How to save a child ? Story of Kaja Finkler, 5 years old when WWII started.

S/S Drottningholm hyrdes in av det Engelska Röda Korset. Fartyget gjorde utväxlingsresor med bl. a. krigsfångar mellan New York och Medelhavshamnarna mellan åren 1942 till 1945. Den 26 mars 1946 avgick S/S Drottningholm på sin första ordinarie resa till New York med mellanlandning i Liverpool.

 https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn611761

Kaja Finklers story is special. She was just 5 when WWII started and just one year later she was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto. After big deportations from Warsaw Ghetto to the death camp Treblinka she was sent to the relatives in the ghetto in Piotrków Trybunalski.


Actually Piotrków (Petrikau) ghetto was the first ghetto to be established in Poland, just few weeks after Germans entered the city. However, until April 1942 the Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto was a kind of en "open ghetto". It was not fenced in or guarded like in Warszawa or Lodz. The ghetto’s area was just marked by signs “Ghetto”, along with a human skull above the lettering. Jews were allowed to leave the ghetto without a license during certain hours, and only to the defined part of the city.
Kaja Finklers mother’s decision to send her to live with her father and his mother was motivated by above facts and that Piotrków ghetto was regarded as a safe place. Kaja was therefore smuggled out of the Warszawa Ghetto and traveled with a Polish woman by train to Piotrków Trybunalski. Later her mother succeeded to leave Warszawa ghetto and join the rest of the family. 

In October 1942 the Piotrków ghetto changed its face. It become the deportation point for the death trans to Treblinka like it was in June 1942 in the Warszawa Ghetto. During the Action in the Piotrków ghetto Finkler family were hiding and survived the October deportations. More than 22 000 Jews were deported. Approximately 2 000 Jews actually entire Jewish families were left "legally" to work at the three factories in Piotrków; 1 000 at the Bugaj wood factory, and the rest at two glass factories Kara and Hortensja. 

Page 2 (of 3) of women and children deported from Piotrków in december 1944 to Ravensbrück. Finkler Katja (Kaja) is number 101 and her year of birth is 1930. There are numerous small children that are just 3 years old and younger. Several girls on the list were sharing Kajas fate and were later transferred to Bergen-Belsen.

Kajas grandfather was a well known rabbin. He, like  numerous members of the Judenrat paid the Germans not to deport Kaja and her grandmother in 1942-43. Both were saved at that point and moved to a smaller ghetto. Her mother sent to a forced labor camp in Skarżysko-Kamienna and there she was working för Hasag company. 

On November 1942, about 100 Jews were taken to the Rakow Forest and were shot. Six days later, the Germans invited all the “illegal” to present themselves and register. Those who did so were taken to the synagogue, which was surrounded by brutal Ukrainian guards. The Jewish detainees, including many children, were left without food, water or light. On December 19, 1942, 42 men were taken from the synagogue to Rakow Forest, where they were ordered to dig five burial pits, after they were shot. Only a few managed to escape. That night, 520 Jews were brought to the burial pits in groups of 50 and were shot.

In December 1944 Jewish men and children were transported from Piotrków to the Buchenwald concentration camp while Jewish women and children were transported from Piotrków to the Ravensbrück. Later some of the children, boys from Buchenwald, were transported to Bergen-Belsen. 

When in Bergen-Belsen the children were allowed to Kinderheim in barrack 211. Also prisoners from the labor camp in Skarżysko-Kamienna were evacuated to the camps in west, a.o. Ravensbrück concentration camp and also Hasag factories like Hasag Leipzig where Kajas mother Golda (Genia) ended.

So at the end of WWII mother and daughter were at different places without knowledge if they were alive and where. 

It is not clear if Kaja was in Kinderheim but she was for sure at children ward at Bergen.Belsen hospital and on the White boat S/S Kastelholm to Malmö- It is likely that she was thereafter transferred together with "Norwegian children" to Fiskeboda close to Katrineholm. 

Prisoner cards from CC Buchenwald (women)

Another Jewish girl from Poland, also inmate of Ravansbrück that left Sweden for USA is Natalia Natalie Hess. She was transported to Sweden by White buses.


I read her book with a great interest. There are several books by Holocaust survivors who came to Sweden as a result of the rescue actions such as the White buses and White boats at the end of WWII. In Natalie Hess’s book the logistics of the Holocaust and the time of healing, as reflected in the book title, are well presented and well woven with her personal story. I myself have had close contact with several survivors with a similar fate. For the Swedish reader it is of great interest to follow Natalie during her seven years in Sweden -- the important years when moving from the lost childhood and entering life as a teenager. When in Sweden Natalie wants to start her life again. She wants to be Swedish, 100 percent Swedish. She speaks like a native Swede, her thoughts and dreams are in Swedish. One of the issues, however, not directly pointed out, is that in many Swedish families there are several generations living side-by-side, complete with the grandparents, and often also with the great grandparents. Subconsciously she wants to have a second start in her life. That means meeting her only surviving family who lives in the United States. It is amazing that this 15 year old girl takes the decision to move. She writes that it was a decision of the adults on the part of her American relatives but the reader is not so sure of it. Although she spent 7 years in Sweden, she is not a Swedish citizen. She only has Swedish alien passport. She travels to the USA on the Swedish ocean liner M/S Gripsholm. Two weeks at the sea works like the metamorphosis of the butterfly . From the pupal skin that splits, the adult insect that climbs out and after a while it flies off. An American butterfly. Starting over and over again seems her entire life story. Poland, Sweden, the United States, Israel and back to the USA are not just those countries she lived in, there are places of several "starting over”, restarting new lives. Natalie refused to visit Poland and her Poland for 70 years. She did it only recently when writing her book about her life characterised by "starting overs".

During World War II the Drottningholm and the Gripsholm were used as repatriation ships and made 33 voyages to exchange prisoners of war, diplomats, women and children, between the warring nations.