--from Elie Wiesel’s Night Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children. Babies! Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves .... Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp .... Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent sky. --
Transcript
--from Elie Wiesel’s Night
Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load-little children. Babies!
Around us, everyone was weeping. Someone began to recite the Kaddish. I do not know if it has ever happened before, in the long history of the Jews, that people have ever recited the prayer for the dead for themselves ....
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp ....
Never shall I forget that smoke.
Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent sky.--
"In this train women gave birth to babies
who were thrown out of the windows [of the
cattle car] during the journey."
The Nazis tossed babies in the air
and used them for target practice.
The mother was young, about 30 years old…
She held the baby in her arms. The Jews from Poland, who were seniors at the camp compared to
us, knew that mothers with babies would be sent to the gas chambers immediately. When
they saw the young woman with the baby, they shouted at her to
give her baby to an older woman.
The mother, without understanding what these Jews meant in their screams, gave her baby to an older woman in confusion. The older woman
was also from Cluj. I knew her. She, with the baby, went to the gas chambers. The young mother lived for a short while afterwards. In
those hours, no one understood anything about what was going on around us, or with us.
It was horrible, just horrible.
The next day, the mother burst out in shrieks: "Where is my baby?! Where is my baby?!"
The children that survived outside of the camps did so because they were hidden
in homes, basements
and convents or lived with
Christian families who
concealed their
identities. Look at how young these children are.
In this photo,
children await their freedom as
Allied soldiers
reach their camp.
Dressed in prison-like clothing,
these children
may have been used as slave
labor or as subjects in
medical experiment
s.
From The Jewish Way
One Mrs. Eliaz testified in a hearing about Dr. Mengele that he did not at first detect her pregnancy. Angered that she had thus escaped the gas chambers, Mengele ordered her to give birth to the baby. Once it was born, he forced her to cover her breasts with tape.
"The child grew thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker. Every day Mengele would come and look at it," Mrs. Eliaz recalled. Mengele thus studied how long a baby could live without food. After some days, a nurse stole some morphine and a syringe and told Mrs. Eliaz to put her baby out of its misery.
After more days of seeing the infant's suffering, the mother finally acted.
"I murdered my own child," she testified.
Many babies were gassed
&usually died in their
mothers’ arms.
From The Jewish Way
As the killing frenzy intensified, thousands of
Jewish children were thrown directly into the crematoria or into the
burning pits alive.
THE INCINERATION
In 1944, a young Jewish woman arrived to Auschwitz, carrying a year-old baby. She was healthy and pretty and was spared the gassing. Before entering the gates of the camp, a
SS-man pulled the baby from her hands and threw it alive into the
