Children During the Holocaust
Children were especially vulnerable in the era of the Holocaust. The Nazis advocated killing…
Back in 2006, the Oprah Winfrey Network honored the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust by interviewing and featuring Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and New York Times bestselling author Elie Wiesel who eloquently recalled his ordeal at Auschwitz while standing on those very grounds decades later.
This short video encapsulates the incredibly extraordinary actions of a non-Jewish American prisoner of war in defending fellow Jewish soldiers from an almost certain death on a cold January day back in the Second World War.
On February 6, 1947, 11 1/2-year-old Krystyna Chiger was interviewed by Magistrate Maria Holender. During the war, she had been hidden with her family in the sewers of Lvov, a city in Poland. Here is what she said.
When Daddy found out that there would be a liquidation of the Ghetto, we hid in the cellar. We usually went there in the afternoon when Mommy would come back from work. I was 7 years old then and I knew about everything.
Later we headed for the sewer. It was very wet and dark. I was very scared and I was shaking, but I tried to be calm and only asked Daddy if we still had far to go. There were stones with yellow worms crawling all over. We put all our things over the stones and sat on top of them.