CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
“Mankind has never sunk lower than when children perished on the gallows
and in the gas chambers.”
-From the sentence of the Nuremburg Tribunal
Of the 1.3 million people deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945,
232,000 of those people were children and adolescents under the age of fourteen.1
Most of these children met their fates in the gas chambers, as they were unfit for the
hard labour of the camp, which the other prisoners were condemned to. However,
22,000 child prisoners were registered in the camp, and they did not escape the
deplorable conditions because of their young age. Children were also born in the
camp, as women were sent to Auschwitz while pregnant. Most of these newborns
were not spared. Those babies who were not murdered by doctors and physicians,
usually succumbed to the harsh conditions and lack of resources in the camp,
leaving few babies who were born in the camp to survive. Children were also used
as guinea pigs in medical experiments, performed primarily by Dr. Josef Mengele.
Most of the children died as a result of these experiments, or were murdered once
the experiments were completed. This paper will discuss and analyze the treatment
and conditions of children and pregnant women and their newborn babies in
Auschwitz. It will also briefly look at their subsequent fate in the camp and their
lives after the liberation of the camp in January of 1945.
1Helena
Kubica, We Should Never Forget Them, Oś więcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Museum, 2005, DVD.
1
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
The women who gave birth in Auschwitz were sent there while they were
pregnant. Though a decree was issued stating that pregnant women were not to be
deported to concentration camps, this was not adhered to in reality.2 Many pregnant
women who were sent to the camp were immediately sent to the gas chambers if
they were noticeably pregnant, as they could not work. If a woman’s pregnancy was
not noticed at selection and she managed to give birth in the camp, when
discovered, both she and her baby were murdered, usually by a phenol injection to
the heart. Before 1943, all new mothers and their babies were killed. Midwives were
the ones who performed this task. Former prisoner Dr. Janina Kowalczyk explained
“in that initial period it was known that giving birth to a child and the official
reporting of this fact to the camp authorities was a death sentence not only for the
child, but also for the mother.”3 This task was usually performed by midwives
named “Schwester Klara and Schwester Pfani” in the women’s hospital in Birkenau,
and they are mentioned in several sources.4 In some cases, due to a desperate will to
survive, mothers killed their own children so they too would not be taken to the gas.
This is the case of Ruth Elias, a former Jewish prisoner.5 In the first half of 1943,
women were allowed to live after giving birth, and pregnant women were spared
from the gas, though the newborns were still killed.6 This could be because of a need
to use the mothers for labour, or because of the new orders issued by Himmler
Helena Kubica, Pregnant Women and Children Born in Auschwitz, Oś więcim:
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2010, p. 7.
3 Ibid., p. 34.
4 Ibid., p. 36.
5 Ibid., p. 46.
6 Ibid., p. 8.
2
2
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
about the “14f13” euthanasia policies.7 It was in May or June of 1943 that the killing
of non-Jewish newborns was suspended. Also at this time in 1943, Stanisława
Leszczyńska replaced midwife Klara as the chief midwife in Birkenau.8 Though some
newborns were now allowed to live, most died a few weeks after birth due to a lack
of basic supplies, such as clothes and proper food. The ones who did live, however,
were tattooed, registered in the camp and were permitted to live with their mothers.
The conditions that women lived and gave birth in were extremely
unsanitary. The scarcity of special food and clean, proper clothes for the babies,
coupled with the prevalence of disease led to an extremely high death rate among
newborns. Midwife Stanisława Leszczyńska describes the conditions in which
women gave birth in the hospital in Birkenau, as she was the midwife there for two
years. She says that women were crowded into the three-tiered wooden bunks of
the hospital, sometimes filled with up to 1,200 women, and the floor would turn to
several centimeters of mud when it rained. Thus, the only place to give birth was the
brick stove down the middle of the barracks, in view of the other patients. Infections
and vermin were abounding, as clean water and clothes were scarce. The women
died in grave numbers, as did the newborns. Leszczyńska says, “[the babies]
organisms depleted by hunger and the cold, ravaged by torture and disease, they
died quickly.”9 The lack of supplies was also a huge problem, only adding to the poor
conditions of the hospital. There were rarely bandages, medicine and antiseptic,
Tadeusz Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945: Central Issues in the History of the
Camp, Volume II, trans. William Brand, Oś wie̜ cim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Museum, 2000, p. 268.
8 Ibid., p. 270.
9 Kubica, Pregnant Women and Children Born in Auschwitz, p. 36.
7
3
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
making the births very unhygienic. Furthermore, it was hard for mothers to provide
for their children, as newborns were not given food rations, and most mothers could
not breastfeed their children because the of state of exhaustion that their own
bodies were in. It was only in 1944 when mothers received some special food to
provide for their babies. Most mothers, when nearing the time of birth, had to give
up their food rations in order to “organize” (or trade for) bed sheets to make into
diapers and clothing for their children.10 However, there was no clean water
available in the blocks so this made washing and cleaning both the infants and their
diapers very difficult. Hanging up diapers was also forbidden, so mothers had to use
their own bodies to dry diapers if they were able to wash them. 11 These inhumane
conditions resulted in the deaths of many children, and there are very few who were
born in the camp and survived. An example is Barbara Perończyk, who was born in
Auschwitz on May 17, 1944, and survived with her mother until the evacuation of
the camp in January 1945.12 She is one of the few to survive being born in the camp.
