by Joan Salter MBE
This blog offers a brief introduction to this deportation of Jews from the Southwest areas of Germany to the camp of Gurs in the then unoccupied zone of France. Interweaving the historic facts with the eyewitness accounts, it follows them onto the deportation trains and their arrival at the camp of Gurs.
Joan Salter is a child survivor of the Holocaust. Since the 1980s, she has been involved in Holocaust education and research and has an MA in Holocaust and Genocide studies.. In addition to her own Holocaust experience, her presentations and papers include: Surviving Occupation in France and Tarnow the Life and Death of a Polish Jewish Town. She has presented in schools, universities as well as at Academic Conferences in the UK and USA, Poland and Greece. She is a Trustee of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. In 2018, she was awarded an MBE for services to Holocaust Education.
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23 October 1940 was an eventful date for the Jews of the Southwestern regions of Germany. It was the beginning of the most solemn and important dates in the Jewish Calendar known as the Yamin Nor’aim (Days of Awe), starting with the celebration of the New Year (Rosh Hashana) followed a week later by the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). All, but the most secular of Germany’s Jews will have attended these services.
Yet on this day, the Jews of Baden, Palatine and Saarland were not in Synagogue, they were on trains on the way to camp, Gurs, in the so-called “unoccupied” sector of Southern France, not far from the border with Spain.
Werner L. Frank termed the deportations of 6,504 Jews during this most holy of days, The Yom Tov Trains to Gurs. He clarifies that this is not meant to be disrespectful to the victims but “to expose the meanness and inhumanity of the brutal Nazi regime”[1].
Alsace and Lorraine were French provinces adjoining Germany. Historically bounced back and forth between French and German administration, their population was fluent in both French and German. Given the order to deport the Jews of Alsace and Lorraine to the unoccupied zone of France, the Nazis included the Jews from the Southwestern section of Germany. The Governor of Baden, Robert Wagner, was given charge of Alsace and the Governor of Palatine took charge of Lorraine. The German Armistice Commission and the representatives of the Vichy regime entered discussions to deport the Jews from these provinces to the unoccupied sector of France.
Warner L. Frank (2012) has researched these deportations in detail. There were more than 150 local roundups from where the Jews were trucked to gathering points in larger towns and then transported by road to a few major rail centres. In total nine trains were organised to carry out the deportations: Seven to transport the expected 5,600 Jews of Baden and two trains to transport the nearly 900 Jews of the Pfalz/Saar/Saar.[2]
Although exact points of departure of the trains is unclear, Frank cites two trains emanated from Mannheim, and one each from Heidelberg, Karlsruhe, Freiburg, Baden and Konstanz.[3]
In the Pfalz/Saar regions, one train collected the Jews who had been assembled in the cities of Kaiserslautern, Ludwigshafen and Landau. The second train collected the Saar Jews from the border town of Forbach in Lorraine. They had been held in the Gestapo headquarters at the Saarbrucken Schloß. This train is reported to have taken four days and three nights to reach its destination.[4]
The court records of Adolf Eichmann’s1960 trial in Jerusalem reveal Eichmann’s complicity in this deportation. Evidence was submitted that he paved the way for the unexpected trains to enter the unoccupied area of France by negotiating with the Free-French authorities. He convinced the station master at the entry point to the unoccupied zone, Chalon-sur-Saône, that the trains were German military transports, and they should be allowed to proceed. This argument was accepted, and the trains were allowed to travel southward.[5]
For the German Jews, the Nazi laws of the 1930s had already decimated their lives. The “Aryanization” of Jewish businesses meant for many including those well established in German, had lost their sole means of income and their homes. As difficult as life was for the Jewish families remaining in Germany, the events of October 1940 were the precursor to what would become known as The Final Solution to the Jewish problem.
