Clara

I learned today that my great-grandmother Else's elderly mother, Clara Hirschel (née Goldstein), was interned alongside her daughter and son-in-law at the transit camp I visited in Rybna (formerly Reibnig).

Clara was a member of the prominent Goldstein family, several of whom moved from Kattowitz to Breslau in the mid-19th century. I'd previously found her husband's name on the Goldstein family tomb, in the Old Jewish Cemetery on ul. Ślężna, Wrocław. Ludwig died in 1933, during the early phase of Enteignung, leaving his family to face an increasingly hostile future.

Clara was reunited with Georg and Else in Riebnig in May 1942, around six months after her daughter and son-in-law had been interned there. She didn't stay long, however, as the Nazi authorities would have considered a 69-year-old woman unsuited to carrying out forced labour in the woodland surrounding the camp.

Once selected for deportation on 24 August, she was forced to walk the six kilometres to Poppelau (Popielów) train station with 217 others, arriving in Breslau the following day. If she had sufficient funds in her bank account she would have signed a contract for the purchase of an 'apartment' in the Theresienstadt ghetto, which by 1942 was mainly used to house prominent and elderly Jews. The so-called Heimeinkaufsvertrag (home buying contract) was simply another form of spoliation of Jewish property: on Clara's arrival at Theresienstadt she would have been processed at the "sluice gate", staying in unheated barracks for several days, before being assigned to an overcrowded, unsanitary house emptied of its furniture by the previous owner.

By 1942, a quarter of new arrivals at Theresienstadt died within six weeks, due to the scarcity of food, prevalence of disease, and poor medical conditions in the ghetto. The self-administration adopted a strategy to save as many children and young people as possible, to allow them to emigrate to Palestine after the war, which severely disadvantaged the elderly. Almost all elderly prisoners who were not deported from Theresienstadt died there, making it inconceivable that Clara would survive the camp.

However, Clara didn't die at Theresienstadt, managing somehow to survive for over a month. On 27 September 1942 she was selected for transportation to "another ghetto" by the self-administration, before being marched three kilometres to Bauschowitz train station. The average age of deportees on this transport was 72, with those who died on the march to the train station loaded onto train cars nonetheless, in order to maintain quotas. The train left Bauschowitz on 29 September, headed to the notorious extermination camp at Treblinka, where it arrived a couple of days later via Dresden, Breslau, Posen and Warsaw. Of the 2000 Jews on board this transport, not a single person is known to have survived.

I don't know whether Clara died en route to Treblinka or at the camp itself, and I don't know if she would have been aware that she was passing through her hometown of Breslau on the way. These cruel 'homecomings' seem to be a feature of the drawn-out torture and murder of my family, and I often wonder if at that point they might have retained any hope of survival. I think it's unlikely, given that rumours of deportations to extermination camps were supposed to have been rife around the camp at Riebnig as early as 1941. I also wonder what Else knew of her mother's fate after their separation in August. It seems unlikely there was any means for Clara to have contacted her, especially given the accelerated timescale of her deportation from Theresienstadt to Treblinka. When Clara was selected for deportation in August, Else must have known she would never see her mother again, having perhaps experienced some relief only a few months prior when she joined the family in Riebnig.

Prisoners incapable of labour were gassed almost immediately on arrival at Treblinka, sometimes having been tortured beforehand. I don't want to detail that here. Long before I began this research, I set limits on what I exposed myself to, deliberately stepping back from some material. Nothing in the historical record in relation to the Shoah could reasonably be described as gratuitous, but I find that unless I draw boundaries somewhere I'm less capable of absorbing what must be understood. I barely spoke for a day after reading Jan Gross's Fear. Engaging with that research wasn't just an intellectual exercise but something that reverberated inward—the intensity of it and the scale of what it described were completely overwhelming. It probably doesn't help that the sense of distance that might otherwise exist is collapsed by the knowledge that this is my family's history, and it's inevitable that this proximity intensifies my response.

I've long described myself as a philosophical pessimist, and I genuinely have no idea how anyone can encounter this material—the absolute horror of it, alongside the knowledge that people continue to treat one another in this way—and emerge with anything other than the darkest possible view of humanity.

Clara Olga Hirschel (née Goldstein), 1873–1942.