This article from the Indy [Indianapolis] Star is more than a year old, but I still found it moving and wanted to call it to your attention (there’s a similar piece with additional information in the 2019 Journal Review).
Click on the screenshot to read the Star piece, whose words I’ve put in indents below:
In 1944, Frank Grunwald and his family, along with many other Jews, was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Grunwald (then 11) was standing in line with his mother Vilma and crippled brother, waiting for the gas chamber when, unaccountably, a German guard pulled him out of the death line and put him with children who weren’t to be immediately executed. (Frank’s dad Kurt wasn’t killed, but had been put to work earlier in the prison hospital.)
Here is Frank with his mom before the war:
And Frank’s parents:
As his mom waited for execution (most of those prisoners were aware of their fate, as they could see the crematorium smokestacks billowing ashes of the dead), she scribbled a ten-sentence note on a sheet of paper in pencil and handed it to a German guard. It was addressed to her husband : “Dr. Grunwald F Lager.” (F Lager was her husband’s barracks, and her husband had apparently been sent to Auschwitz before the rest of the family.) Unaccountably, the guard actually gave that letter to Kurt Grunwald.
The article tells the rest:
Auschwitz was liberated seven months later. Some time after that Kurt Grunwald was reunited with his surviving son, and said: I have a note here from your mother.
“I didn’t want to see it, I was too upset,” said Frank.
In 1951 the surviving Grunwalds moved to New York City. The father practiced medicine in Forest Hills. The son went to the Pratt Institute and studied industrial design. He got a job with General Electric in Syracuse and married his wife, Barbara. The couple had two children.Kurt Grunwald died in 1967 at age 67, and it was while going through his father’s belongings that Frank came across the letter. “He had it in a desk in his bedroom,” Frank said.
“The paper had turned yellow. I saw it and knew what it was right away. I recognized my mother’s handwriting.”
The Grunwalds were Czechoslovakian, and Vilma had written in her native language. Frank read it.
Frank kept the letter to himself for ten years, and eventually donated it to the National Holocaust Museum.
Over the years the museum has received donations of thousands of personal artifacts. But Vilma Grunwald’s letter stands alone.
“I’m always reluctant to say it’s the only such document ever created,” said Judith Cohen, the museum’s chief acquisitions curator, “but to the best of our knowledge it is — it is the only one we have ever seen. Auschwitz, in the moments before gassing. In the extermination camps it was almost impossible to write material that was preserved.”
Here it is:
By now you’ll want to see what the letter says. It’s heartbreaking. Here’s a translation:
“You, my only one, dearest, in isolation we are waiting for darkness. We considered the possibility of hiding but decided not to do it since we felt it would be hopeless. The famous trucks are already here and we are waiting for it to begin. I am completely calm. You — my only and dearest one, do not blame yourself for what happened, it was our destiny. We did what we could. Stay healthy and remember my words that time will heal — if not completely — then — at least partially. Take care of the little golden boy and don’t spoil him too much with your love. Both of you — stay healthy, my dear ones. I will be thinking of you and Misa. Have a fabulous life, we must board the trucks.
“Into eternity, Vilma.”
The “into eternity” signature makes me tear up.
There’s nothing more to be said, except that although this is stirring, as is Anne Frank’s diary, they are unique only in that they are written documentation of the lives and feelings of doomed Jews. Multiply this letter by six million who did not leave words and you’ll have an idea of the enormity of the tragedy.
h/t: Ginger K.
Painful, but beautiful in its’ humanity.
My husband and I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. shortly after it opened. One of our friends had said we should allow at least half a day for our visit. We spent a full day and then came back the next day for another 4 hours because it was so compelling. My parents were in the U.S. occupation in Germany after the war, so I grew up with family friends who were survivors. So unbelievably horrendous. How can people be tolerant of Neo-Nazis?
The “Take care of the little golden boy …” did it for me.
For America WWII was the most necessary war that we entered, however it is becoming more clear today that we learned very little from the conflict. Maybe it is the collective ignorance of history or the built in prejudices of the people. I hope it is simple ignorance but often think it is a worse part of the culture and society as a whole.
At times I think the reason for our regressions is because they are somehow innate to the species. They can be suppressed by learning, but they do seem to creep back in.
Yes, the question is – does our evolution fight against the negative condition or bring us back to it?
We may be in a relative golden age as Pinker describes it. But, your comment should make us all understand that future progress is by no means guaranteed. This is especially true because in contrast to previous eras, one mad person can destroy much of the world in the blink of an eye.
