Children. Fourteen, sixteen year-olds, or even pre-puberty. The younger ones had little chance of survival.

Boys and girls, some more mature, others quite inexperienced. Children, who could not comprehend the incomprehensible, children, who turned suddenly into adults and even in their innocent hearts, knew unerringly the horrors that awaited them. Siblings, keeping up each other´s spirits, twins, subjected to experiments, healthy ones, dreading sickness, and those with ulcers on their legs, suffering from scurvy, infections, who no longer had any hope left. Strong lads, whose strength failed them, and frail girls, who tried to hang on, mustering all their faith and spiritual fortitude. And who hoped and believed, like that ten year-old little girl, asking ˝God˝ in a letter, to save her parents.
 
Sick children, who, tearfully and petrified with fear, waited to wake up from the nightmare. Children, who had been torn away from their loved ones, children, whose parents were humiliated before their eyes and sent to their death.

Children who could no longer have children.

Children, who, even if they survived, would wake up a thousand times from their dreams with a start, a thousand times experiencing again the terror, hearing the same commands, and who relived that same horror which one cannot shake off in a single lifetime.

For those, who as children experienced and survived the hells of Birkenau, Dachau or Mauthausen, the horrors of the ghettoes, ˝childhood˝ had a quite unique meaning. They can never turn back to that childhood as a wellspring of strength. To be able to live, to be able to settle down and have a family, they were forced by life to somehow surmount their childhood experiences. There were some, who grew old in but a few weeks. Their skin, their bones, their bodies, their souls will forever retain - perhaps even more so than those of an adult - what should never have been allowed to happen to them.  There were elementary school children and tiny tots amongst them. Some of them were just experiencing their first love, like the little Dutch girl, the emblematic Anne Frank. As if they had left their school results, their sports achievements, their character-forming hobbies, not ˝at home˝, but on another planet. Because all that had belonged to the time before they were uprooted from their life. Before the world had abandoned them.

They did not even have a chance to show what they could accomplish; in some of them there were only vague intimations of future talent.

Children. They did not comprehend the world yet - and they could no longer comprehend it.

They had everything still ahead of them - yet they were beyond everything.

Children. The doors of awareness, of adulthood had not even opened before them yet - but now they were slammed before them forever after.

Children, who, even if they survived, were no longer children. Fear and death had settled in the mirror of their eyes.

Photos preserve the look in their eyes.

 

 

 

Holocaust is a Greek word, meaning burnt offering. This term best describes the unprecedented phenomenon of European Jewry´s tragic fate, which it had to endure during World War II in Germany and in areas under German military control. The Holocaust connotes the whole-scale, systematic, physical annihilation of Jewry. Nazi policy, based on racism, intended to wipe out Germany´s fully assimilated Jews, just as much as other assimilated Western Jews, as well as the more or less traditional East European communities.

Straight after Hitler came to power (1933), the construction of a network of concentration camps began in Germany. The first prisoners of these camps were the National Socialists´ political opponents; communists, social democrats, conservatives and trade union activists. Jews and Gypsies, regarded as inferior by Nazi racial theory, were confined to labour camps, as were those groups, whom the Nazi regime regarded as antisocial. Among these were homosexuals and alleged or real idlers, but so were also Jehovah´s Witnesses. From the beginning of 1934, guarding and managing the camps was in the hands of the SS.

In 1939 six main camps - Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück - and four ancillary camps were functioning in Germany. After the war against Poland got underway (1939), the network of camps was expanded by the establishment of Auschwitz, Neuengamme, Gusen, Natzweiler, Gross-Rosen, Majdenek, Niederhagen, Stutthof, Arbeitsdorf, and by 1942 the number of main camps grew to 15. By April 1944 twenty main and 165 ancillary camps were operational. Apart from the Jews, Romas (Gypsies), Poles and prisoners-of-war of various nationalities were also confined to the camps. The number of Soviet POWs, who perished due to hunger, sickness and exhaustion, is estimated at 2.2 - 3.3 million.
Various ˝medical experiments˝ were also carried out in some of the camps. In the Dachau camp, pressure cabins were tried out on prisoners for the air force. But they were also ˝treating˝ artificially induced frostbite. In Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Buchenwald and Neuengamme they injected prisoners with typhus, yellow fever and malaria in the course of ˝immunological research˝. In Auschwitz and Ravensbrück they conducted sterilization experiments in order to prevent the reproduction of ˝racially inferior˝ people.

Hitler probably gave his directive for the preparation of a ˝final solution of the Jewish question˝ (Endlösung) at the end of 1941. The systematic annihilation of Jews in the Eastern theatre of war was conducted by the mobile killing units (Einsatzgruppe A,B,C,D) under the aegis of the SS. By 1943 this  military machinery had murdered more than a million Jews.

Hitherto unknown and unimaginable methods of mass murder were devised and carried out in the extermination camps. The first extermination camp was at Chelmo near Lodz. From December 1941 onwards, mass murders were perpetrated here by carbon monoxide gas inside mobile gassing vans. The first gas chambers were set in motion in Auschwitz-Birkenau from March 1942. In 1942 death camps were established in the Polish Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka and Majdenek. The Nazis killed more than three million Jews in these camps.

During the Holocaust they systematically planned, organized, and with methodical, technological proficiency attempted the total physical annihilation of Jewry. More than 5 and a half million European Jews were murdered. Among them one and a half million children.
 
Inscriptions in the hall: ˝ man has grown so debased˝ (Miklós Radnóti: Fragment) Children´s´ breviary quotations: Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust, Fontana Press, London, 1986, pp. 343, 442, 687.

George Eisen, Árnyak játékai (Children and Play in the Holocaust: Games Among the Shadows), Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1990, p. 141.

Anne Frank és Dawid Rubinowicz naplója (The Diary of Anne Frank and Dawid Rubinowicz), Európa Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1962, p. 57.

Benoschofsky Imre ed., Maradék zsidóság, A budai izraelita aggok és árvák menházegyesületének évkönyve (Remnants of Jewry, Yearbook of the Buda Jewish old people´s and orphans´ asylum organization), 1945/46, pp. 41-45.