Annie, Yorina, Tolé, and Mima risked their lives to save a nine-month-old Jewish baby, making it possible many, many years later for that Jewish baby to become a doctor and eventually to become acquainted with your dad and to write this letter at his request.

I hope, dear Olivia, that you will never be confronted with the choice the family who saved me had to make. But there will be times when you may hear hateful words being said about people of a different religion or of a different race or who speak a different language. And I hope that you will then remember the story of my family and the terrible consequences when hate goes unanswered. Don’t ever go along with people who hate others and always look for ways to tell them what you learned from this letter. I hope you will share the letter with your friends and classmates. All of us working together can make sure something like the Holocaust never happens again.

I wish you all the best, dear Olivia! And please say hello for me to your mom and dad.

Alfred Münzer 

© 2019, Alfred Münzer. The text, images, and audio and video clips on this website are available for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal use only, or for fair use as defined in the United States copyright laws.

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Auschwitz liberation

Tales from Auschwitz: survivor stories

Tuesday 27 January is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Six survivors, some of whom will be returning to the site for the last time, tell Kate Connolly their stories

Irene Fogel Weiss, born in 1930 in Bótrágy, Czechoslovakia, now Batrad, Ukraine. She lives in Virginia, US. She will be returning to Auschwitz for the third time, as part of the US presidential delegation, along with her daughter, Lesley Weiss

We lived in Bótrágy, a very small, mostly poor town in Czechoslovakia with a population of approximately 1,000 mainly farming families, including about 10 Jewish families. The town was a typical low-income community with a tailor, a shoemaker, a grocery store, where people struggled to get by, but where everyone knew each other and there was easy communication between the neighbours, though that didn’t mean we were equal.

When I was eight years old Czechoslovakia broke apart and we became part of Hungary. That was when our problems started, because the Hungarians were allied with the Nazis. It was a difficult time for Jewish families, as suddenly the law no longer protected us and overnight we lost our civil rights. My father’s lumber business was confiscated and given to a non-Jew, and we received no compensation. Jewish children were thrown out of Hungarian schools, so right away we had no choice but to concentrate on hunkering down and trying not to bring attention to ourselves. We couldn’t ride the trains and we had to wear the yellow star. It was a free for all. With no law to protect us, it was common for Jews to get beaten up or thrown off the train.

It’s an incredibly scary feeling when you’re exposed to anyone’s raw feelings and enmity. These young Nazis habitually roamed around and did tremendous damage to many individuals. But at least we were still in our community and were not evicted from our home, so that was some comfort.

Irene Fogel Weiss holds a photo of her that was taken at Auschwitz by two Nazi guards.

We didn’t have radio or much access to newspapers, so all the children were reliant on listening to their parents for information. But I remember many things about the course of the war, who was winning and losing, and the repression of Jews elsewhere.

Hungary didn’t give up its Jewish population until it was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1944. The very first task the German government gave the Hungarians was to round up Jewish families and deport them to Auschwitz. There was a huge rush to take half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and it was completed in just six weeks, in 147 cattle cars. So in the spring of 1944 my family – my parents and their six children, the oldest of whom was 17 and I was 13 – found ourselves in the Munkács ghetto and from there being taken on cattle carts to Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Imagine it like this: three generations of your family have lived in the same house in the same town. They’ve struggled to raise a family, put kids through school, to feed them all. You have your friends and family. All of a sudden you are told to leave it all and walk out with a single suitcase.

I remember the night of the packing very well. Things went in the suitcase, things were taken out of the suitcase. In the end my mother filled it with food she had cooked and warm clothing and bedding. Then it was full. Plus we took a watch, some earrings, a wedding ring with us to exchange for food if necessary. The next day my father was forced to hand over his remaining money to a delegation that included the mayor and the school principal as they rounded us up at the town hall.

We had been absolutely unaware of such a place as Auschwitz. It was a stunning reversal of the life we had had up until then. And I cannot emphasise enough how utterly scary it is to be at the mercy of your fellow human beings. As a child I could not understand what we had done to deserve going there.

My father surveyed the scene from the train and could see prisoners, uniforms and barracks so we immediately thought it was a work camp, and that was reassuring – if we can work, it can’t be such a dreadful place. We had heard about the stories in Poland of lots of mass shootings of Jews or people being taken into the forest and shot, so it was a relief to see out the window that there was actually a system. Even though we were victims of discrimination at that stage that’s all it was, as we had no clue then that this was a very carefully orchestrated plan of genocide. We could not have imagined that they would kill little children, until we realised that killing children was their primary goal to prevent any new generations. Because desperate people will always look to find some sign of hope, we thought to ourselves even if we have to work, at least we’ll see each other occasionally.

But the German system was full of this sort of deception. It counted on people’s normal perception of things. Thinking we were going to a work camp. Thinking that you were going to take a shower when in fact you were going to the gas chambers – that was the ultimate deceit.

When we arrived it was, as I later found out, the usual story, though not to us at the time. Our family was torn apart on the platform on arriving. My sister, Serena, was chosen for slave labour. My mother and the younger children were sent off to one side and my father and 16-year-old brother to the other side. I held tightly on to the hand of my 12-year-old sister and for an instant I was mistaken for being older than I was, probably because I was wearing a headscarf that my mother had given me.

My sister was sent with my mother, while I went to the opposite side. That was the first chance I had to survive. Unbeknown to any of us at the time, two Nazi soldiers had been asked to make a photographic document of the deportation of Hungarian Jews from the moment they got off the train – through the entire system of arriving, going to the bath house and getting their prison clothes – so I ended up in a picture at the very moment I was separated from my sister. It captures me standing alone without my family on the Auschwitz platform, and I’m leaning inwards to see where my little sister has gone.

Another picture we discovered shows my family waiting in line for the gas chamber. Two little boys, my brothers Reuven and Gershon, are shown dressed in hats, one struggling to put on his winter coat. For a long time I failed to find my mother and was very unhappy. But I spent hours looking at these photos with a magnifying glass and one day I found her little face sticking out.

The pictures only came to light 25 years ago and, despite them showing moments from around 45 years before that, they completely captured the entire experience as it had been in my mind all that time. I was dumbfounded and devastated, having had no idea they existed, and I have spent literally hundreds of hours scouring them, trying to find my father and brother. The pictures have reassured me that I was not imagining it all, as I sometimes thought I might have done.

The reality of where we were, struck home fairly quickly. I was stationed near crematorium number four, and we witnessed the columns of unsuspecting women and children entering the gate of the crematorium; they would have been dead within half an hour. When the Hungarian Jews arrived they had the gas chambers going day and night. How can you wrap your imagination round that? I still can’t.

I was with my older sister Serena and we were sent to be forced labourers together in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. Many times we were threatened with separation but somehow we managed to stay together. Later on, to our great relief we ran into my mother’s two younger sisters, our aunts Rose and Piri, who were in their early 20s. It was like finding our parents. They were such a huge moral and emotional support for us.

On about 17 January or 18 January 1945, the SS dragged thousands of us out of the camp to walk to Ravensbrück concentration camp deep into central Germany. I don’t really know why. We were in terrible straits with no proper clothes, nothing suitable for marching through the snow. It was as if the cruelty would never end. If anyone sat down out of exhaustion, they were shot. Later we were transported yet again, and my aunt Piri became ill and was killed.

As the Soviets approached, the SS left and I, Serena and Rose took shelter in an empty house nearby. The Russians came but for some reason left again immediately, so we were left to fend for ourselves.

We spent months trying to get to Prague where we knew we had some relatives and from there we went to the Sudetenland. I got to go to school, my sister found work in a factory and Rose was sick at home with tuberculosis.

