Auschwitz (22 page)

Odette and the other helpers, confronted by this pitiable sight, felt they had no option but to try and comfort the children with words they knew to be untrue:

Odette saw how the children still possessed “some little objects that were very important to them” such as photos of their parents or small pieces of jewelry. “There was a little girl who had earrings and who said, ‘Do you think they'll let me keep little things in gold?'” But, the day before the children left, Jewish women from elsewhere in the camp arrived to search them for valuables. “These women were paid by the day and we knew that about half of what they found they would stick in their own pockets. And I saw that they weren't nice with them at all. They were completely insensitive to the way they treated the children, which seemed curious to me.”

Michel and Annette Muller found life in Drancy—a camp set up in a semi-completed low-cost housing project—“like walking through a nightmare.” Annette was shocked not just by the living conditions—she and her brother slept on a cement floor surrounded by excrement—but also by the fact that, because the few adults who were trying to look after the children were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, it meant that “no one took care of us. We were really left to ourselves. I don't remember an adult looking after us.” Then, just before the transports were due to leave for Auschwitz, she heard her name and that of her brother called out from a list. She and Michel were escorted out of Drancy, past the barbed wire, to a police car that awaited them. “We thought we were going to be liberated,” says Annette.

Annette and Michel were taken to another holding center for foreign Jews in a house not far from Drancy—a former asylum on the rue Lamarck in Montmartre. They did not know it yet, but this was their first step towards liberation. Their father had received the letter his wife had written from Beaune-la-Rolande. As a result he had made a series of payments—first to an influential French Jew, and through him to the French authorities. This meant that Annette and Michel had been, despite their age, reclassified as “fur workers” and so transferred out of Drancy. Once they arrived at the new holding center their father arranged for the children to be taken away by representatives of a Catholic orphanage, where they were hidden for the duration of the war.

The vast majority of the thousands of children sent to Drancy in the summer of 1942 were not so lucky. Between August 17 and the end of that month, seven trains were dispatched from the camp to Auschwitz, carrying the children who had been separated from their parents at Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. “The morning before the departure we dressed the children as best we could,” says Odette Daltroff-Baticle.

Jo Nisenman,
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then eighteen years old, left Drancy on a transport for
Auschwitz on August 26. On the train were 700 adults and 400 children, including his ten-year-old sister who was “blonde and very pretty.” Of the 90 or so people in his wagon about 30 of them were children being deported without their parents. Jo remembers how the children “stoically” endured life in the freight train during the lengthy journey to Auschwitz.

Jo was one of the adults selected to leave the train.

Sixty years later, Jo Nisenman recalls daily the suffering of his sister and the rest of the children from Drancy:

Of all the many terrible incidents from the history of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, the story of the murder of the Jewish children sent from France is one of the most profoundly affecting. At the heart of the story, of course, is the shocking image of the separation of children from their parents. But it is not just the horrific idea of children being ripped from their mothers' arms at camps like Beaune-la-Rolande that is so upsetting. It is rather that some parents, like the mothers who told their sons to run away during the initial round-up, had to act against instinct and abandon their
own children so that they might survive. The emotional trauma involved in such actions must have been devastating.

Even Höss observed how families in Auschwitz wanted to stay together at all costs. And though the selection process separated men from women, husbands from wives, the Nazis soon learned that it was almost always counter to their own interests to separate mothers forcibly from their children. Even though the Nazis lost valuable labor by sending some young, healthy women to the gas chambers with their offspring, they realized that to wrench boys and girls from their mothers against their will at the initial selection would result in such horrendous scenes that efficient management of the killing process would be almost impossible. Moreover, the upset involved in such separation would be so great as to rival the emotional disturbance caused to the killing squads by shooting women and children at close range—the very trauma that the gas chambers had been designed to diminish.

After the transports of children in the summer of 1942, the French authorities came to the same conclusion. So disturbing was the image of small children fending for themselves, deprived of their mothers, that after the last train containing parentless children left Drancy on August 31 an order was given that such transports were not to be repeated. Never again, as far as the French deportations were concerned, would children be snatched from their mothers; instead, whole families would be sent to Auschwitz together. It is important, however, to draw from this decision the right conclusion, which is not that the French authorities had suddenly developed a sense of compassion but rather that they had realized, just as much as Höss did at Auschwitz, that it would be easier for them—in pursuit of their own interests—if they avoided separating mothers from their children.

