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Deutsches Historisches Museum Abteilungsdirektorin Kommunikation Ulrike Kretzschmar Unter den Linden 2 10117 Berlin T +49 30 20304-400 F +49 30 20304-152 presse@dhm.de Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit Daniela Lange Unter den Linden 2 10117 Berlin T +49 30 20304-410 F +49 30 20304-412 presse@dhm.de www.dhm.de

Deported to Auschwitz – Sheindi Ehrenwald‘s notes In the permanent exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

Exhibition texts

Deported to Auschwitz – Sheindi Ehrenwald‘s notes

Since the summer of 1941 at the latest the murder of the Jews was one of the most important aims of the Nazi regime. The conquest of large parts of Europe by the Wehrmacht provided the prerequisite for this objective. With the occupation of Hungary in March 1944 the Jewish population, first those in the rural areas, were disenfranchised, persecuted, deported and ultimately murdered.

At the time Sheindi Ehrenwald was 14 years old. She kept a diary starting when the invasion began, during the expulsion to the ghettos, in the railway to Auschwitz-Birkenau and even during the first days in the extermination camp.

Sheindi survived the Holocaust. Even while still in the concentration camp she prepared copies of her diary and was thus able to save the document. The pages that have come down to us tell of people who were murdered and about whom no other traces and stories have survived. The Deutsches Historisches Museum has been able to prepare her notes for the first time in an exhibition.

Notes Sheindi Ehrenwald’s diary

Sheindi Ehrenwald was born in 1928 in the small town of Galánta. When the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944 she began writing a diary. Sheindi recorded the last words three months later in June 1944 on a slip of paper she had torn out the diary and then hidden in her barracks in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Designated for forced labour during a selection, she was deported to an arms factory in Lower Silesia. She took the pages – meanwhile merely crumpled-up clumps of paper – with her.

The work done in the factory was documented on index cards. Sheindi collected discarded cards and in December 1944 began in the evenings to secretly copy the severely damaged pages of her diary onto the cards. She succeeded in hiding these notes until she was liberated in May 1945.

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Home Jewish life in Galánta

Sheindi Ehrenwald spent her childhood in the circle of a large Jewish family. Of them only three members survived the Holocaust: Sheindi, her sister Yitti and her brother Yezekiel.

The Ehrenwald family lived in Galánta. There the family owned several shops along the main street. Until the end of the First World War in 1918 the town had belonged to Austria-Hungary, from 1920 to Czechoslovakia and from 1938 to Hungary again. In the Ehrenwald family they spoke Hungarian, German and Slovakian.

In Galánta one third of the 4000 inhabitants were Jewish. The town had two Jewish communities and was known as a centre of Jewish erudition. Religious education played an important role in the Ehrenwald family as well.

The notes that Sheindi started taking down with the German invasion of Hungary tell of the women, men and children of the Jewish communities in Galánta.

Threat The Wehrmacht in Hungary

At the beginning of September 1943, Italy, which had fought on the side of Germany, capitulated before the oncoming Allied forces. Shortly thereafter the German alliance partner Hungary took up contact with the Allies. In order to prevent the Hungarians from changing sides the Wehrmacht invaded Hungary in March 1944.

The invasion did not take place only for political and military reasons, however. To carry on the war the Reich desperately needed Hungarian resources and labourers. The German regime therefore regarded the Jewish population of Hungary as potential work slaves to be deported to Germany and there ruthlessly exploited. Moreover, anti-Semitic forces took over positions of power in Hungary and urged the forcible expulsion of Jewish men and women. Sheindi describes this threatening situation in her notes.

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Persecution

Ostracism and ghettoization of the Jews

Within an extremely short period of time after the invasion of the Wehrmacht, the Hungarian state machinery enforced the expulsion of Jews from the economy and society and thus robbed them of their livelihood: Jewish shops were closed down, assets confiscated. Occupational bans were enforced against Jews and they were prohibited from leaving Hungary. Their food rations were also reduced.

