European Jews were affected by the outbreak of war and Nazi occupation in a multitude of ultimately catastrophic ways. Where one lived at the time of German invasion, their age, gender, and socioeconomic status all played a role in determining how long one was able to prolong the inevitable: deportation and dehumanization. The introduction of the Nuremberg laws in 1935 codified and legalized discrimination against Jews, which for some had already been a lifelong endeavor. Despite already being an historical scapegoat, this legislation had officially marginalized Europe’s Jewry. Children, however, experienced this marginalization differently than their older Jewish counterparts. This paper will discuss the intersectionality of location, class, gender, and age prior to deportation. Through this approach we may begin to offer both nuance and utterance to the soft voices of children who previously have been deprived of thorough historical analysis.
Between marginal identities a magnetism exists, drawing those identities previously believed to lay peripherally, radially together. This concept is often referred to now as, intersectionality. In his recent monograph Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages, Roland Betancourt, drawing off Kimberle Crenshaw’s original definition of intersectionality, defined this methodological strategy as the act of acknowledging that marginalized identities intersect and, “...overlap with one another - not as distinct identities but as enmeshed conditions that radically alter the lives of figures, both real and imagined.”[i] Though this approach has more recently been employed within the context of scholarship on antiquity, it may too be beneficial to view the subjects of Holocaust and Genocide Studies under this lens. Being that children were a minority among those persecuted during the Holocaust, in this light, we may begin to complicate the lived experiences of children in the Holocaust by considering the full scope of their marginality. The diary of Dawid Rubinowicz in Alexandra Zapruder’s, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, is a good starting point for further exploration. Dawid was born on July 27, 1927 and lived with his mother, father, and two siblings in the village of Krajno, Poland. His diary begins seven months after the 1939 German invasion of Poland.[ii] Immediately though, there is something striking about Dawid’s family life. Dawid grew up the child of poor dairy farmers in rural Poland.[iii] The circumstances of his socioeconomic status and his residence in Poland, when viewed in tandem, alter Dawid’s identity. He no longer lived only as a religious minority, but also as a minority within the broader spectrum of European Jews. For starters, despite the fact that a majority of Jews lived in Poland in 1939, Dawid’s family was one of few Jewish families in Krajno.[iv] In his diary we learn of at least three groups who hold power over Jews in and around Krajno: the Nazi Gendarmes (rural police force), the local Polish police who are subordinate to the Nazis, and the Gentile civilian Poles themselves, though minimally. While it was fairly common for local police and populations to side with the Nazis, the compounding forces of surveillance and conflicting attitudes of Gentiles towards Nazi occupation would have transformed “home” into an ambiguous and volatile living environment. Initially, Dawid, as most young boys might be, was amused by the sight of Germans soldiers marching through his village, however, it was not long before he realized the effect of their presence on his life.[v] Dawid chronicled the random raids, arrests, and quartering of soldiers in his home. One afternoon, Gendarmes, by surprise, entered Dawid’s house and nearly immediately began searching the residence. Before finally leaving, the German soldiers informed Dawid’s father, Josek, that he was to come with them in two days’ time.[vi] While the reason for the search and his father’s forewarned arrest is still unclear, certainly, we can see why Dawid would later remark, “Nowadays a person can be arrested for any trifle.”[vii] At another point in the journal, he writes that his family was warned that the Gendarmes were returning to the village to sequester livestock and any villager who had yet to pay and deliver their quotas.[viii] Additionally, Dawid writes about a Gendarme who unexpectedly came into his house to “warm up” and suggestively stated that the Jews should all buy sheepskin and make him a fur coat.[ix] Living constantly in both fear and close contact with the Gendarmes, the threat of arrest or murder was heightened for Jews living in the highly militarized provinces of Poland. Interactions with the local Polish police force could be equally as fear inducing as they were ambiguous. Conscripted to serve under the command of the Gendarmes, the local police force was turned against its own citizens in order to operate the Nazi machine of death most efficiently. Pre-existing prejudices against Jews, increased levels of power, and fear of Nazi overseers, among other factors, contributed to the Polish extortion and brutalization of both Gentile and Jewish Poles. Dawid records a particularly striking example of the violence and ambiguity of local force. After discovering that two men had slaughtered a pig, the local police confiscated the meat and surrendered it to the gendarmerie, informing both men that they were to report to the police station the next day.