That was related to one of my complains about Pinker’s very interesting books. That is, it is true that things are better in many ways, but the likelihood of total disaster has gone up. When was the last time before the mid 20th century that one event could end the species?
I think you will find Pinker was very aware of this. One freak individual and… i dont need to go on.
Oh, I am sure he is aware of it, but I don’t think he addresses the topic adequately. Not surprisingly, since it is sort of an instance of the aggregation of values problem.
Not sure what you mean by a aggregation of values problem, but I’m pretty sure he can’t predict any future pertaining to a progresive movement toward betterment in any category we care to name. If this touches on what you mean.
So i say, why would he go there.
heartbreaking
No matter how many times I read letters or stories, see pictures, hear interviews, etc. from the Holocaust, I never become even slightly desensitized to it. Multiple ancestors of mine died there. I’ll never forget the tattoo on my great grandmother’s arm. I often think when I see the photos of corpses piled up that one of my relatives might be in that picture. And I often think of how, if my great grandmother didn’t have the bravery, toughness, and sheer will to endure (and the luck to not simply be shot or beaten to death or gassed, etc.), I wouldn’t exist today.
Heartbreaking, as always.
I’ve spoken to survivors. For AOC, et al. to flippantly call the border processing centers “concentration camps” is an insult to them.
There are many who don’t agree with you here, Matt.
I should have added George Takei’s observations.
You talk to someone who made it out of Sachsenhausen or Theresienstadt, then get back to me.
Only German concentration camps are concentration camps, eh?
Everybody, including AOC and those who defend her on this, know exactly how the phrase “concentration camp” is used colloquially in America, the images it conjures, and what it’s almost always used to refer to. She knew exactly what she was doing.
I think she was referring to concentration camps as concentration camps. As does George Takei who spent his childhood in a concentration camp.
Of course you might not think there were any concentration camps in colloquial America.
No, I realize what the academic definition is, but everyone in America knows what the colloquial definition is. Everyone. Especially someone from NYC. This is the height of absurdity.
Perhaps you’re not from the US? I’m not being sarcastic. Maybe in your country, “concentration camps” does not always refer to The Holocaust in regular conversation. Hell, in regular conversation, we refer to the Japanese camps as “internment camps” because “concentration camp” is so completely chained to the Holocaust that we need to delineate between them and the camps that the Japanese were forced into in the US during WWII. See, in the US, “concentration camp” means “death camp used for the systematic extermination of an entire ethnic group,” usually for Jews during WWII. Which is not what the Japanese camps were.
George can blab on all he wants, but he knows this because he’s lived here his whole life.
In my country we refer to concentration camps as concentration camps even if they weren’t established by Germans leading up to, and during, WWII.
It is just kind of a funny thing, I suppose, about us foreigners in far-away Milwaukee. Take a trip sometime and visit us. It’s nice to travel abroad from time to time.
Those are the two camps where the survivors I’ve spoken to had been. But you go ahead and rely on a 29-year-old airhead for your info.
George Takei is 29? Doesn’t look it.
“Concentration camps” existed for a decade before the Holocaust. The term is NOT exclusively used to refer to the camps where 6 million Jews died. Those were extermination camps, death camps – subsets of concentration camps.
To ascribe flippancy to AOC over this terminology is to be determinedly ungenerous. Her heart is most assuredly in the right place on this one.
(From a Jew who does not agree with AOC on the Middle East.)
“To ascribe flippancy to AOC over this terminology is to be determinedly ungenerous.”
I disagree. I think that to not ascribe flippancy (or, worse, intentional use of the word to conjure images of the Jewish Holocaust) is to say that AOC, a politician, somehow didn’t know that the phrase “concentration camp” is almost exclusively used colloquially in the US to refer to the Jewish death camps. The only place in which this isn’t true is some academic contexts. Even the Japanese camps from WWII have always been referred to colloquially as “internment camps” to delineate the difference between them and what we all think of when we hear “concentration camp.”
We all know how the phrase is used, how people think of it, and what images it conjures. Pointing to academic definitions does nothing.
I agree with you BJ. It’s like the Confederate flag; whatever it complex history it has taken on a particular meaning* that takes precedence in the minds of most people. Just so, when referring to concentration camps there are very few people who conjure the concentration camps established to house Japanese Americans during WWII with the ones in Europe at the same time.
I believe that those who use the term to describe the conditions at the US border today use it with the intent of conflating those images because the Nazi camps are both more horrific and play into their narrative. Besides, they can then point us to the dictionary definition as a defense against the misdirection.
