Published in the Jerusalem Post weekend magazine, 21 July 2023
“The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz” by Thomas Geve
It is unique for two reasons. First, the author was only 13 years old when
he and his mother found themselves undergoing the notorious selection process
just outside the gates of Auschwitz. Although both escaped an instant march to
the gas chambers, Thomas Geve saw his mother only once again, and very briefly.
He never discovered how or when she died.
So it was as a boy only just into his teens, and without support of any kind,
that he had to learn how to survive in the harshest of circumstances.
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The selection. Males able to work; females able to work; for the rest, death
Secondly, Geve was determined to preserve a
record of what he was witnessing day by day. He began drawing his impressions
of life in the camps, using the charcoal and cement sacks that were to hand
during his time bricklaying in Auschwitz.
After the war he redrew these sketches, and added more of what remembered.
Thirty-two of these drawings, in full color, are bound into the book. They
present a series of vivid scenes, perceived from the inside, of camp regime.
The
volume is also illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs which
trace his life from his birth in Stettin in 1929. His father was a doctor who lost his job
after Hitler came to power in 1933. With
Nazi antisemitic persecution on the increase, the family decided that Geve’s
father would travel to England, while he and his mother would join him
later. Meanwhile they would live
temporarily with grandparents in their Berlin apartment. Only they left it all
too late. His father left for England in
the summer of 1939, and when the war began in September Geve and his mother were stranded in Berlin.
It is well documented that in Berlin
some Jews managed to lead a restricted sort of life right into the beginning of
1943. Early in 1942 the family actually
received a letter from Geve’s father in London by way of the Red Cross. The total liquidation of Berlin’s remaining
Jewish community began at the end of February 1943.
Whether it was his youth, or the
fact that he was a Berliner, or later that he spoke colloquial German among his
polyglot fellow prisoners, Geve often tells of help and even kindness from
unexpected quarters. Gestures such as
this, even in Auschwitz, saved his life more than once, and it was just such a
gesture from an acquaintance of his mother that enabled them to survive in
Berlin until the very end.
At one point they were arrested, but instead of
instant deportation to the east, Geve secured a job as a cemetery worker
digging graves and burying the dead.
“This brat will have plenty of work,” said one of the German officers
who approved his application.
Meanwhile he and his mother eked out an
existence in an otherwise deserted apartment.
But soon their situation became so impossible that they decided to hand
themselves in to the authorities and make their way to the work they were told
awaited them in the east. Geve gives us
a vivid picture of the packed cattle-truck journey to Auschwitz, with only a
small grille to let in some air, and one lavatory bucket.
Even so, he records that over the two-day journey their guards, who were far from the ruthless SS types they were about to meet, occasionally allowed them out in a lonely countryside spot to have a short stroll, find a pit latrine, empty the lavatory bucket and fetch much needed water. He also tells of the heated arguments among the detainees over who had to clean what. “Courtesy and sympathy had been blotted out,” he writes, “heralding a ruthless struggle for survival.”
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Rollcall. When the numbers didn't tally, Appell could last for hours
And that 22-month struggle Geve describes and
illustrates in frank and brutal detail.
We learn of the standard whipping punishment, when candidates were
strapped to a scaffold and beaten from 25 to 100 times. “Some,” writes Geve, “never returned.”
He tells us about the camp brothel in Block 24,
above the camp orchestra’s room. The two
dozen women were drawn from all over the camp, some of them, Geve remarks,
“having already practised the oldest profession.” They catered for both prisoners and
guards. German prisoners were entitled
to visit them every fortnight. Other
inmates, except Russians, Gypsies and Jews, received entrance discs every few
months. The women would sometimes drop a
ration of bread from their window to a prisoner who looked particularly
frail. “We could not help but respect
them,” observes Geve.
As defeat began to stare the Nazi regime in the face, Auschwitz was evacuated and the prisoners were forced into a long march. Geve ended in Buchenwald camp, where he spent the last months of the war and the first months of peace. With nowhere to go, and in any case too weak to walk far, he found a stache of postcards and coloured pencils in the abandoned offices and drew some 80 pictures of his life in the camps.
The camp orchestra played marches as the prisoners were herded to work
Through Switzerland’s generosity, he was
fostered with a Swiss family for six months to recuperate, and was then flown
to London to join his father.
How, after one failed attempt, he managed to
get his story published in 1958, and then in a fuller version in 1987, he and
his daughter Yifat recount in a video produced and released on YouTube by New
York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage. In it Charles Inglefield describes how he
became intrigued by Geve’s story, and became involved in editing and revising
it to make “The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz”- a new account for a new generation of readers. In the video Geve himself dedicates this
volume to “the 40 prisoners who helped me to survive two years of concentration
camp.” At the very start of the book he
lists 18 whose names he remembers. The
others have to remain anonymous.
“The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz” is a full, frank
and sometimes painfully truthful account of Geve’s experiences. It is his personal testimony to suffering no
human being should be forced to endure, let alone a youngster in his early
teens – an account vividly illustrated with the drawings that accompany his
story. This is a book that deserves to be read.
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-751823
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