During the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of children were transported to the murder mill that was Auschwitz. It is estimated that in 1945, only fifty two under the age of eight were liberated.
This is one of the most searingly horrific quotes found in any memoir of historical book about the Holocaust. One of the goals that the Third Reich's final solution was intended to accomplish was to completely wipe out the future of Judaism in Europe. They believed that the most efficient way of accomplishing this was to kill as many Jewish children as they could find. By eliminating the next generation, and waiting for the older generations to die, they believed that the Jews could be eliminated completely from both Germany and her European neighbors. Therefore, children were rounded up in staggering number, transported to the death camp, and gassed in the gas chambers.
This statement also reveals one of the goals in the writing of the memoir. We are soon at a stage in the world when the oral history of the death camps and the Holocaust will die with the people who experienced it. This book not only teaches children about the horrors of anti-Semitism in a way that they can understand; through the eyes of other children who were amongst the few who survived it.
The fact that less than sixty children survived Auschwitz makes the testimony of the author even more powerful, because there are not many people who actually have this experience to relate, or this story to tell. This gives his words even more weight to the children reading the book, because it is so rare and so hard to come by eyewitness accounts from storytellers who are at the time of experience, their peers.
Fathers gave their final hugs that must have carried the weight of a thousand bedtimes.
When their children were ripped from their parents on entering Auschwitz, the adults knew that this would be the last time they saw their sons and daughters again. The children were less aware of this, too young to comprehend or imagine the horrors that awaited them, and too young also to have been given any information in the "outside world" about what was happening to their relatives, friends and neighbors. Bornstein saw these final goodbyes, and hugs that parents wanted never to end. It was as if they were hugging them hard enough to take them through their next hundred bedtimes, and also hugging them hard enough for their last. It is impossible to imagine the pain and deep sorrow these parents experienced, and also the parallel they must themselves have drawn between these last hugs, and the thousand that went before them in happier, more normal circumstances.
