The Children Of The Holocaust

The children lost in the Holocaust. A subject that I had never quite spent too much time thinking about, you always see pictures of adults and what happened to them but not often the children. When we went to Auschwitz I learned things that broke my heart. I have a niece and two nephews at home and just imagining them in the best of the situations there tore me up inside as we walked through the camps. We saw children’s shoes along with the 80,000 other pairs in the museum. Children’s clothes were hung up among the other confiscated items. We saw small uniforms for the camp made for the small frames of children, forced to work and starve in the camps.

            In wartimes you never think of children as being the ones to suffer, not initially anyway. You think of women and children as being the first to be evacuated or the first being sent to the lifeboats. Never do you think that children would be the first targets or the first to die. They were specifically targeted in many cases because they were too weak to work or too little. They were often sent to the gas chambers, if not, they were often used in Nazi experiments. Most of the time separating twins or other siblings to have a control group along with a test subject.

            Thinking about what these children had to witness, what they must have endured, it is sickening. Small, young kids that had no idea what was going on in their countries. They had no clue why their friends weren’t allowed to hang out with them anymore or why they couldn’t go to school, or why their mom and dads seemed so frightened all the time. They had no way of comprehending the reasons why people they had known all their lives suddenly hated them and wanted them to go away. They were sent away to ghettos and camps knowing what was going to happen to them. Some children left drawings, they knew that they were going to a scary camp where there were men with guns who would shoot the people they loved without a second thought. Those are some of the atrocities these children had to become witnesses to. Things that they would grow up having nightmares about, and that’s if they survived because out of the 104,000 children in the camps, only 600 were liberated.

            These children and all of their stories are the reasons that we can never let this happen again. Why we must stand as witnesses to the horrible things that occurred and stand firm against anyone or anything that would threaten this kind of destruction to our children.