[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 81 (Thursday, June 23, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: June 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
THE HOLOCAUST JOURNEY OF RACHEL GOTTSTEIN
______
HON. TOM LANTOS
of california
in the house of representatives
Thursday, June 23, 1994
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, we frequently deal with the horror of the
Holocaust and the brutal Nazi atrocities of half a century ago in very
broad terms--the death of 6 million men, women, and children, the
mechanical mass-production efficiency of the extermination camps, and
the scope of the monstrous atrocities committed by Nazi officials at
all levels. Too seldom, however, do we confront the Holocaust in
personal terms. We do not examine those horrors at an individual level.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to call to the attention of my colleagues a
very personal account of the horror of the Holocaust--excerpts from the
article, ``The Nightmare and the Dream: The Holocaust Journey of Rachel
Gottstein,'' which appeared in the April 17, 1994 issue of the journal
``We Alaskans''. The article tells the story of Rachel Landau--born in
Krakow, Poland, in 1936. As a 5-year-old child, her parents were
captured and murdered and managed to survive for an additional 4
years--from a life of hiding out to escape German troops, being shifted
from the labor camp at Plazow, which was dramatized in the movie
``Schindler's List,'' to camps in Ravensbrueck and Bergen-Belsen where
she was finally liberated in 1945.
I ask that this excellent article about the Holocaust experiences of
Rachel Landau Gottstein be placed in the Record, and I urge my
colleagues to read it carefully.
[From We Alaskans, Apr. 17, 1994]
The Nightmare and the Dream: The Holocaust Journey of Rachel Gottstein
(By George Bryson)
Rachel Gottstein had a dream. She was sitting in a house
with her husband, Barney, and all their children. Somehow
they'd learned the Nazis were coming to get them, to take
them away to kill them. There was nothing they could do about
it, so they sat and talked and waited.
In reality, the children born through previous marriages to
Anchorage's Barney and Rachel Gottstein weren't even alive
during World War II when the Nazis murdered nearly 6 million
European Jews. Barney was only a teenager then and Rachel was
hardly a schoolgirl. Barney grew up in Alaska, where he would
later develop the Carr-Gottstein grocery store empire. He
never experienced the Holocaust directly.
But Rachel grew up in Poland. And Rachel remembers.
Rachel Landau was born in Krakow in 1936. She was 3 when
Hitler's armed forces invaded Poland. She was 5 when her
Jewish parents suddenly hid her in a basement with neighbors
and said goodbye. She remembers crying and screaming after
them as they left. She remembers hiding in another home with
her aunt and uncle and cousin and being captured by the
Gestapo and taken to her first concentration camp.
She witnessed murders in the camps from the very beginning.
At first she wondered about it: Why did the Nazis want to
kill Jewish people--all the Jewish people, even little girls
like herself. But she could see clearly that they did. She
saw parents murdered in front of their children. She saw
children deliberately murdered in front of their parents.
``I saw people begging and crying for mercy. . . . It felt
embarrassing, but anybody will do anything to live. And we
tried to survive, even me as a 5-year-old. I would do things
that you would think were impossible . . . ''
Over the next three years, Rachel clung tightly to the
hands of her aunt and cousin as she survived three
concentration camps: from Plaszow, to Ravensbruck, to the
infamous Bergen-Belsen where the British discovered 10,000
unburied corpses the day the camp was liberated in 1945.
They also found 8\1/2\-year-old Rachel, emaciated by
typhus--just as a typhus-ravaged teenager named Anne Frank
had died at Bergen-Belsen one month earlier. But Rachel
survived the Holocaust, a witness. A half-century later, it
haunts her still.
``I still live in this trauma of the concentration camps,''
Rachel Gottstein said recently, speaking carefully,
deliberately. ``I have all kinds of dreams about this even
now . . . Things you can never forget.''
So much that was horrible happened at night, she recalls.
Maybe that explains the dreams. The lights would go out and
they would fall asleep on the straw mattresses on the long,
wooden bunk beds. Then it would begin.
``They would drag people out. The would beat people up.
They would torture them. They would kill them. They would
take people for experiments.
``They would do this in the night thinking that more people
would be sleeping and there would be less screaming and
crying and people going insane.''
Now she hates to sleep at all, Rachel says. ``I sit to fall
asleep so I won't realize I'm going to. Because I still think
that . . . maybe, maybe this nightmare is still going on. And
if I fall asleep, this will happen.''
Just as she fell asleep one night recently and dreamed that
the Nazis were on their way to get her husband and children .
