Every year, life in Israel comes to a standstill for two minutes as the country celebrates Holocaust Remembrance Day. Air raid sirens blare, pedestrians stop, drivers get out of their cars, and everyone bows their heads in memory of the six million victims of the Nazi genocide that wiped out a third of the world's Jewry.

For Israelis from all walks of life, the two-minute tribute is an appropriate moment to remember the victims of the Holocaust, but the painful memories linger year-round.

Hundreds of thousands of survivors reached the state of Israel after the war and helped build a new country. Israel, with less than 200,000 survivors still among us, is still home to the largest community of its kind in the world.

Asher Aud (Sieradski), 86 years old (Poland): married, three children and ten grandchildren. Retired, worked for a weapons company.

Usher's Odyssey is a true story of the horrors of the Holocaust. He was separated from his parents and siblings in his Polish hometown of Zdunska Wola and lived in the Lodz ghetto before being deported to the Auschwitz death camp.

There he escaped the gas chambers and the crematorium, and after a long imprisonment, survived the notorious death march through the snow to Mauthausen, where those who lagged behind were shot on the spot. After the war, he boarded a ship bound for the Holy Land, where he did his best to forget the past.

Aud is one of six survivors chosen to light a symbolic torch in an official ceremony honoring those killed.

Of his memories, the most painful was the separation from his mother at the age of 14. It was September 1942. The Nazis herded the Jewish community into a local cemetery and prepared to deport them. His father and older brother had already been taken away, leaving him with his mother and younger brother, Gavriel.

“I remember looking down and seeing that I was standing on my grandmother’s tombstone,” he recalls. “The Germans walked among us, as soon as they saw a mother with a child, they tore the child out of her hands and threw him into the back of a truck.”

It was then that he realized: life as he knew it was over.

“I looked around and said, ‘Mom, they’re going to separate us here,’” he recalls.

They were soon forced to walk through two rows of German soldiers. “I didn’t even feel when the Germans hit me, but every time they hit my mother and brother, it felt like they were cutting me alive,” he said.

Shmuel Bogler, 84 years old (Hungary): married, two children, five grandchildren. Retired policeman.

Shmuel Bogler never got to say goodbye to his family - like many Jews in the Hungarian community, he ended up in Auschwitz. Of the 10 children in the family, one died young, three ran away, and three more were sent to labor camps. Bogler and his parents, brother and sister were forced into a truck. After five days amid the stench of human excrement, they arrived at the infamous death camp.

“The first thing they did was beat us and separate the women from the men. It happened so quickly, I couldn’t even say goodbye to my mother and sister,” he said.

The next to leave him was his father, who was ordered by Josef Mengele, who decided who would live and who would die, to go to the left. "I remember him asking, 'I'm still young, I can run, I can work.' But that didn’t help either,” Bogler recalls.

She and her brother were left alone. They survived Auschwitz, where he vividly remembers the screams of Jewish prisoners as they burned alive and the smell of their charred flesh. “I don’t know if mother and father were among them. I have no information about how they died,” he said.

The brothers were transported from one camp to another, and he remembers that both of them were constantly hungry and lice-ridden. They were eventually released from the Buchenwald concentration camp, and Bogler later came to Israel, where he fought in the 1948 War of Independence.

“I still have nightmares,” he said. “Just two weeks ago I had a dream that I was being taken to a death camp again.”

Although he no longer practices Judaism, Bogler still attends synagogue in honor of his father, whose beard and sidelocks were cut off in a humiliating manner by the Nazis.

“The bad thing is that there is no Jewish grave for my parents that I can go to,” he said.

Jacob Philipson Armon, 76 years old (Netherlands): married, two children, one grandson. Worked for a defense company.

Jacob Philipson Armon was just two years old when his native Holland was overrun by the Nazis, and three years later he was forced into hiding, like his more famous compatriot Anne Frank. His family's five children were scattered among various non-Jews who risked their lives to protect them.

His story has been largely reconstructed from documents, other witnesses, and a few random memories. “I remember crying and being so hungry that I couldn’t sleep,” he said.

He remembers how German soldiers knocked down the door to the family home of his patron, Kit Winkel.

“They broke into the house and started looking for documents, overturning furniture and tearing off wallpaper. One soldier stood and looked at me. I sat there, not daring to move. I was so scared I almost couldn’t breathe,” he said. Then the Dutch policeman who was accompanying the German soldiers said that he saw something in the other room. He distracted the soldiers and probably saved my life."

His mother, who was also hidden, survived the war. She later recalled that the last thing she said to him before she handed him over to his guardian was: "Remember that you are a Jewish boy, be proud of it."

Only 13 of his 100 relatives survived. His father, who had been hiding in the attic, was “turned over” to the Nazis and later died in the Sobibor extermination camp.

Esther Koffler Paul, 82 years old (Galicia, today Ukraine): married, three children, nine grandchildren, three great-grandchildren. Housewife.

When Esther Koffler Paul remembers what she went through in the Holocaust, her sister comes to mind. In 1941, when the Nazis invaded their hometown of Buchach in what is now Ukraine, Paul was 8 and her sister Nunia was 10. Their mother died before the war, and their father, along with 700 other Jewish men, was killed by the Nazis.

The girls were taken care of by their grandparents. My uncle, who was an engineer, built an underground bunker under the house, with a tunnel opening into the park.

When the Nazis began knocking on the door, the grandparents stayed behind to close and hide the hatch through which the girls escaped. “They sacrificed themselves,” she said. “The Germans grabbed them and stopped searching.”

For the next few years they were on the run, sleeping in fields and eating scraps. When the Russians captured the city, they returned home, but the Germans soon recaptured it. This time the girls were caught on the street and handed over to the Gestapo.

“They asked my name, and I said “Romka Vochik.” I don’t know where it came from, it just dawned on me,” she said, explaining its non-Jewish sound. “This name saved me.”

Her sister could not lie, fearing that she would be caught in deception. “She had an accent and she was scared,” says Paul.

This decision cost her her life.

“I believe in fate,” says Paul. “I was protected by some higher power.” I do not know how to explain it".

“Juden, com!..” - the Germans shouted. It sounded like an invitation to execution...

The concept of “Holocaust”, derived from the words “burnt offering” and “catastrophe”, means the death of a significant part of the Jewish population of Europe (about 6 million people) as a result of the organized extermination of Jews by the Nazis and their accomplices in Germany and in the territories it captured in 1933-1945 years. The Nazis called this monstrous action “the final solution to the Jewish question.” They “solved this issue” in almost every locality in Ukraine. A man who now lives in our city of Dnieper and agreed to talk about those terrible events met the war in Mogilev-Podolsky, Vinnytsia region.

Ilya Shafirovich was born in this city nine years before the Nazi invasion of our land and a year before the start of the genocide against the Jewish population. His father’s name was Gersh Elevich, and his mother’s name was Etya Moiseevna. There was also a sister, Esther, who was born shortly before the start of the war.

His father worked in a printing house, his mother was a housewife. Ilya, affectionately called Elechka in his family, studied at a Soviet school. Despite the fact that Gersh Elevich and Etya Moiseevna were religious people and attended the synagogue, they did not interfere with their son’s lack of faith in God at that time, believing that, having matured, he would decide for himself whether he needed God or not. If they knew then that this decision - in favor of God - would be made as a result of terrible, inhuman suffering and trials...

They came with the war... Already on the first day, June 22, an aerial bomb hit the house where the Shafirovichs lived. Father's brother Yankel and his wife Malka died. God saved Gersh Elevich from death. Finding himself under the rubble, shell-shocked, he climbed out from under it for several days... At this time, Etya Moiseevna, who had gone with her children on the first day of the war to spend the night with her sister Khana Moiseevna Vaisman, had already cried her eyes out.

They remained in the Weissman family, not knowing what tomorrow would bring. Meanwhile, the front was approaching at the speed of enemy bombers. But even more rapid were the rumors about the fascists’ fanaticism against the Jewish population. The Shafirovichs and Vaismans decided to evacuate. Having collected all the essentials for the journey, they loaded simple belongings onto carts and set off, intending to get ahead of fate...On the third day, a fascist car overtook them. Elya was the first to see it - with a huge red banner, in the center of which a swastika crawled like a terrible spider. There was nowhere to hide, and there was no time. The car caught up with the carts traveling parallel to the highway along a country road. The fugitives saw that her body was chock-full of Jews... Maybe that’s why the Germans didn’t stop.

