Orphaned Holocaust Survivors on Their Way to a Foreign Land
Nazi persecution left tens of thousands of children orphaned or separated from their parents. Some went on to find a new home in what is now Israel. Their files have now resurfaced.
When World War II came to an end, hundreds of thousands of young Holocaust survivors were left wandering through the ruins of war-torn Germany and Europe. The United Nations set up a special tracing service for children, tasked with reuniting missing or unaccompanied children with members of their families. Over sixty-four thousand case files created in the course of this work are now held by the Arolsen Archives. However, the collection is far from complete. Many files were sent on to other countries along with those children who emigrated after the war. A partnership with the Central Zionist Archives (CZA) in Israel has now made it possible to reunite some of these scattered records with the rest of the collection. Now, more than 80 years later, the files of children who were evacuated to Palestine are returning in digital form – valuable historical records from the early post-war period. And with them come stories like that of Isak Gross, a Romanian boy who was deported to Auschwitz with his family when he was 14 years old.
Taken to Dachau as a 14-year-old to perform forced labor
Isak Gross was born in 1929 in northern Romania, where he grew up with his three siblings. The family kept livestock and six horses. After attending school until he was 11 or 12, he worked on his parents’ farm – until they were raided by German troops in April 1944. Isak, his parents, and his siblings were deported to Auschwitz.
The Nazis separated them, and Isak was taken to Germany. He was made to perform forced labor at the Dachau concentration camp. Supervised by the SS, he and other prisoners had to load heavy building materials onto railroad cars. According to his own account as recorded in his child tracing file, this was the heaviest work there was.
Liberated one year later on a death march to Tyrol
Almost a year passed before SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp to be evacuated in mid-April 1945 in response to the continued advance of U.S. troops. At least 25,000 prisoners from the Dachau main camp and several sub-camps were driven south by the SS. Some were forced to march on foot, while others were transported by train.
Weakened by forced labor, hundreds of prisoners died along the way from exhaustion and disease. Isak Gross was on one of these death marches. The SS was forcing them toward Tyrol, but shortly before the SS troops reached their destination, the survivors were liberated by American troops on May 2, 1945. Isak was free, but found himself more than a thousand kilometers away from home.
He manages to find his seriously ill father
In the weeks that followed the end of the war, Isak, who had turned 15 by then, learned that the SS had not only murdered his mother, Helene, in Auschwitz, but also his older sister, Dina, and his two younger brothers, Shamiel and Moritz. But what about Jakob Gross, his father – had he survived?
Isak found out that his father was last known to have been in Ebensee, Austria. From Tyrol, he made his way 250 kilometers east across Austria, where he found his father, who was being treated in hospital for “swollen feet.” Jakob Gross died six weeks later, probably as a result of an injury sustained during forced labor.
Isak Gross wants to leave Germany
Isak was now 16 years old and had no relatives in Austria. He ended up in a former military barracks near Munich. In August 1945, it was probably being used as one of the many camps for so-called displaced persons (DPs) run by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
From there, he traveled on to Ramerberg, which is not far from Munich. According to his file, he stayed with friends there, probably people he had met at the camp. They were working for a farmer who provided them with an apartment to live in.
But Isak actually wanted to leave Germany. Hoping to access the support he needed in a DP camp, he registered at a camp in Heidenheim near Stuttgart in September 1946.
The child tracing service faces a huge challenge
After liberation by the Allies, there were around 11 million displaced persons in Europe. In Germany alone, there were an estimated 2.5 million children who had lost one parent and tens of thousands who had lost both. After the war, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was the largest and most important aid organization for survivors of Nazi persecution. The enormous task it faced was to reunite as many unaccompanied children and adolescents as possible with surviving members of their families. To facilitate this work, it set up the Child Search Branch in 1945. Three years later, the International Tracing Service (ITS), now known as the Arolsen Archives, established a special department dedicated to locating missing children, which was initially based in Esslingen before moving to Arolsen in 1950.
Teams from aid organizations visited DP camps and registered all the displaced persons they found there, including the surviving children. They filled out four-page application forms and asked the children about where they came from, their education, the names of their family members, and the places to which they had been deported. The last page of the application form included a place for the child to sign their name.
