A girl called A-18352: The Story of a Child of Auschwitz

A new transport

A new transport came a while later. All were Hungarian Jews, they watched us their eyes wide with horror, the little children cowering against their parents watching us warily. As they were herded toward Mengele a little girl dropped her doll, she tried to pick it up but her parents hurried her along. These people had no idea what was in store for them.
There are two new women the bunk right next to ours, they doesn't say much. One could tell the younger one was only two maybe three years older than me, about thirteen or fourteen. I wonder how she got past the Angle of Death, Mengele. Patches of golden fuzz cover her head. I drift off to sleep wondering about her, her name, what she was like, how she is alive.

     The next day, on my way to kitchen duty, I saw a band of dark skinned children waiting in line to die. When I came back at the end of the day, a single small shoe was where they used to stand. The smokestacks were working harder than usual that day.

   Many infants were born in the camp but died soon if they weren't drowned or suffocated immediately after birth. More than one prisoner decided to go to the gas with her newborn than just hand the babe over, they held their heads high and didn't shed a tear as a pair of guards led them away.

      I remember in my early days here of a woman who bled out and soon delivered a babe prematurely. The child's weak cries died in minutes, the mother just tossed the body into one of the piles of corpses of the women and girls who died that night. That woman was chosen to die the next day anyway. Sometimes I think she had killed her own child in a attempt to preserve her own life. But, I have no proof.