Believing that the Nazis would definitely return for them, the men turned their horses towards the forest belt that grew parallel to the road. That day there was heavy rain - the only and unexpected one in that dry summer, the water stood knee-deep all around, and the wheels of the carts heading to the shelter left no traces. And the Germans, indeed, soon returned. Not finding any prey and suspecting that the fugitives had taken refuge in the forest, they began to shout: “Yuden, com!”... This terrible call, similar to an invitation to execution, is still heard by Elya Shafirovich, who has long matured and entered the age of wisdom. Then all their families seemed numb and, it seems, even stopped breathing, so that suddenly the wind would not carry the rustle of their breath to the murderers. Even the horses froze, not making a sound. However, the men managed to guess to give them some oats.

After shouting for some more time, the Germans left. And Etya Moiseevna said: “It was God who saved us!” And the nine-year-old pioneer and atheist Elya believed his mother.

There was no point in moving further - the Germans were all around, and the travelers turned home. And in Mogilev-Podolsky a ghetto had already been organized - a part of the city into which all Jews were resettled and from which they were not allowed to leave. The Weissman house just happened to be on this territory.

Before the war, Lev Borisovich Vaisman worked as a commissioner for the collection of scrap metal. Having at his disposal a couple of carts, carts and horses, he traveled the length and breadth of the areas adjacent to the city and made many friends. They helped two Jewish families not die of hunger. Arriving at the market, to which the ghetto territory was adjacent, Lev Borisovich’s acquaintances stopped with him and often left unsold goods, which were then sold or exchanged for food.

The names of these people did not remain in the memory of Eli Shafirovich. But the names of Pavel Petrovich and Alexandra Fedorovna Vlasyuk are forever imprinted there. It was thanks to these people that they, two Jewish families, nine people, survived that terrible meat grinder, later called the Holocaust.

The Vlasyuks were neighbors of the Vaysmans; before the war, Pavel Petrovich worked in an artel led by Lev Borisovich, and perhaps this circumstance played a certain role in the choice of this Ukrainian family: risking themselves and their children, to save two Jewish families, or take the position: my hut is on the edge . You need to have considerable moral strength to choose the first...

Waking up, Elya Shafirovich thought: will he, his mother, father, sister survive until tomorrow morning?.. A new morning came and brought the same question. This constant mental and physical tension lasted from 1941 to 1944.

The most terrible events in the life of the Mogilev-Podolsk ghetto were the raids. The Vaismans and Shafirovichs were hidden by the Vlasyuki. Alexandra Fedorovna, who traded at the market, managed to find out about them in advance and “hooked” the neighbor’s children into a hole dug under a spreading nut tree that grew in the yard. There were other shelters for adults.

Before his death from illness in 1943, Vlasyuk’s brother, Vasily Petrovich, warned about the raids. Having worked as a machinist before the war, he fell ill with volatile rheumatism, and in order not to doom his family to starvation, he went to serve as a policeman. It was his timely information that allowed the Vaismans and Shafirovichs to hide in time from the raids that thinned out the ghetto like a deadly mower. In 1942, Eli’s two cousins, Klara and Lyusya, and their mother Dora were taken to the Pechora concentration camp, where prisoners worked on the construction of underground bunkers at Hitler’s headquarters, and were never seen again. The father and husband of the unfortunates, Joseph Weintraub, died even earlier, during a typhus epidemic. Ilya Grigorievich tried to find out something about the fate of his sisters, but to no avail. However, Shafirovich still believes that there will be witnesses to the last days of Clara, Lucy and their mother Dora who survived the terrible torment and trials, who will tell him about these days... He would be very grateful for this memory.

...When the leaves fell off the nut, it ceased to be a reliable refuge. One day, in the late autumn, when Vasily Petrovich was no longer alive, the Romanians who came with a raid almost took three families by surprise. The Vlasyuks placed the neighbor's children, covering them with rags, on the stove, next to their own children. The invaders, seeing the blue-eyed faces and fair-haired heads, left the yard, giving its inhabitants hidden in all the nooks and crannies a temporary respite...

On March 8, 1944, the Soviet Army liberated Mogilev-Podolsk. Leaving the city, the brutal fascists littered their path with the bodies of innocent people. So, in the courtyard of the Vaismans’ house, their neighbor, Joseph Sadetsky, was killed. Then, looking after the fleeing enemy, Elya Shafirovich experienced an incomparable relief, which a patient may feel who has overcome a terrible, fatal illness. He and his family survived...

The euphoria, however, passed very quickly - upon meeting an unfamiliar liberation officer, walking hand in hand with the girl.

“Hello,” Elya Shafirovich greeted them joyfully. They silently glanced sideways at the teenager, and the girl muttered contemptuously through her teeth:

Little liquid...

And Elya realized that even after the Victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War, not everything in his life would be simple and smooth. Perhaps that is why he soon began to be called Ilya Grigorievich.

He graduated from school, taking exams as an external student, trying to make up for the time lost due to the war and occupation. And he left for Leningrad, where relatives lived who had survived the blockade, provided the guest with shelter and provided the attention they were capable of. Ilya Grigorievich entered the correspondence department of the Leningrad Institute of Chemical Technology, and a year later transferred to the Dnepropetrovsk Institute. Shafirovich graduated from it in 1956, when the cult of personality of Stalin was debunked, who in the last years of his life for some reason decided to deal with the “Jewish question” using methods that were hardly different from the methods used by Hitler.

However, Ilya Grigorievich, perfectly understanding and feeling the policy of state wariness towards representatives of the Jewish people, did not become a rebel and dissident due to the gentleness and intelligence of his character. Protecting himself from some prejudice brought up in his citizens by Soviet ideology, he created his own world in which he searched for truth and in which he was even a pioneer. He - together with his wife Minna Leonidovna Ulanovskaya - came to God a long time ago. Coming to the synagogue, the former little Elya probably talks with Him about the moral values ​​that so many people he met in life had. They, of course, were fully gifted by Pavel Petrovich and Alexandra Fedorovna Vlasyuk. They have been dead for a long time. But the children are alive—those same ones, light-eyed and fair-haired, who with their appearance once, a long time ago, warded off trouble from nine representatives of the Jewish nationality. Not long ago, the children of Pavel Petrovich and Alexandra Fedorovna Vlasyuk were invited to Israel, where they were awarded the “Righteous of Ukraine” medals, which the grateful state of Israel awarded to their parents.

Elya Shafirovich, a believer in God and the good human mind, wrote about all this in the “Book of Memory” - a collection of piercing and tragic stories of eyewitnesses and participants in those terrible events, called the Holocaust.

"Children's War Book" with children's diaries about the Holocaust

Almost 78 years have passed since the outbreak of World War II, and those who were children at that terrible time are already about 80 years old or more. Even by the standards of modern life expectancy in Israel (81 years for men and 84 years for women), this generation is fading into oblivion. It should also be taken into account that of the six million Jews who died during the Holocaust, 1.2 million were children - this also reduces the likelihood of finding Shoah survivors in the modern Jewish world community.

Among the children of that time living today, for obvious reasons, there are significantly more former Jewish refugees of World War II than those who ended up in the territories occupied by the Nazis. The death last year of former child prisoners of ghettos and concentration camps, Nobel Prize-winning writers Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertesz and the writer, “Soviet Anne Frank” Maria Rolnik (Rolnikite), left a sad trace in the souls of readers of their works about the suffering experienced in Hitler’s dungeons.

Maria Rolnik ended up in the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius as a teenager, and then went through the terrible ordeals of the Nazi death camps. The diary entries she kept from the age of 14 to 18, memorizing them in the Vilnius ghetto and Nazi concentration camps, turned after the war into the book “I Must Tell,” which was subsequently translated into eighteen languages.