Up to this time, Hitler had no concerted plan for making Europe Judenrein. When, in May 1940, SS chief, Heinrich Himmler presented a scheme for the large-scale emigration of all Jews to Africa, it was seized on. Himmler wrote, “I hope to see the concept of Jews completely obliterated, with a large migration of all Jews to Africa or else in a colony.”[6]
The historian Cessarani comments:
Given the defeat of France in June of 1940, the French colonies appeared to be the solution. The island of Madagascar was an ideal location for an open-air prison to incarcerate all the Jews of Europe. “The transfer could start within a month, with millions of Jews sent by ship. Such was the Germans’ confidence that their building of ghettos in Poland was halted, and the SS started learning Swahili.”[7]
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The adult who was the then nine-year-old Eva Kohn remembers the beginning of the events which had turned her secure, happy childhood upside down. Born in 1931 in Offenburg Germany, barely 28 km east of Strasburg in France, she remembers a happy childhood in an affluent home. Integrated into the wider community, her mother considered herself more German than Jewish.[8]
Following the laws enforcing the Aryanization of Jewish business, her father had lost his business and was away travelling in order to earn a means to support his family. Both Eva and her disabled sister, Esther were living away from home.
Eva recalls the events of 22 Oct 1940.
Seven o’clock in morning, the Gestapo told mother to pack. She was given two hours to buy food. She was told, carry what you can carry, no more. She took clothing for the girls. Seven-year-old Eva was taken with her host family to the station in Freiburg. At two o’clock in the morning the train came from Offenburg. Her name called out over the loudspeaker, “Eva Kohn with plats.” She joined her mother and sister on the train… We were on the train three nights, maybe four days.”
The Nazi establishment were not ashamed of this action, nor was it done in the darkness of the night. Indeed, these events happened in broad daylight in view of all the villagers and were filmed. The deportations from the village of Bruchsal, Baden is available on YouTube.[9] Amongst the images of a community being harried along, burdened by their few meagre belongings, are a young boy and girl, the only two children left in the village. The girl has been documented as having been murdered in Auschwitz.
The boy, Leopold Rosenberg, (Leo) seen holding his father’s hand is known to have survived. Leo’s mother stayed behind to look after her bedridden sister. When his aunt died, Leo’s mother had to dig the grave herself. In 1942, Leo’s brother, who had been evacuated to England on the Kindertransports, received a letter from her saying she was being deported east to Lublin. It was the final deportation from Southwestern Germany. Her name is listed on the deportation notice but no trace of her beyond that has been found but it is believed she perished in Belzec. So many Jews were being departed that it is assumed the Nazis did not bother with records.[10] But that was for the future. The little boy and his father, shown in the film, had no idea of what lay ahead. The events of the following five years have haunted Leo to the extent that he has never been able to give his testimony. Even to his family, only the occasional memory slips through his lips which immediately snap tight, as though only by banishing these thoughts to the deepest depths of his subconscious can he deal with the world of his present.
Nor could the world pretend it did not know. Within weeks, the event was reported in The New York Times: REICH JEWS SENT TO SOUTH FRANCE.
10,000 Reported Put into Camps: Deportations from the Palatinate and Baden. The destination was a camp in the unoccupied zone of France.[11]
GURS
Gurs had been founded in 1939 as one of several camps close to the Pyrenees intended to house nationalist Spaniards fleeing the wrath of the right-wing regime of the victorious Francisco Franco. It was built on swampland, virtually devoid of any vegetation. At one stage, it housed 17,000 of these endangered Spaniards. By this time, the majority had been repatriated, although many preferred to remain in France. As the Spaniards departed, they were replaced by thousands of French “enemy” aliens, including Jews fleeing in front of the Nazi invasion of western Europe, French activists on the left, pacifists and common criminals.
During the phoney war, before France was invaded on May 10th, the internees could be released from incarnation through a third party that provided a safe haven via Switzerland or Spain. By the time Germany deported its Jews to Gurs, there were already many “alien” Jews there sent from the occupied northern zone. These extra prisoners were an unwelcome burden on the Vichy authorities and it fell onto various voluntary groups to supply the meagre rations necessary to sustain even the most rudimentary level of existence.
