Riva Minska
# 55082
Camp Mittelsteine
Poland 9/23/44 to 5/6/45
# 55082
Camp Mittelsteine
Poland 9/23/44 to 5/6/45
Ruth Minsky Sender was born Riva Minska, in the industrial town of Lodz, Poland on May 3, 1926. Riva was the 4th of seven children and lived with her 4 brothers and 2 sisters and her mother in a middle class neighborhood. Her father died in 1931 from typhus and her mother raised 7 children while running her own specialty tailoring business. She manufactured children’s made-to-order coats for the “well-to-do” customers. She sent her children to a private Jewish Day School 6 days a week and struggled to make ends meet, but only her eldest daughter knew how much she struggled.
They were a tight knit family and they rented a two room apartment from Mrs. Gruber. Riva remembers Mrs. Gruber as something of a busy body, but Riva’s family and the Grubers were very close and felt like one big family. They slept three children in each bed and the apartment had no running water so they used an outhouse and pumped water from a well to bring upstairs. Despite these conditions Riva and here brothers and sisters never felt deprived.
After Hitler took power and Germany began racing toward war Riva sensed a growing antisemitism in her neighborhood. In 1939 Riva was 13 years old when the Nazi’s invaded Poland and began to implement their strategy of isolating the Jews and turning the Polish citizens against them. Polish citizens researched their family history to find any link that could identify them as German. If they could prove this, they would be considered “Volksdeutsche”. These were people of German ethnic origin but living beyond the borders of Germany. The significance of Volksdeutsche was to ensure these people, in the countries they invaded, held a special place in the Nazi plan of world conquest. It also helped turn these people against the Jews by stripping them of any rights and giving the Volksdeutsche the power to take any property they wanted from the Jews. Riva’s mother decided to smuggle her three oldest children out of Poland to Russia so they would not be taken to Nazi labor camps.
A few months after the invasion Riva remembers that the Jews were required to wear yellow Stars of David on their clothing to identify them as Jews and were forced to walk in the streets rather than on the sidewalks. Soon the Jews lost their businesses, then their jobs, then their property and finally they were herded into a Jewish Ghetto in Lodz. Riva’s mother had to give all of her sewing machines to the Nazi’s who in turn gave them to German companies. Mrs. Gruber and Harry join the Volksdeutsche. Mrs. Gruber takes things from Jewish families and then moves into a Jewish home in the nicest part of Lodz. Riva remembers Mrs. Gruber becoming very nasty and then turning against her family. One day Mrs. Gruber marched into the Minska apartment and took several fur coats Riva’s uncle had left in the apartment for safe keeping. Riva remembers her mother pleading with Mrs. Gruber not to take the coats and Mrs. Gruber saying, “Don’t worry. You won’t be here much longer. You will all be gone soon.” Riva’s mother said to Mrs. Gruber, “God will punish you for what you are doing.” Mrs. Gruber replied, “Silence! God is with us.” Mrs. Gruber had a grandson Harry who was the same age as Riva. Riva and Harry were always playing together like brother and sister. Riva recalls Harry coming to her apartment one day dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform. Riva’s world was shrinking.
I asked Riva her opinion on why the non-Jews turned so quickly on the Jews. “It was the power. When you give some people power, they abuse it.” “I also learned that you could teach people to hate.”
The Jewish population was now forced to work in the ghetto making products for the German war effort. Riva and her mother worked at a company sewing German Military jackets. The payment for working was extra food rations but even with the “extra” there was not enough nutrition to keep people healthy. Riva’s mother became visibly sick and worn down due to the cramped, unsanitary conditions and the lack of food. In September of 1942 the situation went from bad to worse when the Nazi’s arrived in the Ghetto one morning searching through houses, looking for those that were too sick to work. Riva’s mother was taken away and Riva and her brothers and sisters never saw her again. Her parting words were, “With hope there is life. You must live.”
Now at the age of 16, Riva is the eldest of the 4 siblings, one of which has Tuberculosis. The responsibility of raising the family falls to Riva. She manages to get permission to do her sewing work from home so she can take care of her sick brother but that means her food rations will be cut. The Ghetto government orders Riva and her brothers to leave their house. It was going to be torn down and used for firewood which was in short supply. They move into what was once a grocery store. It is just one big room with a cellar.
