Lest we forget... Auschwitz +60

Mayer Franck is the last surviving Auschwitz inmate living in Finland

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By Anu Nousiainen
     
      It is a January afternoon in southern Helsinki, at the bottom of the rise known as Tähtitorninmäki. The high-roofed corridors of the Svenska Normallyceum echo, as the school is practically empty.
      Up the stairs, right down at the end of the long corridor, one lesson is nevertheless just about to begin. It is part of a voluntary history course, entitled Förintelsens historia, and the subject is the Holocaust, the mass extermination of Jews during the Second World War.
      The classroom is packed. More chairs have to be brought in from other rooms. Slim, pretty girls with long scarves and fur-collared parkas, highlights in their hair, ponytails. Fjällräven backpacks filled with books, long-haired boys carrying guitar-cases.
      Branded hip-hop jackets, Nike trainers. Finnish prosperity in action.
      An armchair has been lifted onto the dais at the front of the class. It’s for today’s guest.
      In a few moments it will be occupied - but only briefly as he seems to prefer to stand - by Mayer Franck, 76, who moved here from Poland after World War II. Franck is a former inmate of Auschwitz. A rare survivor.
     
The classroom is completely silent as Franck begins his story. It starts in Poland in the fall of 1939.
      Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1st. Poland fell within three weeks. Franck’s working-class family were driven out of their home and ordered to live in the Lodz Ghetto. Lodz held the second-largest Jewish community in Europe, second only to Warsaw. The city had nearly a quarter of a million Jews.
      In the ghetto, the 12-year-old Mayer was put into a factory making fur-lined greatcoats for the Germany army. His father died of dysentery.
      In September 1942, the Germans began to reduce the population of the ghetto. Only "productive specimens" were to be allowed to remain. The rest would be deported
      The residents were herded out into the street and told to stand in rows of five. The soldiers began to sort them. Mayer, his older sister and his younger sister, and their mother were ordered into a former hospital building.
      Mayer’s little sister asked her mother when they would be going home. The mother burst into tears.
      Mayer jumped out of a window and hid in a sewer pipe. When he crept back to the hospital at nightfall, there was nobody left there.
      His mother and his sisters had been taken to the Chelmno [Kulmhof] death-camp around 80 kilometres north-west of Lodz. They were ordered to strip naked and were gassed in the freight compartment of a van, using carbon monoxide from the vehicle’s exhaust pipe. Between 50 and 70 people at a time could be killed in this way.
     
Mayer Franck was 14 years of age and the last surviving member of his family. He managed to find a place to live with a neighbour in the ghetto, and he continued his work in the fur factory.
      As the Eastern Front moved towards Lodz in the spring and early summer of 1944, the Germans under Heinrich Himmler ordered the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. The residents, said the soldiers, were to be transported "to better camps". Chelmno was still active, though not for long. The Soviets were getting too close.
      When it became clear to the residents what was really happening, the Jews of Lodz tried to hide. There was no shortage of hiding places. The majority of the population had already been transported to their deaths.
      Mayer and some friends built themselves a hiding-place in an attic. The entrance was concealed behind a wardrobe, and the wardrobe had a removable back panel. After a day or two in hiding, they went out at night in search of food. Somewhere they found cabbages growing, and the boys boiled them on the stove of an empty and deserted apartment in the building.
      When German soldiers came looking for hideaways, they found a still-warm stove. The back panel was kicked in, and the boys were discovered.
     
Franck and the others were marched to the railyard and into a goods wagon packed with people. Women, children, men, all strangers to one another.
      The train journey lasted a full day and night. Nobody knew the destination. It was too far to be Chelmno. When the train finally came to a halt, some climbed onto the shoulders of the others to peer out through cracks in the shutters at the roofline.
      Outside were men in striped overalls. It was summer, perhaps July.
      Those up by the roof of the wagon asked the men where the train had arrived.
     
By now you could hear a pin drop in the classroom. All eyes are fixed on the small elderly man who stands in front of the school map hanging from the ceiling.
      "They urged us to say our farewells to our wives and children. We would all be going to..."
      And Franck points with his thumb towards the classroom ceiling.
      The train had arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and Vernichtungslager, or extermination camp.
     
This is a good place to pause. The upper secondary school kids are going on a study trip to Auschwitz this spring.
      It is the third Auschwitz trip organised by the school’s headmaster and history teacher Mikael Nyholm. Similar Holocaust courses with visits to concentration camps have been arranged in a few other schools around Finland, for example at Tampereen normaalikoulu (a teacher-training high school attached to the University of Tampere) under the direction of history teacher Christiane Jukka.
      Jukka arranged the first course after a 1997 Swedish study revealed the alarming fact that one in three of the Swedish youth respondents did not seem to believe in the Nazi atrocities.
      When Helsingin Sanomat carried out a similar study on Finnish 9th-grade pupils [in their last year of compulsory education] in 1998, slightly fewer than half of the 500 respondents were "completely certain" that the persecution of the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s had actually taken place. When the "pretty certain" respondents were added in, the figure rose to 90%, which is apparently around the standard European level.
     
