Solidarity and Mutual Aid Between Women in the Camps

"… I was saved by a young woman who was in as helpless a situation as the rest of us, and who nonetheless wanted nothing other than to help me. The more I think about the following scene, the more astonished I am about its essence, about someone making a free decision to save another person, in a place which promoted the instinct of self-preservation to the point of crime and beyond. It was both unrivaled and exemplary. Neither psychology or biology explains it. Only free will does. Simone Weil was suspicious of practically all literature, because literature tends to make good actions boring and evil ones interesting, thus reversing the truth she argued. Perhaps women know more about what is good than men do, since men tend to trivialize it. In any case, Weil was right, as I learned that day in Birkenau: the good is incomparable and inexplicable as well, because it doesn't have a proper cause outside itself, and because it doesn't reach for anything beyond itself." [1]

In 1988 a special meeting was held at Yad Vashem. Thirty-two Auschwitz survivors, Jewish women from Hungary and Hungarian territories, that had been aged 12-16 when they were in Auschwitz, asked to hold an event in recognition of a woman who they said had saved them; The blockälteste (block elder) of Block 8 in the "C" camp in Birkenau – Fela Zeitag Meibaum.

The event was organized by Lea Schenap, a survivor of Block 8. She had met Fela by chance in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood of Jerusalem twenty-seven years after they had been liberated from Auschwitz. Two weeks later, an article about the meeting was published in Kol Ha'ir and a year later, both Fela and Lea gave testimony about their experiences during the Holocaust.

"…It was when I was in Beit Hakerem, near my son's yeshiva, I waited for my son, and my son was already next to me. Suddenly I saw a woman like that, a woman with white hair, a woman with sad eyes and I felt as though I couldn't speak. I, maybe I had gone crazy or something, and for a long time I couldn't. I held the woman's hand and I couldn't speak, and my son stood next to me and I was scared to say, "she helped me," I could be taken to a mad house for what I was doing. I only said, "Fela," and she said "Block 8 my child," there in the street." [2]

For many years, Fela Meibaum (Zeitag) did not give testimony. Finally, in April 1989 she gave testimony at Yad Vashem. At the end she was asked why she had not spoken about the Shoah, why had she not told anyone about it? Her response was very forceful. It revolves around the same firewalls of understanding, the transmission of knowledge, the question of misunderstanding. The ability to do so, that is to write, tell, draw, and the knowledge that it is impossible. She expresses anger towards the interviewer who she sees as an emissary of Israeli society and of humanity. "It is impossible to understand," she says, "What could I have told?" her voice fading away. This is also the stage of her testimony where she almost raises her voice to the interviewer. She talks about senses that someone who was not there cannot feel and which are in so many ways the basis of understanding or attending or experiencing. The senses of smell, sight and hearing. "Can you smell it?" she almost shouts at the interviewer. The senses are repeatedly referred to throughout her testimony, interwoven throughout, sometimes as part of associative thoughts, as a post-traumatic overflow, she feels it and says:

"Why didn't I say anything? First of all, I am not sufficiently intellectual, I lack the words and the words that I do have don't reflect even a percentage of the reality. I didn't want to lie, I didn't want to exaggerate, and the truth is that it is impossible to describe.
 …
I don't think, I am sure [that people wouldn't understand]. Imagination doesn't work and is limited. It is already a superhuman strength. Can you envision a room of burnt children? Can you feel it? Can you smell the stench of the bodies? What can be told? See the hairs, the teeth? You can do that in a theatre too, you can make piles of hair and it isn't suffering. See the shoes that were collected? Theater. There is no way, no way at all.
…
Q. Did you not need to speak, even if people wouldn't understand everything?

A. No, because I understood that I would be talking into a vacuum." [3]

Her words also seem to contain an expression of guilt; survivor's guilt isn't based in reality, but it can become a painful and debilitating part of life. Fela gave her testimony after her husband had passed away. Her testimony reveals the beloved and supportive figure of her husband Avraham. His death was certainly traumatic. It was only after the meeting with the women who credited her with their survival in Auschwitz, who remembered who she had been, how she had treated them and how she had given so much of herself in order to help them did she feel that she could give testimony. Could giving testimony have been a deep sigh of relief after years of feeling guilty that she had held an official position as a prisoner in Auschwitz? It is possible.

Following her husband Avraham's death in October 1988, she called Lea Schenap, twenty-one years after they had become reacquainted.

