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The Butterfly The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. Perhaps if the sun's tears Would sing against a white stone Such, such a yellow Is carried lightly 'way up high. It went away I'm sure because It wished to kiss the world goodbye. For seven weeks I've lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto. But I have found what I love here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut branches in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here, In the ghetto. Written by Peter Friedman Born January 7, 1921 Died in Auschwitz - September 29, 1944 Adolph Hitler and his Nazi government had two clear agendas and two separate wars. The first was godless and the other "holy". These wars were fought parallel to each other and the ideology behind each was the dogma of the Nazi government (National Socialist Movement). The first war was against liberal democracies and communism. The second war was against the Jewish people of Europe. The second War was not decided on after Nazism rose to power - it was core doctrine from the very beginning Hitler's hatred of Jews was present when he wrote Mein Kampf (My | j Struggle) in 1925 when he was imprisoned. His intentions were clear, "I believe thatj I am acting in the spirit of Almighty God; in defending myself from the Jews, I am dojng God's work." It continued until the end of the war and is evident when Hienrich Himmler, the head of the SS, said," It has been an appalling task for us to kill the Jewish people. Only the SS knows what it means to see a hundred corpses, or five hundred, or a thousand, lying side by side. This is a page of glory in our history that is never to be j written... We had the moral right, we had the duty to destroy these people, who want ;d to destroy us We have exterminated a germ ". This war against the Jewish peopl e was fought relentlessly to the bitter end. Nazism rose to power with an unambiguous hatred of Jews. The problem of what to do with the Jews was not so clearly defined. In the beginning when Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, his policy consisted of isolation and expulsion. He issued a decree explaining, "...anyone descended from non-Aryan, especially Jewish, parents or grandparents. One parent or grandparent classifies the descendent as non- Aryan.. . especially if of the Jewish faith." In 1934, Jewish people were banned fronj the German Labor Force, were not allowed health insurance, and prohibited from obtain ng legal qualifications. The situation for the Jewish community rapidly deteriorated unt 1 they had absolutely nothing at all. Hitler wanted all Jews out of Germany and he was successful. By 1939, of the 500,000 Jewish people that had lived in Germany, 320,000 had emigrated to other countries. The remaining Jews left in Germany were completely ostracized from society. In 1935 and 1936, the Gestapo (German Police) were placed above the law. pie SS Deathshead division was established to guard the concentration camps already in place for the homeless, unemployed, alcoholics, disabled, and sickly. In 1938, the t^azis invaded Austria and captured it. In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and conquered it wilhin 18 days. Now the second stance by Hitler and the Nazis was to segregate all the Jewish people into ghettos. Between 1939 and 1942 in all of Eastern Europe, people of Jew sh ancestry had their homes, businesses, income, and freedom completely taken away. They were all forced into Jewish resettlement ghettos unable to take anything with them. In 1941, Hitler's policy began to take on a sudden, sharp focus. The Nazis were determined to kill every living Jew. In October 1941, the Gestapo issues a decree: Jews were henceforth prohibited from leaving Europe. Hitler's "Final Solution" was the complete annihilation and extermination of all Jewish people. The first mass killing grounds were in the Soviet Union. Special units along with the German Army were sent on a mission to "liquidate Jews". One million Jewish people died at the commencement of the Final Solution. This vile extermination continued on until the end of the war in 1945. Jewish people were systematically rounded up into the Jewish ghettos and concentration camps of Europe. The Nazis took the people that were useful to them and eradicated all the rest. By 1945 Hitler and hik Nazi Army had killed six million Jewish people at the altar of the Final Solution. This is the story of Lillian Kronburg, a Holocaust survivor. She was born Lil lan Gertler in the 1920's in Lublin, Poland. She was the oldest of five girls born to her father, a tailor, and her mother, a homemaker She distinctly remembers the German Jews immigrating from Germany and feeling that they must have done something wrong. "Why would a country just kick |you out if you hadn't done something bad?" Poland was becoming overrun with fleeing German Jews. At this time Lily had finished up the seven years of school provided fbr everyone but was