[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.''

                          ____________________