For release with feature BC-Poland-Auschwitz

We initially had no idea what had happened to the rest of the family and had no access to a phone. But on buildings everywhere lists were put up stating who was still alive. Everyone you met you asked, every meeting of refugees was dominated by trying to find out where your relatives were.

Eventually I discovered that of around 100 people from my town who were deported, only about 10 survived, only two of whom were children – my sister and me. But there was not one parent and child who lived. All of them were killed.

Serena now lives in New Jersey with her family, including three children and grandchildren. We’ve both managed to hang on in there, but she can’t come to Auschwitz because her elderly husband is sick. For years when we talked about our experience she’d say to me: “You probably don’t remember, you were too young,” as I was four years younger, but some things I remembered even more sharply than her and my aunt.

I’m often asked how I have coped. I never went to a psychologist and I never will. Quite simply, I kept it at a distance. I saw and understood, and yet I didn’t. I’ve never cried over the columns of children and mothers I saw. When I was in Auschwitz I thought: ‘This is not actually on earth.’ It was a system of masters and slaves, gods and subhumans and I thought to myself: ‘No one knows about it. It’s the forest, surrounded by multiple layers of fence, it’s not actually real.’ I never let it penetrate that my parents were killed and I even thought: ‘After this we’re going home and everyone will be there again.’ Those who never managed to keep it distant killed themselves.

Children inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp after liberation in January 1945.

I threw myself into family life. I married young, I had three children, (I now also have four grandchildren) and then I went to college and became a teacher. You fall into a routine and do the best you can. But I’ve never lost the feeling of how unreliable human beings are and neither am I fooled by superficial civilisation. But I realise that loss of faith in people is more devastating than loss of faith in God.

I won’t be going back to Auschwitz again after this visit. So it’s my last chance to make sure this tragedy is not forgotten. I found out only about a week before I was due to leave that I will be one of two survivors who will be part of the US presidential delegation, headed by the secretary of the treasury, Jack Lew, and I feel very honoured, but it has much to do with the fact that many others who could go are ill and unable to travel.

Joseph Mandrowitz, born in Czemierniki, Poland in 1923. He now lives in Toms River, New Jersey, and is returning to Auschwitz for the second time with his second cousin

Auschwitz survivor

We had a quiet life until the day they took 1,000 Jews away from my village of Czemierniki, a typical Polish village with a big square around which community life took place. My father was a bootmaker, my mother was a seamstress and everyone worked hard. There was always some antisemitism, but it was mainly fairly harmless, consisting of kids at our school who during religious education taunted the five or six Jewish kids in the class with “Jews killed Jesus.”

I had trained as a tailor and had left home before we were deported, when I went to work four miles away on a ranch. It was taken over by the SS, so suddenly I found myself working for them. In May 1943 they lined us up one day and told us to empty our pockets. If they found even a single zloty in anyone’s pocket, they were shot on the spot. We were transported to Majdanek, which was only 19 miles away – a torture camp in the true sense of the word. For 500 metres there were just ditches full of bodies, legs, heads. We were deported to Auschwitz four weeks later. We arrived in the early morning and they gave us a bed, a real shower, they cleaned us well with disinfectant and shaved us. After that they gave us striped uniforms and tattooed us. I was given the number 128164 on my left arm and from that point on I was a number, no longer a name.

From there we were sent to Buna (an Auschwitz sub camp) and were set to work. After a few months there, I went for a walk one day and saw a few tomatoes growing. I was starving by then so tried to take them and was given a beating so severe, I don’t know how I survived it. I still have the scars from it today. I was taken to hospital and knew the rule: if you didn’t heal in four to five days, they’d take you to Birkenau and you’d be gassed.

I was 20, about 1.7 metres (5ft 7in) tall, blond, not bad looking and, despite the beating, in pretty good shape. When my limit in the hospital was up, they sent me to the gas chambers. There I met Dr Mengele, who asked me what was wrong. I said: “You can see, I’ve been beaten up.” Instead of sending me to the gas chambers, I was sent back to the hospital, presumably he saw the potential for labour in me. As I had trained as a tailor, he decided I had my uses there. The soldiers wanted to look nice, so they’d come to me in the hospital if they wanted their uniforms fixed up. The very fact that my new job meant I didn’t have to get up in the morning in the harsh winter in thin clothes standing around for hours for the headcount was a big thing. It meant that being a tailor saved my life.

That Mengele – they call him a doctor, but he was as much a doctor as I’m an army general. A complete fake of a man who I was too scared to look in the eye. I saw him day in, day out for months and was one of 152 Jews in his “care”. One of the experiments he carried out on me was to take blood from my arm and inject it in my rear end. I’ve no idea what that was trying to prove.

For some astonishing reason he “saved” me a second time, after the decision was made to clear the hospital and 150 people were sent to the gas chambers except for me and a boy from Saloniki. That’s not to say I liked him at all – he was a hateful man, who hated himself first and foremost and then everyone else around him.

Auschwitz survivor

In 1944 we were sent on a death march from Birkenau to Oranienburg and from there to Buchenwald. Then to a quarry, where we were ordered to drill into the mountains to make some sort of secret city. From there we walked back to Buchenwald. Whoever was incapable of walking was shot. From there, big trains took us to Theresienstadt just as the Soviets were bombing the rails. We could sense that the Germans were almost destroyed. For 17 days we had no water, no food, nothing. Despite the hardship I was doing OK compared to others. I still had the capability to clamber on to the cattle trains without help.

We were liberated from the Russians at Theresienstadt on 9 May. I developed typhus and spent several weeks in hospital before I could go anywhere.

I decided to go back to my village as I had nowhere else to go. But of the 1,000 or so of us who had been deported, only eight to 10 had survived. Some people had warned me not to go back, saying there had been attacks on those who had returned, including the Jewish woman I had worked for when I’d done my tailor apprenticeship. She’d gone back to reclaim some possessions she had left behind in somebody’s house and they killed her rather than return the items. She and her husband had been the only couple in Czemierniki to survive and then they went and murdered her when she came home.

I had had parents, two brothers, three sisters, two nephews, two nieces, an aunt, an uncle, and all of them died. I found out the rest of my family were taken to Treblinka in 1942.

When I finally returned to Czemierniki in 1993, despite the years in which Jews had lived there I could not find a trace either of my family or of Jewish life. Even the cemetery where my grandfather had been buried had been razed. The synagogue was gone. I went to ask the local priest, who said they had taken the tombstones and crushed them for building materials or something like that. I believe they deliberately destroyed any sign of Jewish life so as to be rid of us for ever.

The Jewish Federation brought me to America. I deliberately chose against going to Israel as it would have meant I would have had to fight and kill and the US seemed the next best choice. They put me up in a hotel on 35th and 36th street until I got myself sorted out. I was desperate to get to work and make up for all those wasted years.

I started looking for work as soon as I arrived, finding a job earning $35 (£23) a week and by 1955 I had opened up my own business in Brooklyn, Queens, as a tailor and I think I did OK. I worked for some dignitaries, including Henry Kissinger and Nancy Reagan, and I also did a lot for the Johnsons. I’d be putting together the garments designed for them by the likes of Oscar de la Renta and Geoffrey Beene.

The US gave me a pretty good life. In fact I’d say I found my heaven here.

Of the 1,000 Jews taken from my village, only three of us are still alive, one living in Israel, one in Baltimore and myself. We stay in touch.

I still drive my car, though not at night any more. I get jumpy when someone honks their horn, and occasionally I have bad dreams and wake up at night, my wife asking me: “What’s up?”, and I tell her I’m being chased by Germans. But that’s the story of my life. I still can’t believe it happened. When I sit down and watch programmes on the Holocaust on the History Channel it’s as if I’m watching some made-up horror film.

