A Little Girl in Auschwitz

November 11, 2024
“I was one of the children who spent the longest time” at Auschwitz, recalls Maksymowicz, a survivor of Josef. Mengele’s laboratory, in her haunting debut. The daughter of partisans hiding in the forests of Belarus, Maksymowicz grew up constantly on the run. After her father left to fight for the Allies, she and her mother were captured and sent to Auschwitz; when they arrived, Maksymowicz was only three years old. Spared the gas chamber because “Dr. Mengele chose me,” she endured blood transfusions, eye injections, and poisonings (“His cold gaze returns to me.... It’s as if he had come back to look at me. Panic takes hold of me. He looks at me and says: you’re mine. I can do whatever I want with you”). As Russian forces neared the camp, Maksymowicz’s mother was forced to march deeper into German occupied territory. Left behind, Maksymowicz was adopted by a local woman; she was eventually reunited with her mother in 1962. In the same spirt as a foreword by Pope Francis reflecting on the lessons of the Holocaust, Maksymowicz concludes with a call not to repeat the past: “We survivors do not forget. We saw the fall of humanity and we do not want it to be repeated.” The result is a traumatic and affecting story of survival.