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In this issue: Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day and I want to take more than a moment
to remember. Recently I've realized - albeit I don't base this on any
scientifically rigorous content analysis of materials - that referring to
the Nazis and their treatment of Jews is a very often cited but too often
miscited historical reference. And one wonders, perhaps it's still better
that we remember at all. But is it enough to just remember vaguely and
misrepresent, or should we be better about remembering more accurately?
That's all just some food for thought on this day.

In the US, the Holocaust often seems more distant than it should. One
doesn't walk the streets where people experienced the horrors. Moreover,
survivors are depicted as part of a distant past. I recall in college an
event organized for those whose grandparents were survivors of the
Holocaust. But what about our parents? Why make it seem as though it was
so long ago that our parents couldn't be survivors as well? Some of them
are, like my father, and I think it's important to remain conscious of
that fact.

Today, I share with you some relevant links. Also, below, I share some
book related excerpts. Recently, my brother read a description of events
in 1944 Hungary that is precisely about why some of my family survived.
We knew about some of this, but it's interesting to see it written up.
It descibes the reasons why the train that my father, uncle, grandmother,
great-uncle, great-aunt and great-grandmother were on changed route from
Auschwitz to a camp in Vienna and ultimately allowed them to survive. (My
grandfather had already been killed by then in a labor camp so he was not
part of this journey.) I share with you this excerpt. But then, to offer
some context to its concluding thoughts ("On the whole they were often
treated quite humanely") I also share with you some snippets from my uncle
about his experiences when he was 11 in the camps published in my father's
recently completed book. I wrap up the excerpts with a bit about my
father's visit last year to the camp he'd been in and how poor the
rememberance is there.

So I invite you to join me today in thinking about some of these things,
whether it is the suffering to which people were subjected or the grand
apathy of so many, there's lots to remember and lots from which we can
learn.

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation
http://www.vhf.org/

The Holocaust History Project
http://www.holocaust-history.org/normal-index.shtml

Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority
http://www.yad-vashem.org.il/

Some pictures of present-day Auschwitz
http://www.merengo.hu/galeria/?id=340

Pictures of Auschwitz/Birkenau, 1978-1981
http://www.remember.org/jacobs/

---

Excerpt from
"The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary"
Condensed Edition
Randolph L. Braham
Wayne State University Press (in association with the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Detroit, 2000

Original book published at Columbia University Press, 1981

Chapter 7: Deportation

pg. 147-149

The Strasshof Transports

The Jews who lived in Gendarmerie Districts V and VI fared relatively
better than their counterparts in the other provincial gendarmerie
districts. This was due to a combination of good luck and a new
element introduced in the so-called blood for trucks negotiations
between Rudolph (Rezso) Kasztner, the leader of the Budapest Relief and
Rescue Committee of Budapest (Vaadah), and the SS. On June 14, during
the deportations from Zone III, Eichmann unexpectedly informed Kasztner
that he was willing to allow thirty thousand Hungarian Jews to be "laid
on ice" in Austria as a demonstration of his goodwill. He demanded, as
counterdemonstration of goodwill, an immediate payment of five million
Swiss francs. Since the Jews of Carpatho-Ruthenia and Northern
Transylvania had already been deported, Eichmann insisted that only
Jews from Trianon Hungary could be considered for the transfer. He
referred to the former as "ethnically and biologically valuable
elements," whom he would not allow to remain alive. As originally
envisioned, half of the thirty thousand Jews were to come from Budapest
and half from the provinces. Kasztner revealed the details of the new
Eichmann offer to the Jewish Council that very day.

Eichmann's offer was based on instructions he had received from Ernst
Kaltenbrunner. The head of the RSHA, as the evidence reveals, was
besieged by Austrian entrepreneurs operating war industries and by
government officials, including SS-Brigadefuhrer Karl Blaschke, the
mayor of Vienna, with requests to provide them with desperately
needed slave labor. Since Hungarian Jewry was at that time the one
still relatively untapped reservoir of Jewish labor, Kaltenbrunner
requested that Eichmann have a few transports of deportees diverted to
Austria.

