One of the least-known Holocaust books to emanate from British Columbia is also one of the best.

Mary J. Gallant's academic work in the field of psychotherapy, Coming of Age in the Holocaust: The Last Survivors Remember (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America 2002), highlights caring and ingenuity of eighteen survivors while enduring captivity and abuse. Possibly, by coincidence, the number 18 represents 'Chai', the Hebrew word for life.

Ostensibly, Gallant does not reveal the identities of eighteen Holocaust informants or where they reside. Each of the raconteurs is identified by their real first names along with a fictitious surname. This veil of anonymity arguably stimulated candour. However, once one knows all these interviews were conducted in British Columbia, it takes very little detective work to deduce the sources. Each fictitious surname commences with the actual first letter of that person's real surname. Gallant fails to make clear whether or not she herself conducted the interviews that frequently contain alarming and disturbing contents. At least six of the interviewees have proceeded to publish books under their own names. Robert Krell reviewed this book for the American Journal of Psychotherapy in 2003 and respected the privacy of the informants. Following suit, here are just a few excerpts from a female informant born in Hungary in 1928.

When K. was sixteen, Hungarian police knocked on the door of the family home on a Sunday morning at 5 a.m. and gave them all twenty minutes to prepare for transport. K. had a brother and a sister. All five family members hastily prepared to give up their freedom at gunpoint as police waited at the door. K. and her family stayed overnight in a school, then they boarded a train. The days that followed were a descent into hell. At a second railway station, SS officials politely told them they were being sent to work on a Hungarian farm, and could return as war's end. Locked into a cattle car with 84 people and no food or water, with just one tiny window, no bathroom facilities, nearly suffocating in terror, they survived on meagre rations of hope as the train moved relentlessly beyond Hungary's borders, arriving in a barbed wire compound at Birkenau--where K. and her family were greeted by Dr. Mengele.

"... And there were all these old people who couldn't move at all and so they just fell, everybody on top of each other, and the small children and the babies and these young mothers holding their babies. And everybody was screaming and everybody was just terrified. They were asking for water and, of course, there was none. All of a sudden we were surrounded with dogs, you know, the German shepherds. They never walked without a dog. Before we knew (it), my father and brother were gone. I never said goodbye to them. I never said goodbye to them.

"We were walking and my mother was in the middle. I was on one side and my sister on the other. He [Mengele] was there, standing, and he just put his arm between my mother and myself. They went the other way and that was it. And I didn't... I.. I... The dogs were barking and there was blinding light. There were hundreds of light bulbs and it was night and it was terribly cold and everything happened so fast. It was so frightening because of all the screaming, and people were shouting to one another. And so by the time Mengele out his arm between my mother, sister and myself... they were lost in the crowd..."

K and other women were forced to stand in the icy all night, waiting to be processed. All their clothing was taken from them and they were forced to undergo a disinfectant bath. then all of their body hair, in all places, was brusquely shaved in the presence of many SS men who appeared indifferent. She was given a light summer dress, four or five sizes too big for her. She recounts:

"So we got out of the bath and with my shaved head which was bleeding because they were terribly, terribly rough, and there was no time to just gracefully and gently shave our heads off. So we got out and I had a short-sleeved sort of little, summer dress down to the ground and no underwear and I was freezing and it was pouring outside, a very icy rain and we got out had to line up! Probably the worst part of was the SS were all around--men! And we had to get undressed. And they over while we were shaved everywhere. And we were completely naked and, you know, for a sixteen-year-old girl to stand there in front of men and be shaved. And my head. I had long hair, heavy, wavy hair [She gives up trying to find the right words.]"

On that first night in Birkenau there was one blanket for twelve women. These squeezed together, twelve to each of the three levels of bunk beds. Early the next morning, they were commanded to re-assemble outdoors. It was still pouring.

