Seventy-five years after liberation of Dachau
Survivors’ accounts serve as pertinent reminders of where hatred can lead, Zelda Abramson says.
April 29 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. First opened by the German Nazi Party in 1933, Dachau became the model for future concentration camps.
It was initially built to incarcerate political opponents of the Nazi regime, namely, communists, social democrats and trade unionists. Following the enactment of the 1935 Nuremburg race laws, groups viewed as socially deviant or racially and physically impure, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and people with disabilities, were also incarcerated in Dachau.
After Kristallnacht, in November 1938, 11,000 Jews were incarcerated there. With the start of the Second World War in September 1939, these Jewish prisoners were transported to Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Flossenburg, and Dachau became a training camp for SS guards. Within a year, it reverted to a concentration camp for slave labour.
Dachau was also one of the centres of medical experiments on prisoners, often resulting in death.
In 1944, Dachau built and administered a series of 30 sub-camps in the region to supply slave labour to the German armament industry, the two most infamous were Mühldorf and Kaufering, a complex of sub-camps. The first prisoners, a group of Hungarian Jews, were transported from Auschwitz on June 20, 1944.
Paul was 14 years old when he arrived, alongside his father and a friend. He tells what he saw and experienced:
“Mühldorf is next to the highway, to a small airport. And there is a forest on the left. In the middle of the forest there were buildings. The Germans had the jet technology. They were building three factories to manufacture jets, and this was one of them. They were two or three storeys underground, all out of concrete, four football fields long — 400 metres — hangers. Once they finished it, they put sand on the roof, so from the air it was camouflaged.
“So, what was our work? When we got there, steel grates were created on top of the hanger, three metres deep, and we had to pour concrete into that. The Germans put up the mixing machines on top . ... We would work 12-hour days. Two prisoners put a bag of cement on your shoulder. And we had to bring it up the roof line to the machines. So that’s what we did, day in and day out.
“People were dying from the work. When you went out to work in the morning, you would come back with many dead bodies. Most died within six or seven weeks after arriving. My father lasted about, I’d say, November; he couldn’t take it longer, winter comes, no clothing, no underwear. Based on the calories we got, I have since learned it was about 1,0001,100 calories a day together with hard physical labour. Nobody could survive more than a few months. This was part of their extermination plan. Every few weeks a new supply of Jewish prisoners arrived.”
My father, Chaim, a Lithuanian Jew, was one of them. He was sent to Kaufering.
In late July 1944, with the threat of the Soviets advancing from east to west, the Nazis razed all the Lithuanian ghettos. More than 8,000 Jewish men and women were deported to Stutthof concentration camp in Germany; the able-bodied men were sent to Dachau — Kaufering.
Between June 1944 and April 1945, 30,000 slave labourers (mostly men) were said to be at Kaufering; 22,000 were Jews. The Dachau records report that 14,500 prisoners died in Kaufering, but in the final days, about 7,000 were forced on death marches or transports; thousands of deaths were not recorded.
Paul and Chaim are two of the 30,000-plus Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives in Montreal after the war. May they serve as a reminder of the ways hate targets groups of people, and what can happen when lives are designated as inconsequential.
Seventy-five years after the end of the Holocaust, the need for an inclusive and tolerant society is greater than ever.