Male prisoners housed in nearby blocks also pampered the little boy with the innocent demeanor, who brightened the gloom of life in Auschwitz. Julius Mayer, a prisoner who served as a Kapo in the camp, recalled being punished with fifty lashes after being caught giving the boy a pair of boots. But there were also SS soldiers who liked Peter and brought him – and the other two boys – food and sweets.
Ruth and Peter Dattel lived in Block 10 for a year and a half, until they were evacuated and sent on the death march. Little Peter had a hard time keeping up. Ruth was aided by her friend, Ilse Nussbaum; together they carried Peter on their shoulders until they were too exhausted, whereupon the child had to make do on his own and lost sight of his mother. Fortunately, he was found by Dr. Alina Brewda, who had been walking behind. She handed him to an SS man whom she knew from Block 10, who was accompanying the march with a horse-drawn cart and allowed him to ride in it. Eventually, he was picked up by five Jewish Czech sisters who took pity on the boy and carried him with them. When an opportunity arose to escape from the march, they disappeared with Peter.
Ultimately, his mother Ruth survived the march and the concentration camps in Germany. Liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, she returned to Berlin and, having no idea what became of her son, appealed to the Red Cross and other aid organizations to look for him. Not long afterward, she married
a German soldier, a defector from the Wehrmacht, named Friedhoff. Finally, in September 1946, the Red Cross succeeded in locating Peter, by means of the number tattooed on his arm. The five sisters had taken Peter to Brno, Czechoslovakia, and one of them took him into her home and, along with her husband, Pavel Bauer, adopted him as
a son.
During the almost two years between the time when the child, now seven, was separated from his mother and was located by the Red Cross, he learned Czech and forgot his native German. He barely remembered his mother and was certain that she was no longer alive. Nor did he want to leave his adoptive parents, who were warm and loving.
However, when Ruth asked that he be returned to her, the gracious Bauers acceded. Mother and son were reunited in January 1947 at the Czech-German border in
a moving ceremony that grabbed headlines throughout Germany. Of the approximately 8,000 Jewish children who were deported from Berlin to the death camps, Peter was the only one to return to his native city.
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The three children who were in Block 10 of Auschwitz I never saw each other again. They built new lives on three continents, established families and did their best to integrate into societies that didn’t always want to hear their story. Like most Holocaust survivors, they tried to repress their memories of that horrific period and did not tell their children what they had endured – although they could never free themselves of the nightmares of life in Auschwitz.
Bronislaw Seeman and his parents moved from Krakow to Paris and lived in the French capital until their death. After high school, Bronislaw went on to study geophysics and, as an engineer, worked for Schlumberger Technology Corporation (known as SLB),
a global firm in the field of energy and natural resources, and registered a large number of patents in his name. He died on August 10, 2001, at the age of sixty-eight.
Dr. Ena Weiss, whose whole family was murdered in the war, decided to emigrate from Czechoslovakia to Australia – along with Karol Umschweif, the son of her friend Natalia, whom she had saved. A large number of Jewish women from Slovakia, who had held key positions in the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided to start a new chapter in their life Down Under. But before Weiss left, Karol’s uncle Dolek Amishav, who lived in Mandatory Palestine, discovered that his nephew had survived and wanted to adopt him. Weiss ultimately entrusted Karol to the Mother Superior of a Catholic convent on the outskirts of Brno, where the boy, now nine, lived for about a year, until Amishav arranged passage for him to Palestine.
In the spring of 1947 Karol arrived in the port of Haifa aboard the Providence, having been registered – by the clandestine aliyah organization that organized immigration of Jews to bypass British restrictions – as the son of a Jewish woman passenger who had a valid immigration certificate to the country.
Karol, who later changed his name to Zvi, grew up and went to school on Kibbutz Ein Hamifratz. A gifted athlete, he became
a member of Israel’s national volleyball team and a champion long jumper and pentathlete. After successfully completing a combat pilots’ course in the Israel Air Force, he took part in multiple operational missions, including forays and dogfights in the Six-Day War, the War of Attrition that followed, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Upon completing his military duties, he became a pilot in El Al and flew jumbo jets. Zvi Umschweif died on August 26, 2005, aged sixty-seven.
For his part, Peter Dattel, the “mascot” of Block 10, bore the brunt of virulent German antisemitism decades after the war. Initially he moved to Palestine with his mother and stepfather, but they were not able to integrate into their new surroundings, and in 1948 returned to Germany and settled in Cologne. At the start of his adult life, after changing his name to Danny, he tried his hand at acting but failed, later accepting a job as an apprentice at Cologne’s Herstatt Bank, at his mother’s urging. His success in the all-important trading and foreign currency and gold department led his employers to dub him the “golden boy” of the
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