One of the first documents about the fate of Jewish children of the war was the Yiddish book “Children’s Martyrology” (martyrology is a collection of tales about the life and suffering of martyrs), published in 1947 in Buenos Aires by the publishing house “Polish Jewry”. A huge amount of documentary information about the fate of Jewish children in ghettos and concentration camps is contained in the collections “The Nuremberg Trials: Crimes against Humanity,” now presented on the Internet.

Even before World War II, the Nazis were able to consolidate the German people with the slogan “One race, one state, one Fuhrer.” Having come to power in Germany, the Nazis already proclaimed at the state level that the Germans were “racially superior to the Jews,” who were a threat to the so-called “German racial community.” The anti-Jewish policy was part of the German consolidation plan, its goal was the destruction of the Jewish people. Nazi propaganda claimed that there was no real difference between Jews and animals. As a result, millions of Jewish men, women and children were killed during the war by police forces supported by Wehrmacht, SS and collaborator units.

Between 1941 and 1944, the Nazis deported millions of Jews from the occupied territories and from the countries of many of their allies in the Nazi coalition into ghettos and extermination camps, where they were killed in specially created gas chambers. Adults still had a small chance of escape by being selected for forced labor in German factories. Children, especially those under the age of 12, generally had no chance of being used as laborers and surviving. For example, in Auschwitz, of the 216 thousand older children deported to the camp, only 6,700 teenagers were selected for forced labor. By the end of the war, only 6 to 11 percent of Jewish children in Europe were alive.

Children of the Warsaw Ghetto

Children were the first victims of mass Nazi crimes. It was from them that the extermination of Jews on a huge scale “in an industrial way” began. The Wannsee Protocol of January 20, 1942 states: “Reichsmarshal Goering appointed Heydrich as commissioner for preparing the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe.” On their conscience are millions of dead people: shot, hanged, burned alive, gassed. A terrible memory of their “merits” is five- and six-year-old Jewish children who were driven into gas chambers, and they, trying to escape, pointed to their pathetic, thin fists and said: “We are still strong, we can work!” You experience involuntary horror when reading the documentary order of the Nazi executioners, given at the Nuremberg trials: to throw children into the crematorium ovens alive, without spending resources on killing! From these same documents we learn that the total number of Jews killed by gas in Auschwitz between April 1942 and April 1944 was more than a million people.

The French citizen Ida Vasso, director of a boarding house for elderly Frenchmen that existed in Lviv, testifies to the methods of educating German youth used by Nazi criminals. During the period of the German occupation of the city, she had the opportunity to visit the Lviv ghetto. From the statement of this French woman it is clear that the Germans raised German youth by training young Nazis in shooting at living targets - children who were specially given to the Hitler Youth organization as targets.

When children were sent to die in gas chambers, they were most often separated from their parents. Janusz Korczak, director of the Jewish orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, refused to leave the children doomed to death. He voluntarily accompanied his students to the gas chamber, sharing their fate in the Treblinka death camp.

Among the 1.5 million children exterminated by the Nazis and their collaborators, in addition to more than a million Jewish and tens of thousands of Roma, there were also German and Polish children with physical and mental disabilities. Examples include the massacre of Roma children in the Auschwitz concentration camp; killing under the so-called “euthanasia program” (the practice of ending the life) of mainly German children suffering from incurable diseases; executions together with the parents of children in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union.

Many Jewish and some non-Jewish teenagers (13-18 years old) used as forced labor in concentration camps died due to the harsh working conditions. In ghettos and concentration camps, children also died due to lack of food, clothing and shelter. There were cases of children dying due to the terrible conditions in the transit camps, from where they were sent to death camps. SS doctors and medical "researchers" in concentration camps used children, primarily twins, for medical experiments, as a result of which the "test subjects" died.

The Nazi leadership was indifferent to the mass mortality of children, since it believed that they were unfit for any useful activity. The elders of the Jewish ghetto councils (Judenrat) sometimes had to make painful and controversial decisions in order to fulfill German quotas for deportations to death camps. Thus, the decision of the Judenrat in Lodz in September 1942 to deport children to the Chelmno murder center was an example of a tragic choice. This was done to fulfill the Nazi requirement to ensure a certain number of Jews sent to death. The adults who remained in the ghetto still had a better chance of surviving in terrible conditions.

Despite their vulnerability, some children managed to become indispensable, delivering smuggled food and medicine into the ghetto at the risk of their lives. Some older children participated as members of the youth movement in underground resistance activities. Some of the children escaped with their parents or other relatives, and sometimes themselves, into family units of Jewish partisans.

The fate of the children of the Holocaust can be represented in a number of categories: those killed upon arrival at the death camps; destroyed immediately after birth or in hospitals; born in ghettos or camps and survived thanks to the prisoners who hid them; children over 12 years of age who were used as labor and some as subjects for medical experiments and, finally, killed during punitive or anti-partisan operations.

As part of a campaign to “protect Aryan blood,” SS racial experts ordered the forcible transport of children from occupied territories of Poland and the Soviet Union to Germany for adoption by racialized German families. Such children, whose appearance indicated "racial Nordic blood", were to be abducted and subjected to a selection process. Often, blond hair, blue eyes or a beautiful face were sufficient grounds for “possible Germanization.” At the same time, if Polish and Soviet women, deported to work in Germany, had sexual relations with Germans (mostly under duress), which resulted in pregnancy, they were forced to have an abortion or carry a child to term in conditions leading to the death of the baby in cases where, according to “racial experts,” the child did not have enough Aryan blood.

After the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, some countries eased harsh restrictions on Jewish refugees, especially children. Due to the impossibility of obtaining visas to travel to safe countries, many parents preferred to save their children by sending them there alone. Very few of these families were reunited after the war. "Baby Transport" was the informal name for efforts to rescue Jewish refugee children (without parents) between 1938 and 1940. Thousands were transported from Nazi Germany and German-occupied parts of Europe to Britain.

One such child rescuer is Nicholas George Winton (1909-2015), who, before the outbreak of the Second World War in late 1938, organized the rescue of 669 children (mostly of Jewish origin) aged two to seventeen from German-occupied Czechoslovakia, taking them to the UK . Winton came from a family of German Jews who were baptized. He found shelter for the children with the help of his mother living in England. She looked for families there who were ready to take in Jewish children.

Winton's job in Prague was to organize trips for children; this required the consent of the authorities of the Netherlands, through whose territory the transit was carried out, and financial guarantees, without which Great Britain would not allow their arrival in the country. For many years he kept the secret of rescuing the children, but in 1988, Winton's wife discovered his 1939 notebook containing the addresses of English families who had taken in the rescued children. In September 1994, Nicholas Winton received a letter of gratitude from Israeli President Ezer Weizman. Winton's Jewish origin became an obstacle to the Israeli title of "Righteous Among the Nations", although he was a Christian. This title, according to the statute, is awarded only to non-Jews who saved

Jewish children from Germany who arrived in England after Kristallnacht

Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

Among the righteous of the world, a special place is occupied by the feat of Irena Sendler (1910-2008), a Polish resistance activist who saved 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. As an employee of the Warsaw Health Administration and a member of the Council of the Polish underground organization for aid to Jews (Zhegota), Irena Sendler often visited the Warsaw Ghetto, where she looked after sick children. She, using her official position and her like-minded people, was able to take 2,500 children out of the ghetto, who were then transferred to monasteries, Polish orphanages and families. Small children were given sleeping pills, placed in small boxes with holes to prevent them from suffocating, bags and baskets, older children were hidden under tarpaulins in the backs of trucks and taken out in vehicles that delivered disinfectants to the camp.

Irena Sendler

On October 20, 1943, she was arrested following an anonymous denunciation. After torture, she was sentenced to death, but the righteous woman was saved by bribed guards who accompanied her to the place of execution. Until the end of the war, Irena Sendler went into hiding, but continued to help Jewish children. After the war, she unearthed her cache of data on the rescued children and handed them over to the Committee of Polish Jews. The orphans were placed in Jewish orphanages. Later, a significant part of them were transported to Palestine. In 1965, the Israeli Holocaust Museum Yad Vashem awarded Irena Sendler the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

Some non-Jews hid Jewish children and sometimes other family members, risking their lives. In France, almost the entire Protestant population of the small town of Chambon-sur-Lignon from 1942 to 1944 participated en masse in hiding Jewish children. Catholic priests and the Catholic population in Italy and Belgium did the same.

