Auschwitz, Paintings and Torah Scrolls

BBC Radio’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects” takes objects and tells history. Peter Lewis interviews his uncle Bryn Peterson, a Welsh WWII Prisoner of War about the painting of his later wife Peggy, painted in the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland.

In 1939 Bryn met Peggy before he went off to war. He told her that he would come back to her. Bryn was picked up by German soldiers six days after he arrived in Belgium. He thought that they were there to shoot them on sight, instead the Germans came up to them and shook their hands. They were taken to Thorn, Poland and Bryn escaped. By jumping trains he almost made it to Vienna, Austria but he was captured and taken back to Thorn. Whilst in Thorn, a compound of twenty barracks, Bryn learned German. He said, “After Welsh German comes easy. They used me as a translator.”  Bryn remembers the horror of his time in the camp. “All you would think about was food” He reflects, “Once there was a man who was sick, he had diarrhea but he kept eating.” He would escape at every chance he could. Bryn would volunteer for the working parties. Bryn and about 30 other British prisoners were taken to Auschwitz to work in a metal shop. “I used to see the naked Jewish bodies. Women, babies, men. All nude. They were gassed and then they would burn. Even the Germans would talk quietly amongst the dead.”

In Auschwitz, Bryn worked with a Polish Jewish boy, a painter. “I pulled out the picture of Peggy that I had and he asked me, in broken English, if he wanted me to paint it. So he did. He couldn’t sign it because he a Jew. So I don’t know who he was.” Bryn kept it hidden by putting it on his back (Measurements or visual was not found on the website). Bryn was taken from Thorn and was marched with 12,000 other prisoners. Still marching a horse was killed, “The prisoners were like wolves, they started eating it skin and all.” Bryn made his last escape and made it to the American line of defenses.

The picture hangs on the wall in Bryn’s Welsh home as a reminder oh something hopeful in a time so evil. The mystery of the painter’s identity is a mystery that will never be solved, the painter might have been put to death in Auschwitz along with millions of other Jews there. Bryn says, “I would have liked to find out who he was. I thank him. It all comes back to me. "

The second of the podcast was a first person account of  Helen Goldkind from the First Person Podcast Series-Conversations with Holocaust Survivors reflecting on her removal and arrival to Auschwitz sixty years later. 

Helen Goldkind arrived to Auschwitz with her mother, brother and grandfather. As night approached they could smelled something horrible, "Like they were burning flesh". They opened the cattle cars they had been traveling in and the Germans screamed fro them to get out. Everything they had with them, any luggage or possesions were thrown into a ditch. Helen's heartbreaking accounts goes as follows, "And my grandfather came with the Torah scrolls and he wouldn’t think of parting with the Torah scrolls because, first of all, it’s a sin to throw it down. 
And my mother looked around and all of a sudden, she sees that they’re beating him up. They were telling him to throw the Torah scrolls in the ditch. ...

I saw this with my eyes. That’s why it’s so difficult for me. And they were screaming. My mother looked fairly young, but she was holding on, I had a six-year-old brother, and I don’t know, accidentally, or whatever it was, I wanted to know what was happening to him and he was already on the ground and they were still hitting him there.

And my heart cried out, “Somebody help him!” you know, this is my grandfather. Nobody came to… nobody came. [Crying] And then… 

My mother was still holding onto my brother and he loved books. We weren’t rich, so if we ever got a present that was a book…and he was holding on to one book and my mother saw what happened to my grandfather. She was afraid that they were going to also beat him up, so she was begging him to throw that book into the ditch and he wouldn’t do that.

Then she was negotiating it with him. Finally he took the book and gave it to my mother and he was watching my mother throwing that book into that ditch and she just cried. And then all of a sudden, one of those monsters came and they pulled my brother away from my mother and he cried. [Crying]

And my mother heard him, and she ran after him, and she was telling those monsters that he’s only six years old, he will not survive without me. And they were beating her up and she fell and they kicked her around with those big boots.

And finally, you know, when they saw she had difficulties getting up, they pushed her to the left and she went with my brother. Many times, when I think about it, I say maybe if she wouldn’t run after, maybe she would survive because she was fairly young. In the other hand, I say to myself, you know, my little brother didn’t go to his death crying. [Crying] She was there with him. That was the last I saw my mother."

 -Meg Singer