The ghettoization began in April 1944. In May the Ehrenwald family were among those who were forced to leave their home and were deported by way of three ghettos to Auschwitz. Accommodation and provisions were completely insufficient in the ghetto. Many Jewish inhabitants experienced violence and even torture. Gendarmerie and police searched them for their last valuables.

Transports Special trains to the extermination camps

Logistics was a key element in implementing the Holocaust. Nearly all transports from the German occupied territories of Europe were organised jointly by the SS and the German Reichsbahn.

The deportation of the Jewish population of Hungary was negotiated at the beginning of May 1944 at a scheduling conference in Vienna by representatives of the SS, the Reichsbahn, the Hungarian and Slovakian railways as well as the Wehrmacht and the Hungarian gendarmerie. They resolved that starting in the middle of May around 3000 Jews were to be transported daily to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Ehrenwald family, who were detained at the time in the Érsekújvár ghetto, were dispatched in overcrowded goods wagons without food or water on 12 June 1944. The train came to a halt in the early morning of 14 June at the new railway siding in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Testimonies of the annihilation What people like Sheindi Ehrenwald experienced and suffered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp cannot be adequately depicted in an exhibition.

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The cruel reality of Auschwitz remains inconceivable to this day despite the many descriptions by survivors.

Some written or pictorial pieces of evidence that prisoners recorded during their time in the extermination camp have survived. While these traces are fragmentary, yet they represent for us today irreplaceable proof of the crimes committed.

The letters or reports they wrote and the pictures they drew at the risk of their lives demonstrate the will of the victims to document the mass murder for posterity. The evidence was buried, smuggled out of the camp or discovered only decades later.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Industrial mass murder

Within only three months, around 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the early summer of 1944. Sheindi Ehrenwald was among the few people who were not were murdered in the gas chambers immediately after their arrival. Altogether around one million people from throughout Europe died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

The Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp was a complex comprising 40 square kilometres and consisting of the main camp and subcamps as well as utility buildings. Near the main camp or Stammlager Auschwitz I, Birkenau was built in 1942 as an extermination camp.

To carry out the killing of hundreds of thousands of people the Nazi regime worked together with private companies. Their know-how flowed into the technical implementation of the mass murder in gas chambers and the subsequent incineration of the corpses. Staff members of these companies entered the extermination camps and were informed of their purpose and function.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Perpetrators in the extermination camp

The personnel on duty in Auschwitz came from all different social classes. In 1944 some 3,000 men and women controlled around 67,000 prisoners. Due to the constant increase in the number of prisoners, the direction of the camp employed a growing number of foreign guards. It also raised the number of kapos, or prisoner functionaries, whose job it was to see that the orders of the SS were carried out by their fellow prisoners.

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Between 1940 and 1944 around 8,200 members of the SS worked in Auschwitz. In the post-war trials conducted by the Allies fewer than 10 percent of them were brought to justice; some were sentenced to death and executed. A great number of the SS personnel from the camps were either convicted much later or not at all.

Forced labour Exploitation by the German arms industry

In 1943 the German industry reported a need of more than 2.5 million new workers, but received hardly one million. As the largest branch of the economy, the arms industry was under great pressure and increasingly applied to the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office for concentration camp prisoners to help fulfil production demands. The SS was therefore counting on the potential labour force of the Jewish population when it was decided to invade Hungary and kept so-called “depot-inmates” available in Auschwitz-Birkenau for this purpose.

In 1943 intensified bombing attacks by the Allies forced many factories to move their production to the eastern part of Germany. Huge manufacturing facilities were built in Lower Silesia. Among them was the Karl Diehl company from Nuremberg, which began producing armaments in the town of Peterswaldau. Starting in the summer of 1944 the company began using Jewish prisoners there. One of them was Sheindi Ehrenwald.