Here is an affidavit given in London by Dr. Rudolf Kastner, a former functionary of the Hungarian Zionist organization: “The following rules were applied to the Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz: children no older than 12 or 14 years old, old people over 50 years old, as well as the sick and people recruited for committing criminal offenses, immediately upon arrival they were sent to the gas chambers. Newborn Jewish children were destroyed immediately."

In 1944, Jewish children from Italy and France began to arrive in large numbers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. They were all sick, suffering from hunger, poorly dressed, often without shoes, and did not even have the opportunity to wash themselves. During the Warsaw Uprising, imprisoned children from Warsaw were brought to the camp. They were placed in a separate barracks. Children from Hungary were also brought to the camp, who worked together with their peers from Poland. All these children were used for the most difficult jobs. They had to transport coal and other heavy loads on carts from one camp to another, and also worked in dismantling barracks during the liquidation of the camp. In January 1945, everyone was evacuated and had to walk to Germany in difficult conditions, under fire from the SS, without food, walking about 30 kilometers a day. Children were subjected to the same system of humiliation as adults, and hunger led them to the point of searching for potato peels among the slop and dirt.

In the essay “Extermination Camp” (Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper from August 10 to 12, 1944, in three issues) by the newspaper’s special correspondent, the popular poet of the war years Konstantin Simonov, we read his impression of visiting the Majdanek concentration camp at the time of its liberation: “...a barracks with shoes ". Length 70 steps, width 40, filled with shoes of the dead. Shoes to the ceiling... The worst thing is tens of thousands of pairs of children's shoes. Sandals, shoes, boots from ten-year-olds, from one-year-olds..."

Many Jewish children from Poland, fleeing with their parents from Nazi occupation and death, ended up on the territory of the USSR after September 1939. In 1942, the Polish government in exile and the leadership of the USSR reached an agreement on the emigration of Polish refugees, among them about a thousand Jewish children. In February and August 1943, they were sent via Tehran to Mandatory Palestine. The surviving Jewish children from Romania, who were in the Transnistrian ghetto during the war, were returned to Romania in December 1943 and then sent to Palestine.

After the surrender of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II, refugees and displaced people searched for their missing children throughout Europe. Thousands of orphaned boys and girls were held in displacement camps. Many of them, along with adult Holocaust survivors, were sent to the western zones of occupied Germany, and from there to Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel. As part of the Aliyat Hanoar movement (Hebrew for “Youth Aliyah”), thousands of Jews repatriated to Jewish settlements, and later, after the formation of the Jewish state in 1948, to Israel.

Of the Jewish children who were persecuted by the Nazis and their allies, only a small number of survivors were able to write diaries that survive to this day. They reflect the bitterness of the loss of home, language and culture; destructive separation from family and friends, the problem of adapting to life in an unfamiliar and scary world around us. Children who escaped in the occupied territories mostly hid in shelters for many months. There were children and teenagers who pretended to be non-Jews using dubious false documents, using their external resemblance to the local population. They were forced to quickly adapt to their new identity and environment. They learned to respond to fictitious names, avoiding language or mannerisms that might indicate their origin. Because some of the surviving Jewish children were hidden by individuals or religious institutions with a faith other than the Jewish one, these children and adolescents learned to recite the prayers of an alien religion to prevent adult suspicion. One wrong word or gesture could be enough to endanger the lives of both the child and his rescuers. These children and those who sheltered them lived in constant fear, even their voices or stomping could sometimes arouse the suspicion of neighbors. Children in their diaries described painful escape routes, difficulties associated with finding a safe shelter, and a constant feeling of fear of being caught. Teenagers tried to hide from German authorities in attics, bunkers and basements throughout Eastern and Western Europe, their memories reflecting the challenges of their survival in such conditions.

The diaries of Holocaust-era children and teenagers often touch on themes such as the nature of human suffering and the struggle against despair. Their memoirs provide readers with the terrible world of children who lived and died during the Holocaust. The diaries of Anne Frank have become one of the most widely read books in the world, turning its author into a symbol of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish children who died during the Holocaust.

It is clear that the surviving juvenile prisoners were completely deprived of childhood, and that for the rest of their lives, terrible memories, the bitterness of losses and illnesses associated with deprivation in childhood constantly poisoned their existence. The Soviet state ignored the problems of the Jewish population who survived the Holocaust. The stay of adult Jews in ghettos and concentration camps was often regarded as a betrayal. Because of this, after the war, even former juvenile prisoners never mentioned their stay in ghettos and concentration camps in conversations with non-Jewish peers. The very topic of the Holocaust was under an unspoken ban; the friendship of peoples during the testing years of war was mainly glorified, although this was not always true...
Alexander VISHNEVETSKY

From the Editorial Board.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Argumenty i Fakty publishing house published a conversation with two Holocaust survivors: Boris Srebnik and Anatoly Kocherov. The full memories of these people and Anatoly’s mother about the days spent under occupation are published here:

• Rimma Kocherova. Every day could be the last... (posthumous publication).

Lessons from the Holocaust: eyewitness memories of the tragedy

(AiF 01/27/13)

Lyudmila Alekseeva, Kristina Farberova

AiF.ru correspondents met with people who survived in the largest ghettos.

The famous economist, Professor Boris Srebnik, dreams of war every night. “Shots, screams, I’m running somewhere and I keep feeling myself: am I wounded?” Boris Vladimirovich visited psychotherapists, but everything was useless - they say that nothing can erase these memories.

He lived for more than two years in the Minsk ghetto, the largest in the former USSR. The occupiers placed more than one hundred thousand Russian and German Jews there. Gradually they destroyed everyone, with rare exceptions.

The pogrom begins in the cemetery
In Boris Srebnik’s room there is an old photograph of a young, smiling guy dressed in a theatrical costume. This is practically the beginning of his family archive - he has no photographs left of his relatives or his own childhood. When the war began, Boris was seven.

The German army occupied Minsk at the end of June. The commandant immediately issued an order: all Jews should pack their personal belongings and go to the houses on the streets indicated in the letter. In case of disobedience - execution. After the resettlement, the occupiers ordered the area to be surrounded by a wall - it should be built by the prisoners of the new ghetto themselves. It was not allowed to leave the ghetto. The remains of valuables and clothing were secretly exchanged with local residents who approached from the other side of the barbed fence. For potatoes, flour - they have already become luxury items.

In the fall, pogroms began - the occupiers chose one of the districts and completely destroyed all its inhabitants. The first pogrom took place on November 7, but rumors about it appeared much earlier. Boris and his family lived in a large house near an old Jewish cemetery. The older members of the family decided that the pogroms should begin from here: so that the corpses would not be transported too far. The family went to spend the night with friends on Khlebnaya Street. But it turned out that they decided to start from there.

“Early in the morning, we were all driven into the courtyard of the old bakery, lined up in long lines, put into cars and taken away in an unknown direction. The cars returned empty.”

“I remember this line, I remember how tired I was, and I really wanted to get into the car and go for a ride. I asked my mother about this, but as soon as our turn came, she shouted that her husband was working in a specialist camp. Men “with a profession” were taken from the ghetto and housed separately. A rumor spread through the convoy that their family members would not be taken away. Mom screamed, they beat her with rifle butts, but she courageously dragged me to the back of the line. And so on several times. And then it began to get dark, the working day ended and the Germans stopped the pogrom. They are thorough people - they worked strictly according to the schedule.”

Of those who were taken away in cars, no one returned to the ghetto.

Life in "raspberries"
Soon Boris’s mother also passed away - she secretly went to the Russian quarter, to her friends: to persuade them to take her son. At that time, he was fair-haired and had almost no pronounced Jewish features. His mother did not return to the ghetto - a policeman recognized her and handed her over to German soldiers. In addition to pogroms, there were also raids: they broke into a house and took it away selectively, based on certain characteristics. For example, only teenagers. So Boris lost his older brother.

There were no holidays celebrated in the ghetto - everyone forgot about their own birthdays. The main joy was the meetings after the pogrom, people ran out into the street and greeted their acquaintances who had survived. They touched each other and congratulated each other.

