The Little Ones in Auschwitz

By: Lorena Solari

In World War II Auschwitz was one of the worst intended whereabouts for the victims. There a single potato was enough for surviving one more day, the life conditions were not basics for a human being. This extermination camp was started in 1940 and is located at 60km west from Cracovia in Poland. People died by shootings, illnesses, gas cameras, lack of food, etc. But was in 1942 that an order that all the children of the occupied areas should go to Auschwitz was dictated, converting Auschwitz in a hell for the big and little ones.

When the nazis received a group of children, they immediately killed the most little ones, because they were too little to work, or not “useful”. The children that were able to live were separated from their mothers. If their mothers had the conditions to work, they were sent to Auschwitz too, but to a different area. Only the camps of the families with a gipsy origin or from Theresienstadt had the right to stay together. The other ones should live by their own. After this kids were selected they were sent to learn about construction to Birkenau (headquarter of Auschwitz also called Auschwitz II) while the crematories were built there. The kids lived in malnutrition, because they were forced to make extremely hard works with a bad alimentation.

The children’s life was horrible. They had no potable water, and drinking the contaminated water was forbidden. But they were as thirsty that they had to drink the water causing in them more probabilities on being infected with any of the illness of the camp because of the weakening of their bodies. Their bones could be totally recognized, differently from their muscles and fat. They were skinny and with holes, which caused them ulcerative wounds. Their lips were decayed and filled of ulcers, which caused them holes in their jaws and cheeks that finally were infected, and seemed like cancer. In many cases the organisms started to decompose and get full of water, they swelled until they converted into a deformed mass and were unable to move. Another problem that they suffered was the diarrhea, which caused them a huge loss of substances, and causing them to die.

In 1943, these children were sent to Auschwitz I again. There, they were exterminated by injecting them phenol. Some kids were sent to work in the camp as pawns, where the German authorities abused of them. Sometimes, the children were blond with light-colored eyes; the German authorities took them to be “Germanized” while the ones that looked like Jewish people were abused and bad threatened.

What this kids lived was a shock for their whole life. If an adult suffered in Auschwitz, for a kid was worst. Their first memories were seeing people dying or feeling hungry, painful, and unhappy. They never had the time to know what happiness was. This is what they can call “childhood” and what they remember of their first years of life. We can take as an example to Daniel Canoch, who at the age of 7 escaped from the concentration camps. He once visited Auschwitz and leaned back in his bed, and all what he remembered was horrible things. And that was what Nazis did, horrible things that build up what those children know now as their earliest memories.