*or should that be a peculiar meaning?
The phrase “concentration camp” or what it connotes did not originate during the Nazi era. As Wikipedia puts it:
“Concentration camps were operated by the British in South Africa during the Second Anglo-Boer War from 1900–1902. The term “concentration camp” grew in prominence during that period. The camps had originally been set up by the British Army as “refugee camps” to provide refuge for civilian families who had been forced to abandon their homes for whatever reason related to the war. However, when the Earl Kitchener took over in late 1900, he introduced new tactics in an attempt to break the guerrilla campaign and the influx of civilians grew dramatically as a result. Disease and starvation killed thousands.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_concentration_camps
The word “gay” also means “lighthearted and carefree”.
I say; “Those happy young men over there seem quite gay.”
What did I mean?
How did you interpret that?
I made it very, very, very clear that I (1) know what the actual definition is, and (2) I was referring to what literally everyone in the US knows what the colloquial definition is. This is a complete dodge of everything I said in my comment.
As EdwardM says, the Confederate Flag may mean many things, or as Matt said, “gay” used to mean something else, but things change, and words have colloquial and academic definitions that are different, and words take on different meanings over time. This is stretching the bounds of legitimacy so thin is crazy. And all to defend a dumb comment.
If Trump made the same comment he would be pilloried by the same people defending AOC.
Outside of those gassed in the Vernichtungslagern, almost two million people died in the other KZ of various causes. All the prisoners were subjected to horrific living conditions, slave labor, and constant, sadistic brutalities.
The term “concentration camp” was coined during the Boer War, when the British forcibly rounded up civilians to prevent them from harboring francs-tireurs. The internment camps for Japanese-Americans, though ‘merely’ austere, not brutal, could also be labeled such. Likewise for American Indian reservations.
In each of these examples, the confined were forcibly and extra-judicially removed from their homes against their will, a condition that does not apply to the illegal border crossers in the processing centers. In even the most benign of these above examples, the conditions were light years worse than temporary privations and lack of toothbrushes & other amenities.
You and I have widely disparate assessments of AOC’s character. I see her as a pathological narcissist of the most dangerous (trumpian) type. Her sincerity is seriously brought into question by her bald-faced lie about detainees having to drink toilet water, and her quickness in playing the racism card against Speaker Pelosi.
It’s so nice to see Jerry’s comments section on a post about the horrors and humanity of the Holocaust turn into one where there are more comments about Trump and defending AOC than about the subject of the post.
This. This is part of what I was talking about with my empathy comment toward the bottom. We’re so caught up in politics and tribalism that we can’t even take a moment to think solemnly about something as horrifying as the Holocaust.
Mea culpa on that one.
Awful.
While I was at my school, safely in Devon, the Nazis were parading Jews into gas chambers. I didn’t know about this of course but I do now and in spite of this horrible tragedy anti-Semitism is still rife.
This letter is so powerful, how can it fail to pierce the stoniest heart! We must constantly be reminded of what humans can do to each other and the Holocaust must never be forgotten or compared with lesser evils.
No words but these.
Also no words.
Same.
WEIT is sort of depressing me today, but that’s OK. I didn’t start out with Hili or Wildlife photos, but went from the bigot comment to this heartbreaking letter. I think I’ll go read Hili next. I don’t have any ducks to console with. 🙁
When will we humans ever learn? How many of the GI’s who participated in the liberation of the concentration camps left unchanged by the experience? Not many I would speculate.
How can our Vice President and his GOP entourage stare blankly at the detainees in our detention camps and not express any outrage? Not that this is an equivalent situation but hard hearted individuals will think the same thing:
“They deserve what they are receiving “
Grim.
There is more that survived, eg. the diary of David Koker, smuggled out of different camps piece by piece.
It is breathtakingly objective and fresh, never judgmental, deeply impressive. When you read it it is as he’s living now, so direct, so ordinary and everyday, it is as if he’s telling you sitting next to you.
I was somehow shocked to learn he did not survive.
It has been translated into English as “At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944”. I haven’t read the English version, so I cannot vow for it being as fresh and optimistic as the original in Dutch, but I’m sure I can safely recommend it.
I have a letter by my great uncle, written with pencil on cigarette paper, smuggled out of his prison (I’m named after him, but he died long before I was born) on the eve of his execution in 1941, his friend had convinced him of the greater purpose by God. I can understand that when you’re going to be executed at dawn.
It made me very tolerant of people fleeing into religion when they know they are tickets. My late wife did the same (she never was an atheist anyway). It is a kind of way to cope with imminent death, I guess.