. .
In the dream Barney seemed supportive and calm, but Rachel
feared for their lives.
``And I dreamt that my husband said he was going to give us
a drink. That we should have a wonderful time, a wonderful
day, a wonderful evening--and he was going to give us a drink
. . .''
She knew then that the drink would be poison. They would
kill themselves before the Nazis got the chance to do it
first. But she remembers say no--they should try and live . .
.
``I said, `I think there's hope. There's always hope. And
maybe we will survive . . .'''
But that was just a dream. The reality for Rachel was a
nightmare.
* * * * *
When Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939--setting the
torch to World War II--Jewish families all over Eastern
Europe awoke to find their lives in sudden peril. How had
this happened?
* * * * *
Throughout the 1930s, the Nazis had enacted a long list of
punitive laws discriminating against German Jews. Among them:
laws prohibiting Jewish children from attending schools, laws
confiscating Jewish property, laws boycotting Jewish
businesses, laws stripping Jewish doctors and lawyers and
teachers of their jobs, laws prohibiting marriage between
Jews and ``Aryans.''
Anti-Semitic rallies were another signature of the Nazi
regime. By the end of the decade, the gatherings had grown
increasingly violent. In November 1938, the ``Kristallnacht''
rally--so-named for the thousands of windows shattered at
night in synagogues and Jewish owned shops across Germany--
culminated not with the arrest of the vandals but the
victims. Thirty thousand Jewish men and boys were seized and
deported to Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen
concentration camps.
After that, many Jews decided it was time to get out.
Hitler had been forcefully deporting them (after seizing
their property) for several years. Now Jewish men and women
fled voluntarily, leaving as soon as they could. By 1939,
Jews were only half a percent of the German population.
Then war broke out, and the relationship between Hitler and
the Jews changed. First, the borders closed, making it harder
to leave the country. Second, the Jewish population of
Germany skyrocketed as the Third Reich systematically
conquered and occupied Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium,
Holland, France, Greece, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia and
the western Soviet Union. There were 9 million Jews in
Europe, and now nearly all of them fell under the cloak of
Germany. Some 3\1/2\ million Jews were in Poland alone--15
times as many as existed in prewar Germany. To Hitler, this
represented a problem.
Rachel's parents took the advice of her grandfather. They
bought a home in Skavina and moved there with their only
child. They lived there two years, the beginning of Rachel's
memory.
Mostly she remembers her parents' faith. ``I don't know if
they knew what was about to happen, but they always used to
teach me a prayer in Hebrew--just one sentence of this
prayer: `Shema Yisrael Adoshem, Eloheinu Adoshem Echad.' And
that means, `Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is
One.' And that's what the Jewish religion is based on--that
we have one God, and we should have faith in this God, and
that's how we will get strength: In this faith.''
The words of the prayer were so familiar to Rachel they
almost sounded like her mother's voice. Shema Yisrael Adoshem
Eloheinu Adoshem Echad. The prayer reassured her whenever she
got scared.
Rachel also remembers what her mother and father told her
about Palestine--though she didn't really understand what
they were saying. ``They said . . . there is a land called
Palestine, and this is our homeland. And this is where I
should go.''
* * * * *
Just as she couldn't understand why now her parents were
saying goodbye . . .
There'd been rumors in Skavina that the Germans were coming
to take the Jews away. Rachel's parents were afraid for their
daughter's life. They took her to the house of a friend, a
non-Jewish neighbor. Maybe there she would be spared.
``And all I remember is my parents were saying to me,
`Goodbye . . .' And I couldn't understand why they were
saying goodbye and why they were leaving me.
``And the neighbor took me into her basement where it was
very dark. And I was crying and screaming. And the neighbors
were scared that the Germans were coming . . . and that they
couldn't keep me quiet.''
Hitler's ``solution'' didn't begin with the gas chambers.
It began by rounding up Jews all across Europe and
consolidating them in ghettos and work camps in Poland.
In Western Europe, the specter of hundreds of Jewish
citizens suddenly boarding freight trains headed east almost
looked too orderly to be murderous. But the calm was
calculated. The Nazis knew they had to operate more subtly in
countries like France, Holland, Denmark and Norway. The non-
Jewish public might turn sympathetic to the plight of the
Jews if the Gestapo began murdering them in the streets.
