Waldsee 1944 postcard exhibition: a 'woodland lake' in Auschwitz

Judaism, Fall-Winter, 2006 by Hedvig Turai

    The artisans of execution would not meet the industrial challenge
  with more gun cartridges.... Mass murder demanded the gas Zyklon B and
  the mystification of its victims as well....
  --Alain Finkielkraut (1)

IN THE SUMMER OF 1944, RECENTLY DEPORTED PER-sons sent postcards to Budapest from a place called Waldsee. (2) The postcards were handed to the Jewish Council in Budapest to be distributed to the addressees. "I am doing fine," the cards read. "I am working," or "I have arrived safely. I have got work in my occupation," or "Follow us here!"

Those who received a postcard from Waldsee searched for it on a map and easily found a place with this name. More than one, in fact; there was a "Waldsee" in Austria and in Switzerland. One of the leaders of the Hungarian Jewish Council, Fulop Freudiger, helped to distribute the postcards. It was he who noticed that on one of them, the word "Waldsee" was imposed over another name ending in "witz." Only later, at the end of June, would he fill out the remainder of the obscured postmark: Auschwitz. He came to that realization when he himself received a postcard from two of his acquaintances. (3) In this card, the senders, Jozsef and Samuel Stern, signaled the deceit by signing their names as Joseph R'evim (Hebrew for "hungry") and Samuel Blimalbiscj (Hebrew for "without clothing"). (4)

What Freudiger may have surmised, and what we now know, was that the postcards were dictated by SS soldiers to the deported people, often right before they were sent to die in a gas chamber. Some postcards from "Waldsee" have come down to us as documents of this postal fraud; a few are in the possession of the Budapest Jewish Museum.

The trick of the Waldsee postcard was first used in 1943 with the Greek Jews. (5) They were taken to Auschwitz and Treblinka and, immediately before their murders, were forced to write a message home saying that they were "in Waldsee" and "doing fine." (6) Such tricks got the deported people to cooperate in their own deaths, making the process of their annihilation smoother and easier. Over a half-century later, the fake postcards provide at least a partial answer to the often-asked question, voiced at times with accusatory overtones, about how people could go to the slaughterhouse of their own volition, without much resistance, if any at all.

The messages from "Waldsee" were posted to Hungary when the mass killing was at its peak in Auschwitz and the suspicions of victims not yet deported had to be allayed. The ruse may often have succeeded; the postcards may have helped assuage fears and secure the consent and obedience of many of the subsequent victims of Auschwitz.

At the beginning of Imre Kertesz's Fateless, Waldsee is also mentioned. In the train to the concentration camp, he reports, people are guessing at their destination: "I am completely ignorant how (but some adults did discover it) we learned that our journey's end was a place named Waldsee. When I was thirsty or hot, the promise contained in that name immediately invigorated me." (7) The cool shady water of this "woodland lake," for that is what "waldsee" means in German, calmed the imagination of the deported youth.

The Waldsee postcard is a part of a densely woven texture of Nazi lies intended to disavow the genocidal reality of the concentration camp and help reconcile both victim and perpetrator to its intolerable nature. As the historian Saul Friedlander has pointed out, the euphemisms and bureaucratic jargon employed by the Nazis inserted the horrible events into the banal course of everyday life and showed that everything followed a normal course according to laws dictated by necessity. (8)

The examples of such dissimulation abound: "resettlement" for deportation, or "final solution" for mass extermination, "showers" for gas chambers. In a private letter sent by an employee of the I.G. Farben Factory in Auschwitz, the writer referred to attempts to escape from the camp as "attempts to change one's climate"; of those who died, he wrote that they "got a touch of sunstroke." (9)

The perverse motto Arbeit macht frei (work brings freedom), which was posted at death camp gates, was also part of this effort to disguise reality and make the victims complicit in their own destruction. At Treblinka, the camp railway station displayed such signs as "Cashier," "Buffet," "Storehouse," "Telephone" and "Telegraph"; train schedules were posted on the wall to inform people when the trains would arrive from Berlin or Vienna. Also, at the beginning of the liquidation in Treblinka, an SS guard asked people to prepare one zloty as a fee for showering; he collected money in a booth at the entrance of the gas chamber just to maintain the illusion. (10)

The stamped card that made a resort out of Auschwitz is one of those cynical lies intended to create the appearance of normal life in a place devoid of normalcy.

Waldsee is a lie, the metaphor of the deliberately deceptive creation of fiction out of reality. Ironically, even reality was used to distort itself. As literary critic Debarati Sanyal states, referring to the sports matches described by several survivors, "a simple game of soccer can create a beautiful fiction within the deadly realities of the camp." (11) Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi concurs; "the true horror of the concentration camp is normality, the soccer match played in front of the crematoria." (12) Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski reports on how, "between two throw-ins in a soccer game ..., 3,000 people had been put to death." (13)