Very soon the Germans demanded that all warm clothes be given back - the only currency with which it was possible to buy food from local residents. They began to organize “raspberries” in houses - they dug holes in the floor, where they hid all the whole clothes, threw rags on top, and covered them with a bed - often the only one in the room. And usually 15–20 people lived there. They hid there in case of pogroms. The entrance was sprinkled with shag. “I remember one day everyone was once again sitting in such a shelter, dug under the cemetery, in fear, panic and eerie silence.

Someone's baby started crying, everyone started shushing him. But the baby fell silent very quickly. I'm not sure, but it looks like he was strangled. For the sake of saving others."

I wanted to eat more than to live
By the end of 41 years there were no things left, there was nothing to eat. Famine began, which, coupled with the harsh winter, worked no worse than organized pogroms. “A man walks, all swollen and bloated from hunger, and as he walks, he falls like some kind of log. A second - and he was gone,” recalls Boris. As boys, they hid behind cemetery monuments and watched as prisoners of war were shot. One day, next to the prisoners, a horse suddenly fell and died: exhausted people rushed to it, tearing and eating its flesh with their hands. The Germans shot and threatened, but no one left the horse of their own free will.

Boris shows marks on his hands - scars from barbed wire. Together with their friend Maik, they began to make forays out of the ghetto. This was prohibited on pain of death, but I wanted to eat more than to live. They begged from the local population and looked in garbage dumps. They got rotten potatoes, limp cabbage leaves - for some, garbage, and for others - cabbage soup.

“The worst thing was that they would give me away. We made our way through the destroyed Minsk, Belarusian boys ran after us and shouted “Jews!” The police immediately came up to us and demanded that we take off our pants. What saved us was that we were not circumcised. They let us go."

The local population of Jews did not consider them their allies - the first Jewish partisan detachment appeared only in 1942. On the contrary, starving Belarusians staged raids on the ghetto - they demanded jewelry, because “the Jews always have gold.” To protect themselves, a rail was hung next to each house; when looters appeared, they used it to sound the alarm and call the ghetto guards. German soldiers dealt with the marauders mercilessly - they recognized the right to violence only for themselves. Military jealousy. “And I was terribly sorry for one marauder captured right in our house,” recalls Boris.

Before his eyes, someone was killed every day. He lived next to the cemetery. The corpses were brought and dumped into huge pits. Sometimes among them there were still living but wounded people. The holes, lightly covered with earth, moved. Approaching, finding, helping is scary and almost overwhelming.

Jewish partisans
People died, the ghetto narrowed, the survivors were moved to other houses. About 30 thousand Jews from Germany were settled separately; the locals called them “Hamburg”: they said they were promised that they would be deported to Palestine, they were told to take only their valuables with them. This ghetto did not last even a year - everyone was destroyed in a short time.

In the Belarusian ghetto, pogroms were organized more and more often. Boris never walked outside the ghetto alone, only with his friend Maik, but one morning Maik refused to go: his shoes were torn. “I really didn’t want to leave asking for alms, I felt like I was going to Golgotha,” recalls Boris Vladimirovich. “But I needed food, I couldn’t refuse.” I returned in the evening to an empty place - the ghetto was completely destroyed, everyone who was there was killed.”


Eight-year-old Boris was in despair, walking through the city with the firm intention of giving up: he had no idea how and where to live alone. Suddenly I met acquaintances, Joseph Levin and his younger sister Maya, who survived the ghetto pogrom. Joseph knew how to get to the partisans. For three days they searched the city for surviving Jews - there were 10 people, all children and teenagers. We headed into the forest. They even came up with a strategy: go in pairs, at a distance from each other, tell the occupiers that they are heading to the village to visit their relatives. They walked barefoot, hungry, and soon they were left almost without clothes - the village boys took them, they didn’t have even that. They also quarreled among themselves. “We were children,” recalls Boris. One day, after spending the night, the detachment left, leaving him sleeping - the smallest was perceived as a burden. Boris woke up, screaming, crying. Then he ran. Miraculously, it turned out to be in the right direction. Caught up with.


“When we approached the partisan zone three days later, it was the end of the day, the sun had already set,” recalls Boris. - Suddenly, uniformed policemen, young guys, come out of the bushes, we start telling them our fables, they answer: we know you are Jews, now we will shoot you. And they put us facing the bushes and started clicking the shutters. No one cried or asked to be let go. I only remember my bitter childhood resentment: why the hell did I have to suffer for so many years to end up like this. And then they said: it’s a joke, guys, we are partisans. None of us turned around. Then they took out a herring, asked if we had bread, and even then we believed them.”

Memories of food are the most pleasant. Potatoes with milk, which the partisans were fed on the first evening in the detachment, pea soup in the house where Boris was once allowed to stay. It was time to leave, but they started preparing food. The boy hid on the stove, skimped, and looked for ways to stay. He still loves pea soup, although he has never tried it.

The Holocaust that never happened


After the victory, a Soviet military unit passed through the village where the patrizan detachment was located. The Russian tanker asked the child where he was from. I found out that it was from Minsk and took it with me - it was along the path of their advance. Together with other children, Boris reached the destroyed city. “I remember how we stood in the middle of the ruins, a man came up to us and said: “It would be better if we went to Ukraine, at least there is bread there.” Of course, none of the children knew where this Ukraine was. We went looking for Soviet power and came across a military registration and enlistment office. We received referrals to an orphanage: the struggle for survival continued there. Hunger, cold: “sometimes you sleep under a thin blanket, in a room without heating, in clothes. You wake up naked: everything was taken off by your fellow sufferers.”


“When I found out about Dima Yakovlev’s law, I wanted to personally meet with these deputies, tell them what an orphanage is, because they don’t seem to know,” says Boris Vladimirovich, now an employee of the Higher School of the Russian Federation, a member New York Academy of Sciences. Then - an ordinary homeless child. The children from the Minsk ghetto did not receive any compensation or benefits - until perestroika, the phenomenon of the Holocaust was not recognized in the USSR. And it was scary to admit that I lived in the ghetto. Concentration camp prisoners were sometimes subjected to repression in their homeland.


“In 1990, I initiated the creation of the Association of Minor Ghetto Prisoners,” says Boris Vladimirovich. - To somehow preserve the memory of everything that happened. For what? The answer is very banal. If we forget, it can happen again. As part of my job, I work with students, and they know more about the War of 1812 than about the Great Patriotic War. After the Second World War, we lost many important memories: because it was forbidden to talk about them.” Boris Vladimirovich grew up in a generation when the phrase “20 years without war” seemed like a dream - Russian-Japanese, World War I, Soviet-Finnish, Khalkin-Gall. “Now there are people who have not been touched by any war. And I’m a little scared that they value peace much less than we do.”


On the table are economics textbooks he wrote, and “The History of the City of Foolov” by his favorite writer Saltykov-Shchedrin. “You read and understand that so much is happening in the country, victories, defeats, but, in essence, nothing has changed in the mind in 200 years. And anti-Semitism, by the way, is still alive and well - something that has been cultivated for thousands of years is not so easy to get rid of.”

In the fire of war near Poland
For Professor, Candidate of Technical Sciences, Head of the Department of Automation at MSUDT Anatoly Kocherov, the war began when he was three years old. June 1941, he and his mother Rimma Finkenfeld met in the fire of hostilities in Poland, near Bialystok. For three years, having gone through Gestapo camps and prisons, providing all possible assistance to partisan detachments, mother and son tried to survive.

In 1936, Rimma Finkenfeld, a Jew by nationality, married a Russian military man, Vasily Kocherov. Two years later, Tolya's son was born. In 1940, Vasily received the appointment of deputy regimental commander for technology and left for the eastern part of Poland - the town of Krynki, near Bialystok, occupied by Russian troops. A year later, his wife and child left Moscow after him.