But Eastern Europe was a different proposition. It was far
more impoverished, more historically anti-Semitic, more
shielded from the world view. Murderous pogroms against Jews
were staged in Russia and Eastern Europe long before the
Germans arrived. The precedent there was set. When the
Gestapo showed up, they could literally get away with
murder--and did. As the German soldiers invaded Poland, they
were followed closely by the Gestapo's ``Einsatzgruppen,''
special police units that systematically rousted the Jews
from their homes, then shot them in the streets or along some
country road. In all, 600,000 Polish Jews died that way.
Two of them were Rachel's parents. A third was her
grandfather.
* * * * *
Rachel wouldn't hear whether her parents died until after
the war. Then her uncle told her after hearing the account
from an eyewitness.
``They had taken the people from Skavina to this very large
area. It wasn't yet a concentration camp,'' Rachel says.
``There was a very big hole dug in this camp. All the Jewish
people had to get undressed. All their valuables were taken
from them, their clothes. And they were told to stand around
that hole.''
The Gestapo put something like gasoline into the ditch,
Rachel says. And then they shot everybody. Only there were so
many people to shoot, they ran out of bullets. Either that,
or they just didn't want to use any more ammunition.
``And that's why the gasoline--so they burned whoever
didn't die by bullet. And that's how I was told my parents
died.''
Later, even that wasn't efficient enough for Hitler or
Goering or Adolph Eichmann. It took too long to dig the
holes. So about two years into the war--not long after
Rachel's parents were executed--the Nazi commanders initiated
their ``final solution'' with the advent of the extermination
camps. Then the Holocaust began in earnest.
* * * * *
the camps
Scenes from the prison compound in the Krakow ghetto, as
seen through a little girl's eyes:
``It had barbed wires around,'' Rachel recalls, ``and it
had a lot of big rooms with bunk beds where all the women
stayed. And there were some men there, too.
``And every day they would have us all come out of these
big rooms. And they had us stand in line, and they would call
out, at random, different names. And those names had to go to
a truck--big trucks.''
The significance of the roll call wasn't immediately clear
to her, Rachel says, until--right in front of her--an elderly
woman started screaming when her name was called. I don't
want to die! she cried. I want to live!
``And they said to her, `If you don't come voluntarily,
then we'll kill a hundred people instead of you!' And a lot
of people were saying, `Go! Please go! Please go!' And she
didn't want to go. And then they started hitting her, and
they took her into the truck. . . And of course they took
many other people, too.''
Rachel was only 5 then. But just having been torn away from
her mother and father, her eyes were wide open:
``There was hardly any food. And a lot of people were
getting beaten. And there was always screaming, and there was
always crying. People were sick and there were no doctors.''
She didn't like this place, even if it was the city where
she was born. The only comfort was the remaining small circle
of her family and friends--Aunt Gittel, Yossi's mother, the
three other children. They still clung together.
``Then one day, in the morning again, everyone stood in
these long lines--and they called my aunt's name, and
(Yossi's mother's) name. . . And so they took us to a place
call Plaszow.''
* * * * *
Even as they survived, children of the Holocaust didn't
stay children long. Neither did Rachel. The murders and the
torture she witnessed began to etch her young memory.
There was a big building at Plaszow, she says, called the
Gray House. The upstairs served as headquarters for the
Gestapo, the Nazi police. The basement was an interrogation
room for camp laborers. And the Jewish people who went in
that room seldom came out alive.
Rachel lived in a large barracks with the children and the
two older women. ``There were a lot of people in this one
room. . . There was no toilet, but a pail where people went
(to) the bathroom. There was just one pail with water (for
washing hands). And people were crying, and people were
hungry.
``Every day in the morning some Nazi would open the door to
this area and they would bring in bread. And sometimes some
water and sometimes some kind of a soup. And every day they
would take out some people. And we could hear after they were
taken out, screams. . . And you could hear hitting, you know,
blows. And we knew they were being hit and tortured.
``There was a blond lady there with a little girl. And she
claimed that she was a Christian. And every day she would
cross herself and tell the little girl to cross herself. And
she would pray to Jesus. And the Nazis would every day come
in and say, `Tell us you are a Jew.' And she would say, `I am
not a Jew, I'm a Christian.' And they would hit her, and she
would say, `I'm not a Jew!' And they said, `Even if your
great-grandmother was a Jew, then you are a Jew, and you are
going to die for it . . .' Then one day they just took here
and she never came back.
* * * * *
``It was a train that had no windows. There were no steps
to go up. People were just pushed up. Children were just
handed up by the adults. They pushed in as many people as
they could push in--more than that. They squeezed people in,
and there was no food and no light and just total chaos.''
Worst of all, says Rachel, you knew that you were going to
come out of this train ``not to some happy reception with
friends, but you were either going to be shot or put into
another camp.''
