‘I call Zelma Cacik who may be living in London,’ says the announcer, in the clipped RP accent of the BBC in the 1940s. ‘I call her on behalf of her 16-year-old cousin…’ The voice betrays no emotion, no feeling, it’s so matter-of-fact, but the script spares no punches as it tells the cousin’s story in blunt statements of fact. She was born in Poland, separated from her family when she was 12 and made to work in a munitions factory while her parents, her sisters and brother were sent to Treblinka extermination camp.
Twelve names in all are called out on the archive radio programme from 1946, one of several that were made on behalf of children who had been Nazi captives and were waiting in displaced persons camps on the continent with nowhere to go, nothing left, no family, no home, no possessions. Would the contact named by the announcer come forward to rescue them? A 15-year-old boy survived the ghetto at Riga and five concentration camps. A 16-year-old girl watched her two brothers and her aunt being cremated and then lost her mother and her father. Listen again to the announcer and you can hear a bitter anger barely disguised beneath that cool restraint.
Alex Last came across the archive and was haunted by the bleak outlines of those stories. How did the children become separated from their families, and were they ever rescued? On Lost Children of the Holocaust on the World Service (Thursday), we joined Last on his quest to find out. He meets with Gary (formerly Gunther) Wolff, who at 13 was rounded up and sent with his parents to the ghetto at Lodz. His parents could not cope. ‘The fear factor is something you can’t transmit into words.
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