(Section 4 of Traveling Exhibit)
The remnants of the Jewish community arriving in Auschwitz-Birkenau were brutally mistreated by the Nazis. If not selected for immediate death, prisoners chose for forced labor lived in squalid conditions. Some prisoners had to endure inhumane medical experiments by doctors and scientists inside the camps.
During their imprisonment at Auschwitz, two young women from Będzin assisted in an uprising that resulted in the destruction of one of the camp’s crematoria. For their participation in this uprising, the young women were interrogated, tortured, and eventually hanged. One of the women was Rose Rechnic’s aunt, Regina Safirsztain.
In the final ten months of the war, the Nazis forced camp prisoners on death marches. These journeys by foot or by train covered thousands of miles and left many prisoners dead from exhaustion, starvation, exposure, or shootings by their guards if they could not keep up. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz. On May 9, 1945, the German army surrendered.
For thousands of prisoners, liberation from concentration and death camps meant they were finally free. However, many prisoners —including survivors from Będzin—found freedom only to discover that most of their friends and family had been killed. Not only had the Nazis stolen the property of Jews during their occupation of Poland, former neighbors had also looted homes and property or moved into the abandoned houses. Antisemitic sentiment still lingered and threatened the returning survivors. Many survivors felt that they had no homes to return to, so they settled into Displaced Person Camps (DP camps) set up by the Allies to assist them during the years following the war. Eager to begin new lives, most survivors migrated to countries like Israel, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Unfortunately, the end of the war and the Holocaust did not always bring peace to survivors. Surviving Jews who escaped to the USSR before the war or traveled there afterwards often encountered Soviet antisemitism (like Jane Lipski). Discrimination and violence lasted for decades after the Holocaust. Likewise, the children of Holocaust survivors have often struggled to cope with the aftermath of a tragedy they did not directly experience but still felt intimately connected to. At the same time, commemoration of the Holocaust and its victims and survivors developed in different styles and at a different pace in the countries affected by the war. These memorials highlight the important of remembrance of those who suffered and died in the Holocaust.
The few surviving youth of Będzin had a chance to begin a new life, although memories of the Holocaust never left them.