The Girl Who Could Not Hate. My Childhood in the Auschwitz Death Camp

My mother would sneak into the children's barrack 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 photograph circulated the world: Pope Francis bowed his head before a Holocaust survivor and kissed the tattoo with the camp number on her arm. This woman was 81-year-old Lydia Maximovich, 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 Lydia saw before descending into the camp's darkness. The little girl had to endure not only the separation from her mother, hunger, and the horror of approaching death, but also the inhumane experiments of Josef Mengele... She walked out of there in January 1945, hand in hand with a Polish woman who decided to adopt one of the “orphans” freezing in the corpse-laden camp. Lydia stayed with her adoptive mother, but she never forgot her real mother, and she searched for her all her life – and found her in the Soviet Union many years later. Her incredible story shows: you can survive in inhuman conditions only by carrying in your heart love for your family and believing that good will surely triumph.