The Chidren Press Charges

Lt. H. Vinohradský

This was published in the central journal of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in the USSR on February 21st, 1945, February 25th, 1945, February 28th, 1945, March 3rd, 1945, and March 9th, 1945.

More books will be written about the horrors of the German death camps, but what several children who escaped the claws of the German killing machine have said will remain a fierce indictment of German barbarism.

And their indictment is the verdict for these German criminals, is the judgment of their helpers – members of the Hlinka Guard and Vlajka.

Three Little Prosecutors

Three children, boys between the ages of 11 and 14, sit in front of us. They are 3 former prisoners from the Auschwitz death camp, who were saved from death in the ovens of the crematoria by the rapid intervention of the Red Army. The youngest is 11-year-old Petr Abeles of Prague, the middle one is 12-year-old Mario Petrovský from Prague VII., and the oldest is Robert Freund of Nitra, aged 14.

They tell us what they went through in a calm manner. Death ceases to be terrible even for children if it lurks close-by every day, if it becomes something ordinary, inevitable, and usual over the course of more than 3 years. Children from Auschwitz see death with the deep understanding of an 80-year-old person, who departs from this world with a peaceful mind. One grows old fast in the German torture chambers. For Germans, even an infant is mature enough to be executed. Petr, Mario, and Robert may have grown older, but they have remained children not only in terms of their ages, but also in the childlike joy over their new military coats, the fact that they can once again frolic in the streets, that the people around them like them, that they are just like other children, that they are allowed to live again.

A Chased Animal

My father was a doctor, says 14-year-old Robert Freund of Nitra. In 1942, the guardsmen deported father and mother to Poland. I never saw them again. Only once we received a letter from mother who was in Lublin, in which she wrote that she wasn’t with father and whether we could send her some food and clothes.

They didn’t transport my sister, who was 18 at the time, and I because ran away to our uncle’s place in Nové Zámky. The Hungarians were there, but they allowed us to stay. They arrested us several months later and took us across the border back to Slovakia. They wanted to hand us over to the guardsmen. We begged them to let us go back over the border to freedom.

We returned to Nitra. I had another uncle there, also a doctor. It was said that he had a presidential exemption, and so they hadn’t transported him yet. My sister and I hid, and my uncle was working on adopting us in order to save us. The caretaker of the house where our uncle lived, on Farská St. 11, was a member of the Hlinka Guard. His name was Tesár. He found out that we were hiding there and denounced us to the guardsmen. Luckily, our uncle received the adoption documents that day and the guardsmen had to let us go.

Sealed Apartment

I wanted to go to school. Jewish children weren’t allowed to, but my uncle managed

to get me accepted. I was in 4th grade when the Slovak uprising began. On September 7th, I came home from school to find that the apartment had been sealed. I knew what this meant: the guardsmen were looking for us. They were deporting people. I met up with my uncle in a cellar that he told me to go to if this should ever happen. Then I hid in the villages around Nitra. My last hiding place was at a worker’s house in Nitra. He was connected to the partisans and hid up to 15 Jewish children. But the guardsman who deported father and mother 2 years ago found out.

The Prison in Hlinka House

They took me to the Hlinka house. To the cellar. About 30 people were already there and more kept coming, and so there was nowhere to sit. We didn’t have enough air; we were suffocating. They didn’t let us go out, not even to the bathroom and so the cellar stank terribly. In the morning, they gave us a small piece of bread to eat, roughly the size of a matchbox, and coffee, at noon some watery soup and again a small slice of bread, and in the evening only coffee. I spent 8 days in the Hlinka house. In the meantime, I found out that my uncle, who had had an operation and was recovering in the hospital, was dragged away while he still had an open wound. I don’t know what happened to him. I also never saw my sister again.

The Concentration Camp in Sered

On October 22nd, they took us from Nitra to the concentration camp in Sered. For most of the prisoners, this was a transfer station on their way to Poland, to certain death. We already knew this. Here, the guardsmen handed us over to the SS-men. I was only here for 9 days, but that was enough. Sered may have been a prelude to Poland, but even here the SS-men wreaked havoc. For any reason, no matter how trivial, they would force everyone out of the barracks, we had to take off our clothes until we were completely naked, and the Germans would chase us around the camp. Whoever fell down would be beaten to death. The cruelest of the lot was the commander of the camp SS-Hauptsturmführer Brunner.

On November 2nd, they loaded us onto a train, 70 people per car. We could only stand. The next day we arrived in Auschwitz. Hitler's followers transported their victims in various ways. But the destination was sooner or later the same — the camp, death, the gas chamber, the oven of the crematorium.