There is another reason that this story sticks in the gullet so badly—the complicity at every stage of the French authorities. As the Nazis knew from the first, it would be impossible to deport the Jews without the collaboration of the French. And the French decision to hand over “foreign” Jews rather than their “own” Jews betrays a level of cynicism that is breathtaking even at this distance of time (though this was a decision which, as later chapters will reveal, was to be repeated by several other countries in the years to come). Altogether just under 80,000 Jews were killed as a result of
deportation from France during the war, which represents about 20–25 percent of the total Jewish population in France at the time. That figure—which means that roughly four out of five Jews in France survived the war—is sometimes quoted by apologists as a “healthy” statistic showing that the French authorities behaved with relative honor in the face of Nazi occupation. On the contrary, it demonstrates precisely the reverse because, almost certainly, little would have happened had the French refused to cooperate in handing over their “foreign” Jews. Even after the occupation of the whole of France in November 1942, the Nazis did not enforce violent reprisals when the French authorities dragged their feet and the German targets for deportations were subsequently not met.

In the wake of the Paris round-up of July 1942 and the expulsion of the children, there was considerable protest from Church leaders about the actions of the French political leadership. The archbishop of Toulouse ordered a pastoral letter of protest to be read out in his diocese on August 23, and the archbishop of Lyons told Laval when he met him on September 1, that he supported both protest action and the hiding of Jewish children by Catholics. But all this was too late to affect those taken in the Paris sweep that July.

Michel and Annette Muller's mother, snatched from her children at Beaune-la-Rolande, died at Auschwitz. And while it was the Nazis who wished her dead, it was the French who put her in harm's way. “What struck me most,” says Michel, “was that it was completely gratuitous. People were arrested simply because they were born Jewish. And it was the French who did that—that's still beyond me. Sixty years later, it's still unbelievable to me.”

Every single one of the more than 4,000 children deported without their parents from France in the summer of 1942 died at Auschwitz. Recalls Annette,

There are witnesses to the separation of the French children from their parents, to their suffering at the various holding camps, even to their “stoic” attitude on the transports, but until now, once they entered the gates of Auschwitz there was only silence. Trying to imagine this or other similar scenes of selection—still more trying to imagine what it must have been like to participate in the process as a perpetrator—has been almost impossible. The only way to penetrate that darkness would be to find a credible witness who had belonged to the SS and worked at Auschwitz. Exceptionally, and only after many months of research, we obtained an interview with just such a person—Oskar Groening.

In 1942, when he was twenty-one years old, Groening was posted to Auschwitz. He arrived just weeks after the French children, and almost immediately witnessed a transport arriving at “the ramp”—the platform where the Jews disembarked. “I was standing at the ramp,” he says,
¹⁹
“and my task was to be part of the group supervising the luggage from an incoming transport.” He watched while SS doctors first separated men from women and children, and then selected who was fit to work and who should be gassed immediately. “Sick people were lifted on to lorries,” says Groening. “Red Cross lorries—they always tried to create the impression that people had nothing to fear.”

He estimates that between 80 and 90 percent of those on the first transport he witnessed in September 1942 were selected to be murdered at once.

Groening, according to his story, was so filled by “doubt and outrage” that he went to his superior officer and told him: “‘It's impossible, I can't work here any more. If it is necessary to exterminate the Jews, then at least it should be done within a certain framework.' I told him this and said, ‘I want to go away from here.'” His superior officer calmly listened to Groening's complaints, reminded him of the SS oath of allegiance he had sworn and said that he should “forget” any idea of leaving Auschwitz. But he also offered hope—of a kind. He told Groening that the “excesses” he saw that night were an “exception,” and that he himself agreed that members of the SS should not participate in such “sadistic” events. Documents confirm that Groening subsequently put in for a transfer to the front, which was refused. So he carried on working at Auschwitz.