I have to go back to Auschwitz one last time. I feel like I own the place, having spent almost two years of my life there. I never forget it and I don’t want to forget it because it’s effectively the story of my life.”

Eva Umlauf, born in December 1942 at a labour camp in Nowaky, Czechoslovakia, in what is now Slovakia. She now lives in Munich, Germany, and works as a psychotherapist. She is returning to Auschwitz for the third time. Her book on the Holocaust is due to be published in 2016

Auschwitz survivors

I was not even two when we arrived at Auschwitz in 1944. I have no conscious memories of that time, but plenty of subconscious ones. My mother told me later how when they tattooed my arm with a needle, it was so painful that I passed out. The number they gave me and that I still have was A26959. My mother’s ended in 8. I was probably the youngest child to have been tattooed who survived.

My mother was four months pregnant when we arrived. My sister Nora was born there in April 1945.

Had we arrived just two days earlier, we would have been gassed immediately. Our transport was the first from which no one was taken to the gas chambers, probably because they knew by then that the Russians were very close. We arrived on 2 November and on 30 October, 18,000 mothers and children who had arrived from Theresienstadt were killed.

On the two occasions I have returned to Auschwitz, in 1995 and 2011, although I haven’t got memories as such of the time I spent there, something is triggered deep inside me, both physically and in my inner being. I get very nervous and the death, the cold, the expanse and the emptiness of it swamps me – it’s a feeling that it’s hard to explain but it’s everywhere. I can feel the burnt earth everywhere I walk.

When Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, we were already extremely sick, so we had to stay there. A Jewish paediatrician from Prague said my mother and her baby would not survive. She had rickets, TB and jaundice. But in April, against the odds, my mother gave birth to my sister, helped by prisoners who were doctors.

Auschwitz survivors

My mother never talked very much about our time there, mainly to protect us and herself. She was 21 when we were finally able to leave, with a two-year-old and a six-week-old. She also took with us a four-year-old boy who was parentless and she spent months searching for his relatives, who she did finally track down. At the same time, she had lost her husband and was mourning him. There was an unspoken ban on speaking about any of it. We went back to live in Trenčín, the small town in Slovakia where my mother had moved when she married my father, and where the Red Cross found us a room.

There was a frantic search to see who had survived and to look for relatives. But none of our relatives were still alive. My grandmother, great-grandmother and great-grandfather, my mother’s three siblings – all had died.

Probably my earliest memories of anything at all are of walking through the streets of Trenčín and people stopping in their tracks and saying with amazement: “You’re back!” “What a miracle that you’re alive!” I understood as a three-and-a-half to four-year-old that I was a miracle because I got to hear it so many times, but I didn’t really understand what the word meant. Only much later could I recognise what a miracle it really was that I had survived, when I learned that of the thousands of Slovak men and women who were deported to Auschwitz, only a few hundred returned.

My mother put every effort into giving us a normal life. She sent us to school and made sure we studied. She was loving and resourceful. It was only later when she got old that she was gripped by depression. Having held everything together and been so capable and diligent for so long, she just fell apart as if under the burden of it all, and she died at the age of 72. It’s no accident that I and my sister became doctors – we had an absolute primal need to help people and save lives.

I later qualified as a psychotherapist, a job which I enjoy immensely, but which confronts me with the suffering caused by the Holocaust on a daily basis. My patients are from “both sides” – either victims or perpetrators, or their relatives – and many are what you’d call transgenerationally affected – carrying around with them the issues and traumas that their parents or grandparents never dealt with, and which unless cured are like a contagious disease that they’ll pass on to the next generation.

I married a Polish Jew and we settled in Germany, the “Täterland” – the land of the perpetrator – after being forced out of Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Prague Spring in 1968. It does sometimes feel like a strange decision to live in Germany because the Holocaust is just so omnipresent here and there is a growing antisemitism that scares me, especially when you feel it in Germany, of all places, which is why I always repeat what Primo Levi wrote: “What happened can happen again.”

Auschwitz survivor

That’s why I go into schools and talk to 15 year olds in and around Munich because we have to repeatedly confront it. That’s why I’m returning to Auschwitz on Monday. It will be the last time many people return, the end of an epoch. The wounds might heal, but they leave scars which are still very visible.

Susan Pollack, born Zsuzsanna Blau in Felsogod, Hungary in 1930. She now lives in London. She is returning to Auschwitz for the first time, with her grandson Anthony, 33

Auschwitz survivor

From the moment I arrived in Auschwitz with my mother and brother in May 1944, the terror of it just invaded my whole being. My mother was immediately taken away and I later learned that she had been gassed. I only recently discovered that my father had been there too.

My whole world was turned upside down by the brutality of it. We had not in any way understood what had been going on, only later recognising all the sources and streams that led to the Holocaust. In my small Hungarian village, information had been very restricted. We didn’t know about anything, like the Wannsee conference (where the Final Solution was planned), and neither could we have imagined it. We were told by the authorities that we were being resettled, which is why I took my sewing machine with me. I took my sewing machine!

The process of losing any kind of hope was a very gradual one. We were transported in cattle wagons in which many babies and children suffocated, in what it turned out was the last transport of Hungarians. We had no water, no food, there was no hygiene. That diminished our hope and increased the feeling of being trapped. But despite that, you always retained a glimmer of hope. Always.

I had become aware of antisemitism from a young age, when my uncle had his head chopped in two when he was attacked by fascists while driving up to Novograd where he lived. While his attacker was convicted, he was hardly punished, and continued to live opposite my uncle’s wife and child. But as a child you don’t think about these things all that much. My family had a wood and coal business and, like most people in those days, my father was self-employed. As they started to restrict us, he lost his licence to operate and then he faced the enormous task of trying to find work. Meanwhile, my mother was at home trying to keep the family together, with all of us all involved in domestic life.

I recall the time in Auschwitz as single moments, short encounters, smells. We tried to distract ourselves from the reality of it by trying to recall our home lives in what turned into a game of momentary escapism. Quietly, the children would huddle together and ask each other: “What will you have for breakfast?” And I remember saying: “Maybe an egg or a piece of bread and butter,” and tried to conjure up memories of home.

Auschwitz survivors

I vaguely recall the death march to Bergen-Belsen. I was so weak by then. The conditions were appalling and they’d put us in a barracks. I remember crawling out of it – because by that time I was too weak to walk, but I couldn’t bear to stay among the corpses any longer – and bumping into a neighbour who was as surprised to see me as I was her.

Our British liberators were amazing – they were heroes for me in the real sense of the word. After their long battle to reach Belsen, they had a campaign to organise a rescue mission. To this day I’m aghast that they were so saintly. They brought little ambulances in and drove around picking us up. I was trembling and virtually lifeless, lying near the barracks, the stench of corpses everywhere, and unable to walk or lift myself up, when they arrived with a little ambulance. I don’t think I was able to talk to the soldier who approached me, my comprehension had long gone, but I remember the gentleness in him. We couldn’t eat and I remember fainting when I tried to get out of bed. Gradually they administered the food, but I didn’t trust anyone and I hid the food in my bed, afraid that they would suddenly take it away. Even now I feel that sense at every meal time of how lucky I am, and I often say to those at the table: “Isn’t this wonderful?” and “ Aren’t we lucky?”

After our liberation I went to Sweden where we were looked after marvellously. The physical recovery was not as bad as the emotional and mental one, which I’m still working on. I am still touched by the memory of a doctor who taught me how to walk again, as through the malnutrition I was incapable. Such a simple thing, but he told me: “I have a daughter like you,” and how vital that statement of his was to my sense of becoming a human being again. It was amazing to be compared to someone having felt completely dehumanised for so long.

