Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis

12. Raising Their Voices: Children's Resistance through Diary Writing and Song - Debórah Dwork

279 Debórah Dwork 12  Raising Their Voices Children’s Resistance through Diary Writing and Song Helga Kinsky-Pollack was eight years old when her parents sent her from her native city of Vienna to her father’s family in Kyjov, over the border in Czechoslovakia . It was just after the Anschluss in spring 1938 and the faces of their infatuated neighbors told her parents how popular Hitler and his policies would be. A year later, in spring 1939, Helga’s mother went to England as a domestic worker. Her plan was to arrange the emigration of her daughter. Time was not with her. The German army marched into Czechoslovakia in 1939, and mother and daughter were separated.1 Helga’s father managed to reach her in Kyjov, and in January 1943 they were deported to the transit camp the Germans called Theresienstadt, and the Czechs, Terezín. “Sunday 17 January 1943. This is my last day in Kyjov, and we are in a great rush,” Helga, then twelve-and-a-half, told her diary. “Now I am sitting at a writing desk, and I am very tired. No matter! The last day at home must be noted down.” If she did not grasp the historic nature of the unfolding events, she certainly understood their significance for her. Determined to record what she lived, despite her fatigue, she expressed her feelings as she wrote. “Within twelve hours the whole apartment will be deserted. (No, I shall not leave home hanging my head; I shall hold my head high.)”2 So secure was she in her defi1 . Mrs. Pollack-Meisels, interview with author, Vienna, Austria, August 15, 1989. 2. Unpublished diary of Helga Kinsky-Pollack, in her possession. Photocopy in possession of Deb órah Dwork. Entry of January 17, 1943. Translation of this and all quoted passages by Pavel Kalvach and Debórah Dwork. 280 Debórah Dwork ance that she declared it as a self-evident statement, worthy only of a parenthetical comment. Berthe Jeanne (Bertje) Bloch-van Rhijn lived at home with her sister JeanneTruus (Jt) and their parents in Enschede, the Netherlands, when she began to keep her diary in February 1942. She, too, expressed defiance, although she did not come to that position immediately. When the star decree was announced on May 1, 1942, Bertje worried that “while a lot of people would be very nice ... the NSB [Dutch Nazi Party] people would yell, ‘Yid, dirty Yid!’ at me.” Her attitude soon changed. “20 May Wednesday. This evening we had a meeting about Zionism” at a friend’s house. “Marion came, even Annelies.” But, she wrote, if another schoolmate, Halberstadt, knew, “he would stand on his head.” She continued with great disdain: “You have never seen such an assimilationist. He always holds his schoolbag in front of the star, and this is sewn so low that one cannot really see it.” Within just three weeks, hiding the star had come to mean lack of pride in Jewish identity.3 Not all young diarists expressed defiance as unequivocally as did Helga Pollack and Bertje van Rhijn. But the act of keeping a diary itself was a form of defiance; of resistance against the Germans’ massive campaign conducted in the private and public spheres, indeed in every aspect of children’s lives, to undermine their sense of themselves as worthy human beings because they were Jews. Writing offered the diarists a mechanism through which to assert their perceptions and a space in which to maintain their identity. It was a way to raise their voices. Seventy years later, these documents afford us a window into how young people resisted the Nazi assault. Focusing on six diaries by girls and boys aged twelve-and-a-half to just under fourteen when they began to write (an eighteen -month age spread), we shall analyze a spectrum of experiences as reported in the journal pages. Helga Pollack kept her diary for six months, from the day before she was deported to Terezín until June 6, 1943. Written more or less clandestinely, it was hidden in the camp by her father when she was shipped to Auschwitz. Like Helga, Pavel Weiner was deported to Terezín. A Prague-born Czech Jew, Pavel, his brother Hanuš (called Handa), and their parents Valy and Ludvik were sent to that transit camp in May 1942. “Now after having spent two years in Terezín, I deeply regret that I haven’t kept a diary from...