“I’m worried about something. I won’t ask, so at least for a while forget the bad things, be together, how could I be apart for so long,” Rimma Finkenfeld writes in her diaries, which will later be published in the book “Every day could have been the last...”. “I couldn’t stand it, I asked what happened.” “Fascist flags were hung on the street in the morning. Forgive me,” he said quietly. Forgive for what? Silence. Only then did I understand.
Anxious, unfamiliar, alien all around. At the market today, a peasant woman refused to sell butter to an old woman, “get away, Jews,” she says. She contacted me: I’m selling the lady. I ran away. If only she knew what kind of “lady” I was. Scary. “Vasya came at 8 pm. “Get your things, Rimok, it’s war!” For some reason I didn’t feel anything at that moment and began to dress in silence. Vasya came up and hugged me: I’m sorry, I knew there would be a war, but I didn’t think it would be so soon. I wanted to live with you even for the summer, and in the fall I would send you to your father. The families of all officers will be evacuated.”

The long road to Krynki
But the Kocherovs lived only a short time. “In mid-June, everyone already knew that war would start. It was indecent for the families of the officers to leave. This was considered alarmist,” says Anatoly. “Mom was a convinced communist, and attempts to evacuate her led nowhere. The last time she and her father saw each other was at the end of June. And then that’s it.” Using a gas generator, Finkenfeld, his little son and several other people moved east to Baranovichi. We drove at night under continuous bombing, periodically leaving the car and hiding in the forest. “A bomb fragment ricocheted off a tree and wounded me in the chest. Mom bandaged me. “I still have a scar,” says Kocherov.

I remember how we got out onto the Volkovysk highway - it was the most terrible thing. A line of wrecked cars stretched along the side of the road. The fuel ran out and the drivers simply abandoned them here. Nearby lay the wounded with crushed limbs, covered in dirt and blood, begging for death with blue lips: have pity on me, finish me off so I don’t suffer. And then the Germans landed troops. German soldiers in our military uniform shot the Russian wounded. We left this highway into the forest."

Anatoly Kocherov carefully takes out from the envelope a folded sheet of paper, yellowed with time. “At the Baranovichi station we were detained by a German patrol from the commandant’s office. This is mom's temporary ID. Dated July 24, 1941. Organizational commandant's office of Baranovichi.
It says here that the mother must be kept in the camp and do all the work. In Baranovichi she was sent to dismantle destroyed houses. This was the case until September. And then they put us in a heated vehicle and, under escort, sent a whole train to the West, to Poland, to a camp. At the Berestovitsa station, my mother and I managed to leave. At that time, the Germans did not yet have such security. They were confident that everything would end in victory. Mom walked to the nearest station and went back to Krynki. The road there is 26 km on foot.”

“I will never forget this picture: we are walking together through the forest - just me and my mother. And suddenly three tanks came straight at us. Mom froze and hugged me to her. She stood in front of the approaching combat vehicles and covered my face. Suddenly, before reaching us some 30 meters, the tanks turn around and drive onto the highway. The only thing that saved her was that she didn’t run. Otherwise we would have been cut down by machine guns.”

I put cartridges in empty pockets
In October 1941, Finkenfeld and his son reach the Rudawa estate. The owners of the house, Anna and Jan Gutakovsky, keep them. They settled a woman and a child in an outbuilding next to the church. A month later, German soldiers arrived to guard a weapons warehouse abandoned by the Russians. Finkenfelt, after consulting with the Gutakovskys, goes to work with them as a cleaner and cook. There she meets the German Matthias Dorenkamp. “I’m thinking about how to get to the warehouse,” Rimma reflects in her diary. - They tell me: suggest that the Germans fatten the geese for Christmas, this is done by hand, two weeks of such feeding and the goose is ready. Persuaded. Twice a day, wearing a coat with pockets full of peas, I feed the geese: I open the beak with my hands and put in the peas. I put cartridges in empty pockets.” “Matthias hated Hitler. At the first meeting, he told my mother: Moskau gut, Hitler kaput! It was 1941. Yes, there were people among the Germans who understood that Hitler was leading Germany to destruction. With the help of Matthias, my mother was able to get to Krynoki to get warm clothes there.”

“The frost is 30 degrees. Krynki. In front of us are two two-story houses without windows, it’s dark, but we can hear some singing,” Finkenfeld writes in his diary. - A terrible sight: people are sitting, lying, standing, but most of them are already dead, frozen over - this is the ghetto, the Jewish ghetto of Krynok. Ice House, in the prayers of the few living there is only one request - to send death.” In January 1942, the composition of the German watch changed. Rimma and her son were taken on a sleigh first to Khomutovtsy, and then to Berestovitsa - “for identification.” “When I was born, my mother’s father circumcised me, as is customary for Jewish children. Thus, I became dangerous for my mother. They tracked me down and reported me,” recalls Anatoly. - In Berastovitsy they took us to a doctor. He looked at me, waited until the Germans left the office, and told my mother: give up your son! He is dangerous for you, he will give you away! But my mother took me in her arms, hugged me tightly and said that she would never do this. When the German returned, the doctor told him that this was a birth injury and that we had nothing to do with Jews. Later I found out that Jan Gutakowski went to the German and gave him a golden five and a ring. He bought us. Mom was released. But we had to leave, it became known that a list of suspicious persons had been compiled, and we were included in it.”

Tolya is kaput!
The Gutakovskys had relatives in Belarus. In March 1942, Finkenfelt and his son boarded a train to Bialystok, from there they walked to Vilnius and further to the Bigosovo railway station. Here Rimma Finkenfeld remained to work as a cleaner. “One day I climbed onto the roof of the carriage and the station manager, Hoppe, pushed him. Luckily, I didn’t fall on the rails, but I still badly hurt my head and my eyes were swollen with blood. And he shouted to Mom Hoppe: “Tolya is kaput!”

“They brought the Jews to Drissa, forced them to dig a ditch, threw everyone out alive - with children, old people, women - they filled the ditch with earth, the earth moved, groaned, then they sent trucks across this groaning earth. Local residents were herded to this execution, Anatoly’s mother writes in her diary.

Rimma Finkenfeld received two kg of bran per week for her work at the station. I washed extra clothes for the Germans - in exchange for saccharin, soap, and trinkets. On Sunday, together with other women, she went beyond the Dvina, to Latvia, and there exchanged her services as a cleaner for bread, potatoes, and peas. Since she knew German brilliantly, she was obliged to translate orders from the depot chief and his guards to prisoners, and then local residents who needed to talk about something with the military began to turn to her. “Bigosovo is a very important junction station: trains went to the front and back day and night,” explains Anatoly. - My mother was a great patriot. A few weeks later she established contact with the partisans in Bigosovo. Trains were blown up, trains went downhill. The Germans suspected her of having connections with the partisan movement. In December 1943, the Gestapo came for my mother. They suspected that she was Jewish and that she was helping the partisans. One of our own betrayed us. Locals who served the Germans. They were worse than the Germans. They put me in a truck and brought me to the Drissen prison. I remember a large cold room with lattice windows without glass.”

Everything on me was wet with blood
“On the eve of the second call, I had a dream: my father came to see me on a date,” Rimma writes in her diary. - In the kind eyes - pity and sadness, in the Ukrainian straw basket - food, on top lay a large bunch of green onions. I told the women, and they interpreted it unequivocally: there will be tears. At noon they called in for questioning.”
“Mom was subjected to terrible torture,” Anatoly Kocherov reluctantly recalls. - They hung me in a noose in front of her so that she would confess. After that I had a sprained vertebra, even a trace remained. I was only five years old. But mom is an iron man.” “They took me to another room, forced me to take a pill (I understood, so as not to hear my scream), Finkenfeld describes this scene in his diary. - Acute pain, darkness, blood flowed to my legs. But the worst was yet to come. They grabbed Tolya, threw a noose around his thin neck... I saw his eyes and heard: “Mommy, I don’t want to!” She rushed towards him, a strong blow, darkness again. I came to my senses from the blows - I was lying on the floor, my son was crying nearby, alive, I saw a thin stream of blood flowing from my son’s nose. In the cell, the women helped me lie down. Everything on me was wet with blood, a scar was swollen on my neck, my lower back and wounded chest hurt. Tolya had a cut eyebrow and a broken nose.” Finkenfeld assured the Germans that she was not Jewish and that she had friends in Germany - the woman referred to the address and contact details of Matthias Dorenkamp. In addition, the director of the depot where she worked wrote a letter asking to let her go, because “without Mrs. Rimma it’s bad - work stops.” She was released on the morning of February 10, 1943, given a temporary identity card. “Mom was short, thin blonde with blue eyes. She wore such a blond crown on her head. With a redhead,” Kocherov adds, smiling. - And she knew German brilliantly. Nobody mistook her for a Jew, and that saved us.”

