Josef Hellen
Author: Josef Hellen
Publisher: Makor at Lamm Jewish Library of Australia
Place of publication:
Year of Publication: 2017
Location of Book: Lamm Jewish Library, Melbourne Holocaust Centre, Sydney Jewish Museum and State Library of Victoria.
Cities/town/camps: Czechoslovakia: Hodonin; Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau; Austria: Vienna, Rothschild Hospital DP Camp; Hungary: Szerencs; Australia: Melbourne.
Note: those cities/towns/camps underlined are those which are most central to the narrative
Genre: Memoir
Key events/experiences: concentration camp; Kanada; death march; post-war refugee.
Auschwitz-Birkenau: University of Life is the remarkable story of Czech-Jewish survivor Josef Hellen who, as a teenager, managed to survive Birkenau for two-and-a-half years working in the “Kanada” Commando.
The memoir is 141 pages in length. Pages 1-16 detail the author’s childhood in Hodonin, Czechoslovakia, his unexpected arrest by the Czech police in August 1942 and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz a month later. Pages 17-64 describe his internment in Auschwitz-Birkenau from September 1942 until January 1945 with pages 65-82 recounting his escape from a death march, liberation, and life in Szerencs, Hungary. After the war where he married in 1947. Pages 83-104 provide an excerpt of his wife Judith’s testimony to the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, as well a brief eulogy. Pages 105-141 describe his life in Australia.
Josef (Pepik) Hellen was born 8 February 1926 in Hodonin, a village in the south Moravian region of Czechoslovakia to parents Anna Pirovka and Adolf Hellen (formerly Hirsch). He had an older brother, Rudolf, and two younger sisters, Rosa and Maria, born in 1931 and 1935. The family was secular and highly assimilated, speaking Czech at home. Josef celebrated Easter and Christmas with his friends and only went to synagogue on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah with his family. As Josef writes, “We thought of ourselves as Czech before we thought of ourselves as Jews”. His father ran a butcher shop. As a youngster, Josef’s favourite hobby was throwing knives – a skill which would, later, help ensure his survival.
A care-free young boy, Josef hardly noticed the war until 9 September 1941, when Jews were ordered to wear the Star of David. With no experience of antisemitism in his hometown, Josef rarely obeyed the laws and carried on living normally. However, towards the end of 1941, his father was forced to close his shop. After the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942, the Nazis launched reprisals against the local Czech and Jewish population. Josef was fifteen-years-old when one day in August 1942, uniformed Czech policemen stormed into his classroom and arbitrarily arrested five boys. Josef was imprisoned for a month in a local jail before being sent on a three-day transport to Auschwitz.
As he was not wearing the Star of David at the time of his arrest, Josef was initially interned as a ‘political prisoner’, bearing the red triangle. In mid-September 1942, Josef was tattooed with the prison number 64463 and interned in Birkenau where he was sent to a work commando tasked with building Crematorium Two. Within three weeks, only five of the original sixty men in his squad were still alive – most died during the back-breaking labour, committed suicide or were beaten to death. Josef was saved from a certain death by a sympathetic Kapo named Dibowski, who recruited the youngster to help serve soup and retrieve parcels. However, Josef soon found more secure work in the kitchen which helped him obtain extra food and avoid hard labour.
In early 1943, through his connections with influential prisoners, Josef secured work in the “Kanada” Commando, a ‘privileged’ unit tasked with sorting the luggage brought by Jewish arrivals, giving up his identity as a political prisoner and becoming a Jewish inmate. As the youngest and smallest in the Commando, Josef became the ‘favourite’ of two SS officers, whose boots he cleaned. He even taught one how to throw knives and organised a soccer match between the prisoners and the SS. Whilst selecting the team from another barracks, Josef learnt from fellow Czech deportees that his family had not survived. Through his work in the relatively ‘privileged’ Kanada Commando, and his connections with the SS, Josef was able to obtain life-saving food and resources, and to avoid brutal punishment as well as selection to the gas chambers. Though he bore witness to unimaginable brutalities, Josef’s time in Birkenau was largely spent sequestered in the Kanada block and so he was relatively sheltered from the horrors of ‘ordinary’ prisoner life in Birkenau.
On 18 January 1945, with the Russian army rapidly approaching, the Kanada prisoners were sent on a death march. However, enroute, Josef managed to escape, wandering the forests for several days until he was taken in by an older Polish couple. A few days later, the Russians arrived, signalling the end of the war for him. Upon gaining his freedom, Josef journeyed to Szerencs, Hungary, to meet his girlfriend Eva Altmann whom he met in Birkenau and planned to marry. However, Eva’s religious brothers rejected the marriage because of Josef’s minimal Jewish education. Instead, Josef married her friend Judith in late 1947 and opened a shop. As Hungary was quickly coming under communist control, the couple made plans to flee. In April 1949, Judith escaped, travelling across the countryside to the Austrian border. Josef followed soon after but was arrested at the border on three separate occasions. He was eventually able to cross the Czechoslovakian border with help of the Jewish organisation Bricha, reuniting with Judith in Vienna. There, the couple lived for a year in a subcamp of the Rothschild Hospital DP camp whilst awaiting landing permits from Judith’s uncle.
The couple arrived in Melbourne on 3 June 1950, with their daughter Evelyn who was born two weeks earlier onboard. With the help of Jewish welfare, they secured accommodation in North Fitzroy and Josef obtained work at Holden General Motors, working 12-hour-a-day shifts. After five years, Josef quit his job and bought a milk bar, eventually purchasing multiple properties in Melbourne and the United States. Tragically, their daughter Evelyn died of leukemia when she was only 17. After her death, in 1968, the Hellens adopted a baby boy, Michael, and in 1969, another baby girl, Debbie.
Josef’s short memoir is a detailed account of everyday life in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Importantly, he recalls the names and nationalities of his various contacts in Birkenau, particularly the SS, prisoner-functionaries and fellow members of the Kanada commando, and describes their interactions. As a comparatively ‘privileged’ prisoner, the author provides a view of life in the camps not accessible to ordinary prisoners. It is a valuable source for understanding camp life from the perspective of the prisoner ‘elite’. The memoir was written and published as part of the Lamm Jewish Library’s “Write Your Story Program”.