Auschwitz was the most notorious of the Nazi labor camps in WWII. There, a man or woman could expect at any moment to be sent to the gas chambers, used for medical experiments or given a phenol injection to the heart which would cause death in 15 seconds. If lucky, they would instead be used for exhaustive labor under the most grueling conditions.
A selection committee decided who was fit for labor and who would be used for medical experiments or exterminated. One ‘doctor’ drew an arbitrary height line of 5 feet 2 inches and any child who was not tall enough was sent to the gas chambers immediately.
Many were sent to the chambers directly upon arriving at Auschwitz. For that reason records do not exist for all of the people who were killed.
Their horrible suffering and the conditions they endured were beyond belief. People would tell each other lies just to give hope. “The allies have landed in Greece”. The implication was that they would be rescued soon. There were many other stories concocted to keep one another from utter despair.
After Auschwitz was closed and the inmates released there was a reckoning. The Nazis were...