In 1944 Riva remembers the Nazi’s aggressively emptying the Ghetto by asking for volunteers to go to labor camps. They tried to convince the Jews that they are doing this for their own good because the Russians were approaching the Ghetto and when they arrive, they will not treat the Jews very nicely because they have been working for the Nazi military cause. Riva and her brothers continue to hide from the Nazi’s. Finally, her brother mercifully losses his battle with tuberculosis. As the population of the Ghetto decreases it become increasingly difficult to hide from daily morning raids by the Nazi’s.
In August of 1944 the Nazi’s chances of winning the war are rapidly dwindling. This is unknown to the Jews who continue to live in their own private hell. Riva and her brothers decide they will pack up the few possessions they have and go with the Nazi’s. They are herded to the train station where she and her brothers try to keep together. Then the Nazi’s pack the Jews into cattle cars so tightly, that there is no room to sit, very little ventilation, virtually no light and a bucket to be used as a toilet. The train traveled for three days and three nights and no one knew where they were headed. On August 27th, 1944, the train finally stopped. When the doors were opened they saw dead bodies everywhere. The survivors jumped out and the dead are pulled from the train. This stop was Birkenau-Auschwitz.
The Nazi’s begin their torment by sorting the men from the women and children and Riva is separated from her brothers. They are order to strip naked and put all of their belongings in piles. Next their heads are shaved and then they are moved into showers. Luckily for this group the showers have water and not gas. They are herded from the showers into another room where they are given one article of clothing. Riva ends up with a long shirt which covers her to her knees. The women are put into Barracks packed with what look like living corpses.
The Nazi’s and their Kapos, prisoners put in charge of the other prisoners, indiscriminately beat some of the women with clubs and whips and keep them all standing in the hot sun all day. Again, the women are sorted, and Riva is packed into truck along with the other women that have been selected to be slave labor. When the truck stops, they are at a new camp. Mittlesteine.
Riva remembers marching into the camp. They immediately noticed that there were no chimneys and no awful smell. That meant there were no gas chambers or ovens. Riva recalls they were greeted by a woman in her thirties neatly dressed and coiffed who introduced herself as the camp Commandant. She held a whip in one hand and the leash of her German Shepard, Fritz, in the other. 50 women were assigned to each barracks. The bunks were very small, made of wood and instead of a mattress there were sacks of straw. The latrine was a bucket. They were told to forget their names and that they would now identify themselves by their number. They must remember their number because if they forgot it there would be punishment for all 400 girls. They are issued clean cloths and shoes made of canvas with wooden soles.
There are three shifts at the factory and the women are marched through the town to the factory. Sometimes they marched in the darkness of the early morning, sometimes in the darkness of night. With the factory running 24/7 there would have been a steady parade of bald and dirty female skeletons marching through the town. The sound of wooden shoes clicking against the loose pebbles on the road could surely be heard in the neatly kept houses of the town.
They learn that the factory is making parts for the planes used in the German Luftwaffe. On the first day Riva is selected to operate a drill press. The factory employee gave Riva instructions on how to operate the machine but Riva, who is quite short, was unable to reach the controls. She is labeled a reject and sent to stand in a small group of other rejects. They are then marched down a long dark tunnel and left there. In the complete darkness she hears a voice speaking German with a French accent. He tells the women that they are French prisoners and that they are digging air raid shelters for the Nazi’s. He instructs them on how they will fill the buckets with dirt and pass them from girl to girl until they reach the outside where they will be dumped. Riva remembers the French voice saying, “be brave mademoiselles”. He then began to hum the French National Anthem. Riva and the girls joined them.
In March of 1945 the Russians were advancing on the Nazi’s eastern front. The decisions was made to close Mittelsteine and move the women to Grafenort approximately 13 miles away. At Grafenort, the women were used to dig trenches to slow the advance of Russian tanks. At this point of the war, it is clear that Germany has no hope of winning but the women do not know that. They can hear bombs falling and it gives them hope but Riva recalls a Nazi guard saying, “the bombs do not mean liberation…the day before we die, all of you will die first”.
