In September 1939 some 900 stateless Jews (stateless because their citizenship was revoked by the Nazis) were arrested in Berlin and placed in barracks 37, 38, 39 in Sachsenhausen. Within several months of the prisoners’ arrival at the camp, the barracks windows and doors were sealed up and the inmates were engaged in strenuous physical activity for hours on end. These tortures increased an already-high death rate in the camp.
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This postcard was sent from Copenhagen, Denmark, by Arnold Cohn to his brother Simon. Both were veterans of the German army and fought in World War I. Simon resided in the Theresienstadt ghetto, but Arnold was fortunate enough to get out of Germany and escape to Copenhagen. Arnold sent a return-receipt postcard to his brother; when Simon received it, he was to sign the pink card and send it back to Arnold, letting his brother know he was still alive. Unfortunately the card was returned in its entirely; Simon apparently was deported to the East.
This postal card was cancelled in Copenhagen and stamped Zurück. Unbekannt, meaning “Return. Recipient unknown.” The rest of the stamp reads “By the Committee for the Jewish Problem in Bohemia and Moravia.” Note that the pink return-receipt postcard is still attached to Arnold’s card.
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Mail into the concentration camps is even rarer than mail sent out by Jews because after it was delivered to the inmates, it was collected and destroyed. The cover shown has the Israel middle name and was sent into Buchenwald. So how did this item survive? My theory is Max “Israel” Steinhauser was arrested on Kristallnacht in November 1938 and was released in June 1939, the same as the cancel on the stamp. Hitler released thousands of Jews a few months after their arrest, requiring them to leave the country. I believe that Mr. Steinhauser was one of those individuals and was able to sneak the letter out of Buchenwald when he left.
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Laws were passed in late 1935 that stripped Jews of their right of citizenship in the Reich. The new regulations applied if you were Jewish and had any Jewish relatives. Even if you were not raised as a Jew, you could not be considered an Aryan.
This following is a voter registration card, which serves as a reminder that an election is coming up. It relays to the voter the location of the polling place and what issues are being decided. The handstamp on lower left of the front of the card was made at the polling place and indicates that the person voted. The front also has a nice souvenir cancel, dated April 1938.
A peculiarity existed in Birkenau: the Politische Abteilung, as the camp’s Gestapo office was called. This institution employed German-speaking Jewish women as secretaries. They enjoyed better living conditions than the other inmates because the SS saw to it that the inmates with whom they had daily contact had more hygienic surroundings. It is assumed that the SS preferred using Jewish women as secretaries because they were educated, had mastered several languages, and would never see freedom again, and thus would not be able to divulge any secrets.
This postcard, sent from a secretary employed in Auschwitz’s Politische Abteilung. It was placed into special mail bag #77 originating from the camp. The card was not censored, other than receiving the handstamped admonishment to write in German.
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The back of the voter registration card is a clear example of the Nuremberg Laws. The bottom paragraph clearly indicates that the new definition of who was a Jew. It was clearly a racial, not religious, distinction.
A person who exercises his right to vote, even though he has been denied that privilege, or is a Jew, or it is known to him that at least three grandparents were Jews, or is a product of a mixed marriage (at least two Jewish grandparents) and married to a Jew is required to return this voting card to the city voting office and may not take part in this election. Not doing so subjects him to serious punishment.
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This letter was sent via air mail from Vineland, NJ, to Paul “Israel” Herzberg in Essen, Germany.
It was postmarked October 21, 1941, before the US had entered the war. The marking Zurück (Return to sender) sent it back to New York, and it arrived on August 31, 1942, after the US had entered the war.
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Postal history is the study of the movement of the mail. We can learn about postal systems through rates, censorship, mailing directions, travel time, and routes. When there is access to the message on the card or letter, we have another aspect of history to aid us in our study. The four postal cards discussed in this article provide an insight into the postal system between the U.S.S.R. and Nazi-occupied Poland. From them we also get a feeling of ghetto life in general and specifically, a feel for the ghetto postal system. The ghetto was an innovation of the Nazis to subjugate the Jews. After occupation, the Nazis established ghettos in each town or village. These ghettos were usually located in the poor section of the town and walled off from the rest of the population. Life within the ghetto was very difficult and often dangerous.
After each ghetto was created, the Nazis established a Judenrat (Jewish Council). The Judenrat consisted of prominent individuals in the community who were responsible for running the day-to-day activities of the ghetto. “The Judenrat concept,” as described by Isaiah Trunk, “was conceived by the Nazis, not as an instrument for organizing life in the ghettos or for strengthening the structure of the ghetto, but the opposite; as an instrument which, in their hands, would help them in general, to realize their plans concerning the Jewish population in the occupied territories and, in particular, to exterminate the Jewish people.”
The letter carrier’s lot is an unhappy one. He rises at five in the morning and works till nine, ten in the evening and in spite of that, he receives no weekly wage, but gets paid by the piece—six groszy per letter, and after subtracting all taxes and contributions to “social insurance” from which he, as a Jew, cannot benefit according to the canons of the occupation authorities, but for which he enjoys the privilege of paying, there hardly remains five groszy net. The delivery of one hundred, even one hundred and fifty letters a day nets him a ridiculous sum, when a loaf of black bread costs between 22 and 24 groszy ….
This is the life of a ghetto postman in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust. This was penned by Perez Opacynziki, a talented Yiddish writer, in an essay “The Ghetto Post Man” for the Oneg Shabbat archives. He was a post man by need and a writer by profession. In this article, I use excerpts from his observations and combine them with what we know about the postal system of the ghetto. This provides unique insight into the ghetto postal system with commentary from within.
The Oneg Shabbat group was composed of writers, teachers, and observers who gathered every Friday night (thus the name Oneg Shabbat “Sabbath pleasure”) under the tutelage of historian Emmanuel Ringelbum, to record life and death in the ghetto for posterity. These observations, diaries, notes, and stories were gathered and placed in four milk cans and buried before the ghetto was destroyed. Three of the four milk cans were recovered after the war and now give us insight into life in the Warsaw ghetto.
