Holocaust. Part 2: “Mama Koops”

Alexander: “If there is a god, then he’s a shit, and I’d like to kick him in the butt.”
Aron: “Your theory is very interesting and appears to be justified.”
–Ingmar Bergman‘s Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Alfredo de Braganza: You have visited Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Dachau, etc. I understand that Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (which real term was borrowed from the U.S. when they built those camps for the Native Americans and also from the British concentration camps of the Second Anglo-Boer War) and extermination camps (which were established by the Nazis for the industrial-scale mass slaughter). So, the term “concentration camp” is popularly read and used as an euphemism which can be replaced by other terms (more politically correct…) such as; internment camp, resettlement camp, detention facility, etc. But when you read “extermination camp” its a very well direct damned meaning, not a double twist word or an euphemism. At that time, the Nazis divided the camps in different types; POW camps,Transit/collection camps, Labor camps, etc. Although none of the categories was independent and many of them could be classified as a mixture and all camps had some of the elements of an extermination camp, however, it’s said that the systematic extermination of new-arrivals occurred in very specific camps and the other places scholars have been classified as “minor extermination camps”. I believe distinction should not be made upon the number of people killed. Maybe for the new generation just the concept “concentration camp” sounds “light”, something cool like watering plants, making alcoholic drinks from potatoes, and be dressed in “Gap” brand clothing style in The Great Escape movie with Steve McQueen; like no-killing happened inside beyond what it means “detention” or “concentration of people”… What is your opinion about it, and, do you think that in History subject books the term “extermination” has been “polished” or avoided?

Jesús Maguregui: Indeed, I think that things should be called by that name only: Extermination camps. As there is still a debate about the final number of victims of the Shoah (which will be impossible to clarify), there is still a debate about the nomenclature. Some experts have spoken about the terminology of the “Third Reich”, even published dictionaries, and the most interesting ones have made a classification of the Camps. A killed life is a life stolen to God. So serious is the crime of the one who shoots as the one who “orders” to 2,000 people to enter into a gas chamber. Killing is killing.

Yes. The word “extermination” has been tried to be deleted from the vocabulary of the Shoah. But in recent years, more transparency is present, and survivors can held their head high. Some of them have recently begun to leave testimony of their experience, having suffered the silence for more than 50 years…

Think about the trauma of the survivors. Put yourself on the skin of someone who has spent several years watching his normal life away, being cornered and rejected (from streets, friends, at work …), who is expelled from his home and resettled, with another 20 or 30 people, in a small apartment with no running water, no electricity or fuel. Suddenly, everyone must leave to an unknown location in inhumane conditions. There is only one thing in your head: that nothing happens to your parents, wife and children. Days without eating or drinking. Suddenly the doors open, your are completely exhausted. They cancel you as a person by bright lights, screaming and biting dogs. You are separated from your wife and your children. Undressed. They shave your head and you get ridiculous clothes full of lice. After 3 hours standing up at extreme temperatures you do not know anyone around you. You think that this can not be happening to you.

At the Radegast station (just outside the city of Lodz, Poland), you can visit (even get into one) a locomotive and two wagons, donated by the German state, which were used to transport Jews. It is really impressive getting into the wagon and imagine those scenes of great suffering.

It is important to say that there were many Jews who rebelled against the Nazis, and that many non-Jews supported them (risking their own lives). The most exciting episode certainly is the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. To put my hand on the wall of the ghetto (just few meters only have survived) was a unique experience.

This is what is left of the The Warsaw Ghetto wall. Just few vestiges remain. It is within a private house, and you can access asking for permission to the owner. Photo Courtesy: Jesús Maguregui.

Jews building the ghetto wall, Warsaw, October 1940. Around 450,000 people were crammed into the ghetto. About 100,000 died inside from starvation and disease and more than 300,000 were sent by train in 1942 to the Treblinka death camp, 100 kilometers to the northeast.

There is only security of the site when groups of Israeli children come, and they do with gorillas to monitor the area well and avoid personal attacks. Those flower-pots are not of the time. The ruins were largely swept away during the vast communist-era reconstruction programme which radically altered the street layout. Photo Courtesy: Jesús Maguregui.

Himmler stands outside the Ghetto wall.

AB: According to historians the Nazis frequently used euphemistic language to disguise the true nature of their crimes, like for example they used the term “Final Solution” to refer to their plan to eradicate the entire Jewish population in Europe (the most deadly phase of the Holocaust). But, before the “Final Solution” was implementing in 1942, massacres of Jews already occurred (The first Nazi concentration camps were hastily erected in Germany in 1933). My question is: Do you personally think the Holocaust was gradually improvised, or was it the execution of a plan laid in advance?

