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

At night, my mother slipped into the children’s barracks and made me repeat: my name is Lyuda, I’m five years old, I’m the daughter of Belarusian partisans, they took me to Birkenau. She wanted me to remember my story. In May 2021 the whole world was struck by a photograph: Pope Francis bowed his head to an 81-year-old woman who survived the Holocaust and kissed the tattoo with her camp number on her arm. That woman was Lydia Maksimovich—an elderly Belarusian prisoner of Birkenau, the most terrible death camp of Auschwitz. Her family, which had gone into the forests to join the partisans, was sent to the camp when she was only three. The Belarusian forests became the last light Lydia saw before the camp darkness swallowed everything. As a little girl, she would have to endure not only separation from her mother, hunger, and the horror of nearly dying, but also inhuman experiments by Josef Mengele… She left there in January 1945, holding hands with a Polish woman who had decided to adopt one of the “orphans” frozen in a camp strewn with corpses. Lydia stayed with the adoptive mother, but she never forgot her real mother, never stopped searching for her her whole life—and found her many years later, in the Soviet Union. Her incredible story shows: to survive in inhuman conditions, you can only carry love for your family in your heart and believe that good will surely triumph.