For Exchange to Palestine

Lexie Keston

Child Survivor of the Holocaust 

I was born in Krakow on 20 November 1938. I wasn’t quite one year old when Poland was overrun by Nazi Germany.

My very first memories are of my mother, father and maternal grandmother living together. I believe this was in the Krakow Ghetto. I remember that my grandmother was hidden almost continuously from the Germans. The method was simple: she lay on a bed completely covered in doonas to make it appear that the bed was empty. At this time, my grandmother was not only quite elderly, but also frail and blind. I don't know how long she was with us. I do not remember her being taken away – I only know that from one day to the next, she was no longer with us. The Nazis found her, took her away, and eliminated her.  I never saw her again.

The other memory I have of the Ghetto is my habit of sitting outside on the front steps of the building where we were living. I did this even though my mother had told me not to.

On day someone passed me and I fell off the steps onto broken glass and severely cut my top lip. I went inside, bleeding profusely with my top lip cut into two. I remember my mother being absolutely shocked and devastated. She took me to a very fine doctor who happened to be in our vicinity. This doctor sewed up my lip with a long needle without anaesthetic. My mother was crying, but I was the one who consoled her, telling her that it did not hurt and I did not cry. This incident left me with the smallest of scars - thanks to the fine surgeon who did the operation. Had he not been such a fine surgeon, I could have been left with an ugly, disfiguring scar. That is what I think my mother was fearful of. However, it worked out fine. Unless I point out this little blemish, no one notices it to this day.

What year was this? I can only say that it was prior to l943 –

because that’s when we were transported to Bergen-Belsen. I don’t remember the trip from Krakow to Germany. It was probably by train.

The Bergen-Belsen camp was located near Hanover, in north-western Germany, on the site of a former army camp. In 1943 a section of it was designated as an internment camp for European Jews who were to be exchanged for German citizens held by the Allies. It was transformed from a prisoner-exchange camp into a ‘regular’ concentration camp in March 1944. The Bergen-Belsen Book of Remembrance records that poor sanitary conditions, epidemics and starvation led to the deaths of thousands of inmates. One of them was Anne Frank, who died in March 1945, just a few weeks before the camp was liberated. By the end of the war, hundreds of concentration camps had been erected across German-occupied Europe.

My memories of Bergen-Belsen are of a time when I was constantly sick. My mother was always worrying about me, as she had no medications with which to help me or to alleviate my sickness or pain.

I remember one occasion when my mother went to the fence separating the barracks. There would be some sort of illegal barter going on at these places. I do not know what my mother was trying to obtain – maybe it was an aspirin for me. She got caught. As bad luck would have it, some high-ranking Nazi was visiting the camp that day, and we feared that my mother would be made an example of, maybe even put to death. However, it didn’t happen. What punishment she received I do not know – but she came back, and I continued to be with her.

I have no memory of ever being hungry. The only food I remember receiving was a watery soup with a few vegetables pieces in it. There was a certain woman who was in charge of distributing the food. I remember if too many vegetable bits were in the ladle, she would drop most of them back into the big pot. I remember this woman as being fatter than the rest of the people there. I know we were given bread, but I only remember the soup.

The latrines were an awful, scary experience for a little child. They were as illustrated in the Steven Spielberg film Schindler’s List: a long plank that we sat on over a cesspit. I always feared that I might fall off the plank, though I never did.

I remember transports arriving more and more frequently. We could hear terrible happenings in the barracks next to us. People were beaten and we could hear dreadful screams through the night. The next day, the dead and injured were taken out of the barracks. I don’t know whether we could see anything, whether the reports we had were facts or just rumours. I remember that it happened more and more often and I remember the discussions about this.

The section of the Bergen-Belsen camp that my parents and I were in was Section 3, the Sonderlager or ‘special camp’. In this camp were Jews who held special documents such as foreign passports or entry papers. My father, for example, had a Palestine passport, for he had gone to Palestine in the early 1930s. He had returned to Poland after a few years and then married my mother.

According to the Bergen-Belsen Book of Remembrance, the special camp held more than 9000 Jews. Amongst these were two transports of Jews that arrived in late 1943 and 1944 from Poland (including some 2400 from Warsaw, Lwow and Krakow), France, Holland and other parts of Europe. Despite their documents, which their holders had considered a ticket to life, these Polish Jews were deported to their deaths at Auschwitz by mid-1944.

