After she was separated from her mother and father he died, Krauss was assigned to be a "librarian" in the children's block.
"The Auschwitz experience is a constant presence in my life."
Dita Kraus
Photo:
Natalia Hirschfeld
During one of my visits to Prague I came across a special exhibition, which was displayed in one of the historic synagogues in the ancient and famous Jewish quarter of the city.
Children's paintings have been placed on the shelves and walls - some happy and some sad - but all naive, as befits children's paintings ever since.
Critics of the exhibition went from painting to painting, looking at them with veiled eyes and unable to stop the tears.
It was not the content of the paintings or the talent inherent in them that made visitors stop next to anyone for a long time and examine it as if it were real art, but the fact that they were all painted by Jewish children in the Terezin concentration camp.
One of these paintings belongs to Dita Krauss, then known as Dita (Edith) Polakova, the protagonist of the book "The Librarian from Auschwitz" by the Spanish journalist Antonio Iturba, whose translation into Hebrew was recently published (Keter Publishing, Spanish: Yossi Tal).
The book has been published in many countries and has been a bestseller in all of them.
Iturba was also exposed to the paintings of the children of Terezin, but in addition he discovered and described the story of the experiences of many of the painters.
A story that seems unbelievable and so unusual against the backdrop of the horrors of the Nazi extermination machine.
The Terezin concentration camp, or Theresienstadt, as the Germans called it, was activated from November 1941 to gather the Protectorate Jews of Bohemia and Moravia and all the Jews of Central and Western Europe, before being sent to extermination camps or killing valleys in the east of the continent.
Although the place served as a staging post on the way to Auschwitz and excelled in all the cruelty characteristic of the other camps, the Nazis tried to disguise it and presented Terezin as an "example ghetto" in order to deceive the Jews and Western countries.
The German propaganda apparatus hosted delegations from the Red Cross in Terezin and presented them with the "new Jewish settlement," which had a seemingly normal appearance.
For this purpose he even produced an image film, which sought to describe the ghetto as a kind and friendly site.
Of course, the show was false from start to finish.
In November 1942, Dita's small family was deported from Prague to the Theresienstadt ghetto.
Like most locals, being in the "new Jewish settlement" was not meant to be long.
In December 1943, Dita and her parents Hans and Elizabeth were sent to Auschwitz.
We all know what awaited the human deportations in Auschwitz from the testimonies of the survivors, numbers and films.
In the cruel selection, family members were separated, and most of those who arrived were taken directly to their deaths in the gas chambers.
The few who seemed helpful were left alive for a while, until a donor arrived to die.
At this point, luck had dawned on 14-year-old Dita twice.
Arriving at the camp she declared herself a painter, and thus her life was saved at first.
Instead of holding books at the
same time, something else happened that did not depend on the resourcefulness of one girl.
Unlike other transports sent to Auschwitz, the shipment in which she arrived at the camp was destined for a "family camp," which had been established about three months earlier in the Birkenau camp, adjacent to the Auschwitz camp.
The "family camp" took place for a limited time, less than a year.
As early as the beginning of March 1944, all who survived the first transport brought to him in September 1943, with the exception of a few lone prisoners, were murdered in the gas chambers.
In July 1944, a donor of those brought there arrived in Dita's transport and another transport that arrived in May 1944. However, for a few months in the heart of hell on earth, aboard the gas chambers and crematoria, there was a strange bubble with last remnants of imaginary normalcy: the men, the women And while the children were separated into different blocks, at least they were allowed to live.
Why did the Nazis bother to hold on to relatively favorable conditions a group of Jewish prisoners, who in their eyes were in any case sentenced to extermination?
For years there has been no definite answer to that.
Over time, the perception grew that the "family camp" phenomenon, like the "ghetto for example" phenomenon in Terezin, was born to serve a fleeting need for Nazi propaganda.
The Germans expected that one of the International Red Cross delegations, which was supposed to visit Terezin, would continue from there to Birkenau as well.
In order to deceive her and disguise the huge murderous plot of the Jewish people that took place throughout Europe, the Germans, who did not want to give public to the true essence of the camps, set up a kind of show camp.
When the need to pretend was over, the months of grace were over.
From the time in June 1944 the planned visit of the Red Cross was canceled, the "family camp" became unnecessary, and it was possible for the Germans to destroy all its inhabitants.
Dita was also separated from her parents (her father died after six months in the camp) and was sent to Kinderblock, Block No. 31 of the "Family Camp" which housed the children and was a tiny island of relative sanity for them.
Block 31 was founded by Freddie Hirsch, an athlete and educator born in Germany, who was active before the Holocaust in various Jewish sports associations, and helped train young pioneers to immigrate to Israel.
Like other inmates in the "family camp," Hirsch first stayed in Terezin, trying in every way to improve the conditions of the children there.
Among other things, he organized daily physical activity for them and even managed to get a place for a playground, where in May 1943 the "Maccabi Terezin" games were held.
Even in the "family camp" he devoted himself to caring for the smallest and most vulnerable prisoners of all.
Thanks to his command of German and his ability to negotiate with the Nazi commanders, Hirsch gathered about 300 children deported from Terezin to one of the wooden buildings in the Birkenau "family camp" (when Dita's transport arrived, about 200 small prisoners were added, and another building was needed). Who conducted all their activities.
The pages of "The Librarian from Auschwitz" shed light on what happened there, and especially on the role of Dita, who became in charge of the books held on the block in violation of a strict ban by the Germans.
Atlas and Russian grammar book
"Almost everything written in an accurate book," recalls Dita Kraus.
"Still, it should be remembered that this is not a documentary, but a novella based on real historical events, as Antonio Iturba himself defined it, when I complained to him about some inaccuracies. The author added two or three fictional characters and some imaginative details. For example, D." The infamous R. Mengele did not take special care of me, and the danger of death hovered over me no more than over all the other prisoners.
