Dita Kraus
Auschwitz Holocaust Survivor
The Little Librarian of Auschwitz
“I was born in 1929 in Prague the capital of Czechoslovakia to Hans and Elizabeth Polach and I had a wonderful childhood. Everything changed with the annexation of the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in 1938 and later on with the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Hitler’s forces.
In November 1942, my parents and I were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Despite the horrible conditions there, we managed to hold onto a sense of dignity and purpose in our lives while we were there. However, all that changed when we were transported to the East. The moment they shoved us onto those cattle carts, was the moment when we were totally stripped of our humanity.
We endured a harrowing journey of a day and a night in those cattle carts, then reached a place where life was of no value at all. Our final destination was the death camp called Auschwitz.
In the first days of our arrival prisoners from the camp told us: ‘You see those chimneys in the distance with the black thick smoke coming out of them? This is where we are all going to end up. These are the gas chambers and this is where they are burning our bodies.’ In the beginning, I didn’t understand what they were saying. Human beings are burned to death? Gas chambers? It took me a while until I fully understood what Auschwitz was all about.
My parents and I were placed at the section called the Czech Family Camp. I slept in the women’s Block with my mother but worked in Block 31 – The ‘Kinderblock’. My mother soon got an infectious disease and was put in isolation. My father, who became a ghost of himself, died six weeks after our arrival.
The ‘Kinderblock’ at the ‘Czech Family Camp’ was established thanks to Fredy Hirsch, a German Jewish educator and charismatic sports instructor. He had previously organized educational and sports activities for children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In ‘the Czech Family Camp’ he was allowed to continue with his educational activities.
During the day the children in the ‘Kinderblock’ were divided into age groups each with an instructor, they taught them secretly to the best of their abilities. We didn’t have any notebooks or pencils but we had a small hidden library that I was in charge of.
There were about 12-14 books, among them an Atlas and a Russian textbook. As the librarian, it was my responsibility to safeguard these precious volumes. At the end of each day, I carefully collected the books and stowed them away in a hidden location. If the Germans had found me with those books they might have killed me. The fact that I was able to sit indoors and not doing strenuous work in the cold outside, gave me a chance to save my strength and in fact enabled me to be chosen for life. Even if it meant backbreaking work in Germany, Indeed, the books saved me from death in the gas chambers.