During the final months of the war, however, several groups of these ‘exchange Jews’ were transported out of Axis-occupied Europe. German authorities transferred several hundred to neutral Switzerland, and at least one group of 222 Jewish detainees was transferred from Bergen-Belsen by way of neutral Turkey to British-controlled Palestine.

By April 1945, Allied armies had pushed deep into Germany from both east and west, and British troops were approaching Bergen-Belsen. So, in order to keep the remaining ‘exchange Jews’ in their hands, the Germans decided to transfer them to the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia.

To implement this scheme, three trains crammed with prisoners left Bergen-Belsen in early April. My parents and I were on the first of these trains. We were marched out of the camp on a very cold Friday morning, the 6^th of April, to walk the six kilometres to the station. I have no personal memory of this. It is, however, well documented by others.

On the way to the train, the inmates saw a neighbouring village for the first time in two years. In it, Germans were living normal lives in houses with curtains and bicycles leaning against the gate. The villagers seemed untouched and unmoved by the horrors going on in the nearby camp.

My train left with some 2500 people – 400 from the special camp, and 2100 others. Among them were many different nationalities, including Dutch, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles and others. We spent seven days aboard that train, and in those seven days it covered only 80 kilometres. There were constant stops and starts as the officer in charge awaited orders as to what to do with us. His final order had been to take us across the Elbe, but he didn’t follow it. Perhaps he realised that the Americans were very close and that by letting us live, he had a chance of securing his own survival. However, many of his prisoners did not live to see the imminent downfall of the Nazis, or the day of their own liberation.

Again I must say that I have no personal recollection of this horrendous journey, in unhygienic conditions, with many of the prisoners on the brink of starvation. I do however vividly remember getting off the train when the Nazis who were guarding us fled from the approaching Americans. I remember very clearly picking up a gun dropped by the fleeing guards. I also remember that this gun was promptly grabbed from me. That I have never forgotten, and I remember it as if it happened yesterday. It was Friday, 13 April, 1945, at Farsleben, 16 kilometres from Magdeburg.[1]

I now know that our classification in Bergen-Belsen was not ‘Jew’, which was the usual classification for Jewish prisoners. Rather, we were classified as ‘For Exchange to Palestine’.

Altogether we were in Bergen-Belsen from 15.07.1943 to 13.04.1945 – nearly two years. This is recorded on the identity documents that were issued to us by the United States Army after our liberation.

Shortly after liberation, we were taken to the town of Hillersleben. There we were lodged in houses belonging to Germans. I don’t know whether the occupants had fled when the Americans arrived, or whether they were evicted so that we could stay in their houses. I remember the house where we stayed had a beautiful bed with sheets and doonas. There were lots and lots of toys, more than I had ever seen in my life. In one of the rooms there was a large table totally covered in toy soldiers.

I don't know whether it was in Hillersleben, but we were still in Germany when a number of Zionists came with the aim of organising transportation for people who wanted to go to Palestine. Being now six years old, I immediately decided that this was where I wanted to go. My mother found me in the queue and asked me what I was doing there, to which I replied, ‘I want to go to Palestine.’ As she took me away, she told me that this was only for the ‘orphans’ and not for me. Why I wanted to go I don’t know. Maybe I thought that where I was had been so horrible that any other place on earth would be much better.

After a short time, many of the Jews who were now ‘stateless’ in Germany were dispersed to different European countries. We were sent to Belgium. During the five years we stayed in Belgium, we remained ‘stateless’ citizens.

Shortly after our arrival, I was sent to the sanatorium Preventorium Leon Poriniot at Biez, where I spent almost a whole year. I was hospitalised to cure me of TB and of my inability to keep any food in my stomach. I used to vomit every day, and I also suffered from some other health problems. After the years of deprivation and starvation I needed medical help – which I did receive in that wonderful place. It probably saved my life. Had the war dragged on for much longer, I don’t think I would have survived.

While I was in the sanatorium, my parents were living in Brussels, trying to re-build their lives. I remember when I came back from the sanatorium I had forgotten how to speak Polish and could only speak French. For a little while I could not communicate with my own parents, and I think that was a devastating experience for them. However, it was not too long before I was able to speak Polish again, so it was a very short-lived trauma.

I think that my health was still poor. My parents found a kind woman, in a village called Ruisbroek in the countryside outside Antwerp, who wanted me to come and stay with her. I did this on a number of occasions. She, her husband and her son were all very good to me. The family were Flemish Catholics by the name of Van Roy. Mrs Van Roy looked after me well and fed me lots of good food at a time when food rationing was still in force. The Van Roys owned a butcher shop, and the servings of meat at dinnertime were gigantic. When I was with this family I suffered from too much food rather than from too little – so much so that I used to be sick from over-eating.