In February 1943, a punitive detachment came to Bigosovo to fight partisans. Entire villages were burned: they drove old people, children, the sick, women into barns, locked them up and burned them. Part of the population was driven to the station - behind barbed wire. The villages close to Rositsa and Saria were completely burned, everyone died. “After the punitive forces left, our neighbor Stefa Kolosovskaya asked my mother to accompany her to Rositsa - to find and bury the remains of her parents. A terrible sight met my eyes: ashes, pipes, charred ruins. Stefa found some piece of scrap, which she took for her mother’s dress, collected a handful of earth, dug a small hole and buried it. Stefa's mother was only 54 years old. In April - May, my mother went into the forest with me. For several months we lived in a hut near Bigosovo. On June 18, 1944, our troops came to these places. We went out. Afterwards, my mother became very interested in the KGB. The only Jewish woman left alive in the area. In addition, she worked for the Germans. Mom was summoned for interrogation. But the partisans gave all the documents confirming that my mother was their intelligence officer.” The Kocherov-Finkenfelds returned to Moscow at the end of 1944. Already here they received a letter from a certain Prokop Voitovich, who claimed that at the beginning of November 1941, three Russian soldiers who had fled from the camp came into his house in the village of Konchitsy, not far from Pinsk. “One of these military men was my husband, he left his mother’s address with the family - in the city of Yegoryevsk. They left to the southeast, and shortly after leaving, a firefight began in that direction. This is all I know about my husband,” Finkenfeld ends the story of his diary.

Six years ago, in September 2006, Rimma Finkenfeld passed away. A small book “Every day could with
to be the last,” her son Anatoly prepared and published her diary. That same year, he submitted documents to the Jerusalem Holocaust memorial complex, Yad Vashem, to recognize Anna and Jan Gutakowski as “Righteous Among the Nations.” In 2007, he received a letter informing him that they had been awarded the title “for saving the Jewish woman Rimma Kocherova and her son.” “This is the story of how we won the war not only with the strength of our soldiers, but also with the strength of the women who fought the invaders and were able to bear it all on their shoulders,” Kocherov says in conclusion. - My mother and I were saved due to the fact that people helped us. They say that Russians are like this and that - nothing like that. For the most part, they are very kind people.

I told my story to students. They listened to me carefully, then there was silence and
the question was asked: Anatoly Vasilyevich, but now do you feel like a Jew or a Russian? I replied that if I see that a Jew is being unfairly treated, I am a Jew. If it's Russian, I'm Russian. Araba means I am an Arab. This is the only way a normal person would react.”

The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center hosted a lecture by publicist and historian Evgeniy Berkovich “Unsung Heroes,” dedicated to those who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Lenta.ru recorded the stories of such people told by the lecturer.

Today, public discussion of the Holocaust is not very common in society. Some explain this by saying that these are events of long ago and are difficult to compare with reality. Others believe that everything has already been said on this topic and nothing new can be added. The arguments of others boil down to the fact that these events are very tragic, so they simply don’t want to talk about them.

However, these explanations are incorrect. Firstly, we cannot say that our time is radically different from the 1930s and 40s - the danger of a repetition of the Holocaust still exists. The second argument can be challenged by the fact that new materials and memories related to these events are constantly emerging. It is also incorrect to say that all the years of the Holocaust are presented only in a black light - there are many examples of human heroism and self-sacrifice that give rise to high feelings in people.

In Israel, the legal concept of “Righteous Among the Nations” was introduced in 1953. This title was awarded to people who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Such a title, in addition to its enormous moral significance, gives the right to some material benefits.

Currently, about 25 thousand people have received the title “Righteous Among the Nations,” most of them, of course, have already passed away. According to statistics, Poland has the most “Righteous Among the Nations” - about 6.3 thousand, followed by Holland, where there are more than 5 thousand such people. In third place is France with more than 3.3 thousand rescued Jews. Even in Germany, about 500 people received the title “Righteous Among the Nations.”

Titles similar to “Righteous Among the Nations” are not only found in Israel. In Germany, during a time when the country was still divided, the West Berlin government established the title "Unsung Heroes", which was given to Germans who saved Jews. Like the “righteous”, they received a material privilege - an additional pension.

Both the Israeli law on the “Righteous Among the Nations” and the provision on the “Unsung Heroes” stipulated many restrictions on who could be classified as such people. So, such a person himself should not have been a Jew. He could not be a member of any party or political movement, therefore the German police, military or SS men who saved Jews could not be awarded this title.

In addition, these people must be “morally pure,” so, for example, a prostitute who harbored a Jew could not become a “righteous man” or an “unsung hero.” Another condition is the selflessness of the savior - he should not have received any material reward from the saved Jew. This condition was spelled out both in the law on the “righteous” and in the law on the “unsung heroes”.

The Jew who saved Jews

In the scientific community, at one time, the question arose of how the people who saved Jews differed from the rest of the population. Regarding this, it has even been suggested that there is an “altruism gene.” To substantiate or, conversely, refute this hypothesis, American scientists conducted an extensive study - they collected people who survived the Holocaust and asked them to take a survey.

One of these respondents were Wilhelm and Cesia Bachner, who then lived in California. Based on the results of the survey, it turned out that they did not fit into the category of those who escaped during the Holocaust. On the contrary, they themselves saved Jews while in German-occupied territory.

Wilhelm Bachner, who graduated from the German Technical Institute in the Czech city of Brunn (Brno), came to Warsaw to find a job as a builder. After the start of the war, he lived with the family of his future wife Cesia in the Warsaw ghetto, where all Jews began to be taken.

It was possible to leave this ghetto only in a convoy under the control of Polish guards, and to move around with a special bandage on your arm. Bachner found a way out of this situation thanks to fortunate circumstances - on the street he met his relative, who was walking down the street freely without any identification marks. From her he learned that he could get a job with a German entrepreneur who had begun a project to build military facilities and restore destroyed transport systems.

Thanks to this, having hidden his Jewish roots and posing as a Pole, Bachner received a work card and a job in this construction company and soon became its manager. He recruited a large team, in which about 50 workers turned out to be Jews from the ghetto.

Together with his company, which soon received the status of a military enterprise, his team followed the German army east to Kyiv and beyond, restoring railways. Bachner and his workers also moved back to the west when the Red Army began to push back the Germans.

These few years of double life were very stressful for Bachner. In the ghetto he was a Jew with a bandage, and outside it he was an employee of a German company carrying out military orders. Once he even had to rescue from the Gestapo one of the company’s employees, who was suspected of being a Jew, although in fact he was a Ukrainian.

After the war, Bachner was unable to live long in Poland due to the strong anti-Semitic sentiments of the local population and moved with his family to the United States. But for his and his wife’s golden wedding in 1989, all 50 families of saved Jews came from different parts of the Earth. However, he did not receive the title “Righteous Among the Nations” because he did not meet the selection criteria, being a Jew himself.

Brother is not responsible for brother

Another person whose candidacy was also not nominated for the title of “righteous man” was Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering’s brother Albert, whose history is associated with the appearance of the term “Goering’s list” (by analogy with “Schindler’s list”).

The brothers were different not only in appearance, but also in character. The younger brother Albert was indifferent to politics and more interested in bohemian life, and for a long time worked at the Viennese film studio Tobis-Sascha-Film, owned by the Jew Oscar Pilzer.

When the Anschluss occurred and Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, Austrian Jews suffered the same fate as German Jews and Pilzer was arrested. After this, Albert Goering personally asked his brother to release the owner of the film studio; he was released and left Germany with his family.