Pregnant women and their new babies were also subject to the medical
experiments that occurred in the camp. Experiments were performed on pregnant
women to induce premature labour. Former prisoner Zofia Flaks was taken to a
barrack for pregnant women in her eighth month, when her pregnancy was
discovered. There she was given injections in the hips for three days, and she was
also given chemotherapy to provoke a temperature. She gave birth on the fifth day,
and never saw her child again. After only a few days of recovery, she was sent back
Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945, p. 272.
Kubica, Pregnant Women and Children Born in Auschwitz, p. 36.
12 Ibid., p. 58.
10
11
4
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
to work.13 A very similar case is that of Hala Glat-Kulawicz, who hid her pregnancy
for two months in the camp. Before her abortion she received several injections in
the area of the breasts. Her child was also taken from her, and she was discharged
from the hospital five days after her abortion, and was sent back to work.14 Dr.
Mengele also performed experiments on women in the last stages of pregnancy.
Women were given injections of typhus, as Mengele “wanted to find out whether the
placenta functions as a protective barrier against infections and the child would be
born healthy, or whether it is not a barrier and the child would also be infected with
typhus.”15 After the infants were born, blood samples were taken from the temples
of the infants, and this frequently caused death, due to the inexperience of the
physicians.16 Most of these infants and mothers died soon after birth. Mengele also
performed experiments to see how long after birth a newborn could survive without
being fed by his or her mother.17 This was the case of Ruth Elias, who suffered with
her child in hunger for seven days until she injected the newborn with morphine, so
that Mengele would not take them both to the gas chamber the following day. 18
These medical experiments, the results of Mengele’s fanatical and extreme approach
to racial anthropology, had no good results - only the deaths of several mothers and
their newborn infants.
Ibid., p. 20.
Ibid., p. 21.
15 Ibid., p. 33.
16 Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945, p. 266.
17 Ibid., p. 266.
18 Kubica, Pregnant Women and Children Born in Auschwitz, pg. 46.
13
14
5
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
Children and adolescents under fourteen were also brought to the camp, and
they were treated very similarly to the adult prisoners. These transports were
subject to selection upon arrival, and as the majority of these children were unfit for
work, they were not even registered in the camp before being sent to the gas
chambers. Jewish children constituted the largest group of all children sent to
Auschwitz, over 216,000 in total.19 Most the these children were sent immediately
to the gas chambers, as they were a part of the Third Reich’s “final solution to the
Jewish question.”20 Poles, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Russians and Gypsies and their
children were also subject to this. Countless transports from several countries
brought these children and adolescents to Auschwitz, though only few were
registered officially in the camp.
Two “family camps” were established at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where children
were allowed to reside with their families. The first was created from transports of
Jews from the Theresienstadt ghetto-camp. The first transports from this camp were
treated like any other prisoners, and many of them were sent to the gas chambers.
But from September 1943 to May 1944, these transports did not have to go through
a selection, and were placed in the newly established family camp in Birkenau.
There was also a kindergarten set up there, which gave classes and followed a
school curriculum.21 These families had some privileges over the regular prisoners
in the camp: they were exempt from roll calls and they could send and receive
letters, though this did not last for long. The liquidation of the Theresienstadt family
Kubica, We Should Never Forget Them, DVD.
Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945, p. 217.
21 Kubica, We Should Never Forget Them, DVD.
19
20
6
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
camp began in March 1944, and the final liquidation occurred July 11-12, 1944.
Some adolescents selected for youth work were transferred to the men’s sector in
Birkenau, and some mothers had the chance to survive if they parted from their
young children.22 This family camp could have been an act of propaganda, to mislead
international powers about the function of the concentration camps.
The second family camp established at Auschwitz-Birkenau was for the
Gypsy and Roma people that were sent to the camp, the second largest group
persecuted at Auschwitz. Like the Jews, Himmler thought “they should be eliminated
from Europe as a race of little value.”23 Of the 21,000 Roma registered, 11,000 of
them were children, and it is said that 378 of those children were born in the
camp.24 This camp was similar to the Theresienstadt camp in that there was a
kindergarten established – there was even a playground – and the people there lived
in better conditions than in the rest of the camp. The families did not have to wear
the camp uniforms and their hair was not shorn.25 But soon, due to over crowding
and poor sanitary conditions, diseases such as typhus and noma (gangrene of the
face that was seen nowhere else in the camp) began to spread. The camp began to be
liquidated in May of 1944, and the final liquidation of the camp, about 3,000 men,
women and children, occurred the night of August 2, 1944. Both of the family camps
met similar ends, and were thought to have similar functions as propaganda tools
for the Reich.
Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945, p. 226-229.
Ibid., p. 235.
24 Kubica, We Should Never Forget Them, DVD.
25 Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945, p. 236.