After what happened, and having lost 50 members of my family, it was very important for me to have my own little family, to have again that sense of belonging. I really wanted to have children and was just 18 when I got married to a fellow Holocaust survivor from Transylvania. But I’ve always been careful not to tell my children too much about what I went through so as not to traumatise them. They’re entitled to a carefree youth, I always thought, and I didn’t want to be spreading bitterness and hate.

I have had a good life. I was a Samaritan and I’ve been going to schools and talking to 15-year-olds for the past 20 years. I try to tell them how small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so they should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.

I did go back to my village, in 1995. But there was never any sense of any culpability and it seemed a futile exercise for me to try to find out who had betrayed us.

Returning to Auschwitz is going to be a cold, painful and tearful experience. It is a shadow that has always been with me and I’m hoping that by facing it for one last time at the age of 84 I will be able to live my life more peacefully, but I am extremely anxious. I lost my husband just days ago and I’m hoping I’ll finally be able to release my emotions when I’m there, as I’ve never really been able to cry much about anything. I’m comforted by the thought that there will be strength in numbers and that I’ll be there with perhaps 100 or so other survivors, which makes it easier. I would not go on my own. I appear to be a strong person, but inside I’m really quite fragile.

Mordechai Ronen, born in Dej, Transylvania, in what is now Romania, in 1933. He now lives in Toronto with his wife, Ilana. He is returning to Auschwitz for the third time. His autobiography is due to be published in September

Mordechai Ronen is overcome with emotion as he arrives at Auschwitz.

We lived in a white-painted brick house on Kodur Street in Dej, which had a population of about 15,000, around a quarter of whom were Jewish. I was the youngest of five, and we spoke Yiddish within the community and Hungarian and Romanian outside. We had a garden and backyard, full of plums, peaches, cherries and apples. Among the smells of my childhood were my mother’s goulash and the scent of Shabbat candles. My father was a merchant, a travelling salesman. My mother had the full-time job of keeping the house and family. I remember the lullaby she used to sing me, Schaefeleh, schluf mein tier kind (Sleep well, my precious little child). The synagogue or shul was the centre of communal life, and the centre of my life from three years upwards. I don’t remember any overt antisemitism, just my parents warning me to be inside before dark: “Lest some Christian kids decide they don’t like the look of your sidelocks and pick on you.” I just thought my parents were being overprotective.

We had no daily paper, no radio or phone, so the only news we got of the second world war was from newcomers to town. The change started at the end of 1942-43, when people began expressing their anger towards us, especially the Hungarian neighbours. We’d hear: “Zsidók, menjetek ki, Gyerünk haza!” (“Jews, get out of here, Go home!”) I was in the synagogue singing when a rock shattered the stained-glass window. The rabbi tried to convince us it was just some drunk, but as a 10-year-old, I knew better.

One day, four or five men came to our synagogue. They had escaped from Poland and came with stories we found impossible to believe – of Nazis rounding up Jews, looting their possessions, murdering them. People said the men were meshuggah (crazy).

The only impact these stories had on my family was the cache of extra potatoes and bread that I discovered stashed away in our basement. But by 1943, we started getting clearer signs.

My father’s beard was shaved by some locals, who grabbed him. I stopped going to school. My parents gave me a lantern to carry with me after dark. Then I wasn’t allowed out at all.

One day the Hungarian gendarmes came to our house and ransacked it. In 1944, the Nazis ordered all Jews living outside Budapest to be rounded up and placed in ghettoes. Then it was our turn and that was the day our misery truly began. In the spring of 1944 we were part of a contingent of 7,500 Jews who were corralled into a makeshift ghetto in the Bungur forest. We had to wear the yellow stars of David. That was the day when almost one-and-a-half centuries of Jewish life in Dej came to an end.

In our forest ghetto I remember a local man, Mihai, who brought his cow to help us out with milk, having heard we were starving. He was arrested and beaten to a pulp and remained a paraplegic for the rest of his life. Two weeks into our ghetto life, we were sent to Auschwitz, 435 miles north-west of Dej.

The Auschwitz fence.

At this point my family was still together. They told the women and children to go to the left, and that’s what my mother and two sisters did. My father and I were inspected by [Josef] Mengele, who was holding a baton, and went to the right. It was the last time I saw my mother and sisters alive.

Other Jews responsible for telling us the rules approached us and said: “Farvos inem gehenem zayn’ du kumen aher?” (“Why the hell did you come here?”) “Didn’t you hear the warnings?”

I saw some soldiers toss a baby up and shoot it in mid air for fun and from then on I had no doubt about what awaited us here.

I worked out pretty quickly certain survival tricks. That if the guards called us to line up in front of the barracks, I should hide or sneak into another barracks. The safest place I could find to hide was in the yard near the bathrooms where all the dead bodies were brought and piled up … I would get on the pile, lie down next to the dead bodies and pretend I was one of them.

They gave us food in barrels. When the barrel was empty, I could get inside and scrape the leftovers from the bottom. In that way my dad and I got extra food.

I remember the chimneys with dark, thick smoke rising from them; dogs barking all the time. From Auschwitz, they moved us to Birkenau, then to Mauthausen-Gusen. Every morning there were dead bodies along the barbed wire fences around the camp. The electrified fences instantly killed anyone who touched them. Perhaps these were simply acts of suicide.

When we were in Gusen penal camp, my father, who was 50, one day just gave up and said he couldn’t continue. From that moment I was totally alone. In February 1945 they moved us to Gunskirchen, Upper Austria. It was here that I witnessed starving people eating human flesh. We were liberated by Americans and Canadians in Gunskirchen. The Germans had simply left the camp, and with an absence of drama we just walked through the gates. The first thing I did was to knock on a local resident’s door and ask for permission to take a shower. Somehow, I managed to meet up with my brothers, David and Shuli. We had no desire to return to Dej, to the people who had betrayed us.

I wanted to go to Israel, as that had been my father’s dream, but it wasn’t easy to get there. There was no independent Jewish state then and it was run by the British, who wanted to limit immigration.

In Italy I joined the Irgun, the Zionist underground organisation fighting for Israeli independence led by Menachem Begin (later prime minister of Israel), and travelled with an arms smuggling ship, the Altalena, to Tel Aviv. All the time I kept with me my prison uniform, as proof of what had happened to me. We arrived on the shores of Tel Aviv on 20 June 1948 and I found myself at a pivotal moment in Israeli history, in a boat full of weapons that Ben-Gurion would not let on shore. It could easily have turned into a civil war. I was shot at by Israel Defence Force troopers as I jumped into the water and the Altalena was set ablaze and sunk by the IDF. With it sank my suitcase of clothes and my striped prisoner uniform, including my hat, coat, shirt and a knife.

Henry Korman, 94, born in Radom, Poland. He now lives in Hanover, north Germany. He will be returning to Auschwitz for the first time, with the 17-year-old son of his nephew, Ethan.

“I had just finished high school in 1939 and had had all sorts of plans for my future. My family ran a hat factory, making hats for every occasion and purpose. But as the authorities began clamping down and the antisemitism grew, much of it fuelled by the Catholic church, gradually everything was confiscated – our house then the business.

We tried to get out – we’d seen the signs of what was to come, not that we could really have known the full extent of what would happen. My uncle had worked in Palestine in 1917 but had been forced to return to Poland when he got sick. We tried to use the contacts he still had there to escape, but the British (who were in control of it) wouldn’t give us permission to go there. In my mind they carry a lot of the blame for the deaths of many of the Jews – especially the Polish Jews – who perished.

