Ruta's Closet by Keith Morgan

Author:Keith Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unicorn Press Ltd

IT IS NOT clear how many were taken in the Kinderaktion: Yerush-almi recorded that the Komandant claimed 816 people were removed. However, the Judenrat scribe speculated that the number was nearer 1,000 as the trucks had made 21 return trips during that dreadful day. Some documentation showed up in later years and testimony about the event received at various trials and inquiries. How much of it is trustworthy is up for debate. The smallest number is 570 children but others claim that in excess of 700 of Shavl’s children were taken, with the remainder made up of seniors and the sick.

The ghetto census of 1942 offers a clue as to why a larger number may have been taken. At the time of the count, there were more than 1,000 children under 12 years of age. During the Kinderaktion in November 1943, they would all have been targets for removal. In the intervening year, some of those children were undoubtedly smuggled out to safety. Others may have moved with their parents when they were reassigned to another work camp following the closure of the Kaukazas ghetto weeks before the Kinderaktion. Others may have perished when the Nazis simply moved their parents out and shot them in the nearby woods.

Some, like Ruta, survived the round up and stayed in hiding until a safe house beyond the fence could be found. In light of all of this, a transport of more than 700 children to Auschwitz seems very plausible in the absence of trustworthy documentation.

At the station, 100 or more of the captives were loaded into each of the 30-foot long, seven-foot wide wagons before the heavy doors shut. There was no air, little food and water and the daylight barely penetrated the narrow slats high above the hard floor.

What happened to them? After the war, there were gruesome unverified stories, published in the Russian controlled press. Survivors recall some newspapers reported the Germans drained the children’s blood in order that casualties returning from the battlefront might receive transfusions. The Russians had their own nefarious reasons for spreading such tales of inhumanity. It seems unlikely given the Nazi aversion to anything Jewish.

Answers that are more realistic are in accounts offered by witnesses to the train’s departure and a lone observer at the destination. At nightfall on that terrible day, railway workers returning to the ghetto reported seeing a powerful 52-series German locomotive build up a head of steam before pulling cattle cars full of human cargo out of the station for a destination that remained unannounced on the crackly public address system. However, Jewish workers in the maintenance yard recalled seeing the name Auschwitz daubed on some of the cars but the destination did not mean anything to them at the time.

Shortly after the train steamed away, the snow that threatened earlier began to fall, covering all traces of the evil that had blackened the rundown streets of the ghetto.

The train likely picked up more passengers on the way before reaching its final destination in Poland, more than 700 miles distant, two or three days later.

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