In my most recent research project, I examined the oral and written testimonies of several Jewish women in Auschwitz who abandoned or killed their children to save their own lives. For obvious reasons, this was one of the most difficult papers I’ve ever had to write. Yet I wanted to use this opportunity to explore my thesis topic–victim self-preservation in Nazi death camps–from another angle. It had occurred to me that all the testimonies I had compiled for my thesis came from male victims. What about women’s voices? The issue of self-preservation transcends gender; it concerns all of us as human beings with the will to live. But I’ve noticed that the problem becomes particularly complex with regard to mothers. Theirs was not a case of surviving at the expense of others who were utter strangers or with whom they had no special bond. On the contrary, they encountered a situation in the death camp in which the cost of their survival was the life of their own child. While many women, knowingly or not, went to death with their children, there were some who were offered the chance of a separate fate–and took it.
One of the most memorable testimonies is that of Alina Bacall-Zwirn (“Alina Z.”), who describes her pregnancy as the worst part of her experience in the camps. Pregnancy was a death sentence for Jewish women. If the women were not immediately killed, they lived in terror of the next selection and were beaten horribly for the crime of attempting to bring another Jewish child into the world. Alina Z. admits that she feared being beaten. She had already suffered in Majdanek and could not bear the thought of more physical torture in Auschwitz. What if she became crippled? She also hated having to get up several times a night to go to the latrine in the snow, without shoes. As it was for many women, going into labor was a terrifying experience for Alina Z. Already malnourished and exhausted, the women were forced to give birth in deplorable conditions. Delivering the baby came with a sense of relief but also foreboding, because women with newborns were usually sent directly to the gas chambers. Alina Z. seemed to be resigned to her fate, but the midwife took the baby away in order to save her life. Although Alina Z. pleaded hysterically for the midwife to return her baby, the woman persuaded her that it was best to let the child die. Too weak to resist, Alina Z. lay in her cot in the infirmary for days, listening to her baby cry, until one day it stopped. The experience was so traumatic that when Alina Z. found out she was pregnant after the war, she got an abortion. Her husband wanted a family, but she was afraid that her child would be taken away and killed again–or more precisely, that she would let this happen again. Decades later, she insists that she does not know where her first child is. The finality of her baby’s death in Auschwitz is simply too horrible for her to accept.1
The cruelty of the Nazis in pitting mother against child is particularly evident in the story of Ruth Elias. When SS doctor Josef Mengele discovered that Ruth, who was eight months pregnant, had managed to survive the liquidation of the family camp in Auschwitz, he allowed her to give birth in the infirmary. However, he then decided to use her to conduct an “experiment” to determine how long a baby could survive without food. He ordered her breasts to be bound so that she could not nurse her baby. For six days Ruth was forced to lie there while her baby cried incessantly. Mengele came every day to ask her questions and take notes. Over time the infant became weaker and could barely cry. On the last day, Mengele told her that the next morning he would come for them both. Ruth knew that they would be taken to the gas chambers. She accepted their fate, but admitted to herself that she desperately wanted to live. In the darkness of that last terrible night, she began to scream. Another prisoner named Maca, who was a doctor, heard her and asked what was wrong. When Ruth told her about it, Maca said that she would help. She returned with a syringe filled with morphine. Ruth protested vehemently at first, but Maca persuaded her to end the baby’s life so that she could survive. Ruth injected her newborn with the morphine. When Mengele came in the morning, she told him that the baby was dead. He searched for the baby among the corpses outside the infirmary, but could not find it. He told her that she was lucky and would leave Auschwitz on the next transport. While Ruth had escaped certain death, she struggled with guilt and depression for decades. She could not bear the thought that she had been the murderer of her own child.2
Such acts of self-preservation were traumatic for everyone involved, not only for the mother, but also for the witnesses. For example, fifteen-year-old Anna G. tells of a woman selected for labor who refused to join her daughter on the way to the gas chambers. At first she blamed the mother for abandoning the child, but then she asked herself what she would have done. Without a clear answer, she internalized the woman’s guilt. Years later, after her own daughter was born, Anna G. had nightmares reliving that moment as if she had been the mother on the ramp.3 Likewise, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk and Judith Sternberg Newman were haunted by their respective memories of witnessing the secret killing of newborns in the barracks.
On the one hand, I don’t want to pass moral judgment on these women. I’m not a mother myself and I can’t say what I would have done in the same situation. In fact, if I’m honest with myself, I’m not really confident that I would willingly go to death with my child if I knew there was a way out. While I would like to think that I would be incapable of killing my own baby, I can’t say that I would still go to the “left” if I had the chance to go to the “right” during a selection. As I have learned from Schopenhauer’s writings and from numerous survivor testimonies, you don’t truly know your own character until you are confronted with such an ethical dilemma. What you discover about yourself in that moment may be too horrible to live with, or, what’s worse, you will find that, somehow, you are able to live with it. For the human survival instinct, the Schopenhauerian “will to live,” is incredibly strong, almost irresistible.
The Nazis knew this. While they marked every single Jew for extermination, they did not kill all of them immediately. The ones they allowed to live were pitted against each other in a struggle of life and death in the camps. It amused the Nazis to see how far their victims would go to preserve their own lives. According to the Nazi worldview, the Jews were the most selfish race and would do anything to save themselves, including stealing from their own people and sending their fellow Jews to death. By contrast, the Aryans were willing to subordinate their own interests for the good of the community and would gladly sacrifice their lives for a greater cause. Auschwitz was the practical application of this worldview. By condemning Jewish women to death together with their children, the Nazis turned the mother-child relationship into a fatal bond from which the mother could only escape by repudiating that relationship. In doing so, the mother merely confirmed the Nazi view of Jews as enslaved to self-preservation, exposing herself to the mockery and contempt of her oppressors.