It takes detective work to find missing children
Using this information, staff searched through lists of residents at other camps. The Child Search Branch had the names of missing children read out on the radio and published lists of names in newspapers, asking family members or anyone with information about the children’s whereabouts to come forward.
The organization employed “Field Officers,” as they were known at the time, to follow up on any leads. They searched children’s homes for missing children of forced laborers whom the Nazis had torn from their families and placed with German families for “Germanization.”
Child tracing files as valuable historical records
Today, the child tracing files serve as a unique historical record of the immediate postwar period. They document the lives and fates of the youngest survivors, whose families and homes had been taken away from them.
These files provide a sense of just how much importance the Child Search Branch and the ITS placed on their mission. And they show that the children who emerged from camps and forced labor sites were once again recognized as individuals, and that their stories and wishes were taken seriously.
Personal stories of horror and the will to survive
The staff also conducted individual interviews with all the children who were old enough. They produced a typewritten record of the interviews which included their own observations. The person who interviewed Isak Gross described him as “a big, strapping, red-cheeked boy.” The 17-year-old had been in Heidenheim for five months by then and was starting to work there as a “policeman.”
The interviewer noted down how Isak had ended up in Dachau and what had happened to him after his liberation. In the last paragraph, the report states that he was in good physical shape and appeared capable and willing to do “any manual or artisan work.” His desire to leave the country was also noted down: “He wants very much to go to USA.”
The “Application for Assistance” had already asked whether he wanted to return to his home country; the question appears under the heading “Future Plans.” His answer was “No.” A few blank lines beneath the question provide space for an explanation should the response be negative. The reason recorded on Isak’s form was this: “Because he lost all the relatives there.” He was also asked if he wished to emigrate to “some other country.” Here the form states that he wants to go to the “U.S.A.” The form also lists the name and address of a cousin: Mr. D. Eidelson in Philadelphia, USA.
Little willingness to accept victims of Nazi persecution
In the years following 1945, many Holocaust survivors wanted to emigrate to the United States. Some had relatives there, and there was a well-established Jewish community. But in the years immediately after the war, both the United States and Europe showed little willingness to accept them. As a result, many survivors spent years stuck in makeshift DP camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy.
When Isak Gross left Germany three years later, he did not go to the United States. Instead, he emigrated to Israel on October 22, 1948, five months after the first Jewish state was established in the former British Mandate of Palestine. He had probably secured a place on one of the ships used by Jewish aid organizations.
His file travels with him when he leaves Germany
This is where Isak Gross’s file cuts off: “The boy left for Palestine.” No further details are given. “But we know that his file traveled with him,” says Giora Zwilling, Head of Archives at the Arolsen Archives, who is responsible for digitization. “But that’s unusual for children who emigrated to Palestine or, later, to Israel.”
In most cases, the Child Search Branch kept the files. But at this time, the Zionist movement in Palestine was keen to collect documents and important records in order to build up its own archive of Jewish history. Zwilling suspects that the Child Search Branch wanted to support this effort and sent the files along with the children for this reason.
The Central Zionist Archives has now shared the files with the Arolsen Archives
More than 80 years later, the files are now returning to Germany. Giora Zwilling learned of their existence during a visit to the Central Zionist Archives (CZA) in Jerusalem. Simone Schliachter, the head of the archive there, showed him nearly 1,300 files on Jewish children who had survived. Her staff had discovered them when the archive was undergoing renovations. Zwilling recognized the ITS letterhead on the yellowed pages.
For many years, the Arolsen Archives had only had placeholder sheets where these files should have been. Their names still appeared on lists of children who had emigrated, but there was no way to learn their stories or find out what had happened to them.
It quickly became clear to the head of the Jewish Archives and her staff that the files had been created in Germany and sent to Palestine. “We wanted to make it possible for the files of these orphaned children to be reconnected with the whole collection of child tracing files at the Arolsen Archives,” explains Simone Schliachter.
Since August, digital copies have been added to the collection held by the Arolsen Archives. For Giora Zwilling, they fill an important gap in the records: “Like missing pieces of a puzzle, they complete the picture we had up until now of the fate of these surviving children.”
He hopes that relatives of the survivors will also hear about the new files, because this fresh material gives them a new opportunity to find answers about what happened to their family members: “Our mission is to document the stories and eyewitness accounts of as many victims of Nazi persecution as possible.”