unable to pay to attend high school. Her father, who had saved a little money, sent her to a vocational school where she learned to be a dressmaker. Lily claims, " 1 do believe this is what saved my life." In 1939, when Germany invaded and conquered Poland, she remembers being very frightened The conquering Germans began by throwing the Jews out of their Lublin homes. "They made us leave with nothing. They didn't care where the Jewish people went We lived two or three families to a room. They made the Jews their labor force. We were forced to wear armbands and there was constantly new laws of what we could and couldn't do. My father was forded to work making German clothes and I made dresses for German women. They called me the 'little dressmaker' - never by my name and they rarely looked at me. But the Ge|rman women were nice enough, they gave me extra rations if they had it" i In 1941, Lily and her family were driven out of Lublin, a polish city of200,0j)0, to a barbed wire Jewish resettlement ghetto. She remembers being taken to the Lublin Ghetto and how the police were brutalizing people in the street. Lily remembers, " One 3 mile away was Majdanek (a concentration and extermination camp). It was just like Auschwitz. Everyday we watched trucks bring in Jews from all over Europe. They started eliminating people in the camp in 1942. They gassed them or beat them alive." In 1942, they began "dismantling" the Lublin ghetto. "They took my mom and three of my sisters when I was not home one day and I never saw them again," Lily whispers sadly. Through one of the customers in the dxess shop, Lily found out what happened to her mother and sisters. "I thought that they had been sent to a labor camf Then one day a customer came in die shop and started talking to the German women. 'You know what they did with all the Jews' she said. 'They took them to the forest. There were ditches there to bury them in. They made them get undressed and then thjey shot them.' At that moment, I realized they weren't alive." Also that same year, her father and her other sister were taken from the ghetto and she never saw them again either. In November of 1942, the few remaining Jews in the ghetto were being roundjed up. 'There was no need for us anymore. One of my girlfriends said, 'Let's run. We might as well, they are going to kill us anyway.'" The women hid that night in an abandoned home. "We saw dead people lying all around." Lily remembers sadly. The two girls snuck through the barbed wire fence and were running when two Ukrainian soldiers with weapons caught up with them. When the Nazi soldiers questioned the girls they tried to bluff them and say they weren't Jewish The soldiers did not believe them "We were young and they were too. I gave them some money that I had and my gold ring from graduation. They let us go." The women separated because it was a great risk for them to be together. Lily remembers weeks of not knowing what to do and only moving around at night. "We slept in a different place every night - cellars, attics, anyplace." She dyed her hair blond and some Polish friends gave her a little money. Knowing that she would not see her family again and not having any other relatives in Lublin, she wanted to travel to Krakow where she thought there might still be a friend of her family. With the help of a Polish lady, she went to the train station and the womajn bought her a ticket for the two-day trip to Krakow, Poland. During her trip she says, They were rounding up Jewish people on the train. A Polish person could say to the police, 'I think she's a Jew' and they would take them off the train and shoot them or take them away. I was so frightened." Lily tried desperately to blend in with the other travelers. It is quite easy to see how Lily could become a "wallflower". She is very tiny with a soft voice and could melt away if she had to. She did this often throughout the war. Arriving in Krakow in the middle of the night on a Sunday, she had no identification papers and no place to sleep. She hesitantly inquired about a place to s^ay for the night. Someone told her about a house across from the train station where a woman would let her stay if she paid her. This is how she spent her first night in Krakow. She went bravely to the government offices soon after to inquire about the friend of her family. Upon finding her, she could help her very little. She gave her a little money but at this time she was trying to flee herself. "I read in the papers where a family was looking for a dressmaker. I went there. I told them I just came into the qity. They hired me. I asked if they would allow me a place to sleep in their home. They said yes. They got to like me. They had no knowledge that I was Jewish" Throughout this time, she secretly met other Gentle-posing Jews. She needed help to acquire false identification papers. She was able to locate a registration certificate- which said she was 5 born in a part of Poland then occupied by Russian troops (which made it untraceable)! Lillian