We were sent to the Radom ghetto, where I spent the first years of the war working for the Jewish committee. But when they started taking the ghetto leaders to Auschwitz, I quickly changed jobs and began working in a munitions factory instead, hoping that if I kept my head down, I might be OK. But after moving from one factory to another, I too was deported to Auschwitz when the ghetto was liquidated in 1942. I was separated from my parents and three sisters, all of whom were taken to Treblinka.

Auschwitz gate

On our arrival at Auschwitz they chased us off the cattle wagon, which stopped right in front of the gate with the sign Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free). I thought I was entering a labour camp, but little did I know. They asked me my profession, and I said painter as I’d picked up the advice en route to say something practical and useful. If I’d said I’d just finished high school they’d have sent me straight to the gas chambers.

One of the first people I encountered was Mengele. He told us to undress and stand in line and he went through the ranks deciding who was strong and healthy and fit for work, and who was only fit for the gas chamber. After inspecting me, he put his thumb up high, so they gave me the striped uniform and sent me to get a number tattooed on to my arm. I don’t remember the number. It’s there still, but I never look at it because it brings back too many painful memories.

DrJosef Mengele, left, with Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz, Josef Kramer, Commandant of Belsen and a German officer.

After Auschwitz they transferred me to Mauthausen, then Gozen and Hanover. From there they sent us on foot to Bergen-Belsen, where I was finally liberated. It was 14 April (1945). I was so weak I could hardly stand and it was all I could do to lift my head slightly from the ground where I was lying as British army tanks started arriving to save us. But for all the great things the British did then, I can only say they made many other mistakes and what’s going on in Israel now is largely Britain’s fault.

I also resent the Americans for knowing what was going on but doing nothing about it until 1944. As soon as Hitler wrote Mein Kampf they should have known what was going on.

So I ended up in Sweden where I learned that my sister had also been in Belsen. In Stockholm I studied chemistry and it was there I found out, having lost all my family in Europe, that I had relatives in America, an aunt – my father’s sister – who had emigrated in the 1920s, so I went to live with them.

I’ve never sought any counselling or professional help – I never thought it would help. My therapy has been to go and talk to schoolchildren about my experiences. My advice to them is to respect their teachers and have a clear plan for the future.

I did go back to my home town, Radom, just once in 1996 or 1998. I saw our house, and stood in the backyard, but my heart was bleeding so much, I didn’t dare go in. I walked up the street and it was like walking on history – something lost and far away, but also very close. Here was the road on which I used to run to school, to the factory, but I had to get away very quickly. I was thinking: “I’m here, but where are all of them, my family?”

I now live in Hanover, Germany, which doesn’t feel strange to me to be living in the land of the murderers, because it’s a different country now. At least people listen to my story here. When I travel to the US nobody asks me, so I never say anything. But I have a hunch that as soon as his feet touch the ground in Auschwitz, my nephew’s son will start to ask questions.

I never dared to start my own family or have children of my own. I was just too afraid of making those close bonds.

When your relatives die, there’s usually a place you can go to pay your respects, like a cemetery with a grave where you can lay a stone and talk to them. The only place I have is Auschwitz and going back there for the first time will be the first and last chance I have to be able to return to the people I loved who I lost there and in other concentration camps.

My family are always with me. I carry pictures of them in my pocket the entire time, wherever I go, even when I go to sleep they are with me. To this day I still don’t know the circumstances of their deaths or even where they died.

Auschwitz has been in my head all these years. I just need to close my eyes and instantly the pictures of the horror come back to me. I worry what will happen when I and others like me are no longer here to tell the story. I want people to keep reading about it and for them to leave tears on the paper.

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Holocaust poetry and the reclamation of many identities

creative writing on concentration camps

Visiting Fellow, Department of Government, University of Essex

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Marian de Vooght does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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The first Holocaust poems were written 90 years ago, when the full extent of the horror was yet to be known. Starting in the 1930s, those first works foreshadowed the catastrophe that was soon to come. As the second world war erupted and the Nazi killings began, people continued to write poetry that recorded direct experiences of persecution and lamented the murder of loved ones.

While many writers of Holocaust poetry are Jewish, there are those who belong to other groups targeted by the Nazi regime. Including those who were perceived to have disabilities, Roma and Sinti people, political and religious opponents and homosexual men.

Writing poetry of the Holocaust has often been a way to reclaim identity, as writer and translator Lou Sarabadzic puts it:

Victims of the Holocaust are not the Other in these lines, but rather the authors, the ones we listen to, the ones expressing emotions.

As such, they continue to be written today as people continue to reckon with the memories and impact of the Holocaust.

Diverse backgrounds

Published in 2019, Poetry of the Holocaust: An Anthology brings together poems from 19 languages that were previously unavailable in English. The translations in this book are followed by the original texts. These include poems in languages not normally associated with the Holocaust, such as Norwegian and Japanese, and from places like Argentina, Denmark and South Africa.

creative writing on concentration camps

Holocaust poetry in the 1930s and through the war wrestled with the incomprehensible reality its writers were facing. The earliest poems in Europe responded to the foreboding of the fascist regime and its politics of elimination.

In 1932, the German poet Eduard Saenger wrote in reaction to the sinister change of atmosphere that he was witnessing in his country:

A silent wind sends fear through the land / with an edge like the howling of wolves.

Like Saenger, many wrote poems warning of the approaching dark times and also in reaction to specific events, like the book burnings of May 1933 and Kristallnacht in November 1938.

During the war, the poems documented life in ghettos, prisons and concentration camps. They spoke of mass shootings and of seeing neighbours deported.

Writing in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto in the early 1940s, the Czech teenager Dagmar Hilarová expressed the desire to die rather than undergo further humiliation and torture:

Like a bird with wounded wings / To lie down, / And not to wait for morning.

Poems written in concentration camps were memorised or hidden, often later found by others. Sallie Pinkhof wrote a poem in Bergen-Belsen in 1944, in which he mocked the state of his body:

What a hoot / these loose-fitting tendons / and bones in my foot!

Pinkhof did not survive but his poems were preserved by fellow camp inmates. An anonymous poem found in the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy Camp) of Auschwitz-Birkenau opens with the wish:

Do not wake me from my dream, / so the world need never know / how they treat a Roma.

Read more: Nazis murdered a quarter of Europe's Roma, but history still overlooks this genocide

After the war

For many the horror of the Holocaust is both lifelong and unspeakable. As the memory and impact of the catastrophe continue to be felt by survivors, their children and people touched by its reverberations, poems continue to be written about the Holocaust to express what is almost beyond words. Dutch poet Chawwa Wijnberg (2001), whose father was executed by the Nazis:

Always present is the unsaid / the unsaid / that rips the wound open

Silence is a recurrent theme. Rita Gabbai-Simantov, a Sephardic-Turkish poet who lives in Greece and writes in Ladino, Judaeo-Spanish, about Thessaloniki – “old Saloniki” – and its wiped-out Jewish community (1992): “As you walk, your companion / will be silence”.

After her visit to Auschwitz, the Lithuanian poet Janina Degutytė recorded in 1966 the enduring silence of the people who were deported from her country and murdered:

Lips gasp for air … / The only sound is the rustling of golden leaves, / The rustling flow of time: which was – is – will be …“.

Later poetry also gave voices to persecuted groups who were previously unrepresented. In 1995, French writer André Sarcq was the first to express the fate of gay men who for decades after the war, in France and elsewhere, could not speak about their experience in concentration camps. This was because homosexuality continued to be outlawed and they felt, in Sarcq’s words, like "the rag of a pool of souls”.

creative writing on concentration camps

Poetry of the Holocaust continues to be written in our time. A striking example is the poem by Angela Fritzen, a journalist who has Down’s syndrome. Written after visiting an exhibition in Bonn, Germany in 2016, the poem is about the fate of people with disabilities during the Nazi era. “To have strength” is how Fritzen ends her deeply felt poem.

