Children were the most exposed prisoners in the camp system. The Nazi racial doctrine treated Jewish children as the next generation of the people the regime intended to wipe out, and therefore as a primary target. The selection on the Auschwitz ramp sent children under fourteen straight to the gas chambers as a matter of policy, regardless of any other consideration. Around one and a half million Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust as a whole. The few children who survived inside the camps did so because they were old enough or strong enough to be assigned to labour, or because they were taken into Mengele’s twin experiments, or because adult prisoners hid them.
The selection
Children arriving at Auschwitz with their mothers were almost always sent to the left at the ramp selection, which meant immediate gassing. The SS doctor on duty made no real effort to assess whether a child of nine or ten could work. The category was simply: too young to be useful. Adolescent boys of around fourteen and over could be selected for labour, particularly in 1944 when the camp’s labour needs had risen and the Hungarian deportations were producing more arrivals than the camp could process. Some boys lied about their age and stood as tall as they could on the ramp. Others were told by older prisoners standing nearby to claim to be older. A handful survived because of these moments.
Children inside the camp
The children who entered the camp as labour prisoners faced a regime designed for adults. They worked the same hours as the men, on the same starvation rations, with the same lethal supervision. They were also subject to particular dangers: the SS held periodic selections specifically for children below a certain height, and a child who had grown only slowly under the camp diet might be killed in such a selection. The official protection that some adults could buy through skilled labour assignments was largely unavailable to children, who had not yet acquired skills.
A small number of children survived as the protected charges of adult prisoners. The Czech family camp at Birkenau, holding around 17,500 prisoners deported from Theresienstadt between September 1943 and July 1944, included around 200 children whose welfare became a project of the adult prisoners around them. The teacher Fredy Hirsch organised a school inside the family camp, gave the children daily lessons, and persuaded the SS to allow it on the grounds that it kept the children quiet. When the family camp was liquidated in March 1944, around 3,800 prisoners were gassed in a single operation. The children went with them. A second contingent was murdered in July 1944.
The Mengele twins
Josef Mengele’s twin experiments selected hundreds of pairs of twin children from the deportation arrivals. The twins were kept in a separate barracks at Birkenau, given somewhat better food than the rest of the camp, and used as experimental subjects. Mengele’s research interest, in his own framing, was the heritability of physical and behavioural traits. The experiments included blood transfusions between twins, deliberate infection with disease, surgical interventions, eye colour experiments using injections of dye, and the killing of one twin in order to dissect both bodies in parallel.
Around 1,500 pairs of twins passed through Mengele’s programme. Around 200 children survived to liberation. They were the largest single category of child survivors of Auschwitz. Many became, in adulthood, prominent witnesses against Mengele, who was never tried (he died in Brazil in 1979). The Israeli organisation CANDLES, founded by Mengele twin survivor Eva Mózes Kor, was the focus of much of the post-war work to track down the Mengele documents and to record the survivors’ testimony.
Children of the Sonderkommando
One particular and harrowing duty fell to the Auschwitz Sonderkommando. Among the prisoners they cleared from the gas chambers, the bodies of children formed a particular share. The Sonderkommando members were mostly young Jewish men deported with their families, and the children they had to handle were often the same age as their own siblings or their own children, who had been killed in the same building hours earlier. Several of the Sonderkommando survivor accounts describe the daily horror of this work in terms quite distinct from the rest of the camp literature.
The hidden children
Around 100,000 Jewish children survived the Holocaust hidden by non-Jewish families and institutions across occupied Europe. The mechanics of hiding are described on the page on Children in the Holocaust, under Inside the Catastrophe. Their experience was not, strictly speaking, the experience of children in the camps; but it is part of the experience of children in the Holocaust, and the line is not always clean. Many hidden children were eventually betrayed and ended up in the camps. Others survived in hiding for the entire war and emerged as orphans.
The lasting harm
The children who survived the camps and the hiding emerged as adults with particular forms of damage. Many had lost their families completely. Many were physically stunted by the long malnutrition. The psychological literature on what is now called child Holocaust survivor syndrome is extensive: nightmares lasting decades, an inability to discuss what had happened, difficulty in establishing trust, lifelong sleep disturbances, a tendency to compulsive food behaviours formed during the hunger of the camps. Many of the surviving children became writers, doctors, or campaigners as adults, often using their work as a way of giving the experience a public form. Others did not, and lived with what they had seen privately for the rest of their lives.
See also
- Josef Mengele
- The Sonderkommando
- The Fate of Twins
- Children in the Holocaust
- The Hungarian Deportations 1944
Sources
- Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe, Yale University Press, 1991
- Lucette Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel, Children of the Flames: Dr Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, Morrow, 1991
- Eva Mózes Kor, Surviving the Angel of Death, Tanglewood, 2009
- USHMM: Children during the Holocaust