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