In 1944, when the guardsmen transported little Robert from Nitra, the eastern front was collapsing under the attacks of the Red Army. There wasn’t time for the rational usage of human material and the deathtrains rode the shortest distance to their destination.

But in 1941, the infernal German machine, which sucked the last remaining strength out of people’s bodies before sending them, unwanted and unneeded, to the slaughterhouses in Auschwitz and Majdanek.

Prague 1941

Mario Petrovský lived in Prague VII., on Bělského třída 30. He attended school, ran around with his friends all over the Letenské Gardens, tried to sneak into football games — he was a happy, Praguecityboy.

Then the Germans came to Prague. Mario wasn’t allowed to go to school anymore, wasn’t allowed to go to the gardens and playgrounds, and couldn’t even play with his friends in public. The men in black uniforms with skulls and crossbones on their caps didn’t see Mario as a child. To them, he was an enemy child, a dangerous criminal who needed to be visibly labelled, deported, and killed. Nine-year-old Mario, a dangerous enemy of Hitler's 3rd Reich, was therefore transported out of Prague along with thousands of others in the summer of 1941.

To Poland

In the summer of 1941, they summoned our entire family to the Gestapo, recounts Mario. There, they told father that we needed to leave in 14 days. Out of the entire family, only my grandmother was supposed to stay behind, and it took my father a lot of work to get them to allow us to take grandmother with us.

We were summoned to the Trade Fair Palace. There were already a lot of people there. We weren’t allowed outside anymore. Everyone was allowed to bring only one suitcase and took whatever they wanted with them.

Then they loaded us onto the train cars and took us away. We arrived in Łódź several days later.

The Ghetto in Łódź

We lived in Łódź for two years and three quarters. The ghetto in Łódź was a big enterprise. There were many factories there that manufactured all kinds of things. The deported people worked everywhere. Weapons and ammunition were also made here. The commander of the ghetto was the German Biebow.

Life was very hard here. The worst thing was hunger. We didn’t get enough food. We often had to cook grass. Grandma died of hunger here. Many people died here in general, about 500 hundred a day.

There were about 20,000 people in the ghetto, roughly 3,000 of which were from Bohemia and Moravia. We could only write infrequently, and they weren’t really letters. We were given printed German cards that stated that we were doing well and we were told to just sign them.

The ghetto was completely cut off from the rest of the world. We didn’t know what was going on beyond its tall walls with barbed wire and guards. A railroad track passed through the ghetto with several bridges across it, and so we couldn’t meet anybody. We weren’t allowed to go outside of it. It even had its own special ghetto money — paper and lead coins.

When I arrived in Łódź I had just turned 9 years old. I had to work. I first worked for a locksmith and then in a factory.

Death Trains

The Germans started transporting people from the ghetto in 1943. First, only the elderly, children, and the sick. Anyone who couldn’t work. We didn’t know where they were taken. There was talk of Auschwitz, but all we knew was that there was some sort of camp there. Later, we learned that those who were considered useless were sent to the gas chambers and ovens. When I was in Auschwitz, we used to say in short: they went to the chimneys. In spring 1944, the Germans started transporting the entire ghetto. There was talk that the Russians were getting closer. Nobody knew where they were taking us, but everyone was scared.

One day, the German police closed off our street. The Germans went from house to house and dragged everyone out. They made us hurry toward the train. Everything happened very fast. There weren’t enough train cars and they stuffed us in as much as each car could take. In the train car in which I was traveling there were 102 of us. I don’t know if everyone arrived alive. This is how I got to Auschwitz. I never saw my mother, father, or sister again.

Petr Abeles from Prague XII., Americká Street 7, knew the conditions in Theresienstadt. He lived there for almost 3 years until the Germans started liquidating the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Petr was born in 1933. He is one of twins. He had no idea that the happy accident that he came into the world together with his sister Líza would save his life. More about that later.

Petr’s father was still useful in 1941, when the Gestapo decided to transport Petr and his sister and mother to Theresienstadt, and so was allowed to remain in Prague. It is a credit to the Gestapo’s mercifulness that my father was then allowed to be transported together with his family.

When Petr talks about his fate, he isn’t calm like Mario and Robert. He’s only 11 and cries when he remembers his mother. He’s a bright boy with freckled cheeks and wise eyes that seem to reflect what he saw and experienced. He attended school up to the 1st grade and then was no longer allowed. But he knows how to read and write, and even knows how to draw. The children of Hitler's era learned in the concentration camps, not at school.

Theresienstadt

The Germans turned an old Czech fortress, a small town with a military company stationed there, into the largest concentration camp in the republic. The Germans brought people here not only from Bohemia and Moravia, but also from Austria, Germany, and Holland, people whose only crime was that their skulls didn’t conform to the ideas of the madmen from Berlin.