"And one day she called me and there were only two words on her lips, "Avraham has died"
…
I stood at the cemetery in Sanhedria, I looked at Fela in the distance … and the picture changes before my eyes. I see the young woman with golden hair in striped prisoner's clothing, following the movements of Mengele's hand, and the sweat dripping from her forehead. Then, at the end of the assembly, opening her arms towards us. "My dear children, don't despair. We have to stay alive." And now she is standing before me, and with the same motion extends her arms to me … my lips mumbled that I had come to represent the children of Block 8 in Auschwitz. [4]

Fela Meibaum was born on 2 April 1919 in Mława, Poland. During the interwar period, some 5,800 Jews lived there, constituting a quarter of the town's population. Fela's family were merchants. She had an elder sister, Esther, who emigrated to Israel after graduating from the gymnasium (high school) in Mława and studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for one year; she then studied at the Hadassah Nursing School on Mount Scopus and upon qualification, began working there as a nurse. Fela was later to marry Esther's husband's twin brother Avraham.

Fela remained in Mława. In 1937 she graduated from the Jewish gymnasium in the city and enrolled in a Nursing School in Warsaw. With the outbreak of war, she returned to Mława and, together with her parents, was incarcerated in the ghetto that was established there. In the ghetto she worked as a nurse and was responsible for the staff and lodgings in the hospital. The Germans 'liquidated' the Mława ghetto in November-December 1942. Fela and her family who were "essential workers" were deported to Auschwitz on the final transport from Mława in December 1942.[5]

On arrival at Auschwitz they underwent a selection and Fela accompanied her mother on a truck so that she would not have to walk; her mother was sent directly to the gas chambers. Fela was sent to the women's camp in Birkenau and her father was sent to the men's camp. In the camp, she worked as a nurse in one of the 'hospitals'. Towards the end of 1941, after catching her trying to help the patients in the clinic, Mengele appointed her to be the blockälteste of the Hungarian girls in Block 8 of the "C" camp.

"… during that period, there was also selections from among the children. I tried, I already knew and I was experienced, that it was better to send, if not to the crematoria then to any place other than staying in the "C" camp. In general, in Birkenau, any work – they called it a work camp –  would  be better. I did everything that I could, and sometimes even things that I couldn't." [6]

Was there mutual aid during the Holocaust? Solidarity? Was there a difference between men and women in this respect? Did solidarity exist in the camps, in places where the reign of terror and death were so total, the inevitable instinct for survival stronger than anything else? Was it possible for solidarity to exist in a world of death? Are we, in retrospect, revisiting this almost searing question from the perspective of one who was not there?

Clearly, the answer is complicated. The extreme circumstances that were brought about by the Holocaust, brought with them circumstances and relationships that were naturally and understandably complex. It is however possible to determine that there was mutual aid even in the camps, even under extreme circumstances, and that this was true among both men and women.

In the women's camps mutual aid could be found in attempts at survival, in the formation of support groups, in the struggle for life and in preserving sparks of spirituality; many times, at the risk of personal endangerment. We are accustomed to asking ourselves about the evil – the extreme evil that was expressed in the Holocaust – but we tend not to ask ourselves about the good. About the decision or the ability to go beyond one's limits, in the most extreme of circumstances, at personal risk, in order to help another, through seeing the other; both the ability to do so and the choice.

Bruria-Eva Flusberg was born in July 1931 in the town of Csenger, Hungary. She was the daughter of Chava and Joseph Berger and the younger sister of Rivka. When she was one-year-old her parents decided to emigrate to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) and her family lived in Tel Aviv. In 1937, when she was six years old, her parents decided to visit Hungary to help her grandfather who was in poor health. On arrival in Hungary her father was arrested on suspicion of spying; he escaped back to Eretz Israel but the mother and daughters remained in Hungary.

In June 1944 the mother and two daughters were deported to Auschwitz. On arrival the girls were holding their grandmother's hand but, in order to save their lives, they and their mother were separated from their grandmother by a Jewish prisoner. Eva, her sister and mother were registered as inmates of the camp. Their mother became infected with typhus and died within a month of arrival. Her sister was taken during a Selection and murdered during a death march. After five months in Birkenau, thirteen-year-old Eva was 'chosen' to be murdered in the gas chambers and was sent to Block 25, the barracks in which the Germans gathered the prisoners who were slated for death.

