A Holocaust Survivor's Interview

Yesterday I watched and listened to the 2 ½ hour testimony given by a 73 year old woman named Brigitte Altman to an interviewer of the USC Shoah Foundation in 1997. Her testimony is one of over fifty thousand recorded for posterity by the Foundation to keep alive the experiences of men and women who survived the Holocaust. Brigitte’s testimony was given in Fort Worth, Texas where she had lived for some years with her husband, a former USA Air Force officer and their four children. Brigitte was an attractive woman, impeccably dressed, well-spoken with excellent English, dignified, confident, and warm, but maintaining a reserve throughout the process of the interview.

Brigitte was born in 1924, an only child, to a German-speaking Jewish couple in a small city, Memel, in Lithuania. This part of Lithuanian had belonged to Germany at one point and the city was mainly composed of ethnic Germans. Her father was a well-to-do businessman, running a mill and a lumber yard, later a textile mill employing over a hundred people. They lived in a large house with a live-in maid and a nurse for her when she was young. Her parents doted on her; she was, as she said, “pampered.” Her parents celebrated the major Jewish holidays and her mother maintained a kosher kitchen out of respect for her more observant parents and in-laws but as a family they were not strictly observant Jews. Brigitte attended the public school with the other German-Jewish and ethnic German students. No racial distinctions were made in her early years. After 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, she gradually felt a change in her school atmosphere. The ethnic German girls began to shun those who were Jewish at lunchtime and no longer invited them to birthday parties as had previously been the custom. The Jewish girls, perhaps 5 or 6 of her class of about 30 pulled together, forming their own, smaller society. Their teachers' attitudes toward them changed as well; no longer were they as friendly or interested in the Jewish girls. A distinct sense of being unwanted and devalued pervaded their experience. About this time Brigitte joined a Jewish youth group that was Zionist in intent.

Her first real awareness of the Nazis as a dangerous threat came about the time of Kristallnacht in 1938.  Her parents would talk at the dinner table about the events in Germany – how Jewish men there were being sent to prisons, and how German friends were appealing to come to Lithuanian for safety. Lithuania did not want an influx of German Jews, however, and visas were difficult to obtain. About this time her father began to actively seek papers allowing them to move to Canada, the USA or to Britain. Through circumstances not explained by Brigitte, her father lost his mill and other properties about this period. The family left for Brigitte’s grandmother’s village, staying for about a month before moving on to Kovno, one of Lithuania’s largest cities, still seeking visas. Along with the German-Soviet partition of Poland in September, 1939, Soviet troops also invaded Lithuania. Brigitte, then about 15 years old, had been enrolled in a Yiddish school. The Soviets were not a threat to her family as their targets were only wealthy business people and large land-owners. Thousands of wealthy families in the country were deported to Siberia from which few returned.

With the German invasion of the USSR in June, 1941, Lithuania was once again over-run. Brigitte spoke of various anti-Jewish edicts that were quickly put in place: the wearing of the yellow star; being forbidden to walk on sidewalks, along with a myriad of other indignities; and, within weeks being forced to move into a newly created ghetto in the poorest area of the city. Her parents had nothing substantial with which to bargain for a decent placement. They ended with a small attic room in a farm house within the ghetto walls. It contained a bed for her parents, a cot for herself, and a sewing machine of her grandmother’s for a table. In this area of the city there was poor sanitation: outhouses were utilized, and there was no running water. Labour groups were formed within the ghetto. Brigitte, now 17, worked for some time in a nursery and greenhouse that grew vegetables raised specifically for the SS. An early “Action” as a rounding up of prisoners for “special treatment” was called, invited the young, well-educated men of the ghetto to enlist for special jobs that required university degrees. About two hundred showed up, were marched away, and never seen again. In October, all of the Jews of the ghetto were ordered to appear in a main square of the city. There a “selection” took place: those who looked able to work were pointed in one direction; the very young, the old and infirm, in another. About 10,000 people were taken away to be murdered by SS divisions and by members of the Lithuanian Activist Front, a right-wing nationalist group that was profoundly anti-Semitic.  Because her mother was unwell, Brigitte had applied rouge to give her more colour; supported on either side by her daughter and her husband, the mother managed to pass with them onto the side of the chosen workers. All around them families were wailing as members were separated, never to see one another again. Despite their good fortune of staying together, Brigitte’s mother died just a few months later in March, 1942 of starvation and of pneumonia.

