The last witnesses: three Holocaust survivors speak out
The murder of six million Jews will soon be history, not memory. Bryan Appleyard talks to some of the last British survivors of the Nazi death camps.
Maurice, four or five years old at the time, made a boat out of a carrot as a birthday gift for his little sister, Millie. But the birthday never came. Millie had gone.
Manfred, aged 13, went out one morning to work. He left his brother, Hermie, behind because he was 11 and too young to do so. But Hermie was not there when he returned. The women in the kitchen told him two soldiers had taken him away.
When Susan, aged 14, was told she was to be resettled, she decided to take her portable sewing machine with her. She was good at sewing and, with her mother, she walked for miles with the heavy machine on her back. When they reached their final destination, she was separated from her mother. She never needed the sewing machine.
Millie died where she had been born, in Bergen-belsen concentration camp. Hermie was shot by the SS in the forest outside a labour camp in Poland. Susan’s mother was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz.
Maurice Blik is now 79, Manfred Goldberg is 88 and so is Susan Pollack. The witnesses of the Holocaust are old and nearing death. The murder of six million Jews, two-thirds of the European population, will soon be history, not memory. Last Sunday was Holocaust Memorial Day. It’s a good time to listen to these people. In another ten years’ time, this may not be possible. There’s a divide among all Holocaust witnesses between those who think it’s good to talk and those who don’t. Among these three, Maurice is the reluctant talker. He has previously recorded his testimony and now just wants to get on with his life. He is a very successful sculptor; that carrot boat was an early sign of his vocation. But he is impatient with such links – that was then, this is now. “Yes, we witnessed these horrible events, but that’s not what defines us. There’s a toast in Hebrew, ‘ L’chaim’ – ‘To life’ – that’s a really very appropriate toast for people who’ve been through stuff.”
Susan and Manfred are in the majority; they see talking as an obligation. They believe in telling people what happened so it won’t happen again. Around the world, the memories of some 55,000 survivors have been recorded on film. On top of that, the Holocaust has generated a vast academic industry. “Every other PHD in the country seems to be about the Holocaust,” Maurice says wryly. This convulsion of evil is now the most documented event in history. Anti-semitism may not be inherently worse than other racisms or religious bigotries, but, in the face of this monstrous and very recent experience, it is the most inexcusable.
The new horror is that this Everest of evidence may not be working as a warning. Holocaust denial persists – the appalling David Irving profits from this staggering lie. “World’s oldest hatred,” he snarls. “Ever asked why?” Anti-semitism is on the rise in Donald Trump’s America, where, during the violence in Charlottesville in 2017, white nationalists chanted: “Jews will not replace us.” Nationalism in eastern Europe is stirring up old prejudices. Watch out for the name of the billionaire George Soros – he is always used as evidence for the old fantasy of an international Jewish conspiracy, the fantasy that provided the Holocaust with a justification.
And then there’s Jeremy Corbyn. Manfred, a decorous, thoughtful gentleman, pauses when I ask how he feels about the Labour leader. “He is,” he says, choosing his words carefully, “an anti-semite by association. He appears to be obsessed by the fact that the Jewish people now have this state of their own, called Israel.” Susan is equally appalled by Corbyn. “Lay off and learn your history,” she says. “Be a responsible leader... What is this game? What is this ignorance?”
Manfred is also worried about the power of social media to resurrect and disseminate old myths and hatreds. “It’s the initial lie and distortion that makes the impact. The truth being made public has very little impact. I think the only way we can stop these lies taking root is by bringing these websites under control. It runs counter to what we normally call free speech, though I cannot bring myself to call the poison that emanates from these sites free speech. I think the danger is we are heading in the direction of extremism taking hold.” There are more subtle problems. Engaging the young will be harder once the old witnesses can no longer look them in the eye and tell them what it was like. Instead, as survivors die, the emphasis will shift towards material culture and the Holocaust will become a combination of museum objects and databases.
In recent decades, historians have been shifting their focus from the big picture of the Holocaust to the fine grain of the bureaucracy and characters behind it, as well as the victims themselves. This may be important – Walter Rauff, the inventor of the gas vans in which many died, surely deserves his place in the annals of infamy; he is thought to have killed 100,000 – but it is not the stuff of big statements. Nor, perhaps, is the new
“This convulsion of evil is the now the most documented event in history. Yet this Everest of evidence may not be working as a warning”
emphasis on revelation of other, smaller anti-semitic bloodbaths, such as the killing of Jewish dockworkers in Thessaloniki.
On the one hand is the supreme vision of human evil in the form of the murder by Germans of six million Jews; on the other are the nuances and redefinitions that have accreted around this terrifyingly vivid image. The first version has become a central pillar of contemporary Jewish identity; this is understandable. A people that did not cluster around this appalling fact would not deserve the title of a people. And cluster they do. Some, like Maurice Blik, with a degree of reluctance and some, like Susan Pollack and Manfred Goldberg, with sad enthusiasm. They are all scarred, but, unlike most of us in our comfortable lives, they know exactly who they are.