Mrs Van Roy developed a special bond with me and was very keen to adopt me, although she had three children from her first marriage and a son, Flor, from her current marriage, her second. This, of course, did not and could not happen. She asked me while I stayed with her to call her Moe, the Flemish word for mother, and of course I did. I spent some of the happiest times in my life there. I used to play with one of her grand-daughters whose name was Florence. She was a couple of years older than me. We played every day, going on bicycle rides and picnics and skating on the frozen river. To me, that place was paradise. The Van Roy family home had a beautiful big garden, with many fruit trees. The one I liked best was the cherry tree. The cherries were a two-coloured variety, white and red. She also had a little foxy terrier dog. He was not that fond of children, and once he actually bit me. But I wasn’t frightened of him, and liked to play with him and give him pieces of meat.

Every Sunday morning we used to go Mass at the local church. It was so large, it could have been a cathedral. I enjoyed going to church with Mrs Van Roy. But I

 remember many times in Brussels, when I was in the street outside the apartment block where we lived, children would yell abuse at me. ‘Sale Juif!' they would shout, ‘Dirty Jew!’ Why did those children do that? After all the suffering of the Holocaust, there still was so much anti-Semitism in European countries. And today it is on the increase once again.

We spent five years in Belgium. By the end of 1949, there were grave fears amongst the Jewish people living in Europe that there would be another world war, and many decided that it would be safer for them to leave Europe for places as far away as possible. No one could contemplate a repetition of what had happened only a few years earlier. My parents also thought this way, and they applied to emigrate to the United States, Canada and Australia. The Australian visa arrived first, so to Australia we went. We sailed from Genoa aboard a ship called the Surriento, with six to eight people to a cabin. We arrived in Sydney many weeks later, in January 1950.

On our arrival at the Woolloomooloo docks, we were met by people from the Jewish Welfare Association who took us to a beautiful place, a boarding house the association had in the harbourside suburb of Greenwich. I remember being in our room on the first floor, and seeing a hibiscus bush with its beautiful large colourful flowers for the first time. I often used to look out and admire these blooms. Sydney, Australia, looked beautiful from my window.

I went to school, and life became fairly normal for me. I picked up English fairly quickly and easily. But throughout my school years, I had a problem admitting to anyone that I was Jewish. The conscious memories and fears of the war were very much still with me.

I did not like to hear any discussion of the war. Whenever my parents discussed the Holocaust with their survivor friends, I would just walk away. I did not want to hear any of it or think of it. I wanted it totally out of my life.

I did find that I was most comfortable with Jewish friends. I was always worried with non-Jews – worried that they might be anti-Semitic and thus dislike me once they knew that I was Jewish. However, I will say that since I came to Australia, I have never, ever personally been the target of any anti-Semitic insult or slur. To me Australia is the most wonderful country that I could possibly live in. I am most grateful that fate destined me to come to this beautiful country with the most amazing people of goodwill and big hearts.

Recently I had the incredible good fortune to learn more of the liberation of our train at Farsleben. Because of a chance meeting with two people who work at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, I discovered the names of two U.S. tank commanders who were the first to arrive at our train after the guards abandoned it on Friday, 13 April 1945. They were sergeants George C. Gross and Carrol ‘Red’ Walsh.

I also came upon some eleven photos taken on that day by Sgt Gross and his commanding officer. The photos were of the train and some of the survivors from it. When I looked at those pictures  of the desolate region and the physical appearance of the survivors, it just made me cry.

I must confess that the photos did not trigger any memory in me, though I found them a stark record of the events of that day. As much as I tried and wanted to remember, I did not.  The only memory I have of the day of my liberation is picking up the gun.

Finding and seeing these photos was a most emotional discovery for me. That it happened some 60 years after the actual event is almost impossible to believe.