JM: In my library I have 3 different versions of “Mein Kampf“. I always thought that the translations were pathetic, and that was the reason why reading it was a torture. But I finally realized that Hitler was not exactly a brilliant writer (nor Hess, who was responsible for correcting the style of his writing while in prison). However, with patience you can extract some important messages that already announced a very black future for the Jewish people.

Hitler’s machinery was methodical in each of its activities as much as he and his collages were very clear about what they wanted to achieve. Put this clear into your mind regarding the Shoah: Nothing performed with little or no preparation. Because almost everything was written we can confirm than nothing was improvised and that every action against the Jews was launched knowing truly its causes assumed by the Nazis. First it was not possible to use public transport, then to go to public parks was forbidden, later on to study, to work, to buy at shops…, and everything was slowly accepted, because Jews had the firm belief that one day all this would end.

If the wholly plans of the Nazis (the extermination of the Jewish people) would have be known from the beginning, don’t you think that it would have produced a panic situation, a great fright, or even a rebellion?

It is possible that “German people” were carried away by illusions and promises to become again the great Empire they used to be. They dreamed of recovering from the WWI. But at the end, someone manipulated the strings of the puppets, and there also were who decided to cut those strings and confront the Regime, even at the cost of their own lifes.

An iconic photo of “Einsatzkommando” action in Russia. They are also called “mobile-killing-squads”. Their mission was to butcher as many human beings as they could get their hands on. Men, women and children; from the Gulf of Finland to the Black Sea and from the border with old Poland to the outskirts of Moscow would be their victims.

In addition to the visits to concentration camps that I have been doing every year, I am planning a long trip across Europe, mainly aimed to visit those villages, towns and cities in which there was an extermination of the Jewish population. It was known Einsatzkommandos‘ actions, but strongly supported by the local population (which was sympathetic to the expulsion and even applauded the brutal violence in the streets against the elderly, women and children).

The Nazi genocide happened not only in the camps or in the gas chambers, but with small groups of murderers known as “Einsatzkommandos”; a sub-group of “Einsatzgruppen”. They were formed by Himmler and Heydrich for the annihilation of the Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet political commissars. The massacres sites are all over Europe. Photo Courtesy: Jesús Maguregui’s archives.

On the outskirts of the towns, and with the help of researchers (not very well seen by the local people), we are gradually starting to discover the mass graves; the final resting place of those who were rounded up and brutally executed.

“Einsatzkommandos” undertook a campaign of bloody repression. They usually arrested people by groups, who were kept as hostages and eventually shot. Sometimes mock executions (executions for fun) were staged, in which the victims stood for hours in suspense (uncertainty) anticipating their execution. Also pious Jews had their beards removed by blunt, not sharp, instruments, which tore their skin, or had their beards burned off. According to reports approximately 1,500,000 people were murdered by “Einsatzkommandos”. Despite accounts by the rare survivors and judicial inquiries, this part of Holocaust history, which took place in Eastern Europe, is still virtually unknown. Photo: Jewish women in Poland forced to undress prior to being shot. Source: Judaic Encyclopaedia (1971): Poland, vol. 13, pages 757-758.

Many of the people came without resistance to the execution area. It is not as though they had any alternative…The women screamed and wept and so did the men. Sometimes people tried to escape. If the victims didn’t do as they were told there were also beatings.
Recorded testimony of Schutzpolizist Togel, a former firing-squad member of an “Einsatzkommando”: <<The victims -several hundred, or even a thousand, men and women- were transported in trucks. These people were made to lie or kneel about a hundred meters from the well in a depression which had been hollowed out by the rain and remove their outer garments there. They were lined up ten at a time at the side of the well and were then shot by a ten-man execution squad, which included myself. When they were shot the people fell forwards into the well. Sometimes they were so frightened that they jumped in alive. The firing-squad was switched a great many times. Because of the psychological pressures to which I too was exposed during the shooting I can no longer say today, try as I might, how many times I stood by that hole and how many times I was relieved from that duty.>>

The ground round the well was covered in blood. There was also bits of brain and human parts on the ground which the new victims had to step in when they were brought over to the well. They could hear the shooting and screaming from the place where they were kept waiting. It took barely an afternoon before the last victim was in the well dead by members of Einsatzkommandos, who most of them ended drunk with a special ration of schnapps.
Photo: Bodies of women and children from Misocz village, Poland.