* * * * *
As suffocating as the westbound train ride was, it may well
have saved Rachel's life. Children were among the first to
perish on the long marches. Few prisoners had the strength to
carry their children for long.
After Rachel's train passed the pre-World War II border
between Germany and Poland, it stopped at the town of
Breslau. There everyone was ordered off the train and
directed into a staging area full of prisoners.
``We say a lot of people,'' Rachel recalls. ``And you could
see from the way it was--you saw everybody crying, and
everybody hugging and kissing--and I imagined that they had
just been told they were going to be separated and sent to
different camps.
``And I imagine that these people knew from the names they
were told that these were terrible places to go. Because it
was just very traumatic. People were giving each other their
necklaces if they had any. And they said, `For good luck,'''.
There was a moment's joy. Out of the crowd, Aunt Gittel
spotted her husband, Max, and ran to join him. They hadn't
seen each other for years--not since that day they were
captured in their own hometown. But the joy collapsed when
they learned that their orders would soon send them in
different directions.
* * * * *
Yossi's mother was strongly religious, and she had grown
increasingly anxious about eating food that wasn't kosher.
She also suffered deeply the shame of being forced to undress
and walk naked in front of the Nazis.
``She was always crying,'' Rachel recalls. ``And she
started to really carry on. And (Aunt Gittel) was always
saying, `Don't be afraid, she'll be all right.'
``And I didn't understand what was not all right about her.
But now looking back, I can see that she was starting to go
crazy.
``Then one day they took all of us in another kind of
truck, a big truck. And they took us to another kind of
place: Ravensbruck.''
There were a lot of dogs. She noticed that right away.
And the Nazi guards were yelling things as their convoy
rolled into the barbed-wired compound at Ravensbruck, north
of Berlin. The trucks stopped and the prisoners stepped out--
to more curses from the Nazis.
``You dirty Jews! . . . Hitler is going to finish you all
off! . . . We're going to have a world clean of all the Jews!
. . .''
Even after all she'd been through, Rachel says, she still
found all the verbal hate amazing and utterly inexplicable.
``And I just couldn't . . . I couldn't grasp it. I couldn't
understand. What did we do? Why? What happened that would
make people dislike us so much that they would want to
destroy us like this?''
Other images from Ravensbruck: A woman tries to climb the
barbed-wire fence and escape camp. But the barbed wire is
electric--and it stops her in an instant, killing her. Then
another woman tries to escape by climbing the same fence--and
she dies, too.
The question then becomes, were these serious efforts to
escape? Or prisoners gone mad? Or even calm, reasoned
decisions to end all the misery in a quick, uncompromising
act of suicide?
Sometimes the dogs--German shepherds--would pull them down
before they ever reached the fence, Rachel says. ``And they
would bite people and there would be screaming . . .''
Eight years old now, Rachel was beginning to comprehend the
nightmare more and more. The staggering cruelty of it.
Instead of becoming enameled to the cruelty, she seemed to be
growing even more sensitive to it, finding cruelties within
the cruelties.
Like the way the Gestapo not only showed no reticence about
shooting a Jewish child, but would deliberately shoot the
child in front of his mother. Or how they enjoyed breaking up
families during ``selections'' for new camp assignments.
Mother to the right, daughter to the left . . .
``And in other buildings, you would always hear screams of
children and screams of people, we were scared, scared,
scared all the time. All the time.''
* * * * *
``Anybody who wasn't completely perfect was taken away,''
Rachel says. ``If somebody would limp, they were killed. If
somebody would call out (in pain), they were killed. If
somebody would have a little bit of a hunch, stooped ever,
they were killed. Everybody who had anything the matter with
them was killed.''
So Aunt Gittel ``treated'' her niece by taking a piece of
straw from a mattress in the barracks, wadding it into a tiny
lump, and lodging it as gently as she could inside Rachel's
ear canal to staunch the flow of pus.
It wasn't so much a health-care measure as a survival
measure. But it worked, Rachel says. Her ear didn't leak, the
Gestapo didn't notice her, and eventually she got better.
* * * * *
``And from there they took us to a camp called Bergen-
Belsen. And in the camp it was really bad. There was no food.
And you could always see a lot of people dead, lying in front
of the barracks.
``I remember the worst thing was the hunger.'' We were
always so, so hungry. . . I imagine it was coming toward the
end of the war, because it was getting more and more
desperate. . .''
* * * * *
The war was ending, and it was a desperate time all around.