"The SS came with a dog and a whip. With his whip he would point at 'You... You... You...' and so on. Whoever he pointed to had to come out and get on the truck. We didn't know what was going on, but, as he came close to me [she sighs deeply] he pointed to a girl who would have to come out. But her mother came out, too, and was holding on to her daughter. We didn't know yet that it was a no-no, that we should never let them know that we were sisters, mother-daughters, or even close friends, because they made sure they would be separated.

"So the mother was kicked by the SS man and was told that she had to get back into the line and the girl had to get up onto the truck. But the mother wouldn't go. And so he kicked her again, and she fell. It was raining and there was a big puddle. She spoke German, this woman. She asked the SS to let her daughter go with her. She said, 'This is my daughter and I want to go with her.' He started to beat her with his whip and kick her and the finally the dog... He was holding the dog on a leash and he gave the order to the dog, and the dog just took her. The dog just tore her apart, right in front of us, right in front of her daughter. The girl had to get onto the truck. I don't know if the mother was dead by the time we were allowed to go back into the building. She was left there in the puddle. We were all spattered with blood."

Gallant incorrectly states that K. was in Auschwitz-Birkenau for almost precisely one year, from April 16, 1944 to April 15, 1945. In fact, she was in Birkenau for four months, then forced into labour because her small, flexible hands were well suited for fine, tedious work. K. laboured at camps in Weisswasser and Horneberg, making small machinery and lightbulbs for airplanes. Five days before K. was liberated, her work group was marched from a [unspecified] work camp to Bergen-Belsen.

"There was one room. We were practically on top of each other, and in the morning, when I woke up, I seemed to be the only one alive... Bergen-Belsen was the place where at liberation the dead were piled up like mountains. When the British came in, they caught the SS, whoever stayed, and they were put to work. They would have to put their very long ladder to this mountain of corpses, and they would carry up the corpses and put one on top of the other. And later on they had a mass grave. Fifteen thousand in one grave. This was the Germans' own records."

She was taken to a hospital. Depressed, she married a fellow survivor in 1953, in Hungary. He was one of the few Jews allowed to obtain a doctorate in Law. Despite being forewarned that she might never have children due to her camp experiences, she had a daughter and they fled Hungary in 1957 with only items they could carry. A peasant guided them across the border to Austria. They left Vienna and immigrated to Vancouver in 1955 or 1956. Along with other Jews who survived, she would help to establish a monument to those who were murdered at Bergen-Belsen. As her family's sole survivor, she recorded her story within a program for historical interviews that was initiated by Robert Krell and others. Robert Krell began a program of conducting in-depth interviews on film with Holocaust survivors in 1978 under the auspices of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Committee. His first videotaped interview was with Vera Slymovics.

She was emboldened by her fellow Holocaust educator Leo Lowy at a seminal and inaugural symposium on the Holocaust, held in Vancouver on April 27, 1976, when he spoke publicly for the first time about how and he and sister survived the infamous Dr. Mengele’s experiments on twins. Other survivors who spoke with Lowy and Slymovics at that event were Rudolph Vrba and Leon Kahn.

Dr. Mary J. Gallant has been Associate Professor of Sociology at Rowan University since 1992. From 2007 to 2015 she served as Chair of Department. She obtained a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota in December 1985. She is affiliated with the American Sociological Association and the Eastern Sociological Society. She has contributed chapters to Remembering for the Future; The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide ("Social Dimensions of Rescue in the Holocaust", Volume 2:254-270) and Different Horrors, Same Hell; Gender and the Holocaust (University of Washington Press, 2013) ("The Kindertransport: Gender and the Rescue of Jewish Children 1938-39").

[BCBW 2021] by Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit



 

 

The most hated and notorious Nazi who was never captured, killed or convicted was Dr. Josef Mengele who was renowned not only for selecting who was to live, and who was to die, on the train platform when Jews arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but also for his hideous experiments on helpless victims, particular twins, among them Vancouverites Leo and Miriam Lowy.