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[ Why those mass graves are not properly listed and/or protected as a landmark or monument to remember what happened? Apathy and disinterest by the public, bureaucrats, politicians, industrialist…? ]

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An old witness pointing to the site of a mass grave in Ukraine.
Photo Courtesy: Guillaume Ribot

To remove the evidence of the “Einsatzkommandos” ‘ crimes they had to cremate the corpses. Prisoners, mainly Jews, were ordered to undertake this gruesome task. The bodies were stacked between logs of wood and petrol poured over the pyres, which were then set alight. Workers used bone crushing machines (the size of a truck) or hammers to destroy all that then remained and scattered the ashes or buried them in the pits from which the corpses had been removed. When this was completed the workers were shot. A few of them managed to escape, some surviving to describe their experiences.

Location of Sudilkov mass grave in Ukraine. Why this place is so important to be maintained properly? Because Sudilkov was known throughout the Jewish world as a center of the Hasidic movement, for the manufacturing of tallish (prayer shawls) and the printing of Jewish books. The present owner of the mass grave property is private individual(s). Properties adjacent it is agricultural.The earliest known Jewish community in this town was from the 16th century. The village was all but wiped out by the Nazi-genocide, its residents were primarily Jewish and they were assassinated in 1941 in the mass grave and lots of them buried ALIVE! In the vicinity there is an old Jewish cemetery property which is now used for agricultural use (crops or animal grazing). Please see bellow picture.

Properties adjacent it is residential. The cemetery is visited rarely by private visitors (Jewish or non-Jewish). The cemetery has been vandalized occasionally in the last 10 years and despite the weather and vegetation condition there is also a very serious threat as the existing nearby construction developments. Ah! Nice postcard photo, isn’t it? Cows grazing… How beautiful… Maybe one of those people at foreground doing picnic near the lake may brought a stereo-CD-player and we just need to listen Elvis Presley singing “Amazing Grace” in this “amazing grave”. But, who cares? Most maps, in fact, do not even show Sudilkov. As per official figures, the Holocaust brought total destruction to the Hasidic centers of Eastern Europe and at least 500,000 Hasidim were killed. Most survivors moved to Israel or to America soon after the war establishing new centers modeled on their original communities. Also the importance of Sudilkov is because was the home of the famous rabbi and author of “Degel Machaneh Ephraim”, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim, grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov. Certainly if he would come out from his grave and see the neglecting state of his home town cemetery we would see “The real Mad Adventures of ‘Rabbi’ Jacob”, but this time not starting Louis de Funes or Miou-Miou…

AB: In regard of what you have just mention about the local people, I would like to ask you about their role during the Holocaust. Between 1933 and the fall of Nazi Germany in 1945, more than 3.5 million Germans were forced to spend time in several different camps and prisons for political reasons. Approximately 77,000 Germans were executed for one or another form of resistance. Many of these Germans had served in civil positions, government or in the military accused in subversion and conspiracy against the Nazis. That amount of people might had friends, relatives, known people to them… So why its said that German civilians around the camps claimed to be ignorant about what was going on despite having so many fellow-countrymen inside? Do you really think that the average German citizen didn’t know nothing about the extermination of Jews brought from all parts of Europe? Germany had suffered from one of the worst depressions of all time and people were more than happy to have a scapegoat: The Jews. The government was fascist, so going against them was suicide. So, since dissenting from the Nazis meant death, there was no reason not to profit from the policies. Plus, most people probably never wanted to know the big picture like following the motto: “Help the government round up your neighbors and you’re safe. Just don’t ask what the government will do with them“. As you have visited mostly all camps, did you talk with locals about it, or heard something from senior civilians who lived around the area or from whom had any contact with the SS guards at that time? Do you really think that the majority of German public opinion was completely indifferent to what was happening?

JM: Let me tell you something. Today we are used to live in a world of technology and communication. Almost everyone has a profile in a social network, we can send instant messages (without having to wait for letters around the world), we can maintain a video-conference with anyone on the planet…, because information has become Global. Today, any news is known to the World in just seconds. Before it was not like this. We must come back to an era in which information was transmitted by radio, by short films at the cinema or published in public places. Or even through the press… We all know the strength of the Propaganda Ministry at that moment (led by Joseph Goebbels) and its ability to neutralize the media that was against the Regime. So, It is not a question to discuss that many Germans saw how others made their neighbors disappeared. It was an open secret that the camps were used as a tool of “re-education” by the Nazi Regime. Because of the terror imposed, prisoners released from Dachau, Sachsenhausen…, must maintain strict silence about what happened inside there.