The allied forces were marching on Germany from the coast,
approaching Belsen. The Soviet forces were advancing from the
east.
By now most of the death camps in Poland had been emptied,
one way or another. The rate of killing rose sharply in the
end. Some Nazi commanders believed they could avoid
prosecution if no witnesses were left alive.
In Germany, the greatest killer in the camps at the end was
starvation and disease. By some accounts, the most desperate
case of all was Bergen-Belsen.
* * * * *
Aunt Gittel was sick. She'd mothered the children through
all the camps so far and kept them alive, but now she was the
one dying. And there was nothing that could be done. Everyone
at Belsen was dying.
``She was lying there and they came and they took her
away,'' Rachel says. ``And so we were left, just the four
children.''
Rachel took care of them as best she could, but there was
hardly any food at all.
I would always try when it came time for the slice of
bread--I would take the slice of bread and let everyone eat a
crumb at a time,'' Rachel says. ``And they would hold it . .
. and suck on it.''
Then even that single slice of bread shared once a day
between four children disappeared. According to the official
British military report, Bergen-Belsen ran out of food and
water five days before it was liberated.
``When, finally, British troops did enter Belsen in
force,'' Gilbert writes, citing the report, ``the evidence of
mass murder on a vast scale became immediately apparent to
them. Of 10,000 unburied bodies, most were victims of
starvation. Even after liberation 300 inmates died each day
during the ensuring week from typhus and starvation.''
Rachel had come down with typhus, too. Two of the children
had tuberculosis. Lying in her bunk when the first
preliminary British convoys passed through--April 15, 1945--
Rachel was frightened. She feared the Germans were coming to
get her and the others because they were all sick.
She remembers going outside and hiding under the barracks.
``I don't know if I fell asleep or what, but the next thing
it's pitch dark. And I came out from under the barracks, and
I went back in. It was half empty. I saw the three children
lying there, and I was so happy. I went and I laid with
them.''
The next day, Rachel says, she noticed there weren't any
Nazis around. ``And the next thing I remember is that, we all
looked at those doors that led into the barracks, and we saw
a lot of soldiers. And these were the British soldiers that
liberated Bergen-Belsen. And you could see they were all
very, very shocked at what they saw. Because none of them
were coming into the barracks. They were all standing by this
door, just looking . . .''
from here to the holocaust
In the days that followed, many more people died. But
Rachel and the children survived. They stayed at the camp for
several weeks recovering.
The Red Cross had circulated a list of concentration-camp
survivors all over Europe. At Buchenwald, Max Katz saw a copy
of the Bergen-Belsen list and celebrated. There on the list
of survivors were the names of all four children, including
his 6-year-old daughter, Bilha--as well as his wife, Gittel.
He hurried to Belsen to find them.
He found Bilha and hugged her, then hugged the others.
``Where is my wife?'' he asked the children. As the oldest,
Rachel answered first, ``Aunt is dead,'' she said.
Max was stunned. He slapped Rachel on the face. ``That's
not true.'' he said. ``You're lying.''
Rachel gathered herself. ``It's true,'' she said.
Not long after that, the children split for the first time
in more than three years.
Seven-year-old Hanka, the rabbi's child, and 4-year-old
Yossi were bound for Sweden. Both had lost both parents
during the Holocaust, and now they had come down with
tuberculosis. The Swedish government was offering treatment.
Rachel followed her Uncle Max and cousin Bilha to their new
home in Czechoslovakia. After a few weeks, she approached her
uncle with a question of her own: She wondered if he's heard
any news about her mother or father. All through the
concentration camps, there'd been no word about what became
of them.
Now it was Max's turn to deliver bad news. He's spoken to
someone who had witnessed their execution. As gently as he
could, he explained this to Rachel.
The words shocked her, Rachel says. ``I didn't believe
him.''
From Krakow to Plaszow, to Ravensbruck, to Bergen-Belsen--
she always kept thinking that her parents would turn up. That
they would run into each other's arms and hug.
``It just didn't penetrate . . . And to tell you the truth,
to this day it still doesn't penetrate. Even though I'm a
grown woman, in many ways I feel like I'm not a grown woman.
I feel like I am a child. Because I don't understand these
things, and I can't believe them.
``I just feel, `Where are my parents' graves? Where can I
go to see that it's really so? And why? Why did they die? I
cannot understand why they died, I cannot understand why 6
million Jewish people were killed for no reason and the whole
world stood by.
``And until this day, I don't believe this horrible
nightmare really is possible. That it really happened.''
____________________