New life Liberation, return and emigration

On 8 May 1945 the Second World War in Europe ended and thus also the rule of the National Socialists. A new life began for millions of former inmates of the camps and prisons. As “displaced persons” they tried to make their way through the chaos of destroyed Europe and return to their home countries.

Some 121,000 Hungarian Jews survived the Holocaust. However, most of those who returned to their hometowns were again met with anti-Semitic rejection.

For hundreds of thousands of Jews the state of Israel, founded in May 1948, became a new homeland. By 1951 almost 700,000 people had come to Israel. In 1949 Sheindi Ehrenwald arrived in Jerusalem and started a family there with her husband Emil Müller.

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Reparation? German attempts at compensation after 1945

It was only in 1956 that the Federal Republic of Germany regulated the “restitution of National Socialist injustice” in the form of a law. Around one million victims of the Nazis received payments from the state, 80 percent of whom were Jewish. The victims had to be of German origin, however, and even they experienced protracted and agonizing conflicts with German authorities. In many cases former Nazis or at least “fellow travellers” occupied positions in the administrative bodies or wrote medical evaluations of the victims.

For many years private companies that had employed forced labourers assumed no responsibility for their actions. Following the successful lawsuit of a former forced labourer, IG Farben began in 1957 to pay some 30 million D-Marks into a reparations fund. It was only in 1998 that the Diehl AG company established a reparations fund, from which Sheindi Miller-Ehrenwald received a payment.

Historical injustice of the Holocaust cannot be “made good again” (Wiedergutmachen). Nevertheless, victim’s pensions can still help survivors.

Deutsches Historisches Museum Abteilungsdirektorin Kommunikation Ulrike Kretzschmar Unter den Linden 2 10117 Berlin T +49 30 20304-400 F +49 30 20304-152 presse@dhm.de Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit Daniela Lange Unter den Linden 2 10117 Berlin T +49 30 20304-410 F +49 30 20304-412 presse@dhm.de www.dhm.de

Sheindi’s Diary The dramatic legacy of a 14-year-old-girl during the Holocaust

THE STORY For 75 years, Sheindi Serena Müller (92) kept her diary hidden, showing it to only a few people. As a 14-year-old girl, she secretly recorded her dramatic experiences during the Holocaust on 54 dockets from an arms factory, risking her life. They form a unique document describing the horror of the persecution of the Jews from the perspective of a young girl. Sheindi’s struggle for survival begins with her deporta-tion from what was then Hungarian Galanta to the extermination camp Auschwitz in 1944. There she experiences unimaginable terror and also meets the “Angel of Death”, camp physician Dr. Josef Mengele. Eventually, she is used as a forced la-bourer in a German arms factory. She barely survives the ordeal. Finally, after 14 months of suffering, Sheindi is liberated. She manages to save the 54 pages of her diary. It is a world-exclusive document that is now being shown for the first time.

THE FILM BILD has documented Sheindi Müller’s story in an impressive video production. With striking imagery and emotional interviews, the film describes the story of Sheindi Müller. The protagonist herself reads from her original diary. To illustrate the his-toric developments, the artform of motion graphics is employed. The authors visited all of the places described in the diary and thus seamlessly reconstructed the period in which the diary was written: Galanta, Érsekújvár, Auschwitz, Peterswaldau, and finally Jerusalem. The latter is where Sheindi Müller has been living since 1949 and where she gave an interview to the authors. The film will be the basis for an interna-tional exhibition of the diary.

From 23rd of January to 30th of Januar 2020 the film can be seen daily at 3 pm in the Zeughauskino of the Deutschen Historischen Museum. Editors & Producers: Peter Hell and Christin Wahl

Camera: Christin Wahl, Dominik van Alst, Tim Temme, Hannes Ravic, Stephan Meyer

Production Company: Axel Springer SE 2019

Country of Origin: Germany Production Locations: Israel, Poland, Slovakia

Running time: 36:29 ms

PRESS IMAGES

Deported to Auschwitz - Sheindi Ehrenwald’s Notes

From 23 January 2020 in the Permanent Exhibition

Download Pressefotos: www.dhm.de/presse

Die Pressebilder dürfen ausschließlich für die aktuelle Berichterstattung im Rahmen der oben genannten Ausstellung und nur unter der vollständigen Angabe des Quellennachweises verwendet werden.