was very unsure about her safety. " I was always looking over my shoulder and I was always frightened. I tried to move around at night because the picture on the identification card did not look much like me and I knew at night they wouldn't be able to tell it wasn't me as easily. I didn't look 100 percent Jewish or Polish, but I got away with it. I got away living as a gentile until May 1, 1944." Previously, a woman had come into the shop and inquired about Lily making a dress for her. She said she would be back at a certain time. The woman did not arrivje, however, two policemen did They asked for her identification papers and took her tp the German police headquarters. "I didn't fight. I knew if I did they would beat me.M They j threw her into a Krakow jail. Where she stayed for some time and again was used asja dressmaker. She saw her future husband in this jail but she never spoke to him the whole time she was there. I At this time Russian troops were advancing toward Krakow. The Germans retreated taking their Jewish prisoners with them. Lily was moved to the ill-fated Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. She showed me her Auschwitz tattoo beginning with an "A" and followed by 6 numbers - her prison identification numbe \ Never again was she called by her name - only her number. "This they did to make jt impersonal. You were just a number to them." She said they slept five to a wooden bunk with 1 blanket. They were fed, not regularly, three meals a day. "Breakfast was contaminated water that often gave peo ale diarrhea. Lunch was a small piece of bread If I worked and did what they asked, I ^ot a I piece of bologna. Dinner was supposed to be soup but it was just a little warmed up 6 water with turnips. It didn't give us any strength for the work they wanted us to do - | people were dying like flies. We would have to move rocks and dig ditches " Any infraction of any kind was dealt with harshly by beatings. An infraction could be anything the soldiers wanted it to be. For example in Auschwitz, there were many reports of soldiers grabbing the caps off the heads of the Jewish prisoners and throwing I them close to the fence. When forced to go retrieve the caps the soldiers would shoot them for trying to escape and receive vacation days for it. Lily explained that you wefre scared all the time that you could be the next to receive brutal punishment or sent to t tie gas chambers. She explains how it was toward the end of Auschwitz, "In 1944, they were not gassing that many Jews anymore. Instead, people were dying of beatings, malnutrition, and torture." In December 1944, the Russians were advancing too close to Auschwitz. Thi? is an account of why and how Auschwitz closed and where the prisoners went: "Word came to us that we were going to evacuate Auschwitz. Why were we evacuating Auschwitz? It is because the Russians were coming close by. And so we all walked out of Auschwitz and we started walking and we started walking We walked for days I don't know how many days we walked. We walked and then we took cattle cars and then we walked again. And as we walked, we heard gun shots and they told us to keep on marching. We heard gunshots and they were shooting people in the back who could not keep up with all the walking, ft ended up being called the Death March because the ravines and the gutters, they were all red from blood. We were walking through Poland. Some people, who thought they could escape, would try and escape. Some people couldn't keep up with the walking anymore - they got weak. They threw all their bundles away and walked until they fell behind again and the Germans just shot them. We saw people being shot in their chests and in their backs. They were lying all over - on top of and behind trees - it was really like a war zone. And this is how we finally arrived in a camp called Bergen-Belsen. [tills Lily remembers how cold it was in the cattle cars. It was a harsh winter. She said that people were just crammed into them and were dying during the travel. "The first few days after we arrived there we starved. Then they brought in a soup kettle. Everybody ran for it and most of it was spilled." The normal menu at Bergen-Belsen was a cup of soup and a stale piece of bread a day but toward the war's end their diet consisted of turnips. Bergen-Belsen was established in 1943 as a special camp for prominent Jews who might be exchanged for German citizens interned in other countries. However, beginning in the spring of 1944, the situation deteriorated rapidly. As the German army retreated against advancing Allies, the concentration camps were evacuated and their prisoners were sent to Bergen-Belsen. The facilities of the camp were unable to accommodate the sudden influx of thousand of prisoners and all basic services- food, water, and sanitation - collapsed. Leading to an outbreak of disease. Lily contracted Typhoid Fever that late winter of 1945 in Bergen-Belsen. "They i put us in isolation - no medicine or care. I do not know how I made