Life and Death in the Ghetto
Life and Death in the Ghetto - 1
Life and Death in the Ghetto - 2
The statements in the videos are taken from affidavits that the Jewish claimants had to submit as part of their compensation proceedings. They are contained in the files of lawyer Konrad Kittl, who conducted more than 1,500 compensation proceedings for ‘damage to body or health’ in the 1950s and 1960s. For the compensation proceedings for ‘damage to body or health,’ Jewish claimants, mostly from Eastern Europe, had to provide descriptions of their experiences during persecution, see, for example, this letter from the State Compensation Office in Trier. It requires a
‘description of the course of persecution with a detailed account of the physical injuries claimed [...] and the fate of close relatives (wife, children, parents, etc.)’.
They therefore also reported on the fate of their relatives. An (incomplete) list shows the high number of relatives who were murdered.
Konrad Kittl did not destroy the files created during the proceedings and handed them over to the ‘Archiv der Münchner Arbeiterbewegung e.V.’ (Archive of the Munich Workers' Movement).
Further places of persecution: concentration camps, illegality, death marches
However, the affidavits not only describe life in the ghetto, but also experiences in forced labour camps, concentration camps, death marches and life in hiding.
They describe:
- the persecution of German Jews from 1933 onwards
- experiences immediately after the beginning of the Nazi occupation: expropriation, prohibition of school attendance, forced labour, abuse, and the murder of relatives.
- life in the ghettos: cramped conditions, epidemics, hunger, forced labour in 12-hour shifts for German companies and the military, deportations to extermination camps, murder of family members in the ghetto, mass shootings during the liquidation of ghettos
- life in concentration camps and labour camps: Death during transport, murder of relatives upon arrival in Auschwitz, forced labour (in munitions factories, mines, bunker construction, airfield construction, aircraft construction, spinning mills, weaving mills, etc.) and abuse with completely inadequate food and clothing
- The death marches: hunger, lack of clothing, bombings, murder of prisoners by the guards
- life in hiding: some of the claimants were able to escape and had to fight for their lives in hiding with farmers and in the forests, persecuted by German patrols and exposed to hunger and cold.
- Life in the USSR: Jews were able to flee to Russian-occupied territory or were driven there by the Germans. They describe their lives first in labour camps and later, for the most part, in Central Asia.
For more information on the affidavits and their history, see the page ‘About the biographies’.
Life before and after persecution
However, the claimants also described – sometimes in great detail – their lives before persecution, including their education, work, family and living situations. See, for example, the biographies of
and from their liberation to their emigration to Israel or the USA. They list the DP camps in which they were held, report on their education and marriages, and the birth of their children. The odyssey of emigration is also described:
- Berko Deicz
- Ernst Nasch, studied at the Ludwigs-Maximilian-Universität, Munich
- Henia Weissblum and David Kochman were on the ‘Exodus’, Bernd-Dov Joseph on the “Patria”: they report on their illegal entry into Israel on ‘coffin ships’, persecution by British ships and internment in Cyprus, on ships sinking in storms.
as well as the consequences of persecution, e.g.
- termination of education
- social decline because the persecuted could no longer work in their learned profession
Origin and age of those persecuted
The claimants originally came from various countries in Eastern Europe and the German Reich.
They emigrated to Israel or the USA by the end of the 1940s.
There, they hired lawyers to handle their cases, who in turn hired Konrad Kittl to represent them before the authorities and courts here. Konrad Kittl received a large number of cases from the lawyers Rozenberg (Tel Aviv, Israel) and Kestenberg (New York, USA).
The majority of claimants were children or young people at the time of persecution.
Further information about the claimants:
- on the page ‘About the claimants’: professions, origins, ages, ghettos mentioned, concentration camps, persecution
- on the page “Ghettos”: forced labour carried out
- on the page ‘Camps’: concentration camps mentioned and number of claimants, forced labour carried out
List of Claimants
Sources for the biographies - Konrad Kittl's files
Konrad Kittl's files contain a wide variety of documents describing the persecution, including:
- Some very detailed affidavits on the history of persecution
- Information on places and times of imprisonment, based on information provided in earlier proceedings
- Application forms with information on family, occupation and income before the persecution
- Requests for information to the International Tracing Service (ITS), Arolsen
- Information from the ITS on imprisonment, health and whereabouts after liberation
- Expert opinions on psychological and physical damage
- Documents relating to court proceedings brought by Konrad Kittl
A list of which data can be found in which document is available for download.