Brigitte’s father was assigned to a construction group building an airport for the Germans. He and his co-workers walked for two hours daily both to and from the work site. Brigitte also was assigned to a work group. Food was given to them at a depot, in rationed amounts, not always available. There was a daily struggle to find ways to barter for other sources of nutrition in order to stay alive. After a later Action that took the remaining children of the ghetto, Brigitte’s father began serious, though extremely dangerous, efforts to help her to escape. A Lithuanian man, the husband of his former secretary had some business that brought him into the ghetto periodically. Through him, the secretary was contacted and her family agreed to help Brigitte if a way could be found for her to escape. Another work group that regularly went by boat to a site at the outer limits of the ghetto agreed (through what arrangements or payments were not explained) to take her with them on an assigned trip. On the way over one of the women carefully removed the sewn-on star that all Jews wore as identification. Brigitte left the work group and was spirited away in a car which took her to the home of her father’s former secretary. After a month there posing as a new maid, the family sent her on to the husband’s family farm in a more remote and safer location.

The length of Brigitte’s stay in the Kovno ghetto is not clear from her testimony. In July, 1943 Himmler ordered the liquidation of all ghettos. In many places such as in Warsaw the intention was to simply speed up the movement of the ghetto populations to death camps. In Kovno, however, the ghetto itself was made into a concentration camp. This change would have guaranteed even more rigorous controls than those experienced by the ghetto. It is unlikely that Brigitte’s escape could have been effected under that regime. The German occupation of Lithuania lasted three years: June, 1941- July, 1944. During those years Brigitte lived in the ghetto – possibly for close to two years, and for most of the remainder of that period on the farm to which she had been sent.

The farming family sheltered her until the Soviet army re-conquered Lithuania. She was a farm hand, doing the same heavy work as were some Soviet prisoners of war placed there as slave labourers. She shared their work and their meagre food rations but was allowed to sleep in the farm house, together with a six year old Jewish girl who had somehow come under the care of the family. Sleeping there gave Brigitte some protection but she was sexually harassed by one of the sons of the family. He would come to her room at night and force her to come into his. She fought off his attempts to rape her, eventually speaking to his sister; presumably the sister cautioned her brother as these attacks then ceased. When the Soviets arrived, the sons of the house retreated with the Germans, no doubt aware that their status as wealthy landowners would lead to a trip to Siberia. The family appeared no longer willing to keep Brigitte or the other Jewish girl, so she left, finding her way with the child to Kovno. Her father had been taken with the retreating army to continue to be used as a slave labourer in Germany.

Brigitte was able to find a relative of the child and left her there. A family she had known before the war took her into their home though there was no room or bed for her. She slept on the floor, and for a time was without a ration card. Eventually she obtained a job assisting food inspectors on the railroads. This was a good position but Brigitte did not want to remain in Lithuania under what would clearly be but another dictatorship. The Soviets already kept a careful eye on the population, combing out those who appeared to be a threat politically, or simply those not keen to contribute to the newly offered “workers’ paradise.” Brigitte made clandestine connections with a Zionist group; with one of their factions she made a perilous two-month trek across Poland and Czechoslovakia to the border of Austria and Italy. She and others crossed the Alps to join a Jewish “base camp,” a kind of kibbutz that prepared people who intended to move to Palestine when possible. Sometime later she received news that her father had survived the war. He had been taken to Dachau and liberated by American forces. Eventually he joined her in Italy. An uncle of his who lived in Fort Worth, Texas helped them to get visas to go to the USA in 1949. It was there that Brigitte later met and married her husband.

Thinking about the testimony of Brigitte Altman, I am struck by how restrained she was throughout her narration. The interview was conducted by an American woman in a kindly and sensitive manner but without much probing of Brigitte’s feelings. Brigitte herself resolutely did not enter into any in-depth revelation of either any horrific periods or experiences, or of her feeling states throughout her long journey from a happy child in a settled home and city, through the rigours and the terrors of Soviet and Nazi, then again Soviet, domination. At the end of the interview her husband and daughter appeared with her, both praising her dignity, strength, intelligence, and virtues as a good mother and wife. Undoubtedly they also had not either during her interview or possibly throughout their long relationships with her, been privy to her innermost pains and troubles that stemmed from her history. She said clearly that when she came to the USA she had focused on her new life, wanting to leave the past behind her, to fit in as well as possible to the world she was then entering.