From the Germans' point of view the deal with Kasztner offered
several distinct advantages:
- It provided an opportunity for a demonstration of goodwill in the
"blood for trucks" negotiations.
- It supplied the Austrian industrial and agricultural entrepreneurs
and local government officials with needed slave labor.
- It enriched the coffers of the Sonderkommando.

The selection of the Jews for the Austrian transports appers to have
been the responsibility of the Zionists or other well-known Jewish
leaders in the concentration and entrainment centers in the affected
zones, acting on instructions from Kasztner.

Kasztner had expected that the first trainload of Jews would be
leaving from Gyor and Komarom, the areas from which Jews were being
deported at the time. Although this plan reportedly had the
approval of Eichmann, all the transports from Gendarmerie Districts
II and III, including of course those from Gyor and Komarom, were
routinely directed to Auschwitz, presumably due to the inertia of
some of the officers in charge of the transports. (When the
Scharfuhrer responsible for the take-over of the transports from
Gyor at Kassa noticed that the train's number was not on his ledger,
he called Eichmann for instructions. Motivated by a concern for
efficiency rather than moral obligation, Eichmann apparently
decided that as long as the transport was already at the Slovakian
border it might as well continue on to Auschwitz.) Eichmann decided
to compensate Kasztner with a transport from Zone IV.

It was during the deportations from this zone of anti-Jewish
operations on June 25-28 that six or seven transports were directed
to Strasshof, a camp near Vienna. The approximately twenty thousand
Jews in these transports came mostly from ghettos in Gendarmerie
District IV.

After their arrival in Strasshof during the first days of July, the
Jews were sent to labor in industrial and agricultural enterprises in
a number of communities in eastern Austria, including Gmund, Weitra,
Wiener-Neustadt and Neunkirchen. Many of them worked under the
auspices of the Todt Organization. Their treatment varied with the
disposition of the individual employers and foremen. On the whole
they were often treated quite humanely and about 75 percent of them,
including children and the elderly, survived the war.
Organizationally, they were under the control and command of a
central office in Vienna headed by SS-Oberstrumbannfuhrer Hermann
Alois Krumey, a leading member of the Eichmann-Sonderkommando in
Hungary.

---

Excerpt from "Our Lives" by Istvan Hargittai [my father]
Chapter on Sanger
For Preface, see http://www.eszter.com/ol/
The Hungarian version of this book is out now. My father is still seeking
a publisher for the English version.

[this quote in the book is from my uncle who was 11 at the time]

The first day after our arrival [in the camp] the people got their work
assignments. Mother was directed to be helper to a roofing master who
turned out to be a humane Viennese man. He often shared his sandwich with
Mother who pretended to eat it and brought it back for us. Children
younger than 10 years old stayed behind in the camp during the day.
Children above the age of 15 were considered adults and went to work with
the rest. Children between 10 and 15 years old formed a special labor
unit. I was in this unit, which had about 20 children. We were taken to
bombed-out buildings, immediately following the bombing. We had to reach
places that adults could not have reached. We had to bring out cadavers
and wounded people and all the valuables. If we found just limbs or other
body parts we had to bring them out as well. It was a cruel and
frightening job and dangerous too.

Falling down killed some of us. They were replaced then by younger
children. The German guards were not brutal just for the sake of
tormenting us, but they required unconditional discipline. When they
ordered us to climb to a place, however dangerous it was or to walk on a
beam however unstable it was, they expected blind obedience. When any of
us appeared hesitant, they let out a round next to us from their machine
guns to frighten us. I have sharp memories of various events. I remember
when we were carrying a heavy container and when the guard sensed that I
wanted to pause, he gave a round and I did not dare to stop. From the
heavy weight and the fright I wetted my pants. It was so cold that the
urine froze along my legs. I remember my shoes, which were in a terrible
state and we did not have stockings and used newspaper pieces to wrap our
feet. In one of the bombed-out homes I found a pair of shoes that would
have fit me and I changed into them. Upon my return downstairs, the guard
noticed this, he became very angry and ordered me to return and change
back the shoes. This episode stayed with me more sharply than many more
horrible events. I could not figure out why he did not let me have a
better pair of shoes. At about that time, I started having dreams about
Father. He came for us in my dream and engineered our escape. In other
dreams, we went for long walks in the woods just as we used to when we
lived back home and he was still alive. Such dreams I still have
occasionally, and I am now 61 years old.

