THE HOLOCAUST
TEACHING LESSON 5
HANDOUT 5E
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Esther & Elias, Rena, Susan, and Julius

Handout 5A: Both Esther and Elias were born in the village of Janina in Greece. Neither knew the other well until World War II ended. When the Nazis came to her village, Esther, age 22, had been married less than a year to her first husband.   Elias was in his early thirties. He and his wife had a four-year-old daughter.

Handout 5B: Rena was born in Tylicz (Till-ITCH], Poland in 1920. Her oldest sister, Gertrude was sixteen years older than Rena. Her youngest sister, Danka, was born when Rena was two years old. The two sisters were extremely close, with Rena looking after her younger sister throughout their childhood. Their mutual caring and sharing continued throughout their nightmare years in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Handout 5C : Susan was born in Vienna, Austria, and moved to Germany when still a child. One of the jobs Susan held at Auschwitz was in the warehouses known as “Canada.” These were storehouses where inmates, mostly Jewish women, sorted the contents of the suitcases and other personal belongings taken from victims when they arrived at Auschwitz. All money, jewelry, precious stones, and similar valuables were sent directly to the German Reichsbank. Watches, clocks, pencils, scissors, flashlights, and wallets were given to front-line German troops. The clothing went to German civilians. Susan mentions the death marches that took place in late 1944. As Allied armies approached Germany, the SS evacuated outlying concentration camps, covering up evidence of genocide by moving prisoners into camps in Germany. So many inmates died on these long journeys by foot that they became known as death marches.

Handout 5D: Julius was born in Mukacevo, Czechoslovakia, in 1925, but was deported to Auschwitz from Hungary. Hungary’s Jews were the last to be deported to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, Julius encountered the infamous, brutally sadistic Josef Mengele, the German doctor who served as chief physician at Auschwitz from 1943 to 1944. Mengele met the trainloads of deportees arriving at Auschwitz. With the flick of his hand, he decided who lived and who died, gesturing one way for life and the other for death in the gas chambers. Mauthausen, where Julius was sent in the last months of the war, was a forced labor camp. Prisoners there were treated so brutally that the camp had one of the highest death rates of any camp.   Nazi camp leaders tortured their prisoners by making them carry heavy loads up the steps of a stone stairway on starvation rations. Many prisoners lasted only a few days.

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/