During World War II, the nightmare of the Holocaust for Jews, Roma, homosexuals,
and other targeted groups started from the moment they boarded the infamous death trains.
The vast undertaking by the SS to transport Europe’s Jewish population to concentration camps
to achieve the genocidal “Final Solution” was as far reaching as it was horrific.
In this video, we examine the atrocious realities of life on the Holocaust Death Trains.
Let’s start with how Jewish people were forced onto the trains in the first place.
Perhaps the most terrifying part of the Holocaust is that even though it’s usually related to one
evil figurehead - Hitler - the train deportation system to the concentration camps required a
massive coordinated effort among numerous German government offices and officials.
The usage of a vast transportations system to get Jewish people to the camps
at Auschwitz and other locations across Europe, most in German-occupied Poland,
required the cooperation of the Foreign Office, Transport Ministry, and the Reich
Security Main Office. At the time, they all appeared to be staffed by homicidal maniacs.
Representatives from these offices, as well as from the Ministry of Justice and Ministry of the
Interior, were present at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, which was a meeting of top
officials to determine how the Final Solution would be implemented. In other words, a bunch
of top government officials calmly sat at a table in suburban Berlin and figured out the logistics,
schedules, and budget required in order to exterminate entire groups of human beings.
The Transport Ministry organized the train schedules. The Foreign Office was in charge
of negotiating with German-allied states for deportation. And the Reich Security Main Office
organized the rounding up and deportation of Jews and other people targeted by the Nazi regime.
Usually, the German state would give orders without warning the
local Judenraete - to round up Jewish people from their town or district.
These round-ups lasted several days or weeks and were known as Aktions.
The Judenraete were local councils of Jewish leaders who were elected by their own population
and then approved by the German state. They were forced to carry
out Nazi orders against their own people within Jewish communities.
Some Jewish leaders refused to join the council entirely,
and were executed for their efforts. In the earlier days of World War II, others hoped
that if they could show the Nazi command that Jewish councils could be productive and useful,
they could appease the SS and ease the punishment of their people.
Those that were elected and took up positions as council members of the Judenraete
often tried to lighten or delay harsh orders, or at least help community members evade them.
As one can imagine, this didn’t go over too well with the Nazis.
When the SS had reached the point of ordering Judenraete
to round up Jewish community members for transport to concentration camps,
many councils decided to form armed resistance groups to fight against the
Nazis. Others tried to persuade the SS to send Jewish people to labor camps instead.
Some decided to sacrifice a few members of the community, believing it would save the Jewish
population at large. Their position was often an impossible one, and their role controversial.
Though any attempt to appease Nazis might sound ludicrous to us today,
we must remember the heinous campaign conducted against Europe’s Jewish population for years
at this point. The Nazis made huge efforts in previous years to undermine the human dignity,
rights, and freedoms of the Jewish people, even their physical strength through rationing
and starvation, contributing to a community-wide breakdown.
By the time death trains became a fact of life in Europe, the Jewish community had been incredibly
weakened psychologically and physically. Jacob Schwarzfitter, a Holocaust survivor, said,
“by that time we were not anymore human beings like we remembered from once at home,
because…all that belonged to the past.”
Thus, many people became focused on the basics - acquiring food,
saving family - and believed that by appeasing their oppressors they could survive another day.
However, as history has shown us time and time again,
appeasement doesn’t work against oppressors, who only become more cruel with each victory.
When the SS would initiate Aktions, they would often do so around Jewish holidays,
to add insult to injury for those celebrating. They would first call
on parts of the Jewish communities that were less protected, such as the poor or refugees.
Other members of the community hoped that the Nazis would leave them alone
after coming for the lower strata of society. As we now know, this was not to be the case.
People were instructed to gather by train stations and take few, if any, possessions with them.
Those who wouldn’t comply or couldn’t keep up with the pace of the Aktion were shot on sight.
Even these brutal acts weren’t enough to convince some Jewish people of the reality they were about
to face. Most peoples’ minds couldn’t conceive the scale and violence of the horror people who
may have been their former neighbors and co-workers were about to inflict on them.
The lies and deception that were part of the Nazis’ propaganda strategy during World War II
also applied to the death trains. Many Jewish people were told they
were undergoing a “resettlement to the east”, or that they were being taken to labor camps.
In interviews conducted by David Boder in refugee camps in 1946, one interviewee, Adolph Heisler,
said the following: “We did not know about any Auschwitz... We saw people dressed in prisoner
clothes, but we did not know what it meant. Only afterwards we found out the entire story.”
