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The artisans of execution would not meet the industrial challenge with more gun cartridges-Mass murder demanded the gas Zyklon B and the mystification of its victims as well....
-Alain Finkielkraut1
IN THE SUMMER OF 1944, RECENTLY DEPORTED PERsons sent postcards to Budapest from a place called Waldsee.2 The postcards were handed to the Jewish Council in Budapest to be distributed to the addressees. "I am doing fine," the cards read. "I am working," or "I have arrived safely. I have got work in my occupation," or "Follow us here!"
Those who received a postcard from Waldsee searched for it on a map and easily found a place with this name. More than one, in fact; there was a "Waldsee" in Austria and in Switzerland. One of the leaders of the Hungarian Jewish Council, Fölöp Freudiger, helped to distribute the postcards. It was he who noticed that on one of them, the word "Waldsee" was imposed over another name ending in "witz." Only later, at the end of June, would he fill out the remainder of the obscured postmark: Auschwitz. He came to that realization when he himself received a postcard from two of his acquaintances.3 In this card, the senders.Jozsef and Samuel Stern, signaled the deceit by signing their names as Joseph R'evim (Hebrew for "hungry") and Samuel Blimalbiscj (Hebrew for "without clothing").4
What Freudiger may have surmised, and what we now know, was that the postcards were dictated by SS soldiers to the deported people, often right before they were sent to the in a gas chamber. Some postcards from "Waldsee" have come down to us as documents of this postal fraud; a few are in the possession of the Budapest Jewish Museum.
The trick of the Waldsee postcard was first used in 1943 with the Greek Jews.5 They were taken to Auschwitz and Treblinka and, immediately before their murders, were forced to write a message home saying that they were "in Waldsee" and "doing fine."6 Such tricks got the deported people to cooperate in their own deaths, making the process of their annihilation smoother and easier. Over a half-century later, the fake postcards provide at least a partial answer to the often-asked question, voiced at times with accusatory overtones, about how people could...