As the Russian advance continued the Nazi’s had to retreat further. In May, Riva remembers that the guards ordered all of the women to line up and marched them out of the camp toward the woods. When they reached the woods, Riva remembers the Nazi’s arguing among themselves about whether they should kill the prisoners. Ultimately, they fled to save their own lives and left the girls standing on the edge of the woods. At first, they thought it might be a trick but after a while they knew they were free. They did not know what to do or where to go. They knocked on the doors of the houses in the local village to ask for help. No one would answer the door. They headed back to the camp and when they arrived, they found one guard without his rifle. He pleaded with the women not to hurt him. They decided to let him leave without harm. Riva recalls one woman saying, “Let God be his judge.” On May 7th 1945, the Russian Army arrived at the camp. Riva remembers the first Russian soldier into the camp being Jewish. He told them, “You are the first Jews we have found alive.”
For Riva and the rest of the Jews, the relief they felt from being liberated from the Nazi’s was quickly squashed. The Jews had no possessions, did not know of the whereabouts of family members and were left on their own to find their way home. Riva traveled back to Lodz and knocked on the door of her home. The door was answered by a woman who angrily told her that the house was now hers. Riva also found that in Poland, the new government was still killing Jews. This reinforced the uphill battle that lay ahead to put together some kind of normal life. Riva and some of her fellow prisoners found a way to be smuggled into the American zone in Germany and found their way to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp.
Riva spent 5 years in DP camps waiting to find a country that would let her immigrate. While in the DP camps she met her husband and had two children. After a great deal of effort, they were able to find a relative in Malden MA who would sponsor them to come to the US. She was able to reunite with her two sisters and one brother. Riva and her husband built a life for themselves in the US and eventually Riva began to speak of her experiences. Riva has written several books (under the name Ruth Minsky Sender), including a book of poems that she wrote while in the Ghetto and Mittelsteine. She has also gone on to speak about the Holocaust at numerous schools and provided her first-hand account of her experiences to various organizations preserving Holocaust history.
I asked Riva how she was able to get through all of those terrible days. “We were kept so busy during the day we had no time to think. When we got back to the barracks we cried”. She also said her mother’s words to her were what gave her resilience. “Where there is life there is hope.” I asked if she ever wanted to return to Germany and seek revenge. “My revenge is I survived and raised a family of Jews. I have a big family. It is my revenge.”
Unlike the other faces in this project, Riva did not fight for freedom with a gun or a plane. She fought the enemy by staying alive, consuming their resources and diverting their attention. Staying alive was the ultimate victory over an enemy that was determined to eliminate the existence of an entire group of people simply because of their religion. The world needs this history so we can all remember the evil that one human being can be convinced to do to another human being in the name of an ideology.
They were a tight knit family and they rented a two room apartment from Mrs. Gruber. Riva remembers Mrs. Gruber as something of a busy body, but Riva’s family and the Grubers were very close and felt like one big family. They slept three children in each bed and the apartment had no running water so they used an outhouse and pumped water from a well to bring upstairs. Despite these conditions Riva and here brothers and sisters never felt deprived.
After Hitler took power and Germany began racing toward war Riva sensed a growing antisemitism in her neighborhood. In 1939 Riva was 13 years old when the Nazi’s invaded Poland and began to implement their strategy of isolating the Jews and turning the Polish citizens against them. Polish citizens researched their family history to find any link that could identify them as German. If they could prove this, they would be considered “Volksdeutsche”. These were people of German ethnic origin but living beyond the borders of Germany. The significance of Volksdeutsche was to ensure these people, in the countries they invaded, held a special place in the Nazi plan of world conquest. It also helped turn these people against the Jews by stripping them of any rights and giving the Volksdeutsche the power to take any property they wanted from the Jews. Riva’s mother decided to smuggle her three oldest children out of Poland to Russia so they would not be taken to Nazi labor camps.
A few months after the invasion Riva remembers that the Jews were required to wear yellow Stars of David on their clothing to identify them as Jews and were forced to walk in the streets rather than on the sidewalks. Soon the Jews lost their businesses, then their jobs, then their property and finally they were herded into a Jewish Ghetto in Lodz. Riva’s mother had to give all of her sewing machines to the Nazi’s who in turn gave them to German companies. Mrs. Gruber and Harry join the Volksdeutsche. Mrs. Gruber takes things from Jewish families and then moves into a Jewish home in the nicest part of Lodz. Riva remembers Mrs. Gruber becoming very nasty and then turning against her family. One day Mrs. Gruber marched into the Minska apartment and took several fur coats Riva’s uncle had left in the apartment for safe keeping. Riva remembers her mother pleading with Mrs. Gruber not to take the coats and Mrs. Gruber saying, “Don’t worry. You won’t be here much longer. You will all be gone soon.” Riva’s mother said to Mrs. Gruber, “God will punish you for what you are doing.” Mrs. Gruber replied, “Silence! God is with us.” Mrs. Gruber had a grandson Harry who was the same age as Riva. Riva and Harry were always playing together like brother and sister. Riva recalls Harry coming to her apartment one day dressed in a Hitler Youth uniform. Riva’s world was shrinking.