Passport photograph of Sheindi Ehrenwald (now: Sheindi Miller-Ehrenwald), 1947 © Private collection Sheindi Miller-Ehrenwald, Jerusalem.

Portrait of members from the Ehrenwald family; in front Sheindi’s father Lipót Ehrenwald © Private collection Sheindi Miller-Ehrenwald, Jerusalem.

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Index card of the Diehl company, factory Peterswaldau, for the documentation of time fuses, 1944/45 © Private collection Sheindi Miller-Ehrenwald, Jerusalem.

3 Back side of the index card with notes by Sheindi Ehrenwald taken from her diary, 1944/45 © Private collection Sheindi Miller-Ehrenwald, Jerusalem.

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PRESS IMAGES

Deported to Auschwitz - Sheindi Ehrenwald’s Notes

From 23 January 2020 in the Permanent Exhibition

Download Pressefotos: www.dhm.de/presse

Die Pressebilder dürfen ausschließlich für die aktuelle Berichterstattung im Rahmen der oben genannten Ausstellung und nur unter der vollständigen Angabe des Quellennachweises verwendet werden.

Deportation of inmates from the Körmend ghetto (Hungary) towards Auschwitz-Birkenau, 19th June 1944 © Holokauszt Emlékközpont, Budapest.

Aquarelle „Punishment during roll call“ by Zofia Rozensztrauch (later: Naomi Judkowski), 1945 © Yad Vashem Art Museum, Jerusalem. [“Schultz, the leader of the work commando, is on duty’! For minor infractions (failing to walk in line when marching through the camp gate), the punishment was a prolonged kneeling during the roll call. The above named SS man came up with such punishments for no reason whatsoever and also would beat and kick anyone who happened to be nearby. Auschwitz-Birkenau F.K.L. [Women‘s camp] - The arms were to be kept raising during the entire time of kneeling.”]

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8Page of the „Auschwitz-Album“ with photographs of the arrival of a transport from the Beregszász ghetto, 26th May 1944© Yad Vashem, Jerusalem.

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Soviet poster TASS-window with caricature of the relation of the German Reich to its unstable allies Hungary and Romania © Deutsches Historisches Museum.[ “Fatal Care”; Hitler: “The situation on the eastern front draws my attention towards your countries”]

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Deutsches Historisches Museum

Abteilungsdirektorin Kommunikation

Ulrike Kretzschmar

Unter den Linden 2

10117 Berlin

T +49 30 20304-400

F +49 30 20304-152

presse@dhm.de

Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit

Daniela Lange

Unter den Linden 2

10117 Berlin

T +49 30 20304-410

F +49 30 20304-412

presse@dhm.de

www.dhm.de

Deported to Auschwitz– Sheindi Ehrenwald’s Notes An Exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in cooperation with AXEL SPRINGER SE

Facts & Dates

Venue Deutsches Historisches Museum,

Permanent Exhibition, Zeughaus, Ground Floor

Duration from 23 January 2020

Opening Hours daily 10 am to 6 pm

Admission Free up to 18 years

€ 8, reduced € 4

Information

Deutsches Historisches Museum

Unter den Linden 2 | 10117 Berlin

Tel. +49 30 20304-0 | E-Mail: info@dhm.de

Internet www.dhm.de/ausstellungen

Social Media #DHMSheindi

Exhibition area 100 m², Permanent Exhibition

Exhibition content 120 exhibits

President Prof. Dr. Raphael Gross

Head of Exhibitions Ulrike Kretzschmar

Project Leader Fritz Backhaus

Curators and Concept Thomas Jander, Stephanie Neuner

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Exhibition Architecture Werner Schulte

