Abstract: This article addresses the biological and mental extermination of children at the KL Auschwitz camp. Physical extermination was executed through starvation, poor sanitary conditions, and the spread of diseases, the inability to meet basic biological needs, the elimination of children in gas chambers and by burning them on bonfires, beatings, the murder of newborns, or Doctor Mengele's pseudo-scientific experiments. In accounts by prisoners and witnesses, the extermination camp is depicted as a well-organised system of mental abuse of children. The article presents the way young prisoners functioned in inhumane living conditions dominated by ruthlessness, death, and fear, where meeting their basic needs was made impossible, where they were deprived of humanity, but also, how they learned to survive within the camp reality.
Keywords: Auschwitz, children, extermination camp, physical and mental suffering
The scale and enormity of suffering endured by children during World War II cannot be described in words, but as long we continue to speak of it – including those of us who were born many years after the war and know this subject only from written records, books, and camp memories we preserve the memory of those who deserve to be commemorated forever. The suffering of children in KL Auschwitz consisted of enormous physical and emotional extermination.
The largest concentration camp established within Polish territory, KL Auschwitz, was designed for inmates from southern Poland and Silesia. The parent camp, along with two camp complexes, Birkenau and Monowitz, which were established after the population of villages adjacent to the town of Auschwitz was displaced, constituted the largest German/Nazi death camp, witnessing the extermination of 4 million people from all over Europe under German occupation, including children (Boczek, Boczek, Wilczur, 1979, p. 57). Construction of the Auschwitz camp was commenced at the turn of April and May of 1940 and as early as on June 14th 1940, the first transport of 700 inmates, including a number of young Poles, but no children under the age of 14, reached Auschwitz. On March 1st 1941, Heinrich Himmler visited Auschwitz for the first time and ordered the expansion of the parent camp.