They also transported us from the Trade Fair Palace, recounts Petr, and tears roll down his face as he remembers. They numbered our luggage and gave each of us a board with a number to wear around our necks. My number was 369. Then they loaded us onto train cars, 50 people per car. It took days to get to Theresienstadt.

In Theresienstadt, they separated us and took us to the barracks. The men into one, and women with small children into another. I went with my father and my sister with my mother. We were locked in these barracks for three months, we were not allowed to step out of them. There were guards by the gate. They were our own guards — Czech police officers stood outside. Some were nice, but there were also the Vlajka members among them who were brutes, much worse than the Germans. The entire camp was led at the time by two Germans: SS Obersturmführer Bergl and SS Obersturmführer Seidl.

More and more transports arrived in Theresienstadt. One day, all of the Czechs had to move out. The Germans turned Theresienstadt into a ghetto. Right about that time, the German Seidl was sent to the front and SS Obersturmführer Burger arrived to replace him. He was later replaced by SS Obersturmführer Rahm. Burger was the worst of them. He loved to beat people and let people starve. The food was very poor. We received

a small loaf of bread, which was usually moldy, every 4 days.

In Theresienstadt, we could only write once every 3 months, and no more than 30 words, all of them positive. The whole time we were in Theresienstadt, almost 3 years, we received 2 letters and 6 packages. In Theresienstadt, it was not allowed to speak any other language except German, and so all our letters were written in German.

When they moved the inhabitants out of the town, we could walk around the whole town freely because only prisoners lived in the houses. However, we weren’t allowed to leave the town, only to go to work accompanied by the guards. We didn’t receive any news. We had no idea what was happening in the world. Smoking wasn’t allowed. If they found you with a cigarette they would punish you.

People were hanged almost every day. People were executed if a radio or a record player was found among your things, if they wrote the truth without permission, if they went outside of the town, etc. I remember that the Germans hung a Czech policeman for bringing a letter to a prisoner.

The Germans stole our possessions and then sold them in the stores that they opened in Theresienstadt. These stores were mostly there for propaganda purposes. They showed them to foreign journalists to show how well we were treated and what goods we could purchase. Many of us bought our own things back from these stores.

Of course, we had to work. It was very hard work, but couldn’t be compared to what awaited us in Poland. Healthy men and women worked for 12 hours per day in the fields and workshops. Older men and women were given easier jobs. Many people died, mostly from malnutrition. There were many orphans.

Germans soon started to transport people from Theresienstadt. The transports were headed for Poland, but where exactly we didn’t know. We did know, however, that somewhere in that land were gas chambers and that going to Poland was a death sentence. Everyone did what they could to avoid being deported. People would say that they were sick, they would bribe German officials. In some instances, people tried to commit suicide. When they were saved and brought to the hospital, they bought themselves some time. My turn came along with my father, mother, and sister in May 1944. Few people were left in Theresienstadt then, only about 10,000. The transport I was on contained about 7,000 people. Once again, they placed boards with numbers around our necks, locked us in so we wouldn’t run away, and didn’t feed us for 3 days. Then they rushed us onto the train and stuffed us into the cars. They swore at us and beat us. We were finally given food for the journey: 1 kg of bread, 10 dkg of sugar, and a bit of salami and margarine. We rode for two days. We were all in a terrible state, because we knew that something terrible awaited us.

The train stopped at a ramp. SS-men stood outside and we saw people in prison uniforms. They hurried us out of the cars; we couldn’t take our luggage and never saw it again. The guards beat us. One prisoner, seeing me with my sister, told me to say that we were twins because it might save me.

The camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. When any of the transported people got close to it, they were killed. The wires were electrified, but the Germans didn’t tell us. They rejoiced whenever any of us touched the wires.

This was how we were greeted in the Birkenau concentration camp.

In one of Alexei Tolstoy’s articles, a Red Army soldier thinks about a child that was being tortured by the Germans. A long time ago, Ivan Karamazov asked his brother Alyosha: if it was necessary to sacrifice only one child, to torture it to death for the happiness of mankind to be guaranteed — would you be capable to doing it? Ivan Karamazov thought that he was asking Alyosha a question that couldn’t be answered. Alyosha was quiet and didn’t answer. To torture to death a child, what could be more horrible? Yes, maybe for all of mankind to be happy… such happiness would be cursed… but Karamazov’s riddle was solved in the simplest way. They were solving it right now. Yes, they would torture to death a child, but I should be that child. And it’s an empty, made-up question anyway. Life posed us a different question. To save even a single child, this child, from suffering, is anyone who considers himself a human willing to fight for life and death? It’s a direct question and the answer is clear. Yes, even I, Grisha, even machine-gunner Ivan and the other Red Army soldiers will answer: we are willing.

