Christmas In the Concentration and Slave Camps

 CHRISTMAS IN THE CAMPS

I wanted to write something about Christmas for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy this year that I hadn’t written before.  I’ve been writing columns for the paper for 7 years now, and a number of these columns have been about Christmas.  I’ve written, for example, about our first Christmas in Chicago after we came from the DP camps in Germany, and I’ve written about what it was like buying Christmas trees with my parents in the neighborhoods around Humboldt Park when I was a kid, and I’ve written about what Christmas celebrations were like in our family in the 1950s.

Thumbing through those old columns, it suddenly occurred to me that there is one thing I had never written about.  

I had never written about what Christmas was like for my parents in the German camps during World War II.  My parents often spoke to my sister Donna and me about what Christmas was like when they were children living with their parents in Poland, but my parents never told us anything about what their Christmases were like when they were prisoners in the German concentration and slave labor camps.

When I first realized this, it surprised me because my parents weren’t silent about their experiences in the camps.  My father couldn’t stop talking about the terrible things that happened to him during his almost 5 years in Buchenwald.  He told me about friends who were starved, beaten to death, castrated, and crucified by the German guards.  He told me about seeing women having their breasts cut off by German soldiers.  Although mother was less open about her experiences, she shared stories about seeing women raped and babies murdered in the slave labor camps.    

My mom and dad told me these terrible stories, so why didn’t they tell me about what Christmas was like in the camps?

The answer is pretty obvious, and I felt it as soon as I asked myself the question.

Researching this question, I found that Christmases in the camps – not surprisingly – were hell doubled down over and over.  

The German guards seldom allowed for any kind of celebration of Christmas by the prisoners.  Mostly, the guards wanted the prisoners and slave laborers to do what they did every day, work in the freezing cold until they could not work anymore.  There are also stories of the guards doing perverse and disturbing things to the prisoners during the Christmas season.  In one photograph from Buchenwald, a pile of bodies appears near a series of Christmas wreaths.  In another camp, prisoners were ordered to carry soil, and those who did not carry enough were shot.  Some of those who were shot were piled under a Christmas tree.  In another camp, prisoners were called out into the freezing cold to sing Christmas carols, and they sang there until they froze to death.

Despite this violent abuse by the guards, some prisoners in the camps struggled to make the day feel like Christmas.  They exchanged small gifts, things like pieces of bread or Christmas greetings that they printed on pieces of paper they found in the dirt.  Other prisoners gathered together in the barracks late on Christmas Eve to sing a hushed Christmas carol or share some cherished Christmas memories or say a silent prayer.  The lucky prisoners and slave laborers did this without the guards finding out.  The unlucky ones were beaten or killed.  

Reading through these accounts of what Christmas was like in the slave labor and concentration camps, I immediately came to understand why my parents never shared such memories with my sister Donna and me.  My parents were protecting us from the world they experienced and survived.  They didn’t want us to live with the grief and suffering and pain they knew so well and would never be able to shake free from. 

My parents’ silence was the best Christmas present they could give us.

— 

My latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish paper in America.

My Dad was an Alcoholic

My dad didn’t drink during World War II.  He was a Polish slave laborer in Buchenwald Concentration Camp for four years, and in the camps there wasn’t much drinking or even eating.  Right after the camps were liberated, however, he searched for something to drink and found it.  Later in the refugee camps that he and my mom spent six years in, he ran a still and made booze as soon as he could set one up.

He drank for the next 30 years.  He didn’t drink on weekdays.  Weekdays were for working and making the money that the family needed to live in America.  He was absolutely sober those days.  He wouldn’t touch a drop.  

Weekends, however, were different. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why he drank, but now I do.  My dad drank because he was trying to push back the memory of all the terrible things he had seen in the war.  He hoped that the drinking would cut him off from his memories and from the outside world.  He wanted to isolate himself in that piece of himself that hadn't seen men castrated, women bayoneted in the breast, babies thrown in the air and shot.  He never found that peaceful place.  

So he drank.  Fridays when he came home from the factory where he worked, he would go to the kitchen and take out a bottle of vodka and fill a glass and sit down at the table and drink.  If anyone was in the kitchen with him, he would smile at them and say “to your health.”  He would finish that glass and then take another and another.  He would drink until he passed out.  Saturday, he would begin with beer in the morning and switch to vodka in the afternoon.  Sundays, after church, he’d go to the bar on the corner for his Sunday drink, a free glass of booze that would lead to another and another.  

The peace that he sought never came.  No matter how much he drank, the memories of the war still haunted him.  Sometimes, when he would pass out from the drinking, we could hear him in his sleep weeping or screaming from those memories.  

When he was 56 he realized that the drinking wasn’t helping him, and he sought out a psychiatrist.  He gave him Librium, a medication that’s supposed to relieve anxiety.  It didn't help my dad.  He went back to drinking, and the drinking got so bad that the psychiatrist talked about the possibility that my dad would have to be committed to an asylum of some kind.  

What finally saved him from drinking was my mom telling him she would leave him if he continued to drink.  He couldn't stand that thought.  Her leaving would have been his end, his suicide.  

She was his church