What happened soon after, with the extermination of the Jewish people it is a subject that will always be a matter of intense debate. There are those who think that the society and local people around the camps knew perfectly what was going on and there are those who think that they didn’t have any clue or they weren’t sure and really were too dubious to believe because what they thought was just gossips spread by the enemy propaganda. In my personal opinion and for the reasons I said before, I think that not all the citizens, population or society in general had a clear idea of what was happening. But this does not relieve them of the responsibility for not having faced a totalitarian regime based on terror.

This is “The Grey House” which was used by Nazis to torture people. Photo Courtesy: Jesús Maguregui.

I remember a visit to the concentration camp of Plaszow, next Krakow. With much effort I could recognize perfectly the ruins of the synagogue, and a large house that was used by the Gestapo. Despite the years, the house is in an enviable condition, except the bars that protect the basement windows. They are completely oxidized. Nobody cares for them. In this basement are still the torture chambers of the Gestapo. Nowhere advertised. There’s no sign that stand out.

As it’s recorded in history archives, the house is named in above photograph (located in Schindler’s factory) as the “The Grey House” and reportedly it was used by the SS and Gestapo agents specifically to torture people in the cellar. When compared to the previous photo, it has been surprisingly kept exactly as it was when belonged to the Nazis. Photo Courtesy: Jesús Maguregui.

Inside this cellar was around 20 small jails as described in the previous photo from Schindler’s factory museum. How many people were killed inside? Who are the actual owners? How it is possible that the building has been kept safe for so long? Should be any institution/organization to take over the maintenance of this house in order to preserve the remembrance of what happened inside? Photo Courtesy: Jesús Maguregui.

I went to the concierge of the house and just when it seemed she was going to allow me to access to the basement, then immediately came a car and a group of people came out. They looked at me menacingly standing in a line just a few meters from me. It was clear they didn’t wanted me there and if I would insisted in my determination they made clear with their body language that they would use physical force against me. I chose to get out of there without saying anything. But there will be a new opportunity soon.

I want to tell you other anecdote. Some years ago and during a walk through Berlin in the winter, trying to locate where the famous Hitler’s bunker was (now there are signs that clearly indicate it), I requested the help of a neighbor, he was an elderly gentleman. It seems it was not a normal or pleasant question for him to be asked by a foreigner about such an uncomfortable topic, and I had to leave hastily due his shouting and threats with his fists.

AB: I would appreciate if you can share a little bit more your personal experience after meeting “Mama Koops” for whom I am very puzzled after seeing a picture of her. You mentioned about her briefly during our first interview Holocaust. Part 1: Shame On You!

JM: Little, very little, almost nothing told me Marijke Koops-Stokvis about her experience with the Shoah. It was people very close to her that told me she had lost much of her family and it was a very painful issue for her. A taboo subject, which she preferred not to talk about. This is very common in survivors: They did not find enough strength to remove those memories, or the right forum to do it…

But Marijke, “mama Koops” as we called her, was always smiling. She had a special twinkle in her eyes; the brightness of those who appreciate and enjoy every second of their lifes: Carpe Diem. She enjoyed making others happy. We fit very well from the first day and she became my mentor. Actually she became my second mother while I lived those years in Holland.

Photo of late Marijke Koops-Stokvis “Mama Koops”, taken around 1991. Despite her good-looking, austere elegance and beautiful smiling, her character and attitude was secretive and reticent about her past. She never talked about the Holocaust and was a very reclusive person. Photo Courtesy: Jesús Maguregui.

That Marijke was Jewish was something not to be discussed. Quiet and elegant woman, with a curved nose and very sharp facial features. I often think about her and I am sorry not having been able to gain her trust and to open her heart while she was with us. Last time I visited them at their beautiful home in The Hague, it was some years ago, and they welcomed me with love. She was proud that we could keep all our conversation in Dutch, language that I learned many years ago.

The most important lesson I got from her was without doubt her ability to forgive, not to forget. Her physical presence symbolized temperance, peace, forgiveness and love. At this moment I can not but recall some words of Simon Wiesenthal: “Justice, not revenge”. I could put my hand in the fire: “Mama Koops” was that kind of woman.

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An unknown woman is attempting to protect a child with her own body just before they are fired on with a rifle at close range by a “mobile-killing-squad” during the killing of Jews at Ivangorod, Ukraine, during 1942.