it through. People were dying all around me. They didn't even bury the people. They just put them in tents - the bodies stacked up. We had to see this." Anne Frank died of this disease in Match of 1945 in this same camp. I Days before the camp was liberated, Lily remembers the soldiers became a little friendly. The guards wanted them to go outside and get some sunshine. "They wanted us to look nice for the English," Lily believes. The following day only the Hungarians were guarding the camp. She remembers them as especially brutal guards. "That day they were shooting us back into the barracks " On April 15,1945, the English soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen. "We didn't believe it that day. We didn't believe we were free. We were afraid to go outside and greet them. We waited a whole day to be sure." All of the 30,000 survivors left were very sick. After being cleaned up and deloused, the survivors were transferred to hospitals and to a German military camp taken over by the English and Americans. It was knojvn as a Displaced Persons (DP) camp. Lily stayed nearly two years at this DP camp. During this time, survivors were trying to find other family members who made it through the war or relatives in other countries. Lily was able to locate an uncle in California through the American military but unable to find any relatives who survive^. "Of the 100 or so people in my family. I was the only survivor," Lily says. Her soon to be husband was also relocated to the DP military camp. He was a so unable to locate any surviving relatives. They were married and planned to immigrate to America. Lillian remembers, "One day I went into a office in the DP camp and I sawla ? I German girl that I had sewn dresses for. She was afraid of me. She left town that night - she must have had a guilty conscience. I really had nothing against her." Both Henry and Lily Kronburg were placed upon an American military ship rigged with hammocks. They were given $ 10 a piece. She remembers how seasick everyone was because the;1 r had not been on a ship before. "The last day everyone - sick or not - went up on deck to see the Statue of Liberty.... We arrived in Newark, New Jersey. There were street vendors there selling food - especially fruit We bought so much food - we only had $5 left to our names." 9 They settled in Newark for many years. They worked hard to establish themselves in America. One year, they were attending a Holocaust Survivor's conference in Canada and someone mentioned Henry's sister might be alive in Las Vegas. Indeed, she was. After 21 years, the Kronburg siblings were reunited. Lily and her family moved to Las Vegas and opened a business with Henry's sister's husband. When I asked Lily how she felt about the German people she says, "Hitler made it so that if you were a traitor - you would be in the concentration camps as well. When he began his reign of terror, he released murderers from prison and made them high-ranking officials. Who better to kill people than killers who enjoy it? Everybody watched out for I his or her own skin. Hitler was very strong. No country in Europe was as strong as j Germany. Why did they go along? They needed jobs. It was the depression. By joining the Nazi party, the party promised you a good job. During the Depression, people didn't care how they got their stomachs full." Even after many years of freedom, Lily is still afraid of it happening again. The nightmares have never left and she wants people to be aware that it only starts with a |few fanatics. "The world needs to be aware the Holocaust did happen. Those years we Were treated as sub-humans, those years the six million died, can help others understand today's Jews." Lillian Kronburg is an extremely kind, generous, and infinitely strong womanjIi. I am so grateful I was afforded this chance to interview her. Before the interview began, I said to Lily that I hoped I do not overstep any cultural boundaries during our interview. She sincerely replied," There are no more boundaries, my dear. There were boundajries back then but no more." 10 ... We got used to standing in line at seven o'clock in the morning, at twelve noon, and again at seven o'clock in the evening. We stood in a long qupue with a plate in our hand, into which they ladled a little warmed-up water with a salty or coffee flavor. Or else they gave us a few potatoes. We got used to sleeping without a bed, to saluting every uniform, not to walk on the sidewalks and then again to walk on the sidewalks. We got used to undeserved slaps, blows, and executions. We got accustomed to seeing people die in their own excrement, to seeing piled-up coffins full of corpses, to seeing the sick amid dirt and filth and to seeing the helpless doctors. We got use to it that from time to time, one thousand unhappy souls would come here. And that, from time to time, another thousand unhappy souls woulq go away.... From the writings of fifteen-year-old Petr Fischl (bom September 9, 129 and who perished in Auschwitz in 1944.