Those Who Ran Survived

By Steve Rodan

There is a disturbing but crucial axiom regarding Holocaust survival. Those who fled the Germans had the best chance of survival; those who went underground a smaller chance, and those who waited for the SS had virtually no chance at all.

Little wonder that the Germans employed numerous ruses to keep the Jews from fleeing. They spread rumors of generous food rations, lucrative jobs and fictitious camps where everybody would be taken care of. These messages were amplified by the Jewish quisling councils called the Judenrat, which promised a rosy future in the newly-established ghettos of Central and Eastern Europe.

Still, many Jews ran. In 1943, thousands of Jews in German-occupied Greece fled Athens for the mountains. Polish Jews ran east toward the Baltic states and eventually the Soviet Union and its gulag. French Jews climbed the mountains into neighboring Spain. Italian Jews joined the resistance. Czech Jews escaped to Hungary, and after the German occupation in 1944, thousands of those Jews went south to Romania. Their numbers totaled far more than a million.

Meir Ben Dov lived with his family along the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in eastern Hungary. In March 1944, the Germans occupied their wartime ally with the aim of destroying its nearly one million Jews. Ben Dov, who Hebraicized his name, was on the streets of Chust, a river city, and talking to his friend. The Germans had ordered all Jews to gather at the railway station for a trip to what they promised was a modern and clean labor camp, a lie confirmed by the Nazi-appointed Jewish leadership.

"We talked about it for a while and agreed that this story was not true," Ben Dov recalled decades later. "We decided to leave at that moment and began to walk south toward Italy, where we thought we could find refuge."

The 15-year-old survives

Meir was 15 years old. He and his friend survived and eventually made it to Palestine. Their families were taken to Auschwitz and gassed.

Sarah Rosner was also a teenager during the German occupation of Hungary. Unlike Ben-Dov, Rosner was given guidance by her family. She recalled a family meeting that included her married sisters. Her father then relayed to his children a stark message.

"'Those who run to the forest will survive,'" Ms. Rosner recalled her father saying. "Some of my siblings who were married stayed. They had young children and felt life in the forest would be too harsh. I listened to my father and survived."

Many Jews sought to hide with their gentile neighbors. Some gentiles offered to take in their Jewish neighbors, mostly for a hefty fee. Sometimes, strangers agreed to help.

Gabriella Rosenberg found such a gentile for her family in Slovakia in 1942. The family, two parents and a six-year-old daughter, were concealed in a basement of a gentile home. They were told to stay quiet throughout the day to avoid attention.

Jobs and food

In late 1944, after an unsuccessful revolt, the Germans announced that workers were needed for the war effort in Slovakia. They told of a meeting point in a town, and claimed that workers would be given generous food rations and lucrative jobs. Several siblings of Ms. Rosenberg left their hiding places and traveled to obtain jobs. They were immediately packed onto trains for Auschwitz and killed.

Ms. Rosenberg and her family stayed in the cellar. Months later, the Soviet Red Army arrived. The Rosenbergs survived.

During the Holocaust, many Jews escaped or went underground. They defied the assurances of the Germans and their Jewish quislings, particularly Zionist leaders, to stay put. From the start of World War II in September 1939 until June 1941 close to 10 percent of Poland's 3.5 million Jews escaped to the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees were captured by Soviet authorities and sent to Siberia or Central Asia. Conditions were harsh but they survived.

The Jewish refugee flow intensified after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Many Jews fled their villages to escape the Wehrmacht but returned after a few days to face massacre. More than a million did not return but kept running until they reached such Asian republics as Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan. [1]

In Western Europe, escape became more difficult as the Germans tightened their hold over such countries as France, Belgium and the Netherlands. From 1942 through 1944, fewer than 7,500 arriving Jews were allowed to stay in neutral Spain. Thousands more made it to Portugal, regarded as more friendly to the Allies. Some of the arrivals obtained visas to the United States and South America.

'Nothing was prepared'

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was an SS commander assigned to kill Jews and partisans during the war. In mid-1942, he was appointed as successor to Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust. In the summer of 1944, Bach-Zelewski, with two divisions at his disposal, was assigned to suppress the Warsaw uprising.

Nearly 20 years after the war, Bach-Zelewski testified for Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. He recalled how easy it was to kill Jews because they had been abandoned by their leadership.

"Contrary to the opinion of the National Socialists that the Jews were a highly organized group, the appalling fact was that they had no organization whatsoever," Bach-Zelewski said. "The mass of the Jewish people were completely taken by surprise. They did not know at all what to do; they had no directives or slogan as to how they act...Never before has a people gone as unsuspectingly to its disaster. Nothing was prepared. Absolutely nothing." [2]

Notes

1. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/escape-from-german-occupied-europe

2. Bach-Zelewski to Leo Alexander in "War Crimes and their Motivation: The Socio-Psychological Structure of the SS and the Criminalization of a Society." Page 315. Vol. 39. Issue 3. 1948.

Below: Regina Gelb, a Polish survivor, in June 1945.