After this, the youngest of the Goering brothers moved to the Czech Republic, where he began working as a trade and military representative at the Skoda plant. Here he married the Czech Milanda Klazarova, which by Nazi standards was a crime against the purity of the Aryan race, and also helped the plant management, notifying them of impending raids. This helped the underground workers stationed at the enterprise, who organized acts of sabotage against the Nazis, to avoid meeting with the SS men.

Albert was arrested around the same time as Hermann Goering. No one had any doubt that Albert was a Nazi criminal. Who else could he be - the brother of the second man in the Third Reich? While the investigation was ongoing, the Goering brothers were in the same prison, and their cells were located not far from each other.

As proof of his anti-fascist activities, Albert Goering even compiled a list of Jews whom he helped for the court - there were more than 30 of them. Among these people was the name of the composer Franz Lehár, whose wife was Jewish.

Being Hitler's favorite, Lehár hoped that this would help his family avoid persecution. However, his wife was arrested anyway, and Albert Goering had to again use his connections to get her released.

Investigators did not believe in the story of the rescue of Jews; many arrested Nazis tried to save their lives with similar legends. But Albert was lucky - the new investigator on his case turned out to be Victor Parker, the nephew of Franz Lehár, who personally knew the story of his aunt’s rescue. As a result, all the episodes from the “Goering list” were confirmed and the innocence of Goering’s younger brother was proven.

Convicted as a war criminal

The story of reserve captain Wilm Hosenfeld is now quite widely known thanks to Roman Polanski's film The Pianist, the plot of which tells how the Polish Jew, musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, survived the Holocaust in Warsaw.

Vladislav hid in basements and attics for a long time, but one day he was discovered by a German officer - reserve captain Hosenfeld. Having learned that the captured tramp was a pianist and a Jew, Wilm helped him hide better under the roof of the German headquarters, brought him food to his shelter, and gave him his officer’s overcoat. From his hiding place, Szpilman could observe the life of the German headquarters until the arrival of the Red Army in Warsaw. Because of the officer's overcoat, which Vladislav forgot to take off in his joy, he was almost shot by Soviet soldiers, but nothing happened.

Photo: Wojtek Laski / Newsmakers / Getty Images / Fotobank

Almost immediately after the end of the war in 1946, the musician told his story in the book “Dead City,” later renamed “Miraculous Rescue.” However, in the book he could not name his savior; he did not yet know his name - it would become known only in 1950 from another Jew saved by Hosenfeld. It turned out that his savior was in a Soviet prisoner of war camp near Volgograd. Szpilman appealed to the highest ranks of the Polish state security to get him out of there. However, even the Minister of Public Security of Poland Jakub Berman, turning to the Soviet authorities and his colleagues in the KGB, could not do anything.

Hosenfeld was convicted as a war criminal, despite the fact that he was in the reserves and died in a camp from beatings in the 1950s. All attempts by Szpilman to convince the Yad Vashem commission to award Hosenfeld the title of “Righteous Among the Nations” were unsuccessful, since a convicted war criminal could not receive this title. It was only after Szpilman's death in the 2010s that his son and Hosenfeld's son managed to achieve posthumous recognition of reserve captain Wilm Hosenfeld.

Women's riot on Rose Street

Despite all the persecution of Jews, until 1943 several thousand more of them lived in Berlin, legally - these were Jews, usually married to German women, as well as children from such mixed marriages.

Fearing public discontent, the Nazi government for a long time could not find a solution to this problem. However, in February 1943, by order of Goebbels, it was nevertheless decided to completely clear the city of Jews, and a total raid was carried out called the “factory operation.” All Jews encountered were taken from workplaces at defense enterprises, from apartments, from Berlin streets and taken to special collection points for subsequent transportation to extermination camps. One of these collection points was located on Rosenstrasse in Berlin. Several thousand Jewish men and children were imprisoned here. That same day, several hundred German women came out to Rosenstrasse to protest the arrest of their Jewish husbands. Women stood in front of the synagogue building for days demanding the return of their relatives.

Initially, a cordon of machine gunners was deployed against the demonstrators, ready to use weapons at any moment. However, the women managed to get their way, and their husbands and children were released, given special certificates that allowed them all to survive the war, officially remaining in Berlin. The unthinkable happened: 25 Jews, whom the Germans managed to send to Auschwitz, were returned back. Usually there was no turning back from this death camp.

The first written account of the events on Rosenstrasse appeared in a Berlin women's newspaper immediately after the end of the war. And then for fifty years neither historians nor journalists remembered what happened on Rose Street. Only in the nineties did the first monographs, articles, and documentaries about these events appear.

What could such a long silence mean about such a seemingly unusually attractive event for historians and writers as the saving of human lives under conditions of ruthless tyranny?

The success of the demonstrations on Rosenstrasse allows us to take a slightly different look at the events of the past and, in particular, at the responsibility of the German people for the crimes of the Nazis. The speeches at Rosenstrasse show that if the Jews had not been isolated from German society, their extermination would have been a difficult problem for the authorities. And the vast majority of Germans did not object to the separation and isolation of Jews. Since 1933, there have been virtually no protests by Germans against the racist laws and regulations of the Nazis. And this gave the criminals a free hand. The total genocide of the Jews could have been avoided if not for the passivity and tacit approval of the Germans for the actions of their government.

Rebel Countess

The history of conferring and not conferring the title “Righteous Among the Nations” is full of many paradoxes; it is, in the full sense, a “tangle of moral problems.” For example, there were people who received the title of “righteous,” but voluntarily abandoned it. Such was the Prussian Countess Maria von Malzahn. Her entire family, as befits Prussian aristocrats, supported the Nazis, and she alone did not accept this ideology and fought for democratic freedoms.

When the persecution of Jews began, she began to help the persecuted out of principle. Maria von Malzahn actively collaborated with representatives of the Swedish church and anti-fascist Resistance groups. Von Malzahn participated in sending Jews to Sweden along with furniture from the Swedish embassy, ​​and with refugees she crossed Lake Constance at night on the border with Switzerland. After one of these dispatches, a patrol chased her, from which she had to hide in a tree all night. At dawn the bombing began, and she joined the group extinguishing the fire in the village, for which she received a certificate justifying her absence from the city. Once, during one of the operations to rescue Jews, she was even wounded by SS patrolmen.

During the war, about 60 Jews passed through her apartment. So, until the very end of the war, two girls who ended up in a Berlin labor camp lived in her apartment.

She also sheltered in her apartment the publisher of the avant-garde literary almanac, Hans Hirschel, who later became her second husband. She hid it in a spacious sofa, in the bottom of which holes were drilled for air, and the sofa itself was locked from the inside with a hook. Also inside the sofa there was a glass of water and codeine for coughs in case of raids, since in Berlin they were carried out in all houses, and the social status of a person did not matter to the SS men.

Several searches took place in von Malzahn's apartment, during one of which the Gestapo man demanded that the countess open the sofa. She replied that this was impossible, to which the officer stated that he would then shoot the sofa to make sure that no one was there. But, since the other side of the countess’s life was government receptions, where sometimes the highest officials of the Nazi government were present, she was able to intimidate the officer with her connections, and he did not take risks.

In April 1940, German troops attacked Denmark. The country almost immediately stopped resisting. According to the Nazis, the Scandinavian peoples were close to the Nordic Aryans, so they should be allies of the Germans. In this regard, it was decided to make a model protectorate out of Denmark. The Danish government, army and police were retained. And although the German governor Werner Best was put in charge, the country's autonomy was practically preserved.

In 1943, the German naval attaché Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz learned of the impending deportation of all Danish Jews and warned the local rabbi Marcus Melchior about it. As a result, within a few days the Danes organized the transfer of Danish Jews to neighboring Sweden.

Niels Bohr, who had recently found himself in Sweden, was able to get the Swedish government to agree to accept Danish refugees. Thus, out of 7.7 thousand Danish Jews, 7.2 thousand people were saved. The same 500 Jews who could not be transported were sent not to Auschwitz, but to Terezin, which was considered a model concentration camp with admission there by the Red Cross. As a result, almost all Danish Jews survived the Holocaust.

The Righteous Among the Nations are, in the full sense of the word, the “solar plexus” of the problems of the Holocaust. And it is necessary to understand their entire complex in order to understand what a person’s “moral responsibility” meant then and how it should be assessed today.