*speechless*
Many ordinary enlisted men, court-martialed for offenses as minor as stealing food or falling asleep on guard duty, avoided the firing squad by accepting ‘special assignment’ and ended up as camp guards.
This particular ‘guard’ may also have been a “Kapo” — a fellow prisoner who received slightly better treatment in exchange for performing guard & policing duties.
“…ordinary enlisted men,…”
People ask me why and when I became an atheist. From an early age I was a voracious reader. Mystery, current events, biology and especially history. At the age of 10 or 11 I read somewhere that all German soldiers had a belt buckle with “Gott mit uns” on it. Ordinary enlisted men participating in the Holocaust with “God is with us” right there on their uniform.
It was then I decided that there was one thing I knew…. there is no god.
Sorry, the phrase “ordinary enlisted men” in this context gets my blood up every time.
The vast majority of the men fighting on the German side were just like those on ours: scared, alone, and forced into killing and being killed by people they didn’t know. Perhaps many of them even believed in the Nazi ideology, but they lived in a bubble where they were raised from youth to believe it and didn’t have much choice. The vast majority were just ordinary men, and I hold no ill will toward them.
The guards at the death camps are a different story, but, even then, I wonder what most people, even me, would do in the positions of the low-tier guards. Would they truly stand up just to say, “this is wrong,” only to be shot and leave their family without a father or the pension they hoped to receive by surviving the war? How many of us would stand up to say that something is wrong when we know that it will make no difference beyond getting us killed and perhaps making our loved ones suffer?
It’s very difficult to think about these things. It’s hard to ask ourselves what we would do, rather than think about what we would like to think we would do. These are all difficult questions, but I think they’re important because they engender empathy in us. It’s why I have empathy for, say, a rabid right-winger who would call me a “kike” and regularly posts about gassing the Jews on Youtube. I ask myself whether they’ve been raised from birth to think these things, whether they’ve ever lived outside that bubble if they were raised. Not everyone has the critical thinking or the moral fortitude to ask themselves whether what they believe and do is right.
I lament the lack of empathy that is now spreading across my own country (the US) because people would rather feel right than question themselves, and because they’d rather be angry at their fellow human beings who don’t hold their beliefs than to treat them as human beings who may have grown and/or lived differently than them. I think this lack of empathy is spreading across the whole world.
Sorry if none of this is what makes you angry about the phrase “ordinary enlisted men,” but it’s what I thought of when I saw your post. I’m not necessarily saying you lack empathy, and it’s very easy to understand someone having empathy for even political opponents today but not for Nazi soldiers. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone that either.
Well said. The brutal Nazi regime tortured and killed those who disobeyed or resisted right to the bitter end. It would take a brave person indeed to say “No.” Perhaps taking Frank out of the execution line and passing Vilma’s note to Kurt were the only compassionate gestures the guards dared to do. I don’t know. In any case, it is wonderful that Vilma’s words survived to inspire us all.
All well put, well stated. I hold no ill will against the common soldier. I understand the pressures. I wonder what I would have done.
What I cannot understand, what I have no feeling for or empathy with is those who believed then and believe now that an omnipotent being exists which choses to endorse a country an ideology a man or woman and grants leave to those who commit what any human would view as immoral acts.
Ah, I understand. But, I guess it’s like any other ideology I was discussing: if you’re born into it, raised with nothing else but it, and your entire nation adheres to it, then it’s easy for most people to believe. I can’t really view it any differently than Nazism itself. It’s just another way of thought that can take over people’s minds. But I understand your position.
Heck, throughout nearly all of human history, many (most? all?) peoples, nations, etc. believed they were god’s chosen people. There are still many people like that today. The Muslim theocracies believe their god exists and is on their side. There are probably at the very least a couple billion people on this planet who think they are part of “god’s” chosen people. It persists even today. But, would most of those people believe that if they weren’t raised as they were and didn’t live where they are? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not for many or most of them. So, again, I personally don’t find it difficult to empathize with them when I take the time to get past my own feelings about it.
But hey, your mileage may vary, and I completely understand that.
FYI, the “Gott Mit Uns” motto dates to the 17th century Prussian army.
Everyone always believes God is on their side. And if they lose, they assume He was at the start, but they did something along the way to displease Him.
In what way were young German men drafted into the military ‘unordinary’?
Also, did you not note that some who ‘participated’ in the Holocaust did so unwillingly? cf. the tragic case of Kurt Gerstein.
What on earth was going through the guards head?