Exhibitions Graphics BOK + Gärtner GmbH, Berlin/Münster

Patron Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media

Cooperation Partner AXEL SPRINGER SE

20 September 2019 to 8 March 2020

The Crossbow – Terror and Beauty

An exhibition from the collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

21 November 2019 to 19 April 2020

Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

From 23 January 2020

Deported to Auschwitz – Sheindi Ehrenwald’s Notes

In the permanent exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in cooperation with BILD

27 March to 18 October 2020

Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

19 June 2020 to 3 January 2021

From Luther to Twitter. Media and the Political Public

Sphere (working title)

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

19 March to 19 September 2021 “The Political History of the documenta (WT)”

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

PROGRAM 2019 – 2021

6 May to 24 October 2021 The “Divinely Gifted” in the Federal Republic. Artists of National Socialism in the 1950s and 1960s (WT) An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

Permanent Exhibition

German History from the Middle Ages To the Fall of the Berlin Wall An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

20 September 2019 to 8 March 2020

The Crossbow – Terror and Beauty

An exhibition from the collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

Despite all post-war losses the crossbow collection of the Deutsches Historisches Museum is still one of the most important in the world. The crossbows and their fittings in the exhibition are from the 15th to the 20th centuries.

In the Middle Ages crossbows were used as weapons of war, and in later times also in the hunt. But they played their principal role as shooting weapons in the cities and the princely courts. The professional crossbow makers produced weapons of great technical and decorative quality. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods crossbows were adorned with iconographic symbols.

Shooting clubs, particularly in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire, took on an important social role, and their gatherings and festivals were part of urban self-representation. The exhibition addresses the development of the crossbow and its societal functions largely by means of weapons from the collections of the Deutsches Historisches Museum.

PEI Hall, ground floor

21 November 2019 to 19 April 2020

Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

Nowadays, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt are celebrated as German cosmopolitans. They embody the accomplishments of public education, a new perspective on nature, and an unbiased look at the cultures outside of Europe. Their biographies, however, are marked by the contradictions of their time: the image of the equality of all people as conceived by the Enlightenment contrasted with the existence of colonialism and slavery. The new discovery of nature goes hand in hand with its mastery and destruction. International exchange and cooperation are unable to prevent nationalist exclusion.

This first major German exhibition on Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt focuses on the brothers in the context of the complex challenges, developments and opportunities of their time. It explores social and political areas of negotiation and organisation and examines the relation between travel and knowledge and the changing perspective on humankind and the environment under the influence of science and historical consciousness. Questions of the actuality and evaluation of the Humboldt brothers’ positions and actions for the present day arise from the interplay of the multifaceted themes surrounding their lives and undertakings.

PEI Hall, basement floor

From 23 January 2020

Deported to Auschwitz – Sheindi Ehrenwald’s Notes

In the permanent exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in cooperation with BILD

When German troops occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, the Holocaust began for the Jewish population. Sheyndi Ehrenwald from the small town of Galánta, then 15 years old, made notes from the day of the occupation on about how she experienced ostracism, disenfranchisement and ghettoization and how she thought and felt at the time. She continued to write as she was being deported in a cattle wagon that brought her and her entire family to Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1944, where almost all the family members were murdered. She herself was forced to do hard labour.

Yet she survived and was able to save her notes. The Deutsches Historisches Museum is presenting this unique, very personal testimony of persecution, deportation and annihilation of the Hungarian Jews for the first time in an exhibition.

Zeughaus, ground floor

27 March to 18 October 2020

Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

The twentieth century simply cannot be understood without Hannah Arendt, wrote the Israeli author Amos Elon. Two concepts significantly influenced by Arendt’s thought, totalitarianism and the banality of evil, determine how we view the twentieth century down to the present day. One reason for this ongoing influence is that Arendt’s insights were rarely left unchallenged. The planned exhibition aims to trace Arendt’s observations on contemporary history and introduce to the public a life and work that mirrors the history of the twentieth century: totalitarianism, the situation of refugees, the Adenauer era, racial segregation in the U.S., the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem or the student movement. Arendt frequently expressed her views on current events as a public intellectual, often sparking fierce controversy. As the exhibition will show this diagnostic appraisal makes the question of the power of judgement particularly urgent today against the backdrop of pluralization, the accelerated change in values and growing populism.