Brigitte’s daughter, the youngest of their four children was asked how her mother’s experiences had affected her own childhood. She spoke of two things: when she was about six years old other children at school were playing a game in which they saluted with a straight arm and called out “Heil Hitler.” Brigitte’s daughter later mimicked this at home to her mother’s horror. Her mother sat her down and told her what that gesture and phrase meant and something of her own history under the Nazis. The daughter was entirely taken aback with this new and frightening story of her mother’s early life. She spoke to no one of it but carried it always as a secret, an inner knowledge that engendered a sense of being different from others, and, in a particular way, isolated. Her second comment underscored a feeling about her mother that she had sensed from when she was young: her mother was never light-heartened in the way that others of their family’s acquaintance could be. This, she said, affected her as she grew up as well.

Brigitte had “put the past behind her” to begin her new married life in the United States. In the interview she spoke euphemistically or simply brushed over pieces of her story that would have been terrifying for a young woman caught in the grip of regimes so given over to the absolute control of all under their sway, in particular the three years during which the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators ruthlessly murdered many thousands of Jews. She endured great privation, the painful loss of her mother, several years not knowing if her father, her acclaimed “hero” was still alive, lived for a long period in the absolute knowledge that her own life could be forfeited as easily as had been those of others around her, and, without any clear hope that she could survive her circumstances. Her courage and strength as well as good fortune brought her through, but not without wounds that remained with her to the time of her testimony and presumably beyond. Her daughter felt them, “knew” them without articulation, and was impacted by them in ways that as an adult she was trying to understand. These wounds were discernible in Brigitte’s body, her face, in her valiant efforts to project solidity and well-being. Her story with all of its unexamined nuances stood at sharp right-angles to the face and the tone that she projected. One could only acclaim the strength of this woman and at the same time mourn the losses and the brutalities that she had endured.

I believe that the purpose of the Shoah Foundation’s filmed testimonies is to keep for posterity the stories of individual men and women who survived some version of the Holocaust as it was enacted throughout Europe. Brigitte’s interview fulfilled this purpose. In it, as in others that I have seen, the interviewer did not probe deeply into Brigitte’s feeling states or into questions about dealing with trauma once her captivity had ended. This was not a “therapeutic” process. I suspect that in the main those who agreed to be interviewed did so in a spirit of duty: to bear witness to what they and so many millions of others who are unable to speak had endured, to give the lie to those who attempt to deny the Holocaust or to water it down to more easily consumed realities. The grim reality of the Holocaust remains and will always remain exactly what it was.  It cannot be “explained” nor can it be “understood.” 

Holocaust Memorial Week

I had intended to focus my next post on Himmler (and his close associate, Heydrich) but would like to say some things about this year’s Holocaust Memorial Week. I was able to attend four of the many presentations on offer, all happily connected in some fashion with books I have read and issues I have written about. I perhaps had not looked closely enough at the literature announcing the week’s activities, as I only gradually came to realize its over-arching theme: an examination of “collaboration,” that is to say, an active working with the Nazis’ design to exterminate the Jews of Europe and other targeted groups. When the war ended there were two (to simplify something difficult to easily categorize) that played out across the zones of German domination: first -- retribution, swift and most often fatal against those seen as collaborators, as well as bringing high profile offenders into courts of law for judicial punishment; the other –  burying the past, perhaps motivated by the desire and need to orient energies toward life and the rebuilding of personal and political spaces, and/or a disinclination to examine too closely the shades of responsibility shared from egregious to more subtle degrees by many living at the time.

