Newly arrived and, at 17, one of the oldest among the 1,000 boys in Birkenau’s Block 22, Jack Lewin – then Yanek Levin – was incensed as he watched the Polish block leader and his Jewish deputy, a man named Wolkowicz, divvy up the bread rations, cutting the small, hard loaves intended for four prisoners into five portions and pocketing the extras.
“Seven, eight, four, five. Write that down,” Dr. Josef Mengele instructed a nearby guard as a naked and painfully thin Klara Wizel — then Iutkovits — stood before the Auschwitz doctor in yet another selection, her drab, gray dress draped over her right arm, her tattooed left arm outstretched.
\”Get out, move,” Nazi and Arrow Cross soldiers shouted in German and Hungarian as they burst into the crowded four-story Swedish safe house in Budapest, Hungary, on Jan. 8, 1945. Marianne Klein — then 13 and called Marika Roth — had escaped to the house only days earlier
In the early morning darkness of Oct. 9, 1942, Ester Tepper (née Estera Wilhelm), just 10 years old, stood half-dressed and shivering in her family’s apartment in the Radomsko ghetto, which was surrounded by German soldiers.
Early on the designated morning in December 1943, 16-year-old Sidonia Lax (née Sydonia Lewin) and her parents, Cyla and Isaac, left their bunker in the Przemysl ghetto, where they had been living for three months, and made their way to a building near one of the gates.
“Just a minute,” Rebecca, the receptionist at the Laboratoire Rambouillet in Paris, told 5 1/2-year-old Simone Richlin (née Tolstonog) and her two cousins, Serge, 12, and Riton, 9.
Masza Rosenroth (née Czechanowska) stood with her two younger sisters, Gutia, 14, and Surra, 11, in the courtyard of the Lodz ghetto, amid hundreds of other residents who’d been ordered to assemble for yet another selection.
As the transport from Tacova, Czechoslovakia (then called Tecso, Hungary), pulled up to the Birkenau platform in late May 1944, the doors of the cattle cars slammed open.
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