But all the rest are real events and real people from Block 31 and from the camp.
Because of the fictional additions I initially had some reservations from Iturba's book, but they disappeared.
I'm glad he's written and become a bestseller: thanks to the book, many more people around the world will learn about the Holocaust, and that's what matters. "
Dita knew Hirsch since their stay in Terezin, and he remembered helping one of the librarians guide the book cart between the ghetto buildings. But dealing with books in Auschwitz-Birkenau was a completely different thing. "If the SS caught someone with a book, it would have one meaning - death," she says. In Block 31, impromptu lessons were held secretly, in small groups according to age. The children read the contents of books that they remembered almost orally on topics such as geography, history and Judaism, played games with them, sang songs together, performed plays and did daily sports activities to forge their bodies. However, the presence of the books in the block involved a special risk. Them during a careful search - difficult to impossible.
Freddie and the "instructors" ran an impossible race against the predetermined end. They tried to instill in children hygiene rules in a place that was infested with diseases and infections, and took every opportunity to obtain additional food rations for them. Unexpected - Following the repeated pleas, Mengele ordered
Transfer to Block 31 the food packages sent by family members to prisoners who have already passed away.
However, the hiding of the books, if it had been discovered, would not have been applied.
How did inmates obtain books in an extermination camp?
"In Auschwitz there was a huge warehouse, to which objects taken from the prisoners were transferred right when they arrived at the camp, and the objects were filtered on a high ramp. Some non-Jewish prisoners who were employed in the camp in various maintenance jobs, moving relatively freely, managed to get their hands on some books. "From this warehouse. Hirsch paid them for these books in food rations from the packages he received. My job was to know which of the 'guides' were given the books, to collect them at the end of the impromptu lessons, and to return this treasure to hiding places at the end of the day."
Iturba details that the treasure was composed of eight books, some of them in bad condition.
"In this' library 'there were between 12 and 14 books, the previous owners of which were sent to the gas chambers. Not all the books belonged to what is commonly called literature, and the titles were slightly different from Itura's' description of the librarian from Auschwitz. For example, there was an atlas. Russian grammar textbook. And unlike the narrator by Iturba, we did not have materials like glue or a needle that could be used to repair the damage to Russian books. Faced with the huge risk, my main 'profit' was that because of my role as a 'librarian', I was spared I work in harder conditions outside under cold rain or snow. "
The woman made of iron
Dita admits that "the desperate clinging to the books and the culture behind them helped me to be saved. The horrors I saw in my eyes, especially in the next stage, after the elimination of the 'family camp' and after I was sent to the Bergen-Belsen camp, gave me the opportunity to differentiate between And the secondary, "she says.
"And the Auschwitz experience is a constant presence in my life."
The books did not have the power to save most of the residents of Block 31. At the beginning of March 1944, the members of the "Family Camp" were required to organize for what was presented to them as a transfer to another concentration camp.
Hirsch said goodbye to his little trainees, unaware that they were being sent to their deaths.
On March 7, most of the children in Block 31 were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Freddie Hirsch heard about it when the underground operating in Auschwitz offered him to lead the planned uprising in the camp.
According to the evidence, he hesitated, asked one of the doctors for a sedative and was isolated in the room.
Hence the versions split.
Some claim that Hirsch took a large amount of pills on purpose to end his life.
Iturba supports another view, which holds that the doctors, who feared the uprising because it meant the death of everyone, gave him an overdose of medicine, thwarted the plan and saved themselves.
For Dita and her mother, the elimination of the "family camp" marked only the beginning of the path of atrocities.
They survived the selection and were sent to forced labor in northern Germany, from where they were transferred to the Neugraben and Tipstock labor camps, and finally, in March 1945, to the Bergen-Belsen camp.
Both lasted until release, but the mother died less than two months later.
At the end of the war, Dita returned to Prague alone.
She had no home, and almost all the people she knew were murdered.
After a while fate met her again with one of the surviving instructors, Otto Krauss.
They married, and in 1949 immigrated to Israel with their infant son.
In Israel, the couple had two more children, and over the years they also had four grandchildren.
Years later, Otto began writing, and among the books he published were The Unfinished Mural, a historical novel that sketched the life experiences of prisoners, children and adults, at the Birkenau Family Camp in 1944.
Iturba may not be accurate in some details about the makeshift library of Block 31, but when it came to describing her librarian, there was not the slightest hint of exaggeration.
"This woman is made of iron," he wrote of her, adding: "It's amazing how someone who has gone through all this cumulative suffering sitting on her shoulders, is unable to lose her smile."
Even at 91, Dita is amazing in her vitality, activism and kindness.
With restraint and an eternal smile, she balconies the continuation of her life in Israel.
For many years she and Otto were revered teachers in the Hadassim Youth Village, devoting their lives to educating generations of Israeli children.
She is far from glorifying herself or her beloved husband, who passed away about 20 years ago, but it is hard not to see this as a chilling symbolism.
Dita and her husband found the strength to keep going, but Iturba was less restrained in the face of her ability to get on with life.
"Until now I have never believed in heroes," he admitted excitedly, "but now I know they exist: Dita is one of them."
Dita's love of books did not die in Auschwitz either and continues to flourish.
There, in the death camps, the books were a testament to the existence of another world, whose memory almost disappeared from the ravages of hunger and loss.
Here their role is less dramatic, but impossible without it: "Books have been my faithful companions since I learned to read at age 5. I love to read, it was and still is the greatest pleasure for me. I usually read in bed before bed, and sometimes I get so carried away, that I do not Turns off the light until the wee hours of the morning. "
