The Girl Who Couldn't Hate: My Childhood in Auschwitz Death Camp

My mother would sneak into the children's barracks at night and make me repeat: My name is Lyuda, I am five years old, I am the daughter of Belarusian partisans, I was taken to Birkenau. She wanted me to remember my story. In May 2021, a photo flew around the world: Pope Francis bowed his head to a Holocaust survivor and kissed the tattoo with the camp number on her arm. This woman was 81-year-old Lidiya Maksimovich, a Belarusian prisoner of Birkenau, the most terrible Auschwitz death camp. Her family, who had gone to the partisans, ended up in the camp when she was only three years old. The Belarusian forests became the last light that Lidiya saw before descending into the camp darkness. The little girl will have to endure not only separation from her mother, hunger and the horror of imminent death, but also the inhuman experiments of Josef Mengele... She left there in January 1945, hand in hand with a Polish woman who decided to adopt one of the "orphans" freezing in the corpse-strewn camp. Lydia stayed with her adoptive mother, but did not forget her real mother, did not stop looking for her all her life - and found her in the Soviet Union many years later. Her incredible story shows that you can survive in inhumane conditions only if you carry love for your family in your heart and believe that good will definitely win.