An End to Intolerance

When I was in highschool, I worked on a student journal called An End to Intolerance. The journal's focus was educating students about the Holocaust, and fostering awareness of other human rights atrocities around the world.

While skimming through my hard drive (I'm a virtual packrat and need to offload on to a disk more often than I actually do), I found a draft/half-sketched out article I wrote after an interview with Holocaust survivor Helen Grossman. Since the file is still relevant, I reworked my find - and here it is.

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Helen Grossman was born in Poland. She was thirteen years old when her family ran away from their hometown. “We were caught by the Germans and sent back,” she says. “Our house [had] burnt down, so we went to live with my grandfather.”

We’re standing on the second floor of Sydney’s Holocaust Museum, where Mrs. Grossman is leading a tour. Walking over to a wall covered with artifacts, she takes a round metal object from the shelf, and brings it to the center table.

“A few months later,” she continues, “an SS man broke the door down, and my parents were deported and my brother and I were sent to a camp to work in a factory.

“When I was 15, I was sent to Auschwitz and separated from my brother. I caught typhoid. [Then] I was then sent to Birkenau, a section of Auschwitz [that] was known as the ‘forest of death’ [because] people sent [there were forced] on a death march there to die. I worked on shell casings there for a few months.”

Leaning over the metal cylinder, Mrs. Grossman’s fingers move, swift and deft, as she breaks the shell into pieces. Just as nimbly, she re-assembles the casing and replaces it on the shelf.

“Then I was sent to another Auschwitz camp,” she tells us. “The Russians were coming, and the Germans were afraid. We were sent on a death march through knee-deep snow.” She makes eye-contact with each of us, matter-of-fact. “If you lagged behind, you were shot.”

The SS destroyed the gas chambers at Birkenau in November of 1944. In January of 1945, Nazi personnel began to leave the facility. Most of the prisoners were sent toward the West, on a death-march.

“Eventually we were put on a train. I was lucky. I was put in an open carriage […] The closed carriages were worse […] there was no air and no room. People were constantly dying, being sick and going to the toilet all the time. It was terrible.


“We were on the train for days going this way, then being sent that way. We had no food or water. People were begging for water. People were eating snow that was falling into the open carriages and getting diarrhoea and dying.

“We travelled through Czechoslovakia. When we reached the camp, we looked for food at the garbage dump. The female commandant did not like this, and as a punishment, we were not fed for another 48 hours. People were dying like flies. […] There were no burials or cremations so we were waking up amongst dead people.”

Current estimates suggest that almost 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4 million Jews died at Auschwitz, alongside 150,000 Polish Catholics, and 23,000 Romani and Sinti (more commonly known as Gypsies).

“We stayed in these conditions for a long time until eventually the Russians liberated us.” At the end of January,1945, the Soviet Red Army caught up with prisoners sent west from Bireknau. Approximately 7,500 people were liberated.

Turning over her wrist, Mrs. Grossman shows us the line of small black number; people crowd ‘round to see. “these experiences still haunt me,” she says, calm and self-possessed, “but I can't remember the faces. I can see the German officers in their uniforms and their name tags, but my mind has blocked out their faces."

Mrs. Grossman is still an active volunteer at the Sydney Jewish Museum.