When people boarded the trains, they were greeted with inhumane conditions that beggared belief.
Though some made their way onto passenger cars,
many more were shoved into freight and cattle cars.
One example of such a railcar is housed in the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
The interior of a typical car had a length of approximately 26 feet,
an interior height of approximately 7 feet, and an interior width of 8 feet.
Dozens of people were crammed into these cars with barely enough room to breathe.
The people forced into the cars were given little to no food or water. Alexander Gertner, one of the
Holocaust survivors interviewed, stated, “for the whole wagon was allotted a jar of water,
and a half a bread to each….A small piece of black bread. This was for the whole journey.”
They had zero adequate ventilation, and just a bucket, if that,
for the excrement of dozens of people on board each car.
Even more horrifying, Gertner’s experience was apparently one of the better ones.
Many times, prisoners got so desperate they resorted to drinking their own urine,
or each other’s. Parents would urinate to provide some kind of hydration to their children.
For anyone who complained, the punishment was harsh and swift. Nechamah Epstein,
another survivor, shares this memory: ‘There were small children who began to cry terribly,
“Water!” German guards sitting on top of the trains began to shoot inside…When
they began to shoot inside, very many people died.”
Epstein saved himself by hiding under the bodies of the dead to protect himself from the bullets.
Schwarzfitter talked about how some stronger prisoners would stand on the
sidings to unload the dead from the car, along with excrement and other refuse.
Sometimes, the train cars would take days or weeks to arrive at the concentration camps,
often delayed due to waiting for other trains to cross,
with no regard for the suffering of the human beings imprisoned inside the rail cars.
Schwarzfitter describes a journey of five days in the following manner:
“no food, no drink, were given to us. Not even swallowing, catching our breath,
standing up was permitted. And so we remained for five days.”
In the harsh northern winters, the prisoners were subjected to subfreezing temperatures
with no protection from the elements. In the summer, they suffered from the intense outdoor
heat compounded by the crowded conditions in which they were being transported,
smashed against dozens of other human bodies.
Days in the railcars, as one can plainly understand, were beyond
abysmal. It’s likely many of the people being transported, even those who had held out hope
that a fate less severe than death awaited them at the end of their journey, started to lose hope.
History retains no good or detailed accounts as to how many people died
on the trains before even reaching the eventual destination of the concentration camps. However,
one thing is certain: the trains succeeded in dealing the final blow
to what little dignity the Jewish prisoners had left after months of ostracization, persecution,
confinement to the ghettos, and starvation. Prisoners arrived at Auschwitz, Treblinka,
and other extermination camps stripped of their basic humanity, uncertain of
what lay next. All in all, about six million Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust,
and another six million Roma, homosexuals, and prisoners of war. An untold number of them let out
their last breath in the infamous death trains. One story from a holocuast survivor perfectly
encapsulates this entire experience. One of the most famous Holocaust survivors - who,
despite everything the Nazi state had put him through, despite all the suffering and tragedy
he endured, not only survived the Holocaust, but thrived in the years after until his death in New
York City in 2016 - never stopped reminding the world of the atrocities the Jewish people and
others persecuted by the Nazis had suffered. He was born in Romania, and his name was Elie Wiesel.
Of Wiesel’s entire family, only two out of his three sisters survived the Holocaust. Wiesel
himself was liberated from Buchenwald by the Allied army after watching his father succumb to
dysentery and starvation in front of his eyes, and after six days of suffering starvation himself.
In “Night”, the famous account of his experiences at Auschwitz, Wiesel shares what motivates him
to keep the tragedy of the Holocaust alive in peoples’ minds: “for the survivor who chooses to
testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living ... To forget the
dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” Wiesel worked tirelessly to help establish the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and for his efforts in spreading awareness, demanding
the world take notice, and sharing his story, while accomplishing various humanitarian goals,
he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. However, Wiesel is perhaps best remembered as
a symbol of human resilience. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2000, he said this of his
life and experience following the Holocaust: “What is abnormal is that I am normal. That I survived
the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and
tea and live my life -- that is what is abnormal.” As much as the Nazis tried to strip Jewish people
of their identity and humanity, many survivors of the Holocaust, though permanently afflicted
with traumatic memories of their times in concentration camps and death trains,
also went on to have families, embark on careers, and live long, fulfilling lives.
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