"They extinguished the light. And the prisoners started shouting, "Tata Tata, Mama Mama," I didn't shout anything. I saw a hole by the door. I dug and I managed to get my head out. I ran. I was outside, naked, without clothes. I looked around to see what I could do.
…
I saw a watch tower, behind it was a barracks that I wanted to go to.
…
I ran like crazy to get to the fence, darkness. I arrive. I thought that the door was open, closed. I knocked and knocked. It was very cold. Eventually they opened the door from inside. A women wearing a stripped uniform opened the door, she managed to shout at me, "What are you doing?" they thought it was someone from the moon.
…
Then, suddenly, from within all the shouting, a woman stands up from inside the barrack and she asks me in Yiddish, "What happened to you?" "I think I came out of Block 25," "You can be sure of that," she told me. And she took off the dress that she was wearing underneath her dress and gave it to me.
…
And she told me that she had children my age. I was already shaking. I kissed her. She gave me a piece of bread to eat and hugged me." [7]

Eva was deported to Lenzing, a concentration and labor camp in Upper Austria. 600-700 other female prisoners, mostly Jewish, were also deported there. In Lenzing the famished Eva bent down to pick up a piece of peel that seemed to her to be edible, in punishment the guard dog was set on her and she was thrown into the so-called 'pit'.

"And I go and pick it up, and a German Shepherd comes and grabs my hand.
…
It was bleeding, so what could I do? I cut a small patch from my dress and I tried to stop the blood. And they even through me into prison, into the pit, because I had picked something up along the way. And then the girl who was the Lagerälteste (camp elder) at the Lenzing camp brought me a blanket. And I was there in the mud. Snow fell and it was so thick that I could have been forgotten there. I was there for some two or three days. That woman saved me. She saved me there and she spoke to the camp manager and she told him that I didn't have anything, that I hadn't known … She saved me."

Dr. Mark Dworzecki, a survivor of the Vilna ghetto, camps in Estonia and a death march was a doctor in the ghetto and in the camps. He was also a historian and an author. In a lecture he gave in 1961 about medicine during the Holocaust he addressed an important factor in the adaptation of the prisoners to life in the camps:

"I want to emphasize a factor which helped people to adapt, to become accustomed, to life in the concentration camps and not to break down. A factor that is important for our survival as people that has not been widely discussed, that is the factor of solidarity and connection between fellow inmates, and between friends within the concentration camp. The help that one prisoner of misfortune would extend to another was of great importance.  Simple but friendly assistance was valuable.
…
Moral values were a strong mental defense against depersonalization, enabling those who were in hell to retain their humanity and to retain the Image of God that is within Man."[8]

Lea Schenap could not find respite following her renewed meeting with Fela Meibaum; the blockälteste from her childhood barracks, who hadn't given testimony, who possibly felt that she hadn't helped. She placed an advert in a newspaper seeking other women who had been alongside her in Block 8 in Birkenau. When she had located another thirty-two women she arranged a meeting with them and with Fela Meibaum at Yad Vashem. Following the meeting, she and Fela gave their testimonies. The interviewer asked her to talk about the "children's barracks" that she had been incarcerated in and about Fela the blockälteste. She talks of her as a prisoner like them, a prisoner with an official position, and as one who did not take advantage of her status. She describes the responsibility that she bore, her powerlessness against the Germans, and her repeated attempts to help the girls in her barracks at risk to her own life. With regards to herself, she relates how Fela saved her life on one occasion, and the terrible complexity involved.

"… I couldn't do anything more than just lie there, and I had a fever and I don't know what had already happened to me. I went to lie down on the floor, and she came and shouted at me and hit me, "You have to! You have to go out! You have to walk!"
…
But she didn't want to, I didn't know. And I actually got up. That I remember. I stood at assembly for a number of hours, it was death. Absolute living death. And when it was over, when I got back through the door, she took me back into her arms. Right in her arms, she took me to her bed and started cleaning my ears, made me tea … and she told me her entire story, her entire life.
…
She was from Poland and she had studied nursing.
…
And she told me that her mother had been with her in the camp, and she had been happy when they took her mother. She couldn't have born seeing her mother suffer for four years.  And she told me all these things like a friend, and she cried. No one saw us there. We were in her room and she said, "You have to go to assembly every day. You have to live. You have to get to Eretz Israel."" [9]

Dr Naama Shik expands upon this topic in her book With Silent Screams: Jewish Women in Auschwitz-Birkenau 1942–1945, Naama Shik (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, Lama The Open University, 2022), 408 pp.

The book is currently in the process of being translated into English.