Susan was born and brought up in Hungary. In 1934, when she was four, she seems to have become dimly aware of the anti-semitism that was gripping the country. The “blood libel” – that Jews required human blood for the making of matzos – was once again being disseminated. Then, in 1938, her uncle was murdered. The killer received a minimal sentence and continued to live across the road from them. But she still felt safe and secure at home.
“I had a loving home and a supportive family – all I needed was my mum and dad, so I didn’t feel any threat. My brother, Laci, was two years older than me and he had a problem. He wasn’t accepted to a college of further education: they didn’t take Jews.” As a boy scout, Laci was beaten up by anti-semites. The situation was bad, but the Pollacks survived until 1944, when the Germans took over. Adolf Eichmann, the grey bureaucrat in whom the philosopher Hannah Arendt was to see “the banality of evil”, oversaw the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Susan’s father was beaten up before her eyes and then deported – “resettled’ was the official term – then it was the whole family’s turn, and she embarked on her march with that portable sewing machine. She and Laci survived Auschwitz. He was horribly traumatised by having to work as a Sonderkommando, moving bodies from gas chambers to ovens. She, suffering malnutrition, tuberculosis and typhoid, was sent to neutral Sweden to recover. She discovered 50 members of her family had died; only Susan and Laci had survived. “It’s not a game,” she says. “It’s not a game.”
Maurice, born in 1939 in Amsterdam, was told when he was very small that he would have to have a Star of David sewn onto his outer clothes because, said his mother, “we’re special people, we have to be recognised”. He was taken to Belsen when he was four. He was there for two years, after which he spent 14 days on a train “meandering around” until he was rescued by Cossacks on horseback. He still sculpts horses obsessively, as he does figures doing ordinary things – walking, sitting, standing – just living, in fact. Celebrating life, I suggest, as against Belsen. But again he resists. He does, however, say he remembers feeling angry at Millie for not turning up for her carrot boat.
Manfred, born in 1930, was one of about 2,500 Jews living in Kassel, a German city with a population of 200,000. The Nazis closed in. He remembers Kristallnacht in 1938, when SA paramilitaries smashed properties and murdered Jews, sending 30,000 to concentration camps. And he remembers having to wear his Star of David. In 1939, by some miracle, his mother managed to acquire an entry visa to Britain for his father, along with a promise that his family would also get visas within a few weeks. But, a fortnight later, war began and they were stuck in Germany. At the end of 1941, they joined 30,000 Jews at a camp in Riga, and their own private Holocaust began.
Their father knew nothing of their fate until after the War. They had nothing, barely even memories, but he sent them some family photographs – to remember. One showed Hermie. Manfred found a local artist to paint his portrait. Seeing that painting was the first time he accepted that his brother was dead. He almost lost his faith. “The Jewish religion considers the Almighty to be an absolutely just and merciful god, and I could not comprehend how a deity you considered merciful could allow such things to happen to us. I concluded that it is beyond our comprehension. If we cannot understand, it must mean the Almighty does not wish us to understand.”
He could not go back to Germany. He heard in the language the shouts and insults of the guards, but in 2017 he did go back to the site of the concentration camp in Stutthof, in Poland, where he had arrived in 1944. There he met the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. They had wanted to visit the site and he and one other survivor had been chosen to meet them. They walked around and Manfred explained what had happened there as Kate wept and William looked “very grim”. “They were charming, charming people – it was a remarkable experience. When I arrived here in England in 1946, I certainly did not dream that I would be able to spend time in the presence of and shake the hand of a future king of this country. I was really privileged.”
Then, last year, he was invited back to Kassel to see the installation of some memorial plaques outside their old house. He “agonised for several weeks” before deciding to go because it would be the only memorial to Hermie. The family was there for only one day; he had refused to take part in a civic ceremony “because I did not feel comfortable being feted by the Germans”. Will he go back? “I don’t think so.”
Susan’s “It’s not a game”, Maurice’s “L’chaim” and Manfred’s “The Almighty does not wish us to understand” have something in common. They are a testament to a value shared by all the most ancient and enduring religions – the value of survival. They saw one of the most advanced and highly cultivated countries in the world, the nation of Goethe and Bach, descend into a barbarism we still find hard to grasp or imagine. They know how fragile are the comforts and attachments we take for granted, how close we are to hell. Listen, just listen.
A longer version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times (and the original article was amended on 24 January). © The Sunday Times/news Licensing. The Last Survivors, a new documentary shown last week, is still available on BBC iplayer
“Susan and Laci survived Auschwitz. He was horribly traumatised by having to move bodies from gas chambers to ovens”