Holocaust poetry is a rich and diverse genre that continues to be added to. Both the older and the contemporary poems need readers, because Holocaust poetry is about communication. The poets felt the need to share their pain and it is vital that readers take the chance to empathise with what they have been through. By way of reflecting on the experience of others we recognise what it means to be human.

The translators of the quoted lines of poetry in this article are: Jean Boase-Beier (Saenger, Fritzen, Sarcq), Anna Crowe (Gabbai-Simantov), Maria Grazina Slavėnas (Degutytė), Marian de Vooght (Pinkhof, Sarcq) and Philip Wilson (Hilarová).

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Creative Writing at St. Olaf College

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Creative writing courses converse with a broad range of experiences in literature including cross-cultural studies, cross-disciplinary studies, genre studies, and literary history—the four categories of the English major.

“My two creative writing classes have helped me explore a new side of myself and the English major.”

 – Laurel Kallman 2011

Course Sequence

The creative writing curriculum emphasizes literary craft and begins with English 150—the recommended introduction to creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Although not required, English 150 provides students with broad foundational knowledge to support their continued study in intermediate and advanced workshops focusing on a particular genre including screenwriting. English 150 and 200-level and 300-level workshops carry WRI credit.

 English 150: The Craft of Creative Writing

This course introduces the craft of creative writing through contemporary readings and writing exercises in three genres–poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Students learn to read and to write literature with attention to how a literary work is made. Emphasis on the elements of craft and revision provide preparation for students who want to continue into intermediate and advanced creative writing workshops. Prerequisite: prior or concurrent enrollment in FYW.

“My experience with creative writing at St. Olaf introduced me to the concept of seeing the world as a writer, which is something I’ll take with me long after I graduate. ”

– Zoey Slater ‘14 Winner of the ACM Nick Adams Short Story Contest

 200-Level Intermediate Workshops focus on developing an understanding of genre conventions. Students read contemporary models of published work and write and revise their own writing.

  • English 291: Intermediate Creative Nonfiction Writing
  • English 292: Intermediate Poetry Writing
  • English 293: Intermediate Fiction Writing
  • English 296: Screenwriting

200-Level Literature and Creative Writing Courses balance reading literature with the practice of writing creatively.

  • English 200: The Personal Essay
  • English 281: Studies in Poetry
  • English 283: Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing

300-Level Workshops in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry are offered during alternating years and facilitate advanced work in small seminar settings. These courses are open to students who have taken a 200-level workshop in that genre or by instructor permission.

  • English 371: Advanced Fiction Writing
  • English 372: Advanced Poetry Writing
  • English 373: Advanced Creative Nonfiction Writing

For more information about specific courses, please see the course descriptions on the English Department website: https://www.stolaf.edu/depts/english/courses/

 “I can guarantee that no liberal arts education is complete without a creative writing class.”

– Willa Simmet 2012

Off-Campus Study

St. Olaf College sponsors off-campus study at The University of East Anglia, which specializes in creative writing and film studies with an emphasis on professional development. St. Olaf students have attended writing conferences such as Writers in Paradise sponsored by Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival . Students have also participated in HECUA’s Writing for Social Change , a semester-long program based in Minneapolis dedicated to education for social justice.

“The creative writing sequence along with its affiliated campus organizations give students the opportunity to find community in poetry and prose and to keep growing as writers.”

– Clair Dunlap ‘15

St. Olaf College offers students several extracurricular opportunities for writing, publishing, and publicly reading their creative writing:

  • Manitou Messenger , campus newspaper
  • The Quarry, literary magazine publishing student and alumni work
  • The Reed , interdisciplinary journal publishing creative writing, literary criticism, and philosophical essays related to existentialism
  • Student literary societies such as Free Association (poetry) and Defenders of Writeousness (fiction)
  • Women’s Poetry House, an off-campus residential student service project

Students also take part in writing-focused internships with the Northfield News and publishing houses in Minnesota and New York.

The English Department holds annual contests in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry to recognize student work. Nationally recognized writers who have served as final judges are Todd Boss, Greg Bills, Paul Bogard, Mary Rose O’Reilly, and Juliet Patterson . The department also nominates student writing for the American Colleges of the Midwest’s Nick Adams Short Story Contest and The Associated Writing Programs Intro Journals Awards.

Distinguished Visiting Writers

The English Department has hosted notable writers from around the world who have enriched students’ knowledge of contemporary literature through guest readings and other author events. Recent visitors include Paul Auster, Charles Baxter, Paul Bogard, Lynn Emanuel, Sam Hamill, Christopher Howell, Siri Hustvedt, Douglas Kearney, Kim Ki-Taek, Gerry LaFemina, Ed Bok Lee, Philip Lopate, Dennis Maloney, Susan McCabe, Benjamin Percy, Bao Phi, Nahid Rachlin, A.E. Stallings, Rodrigo Toscano, Derek Walcott, and Kao Kalia Yang.

“The creative writing program at St. Olaf urged me to commit to a draft from start to finish, giving extraordinarily helpful feedback and advice, and now I am amazed at the sort of writing I am capable of producing.”

 – Tom Churchill ‘14

Alumni Achievements

Alumni of our creative writing courses have gone on to win national fellowships and grants such as the Wallace Stegnar and NEA; release books with publishers Harper Collins, Penguin, and W.W. Norton and Co.; edit manuscripts at Tin House and Milkweed Editions; support community programming at The Playwright’s Center and the Loft Literary Center; attend top-ranked MFA programs such as Columbia University, Hollins University, New York University, and University of Washington; and feature at literary festivals across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Creative writing at St. Olaf College— opening up worlds within and beyond!

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creative writing on concentration camps

In the second row, second from the right, is Theodor Klein

Yad Vashem Photo Archives 4613/329

creative writing on concentration camps

Yad Vashem Photo Archives 4613/1105

creative writing on concentration camps

;Third from the left is Into Shymshi, submitter of the photograph, and in the front of the photograph, wearing a uniform and a hat, is David Matzista, a Jewish kapo.

Yad Vashem Photo Archives 5535/3

creative writing on concentration camps

The rouge was preserved in a folded piece of celluloid paper that they kept hidden. They would dab a little on their cheeks before each selection.The two women were forced on a death march, survived and were liberated by the Red Army.

Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection Donated by The Association of Krakovians in Israel

creative writing on concentration camps

The Shofar was made in anticipation of Rosh Hashanah 5704 (1943) by Moshe (Ben-Dov) Winterter from the city of Piotrkow, Poland, who was an inmate in the camp and worked in the metal workshop of the armaments factory. The idea of making a Shofar was initiated by the Radoszyce Rabbi, Rabbi Yitzhak Finkler, who was a prisoner in the camp. He believed that the inmates must carry out the commandment to blow the Shofar, and thus awaken God's mercy, especially at this fateful time. In spite of the great danger, Moshe Winterter made the Shofar and brought it to the Rabbi on the eve of the holiday. Word spread and the inmates gathered together for prayers and to hear the sounds of the Shofar.

Yad Vashem Collection, Jerusalem, Israel Donated by Moshe (Winterter) Ben-Dov, Bnei Brak, Israel

creative writing on concentration camps

Victor Webb, a British soldier who was one of the liberators of the camp, took the whip.