22
23
7
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
Upon his arrival at Auschwitz, Mengele was named the head physician of the
Gypsy family camp in Birkenau, so he chose many children for his experiments from
there. His main area of medical interest was twins, most of which were children. He
also picked twin children from the selections on the ramp for his experiments. Many
surgical experiments were performed on these children. Mengele, as he was
interested in racial anthropology, performed experiments attempting to change the
colour of children’s irises. Drops of an unknown substance were placed in these
children’s eyes, which could cause irritation, swelling, blindness or even death in the
cases of very small children.26 This experimental procedure is mentioned often, such
as in the literary texts of Bogdan Bartnikowski, who was a child when he was sent to
the camp. He met a small boy who was blind, and the Stubealtester, or duty prisoner
in charge of a sector, told him that the boy was a “guinea pig” of Dr. Mengele’s.27
Former prisoner Vera Ivanovna Kuzina, witnessed German doctors putting drops of
liquid into the eyes of newborns in an attempt to change the colour.28 Many children
subject to these medical experiments were killed afterwards, by lethal injections of
phenol to the heart.
Children in the camp lived in the same way as the adults, and therefore
suffered the same cruel treatment. Children were shot at the “Wall of Death” in
Block 11 of the main camp, along with their families or with other prisoners.
Members of the Sonderkommando, the group that worked in the gas chambers and
Ibid., p. 266.
Bartnikowski, Childhood Behind Barbed Wire, Oś wie̜ cim: AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum, 2009, p. 77.
28 Kubica, Pregnant Women and Children Born in Auschwitz, p. 54.
26
27 Bogdan
8
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
crematoria, describe scenes of children, sometime still alive, being thrown in the
burning pits near the Birkenau crematoria. 29 Moreover, another danger that
children faced while living in the camp was sexual abuse, as this was “prevalent
among the German criminal functionaries who had spent many years in the
concentration camp system.”30 The children also had to participate in roll call, which
could be torturous and long. Bogdan Bartnikowski details and excruciatingly long
roll call in his memoirs, in which the boys had to repeatedly stand up and lie down,
and were beaten, because a prisoner was missing.31 This treatment was what the
children of Auschwitz had to endure during their time there, as they were treated no
differently than the adults in the camp.
Some of the children either born in or sent to Auschwitz who were nonJewish were eligible for “germanization,” as they were considered “racially
valuable.”32 These children, with their blond hair and blue eyes, were sent to
germanization camps, such as the ones in Łódź and Potulice, beginning in November
1943. Other groups of children that were sent away from Auschwitz were labour
groups, when the camp slowly began to evacuate in the middle of 1944. Many
children were transferred to other work camps that were west of Auschwitz, in the
opposite direction of the advancing Soviet troops. The last group of prisoners were
evacuated on January 18, 1945 included children and pregnant women, leaving only
Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945, p. 278-279.
Ibid., p. 250.
31 Bartnikowski, Childhood Behind Barbed Wire, p. 69-71.
32 Iwaszko et al., Auschwitz, 1940-1945, p. 280.
29
30
9
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
those who could not travel, including several hundred children, in the camp.33 After
the liberation, many of these children were alone, and required medical attention.
Several orphaned children were adopted or taken care of by the people of the town
of Oświęcim, or other neighboring towns. Some were able to be reunited with their
families after the war, though it took some children years of searching to find them.
Auschwitz had not only taken away these children’s childhoods, but their health and
their families. Many children suffered after the liberation, and some even died as
their conditions were so severe. Others could not continue to live normal lives
because of physical and mental exhaustion, or they were left with permanent
medical conditions. Many children lost their parents, and some very young children
did not know where they were from or even their names.34 Though some children
survived Auschwitz, their time there, no matter how short, would affect them for the
rest of their lives.
At Auschwitz, there was no pity: no pity for the living, and especially not for
the children. Many young lives came to and end within the gates of the camp, and
those that left them were altered forever. Children in Auschwitz endured starvation,
extreme cold and hunger, medical experiments and inhumane treatment. Pregnant
women endured the loss of their newborns and before 1943, their lives. In the
words of Jan Szpalerski, “the poor children did not know that there was no hope for
them.”35
Ibid., p. 282.
Ibid., p. 286-287.
35 Ibid., p. 279.
33
34
10
CENS 303D
Prof. B. Karwowska
Julia Mills
37758117
Bibliography
Bartnikowski, Bogdan. Childhood Behind Barbed Wire. Oś wie̜ cim: AuschwitzBirkenau State Museum, 2009.
Iwaszko, Tadeusz, and Helena Kubica, Franciszek Piper, Irena Strzelecka, Andrzej
Strzelecki. Auschwitz, 1940-1945: Central Issues in the History of the Camp,
Volume II, trans. William Brand. Oś wie̜ cim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State
Museum, 2000.
Kubica, Helena. Pregnant Women and Children Born in Auschwitz. Oś więcim:
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2010.
Kubica, Helena. We Should Never Forget Them. DVD. Oś więcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau
State Museum, 2005.
11