“Kuba and I were reminiscing about good old times, when we could eat as much bread as we wished….” So wrote 17-year-old Lolek Lubinski in a 1941 diary found hidden in a wall in Lodz, site of a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland.
The diary, and a Hanukah photo of Lubinski, are among dozens of heart-wrenching items featured in “Give Me Your Children: Voices From the Lodz Ghetto,” opening Friday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Evidence suggests that the teenager died of starvation before his peers were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Among the few survivors was Jutta Szmirgeld, who as an adolescent met her future husband Zvi Bergman in an underground youth group at the ghetto — and again, by luck, at Auschwitz. During the Holocaust, everything turned on luck, she said, surveying the exhibition as it readied to open. “No matter how hard people worked to survive, it was luck” that made the difference between life and death during Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Jutta’s family members were killed. She and Zvi married after liberation, then spent three more desperate years emigrating to Israel.
Children’s intimate testimonies of life in the shadow of death are conveyed through photographs, documents and artifacts: straw shoes made in a workshop, drawings from a student’s biology notebook, a girl’s letter asking authorities to give her mother a job so they could eat, remnants of yellow fabric imprinted with the stars of David that Jews were ordered to wear, and rusted bowls exhumed from a mass grave at Chelmno, where youngsters and the elderly were sent to die.
How does a child respond as hardships transform horror? “We were overwhelmed byhunger, cold, illness, friends dying,” Jutta Bergman said. Nazi soldiers didn’t hesitate to shoot ghetto residents of any age. “But we lived on with hope…. we talked about the future, philosophy, we read a lot.”
The exhibition recalls the Culture House, where concerts lifted spirits and defied Nazi efforts to dehumanize the Jews, and Lodz classrooms. Wrote 12-year-old Chaim Cale in 1940: “I wanted to go to school, not so much to learn, but to eat the soup and not be frozen.”
‘Give Me Your Children’
“Give Me Your Children: Voices From the Lodz Ghetto” opens Friday and runs through Sept. 3
Venue: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW, Washington
Admission: Free
More info: 202-488–0400 or www.ushmm.org