Yad Vashem Artifacts Collection Donated by Bruce Webb, England

creative writing on concentration camps

In the center are photographs of Yeshayahu and Esther, and the twelve children’s photos are pasted around the face of the watch in order of birth.On the eve of the family’s deportation, he entrusted the watch to a Christian friend. Isaiah and his wife Esther, along with four of their children and four grandchildren, were murdered immediately upon their arrival in Auschwitz.

creative writing on concentration camps

Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem Gift of Mr. Serge Klarsfeld, Paris, and Mr. Alexandre Oler, Nice

creative writing on concentration camps

Gift of Mary Simenhoff, South Africa Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum

creative writing on concentration camps

Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem Gift of the artist

creative writing on concentration camps

Gift of C. Landmann, Zurich Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum

creative writing on concentration camps

The hierarchic structure of the concentration camps followed the model established in Dachau . The German staff was headed by the Lagerkommandant (camp commander) and a team of subordinates, comprised mostly of junior officers. One of them commanded the prisoners’ camp, usually after being specially trained for this duty. Male and female guards and wardens of various kinds were subordinate to the command staff.

The prisoners had a hierarchy of their own.  Prisoner-supervisors (kapos) were considered an elite that could wield power. The prisoners had different opinions about them: most Jewish supervisors tried to treat their brethren well; some were harsh towards the other inmates.

The appel, the daily lineup that took place every morning after wakeup and each evening after returning from labor, was one of the horrific aspects of the prisoners’ lives in the camps. They were forced to stand completely still, often for hours at a time, exposed to the elements in the cold, rain, or snow and to the terror of sudden violence by SS men, guards or kapos. The camp routine was composed of a long list of orders and instructions, usually given to all but sometimes aimed at individual prisoners, the majority of which were familiar yet some came unexpected. All of one’s strength had to be enlisted to overcome the daily routine: an early wakeup, arranging the bed’s straw, the lineup, marching to labor, forced labor, the waiting period for the meager daily meal, usually consisting of a watery vegetable soup and half a piece of bread which was insufficient for people working at hard labor, the return to the camp, and another lineup, before retiring to the barracks.

Despite their terrible conditions, cultural and religious activity continued in the ghettos, labor camps, and even concentration camps. Literary and artistic works that survived the war reflect the Jews’ lives, agonies and efforts to maintain their human and Jewish identity. These works are direct and authentic testimonies and depict the Jewish victims’ daily life during the Holocaust. Writing a diary on scraps of paper, producing drawings and illustrations of camp life, making jewelry out of copper wire, writing a Passover Haggadah, and conducting prayer services on the eve of Rosh Hashanah are all manifestations of the tremendous psychological strength maintained by these frail, starving people. Even at the end of the grueling days they had to endure, they refused to abandon their creative endeavors. Prisoners in concentration and labor camps exhibited heroism and resourcefulness in their daily lives, struggling to sustain not only the ember of physical life but also, and primarily, their humanity and basic moral values, friendship and concern for others – values that facilitated their survival.

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Creative writing concentration.

The Creative Writing Concentration  is an intensive track for English majors who want more sustained work in  Creative Writing . While there are many ways to pursue creative writing at Yale, and within the English Department, the Creative Writing Concentration provides a structure for creative work and a community of support that many writers find rewarding.  The Creative Writing Concentration is not a separate degree or certificate; it is a part of the English major and builds on the wealth of its literary offerings. It aims to give English majors with a demonstrated interest and achievement in writing an opportunity to plan the writing courses they take in a coordinated way and to do advanced work in tutorial. The Creative Writing Concentration accepts a limited number of serious writing students at the end of the junior year or occasionally in the fall of the senior year. Concentrators are taught by distinguished professional writers who have direct contact with students, in small classes and one-on-one conferences, helping them to discover their goals and shape their sense of themselves as writers.

Students in the Creative Writing Concentration take at least four required courses. These include intermediate and advanced workshops in writing–at least two of which focus on one genre and at least one in another–and the Senior Project, English 489. The goal is to develop strong writers’ skills in concert with fine readers’ insights, and students complete at least 11 courses in the major in addition to writing concentration courses. Students interested in the Creative Writing Concentration are encouraged to consult the DUS about the requirements of the English major. In the senior year, students complete the Creative Writing Concentration Senior Project, in which they produce a single sustained work or a portfolio of shorter works. Students share their works-in-progress with their fellow students throughout the academic year, and participation in Creative Writing Concentration meetings and events is expected. Like the senior essay, the senior project is read and commented on by a second faculty member who confers with the project’s advisor. Students present their work in an annual evening group reading called “The Concentrators’ Ball.”

Students normally apply for admission to the Creative Writing Concentration in the second term of their junior year, and in a few cases as late as the fall of the senior year. Students applying in the second term of their junior year may elect to complete the Creative Writing Concentration Senior Project in either the fall or the spring of their senior year, and will participate in Creative Writing Concentration meetings and events throughout their senior year. Students who are admitted in the fall of their senior year complete the Senior Project in the spring term.

Creative Writing Concentration Prerequisites

  • Two advanced level workshops numbered ENGL 451* or higher. At least one of these courses must be in the genre in which a student plans to complete ENGL 489, The Creative Writing Concentration Senior Project.
  • One creative writing workshop numbered ENGL 400 or higher in a genre different from the Concentration Project.

*only courses over 451 which require applications will be counted towards the prerequisite of two Advanced Creative Writing classes.

Proposal Requirements

  • Students must obtain the strong support of an advisor. Ideally this is someone with whom the student has studied in the past in a workshop at the advanced level. It is strongly recommended that students seek out an advisor well in advance of the deadline.
  • Students must submit an proposal form with a prospectus providing a detailed overview of the proposed project (500-1,100 words). The prospectus will include a schedule of meetings with the advisor as well as note any assigned readings or intermediate due dates. The advisor must review, approve, and sign the prospectus.

Students interested in becoming Creative Writing Concentrators should contact the Writing Concentration Coordinator, Cynthia Zarin, well in advance of applying.

Creative Writing Concentration Proposal Form

Senior Project Guidelines

Creative Writing Concentration senior projects should be double-spaced and printed in a standard twelve-point font. Poetry projects are expected to be between 30 and 40 pages in length. Fiction projects are expected to be between 50 and 60 pages (approximately 16,000-19,000 words) in length. Nonfiction projects are expected to be between 30 and 40 pages (approximately 10,000-12,000 words), not including ancillary material (source notes, bibliographies, acknowledgments). Students concentrating in playwriting shall write a full-length play, in standard format, as agreed on by the student and the advisor. These are general guidelines; the scope and format of senior projects are to be determined in consultation between the student and the advisor.

Check our list for the senior project due date and other  Important Dates .

Creative Writing Concentration Coordinator

Cynthia Zarin cynthia.zarin@yale.edu 203-432-0756

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creative writing on concentration camps

Liberation of Nazi Camps

As Allied troops moved across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945, they encountered concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. The unspeakable conditions the liberators confronted shed light on the full scope of Nazi horrors. 2020 marked the 75th anniversary of the liberation of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps and the end of Nazi tyranny in Europe.

Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz—the largest killing center and concentration camp complex—in January 1945. 

American forces liberated concentration camps including Buchenwald, Dora-Mittelbau, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Mauthausen.

British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen.

  • liberating units
  • Allied powers

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Majdanek and auschwitz .

Victims' shoes at Majdanek

The first major Nazi camp to be liberated was Majdanek , located in Lublin, Poland. It was liberated in the summer of 1944 as Soviet forces advanced westward. The previous spring, the SS had evacuated most of the Majdanek prisoners and camp personnel. The evacuated prisoners were sent to concentration camps further west, such as Gross-Rosen , Auschwitz , and Mauthausen . As the Soviet troops approached Majdanek at the end of July, the remaining camp personnel hastily abandoned the Majdanek concentration camp without fully dismantling it. 

