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.
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?!"

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.
 As
the killing frenzy intensified,
thousands of Jewish children
were thrown directly into the
crematoria or into the
 burning pits
 alive.
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 crematorium oven.


She survived to tell her story.
 Can
you imagine
experiencing this yourself,
seeing it with your own eyes?
I
can’t.