Difference between revisions of "Category:Czech Family Camp Auschwitz (subject)"

Czech Family Camp Auschwitz / The Birkenau Boys

Overview

At the liquidation of the camp, Mengele selected several adolescents as "adults" for forced labor, some twins for his medical experiments, and a group of 89 boys as errand boys.

The Birkenau Boys

89 were the children selected by Mengele to work as errand boys in the camp.

In January 1945 the Birkenau Boys were evacuated. The first group to leave the camp included 20/30 boys (only two survived: Gerhard Durlacher e Toman Brod). Of the others 40 survived, which brings the total to 42.

Book : The Search by Gerhard Durlacher

Gerhard Durlacher. De zoektocht <Dutch> (Amsterdam : Meulenhoff, 1991).

English ed. The Search: The Birkenau Boys, trans. Susan Massotty (London ; New York : Serpent's Tail, 1998).

Also translated into German (Die Suche : Bericht über den Tod und das Uberleben, Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1995).

"Gerhard Durlacher was stunned to discover that he was not the only survivor who was assigned to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. The Search follows his quest to find his fellow survivors and ends with a reunion of the Birkenau boys in Israel in 1990 ... A child survivor of the Holocaust, Durlacher long believed that he was the only person still alive from a group of 89 boys assigned to the Birkenau extermination camp in 1944. After he learned that he was wrong, he set himself the task of confronting his past by locating some of the others. As in many other Holocaust memoirs, the prose here is spare, and the lack of detail can be a little confusing. For example, the reader is thrown into the author's search without a description of the process that led him to take his journey. But some psychological truisms emerge in this gray travelogue that, while not fresh, are worth ruminating over. What the author, a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam who died in 1996, finds is that even though the survivors shared a common experience, how they have coped with their wartime suffering differs. Some, in particular those who have moved to Israel, meet regularly with other survivors; others keep their harrowing past buried deep in their psyches. Equally diverse are survivors' personal outlooks--despite what they have gone through, some of the "Birkenau Boys" still call themselves optimists, while others possess the bitterness one would expect. Not surprisingly, Durlacher, who wrote two previous books on the Holocaust, enjoyed the company of the former much more than the latter."--Publisher description.

Gerhard Durlacher (1928-1996) was a Holocaust child survivor and writer.

The Children

• Gerhard Durlacher (1928-1996)
• Toman Brod (1929) (see Centropa)

• Otto Deutelbaum (Otto Dov Kulka) (1933-2021)
• John Freund
• Henry Silberstern
• Jiri Diamant (May 4, 1930)
• Itzhak Hacker / Ernie Hacker (Austria, 1929)
• Walter Hacker (Austria, Apr 4, 1929)
• Helmut Szprycer <Orchestra> (Germany, Aug 8, 1929)
• Yehuda Bacon

• Harry Fink (b.1931) Birkenau Boys / Gunskirchen (see [https://www.centropa.org/biography/harry-fink Centropa)
• Harry Goldberger (b.1931) Birkenau Boys / Gunskirchen
• Harry Osers (b.1929)
• Pavel Werner (b.1932) Birkenau Boys / Gunskirchen