Soviet troops first arrived at Majdanek during the night of July 22–23 and captured Lublin on July 24. Majdanek was captured virtually intact. At Majdanek, the Soviet troops encountered a number of prisoners who had not been evacuated in the spring, mostly Soviet prisoners of war. They also encountered substantial evidence of the mass murder committed at Majdanek by Nazi Germans. Soviet officials invited journalists to inspect the camp and evidence of the horrors that had occurred there.  

Six months later, on January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz . Auschwitz was the largest Nazi killing center and concentration camp complex. In the weeks preceding the arrival of Soviet units, Auschwitz camp personnel had forced the majority of Auschwitz prisoners to march westward in what would become known as " death marches ." When they entered the camp, Soviet soldiers found over six thousand emaciated prisoners alive. These prisoners greeted the soldiers as their liberators. 

As at Majdanek, there was abundant evidence of mass murder in Auschwitz. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses in the camp. But in those warehouses that remained, Soviet soldiers found personal belongings of the victims. Among these personal items were hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women’s garments, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair.

In the following months, Soviet units liberated additional camps in the Baltic states and Poland. Shortly before Germany's surrender in May 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Stutthof , Sachsenhausen , and Ravensbrück concentration camps.

Other Camps

Liberation of major Nazi camps, 1944-1945

Shortly after the Soviet capture of Majdanek in July 1944, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered that prisoners in all concentration camps and subcamps in the German-occupied east be forcibly evacuated into the interior of the Reich. Thus, as Allied troops launched offensives within Germany, they encountered tens of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. Most of these prisoners were suffering from starvation and disease.

US forces liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, on April 11, 1945. Earlier that day before the arrival of US troops, an underground prisoner resistance organization seized control of Buchenwald to prevent atrocities by the retreating camp guards. When American forces arrived, they encountered more than 20,000 prisoners at Buchenwald. That April, US troops also liberated Dachau , Dora-Mittelbau , and Flossenbürg . They liberated Mauthausen in early May.

British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. They entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle, in mid-April 1945. Some 60,000 prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive. More than 13,000 of them died from the effects of malnutrition or disease within a few weeks of liberation.

Impact of Liberation

Liberators confronted unspeakable conditions in the Nazi camps, where piles of corpses lay unburied. Only after the liberation of these camps was the full scope of Nazi horrors exposed to the world. The small percentage of inmates who survived resembled skeletons because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, compounded by months and years of maltreatment. Many were so weak that they could hardly move. Disease remained an ever-present danger, and many of the camps had to be burned down to prevent the spread of epidemics. Survivors of the camps faced a long and difficult road to recovery.

Series: Liberation of Nazi Camps: Encountering and Documenting Atrocities

creative writing on concentration camps

Liberation: An Overview

creative writing on concentration camps

Recognition of US Liberating Army Units

creative writing on concentration camps

The United States Army Signal Corps

creative writing on concentration camps

Documenting Liberation: Arnold E. Samuelson

Documenting liberation: j malan heslop.

creative writing on concentration camps

"We will show you their own films": Film at the Nuremberg Trial

Series: after the holocaust.

creative writing on concentration camps

The Aftermath of the Holocaust: Effects on Survivors

creative writing on concentration camps

Displaced Persons

creative writing on concentration camps

About Life after the Holocaust

creative writing on concentration camps

Postwar Trials

creative writing on concentration camps

What is Genocide?

Genocide timeline, switch series, critical thinking questions.

  • What challenges did the Allied forces face when they encountered the camps?
  • What challenges immediately faced survivors of the Holocaust?

Further Reading

Abzug, Robert H.  GIs Remember: Liberating the Concentration Camps . Washington, DC: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1994.

Abzug, Robert H.  Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Bridgman, Jon.  End of the Holocaust: The Liberation of the Camps . Portland, OR: Areopagitica Press, 1990.

Chamberlin, Brewster S., and Marcia Feldman, editors.  The Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945: Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators . Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Council, 1987.

Goodell, Stephen, and Kevin Mahoney.  1945: The Year of Liberation . Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995.

Goodell, Stephen, and Susan D. Bachrach.  Liberation 1945 . Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1995.

Thank you for supporting our work

We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors .

Creative Writing Concentration

The Creative Writing concentration offers students support in developing their writing through a sequence of workshops combined with literature surveys, genre studies, and a selection of special topics courses. The goal of the program is to foster confident undergraduate writers who work with a sound knowledge of their own literary tradition and who can produce works of publishable quality.

Students receive individual assistance in understanding and extending their skills in writing poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, and/or playwriting, with responsibility for growth and achievement resting ultimately on the student. The instructor will encourage, critique, suggest opportunities, and recommend authors to read, but the students themselves provide the spark and will to progress.

Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing with Teaching Licensure

The Creative Writing with Teaching Licensure track is designed especially for prospective teachers. This special curriculum supplements the core requirements of the concentration in creative writing to prepare students in the broad range of areas expected of English teachers, including literature, composition, and the history of the English language. This program has rigorous requirements, and planning ahead is wise. Student teaching, the senior thesis, and comprehensive exams all converge in the senior year, along with other courses that may be needed outside the major. Students who undertake this path need to work closely with their advisors to ensure their success.

Creative Writing Minor

Students may minor in Creative Writing by completing 20 hours of specified courses, including LANG 260 and LIT 240, 4 hours from LIT 325, 326, 327 or 330, and 8 additional hours from LANG 361, 363, 365, or 366. Students can declare a minor online .

IMAGES

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  3. Concentration Camp Letters On Display

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  5. Outstanding cross curricular Holocaust lesson

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  6. Holocaust

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VIDEO

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  6. Holocaust Diaries by Students: The Stories are Fictional, The Learning

    Father is preparing for this dreadfulwar. I am petrified about it. My neighbors have been sent toa concentration camp in Lublin, Poland. Nazis keep searchingour house. So far they have found nothing to show that weare Jews. My mother sent me up to the attic to hide. Shetoo, is very worried.She says I shall have to stay hereuntil morning.

  7. Tales from Auschwitz: survivor stories

    Tuesday 27 January is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Six survivors, some of whom will be returning to the site for the last time, tell Kate...

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  11. Art from the Holocaust: The stories behind the images

    The exhibit features 100 works, mostly drawings and paintings, by Jewish inmates of labour camps, ghettoes and concentration camps. Many of the works portray the dark realities of day-to-day life ...

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    The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe's Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. This programme of targeted mass murder was a central part of the Nazis' broader plans to create a new world order based on their ideology. The artworks shown explore a range of reactions to the Holocaust - from the ...

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    English 281: Studies in Poetry English 283: Fantasy and Science Fiction Writing 300-Level Workshops in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry are offered during alternating years and facilitate advanced work in small seminar settings. These courses are open to students who have taken a 200-level workshop in that genre or by instructor permission.

  18. Daily Life in the Camps

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  20. Concentration Camps, 1933-1939

    1 Nazi officials established the first concentration camp, Dachau, on March 22, 1933, for political prisoners. It was later used as a model for an expanded and centralized concentration camp system managed by the SS. 2 What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system.

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  22. Liberation of Nazi Camps

    Majdanek and Auschwitz. The first major Nazi camp to be liberated was Majdanek, located in Lublin, Poland. It was liberated in the summer of 1944 as Soviet forces advanced westward. The previous spring, the SS had evacuated most of the Majdanek prisoners and camp personnel. The evacuated prisoners were sent to concentration camps further west ...

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