“Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz,” by Alwin Meyer; English version Polity Press (c) 2022; ISBN 13:978-1-5095-4550-6; 496 pages.
By Sandra Scheller
CHULA VISTA, California — In 1971, 21-year-old Alwin Meyer made his first trip to the Auschwitz concentration camp, not as a relative of a survivor but as a German observer. He remembered hearing about Auschwitz in school but until he visited the camp had no understanding of its hellish history. The greatest shock for him was learning that newborns and children were in the camp. These details were obviously eliminated from his German Youth education.
Meyer has devoted his life documenting stories of children who placed their head on an Auschwitz bed. His book, Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz, has fortunately been translated into English from its original German. The book details the testimony of 27 Auschwitz child survivors. Accounts of pregnant women who arrived at the camp and were immediately murdered, gave new meaning to those four births that survived because of the inmates helping and even risking their lives for a new meaning of hope.
Meyer’s extensive interviews with not only Jewish survivors but also with Roma people and political enemies of the Nazis lent weight to the search for truth. His personal interviews and extensive research of historical records makes for a more complete picture of camp life that had been previously available.
From the book, page 128: “On these days in particular, we were extremely fearful of our fate at the roll call. The shrill voices of the SS penetrated deep. Everyone wondered whether they looked weak. We turned to our neighbors: ‘What do I look like?’ The weak and sick were selected for the gas chambers. A small gesture by the SS officer or doctor was sufficient: ‘To the left’ meant death; ‘to the right’ meant survival.”
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Sandra Scheller is the curator of the RUTH – Remember Us the Holocaust exhibit at the Chula Vista Public Library, which tells of Holocaust Survivors who moved to the South Bay region of San Diego County. They included her late mother, Ruth Sax.