At least it was a better response than that received recently by the BBC in Great Britain. When Britons were asked about Auschwitz, 45% of the 4,000 people interviewed had never heard of the place.
      There again, nearly one in three Finnish schoolkids thought that the ideology pursued by Adolf Hitler was Communism. Only one in two knew that Finland had fought alongside Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union during the Continuation War of 1941-44.
      Are schoolchildren no longer taught who the Nazis were and what they did? Britain’s 20-year-old Prince Harry, third in line to the throne, recently turned up at a fancy-dress party in an Afrika Korps desert uniform, complete with Swastika arm-band.
     
The Second World War is dealt with in history in the 8th-grade, in secondary school.
      Pupils go through the rise to power of Hitler, the 1935 Nuremberg Laws on Citizenship and Race, the Gestapo, and the ghettos.
      More than four hundred laws were passed in Germany during the 1930s to restrict the rights of Jews records, for instance, the WSOY textbook Historia NYT ("History NOW").
      "All Finnish history textbooks published in recent years deal with the Holocaust, and some of them cover the subject in great depth", says Chief Inspector Kristina Kaihari-Salminen from the National Board of Education.
      Often the Nazi persecution of the Jews is treated separately in a lesson of its own. Thereafter the subject is also touched on in the study of Europe during the 1930s and 1940s and the creation of the Jewish state in Israel.
      The teacher can go back to the subject of the Holocaust in teaching the basics of democracy and dictatorship, or when going into human rights questions.
     
"But if pupils are asked what Auschwitz was, not all of them will necessarily know. As to what was done to the Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, that they can answer, or at least they should be able to answer", notes Kristina Kaihari-Salminen.
      In upper secondary school, the Holocaust is handled in some detail over one or two lessons.
      "I’d go so far as to claim these subjects are dealt with really well", says Kaihari-Salminen.
     
"The situation in Finnish schools is better than that in Sweden", argues history lecturer Eero Kuparinen from the University of Turku. Kuparinen has done research into anit-semitism, and is a member of the Finnish branch of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.
      Yad Vashem’s aim is to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and to act against anti-semitism and any kind of racism. The Finnish branch works in conjuction with the Institute in Jerusalem, which is the most important international forum for the documentation of the history of the Holocaust and for research into the subject.
      "The Nazis and the SS are enormously interesting to young people."
      Yes, but is that interest curiosity, or is it sympathy? In Kuparinen’s view it is curiosity. Sympathy should be seen more in the wider context of extreme-right movements.
      "Now we no longer have the sort of movement like that which revolved around Pekka Siitoin in his time. Yes, there is racism, and yes, black people get mugged in this country, but it is not channelled into any sort of admiration for the Nazis." Pekka Siitoin, who died in December 2003, was the best-known figure among Finland’s neo-Nazi circles.
      Kuparinen is well aware that the Internet is awash with Holocaust denialists. "And you can find material like this in prefectly readable Finnish, too."
      This very week, there have been threads on Finnish discussion groups and message boards about "the mixing of the races", anti-semitic slogans have been spread around, and gays and the handicapped have been given verbal stick - all popular old Nazi themes.
     
But let us now return to the classroom. The gathered pupils are still as quiet as mice. Nobody is playing with bits of paper. Nobody is doodling. No heads are dropping on desks.
      Mayer Franck goes on with his story:
      On arrival in Auschwitz, the passengers on the train were sorted and filtered many times over, until only a handful were left in the group to which he belonged. Children screamed for their mothers. The alsatian dogs held by the soldiers strained at their chain-leashes.
      A German soldier squeezed Franck’s skinny arm. So mager. "Yes, I’ve been working very hard", Franck replied. Their clothes were switched for prisoners’ striped pyjama uniforms.
      In the mornings they got hot dirty water to drink, then cabbage broth during the day. The days were spent outside, standing. In cold and wet weather the prisoners tried to huddle close together for warmth. A piece of bread was handed out in the evening.
     
Every day there was a new selection process. Franck would pinch his cheeks to bring colour to them and stand on tiptoe to look older, and healthier - like someone who could still be put to forced labour.
      A soldier’s finger picked out the prisoners. "That one! And that one there!"
      After some time, Franck was transferred by truck, along with 40 other young men, to the labour camp at Tzebin, with the task of repairing an oil refinery that had been damaged by Allied boming raids. The work was hard, and it was bone-chillingly cold outside.
      A truck came regularly from Auschwitz to take away the weaker ones among the workforce.
      "That one! And that one over there!"
     
January 1945 came around. Franck was still alive. Snow fell on the fields. The Red Army was approaching from the East. The labour camp was emptied out, and the prisoners were told to march westwards. There were many of these death-marches in the final weeks of the war.
      For two days and two nights they marched in the snow, unfed, and in thin clothing. More than half died along the way. When they finally reached a barn for the night, Franck hid in a pile of hay. It was a scene straight from the movies. A Nazi soldier prodded the hay with a pitchfork, but the prongs missed Franck’s crouching figure.
      He escaped.
     
