'Nightmares walked': Lidia Maksymowicz recalls how her two moms saved her when she was 3 at Auschwitz camp
KRAKOW, POLAND: An 80-year-old Nazi concentration camp survivor recently recalled the horror she endured at the deadly Holocaust camp as she revealed how two mothers saved her from that “living hell.” Lidia Maksymowicz, 82, a Polish woman of Belarusian origin, was just three years old when she was deported to the concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland along with her mother and her maternal grandparents.
The family spent nearly 13 months, from 1943 to 1945, at the Holocaust camp, where Maksymowicz was subjected to pseudo-medical experiments carried out by the infamous camp doctor, Josef Mengele, during World War II. “We didn’t have nightmares,” Maksymowicz wrote in her memoir, ‘The Little Girl Who Could Not Cry’, according to Daily Mail. “Because nightmares walked with us at every moment. Our lives were the worst nightmare it was possible to imagine”
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The author noted that the child camp, where she was kept, was presided by a female kapo, who used to beat children with her whip to take out her own fear. "There was no kindness, no heat, no washing, no lavatories, hardly any food, and not only the constant fear of being chosen by that quintessence of human evil Dr. Josef Mengele for his next experiment but the frequent reality of it," Maksymowicz continued. The author said, she scampered away to hide beneath the bottom bed against the back wall whenever she heard Mengele entering the barrack to select his "guinea pig" youngster for the day.
'I was his favorite guinea pig'
However, Maksymowicz was not saved every time as Mengele hoicked her out many times and took her to his laboratory where he injected poisons into her to watch their effects. "I was his favorite guinea pig," she wrote. Maksymowicz said sometimes she came back to the barrack in a coma, adding, her body was "as transparent as glass."
During this tough time, Maksymowicz 22-year-old mother Anna, who was living in another barrack, bravely snuck 50 meters along the wall to visit her daughter and offer her some raw onion that she had managed to collect while performing forced labor outside the camp. ‘Please don’t just leave me the onion, leave me your hands too, to keep me company in the dark," the author remembered begging her mother's presence.
'Snow settled on our shaven heads'
Maksymowicz was rescued from the Holocaust camp in early 1945, when Russian soldiers killed Mengele. "Snow settled on our shaven heads, covered our filthy clothes, froze our hearts and froze our blood," she added. The little girl was free but she didn’t have any place to go because she didn’t know where her biological mother was. She was eventually adopted by a kind, bossy local woman, who longed for a child of her own.
Maksymowicz happily grew up with her ‘new mother’, who she called "Mama Bronislawa." In her teens, her friends encouraged her to start searching for her mother. Mama Bronislawa was terrified of losing her, so Maksymowicz assured her she didn’t want to leave — she just wanted to know the truth. Eventually, in the late 1950s, she received a letter from the Red Cross, which stated: "Your mother is not dead. She lives in the Soviet Union. She has been looking for you desperately for years and years." Her first telegram from her mother reached her when she was 19.
'Why hadn't she moved Heaven and Earth to find me?'
"I was in pieces," Maksymowicz admitted. She continued, "I felt betrayed. Why hadn’t she moved Heaven and Earth to find out what had happened to me?" The survivor soon reunited with her mother, who apparently did everything to find her. The best moment of the reunion, she wrote, was seeing her two mothers hug each other. Both women, in their different ways, had shown her infinite love and had ultimately saved her life.