In areas quickly taken over by the USSR the latter process was facilitated by the Soviet government’s need to bind its new populations to itself in a common narrative: all of the horrors of the war must be laid at the feet of “the fascists.” The people of a newly created Eastern German state, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and so on were written in as simple victims of the Nazi war machine. It was all: let us maintain clarity about the bad and the good, the black and the white. When I visited the USSR in 1973 with Maurice and his students, a constant refrain given to us was about the perfidy of “the fascists” who had attacked Russia, murdering countless millions. All true of course, but only one segment of the story. In Western Europe as well there was a profound disinclination to examine or to even speak of the issues in any depth.

Over the decades, however, this reticence has given way in some places to a more honest and open dialogue. In the west Germany’s alliance with the USA demanded increasingly a public examination and acknowledgement of the horrors perpetrated within its boundaries. For many years now West German students have been taught about their history in searing detail. Turmoil erupted within families as children have had to examine their parents’ narratives of the war against things they were learning. Since the dissolution of the USSR in 1989 efforts have been made in Eastern Europe, markedly in Poland, to broaden official histories to include what happened to the vast pre-war Jewish populations. The four presentations that I was able to attend during Holocaust Memorial Week considered from various perspectives the differences between collaboration as an active espousal of Nazi aims, and, co-operation, working in some fashion with German authorities in order to protect one’s life and well-being and that of others, though not operating in any actively hostile fashion against the populations marked out for destruction. Clearly there are many shades along a spectrum between these two positions. Many survivors have acknowledged that at least a part of their good fortune in remaining alive came at the expense of others who did not. This is a broad topic that I would like to explore further.

At the moment I am reading Saul Friedlander’s 2007 book Nazi Germany and The Jews 1939-45: The Years of Extermination, sequel to his earlier work Nazi Germany and The Jews 1933-39: The Years of Persecution. Early in this work Friedlander warns against the trap of assumed homogeneity of any group. Our brains like neat categories to fit into frames of reference but these can easily lead us toward wrong conclusions. “European Jews,” (one could substitute almost any group – Catholics, American Christians, Muslims, etc) were by no means all cut from the same cloth. In Europe before the outbreak of WWII lived about nine million Jews. This was an enormously diverse group, having for centuries been effected by distinctive national histories, the dynamics of large scale migrations, and for some, the influences of urban life. Throughout the continent and across time people had been diversely rewarded or punished by changes in economic and social possibilities and/or by hostilities. Overall there had been a gradual reduction in religious observance, especially in the west. Then, as now, religious belief and observance spanned from ultra-orthodox, orthodox, liberal, to non-believing, secular Jews. Politically, Jews tended toward liberal ideas, though these could span ranges of democrats, social democrats, Bundists, Stalinites, Trotskyites, or Zionists.

The most observable split among European Jews in this period was between those living in the east and those in the west. Jews in Western Europe were considerably fewer in number than those in the East. They tended to be urban dwellers, educated, many of them professional people, speaking the national language, and identifying as citizens of their particular country. Intermarriage with non-Jews was not uncommon, allowing for some gradual assimilation. Jews living in the large cities of the East were in most respects similar. Most Eastern Jews, however, tended to live in smaller villages or towns, farming or working as artisans. They spoke Yiddish and did not identify in the same fashion with the country of their births. Generally they were poorer, less educated and sophisticated than their Western counterparts, but lived within a vibrant Jewish culture.

Friedlander speaks of the period from the late 19^th century to roughly the end of the second world war as one characterised by “a crisis of liberalism.” With the rise of nationalism minority groups like Jews everywhere became more clearly viewed as “Other,” not just in Germany but generally throughout the continent. Rights gained over previous centuries under the influence of the Enlightenment (generally put in place by monarchs) were in various ways weakened or rescinded, leaving Jews more vulnerable economically, professionally, and with respect to their rights as citizens. During this period there was also a steady migration westward of Jews from the east. The differences between those who had lived for generations in the west and the newcomers were fairly marked and they did not mesh happily with one another. Western Jews found those from the east somewhat “backward” and embarrassing; those from the east were scandalized by the secular lives of the westerners. Moreover the influx of Jews from the east provoked an even higher degree of anti-Semitism than that which had been a “normal” condition of the western milieu. The ideologies of right-wing, nationalist governments meshed easily with the views of the anti-liberal, anti-communist Catholic church, leaving the Jews of Europe without clear allies in any institutional sector whatsoever as the Nazi war machine was set in motion.

More of Friedlander’s perspectives in my next post.