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NEVER FORGET YOUR NAME
The Children of Auschwitz
Alwin Meyer
Translated by Nick Somers
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Vergiss deinen Namen nicht. Die Kinder von Auschwitz by Alwin Meyer
© Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2015
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
The publishers gratefully acknowledge Catriona Corke’s contribution to the English translation.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4550-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021941498
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Dedication
This book is dedicated to Janek (Jack) Mandelbaum, without whose generosity the English translation would not have been possible. Having survived five Nazi concentration camps and the murder of his parents, sister and brother during the Holocaust, he has spent the last seventy-five years educating people about this dark period of history. His contribution to the publication of this book is part of that noble effort.
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.
