Thomas Geve - The Boy Who Drew Auschwitz

HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Originally published as Youth in Chains in 1958 and Guns & Barbed Wire in 1987

This updated illustrated edition first published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

FIRST EDITION

Text and drawings Thomas Geve 2021
All original artworks by Thomas Geve, holder of the copyrights thereof, are part of Yad Vashem Art Museum collection. Photographs of the drawings Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem
Maps by Lovell Johns HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Photographs courtesy of the author with the following exceptions: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, .

Cover design HarperCollinsPublishers 2021
Cover photographs: Courtesy the author (author as a child); all original artworks by Thomas Geve, holder of the copyrights thereof, are part of Yad Vashem Art Museum Collection. Photo: Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem; Galerie Bilderwelt/Hulton Archive/Getty Images (Auschwitz survivors, front).

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Thomas Geve asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green

Source ISBN: 9780008406387

Ebook Edition Jan 2021 ISBN: 9780008406400

Version: 2020-12-16

In memory of:

Eva-Ruth

Sally

Jonathan

Little Kurt

Long Kurt

Blond Gert

Saucy Gert

Ello, a lad from Slovakia

Mendel, a lad from Bialystok

Jendroe, a lad from Bohemia

Maurice, a lad from Salonika

Leo, a Dutchman

Poldi, a Swiss

Mr Pollack, a Czech

Block doctor 7a, a Belgian

Sigi, room-elder 7a, a German

Block-elder 7a, a German

Camp hairdresser, a German

Chapter 1
Stettin and Beuthen 192939

Chapter 2
Berlin 193940

Chapter 3
Berlin 19412

Chapter 4
Liquidation 1943

Chapter 5
Auschwitz-Birkenau

Chapter 6
Quarantine

Chapter 7
Bricklaying school

Chapter 8
Surviving

Chapter 9
Exhaustion

Chapter 10
Desperation

Chapter 11
Kindness among chaos

Chapter 12
A veteran now

Chapter 13
The wind of change

Chapter 14
Retreat from liberty

Chapter 15
Gross-Rosen camp

Chapter 16
Evacuation

Chapter 17
Buchenwald camp

Chapter 18
Free at last

It was often said that survivors of the Holocaust were silent after the Second World War. True, for many it was a suffering too painful to recount, and for some it remains so to this very day. But many did want to speak. They had promised their fellow inmates, most of whom did not survive, that they would bear witness and tell the world. And so they tried, only to encounter a world unable and often unwilling to hear. Survivors of the Holocaust were not silent. They were silenced.

Thomas Geve was among those who attempted immediately after the Holocaust to explain in detail what had just happened. At first, he simply wanted to tell his father, through an album of drawings. His father had been in England during the Second World War and could never imagine what his child had been through. Then Thomas wrote down his experiences for publication, only to be disappointed. But he did not give up. For over seventy-five years he has told the story you are about to read, a story that will take you deep into the terrifying world of the Nazi concentration camp system, where children, like him, were its prey.

Thomas Geve is a remarkable documentarian. His determination to detail what happened in the death and work camps in the Nazi concentration camp world reaches back into Auschwitz itself, where he found charcoal and scraps of cement sacks he was in the bricklaying Commando and sketched what happened there in real time. The original sketches did not survive, but the memory of what was on those scraps of paper remained in his mind, and immediately after the war, he began to draw again. He saw that other former inmates were documenting what had happened. He had his own facts to share. Somehow, the 13-year-old in Auschwitz had the presence of mind to pay attention to the details to check, measure, count and memorise. He had remembered the daily routine by the hour, the ration portions to the gram. Even the colours of the badges the prisoners wore were committed to his minds eye.

It seems that Geve perceived something at his tender age that adults many years his senior took much longer to realise: the minute detail of how the concentration camp system worked is key to understanding the nature of the crime itself. Through his innate curiosity, he understood that the malfeasance was so unbelievable that it may in fact not be believed, or that details could one day be erased. He was right of course: the role of Auschwitz-Birkenau at the heart of industrialised state-sanctioned genocide resulted in over a million Jews being gassed in carefully designed facilities. It was and remains unprecedented, and deserves our attention, but it was not all that happened there. Wrapped around those killing facilities was an entire machinery of sadistic daily torture and depravation. The Nazis not only murdered their victims; they created an entire system to make them suffer. That is what Geve documented first in his drawings, then in his text.

I have observed that there is a stickiness to testimony. The facts that survivors recount in their testimonies do not drift as much as one might imagine over time. I have also observed that the sooner after events accounts were documented, the more likely they are to reveal the precise nuances of the individuals own direct experience, without the overlay of later tropes and reader expectations. Geves testimony is a case in point. His first drawings were sketched in Auschwitz in 1944, followed in 1945 by the full set of more than eighty, many of which you will encounter in this book. He then wrote an accompanying narrative in 1947, when the memories were still vivid and not interpolated with later reflection, published in 1958 as Youth in Chains. Through the immediacy of Geves account, we get close and personal details of other inmates characters, including the friends he made and lost. We learn about the moral ambiguity within the inmate hierarchy, and the pervasiveness of sexual violence among the prisoner population, both of which are often muted in accounts that survivors gave later. We also learn of the power of friendship and the sacrifices made to help each other survive. Though it is well known that some prisoners cooperated for survival, especially in the womens sections, I have never heard testimony of a four-way food pact such as he and three of his friends created. Aspects of his story are positive in ways that are new and insightful.

Geves arrival at Auschwitz is chillingly and correctly recounted. For miles, I could see no trees, just empty fields. A mist rose in the distance, doubtless hiding whatever was lurking there and waiting for us. Geve accurately describes his arrival at Auschwitz at the little-known