[x] When only one of the men reported, the police went to the house of the second man, found him getting dressed, and entered into a foot chase to capture him. Realizing that they would not be able to catch him, the officers opened fire and struck the man on the right side, wounding, but not killing him. The policeman then called for “a taxi” to bring the man to the hospital.[xi] Dawid wrote, “While telephoning, the policeman tore his hair, he was so sorry at what he’d done.”[xii] This passage is indicative of the effect Nazi occupation had on those who participated unwillingly in the systematic destruction of the Jews. Regardless of the policeman’s mournful reaction, the local police force still enforced Nazi rule. This excerpt too may serve as evidence for the Nazi’s decision to murder Jews in gas chambers and vans since foot soldiers frequently experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some local police officers, however, acted decidedly cruel against Jewish children, shooting them without reason, forcing them and others to lay bricks or shovel snow from sunrise to sunset in blizzard conditions, or randomly appearing at their doorstep with fabricated charges demanding to be paid hundreds of Zlotys or face arrest.[xiii] Within this group of authorities, two paradigms emerge: those who acted violently and mourned retroactively and those who acted unflinchingly. In either paradigm the infliction of brute force remains a constant parallel. Polish-Jewish children also needed to navigate the power differential between themselves and their marginally superior neighbors. Although Gentile Poles too suffered under wartime conditions and Nazi occupation, some Poles willingly took advantage of whatever degree of power they held over Jews.[xiv] For example, Dawid was forced by the town constable to shovel the snow that accumulated behind his former schoolhouse despite the fact that Dawid, along with the other Jewish children, were no longer allowed to attend classes there.[xv] Dawid, additionally, recorded in his diary the day propaganda flyers containing a monstrous caricature of Jews mincing rat meat and pouring dirty water into a bucket of milk were posted in his village.[xvi] At the top of the flyer a slogan read, “The Jew is a Cheat, Your Only Enemy.”[xvii] This was then followed by a short poem that both explained the caricature and took the opportunity to further ridicule Jews, saying that they trod on their bread doughs with worm infested feet and then sell those insect-riddled baked goods to non-Jews.[xviii] A small group of people gathered around the flyer and erupted with laughter. Dawid recounted this formative experience in his diary, saying that, “...their laughter gave me a headache from the shame that the Jews suffer nowadays. God give that this shame may cease soon.”[xix] Humiliated and exploited by his peers and neighbors, these two passages from Dawid’s diary summarize some of the ways in which Poles exercised prejudice against their Jewish neighbors prior to their deportation. By looking critically at the diary of Dawid Rubinowicz we can begin to make sense of how his identity not just as a Jew, but as a Polish-Jewish child adds volume to his young life. By employing an intersectional approach, we see that the lived experience of non-Jewish Poles, albeit trying at times, is vastly different from that of Polish-Jews, which, in part, is why making this determination is all the more important. In fact, Dawid’s life as a Polish-Jew under Nazi occupation was different even from a Jew from France, for instance. Jewish-Poles were exposed to the Nazi machine of death at considerably higher rates than Jews living in other regions of Europe since many of the largest and most efficient extermination centers and work camps were located within Poland. For Jewish children living in Poland this substantially decreased their chances at survival. As previously mentioned, Dawid was prohibited from going to school with his other non-Jewish classmates.[xx] Noted Holocaust historian, Deborah Dwork wrote, “To go to school was the absolute social norm of childhood…”[xxi] What followed Jewish children’s’ expulsion from school was ostracization and the collapse and in turn, redefinition of normativity.[xxii] Other anti-Jewish laws enabled social rifting between Jewish and Gentile children to grow larger. For example, as a Polish-Jewish child, Dawid was not allowed to ride any kind of vehicle, including a bicycle, from 1939 and onwards.[xxiii] Though not mentioned in his diary, if we were to imagine how a twelve-year-old boy might respond to not being allowed to ride bicycles and to being “othered” by his friends, we get, for a moment, a glimpse into Dawid’s interrupted childhood. There too is the additional burden of fear placed on the narrow, though evidently staunch shoulders of Jewish children. Dawid expressed several times in his diary how fearful he was of being deported and sent to the Jewish Quarter. Most of what he knows about deportation, however, is from conversations he has overheard between his father and uncle, and his father and the mayor.