French Jews refused to assist the internees in the camps in case that might be construed as consorting with enemy aliens or that it might provide a basis for antisemitism. The Committee for the Assistance of Refugees did get some aid to the internees and succeeded in getting some internees released.[12]
Because the Southern Zone was the so called “Free Zone”, the world’s media were able to report what was happening in the camps.
…At Camp de Gurs the refugees, it was said, were forced to live in small wooden barracks with not enough water and practically without food supply. The barracks had been used by Spanish Republican refugees and when the Jewish refugees arrived the buildings needed repair.[13]
Given the already over-crowded and under-resourced conditions at the camp, it is worth considering the so-called independent Vichy government’s reaction to this additional influx of prisoners.
In his paper, Streib writes:
The Vichy regime was totally surprised and unprepared. They protested and ordered that the transports be returned but this made little impression on the German administration.[14]
In his book, Harvest of Hate, Poliakov (1945) writes:
The German Ministry of Foreign Affairs pigeonholed the protest so as not to create complications for the deportation authorities. But the deportation which Heydrich and Eichmann hoped to extend to the 270,000 Jews still in the Reich was not continued. It was considered unwise to offend the Vichy government too much.[15]
This was the end of the Madagascar Plan, considered an aberration in plans towards the Final Solution which were soon to be implemented.
ARRIVAL AT GURS
My mother looked out from the train and saw mountains, so she knew we were going west. She already knew the significance of going east, so was relieved. We were on the train for three days and three nights, not always moving… Often we were side tracked for hours at a time. The only food or water we had during the first two days was what we had brought from home. On the third day, Friday October 25, we pulled into a train station. We realised we were in Southern France in the city of Pau. The Nazi SS guards, having completed their mission, had disappeared and been replaced by Fascist Vichy soldiers. Much to our relief there were civilians on the platform with rice and water for us. They were representatives from the American Friends Service Committee.[16]
The families were herded onto lorries and travelled for another one and a half hours or so. they then arrived at the Camp des Gurs.
A letter written from one of the inmates appealing for help from Americans explains succinctly the conditions which these people, mostly from warm loving homes, were faced with:
Instead of windows they have a kind of wooden trap-door which does not open fully. On rainy days it is too dark to read or work… there are plenty of insects of every kind and we are beginning to look upon rats and mice as domestic
animals. The sick room has wooden beds, the rest of the barracks only straw mattresses… we have only sheds with buckets which are emptied twice every day. …would it not be possible to collect some money for the women at Gurs? It could mean so much for them to see they are not forgotten. It is only from America that we can expect help.[17]
Among the inmates of the camp were many non-Jewish women who had fled to France because of their anti-Nazi views. Because they spoke both French and German, they were appointed to take charge of the barracks. One of them Hanna Schramm later wrote of her impressions of the new arrivals:
The first one to emerge from the darkness into the lighted hut were old women, women holding babies, others leading children by the hand, all of them wise eyed with fear. The trucks arrived one after the other, unloading their cargo- women of all ages, rich women, poor women, the healthy and the sick… They looked like ghosts, confused and bewildered in an unfamiliar world.[18]
One of the deportees, Dr Ludwig Mann, later wrote:
The barracks were cold, damp, drafty and dirty… There were bugs, lice, rats and fleas; but no eating utensils and no drinking gear… Many still did not understand what had happened to them. They sat around on the straw filled sacks, unable to go outside. [19]
Decades later, the memories of what faced the children remains vivid in the uniformity of their descriptions.