Istvan, who was 3 years old, was a good child throughout the deportation.
He was quiet and withdrawn. When soldiers entered the room he always hid
behind Mother.

The sick in the camp were moved to the attic. So was grandmother when she
became sick. It was a final move because seldom did anybody return from
the attic. Nobody tended the sick. Their meals were placed at the
entrance to the attic and those in better condition among the sick
distributed the food and reported in the morning about the recent dead.
One morning then grandmother was among the dead.

[the chapter continues with my father's return to the camp site in 2002,
this is now my father's voice]

Vienna 2002

In June 2002, I visited our former camp, Lager 12 at 10 Bischoffgasse in
Vienna. It was my first visit to the former camp site and I am the only
member of our family who has ever visited the place since World War II.
There was no trace of the former camp there, outside or inside the school,
as if the camp might have not existed. I almost felt embarrassed, but the
director had vaguely heard about some camp. She showed me the school and
took me to the attic, where they keep the old year books. In the one for
the year 1944/45, there were only short notes, and not a word about the
camp that operated on the premises of the school. I found that part of
the attic to which a stair-case leads and which I recognized from
Brother's narrative. I was there, alone for a few moments in empty, dusty
space, held up by heavy wooden beams, and I felt very close to my
grandmother.

On that visit, I contacted the Research Center of the History of Jews in
Austria and they sent me photocopied material of the trial of the
Lagerfuhrer of Lager 12. There were about 130 pages, mostly testimonies
of former inmates, that is, surviving Jews from Hungary, also, testimonies
by Viennese people, who lived nearby, and could see some of what was going
on in the camp. There were enclosures in the material, and I found my
name in the listings as Stefan Wilhelm (Stefan is the German equivalent of
Istvan). [my father later changed his name to Hargittai, this is explained
in another part of the book]

The testimonies described how Franz Knoll, the Lagerfuhrer, beat not only
the young but also 80-year-old people, how he locked people up in the cold
cellar in wintertime without food, how he stole the rations and had them
delivered to his home by the prisoners, and how he tried to hide his loot,
from the prisoners, in three big boxes after the camp had been liberated
by the Russians. He was characterized by former prisoners and neighbors
as brutal, inhuman, ruthless, and sadistic. A former inmate described how
she had to witness the slow dying of hunger of her infant son, her
pleading in vain for help to the Lagerfuhrer, who then did not let her be
there when her child was buried. Witnesses described how others,
including children, perished in the camp. There were close to 600
grownups and about 60 children incarcerated there, and the Lagerfuhrer
referred to them as if they were things rather than human beings in his
testimony. He repeatedly referred to children as children only for the
age group between 0 and 10 years old. [fn8]

Franz Knoll was born in 1894 in Vienna. He did not have much schooling,
did not have any profession, and before the Nazis elevated him to
positions of importance, he used to work mostly as a waiter. He joined
the Nazi party in 1932, that is, long before the Anschluss. He was
accused not only of the crimes he committed as the Lagerfuhrer of Lager 12
but also of other crimes committed during the preceding years in other
positions.

I have no expertise in legal matters, so it is only my impression that the
trial was meticulous, preceded by a meticulous investigation during
Knoll's long detention of about 22 months. Knoll pleaded not guilty, but
the Court found him guilty and on August 20, 1948, it sentenced him to 18
months of imprisonment. The Court considered several mitigating
conditions, among them his partial confession, the difficulty of his
service, his reduced sense of responsibility, and his duties of supporting
his wife and underage child. The Court also ordered to deduct Knoll's
detention from his prison term. Thus, when the sentencing was over, Knoll
walked free.

[Please see http://www.eszter.com/ol for more information about this
book.]