A local farmer hid him, first in the space above the cowshed, and then in the pigsty, since the farmhouse was periodically visited by squads of German soldiers. He lay on top of a cupboard for six weeks, and his legs swelled up with the cold. He was infested with lice and fleas from head to toe.
      When the Soviet troops came, Franck headed back towards the East and finally made it to a Red Cross station for treatment.
     
The neighbouring family in Lodz that had adopted him on the death of his parents were all among the killed, but the brother of the family’s mother, who lived in Finland, came to Poland after the war to look for his relatives. He took Mayer Franck, then 18, back to Finland with him.
      Franck spent his first nights in Finland in the hospitz maintained by the women of the Helsinki YWCA. These days the place is Hotel Helka, on Pohjoinen Rautatiekatu. At the hospitz, they had paper sheets on the beds, and they were changed every day. They made a crinkling noise when you turned over in bed.
      The uncle put his adopted son to work immediately. The boy had, after all, learnt how to handle furs in the Lodz Ghetto. Later, Franck had his own furrier’s business in Töölö for many years.
      He married, and had three children, and now he has grandchildren, too.
      "I’ve lived here in Finland for 58 years. Not once in all that time has anyone come up to me and told me I’m Jude."
     
Mayer Franck has seen evil. And that, ultimately, is what these courses for the school pupils are all about: the study of evil.
      "About how a person can become so evil and under what circumstances", Mikael Nyholm explains the purpose of studying the Nazi era and the Holocaust.
      At the end of the course, after the visits to Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück, the intention is to look at what has happened in the world since 1945.
     
There is no shortage of material: in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge killed perhaps 1.7 million people between 1975 and 1979, either directly or by slow starvation. In the closed dictatorship of North Korea, who knows what atrocities have been committed over the decades.
      In Ruanda, genocide took wing in 1994: the Hutus managed in the space of around 100 days to butcher an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The wars in the Balkans were characterised by "ethnic cleansing". The concentration camps were back - in the Europe of the 1990s.
      The goings-on in Chechnya are constantly being swept under the carpet in the name of wars on terror. Most recently, we have seen the Darfur crisis in Sudan: bloodshed, battles, purges. The genocide word has already been uttered. The United Nations has threatened the Sudanese government with sanctions. But it is only threats.
      A little like those of the Allies during World War II. Many have questioned, for instance, the failure to bomb Auschwitz and other camps in order to put them out of service, even at the risk of prisoners’ lives being lost.
     
The Holocaust has often been regarded as a unique event in world history. At the Nazi extermination camps the active killing of people was the end itself, whereas during the purges instigated in the Soviet Union by Josef Stalin more people died, but most succumbed to starvation and disease.
      "But even if it is unique, it is not necessarily a one-off thing. What happened once, could happen again", says Eero Kuparinen.
      And that is why Vergessen darf man nicht. We can never forget.
      "George Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat and relive it. The Holocaust shows us where whipping up a people and evincing negative racial stereotypes can lead us."
     
On Thursday, the world will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by shocked Red Army soldiers. In Finland, too, January 27th has been designated a day to reflect and remember the victims of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution.
      Every January, there are fewer survivors of the Nazi camps left alive.
      "In a sense the emotional link with the Holocaust has already been broken. It has changed the attitude towards Jews in a more negative direction. Modern generations feel that they are no longer responsible for what went down in the 1920s through to the 1940s. They do not feel they have anything to apologise to the Jews for. Now already one can hear people asking whether all this dragging up of old matters hasn’t gone on long enough", ponders Kuparinen.
      But in the school classroom on Unioninkatu, the upper secondary pupils have a live connection with Auschwitz standing right in front of them: Mayer Franck. He knows that these visits are important.
      This is how the memory of Auschwitz will be carried forward to the next generation. When these kids eventually have children of their own, they will almost certainly tell them that they once met an old man who had been a prisoner at Auschwitz. And that his name was Franck, but he had on his left forearm a crudely-tattooed identification number: B-10197.
     
An hour and a half has passed. "OK. Ask me something", urges Mayer Franck. He knows that on school visits nobody generally puts a hand up to ask a question.
      This time there are two. Yes, he does look at films and documentaries about concentration camps, but he is not very enthusiastic about them. Yes, sometimes it is difficult to live with memories like these. Now they come back to haunt the mind, particularly at night, when lying awake. Mornings can be bad, too.
      Franck looks just a shade tired: he has ignored the armchair and remained standing throughout. But an almost mischievous grin flashes across his face.
      "Well, children. I hope you all enjoy a good and peaceful life. Did you understand everything I told you?"
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.1.2005


Links:
  Jewish Virtual Library: Concentration Camps
  Jewish Virtual Library: Auschwitz-Birkenau (table of contents)
  Jewish Virtual Library: Auschwitz-Birkenau (a short history)
  Jewish Virtual Library: The Lodz Ghetto
  Jewish Virtual Library: Forced Labour (table of contents)
  Jewish Virtual Library: Dora-Mittelbau (Nordhausen), an infamous forced-labour camp producing V-2 rockets - and arguably the cradle of modern space flight
  The Forgotten Camps

ANU NOUSIAINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
anu.nousiainen@hs.fi