September 1938, Czechoslovakia. Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Germany, threatens to unleash
a European war unless the Sudetenland, a border area of Czechoslovakia on which the ethnic German
population lives, is ceded to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany hold a
conference in Munich between the 29th and 30th of September 1938 and agree to the German annexation
of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. The Czechoslovaks are not even
invited to this conference and less than 6 months later on the 15th of March 1939, in violation of
the Munich Agreement, Nazi Germany invades and occupies the Czech provinces of Bohemia and
Moravia. Adolf Hitler himself arrives in Prague and on the 16th of March 1939, by a proclamation
from Prague Castle, establishes the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. More than 118,000 Jews
living in the protectorate find themselves under Nazi domination. One of them is Dita Polachová.
After spending years under the Nazi occupation and one year in the Theresienstadt Ghetto,
Dita and her parents were sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in December 1943.
Between the 26th of October 1942 and the 28th of October 1944, the Germans deported nearly
47,000 Jews from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in twenty-seven transports.
While at Theresienstadt life was worth something, at Auschwitz this was no longer the case.
When Dita’s transport arrived in Auschwitz, it was a night-time. The exhausted arrivals,
blinded by strong lights, were “welcomed” by the SS men with dogs straining to attack them as well
as prisoners in striped uniforms who were beating them with sticks. They were ordered to leave
everything behind and line up in two columns – men and boys in one, women and girls in the other.
They were then marched into a wooden shack where they spent a night sitting on the cold hard floor.
In the morning Dita, her mother and the other women were ordered to undress, take a cold shower,
and then run cold and wet in the snow to another barracks where they were given old civilian rags
and worn shoes, not striped uniforms as with the rest of the Auschwitz prisoners.
Because Dita stayed in her boots during the shower, she managed to save them.
Then all the prisoners were tattooed on their left arms. From that moment Dita
was not called by her name anymore. She became only a number: 73,305.
They were placed into B II b family camp, called Theresienstadt family camp Auschwitz, established
on the 8th of September 1943 for the Jews from the Ghetto in Terezin. It was one of the nine camps
built by the Germans in the Birkenau subcamp of Auschwitz and about 18,000 Jews deported
from the Theresienstadt ghetto were placed there between 1943 and 1944. This was the second camp,
after the Gypsy family camp, where men stayed together with women and children, but slept in
separate barracks. It was set up by the Nazis for propaganda purposes. But other living conditions
were the same as in the other camps—hunger, beatings, hard labor and limited access to water.
The Theresienstadt family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau
consisted of thirty-two wooden barracks, originally horse stables, with no windows,
only some narrow apertures in the walls which let some air in. Each of them housed 300 prisoners.
The camp also contained a washroom barrack with a row of taps from which trickled cold
brownish water. One barrack was the latrine - a concrete row with holes divided in two by a strip
of sackcloth; one for men and one for women. The sackcloth was hiding only the middle part
of a person, leaving the face and bottom part exposed to humiliate the prisoners even more.
When Dita saw the people who had been deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz
three months before she arrived in the camp, they looked different.
They had greyish pale skin, and no one smiled. They talked strangely and kept
saying something about gas chambers and the chimney in which all of them would
end. They had strange expressions and big empty eyes. When they were pointing at the chimneys,
from which flames shot up at night and grey ash filled the air like snow, the new arrivals did
not understand what they meant. Eventually, Dita learned that the ashes and the smell came from
the crematoria, where the bodies of people murdered in the gas chamber were cremated.
The prisoners were counted during roll call which took place in the mornings and the
evenings. If the numbers did not add up, roll call was prolonged and often took long hours
which could be especially tormenting for the prisoners, particularly in severe weather.
The only food they received was a bowl of soup at midday and in
the evening a piece of bread with a spoonful of margarine or fake jam.
The prisoners were so hungry that they could think of nothing but food.
One day in February, Dita did not see her father standing at roll call. When it was dark,
she somehow managed to enter the men’s barrack and saw him lying with closed eyes on his bunk. When
she saw that he had not eaten his soup, she knew that his end was close. He died the same night.
Dita’s mother did not know about it. She was ill in the hospital for infectious diseases and Dita
could not visit her. She told her about the sad news through a slit in the wooden wall.
They were both thankful that he had died in this way instead of being murdered in the gas chambers.