On the other hand, expressing understanding and compassion for these women is not the same as condoning what they did. We must remember that their actions affected not only themselves, but also their children. This is where I disagree with scholars such as Esther Hertzog, who argue that these acts signify the women’s agency against Nazi oppression and rigid sociocultural norms. She believes that the mother-child relationship represents a subjugating bond even outside the context of the Holocaust, which revealed the fatal implications of this relationship. She insists that the right to live is “the most basic human right” and that “the sacredness of life is a moral imperative.”4 Thus, mothers who abandoned or killed their children were asserting their individual “right to live as preceding that of their offspring.”5 In making this claim, however, Hertzog does not seem to see the contradiction in denying that same right to the children and infants. Her goal is to “question the idealization of motherhood in the Holocaust, which implicitly or openly condemned women who chose to stay alive rather than dying with others.”6 However, it is clear from the women’s testimonies that this agency was undermined through their surrender to the will to live, which the Nazis exploited. To illustrate my point, I think it would be helpful to hear from one of these “others,” that is, one of the abandoned children.
I had originally planned to include Luna K.’s testimony in my paper, but I ended up narrowing my focus to testimonies concerning mothers in Auschwitz. As Luna K.’s story takes place in the concentration camp at Płaszów, I had to leave it out. Nevertheless, it deserves to be told for at least two reasons: it shows (1) that a mother’s abandonment of her child did not have to be physical, and (2) that it was possible for the abandoned child to have internalized the “lessons” of self-preservation to justify her mother’s actions.
When the Kraków ghetto was liquidated in March 1943, Luna K. and her mother were moved to Płaszów, where they worked in a brush factory. There she learned “what it meant to sit quiet,” that is, the art of self-preservation. Through the windows of the factory, Luna K. could see people being led to the mass shooting site at Hujowa Górka. The condemned were forced to dig long trenches in the hillside. The executioners would then line their victims up along the edge and shoot them into the trenches. The interviewer suggests that a “psychological numbing” enabled Luna K. and the other prisoners to watch the executions without taking any action. She disagrees: “It was the will to live, and knowing that—that your action not going to be effective.” Not only was there “nothing you can do, but by your action, you will endanger scores of people along with you.” This was part of the Nazis’ “perfidious psychology” to prevent resistance.7
As an example of “what it meant to sit quiet,” Luna K. recalls how the Hasidic Jews who ran the brush factory at Płaszów decided to observe Yom Kippur. She and the other prisoners begged them to keep working, but they refused. The SS found out, stormed the barracks, shot the Hasidic Jews, and began beating and randomly executing some of the other prisoners. Knowing that she would get the next bullet if she lifted her head, Luna K. continued working at her table. Suddenly, an SS man came up behind her, and she heard “a little click.” She thought at first that he had taken a cigarette from his case and was lighting it. But then she looked at her mother, who was working opposite her a few tables down, “and she was white like a ghost, but sitting without budging.” It turned out that the SS man had put his gun to her head and pulled the trigger but was out of ammunition—the click had been the sound of the empty chamber. Luna K. admits that it would have been easy enough for him to reload, but when “he looked again around the room, whether anybody would scream and yell coming to my rescue,” no one said a word, not even her mother.8
Luna K. believes that her mother’s apparent indifference convinced the SS man to spare her. “It wasn’t worth taking my life, so he just walked out. So now you can understand why people were quiet. If my mother said a word, I wouldn’t be here today.” Luna K.’s praise of her mother’s silence suggests that she is unable—or unwilling—to conceive of the act as abandonment. However, while it is possible that Luna K.’s mother kept silent out of maternal love, her silence can also be considered an act of self-preservation, just as Luna K. kept working while her fellow inmates were being killed. In the perverted moral universe of the camps, callousness was rewarded, while concern for others, even for one’s own child or spouse, was punished. Earlier in her testimony, Luna K. recalls how the SS were “toying” with one of the young Hasidic men. When his wife started crying and screaming, trying to protect him, they put a bullet in his head. This young woman had evidently not learned “what it meant to sit quiet.” By contrast, Luna K.’s mother rejected her maternal role, which ultimately saved them both, but it came at a cost. Luna K. seems to be aware of this, in spite of her insistence on the value of silence. The SS man would have reloaded if there was a point, she explains, “but why bother if nobody cared about me? Why should he bother putting the bullet into the gun?”9 Here she is imagining the psychology of her potential executioner, but within the word “nobody” we can sense the pain and bitterness of a daughter whose mother did nothing when an SS man held a gun to her daughter’s head. The silence of one’s own mother at the moment of death is as deafening as a gunshot.
References
- Testimony of Alina Z. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University. https://fortunoff.aviaryplatform.com/collections/5/collection_resources/2109/.
- Ruth Elias, Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel, trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998).
- Testimony of Anna G. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University. https://fortunoff.aviaryplatform.com/collections/5/collection_resources/181/.
- Esther Hertzog, “Subjugated Motherhood and the Holocaust,” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30, no. 1 (2016): 34, https://doi.org/10.1080/23256249.2016.1126983.
- Ibid., 17.
- Ibid., 34.
- Testimony of Luna K. Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University. https://fortunoff.aviaryplatform.com/collections/5/collection_resources/1157/.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.