r/holocaust

 The story of Anne Frank has inspired generations—from her powerful belief that “people are really good at heart” to the bravery of Miep Gies, who risked her life to hide Anne’s family and later preserved her diary. That this took place in the Netherlands, where others also chose courage over fear, fills my heart with hope.

Corrie ten Boom was born in 1892 in Haarlem, the Netherlands, into a family of devoted Calvinist watchmakers. She delighted in both the craft and the business, but more importantly, the ten Booms believed deeply in helping others, especially the Jewish people, whom they saw as God’s chosen.

As the Nazis invaded and began rounding up Jews, Corrie and her family opened their home, joining the Dutch resistance. With the help of an architect, they built a hidden room behind a wall in Corrie’s bedroom, complete with a warning buzzer to alert those in hiding. The ten Booms took in as many as they could.

Eventually, they were betrayed. The Gestapo raided the home. Though the Jews hiding there escaped detection thanks to the secret room, Corrie and her family were arrested. Her father died soon after, and Corrie, along with her sister Betsie, was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Incredibly, they managed to smuggle in a Bible and held secret worship services, offering faith and hope to fellow prisoners. Betsie later died in the camp.

Corrie was unexpectedly released—later discovering it was due to a clerical error. Days later, all the women in her group were sent to the gas chambers. She returned to the Netherlands during the brutal "Hunger Winter" and opened her home to people with disabilities, protecting them from Nazi extermination efforts.

After the war, she founded a rehabilitation center for survivors and traveled the world sharing her story of forgiveness and faith. Her books, Tramp for the Lord and The Hiding Place, chronicle her extraordinary life. Perhaps most astonishing of all, she once forgave one of the cruel guards from Ravensbrück—embodying the compassion and strength she lived by.

Thank you, Corrie ten Boom.

The Germans expelled these “Polish” Jews (many of whom had been born in Germany or had lived there for decades) and forced them over the border, but Poland refused to accept them and so they were stuck in this border area. Thea says in her book that they had to sleep in horse stalls and the like. A lot of people died due to the poor conditions. Chaya, as a widow with four kids to look after, must have had a very hard time. She was ultimately able to send three of them away to safety, but not her youngest son Leopold who shared her fate.

The family of Herschel Grynszpan were among those expelled. Herschel was in Paris at the time. When he found out, he killed a German diplomat. The Nazis used this as an excuse to start Kristallnacht.

Source of the photo is a memoir by Chaya’s daughter Thea, available to read for free on PDF here: https://escholarship.org/content/qt4wn4458v/supp/Transported\_Life.pdf or you can buy it at a bookstore. Thea got sent to the UK on a Kindertransport in August 1939; her transport was the last one out before the war began and the Kindertransports stopped.

The book is told in the form of a series of letters between Max, an American Jew, and Martin, his non-Jewish former business partner and good friend who has just returned to Germany with his family in 1933. Martin rapidly becomes a Nazi and tries to cut off contact with Max. He rises high in Nazi society and fails to help Max’s sister, a Viennese actress offered a chance to perform in Berlin. The ending offers a sense of ironic justice and a sense of ominous foreboding at the same time.

If you didn’t already know it, you’d have thought this came out after World War II; in fact, when Taylor published this story, it was 1938 and the war hadn’t yet begun. But she really captures how quickly fascist beliefs can take over a formerly decent person’s mind, and how bad things can go very quickly.

I’ve included one quote from the book, where Martin (the German, who had not yet become a Nazi by this point) is talking to Max (the Jew) about Hitler.

So, despite the fact that he lost every single person in his entire family both immediate and extended, based on this short account Eddie basically bounced from (compared to other Jewish people’s situations) bed of roses to bed of roses throughout the Holocaust. Like, he was in a really awful situation, I am not trying to say he was not, every Jew in Nazi Europe was. But at the same time, over and over again he was absurdly fortunate.

After Eddie’s dad starved to death in the Łódź Ghetto and his mom was deported to Chelmno, Eddie was “adopted” by Dora Fuchs. She was the secretary to Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the chairman of the ghetto, and so Eddie became a member (or at least member-adjacent) of the tiny ghetto elite who all basically lived in the same apartment building, there weren't very many of them. This meant he ate well: plenty of food and many items such as oranges and chocolate and eggs, that were not on the menu for the average Łódź Ghetto resident. The average ghetto resident subsisted on starvation rations of mostly bread (often adulterated with inedible things), potatoes and turnips (often rotten), and occasional shreds of horsemeat (which is nonkosher so religious Jews could not eat it).

After the Łódź Ghetto was liquidated and Eddie was sent to Auschwitz he survived selection and landed on his feet with a job in the kitchen, one of the most coveted work assignments for obvious reasons. Over and over, people he encountered went out of their way to protect him. Later on he became a runner, also one of the best camp jobs, delivering messages and things between different sections of camp.

Then he transferred to the Sosnowiec camp, which was a much better regime than Auschwitz. No gas chambers there, no selections; it was a work camp. Eddie was a runner there, could go pretty much anywhere in camp, and was a daily presence in the commandant’s office. The commandant liked him and actually GAVE HIM CHRISTMAS PRESENTS! Later on Eddie asked for a factory job “so I can learn a trade” (in fact he had escape plans and needed a night shift job for this) and the commandant consented to this. Another Nazi might’ve murdered him on the spot for daring to imply he had a future he should learn a trade for.

Subsequently Auschwitz and Sosnowiec were evacuated and Eddie survived the death march to Mauthausen. He got some boils and was sent to the camp “hospital” which like every camp hospital was just death's waiting room. In fact a death certificate was even issued for Eddie at Mauthausen. But instead of selecting him to die, a German officer… treated his injuries.

And so he survived. He got all the luck. The rest of his family got none at all, his parents and brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins all wiped out.

It's a short book but I thought it was very enlightening given Eddie's unique perspective. The aforementioned ghetto chairman, Rumkowski, is an extremely controversial figure in Holocaust history. This is in part because he allowed the Nazis to deport almost all the children from the ghetto to their deaths (defending it to the ghetto by saying sometimes you have to cut off limbs to save bodies), and in part because Rumkowski was almost certainly a pedophile and serial rapist. He was involved with orphanages and community activities and stuff prior to the war and the allegations against him had gotten to the point that by the late 1930s there was an investigation opened by the authorities in Poland into his conduct towards children, but then the war happened and of course the investigation fell by the wayside. Lodz Ghetto survivor Lucille Eichengreen wrote a book that's basically a collection of witness reports (including her own) of Rumkowski abusing children and women inside the ghetto.

Eddie's memoir doesn't directly address the allegations about Rumkowski. But he certainly knew about them and he makes a point of saying that he never personally saw or experienced Rumkowski being anything other than kind to children. He doesn't seem to have particularly cared for Rumkowski though, and thought he was a narcissist. I think he felt that way about all the Lodz Ghetto elite. He said it was very uncomfortable for him living with Dora Fuchs and watching her pitching a fit because her egg delivery was late and she couldn't have her favorite breakfast when he knew almost no one in the ghetto had access to eggs and that his own father had died of starvation.