It was called Richard Frenkeland he was a Jewish boy of just over two years old who was deported to Auschwitz completely alone. The sadness of its story has no end, and it is bitterly topical these days, less than a week away. … that the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of the extermination camp be celebrated. More than a decade has passed since its brief existence came to light thanks to a study by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. And, despite this, it should not be forgotten.
The one who has rescued the story of this child and his family from oblivion is the Yad Vashem, the ‘Place of Names’, the museum with one of the most difficult missions in the world: to keep alive the memory and names of those that the hurricane of Nazi hatred tried to erase. Richard Frenkel was a beautiful child, who had been born in a world at war, in 1940, to a couple made up of Nissan Frenkel and Ester Horonczyk. Hope shone in his eyes.
The story begins in Poland, where the Horonczyks lived. When Esther’s mother died, they decided to try a new life and traveled to Paris, where they founded a flourishing tailor shop and expanded their family. However, the war would overwhelm them there. The repression destroyed them beyond what anyone, much less them, could have imagined.
In the midst of the whirlwind of arrests and deportations that followed the Nazi invasion of France, almost the entire family ended up in detention and transit centers such as those in Drancy and Pithiviers. Centers that are just two of those thousands and thousands documented for a decade. There, on French soil, with greater or lesser speed, fate took its toll on thousands of lives. Of the entire large Horonczyk family that had traveled to Paris, only one of Richard’s aunts, the child in our story, was saved: this is Leah, Esther’s sister, her son Raphael and her husband Solomon. Just them.
The little boy, with his mother
Solomon was able to escape from Pithiviers, find safety in a small town with his wife and son, and have two more twin sons after the war. Nissan Frankel, Richard’s father and Esther’s husband, did not have the same luck, who saw his happy life interrupted. Within weeks, Nissan was deported to Beaune-la-Rolande and from there, in June 1942, to Auschwitz, where he was murdered, along with two of his brothers-in-law who were traveling in the same transport.
Detention and travel
And the day came when they arrested Esther and her son Richard, who was only 2 years old. It was July 17, 1942, and the whole family learned about it from Fanny Korman, Richard’s 6-year-old cousin, who ran to the Horonczyks’ house to tell it. The grandfather, Shimon, went down to the street as soon as he heard the news and begged the French police to arrest him instead of his grandson. The agents told him to wait a few days, that they would come for him. And so it was. Transferred to Pithiviers, and then to Drancy, he was deported to Sobibor, one of the death camps, where he was murdered.
Esther and her son spent a short time together in Pithiviers. On August 7, she was forced onto an infamous wagon bound for the hell of Auschwitz. It is not difficult to imagine her anguish at being forced to abandon her son, just over two years old. Completely helpless, Richard shared his painful fate with 1,800 other children whose parents had already left packed like cattle on trains to the gas chambers. Looking at the anguish of that child, and multiplying it by the other 1,800 infants who were waiting there with him, makes our imagination step on glass.
Postcard that Esther (Estha) Frenkel, née Horonczyk, threw from the carriage of the train going from Pithiviers to Auschwitz
Yad Vashem preserves a piece of paper that Esther Frenkel managed to throw from inside the carriage. A yellowish sheet of paper written with pencil and chaotic words, the most distressing words a mother has ever written. It says like this:
«Dear ones: yesterday at the last minute they called me for the transfer. They put me on the train. And I don’t know what has become of me Richard. He is still in Pithiviers. Save my child, my innocent baby!!! How she is crying. Our suffering is nothing. Save my Richard, my little darling. I can’t write. My heart, my Richard, my life, is far away, and no one is protecting him, my two-year-old little boy. Die, quickly, oh my child! Give me back my Richard. Esther.
Hurry…maybe that’s the word. But time must have passed too slowly for the child, the days veiled by tears, among strangers, lost in that place of a world at war. Until August 15th arrived and Richard suffered another move. From Pithiviers to Drancy. There he waits for her again, feeling lost again, who knows if maybe oblivious to his sad destiny.
sad ending
Time quickly, too quickly, consumed her little life, drowned in that violent sea. On September 10, just a few weeks after his arrival in Drancy, and without having been able to meet anyone he knew, Richard Frenkel boarded the train that was taking him to its destination.
That fateful transport 31 took a thousand people to Auschwitz. Piled into cattle cars after a thousand hardships. Among them, all strangers and all brothers, 171 children were traveling. Among them, lost, little Richard Frankel. He no longer had a chance. Of the entire transport, only 380 people passed the selection that would grant them a miserable slave epilogue. The rest went directly to the gas chamber.
Prey to terror, naked, disoriented, spinning in the darkness of an incomprehensible hatred, perhaps seeking warmth among the starving bodies of hundreds of strangers, in the exact place where his father, first, and his mother, then, had been murdered. ; He arrived there, prey to the same anguish, a leaden anguish for such a small child, when the showers exhaled their poison and took his life.
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