Biographies of persecuted Jews
Based on the information in the files, 43 biographies have been compiled to date.
The documents relevant to the compilation of the biographies are available for download. They are often sketchy and will be supplemented gradually with information from the original files, if these are accessible.
In addition, excerpts from the statements of more than 90 claimants describe their experiences in the German Reich, ghettos, concentration camps and forced labour camps, in hiding, on death marches, after liberation and in the USSR.
External Sources
The biographies are supplemented by documents and information from other archives and websites, e.g.
- Prisoner records from the Arolsen Archives, search for and download of documents in the online archive
- Documents from the ghetto administration of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, search for and download of documents in the ‘Holocaust Survivors and Victims Database’
- Original files from the archives of the state compensation offices
- Websites of the memorial sites
Bildquellen siehe Antragsteller
- Interviews with survivors, e.g. Henry Adler, Sam Binke, Esther Eisdorfer, Elka Kolski, Bernhard Martin, Hyman Olstein, Boris Piekny, Joe Schlesinger, Rachel Schper, Lilli Silbiger, Felix Zgnilek. See USC Shoah Foundation Institute
- Court rulings from judicial archives, e.g. in the case of Lilli Silbiger.
- Other sites: Statement by Boris Piekny in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.
The supplementary documents from the Arolsen Archives, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the state compensation offices, among others, provide additional information that confirms and supplements the data provided by the claimants. They also provide insight into the bureaucracy of persecution, where the persecuted were registered with work permits, registration forms, apartment occupancy forms, expulsion orders, prisoner index cards, prisoner personnel forms, effects cards, work assignment cards, transport lists and much more.
A complete list of sources is available for download.
Fates of Vilnius Jews
The ‘Vilnius’ page attempts to describe the fate of the inhabitants in more detail based on the accounts of 20 survivors, their lives before the occupation, in the ghetto, then in Baltic concentration camps such as Vaivara and Riga, and later in Stutthof until liberation.
Some managed to escape and survive in hiding, others survived in Heereskraftfahrpark 562 and were able to hide when it was disbanded. They describe the fate of their relatives, who were murdered by Einsatzkommandos during the occupation of Vilnius or later in Ponary.
Two of the prisoners survived the massacre in Niemenczyn on 20 September 1941 before being sent to the Vilnius ghetto.
Similar presentations for Auschwitz (178 claimants) and the Lodz ghetto (88 claimants) are planned.
Notes on the file inventory
The collection in the 'Archiv der Münchner Arbeiterbewegung e.V.' (Archive of the Munich Workers' Movement) comprises approximately 1,500 files relating to compensation proceedings for 'Schaden an Körper oder Gesundheit' (damage to body and health) under the 'Bundesentschädigungsgesetz (BEG) (Federal Compensation Act). These were conducted by Munich lawyer Konrad Kittl in the 1960s. I began cataloguing and evaluating the files in 2015.
Konrad Kittl's files give an idea of the information contained in the original files in the archives. To our knowledge, they are the only documents on compensation proceedings outside the state archives, and the correspondence between the lawyers and the insight into Kittl's work provided by his correspondence are certainly unique.
They are examples of the original files, of the ‘hundreds of thousands and millions of individual files of people who, in administrative proceedings, described their persecution and their family history, including dates, places, names, perpetrators, other victims and more.’ (Bundes-Ministerium der Finanzen, Monatsbericht des BMF, Januar 2021, "Das Archivierungsprojekt der Wiedergutmachung und seine Bedeutung im Kampf gegen den Antisemitismus", S. 75).
Why ‘Files as contemporary witnesses’?
At the beginning of each proceeding, claimants were asked to provide a description of their persecution and, in the case of a claim for compensation for ‘bodily injury or damage to health,’ the fate of their relatives. This was often followed by requests from authorities for clarification of open points.
These descriptions had to be prepared for every possible proceeding (imprisonment, life, health, education) of the claimants. In the case of court proceedings, the claimants often had to answer further questions as well. They also described their experiences to experts, so that these ‘interviews’ often lasted 5, 10, or even 15 years. Overall, the files contain ‘detailed written accounts of personal experiences. They are, so to speak, written conversations with contemporary witnesses.’ (Monatsbericht des BMF, Januar 2021).
Due to the different types of damage, a wide variety of aspects of persecution were described.
However, Konrad Kittl focused on compensation for ‘bodily injury and damage to health’. Statements by claimants on other types of damage mainly relate to ‘loss of liberty’. The files contain only a few statements on damage to property, education and life. For more details, see the section ‘About the biographies’.
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