PEI Hall, 1st + 2nd floor

19 June 2020 to 3 January 2021

From Luther to Twitter. Media and the Political Public Sphere (working title)

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

The current discussion about the transformation of political culture brought about by the Internet provides the Deutsches Historisches Museum with an occasion to look into the relationship between media, politics and the public sphere – medial innovations were, after all, always an important means for political actors to influence and mould the public in previously undreamt-of ways.

The exhibition “From Luther to Twitter. Media and the Political Public Sphere” covers the broad spectrum from the Early Modern Age to the present day. Starting with the invention of printing and its importance for the Reformation, the exhibition then focuses on the press in the 18th and 19th centuries, the special role of radio broadcasting from the 1920s to the 1940s, and that of television in the post-war decades. Structural transformations of the public sphere – between repression and emancipation – have always been influenced not least by the media. They will be traced in their continuities and interruptions up to the current developments.

PEI Hall, ground floor

19 March to 19 September 2021

“The Political History of the documenta (WT)”

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

The aesthetic-political history of the Federal Republic is eminently reflected in the documenta. Since its founding in 1955 it has consistently acted a scene where central aspects of German post-war history, traces of National Socialism, the formation of blocs in the Cold War and the self-understanding of West German society are deliberated. The DHM’s exhibition sheds light on the cultural-political networks and impulses that this major international art show has injected into German society between 1955 and 1997. In a series of oral history interviews artists and festival organisers tell how they experienced the documenta.

The exhibition is curated by Lars Bang Larsen and Dorothee Wierling.

6 May to 24 October 2021

The “Divinely Gifted” in the Federal Republic. Artists of National Socialism in the 1950s and 1960s (WT)

An exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum

The so-called Gottbegnadetenliste – the “Divinely Gifted List” – was compiled by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in August 1944: 1,041 “artists in the war effort”, including 104 sculptors and painters, were considered “crucial” by the National Socialist regime and exempted from front duty. With few exceptions leading artists of National Socialism such as Arno Breker, Hermann Kaspar, Willy Meller, Werner Peiner, Richard Scheibe and Adolf Wamper lived and worked in the Federal Republic after 1945. They took on teaching activities, participated in awards ceremonies and competitions, received commissions from the areas of politics and industry, and produced a great deal of art for the public space. Their designs of monuments, fountains, statues in squares, façades and foyers marked, and still mark, the appearance of prominent places in West German cities.

The exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum sheds light for the first time on the post-war careers of the so-called divinely gifted visual artists, their reception and the related continuity of an anti-modern outlook on art. Parallel to the exhibition “The Political History of the documenta” (WT) the “Gottbegnadeten” represent a counterposition to the image of the radical new aesthetic beginning that has emanated from the major exhibition in Kassel since its premiere in 1955.

Permanent Exhibition

German History from the Middle Ages to the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Permanent Exhibition in the Zeughaus provides key insights into 1500 years of Germany‘s past. A tour covering the two floors of the exhibition chronologically presents German history in its European context: the introductory section on the first floor revolves around changes in the borders of Germany and Europe, and the history of the German language. The tour then covers the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Thirty Year‘s War, on to the German Empire and end of the First World War in 1918. The ground floor explores the Weimar Republic, the National Socialist regime, and the post-war period. The exhibition also covers the history of the two German states from 1949, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and German reunification in 1990.

7000 historical exhibits show us how people lived and thought, as well as the events and historical developments they were part of. The exhibition focusses on political history shaped by rulers, politicians and communities. Furthermore, each epoch in the exhibition also contains a variety of rooms in which everyday life is explored.

Zeughaus