I asked Riva her opinion on why the non-Jews turned so quickly on the Jews. “It was the power. When you give some people power, they abuse it.” “I also learned that you could teach people to hate.”
The Jewish population was now forced to work in the ghetto making products for the German war effort. Riva and her mother worked at a company sewing German Military jackets. The payment for working was extra food rations but even with the “extra” there was not enough nutrition to keep people healthy. Riva’s mother became visibly sick and worn down due to the cramped, unsanitary conditions and the lack of food. In September of 1942 the situation went from bad to worse when the Nazi’s arrived in the Ghetto one morning searching through houses, looking for those that were too sick to work. Riva’s mother was taken away and Riva and her brothers and sisters never saw her again. Her parting words were, “With hope there is life. You must live.”
Now at the age of 16, Riva is the eldest of the 4 siblings, one of which has Tuberculosis. The responsibility of raising the family falls to Riva. She manages to get permission to do her sewing work from home so she can take care of her sick brother but that means her food rations will be cut. The Ghetto government orders Riva and her brothers to leave their house. It was going to be torn down and used for firewood which was in short supply. They move into what was once a grocery store. It is just one big room with a cellar.
In 1944 Riva remembers the Nazi’s aggressively emptying the Ghetto by asking for volunteers to go to labor camps. They tried to convince the Jews that they are doing this for their own good because the Russians were approaching the Ghetto and when they arrive, they will not treat the Jews very nicely because they have been working for the Nazi military cause. Riva and her brothers continue to hide from the Nazi’s. Finally, her brother mercifully losses his battle with tuberculosis. As the population of the Ghetto decreases it become increasingly difficult to hide from daily morning raids by the Nazi’s.
In August of 1944 the Nazi’s chances of winning the war are rapidly dwindling. This is unknown to the Jews who continue to live in their own private hell. Riva and her brothers decide they will pack up the few possessions they have and go with the Nazi’s. They are herded to the train station where she and her brothers try to keep together. Then the Nazi’s pack the Jews into cattle cars so tightly, that there is no room to sit, very little ventilation, virtually no light and a bucket to be used as a toilet. The train traveled for three days and three nights and no one knew where they were headed. On August 27th, 1944, the train finally stopped. When the doors were opened they saw dead bodies everywhere. The survivors jumped out and the dead are pulled from the train. This stop was Birkenau-Auschwitz.
The Nazi’s begin their torment by sorting the men from the women and children and Riva is separated from her brothers. They are order to strip naked and put all of their belongings in piles. Next their heads are shaved and then they are moved into showers. Luckily for this group the showers have water and not gas. They are herded from the showers into another room where they are given one article of clothing. Riva ends up with a long shirt which covers her to her knees. The women are put into Barracks packed with what look like living corpses.
The Nazi’s and their Kapos, prisoners put in charge of the other prisoners, indiscriminately beat some of the women with clubs and whips and keep them all standing in the hot sun all day. Again, the women are sorted, and Riva is packed into truck along with the other women that have been selected to be slave labor. When the truck stops, they are at a new camp. Mittlesteine.
Riva remembers marching into the camp. They immediately noticed that there were no chimneys and no awful smell. That meant there were no gas chambers or ovens. Riva recalls they were greeted by a woman in her thirties neatly dressed and coiffed who introduced herself as the camp Commandant. She held a whip in one hand and the leash of her German Shepard, Fritz, in the other. 50 women were assigned to each barracks. The bunks were very small, made of wood and instead of a mattress there were sacks of straw. The latrine was a bucket. They were told to forget their names and that they would now identify themselves by their number. They must remember their number because if they forgot it there would be punishment for all 400 girls. They are issued clean cloths and shoes made of canvas with wooden soles.