Alexei Tolstoy ends his ruminations by saying: let’s ask ourselves this question practically. We demand a settlement. Three million Germans for the single murdered child, three million blonds with thin necks, doe-eyed lashes, and degenerate brains.

How many Germans should be sentenced to death just for the children murdered in the Birkenauconcentration camp?

Birkenau

Everyone here beat us from the first moment we arrived, continues Petr. The guards beat us, the overseers beat us, even the senior in the barracks beat us. Roll call was at 5 in the morning. This meant another beating. They counted us and led us to the showers. We were afraid that they would be gas chambers. But they were real showers. There, they took the last of our possessions away from us and gave us prisoner uniforms: pants and a jacket. We wore this in summer as well as in winter. The children got to keep their shoes. Then they tattooed numbers on our arms. My number was A - 77.

We didn’t eat anything for two days. Then we got camp food: beet soup, 200g of bread, and a spoonful of beet marmalade. After we ate the marmalade, we all got horrible diarrhea and people died. We were shut in our barracks, nobody was allowed out, not even to the bathroom. And for every soiling they beat us cruelly.

Experiments on Twins

Then the camp doctor, SS-Hauptsturmführer Mengele, arrived. He was a terrible person. He selected who would be gassed and who would live. When he sent someone to the chimneys, he did so politely and said that he was sending them somewhere where they would be better off.

Mengele would have twins summoned. It was his hobby. He conducted medical experiments on them and until the twin died from them nothing was supposed to happen to them. He would often take blood samples from us, sometimes even from our ears. Once, he took so much blood from us that we couldn’t get up for several days. He busied himself with us for about 6 months. During the last week when the front was coming closer he didn’t have time for us. The experiments saved my life because small children like me were considered useless and went to the chimneys.

A Natural Death

E camp was built for 10,000 people, but they stuffed 14,000 into it. It was the so-called Czech camp. Within 6 months, about half of the people there died a natural death. The work was hard. We hammered rocks, dug out earth, and hauled mud away from the swamps on which the camp was built.

Between the barracks were piles of corpses. Bloody, beaten, they often laid there for several days and stank horribly. We got used to it. While people worked, they saw dead bodies all the time. When someone could no longer go on working, the Germans would throw him onto the pile of corpses, and if he didn’t die fast enough they would beat him to death. They often threw a husband onto the pile of corpses in front of his wife, a child in front of its mother, etc.

And With Gas

In July 1944, they took away the healthy men, supposedly to go work in Germany. Only women, the elderly, the sick, and children remained. They took us to the Gypsy camp. The next day, they took the twins to the hospital and, during the night, sent all of the Gypsies to the gas chambers along with 6,000 people from camp E.

During this time, large transports began arriving, mostly from Hungary.

When the Germans were in a good mood, they first separated the people from the transport into groups and sent some to the camp, but they sometimes sent entire transports from the train cars directly to the gas chamber.

The hospital was right next to the gas chambers and crematoria (there were 4 in total) and I saw people standing in line in front of the gas chambers. They let as many people in as the chambers would hold. Then cries could be heard for several minutes, and then everything was quiet and more would enter.

Prisoners — Russians and Jews — also worked in the crematoria and gas chambers. Every two months, the Germans would kill the old workers, which they called the Sonderkommando, by gassing them, and would send new workers in. The crematoria couldn’t keep up when there was a big flood of people, and so the Germans burned corpses on large pyres.

Every other day, and sometimes every single day, the medical committee would walk through the camp and “select.” It would select the weak who could no longer work and sent them to be gassed. The members of the committee were the camp doctors SS Obersturmführer Mengele, SS Obersturmführer Thielo, and SS-Obersturmführer König.

Prisoners of War

There weren’t only Jews in Birkenau. There were people from all over Europe — the French, Belgians, the Dutch, Poles. There were also many Czechs. Imprisoned Germans had a special position. They were mostly vulgar criminals, thieves, murderers, and swindlers. They guarded everyone else.

There were also a lot of Russian POWs in the camp. The Germans treated them extremely cruelly. They died of hunger and the Germans would shoot them for any reason, no matter how small. Once, 4 Russian POWs attempted to escape. The Germans caught them and hung them in front of all of the Russians. Before the men died, they cried out: Glory to the fatherland, glory to the Red Army. After the execution, the camp commander asked the Russians whether they agreed with what was done to the 4 men. All of the Russians shouted out: we don’t agree. The SS-men then began shooting them and killed many Russians.

