The Boy From Block 66: A WW2 Jewish Holocaust Survival True Story (Heroic Children of World War II Book 1)

by Limor Regev

We returned to camp every evening. After the long hours of hard work, roll call awaited us and only when it was over did they give us any ‘soup’. It was muddy water, food not even fit for cattle let alone for human consumption. Here and there, if you were lucky, bits of potato floated in the water. It was our only food. At an age when the body is growing and maturing, when the appetite becomes especially strong, hunger had its effect on our bodies, and we quickly became emaciated.

The Germans did everything to break any element of human individuality or uniqueness and made sure we remained a mass of nameless creatures. We looked the same, dressed the same, and were a row of numbers in a column. No one knew the others’ names. At the line-ups and for everything else, they called us only by the numbers tattooed on our arms.

Buna was a crowded camp with about 10,000-12,000 prisoners, although it was designated to hold 7000-8000 people.

water in the camp was not drinkable, including the water that came out of the showers.

An orchestra made up of prisoners like ourselves played rhythmic marches when we left the gate in the mornings and returned to the camp every evening. It was one of the most insane things about planet Auschwitz. Stirring music was so far removed from this horrible place, and the sounds of musical instruments where death, hunger and fear reigned supreme was particularly cynical. The orchestra accompanied our departure from the camp and our entry into it and we were forced to march in fives and in rhythm: left-right, left-right…

Every day, we struggled for the privilege of staying alive.

The instinct for life was greater than the instinct for freedom.

The Germans succeeded in neutralizing the innate desire for independence in the human psyche and they extinguished within us the urge to take action and fight for freedom and liberty.

The fate of the Jews was not a major concern for the United States, Britain, or their allies in its waging of the war. Just a few miles from where they were bombing on a regular basis, the killing factories churned on uninterrupted. To this day I do not understand why the planes did not bomb Birkenau. This is one of the greatest stains on the Allies’ conduct during the Nazi campaign of genocide of the Jews the Holocaust.

In this final selection, they sent 850 victims for extermination.

The apathy and our daily struggle for survival disrupted the centuries-old connection to the tradition from which we came.

In addition, many of us had lost faith. God was not with us there, and I believe that a great many of the camp inmates found themselves in a particularly severe spiritual crisis, when not only was their physical world shattered, but also their belief in religion.

“Why must I sanctify His name? The Lord God, King of the world, All Powerful God…Is silent. Why should I acknowledge Him?”

In its years of operation, approximately 1,500,000 men, women and children were murdered at Auschwitz, representing about one out of four of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust.

I had almost forgotten what an apple tasted like.

Indifference and the numbing of our senses was the only way we could go on: to harden our hearts and neutralize our feelings in the face of these dreadful sights.

“Eat the snow and hold on; whoever falls asleep freezes to death,” he repeated to us.

I remember setting one goal only: to keep awake, to keep breathing.

“JEDEM DAS SEINE”: “Every man to his own fate.” These words cynically and frighteningly reflected what was going on inside the gates, not only in Buchenwald but also in all the camps.

The Holocaust taught us that indeed, each man has his own destiny.

Years later, I learned that Laser, the boy who smuggled the prayer book out of Auschwitz, was Nobel Peace Prize laureate Eli Wiesel.

Our struggle for survival, day by day, hour by hour, had robbed us of the ability to feel.

The same mechanism that had forced us to emotionally disconnect to survive prevented us in that moment we had dreamed of, from feeling true joy. We knew we were free, but it would be many months before our hearts, which had known almost inconceivable sorrow and pain, would truly beat again.

The terrible hunger we suffered from continued to take its toll even after liberation.

22,000 Jewish prisoners had been sent from Buchenwald on death marches since April 6. Kalina was able to rescue 904 children from the clutches of the Germans thanks to his courage, resourcefulness and determination.

The war had taken my grandmother, my grandfather, my little cousins, uncles and aunts… …my little brother …and my father And it had taken my belief in man and in God. It had stripped me of my childhood innocence.

Unity is the basis of our continued existence and the foundation of our future.