Dita Kraus - Part 1
- Brutal Nazi Torture of Jewish Girl & Her Revenge - Auschwitz & Bergen-Belsen

30 August 2022

Category: Nazi Victims

Edith Polachová was born on the 12th of July 1929 in Prague, then Czechoslovakia. Edith was the only child of Elisabeth and who nicknamed her “ Dita”. Dita’s grandfather, Johann Polach, was a member of Social Democratic party and became a senator of Czechoslovak National Parliament. When on the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg, Dita was only 3 years old.

Things changed for the worse in Czechoslovakia in late summer 1938, when Adolf Hitler annexed the Sudetenland where ethnic German population of Czechoslovakia lived. This border area of Czechoslovakia also contained the Czechoslovak Army's defensive positions in the event of a war with Germany.

Dita’s parents started to think about emigration but very few countries accepted Jewish immigrants and emigration became even more difficult when on the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the remaining Czech parts of Czechoslovakia establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Immediately after the Nazis started to occupy the whole country, they passed new anti-Jewish laws which were designed to exclude Jewish people from society and restrict their livelihood. From November 1940, new laws, decrees, guidelines, and regulations increasingly restricted the civil and human rights of Jews in the protectorate.

However, there was still an oasis of fun and hope in a desert of oppression, where Jewish children of Prague could meet - Hagibor. All was organized by Fredy Hirsch - a German-Jewish athlete, sports teacher, and Zionist youth movement leader. In November 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi architect of the Holocaust, established the Theresienstadt Ghetto which was located in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Deportation to Theresienstadt

Dita along with her parents were deported to Theresienstadt in November 1942. When Dita and her parents arrived in the Ghetto, it was so overcrowded they had to sleep on the floor inside the ramparts. Conditions in the camp were harsh. Lack of water and electricity, overcrowding, bedbugs, fleas and lice, and above all no privacy.

Men and women lived in separate barracks. They slept in three-tired wooden bunks. There were also several separate Homes for girls and boys. The prisoners spent their waking hours either at work, queuing for their meal, or on the bunk. All prisoners aged 14 to 60 or 65 had to work. Those who did not work, mostly the elderly people, received 60% less food than heavy laborers. The Ghetto was administered by the Jewish Elders, among them Fredy Hirsch, who was Head of the Children and Youth Department.

On the 26th of October 1942, less than 48 hours after the arrival of the last transport from Theresienstadt to Treblinka, the SS dispatched the first transport to Auschwitz, carrying 1,866 persons. Upon arrival, SS officials selected 247 people, mostly men, to be registered as prisoners. The remaining 1,619 were killed in the gas chambers. In order to convince the German population that the deportees were bound for resettlement, most Jews from the German Reich itself were dispatched to the east by passenger trains. Jews in the German-occupied east fared far worse. German authorities generally did not give the deportees food or water, even when the journey was long. Packed into sealed cattle cars and suffering from overcrowding, they endured intense heat during the summer and freezing temperatures in the winter.

Transport to Auschwitz

The Polachs were selected for deportation “ to the working camp in the East “ as they had been told, in December 1943. The transport was so overcrowded that man, women, children and elderly people could not sit and had to stand for about two days until they reached their destination - Auschwitz. Aside from a bucket, which was overflowing within a few hours, there was no sanitary facility. The stench of urine and excrement added to the humiliation and suffering of the deportees. Lacking food and water and proper ventilation, many of the deportees also died before the trains reached their destinations. Armed police guards accompanied the transport and they had orders to shoot anyone who tried to escape.

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