One of the “privileges“ in the Theresienstadt family camp,
was the Children’s Block. It was in barrack number 31. The children could stay there
during the day until the afternoon roll call. The block was empty except for small stools,
where the children in age groups sat in a circle with an adult, who was responsible
for them. They played guessing games or sang but were also secretly taught. Of course, all of which
happened orally. There were no toys or pencils. The only aids were some 12-14 books, which had
been smuggled in by the prisoners responsible for sorting the luggage of the arriving transports.
Dita was the one who was responsible for the books, becoming the camp’s “librarian”.
Head of the children's block was Freddy Hirsch, whom Dita knew from Prague and Theresienstadt.
Hirsch had managed to convince the camp’s commander to allow this Children’s block,
claiming it would keep the children busy, while their parents had to perform forced labor.
Hirsch was also able to obtain some additional food for the children. He
arranged for the Children’s Block to be heated and the roll calls for children to be held indoors.
Hirsch was extremely strict about the children‘s hygiene, insisting that they wash daily, even
in the frigid winter of 1943–44 and conducting regular inspections for lice. Due to his efforts,
the mortality rate of the children was nearly zero, compared to the overall
mortality of about 25% of the residents of the family camp in the first six months.
In February 1944, the Auschwitz resistance movement decoded the
meaning of “SB6” which was a cryptic abbreviation for the
“special treatment 6 “meaning “murder in the gas chamber after 6 months”.
As a result, the Jews decided to make an uprising by setting the compounds
on fire while cutting through the gate and running for their life.
Fredy Hirsch was selected as one of the leaders of the uprising.
On the 8th of March 1944, one hour before the uprising was supposed to begin, Hirsch asked
the doctors to give him some tranquilizer as he was extremely nervous. However, the doctors
deliberately overdosed Fredy to prevent him from leading this uprising. The reason was that they
had been promised by Doctor Mengele that they would not be killed together with the other Jews
of the Theresienstadt family camp because of their talents which were needed by the SS. Fredy Hirsch
ended up in a coma and was not able to launch the uprising by blowing his whistle. Later the same
day, still unconscious, Fredy and the other 3,800 men, women and children from September
transport were loaded into trucks and driven to the gas chambers where they found their death.
After the liquidation of the September transport, the activities on the Children’s Block went
on with a new Block leader, but Dita, who had come into Auschwitz in December 1943,
knew that her life would end six months after her arrival, namely in June 1944.
However, that May new orders came from Germany, to select men and women from among the prisoners,
who would still be able to work in the German armaments industry.
The doctor who performed the selection was known at Auschwitz as the angel of death,
it was Josef Mengele. Men aged 16-45 and women aged 16-40 were asked to report. They
had to undress, stand to attention, and say three words – their tattoo number, age, and profession.
Dita was only 14 years old, but she knew that if she were not selected for work,
she would be murdered in the gas chamber. She reported for the selection quoting her age as
16 and her profession as a painter. Mengele asked: a house
painter or a portrait painter? Dita replied: “a portrait painter”.
Then Mengele asked: Can you paint my portrait? She replied “Jawohl“ meaning “Yes”.
With a wave of his hand, Mengele sent her to the group destined for hard labor. But Dita’s mother
was sent to the other group. She managed somehow to sneak back into the waiting queue, chose to
stand between other skinny women and passed. Dita and her mother were in the same group together.
The Theresienstadt family camp was liquidated in July 1944. The remaining 7,000 men, women,
children including babies were murdered in the gas chambers.
About 2,000 women and 1,000 men, who survived the selection, were put on a train and sent
to other camps in Germany such as Stutthof or the subcamps of Neuengamme near Hamburg
where Dita arrived together with her mother and other Auschwitz prisoners.
Toward the end of the war, the death rate among the prisoners
in the Neuengamme concentration camp and its subcamps, which had been steadily climbing,
reached catastrophic proportions. In the winter of 1944-1945,
1,700 prisoners died each month; in February 1945 alone, nearly 2,500 prisoners died.
Dita and the other prisoners were exposed to constant air raids. Almost every night there
were 2 or 3 air raids and the prisoners had to descend into cellars which were full of rats.
The prisoners had to get up at 5 in the morning, stand in formation for roll call and then walk to
their assigned places to perform demanding work in various locations outside the camp. This could
be collecting bricks from the bombed houses and stacking them to be reused, digging trenches,
or shoveling the snow from streets. Sometimes, the local German people,
who themselves were suffering from bombings, left the starving prisoners some food to eat.