EnglishPOWs were also there. The Germans treated them very well.

They had their own camp, good food, they even got better cigarettes, walked around in their own uniforms, wore their awards and decorations. When the front drew closer, the Germans were very surprised. They said that they were counting on the English and Americans to arrive, but not the Russians. That’s why they treated the English POWs so well.

The Last Days of Birkenau

About 5 months before the arrival of the Red Army, the Germans began to transport prisoners, apparently to go work in Germany. In December, they no longer transported anybody, and the people who were to be transported had to walk. The Germans asked those who could handle walking 40-50 km a day to come forward. People were scared not to go because they thought they would be killed otherwise. Mostly only women, the elderly, and the sick stayed behind. The more the front got closer, the more chaos there was. The order came down to liquidate the camp. The Germans began to set fire to the warehouses. They had already blown up the crematoria and gas chambers. Then they led the remaining prisoners to the neighboring Auschwitz concentration camp.

Auschwitz

Today, Auschwitz is a blanket term for the whole system of torture chambers built by the Germans around the town with the same name. In reality, Auschwitz was only one of many camps. It was actually smaller than Birkenau, which was planned for 10,000 prisoners. The camps created something like a town with several hundreds of thousands of prisoners, all surrounded by a barbed wire electric fence, which was illuminated with light bulbs at night and small guard towers with machine guns every hundred meters (the so-called grosse Postenkette). Each camp was once more surrounded by electrified barbed wires and guard towers (the so-called kleine Postenkette), has its own railroad track, its own crematoria, own gas chambers, etc. Finally, in each camp there were blocks separated by barbed wire fences. Each block had a number, held 5 to 10,000 people, and had its own purpose. For example, in Birkenau block A was the quarantine ward, B was the women’s camp, D the men’s camp, E the Gypsy camp, FKL for women with children, F the hospital, etc.

It’s hard to say which concentration camp was the worst. Everywhere they killed with a German thoroughness and cold calculation.

It’s a miracle that we weren’t sent to the chimneys, say Robert, Mario, and Petr. It was difficult to escape from the claws of the German executioners like the Lagerkommandantur of Auschwitz: SS-Hauptsturmführer Hössler, SS-Obersturmführer Kaduk, who practiced shooting on live targets and relished aiming at the red signs that the prisoners had on their backs, Rapportführer Buldog, or the doctors SS-Hauptsturmführer Klein and SS-Obersturmführer Fischler.

To toil away until we fell — that was our only hope to be saved. This was true for everyone, even children. If you could still stand on your feet and work, you would probably stay alive. This is why Mario cried when the young people didn’t want to accept him into the work group. He claimed to be 16 years old and begged an imprisoned Frenchman to tattoo a number on his hand and add him to those who were able to work. Robert rose at 3:30 a.m. and worked 15 hours a day.

The ultimate goal of Hitler's new order is revealed in Auschwitz and Majdanek: to turn people into working animals, slaves who have the right to live only if they are able to work. And then lead them to the slaughter like lame horses.

The Rescuers

The thundering of Soviet guns foreshadowed the rescue of 10,000 of the 6 million condemned people. The days and hours of waiting were awful. We didn’t know whether we would be saved in time, or whether the Germans would murder us. In Auschwitz, the prisoners already stood in rows of three and the Germans were readying their machine guns when news arrived that the Russians were here. The executioners fled.

There are no words to express the liberated prisoners’ joy and gratefulness to the Red Army heroes. No words were necessary. The Soviet soldier who stroked the heads of Petr, Mario, and Robert thought about his own children who had been killed by the Germans back home in Smolensk or Poltava, or had been dragged away into their hellhole. The Red Army soldier smiled at the rescued children and then headed west, where millions more prisoners waited to be saved and millions of criminals awaited their punishment.

At Home

In Krakov, the children learned about our corps. On foot and in military vehicles they hurried to find us. Their documents were their tattooed numbers. When they made it to our unit, they begged our gray-haired lieutenant colonel, who had seen and experienced a lot and listened with emotion to their account of what had happened to them: let us stay with your unit, we may be children, but we want to help you fight the Germans. It’s our right.

The Germans thought that children would never take revenge against them. But they were mistaken. The children’s revenge was their powerful testimony. And they are avengers, as are the millions of Soviet soldiers in Germany, as are we. We all sought revenge for Petr, Mario, and Robert, and the millions of murdered men, women, and children who couldn’t be saved and who cry out: onward to Germany, to Berlin, justice.

Documentation Campaign

24. IX. 1945

On behalf of the archive: Alex. Schmiedt