Lila Perl - Four Perfect Pebbles: A True Story of the Holocaust

Childs identification card bearing the Nazi coat of arms, issued to Marion Blumenthal, age three and a half, in Hoya, Germany, on June 10, 1938

T o Joan Newman, to whom I am deeply grateful for the privilege of having met Marion Blumenthal Lazan.

L. P.

T o my mother, Ruth Blumenthal Meyberg, who carried the full burden and whose love and perseverance saw us through, and to my husband, Nathaniel, whose deep devotion has made the perpetuation of our heritage possible. And in memory of my father, Walter Blumenthal, who would have derived great joy and fulfillment from his three grandchildrenDavid, Susan, and Michaeland nine great-grandchildrenArielle, Joshua, Gavriel, Dahlia, Yoav, Jordan Erica, Hunter, Ian, and Kasey Rose.

To all those who have known adversity and despair, I offer my belief that out of darkness can come light.

M. B. L.

T his is the story of a familya mother and father and their two young childrenwho became trapped in Hitlers Germany. They managed eventually to leave that country for Holland, where they were soon again caught in the Nazis web, and their situation grew even more serious. For in the final years of World War II, when the Holocaust reached its most feverish pitch, the four members of the Blumenthal family were returned to Germany.

During their ordeal, lasting six and a half years, the Blumenthals lived in refugee, transit, and prison camps that included Westerbork in Holland and the notorious concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany.

Bergen-Belsen was the camp to which Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were transported in October 1944. The two girls, aged fifteen and nineteen, died there of typhus in March 1945. It was in the very same section of Bergen-Belsen that the Blumenthal family remained imprisoned from February 1944 to April 1945. Marion Blumenthal, the younger of the two children, was nine years old when she arrived there. Her brother, Albert, was eleven.

The British troops who liberated Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, wrote of its indescribable horrors. Piles of corpses lay unburied everywhere, while those who still breathed were little more than living skeletons. The entire camp population was infested with lice. Those prisoners who had not already succumbed were the dying victims of typhus and other epidemic diseases, starvation, exposure, and neglect.

The Blumenthals, however, were not among the deeply suffering prisoners who might have benefited from the British capture of Bergen-Belsen on April 15. Six days earlier they had been marched to the camps loading platform and placed aboard a train of cattle cars headed east in the direction of the dreaded Auschwitz extermination camp. For two weeks the death train, so named for the many passengers who died of typhus, made its tortuous way across Nazi Germany. When liberation came at last, it was at the hands of Russian troops who had little to offer those who staggered weakly from the train.

As a grown woman Marion Blumenthal Lazan recalls the events that shaped her youth. She tells of the four years she spent with her family in Hollands Westerbork, of her terrified arrival in Bergen-Belsen and what it was like to live through the long chain of days behind its barbed-wire fences, and of the struggles of her teenage years of postwar Europe and America.

Invaluable details and documentation have also been supplied by her mother, Ruth Blumenthal Meyberg, and her brother, Albert Blumenthal. The inner strength and enduring spirit of the members of this family make it possible for all of us to become witnesses to an evil that, sadly, must remain forever in human memory.

L ong before dawn crept through the windows of the wooden barrack, Marion stirred in Mamas arms. She had slept this way, wrapped in her mothers warmth, for many weeks now, ever since her family had arrived at the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in northwestern Germany.

All around her were the sounds of the other women and children, lying in the three-decker bunks that ran the length of the barrack. As Marion came awake, the muffled noises sharpened. There were gasps and moans, rattling coughs, and short, piercing cries. And there was the ever-present stench of unwashed bodies, disease, and death.

Hardly a morning passed without some of the prisoners no longer able to rise from their thin straw mattresses. When the guards came to round up the women and children for roll call, they stopped briefly to examine the unmoving forms. Later those who had died in the night would be tumbled from their bunks onto crude stretchers, and their bodies taken away to be burned or buried in mass graves. Soon new prisoners would arrive to take their places. As many as six hundred would be crowded into barracks meant to hold a hundred.

Mama nudged Marion. Get up, Liebling. Its time.

As soon as Mama withdrew her arms, thin as they had become, the warmth vanished, and the chill of the unheated room gripped Marions nine-year-old body. Cold and hunger. In her first weeks at Bergen-Belsen, Marion had been unable to decide which was worse. Soon, however, the constant gnawing sensation in her belly began to vanish. Her stomach accustomed itself to the daily ration of a chunk of black bread and a cup of watery turnip soup, and its capacity shrank. But the bitter chill of the long German winter went on and on.

On one of her earliest days in the camp Marion had actually believed that she saw a wagonload of firewood approaching. Perhaps it would stop in front of the barrack and some logs would be fed into the empty stove that was supposed to heat the entire room, for a few hours of glorious warmth. But she had been horribly mistaken. The wagon trundled past, and a closer look told her that it was filled not with firewood but with the naked, sticklike bodies of dead prisoners.

As on all winter mornings, getting dressed in the predawn grayness took no time at all. Marion had slept in just about everything she owned. All she had to do was to put her arms through the sleeves of the tattered coat that she had used as an extra covering under the coarse, thin blanket the camp provided.

Soon the cries of the Kapos (Kameradshaftspolizei, or police aides)privileged prisoners who served as guardswere heard as they moved from barrack to barrack.

Zum Appell! Appell! Raus, Juden!

Marion and Mama must now find a way to relieve themselves before hurrying to the large square, with its watchtower and armed guards, where the daily Appell, or roll call, took place. There was not always time to visit the communal outhouse, about a block away from the barrack. The toilets in the outhouse were simply a long wooden bench with holes in it, suspended over a trench. There was no water to flush away the waste, no toilet paper, and, of course, no privacy.

Some mornings, Marion and Mama and the other prisoners had to use whatever receptacles they owned as night bucketseven the very mugs or bowls in which they received their daily rations. Before leaving the barrack for