Eva: There was mud everywhere. Wooden Barracks on either side of road. One side for men. One side for women. No vegetation, just mud everywhere. The conditions were terrible. Fifty people in each barrack…[20]
Frederick: The barracks they put us in were completely bare. That first night we didn’t even have straw to sleep on. It was a far cry from home, from our more or less normal lives… the contrast was so stark that we were all in shock… The little ones and the old people simply cried and whimpered all the time.[21]
The toilets were installed next to a barbed wired fence surrounding the camp. No more than a raised slab of concrete with holes along its length, separated from one another and open to the heavens. The whole area was contaminated and the stench unbearable. The full barrels were replaced by empty ones every morning. This was done by carts running along a narrow rail track, “which we children promptly named the ‘shithouse express”.[22]
Lice thrived in these conditions. Weakened by the lack of food and overcrowding, the inmates had little reserves to fight the inevitable outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid fever, diphtheria and other infectious diseases. The children were given inoculations, yet death became a regular visitor to the camp. The Gurs cemetery is the final resting place of 1,187 camp prisoners. It requires little imagination to understand the effect of this on the children who witnessed these everyday trials. Survival is not only about physical endurance but the psychological resistance to trauma.
FRED: One morning I awoke to see two candles burning besides me. A woman had died in the night. It was the first time I saw a dead body. The Spanish prisoners who were responsible for cleaning the camp came with a cart to collect the Angel of Death’s gleanings of the previous night.
MENACHEM: I remember standing next to the fence one morning transfixed by the sight of a horse-drawn waggon carrying corpses covered with blankets…I can still see the legs sticking out.[23]
1942
Once the programme for the eradication of all Jews was set in motion, the Vichy regime turned over the remaining 5000+ Jews to the Nazis who ordered their deportation via Drancy to the extermination camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor.
[1] Frank, Werner L., The Curse of Gurs: Way Station to Auschwitz (Amazon Fulfillment, Poland, 2012) Chapter 17
[2] Frank, Werner L., The Curse of Gurs: Way Station to Auschwitz (Amazon Fulfillment, Wroclaw Poland 2012) p. 222.
[3] Wikipedia entry for Camp Gurs, Cited in Frank (2012) p.222
[4] Taken from the memoir of Dr. Hans-Walter Hermann quoted in Frank (2012) p.222.
[5] See Die ‘Judendeportationen’ aus dem Deutschen Reich 1941-1945: Ein kommentierte Chronologie. Quoted in Frank (2012) p.222
[6] Quoted in Menachem & Fred: Thoughts and Memories of Two Brothers (Holocaust Remembrance Series, Amberey Publishing, 2016) P.58
[7] Cesarani, David, Final Solution (2016) pp. 298 – 303 & 356
[8] Eva Mendelsson’s testimony given to the author on 19July 2018.
[9] https://youtube/r-oJkZjy-ak (accessed, 28 August, 2018).
[10] This information is from the interview between the author and Leo’s daughter, Jeanette on 19/08/2018. She is a genealogist and has recorded as much documentation as possible on the fate of her father’s family. Leo is remains too traumatised to speak of the past but gave Jeanette permission to speak with me.
[11] The New York Times, early November 1940.
[12] Cesarani, David, (2016) p.306.
[13] The New York Times, early November 1940.
[14] Streib, Ludwig, quoted in Menachem & Fred p. 59.
[15] Poliakov, Leon Harvest of Hate (London, 1956; First published in French in 1951) p.106.
[16] Interview with Eva Mendelsson, 19 July 2018.
[17] Letter headed Civil Prisoners in France 1940, addressed from Mme Anneliese Eisenstaedt, Iliot M, Gurs camp, post marked October 22, 1940 but received on January 2, 1941. AFSC archives pp.160 -161
[18] Schramm, Hanna, Vivre a Gurs, Paris 1979, Quoted in Menachem & Fred, po. 61-62
[19] Quoted in Es geschah am helllitag! Pamphlet published by Landeszentrale flir politische Bildung, Baden-Wurttemberg 2003 (Stuttgart 2003) p.17 (Wiener Lib. OSP 2377
[20] Interview with Eva Mendelsson, 19 July 2018.
[21] Menachem & Fred: Thoughts and Memories of Two Brothers. P.80.
[22] Menachem & Fred: Thoughts and Memories of Two Brothers. P.61
[23] Menachem & Fred: Thoughts and Memories of Two Brothers. pp. 63 -.64
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