In March 1945, the SS emptied the subcamps of Neuengamme, and the prisoners,
including Dita and her mother, were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Sanitary conditions at Bergen Belsen were terrible and there was no water for washing
and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January and March 1945 when the
prisoners were sent on death marches from the other concentration camps, about one-third of
the prisoners who arrived in the transports were already dead, and almost 80 per cent
of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station as they were too week and sick to walk.
On one occasion out of a transport of 1,900 inmates over 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches and there was no food when they
arrived at the camp either. The camp was so overcrowded that during the winter months
when it was freezing cold, the prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the
floor and somehow try to share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands
of prisoners. Due to starvation, thirst and the outbreak of typhus epidemics,
the average daily mortality rate of the prisoners was between 250 and 300.
When on the 15th of April 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen,
they found almost 13,000 unburied dead bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved.
Thousands of them died of various diseases such as
typhus and tuberculosis during the months that followed the camp’s liberation.
The prisoners finally got food and clothes. Due to the typhus epidemic and lice infestation,
the camp was then burned to the ground. Captured male and female Nazi guards were forced to
help bury the dead bodies in mass graves. Among the liberated prisoners were Dita and her
mother Elisabeth. Shortly after the liberation, Dita, being fluent in Czech, German, and English,
volunteered to serve as an interpreter, but a few days later, she contracted typhus.
While Dita was recovering, her mother Elisabeth, being fluent in Czech, German,
English, and French, volunteered to work as a secretary for the British camp commander.
In June 1945, the liberated prisoners, who had recovered from typhus and were
no longer infectious, were invited to Sweden for recuperation. Dita and her mother wanted
to go to Sweden, but the mother needed proof that she was not infectious. She went to the
improvised hospital for 2-3 days, faking some disease, to get such a document at her release.
When Dita visited her mother on the second day, she complained about not feeling well.
After having survived so much pain and horror, Dita did not doubt that she would well soon.
However, when Dita came to visit Elisabeth on the third day, she found the bed empty.
The female patient in the next bed said quietly: „Your Mom died“.
The next morning a coach was traveling from Bergen-Belsen to Prague. Dita’s friend put
her on it. Two days later Dita was reunited with her aunt Máňa, the widow of her late uncle Ludwig.
A few weeks after her return Dita met Otto Kraus, whom she remembered as one of the
teachers on the Children’s Block in Auschwitz. He too had lost family in the Holocaust.
Dita knew his mother as they had been together in Hamburg
and Bergen-Belsen. His brother Harry died during the death march in January 1945.
As with Dita’s mother, Otto’s mother also died shortly after the liberation.
In September 1945, Dita went to Teplice for one year where she studied at the local High school.
She and Otto exchanged letters almost daily. After one year, she returned to Prague and in 1947 Dita
and Otto got married. Otto was managing his father‘s factory and house, which his
family had owned before the Nazi occupation. Yet in February 1948 the Communists assumed
control of the country, and Otto lost the factory again. The young couple, with their
little son Peter, decided to leave the country. They moved to Israel in May 1949. Dita and Otto
were teachers, but Otto was also an author. His books have been translated into several languages.
Dita herself wrote two books, one is her biography: A Delayed Life and the second one
is about her husband's life, called “Life with Otto” which is not yet available in English.
They had three children and lived a happy life together until 2000 when Otto passed away.
Today at the age of 93, Dita lives peacefully, surrounded by her family, including four
grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. Even though the Nazis tried to murder all
the Jews, they were unsuccessful. Dita’s revenge is not only that she survived and
still lectures about the hardship she endured during the Holocaust, but that her legacy and
her bravery will go on through her children. Until today, her story, as well as others like
hers, serves as a beacon of courage in the face of the unjust, and cruel forces in the world.
The message is do not hate teach your children not to hate.
Teach them from small before school even
teach them that even the child that is different from you can be your friend, don't hate him,
accept him. Most of mankind has so much in common and the little differences are so unimportant.
The different religions all believe in God
which is one, God is only one, we all believe in the same God there is no a different God
for Muslims and Jews or Christians, it is the same God. We have much more in common
than we are different, we are different only in the very small, small things, minor things,
unimportant things color of skin, color of eyes, language
some kneel when they pray, some stand when they pray, some look up
and they all pray to the same God.
So tolerate, don't hate.
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