The following passage is from ‘A Train Near Magdeburg’, George C. Gross’s memoir of that day:

On Friday, April 13, 1945 I was commanding a light tank column of the 743^rd Tank Battalion and the 30^th Infantry Division, moving south near the Elbe River toward Magdeburg, Germany. We received the news of the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which cast a pall upon our victories. I had no inkling of the further grim news that morning would bring. Suddenly I was pulled out of the column, along with my buddy Sergeant Carrol Walsh in his light tank, to accompany Major Clarence L. Benjamin of the 743d in a scouting foray to the east of our route. Major Benjamin had come upon some emaciated Finnish soldiers who had escaped from a train full of starving prisoners a short distance away. The major led our two tanks, each carrying several infantrymen from the 30^th Infantry Division on its deck, down a narrow road until we came to a valley with a small train station, where a motley assemblage of passenger compartments cars and boxcars had pulled onto a siding. There was a mass of people sitting or lying listlessly about, unaware as yet of our presence. There must have been guards, but they evidently ran away before or as we arrived, for I remember no firefight. Our taking of the train, therefore was no great heroic action but a small police operation. The heroism that day was all with the prisoners on the train. Major Benjamin took a powerful picture just as a few of the people became aware that they had been rescued. It shows people in the background still laying about trying to soak up a bit of energy from the sun, while in the foreground a woman has her arms flung wide and a great look of surprise and joy on her face as she rushes towards us.

I pulled up my tank beside the small station house at the head of the train and kept it there as a sign that the train was under American protection now. Carroll Walsh’s tank was sent back to the battalion. I do not remember how long the infantrymen stayed with us. My recollection is that my tank was alone for the afternoon and night of the 13^th. A number of things happened fairly quickly. We were told that the commander of the 823^rd Tank Destroyer battalion had ordered all the burgermeisters of nearly towns to prepare food and get it to the train promptly and were assured that the Military Government would take care of the refugees the following day.

As we stood in front of the tank a long line of men, women and little children formed itself spontaneously to greet us. Each would introduce himself or herself by both the origin and the home from which the person had been seized. Then each would shake hands in a solemn and dignified assertion of individual worth. What stamina and regenerative spirit those brave people showed!

Little children came around with shy smiles, and mothers with proud smiles happily pushed them forward to get their pictures taken.

How sad it was that we had no food to give immediately, and no medical help, for during my short stay with the train sixteen or more bodies were carried up the hillside to await burial, brave hearts having lost the fight against starvation before we could help them.[2]

I have developed a warm relationship with these two wonderful men.  George is now 83 and a retired professor of English living in San Diego, California, while Carrol is 85 and a retired judge of the Supreme Court of New York State. We have exchanged many e-mails and I cherish very much the experience of having found these two men. In my heart and soul I honour them for being part of my liberation and enabling me to regain a normal life.  I think that I also mean something to them – for they also never thought that someone from that day 61 years ago would find them and have the opportunity to say ‘thank you.’

I have also obtained many articles from Germany that have helped me gain a broader understanding of my years in Bergen-Belsen. I am grateful for the help extended to me by the people from the Bergen–Belsen Memorial.

This part of my story would never have come to light, if not for the wonderful work of Matthew Rozell, a history teacher at Hudson Falls High School in New York State.  It was his website which provided the opportunity for the photographs and the story written by George Gross to be exposed to the world.  So in fact the website was the catalyst for my discovery of the information on my liberation. 

George Gross’s account is also an unbiased witness testimony of the events of the day of my liberation, Friday, 13 April, 1945.  George is not Jewish. His account is an impartial illustration of Hitler’s other war – the ‘War Against the Jews’ – and carries all the more weight for that.  It is a valuable counterbalance to the distortions of revisionists, who are still trying to minimise the sufferings of the Jews during the Holocaust.

I admire the survivors who speak of their experiences, who teach the younger generations, and who serve as guides in the permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Sydney Jewish Museum. I still don’t think I have come to terms with my Holocaust past. I think it still controls and affects my daily life. I think that having discovered so much more information such a long time after the war, I may be on my way to finding closure and some inner peace.

 My life now consists of spending quality time with my two grand-daughters, nine-year-old Jessica and her sister Rebecca, aged seven. They are indeed a core part of my life. My little family consists of Jessie and Becky’s parents Helen and Anthony Epstein, together with my younger daughter Anne.

Every day, with great interest, I read newspapers on the Internet, and try to keep informed as to what is happening in the world. I retain a very special interest in Israel. To me a peaceful Israel is of the greatest importance to world Jewry. I believe the need for a Jewish Sanctuary in Israel is of paramount importance to Jewish people everywhere. Had we had an independent State of Israel in the 1930s and 1940s, there would have been no Holocaust of six million Jews.

Hitler did not win.

click here for more of  Ms. Keston's story and her reunion with George Gross and Carrol Walsh, the tank drivers in this story, 60+ years later...

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