[xxiv] We might imagine young Dawid eavesdropping on conversations after dark from an inconspicuous place in his house. This is not all to say that non-Jewish Polish children did not also fear the Nazis, local police officers, or deportation; they too could have found themselves or their family members arrested or shot if they did not obey the rules, however, deportation and death for Gentiles, was considerably more avoidable than it was Jews, for which it was inevitable. Gender is another place in which we can complicate the identity of Jewish children in the Holocaust. Boys and men, for example, were constantly at risk of being seized and sent to do forced labor.[xxv] Dawid occasionally makes remarks about Gendarmes searching for men to perform manual labor. One night, during a holiday gathering, German soldiers broke up their meager festivities and requested that all of the men follow them and report for work. Fearing what this work detail might entail, some of the men ran and hid.[xxvi] Although it is unclear whether Dawid was among those who chose to hide on this particular occasion, he does mention in another entry that he was selected for work, passing bricks to a bricklayer, which he described as being more tedious than it was arduous.[xxvii] After being evacuated to Bodzentyn, Dawid writes about the pervasive terror that swept through the ghetto on days when raids were rumored to occur. On one particular raid, when Germans were looking for 120 men, the ghetto streets were deserted. Dawid reported in his journal that the men all hid in their homes until seeing or hearing the Germans approach their tenement building, after which, they took off into the woods, seeking whatever cover they could find.[xxviii] Dawid’s aunt, worried the Germans would select him for work duty, arranged a temporary hiding place for him at her neighbor’s house.[xxix] Dawid alternatively writes that the Gendarmes shot and killed a woman who refused to stop running across the yard.[xxx] Despite the fact that gender influenced some of the ways in which children navigated the daily terrors of their existence, nothing interfered with the Nazi machine: destruction was always at the core of the Germans’ plans for the Jews. The act of hiding from work detachments, however, was an ill-informed choice that men made, hoping at best, that it would increase the chances of survival. It is decisions like these that Dwork (influenced by Lawrence Langer) refers to as “choiceless choices”.[xxxi] Even choices made with the best of intentions could be potentially fatal. Dwork relates the story of Jack Rubinfeld who volunteered for a work detail thinking it would be safer for his sister and niece. Rubinfeld’s friend tried also to push himself into the work group and had his head “cracked open for his pains.”[xxxii] Those from this same account who chose not to work were transported to Belzec, one of the Operation Reinhard camps, constructed specifically with the intention of exterminating Poland’s Jewish population.[xxxiii] Unknowing of just how arbitrary these choices were, Dawid’s father advises him to remain hidden.[xxxiv] In a rather striking letter, his father even goes so far as to advise him to dress as a girl.[xxxv] This paternal recommendation is suggestive of the fact that boys were targeted by the Nazis in ways that girls were not. Although the final destination for most Jews were the killing centers, the events that transpired between deportation and extermination (liberation only rarely), were shaped, in part, by the circumstances of one’s identity. In this case, Dawid Rubinowicz, a Polish-Jewish-boy was subjected to the dangers of work detail and the death machinery of the Operation Reinhard camps. Prior to being stripped of all assets and valuables, one’s socioeconomic status affected how long one was able to delay the inevitable grip of the Nazis. In other words, however long one was able to pay illegitimate fines and bribes factored into how long they could prolong arrest or deportation. Coming from a poor family of dairy farmers, money, even prior to the war, was scarce for the Rubinowicz’s. Dawid, thus, writes ubiquitously about the number of fines levied on them by the local police force and Gendarmes in both Krajno and after being deported to Bodzentyn. Not long after arriving in Bodzentyn a police officer informs Dawid’s mother that they will need to pay 150 zlotys or be detained for eighteen days for a corn grinding violation they committed while still in Krajno. Unwillingly, Dawid’s mother pays the inordinate price of the fine, prompting Dawid to write, “We’ve paid the fine; now we’re done for...you have to pay hundreds for every trifle.”[xxxvi] Another slew of unexpected fines befell them when Dawid’s father was caught in Krajno.[xxxvii] Dawid’s father writes to them requesting that they sell off household items and borrow money in order to raise the 500 zlotys needed to secure his release.[xxxviii] Despite having brought the money to an acquaintance who knew how to have him released, Dawid’s father remained on work detail. The Jewish Council in the ghetto was just as corrupt as the Nazis and was practically useless. Even Dawid, a child, noted, “These people are in no hurry, they’re not bothered; why should they put themselves out? If you were suddenly to give them several hundred zlotys, then they’d soon be interested. But where from?...You’d have to sell the clothes off your back.”[xxxix] After almost a month of maneuvering through the bureaucracy of the Jewish Council and paying hundreds of zlotys in bribes, Dawid’s father was released.