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Number of pages: 10
Reference number: 1656/3/8/367
Catalogue ID: 105785
Subject: Riga (ghetto)Stutthof (concentration camp)Terezin (ghetto)
Summary:

Mrs Valk and her husband were arrested on 10 December 1941 at Goch and deported to the Riga Ghetto. The men were soon taken to Salaspils where most of them perished. In the ghetto, Jews exchanged clothes against food provided by the Latvians; this transaction was punishable by death. Amongst the SS officers who carried out executions were Krause, Roschmann and Gimmlich. During the night, Latvian SS guards raped women and children in the ghetto. In February 1942, 1,500 elderly persons were deported from the ghetto; they ended in prepared mass graves in the forest.

Mrs Valk did various kinds of forced labour under horrible conditions. In August 1944 both Mr and Mrs Valk were brought by sea to Stutthof concentration camp, where inmates again suffered physical violence thirst and hunger. Afer 5 weeks Mrs Valk was detailed for work on the railway lines at Bromberg. “Reichsbahninspektor” Ballhorn and the female SS guard Gerda Hesper from Essen, are mentioned for their cruelty. In January 1945, the Russian army approached and the death march of concentration camp inmates began. Out of 1,300 women only 40 survived and arrived at Falkenburg, where Mrs Valk escaped. She made her way to Pommerania and pretended to be a German “OstflÜchtling”. She was, therefore, well fed and clothed. Finally she crossed the Elbe and reached the American army.

Mr Valk had been seperated from his wife at Stutthof; he went to Buchenwald and Theresienstadt. They met again in their native town of Gogh. Their child perished in Belsen or Auschwitz.

Number of pages: 16
Reference number: 1656/3/8/1159
Catalogue ID: 106299
Subject: Anti-NazisChildrenDenunciations
Summary:

Mrs Ehrenberg lived with her first husband, an engineer holding a French diploma, Schlama Goldstein, and their little daughter (born 1938) in comfortable circumstances at Lodz, Poland (p.1, 10, 11, 13). Together with innumerable others, they fled from the approaching Germans in September 1933. The situation on the main road proved to be chaotic; she went back to Lodz through burning villages, under the fire of German planes shooting recklessly down at the fleeing people (p.1). Terror at Rawa-Mazowiezka; hostages (p.2); a pastor (Volksdeutscher) ordered the murdering to be stopped. After the occupation of Warsaw, the author's husband and brother returned to Lodz, too, but as the oppression was getting worse, fled to Bialystok (p.3-9), a Polish town, belonging to Russia at the time. When, in February 1940, the author's family had to move into the Ghetto Lodz she pretended to be a Polish Aryan and tried to join her husband with her little child (who soon died there) at Bialystok, occupied by the German troops since June 1941. Although she enjoyed the help of several people, the dangers of her illegal life finally proved too much for her nerves, and she went to live in the Ghetto, in August 1943. Dreams coming true (p.5-6, 9-10, 12). In view of the pending liquidation, her husband insisted that she left the Ghetto, and she used her Aryan document to get released; as she was leaving, the SS-officer who was guilty of the murder and [illegible]JÄ misery of innumerable human beings, gave her a kitten to save its life (p.6).

She then made several - interesting - attempts to rescue her husband (p.7), but could not save him from the worst. At last she was denounced by an informer, Czeslaw Bielilo (p.7, 13) and imprisoned at Bialystok, as, since November 1943, Jews who had escaped from the Ghetto were no longer shot dead on the spot, where they were discovered, but had to be taken to an annihilation camp.

Horrible transport to KZ Stutthof near Danzig. Selected and sent to Auschwitz (p.9-11). There she was an eye-witness of all kind of horrors and atrocities. With the aid of a Polish detainee, she would succeed to hide and rescue Jewish girls from the selections (p.11).

In October 1944, transfer to Bergen-Belsen (p.12-13). Typhoid. She would see Irma Gresse repeatedly but never saw her ill-treating a detainee (p.12). Liberation, on 15 April 1945. Visit to Lodz; of her large family only one aunt had survived.

At Konstanz, Bodensee (p.13), she made the acquaintance of Mr Hajim Ehrenberg, a survivor of Treblinka, whose wife and children had perished. She got married to him, in December 1946, and with the help of the Joint, they emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1949, where they are both working successfully, after a son was born to them, in 1950. (p.13,14).

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