Preface

Children in Auschwitz: the darkest spot on an ocean of suffering, criminality and death with a thousand faces – humiliation; contempt; harassment; persecution; fanatical racism; transports; lice; rats; diseases; epidemics; beatings; Mengele; experiments; smoking crematorium chimneys; abominable stench; starvation; selections; brutal separation from mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles and friends; gas …

In 1940, a first camp by the name of Auschwitz, later to be known as the Main Camp or Auschwitz I, was erected by the Nazis on the outskirts of the Polish town of Oświęcim (65 kilometres west of Kraków). The first transport of Polish inmates arrived from German-occupied Poland in mid-1940. In 1941, the Nazis planned and built the killing centre (extermination camp) Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, on the site of the destroyed village of Brzezinka.

From March 1942, Jewish children and their families were transported to Auschwitz from almost all German-occupied countries, for the sole reason that they were Jews. There were already a large number of Jewish boys and girls in the first transports to Auschwitz from Slovakia. Well over 200,000 children were to follow, and almost all of them were murdered.

The Auschwitz complex consisted of forty-eight concentration and extermination camps. Auschwitz-Birkenau has become the unmatched symbol of contempt for humanity, and a unique synonym for the mass murder of European Jewry. It was the site of the largest killing centre conceived, built and operated by the Germans, and played a central role in the Nazi ‘Final Solution’,1 the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jewish inhabitants.

By far the largest group of children deported to Auschwitz were thus Jewish girls and boys (see also pages xi and xii). Most of them were transported with their families in packed, closed and sealed freight cars, mercilessly exposed to the summer heat and freezing winters. They had to relieve themselves in buckets that were soon full. Because the wagons were so packed, many couldn’t even reach the buckets in time and the floors were swimming in urine and excrement. The stench was overwhelming. In many cases, the deportees had little or nothing to eat or drink. Although especially the small children begged constantly for water, their entreaties went unheard. Many – particularly infants, young children and elderly persons – died during the journeys, which often lasted for days.

The Jews were deliberately kept in the dark about the real intentions of the Nazis. Before the deportations, they were told that they were being resettled in labour camps in the East, where they could start a new life.

The opposite was true. The Jewish children, women and men were destined to be murdered. They were ‘welcomed at the ramp in Auschwitz with the bellowed order: “Everyone out! Leave your luggage where it is!”’ The few people who were initially kept alive never again saw the possessions they had been allowed to bring with them.

Selections began sporadically from April 1942, and then regularly from July of that year. They were carried out on the railway ramp, usually by SS doctors but also by pharmacists, medical orderlies and dentists. Young, healthy and strong women and men whom they considered ‘fit for work’ were temporarily allowed to live and were separated from the old and invalid, pregnant women and children. Germans randomly classed around 80 per cent of the Jews – often also entire transports – as ‘unfit for work’, particularly during the deportations to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing centre of 438,000 Hungarian Jewish children, women and men from May 1944. These people were marched under guard or transported in trucks by the SS to one of the crematoria, where they were ordered to undress. Under the pretext that they were to be showered, the SS herded them into the gas chambers disguised to look like showers. The poisonous gas Zyklon B was then introduced, and those inside suffered an agonizing death by suffocation. It took 10 to 20 minutes for them all to die.

Small children in Auschwitz were almost all killed on arrival. If a mother was carrying her child during the initial selection, they were both gassed, however healthy and ‘fit for work’ the young mother might be. This was irrelevant. Pregnant woman also suffered a terrible fate in Auschwitz. They were ‘automatically’ killed by phenolin injection, gassed or beaten to death. This applied initially to Jewish and non-Jewish women alike. Pregnant women from other concentration camps were also transferred to Auschwitz exclusively to be gassed.

A stay of execution was granted only to those condemned to heavy physical slave labour inside and outside the camp. These men and women were physically and psychologically exploited in road building, agriculture or industrial and armaments factories, in which inmates from the satellite camps in particular were forced into slave labour.

Sometimes children aged between 13 and 15 were also ‘selected for work’ and allowed to live, usually only for a short time. For example, a large group of children and juveniles were assigned to the ‘Rollwagen-Kommando’, where they pulled heavy carts in place of horses, transporting blankets, wood or the ashes of incinerated children, women and men from the crematoria. They were highly mobile and had plenty of opportunity to see the atrocities taking place in the camp.

Some sets of twins up to the age of 16 were also kept alive for a time. SS doctor Mengele exploited and misused both Jewish and Sinti and Roma twins for pseudo-medical experiments. They were selected, measured, X-rayed, infected with viruses or had their eyes cauterized, and then killed, dissected and burned.

Throughout the five years of its existence – from the first to the last – however, the main purpose and primary aim of the killing centre was extermination. All other aims by the Nazis – such as exploitation of the children, women and men as slave labourers, or the criminal, so-called ‘medical’, experiments by SS doctors – were of secondary importance.

The children and juveniles transferred temporarily to the camp soon became acquainted with the reality of Auschwitz. They didn’t know whether they would still be alive from one day to the next. No one could foresee how the same situation would be dealt with by the SS the next day, the next hour or the next minute. Any act could mean immediate death. Apart from extermination, nothing in Auschwitz was predictable. The children were permanently confronted with death and knew that they had to be on their guard at all times.

*

• More than 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945. Among them were at least 1.1 million Jews. They came from Hungary, Poland, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Romania, the Soviet Union (especially Byelorussia, Ukraine and Russia), Yugoslavia, Italy, Norway, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Latvia, Austria, Germany and elsewhere.2
• The Auschwitz complex consisted of three main units. The Main Camp, Auschwitz I, held up to 20,000 people. The killing centre Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, was the largest unit of the camp complex, containing as many as 90,000 children, women and men. Birkenau was divided into ten sections separated by electrified barbed-wire fences. For example, there was the Women’s Camp, the Theresienstadt Family Camp, the Men’s Camp and the Gypsy Family Camp, where Sinti and Roma were interned. In Auschwitz III (Monowitz), IG Farbenindustrie AG (headquarters Frankfurt am Main) employed Auschwitz concentration camp inmates as slave labour to make synthetic rubber (‘Buna’) and fuel. There were also forty-five satellite camps of various sizes, such as Blechhammer, Kattowitz or Rajsko.3
• At least 1 million Jewish babies, children, juveniles, women and men, mostly in Auschwitz-Birkenau, were starved to death, killed by injections into the heart, murdered in criminal pseudo-medical experiments, shot, beaten to death or gassed.4
• Between 70,000 and 75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma and Sinti, 14,000 Soviet prisoners of war and 10–15,000 non-Jewish inmates speaking many languages were murdered in Auschwitz.5
• At least 232,000 infants, children and adolescents between the ages of 1 day and 17 years inclusive were deported to Auschwitz, including 216,300 Jews and 11,000 Roma and Sinti; 3,120 were non-Jewish Poles, 1,140 were Byelorussians, Russians and Ukrainians, from other nations.6
• On 27 January 1945, only about 750 children and youths aged under 18 years were liberated; only 521 boys and girls aged 14 and under,7 including around 60 new-born babies, were still alive, and several of them died shortly afterwards.8

*

Very few of the children deported to Auschwitz remained alive. To some extent, the survival of every child was an anomaly unforeseen by the Nazis, a type of resistance to the only fate that Germans had planned for the children – namely, extermination. Very many of the children and juveniles in this book are fully aware that their survival was a matter of pure luck.

In some cases, comradeship and solidarity among the camp inmates helped them to stay alive. For example, some women relate how their pregnancy remained undetected because of the starvation...