[xl] Bribes and fabricated fines were simply another way for the Nazis to exploit Jews and fund their war machine. In the case of Dawid Rubinowicz, his family barely escaped detainment and were able to secure the release of their father, despite being poor, by borrowing money from others and selling away the few household possessions they carried on their backs from Krajno. Class also partially governed how one managed to pay exorbitant prices for food in the ghetto. Although even formerly wealthy Jews entered the ghettos impoverished, there still seems to have been a class hierarchy in which some fared better, even if only fractionally, than others. In fact, in one diary entry, Dawid expresses great concern over how “poorer people” will survive if the prices of food continue to rise at such an alarming rate.[xli] It may safely be argued then that a) a quasi-caste system existed in the Bodzentyn ghetto; and b) from his use of the word “poorer” to describe relation or comparison, Dawid does not perceive his family to be in the lowest social class. However, it is clear that Dawid was aware of inflating prices and the financial hardships his family experienced. He notes in his journal that the price for one tablet of saccharine (a zero-calorie sweetener) increased in price by over 1300% since the start of the war.[xlii] Moreover, in a rather poignant entry from April 24, 1942, Dawid lamented, “Can anyone earn enough to cover anything? How long can we go on selling household possessions? O God make this war end as quickly as possible. If it goes on much longer, no one will survive this terrible war and these terrible times.”[xliii] Although Dawid does not complain of constantly being hungry, as in the case of the Anonymous Girl, he certainly is fixated on the prices of food, how they will soon afford to buy food, and how others in Bodzentyn are faring in comparison.[xliv] As previously emphasized, regardless of all these efforts, Dawid and his family still could not stop the gears of systematic extermination, no sum of money could, it merely was a distraction from the inevitability of it all. In employing an intersectional approach to studying the lives of children in the Holocaust, we see how viewing Dawid Rubinowicz not just as Jewish, but as a poor Polish-Jewish boy complicates his identity and adds nuance to his life and the lives of others with similar identities whose words and being no longer remain extant. One thing that need not be viewed intersectionally, however, is that ultimately, all Jewish children and adults were dehumanized by the Nazis and millions were subsequently murdered. It is for this reason that the focus of this paper lay primarily on the lives of Jewish children prior to deportation, or in other words, prior to dehumanization. Since many Jewish children have been excluded from Holocaust historiography and unfortunately met the same untimely end, offering them their humanity back and capacious, nuanced biographies of their life prior to deportation is imperative, lest we let their stories and voices be stubbed out forever. Bibliography: “Anti-Jewish Decrees: Learning Voices of the Holocaust.” In The British Library. The British Library, n.d. https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/info/decrees/decrees.html. Betancourt, Roland. Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–67. Dwork, Debórah. Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Zapruder, Alexandra. Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. Second. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Notes: [i] Roland Betancourt, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 2; Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–67. [ii] Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, Second (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 271. [iii] Zapruder, 271. [iv] Zapruder, 271. [v] Zapruder, 277. [vi] Zapruder, 279. [vii] Zapruder, 283. [viii] Zapruder, 281. [ix] Zapruder, 281. [x] Zapruder, 281. [xi] Zapruder, 281. [xii] Zapruder, 281. [xiii] Zapruder, 280–82, 286–87. [xiv] Zapruder, 273. [xv] Zapruder, 288. [xvi] Zapruder, 288. [xvii] Zapruder, 288. [xviii] Zapruder, 288. [xix] Zapruder, 288. [xx] Zapruder, 277. [xxi] Debórah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 15. [xxii] Dwork, 15. [xxiii] Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, 275; “Anti-Jewish Decrees: Learning Voices of the Holocaust,” in The British Library (The British Library, n.d.),https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/info/decrees/decrees.html. [xxiv] Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, 277, 286. [xxv] Zapruder, 273. [xxvi] Zapruder, 281. [xxvii] Zapruder, 281. [xxviii] Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, 295. [xxix] Zapruder, 296. [xxx] Zapruder, 299. [xxxi] Dwork, Children with a Star, 257. [xxxii] Dwork, 242. [xxxiii] Dwork, 241. [xxxiv] Zapruder, Salvaged Pages, 296. [xxxv] Zapruder, 297. [xxxvi] Zapruder, 292. [xxxvii] Zapruder, 294. [xxxviii] Zapruder, 296–97. [xxxix] Zapruder, 296. [xl] Zapruder, 299. [xli] Zapruder, 291. [xlii] Zapruder, 292. [xliii] Zapruder, 292–93. [xliv] Zapruder, 226–43. Contributor: Ryan Abramowitz Comments are closed.
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Contributors:Ryan Abramowitz, Senior Art History Major at The College of New Jersey |