Hanna Brezinska
1944 Majdanek, Poland
Hanna is standing in a long queue that leads to the gas chamber. So many people are being sent to their deaths that the crematoriums can’t keep pace. Bodies from the gas chambers pile up faster than they can burn them. Hanna had thought she would be afraid. But now she’s just relieved to get away. Still, she prays to God to be rescued.
HANNA WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD when she was registered at the Roma section of Auschwitz-Birkenau in the spring of 1943. Her little sister Anita, who was only eight years old, was soon sent to death in the gas chambers. Hanna understood that the only way to survive was to push away all her feelings.
Hanna pretended to be older than she was and worked hard. She endured starvation and beatings and saw things she could never forget. She tried to keep track of time by following the seasons, but it was difficult. After spending time in several different camps, Hanna finally arrived at the Majdanek extermination camp.
Time and again, the guards had assigned Hanna, “Prisoner Z-4517”, to the ranks of those who could still work. But in Majdanek, it was Hanna’s turn to die. She was literally standing on the threshold of the door to the gas chamber when the guards received new orders. All able-bodied prisoners were to be sent to Hamburg to work as slave labourers in the Nazi German war industry.
Majdanek
Majdanek, outside Lublin in Poland, was to begin with a camp for Soviet prisoners of war. In the spring of 1942, the Nazis began their large-scale murder of Europe’s Jews. Majdanek became a combined labour and extermination camp. Gas chambers were built in the camp, where prisoners were murdered with the gas Zyklon B and with carbon monoxide. About 80,000 people were murdered in Majdanek. Most were shot or gassed to death.
Before the Soviet army liberated the camp in July 1944, the Nazis began moving prisoners to other camps and to forced labour in the German war industry.