There are three shifts at the factory and the women are marched through the town to the factory. Sometimes they marched in the darkness of the early morning, sometimes in the darkness of night. With the factory running 24/7 there would have been a steady parade of bald and dirty female skeletons marching through the town. The sound of wooden shoes clicking against the loose pebbles on the road could surely be heard in the neatly kept houses of the town.
They learn that the factory is making parts for the planes used in the German Luftwaffe. On the first day Riva is selected to operate a drill press. The factory employee gave Riva instructions on how to operate the machine but Riva, who is quite short, was unable to reach the controls. She is labeled a reject and sent to stand in a small group of other rejects. They are then marched down a long dark tunnel and left there. In the complete darkness she hears a voice speaking German with a French accent. He tells the women that they are French prisoners and that they are digging air raid shelters for the Nazi’s. He instructs them on how they will fill the buckets with dirt and pass them from girl to girl until they reach the outside where they will be dumped. Riva remembers the French voice saying, “be brave mademoiselles”. He then began to hum the French National Anthem. Riva and the girls joined them.
In March of 1945 the Russians were advancing on the Nazi’s eastern front. The decisions was made to close Mittelsteine and move the women to Grafenort approximately 13 miles away. At Grafenort, the women were used to dig trenches to slow the advance of Russian tanks. At this point of the war, it is clear that Germany has no hope of winning but the women do not know that. They can hear bombs falling and it gives them hope but Riva recalls a Nazi guard saying, “the bombs do not mean liberation…the day before we die, all of you will die first”.
As the Russian advance continued the Nazi’s had to retreat further. In May, Riva remembers that the guards ordered all of the women to line up and marched them out of the camp toward the woods. When they reached the woods, Riva remembers the Nazi’s arguing among themselves about whether they should kill the prisoners. Ultimately, they fled to save their own lives and left the girls standing on the edge of the woods. At first, they thought it might be a trick but after a while they knew they were free. They did not know what to do or where to go. They knocked on the doors of the houses in the local village to ask for help. No one would answer the door. They headed back to the camp and when they arrived, they found one guard without his rifle. He pleaded with the women not to hurt him. They decided to let him leave without harm. Riva recalls one woman saying, “Let God be his judge.” On May 7th 1945, the Russian Army arrived at the camp. Riva remembers the first Russian soldier into the camp being Jewish. He told them, “You are the first Jews we have found alive.”
For Riva and the rest of the Jews, the relief they felt from being liberated from the Nazi’s was quickly squashed. The Jews had no possessions, did not know of the whereabouts of family members and were left on their own to find their way home. Riva traveled back to Lodz and knocked on the door of her home. The door was answered by a woman who angrily told her that the house was now hers. Riva also found that in Poland, the new government was still killing Jews. This reinforced the uphill battle that lay ahead to put together some kind of normal life. Riva and some of her fellow prisoners found a way to be smuggled into the American zone in Germany and found their way to a Displaced Persons (DP) camp.
Riva spent 5 years in DP camps waiting to find a country that would let her immigrate. While in the DP camps she met her husband and had two children. After a great deal of effort, they were able to find a relative in Malden MA who would sponsor them to come to the US. She was able to reunite with her two sisters and one brother. Riva and her husband built a life for themselves in the US and eventually Riva began to speak of her experiences. Riva has written several books (under the name Ruth Minsky Sender), including a book of poems that she wrote while in the Ghetto and Mittelsteine. She has also gone on to speak about the Holocaust at numerous schools and provided her first-hand account of her experiences to various organizations preserving Holocaust history.
I asked Riva how she was able to get through all of those terrible days. “We were kept so busy during the day we had no time to think. When we got back to the barracks we cried”. She also said her mother’s words to her were what gave her resilience. “Where there is life there is hope.” I asked if she ever wanted to return to Germany and seek revenge. “My revenge is I survived and raised a family of Jews. I have a big family. It is my revenge.”
Unlike the other faces in this project, Riva did not fight for freedom with a gun or a plane. She fought the enemy by staying alive, consuming their resources and diverting their attention. Staying alive was the ultimate victory over an enemy that was determined to eliminate the existence of an entire group of people simply because of their religion. The world needs this history so we can all remember the evil that one human being can be convinced to do to another human being in the name of an ideology.