Excerpt:
Before March 1941, Adolf Hitler’s goal had been the forced emigration of all Jews from Germany and recently conquered territories. Now that changed. The newly planned objective of the German government was the total physical annihilation of the eleven million Jewish people living in Europe.

To accomplish this the German government built a network of concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau was by far the largest and most lethal of these secretly constructed camps. The Nazis intended to keep their existence unknown to the population in the area, German citizens in general, and the world at large. The site had been chosen because of its isolated location, which would help in that regard. In addition, there was access to rivers and rail transportation – transportation that could bring people who were to be killed. Auschwitz’s barracks, satellite camps, factories, and killing facilities were laid out over twenty-five acres. (For reasons of efficiency the SS – the branch of the German military responsible for implementing these plans – had turned from mass shooting to murder by poison gas.)

On the night of September 5, 1944, the transport carrying the eight from the street annex reached its destination.

“…the train suddenly came to a stop. The doors…were slid violently open, and the first we saw of Auschwitz were the glaring searchlights fixed on the train.”

“We were taken, with our baggage, to a large area that was lit up by extraordinary strong lights – so strong that I had the feeling that they were moon. I thought, We’re on another planet…and here there are three moons.”

Trains were purposefully scheduled to arrive at night, adding to the feeling of confusion, helplessness, and disorientation. The night air was pierced by the fearsome sounds of barking dogs and loud speakers crackling instructions: Anyone too weak to walk should board the nearby trucks with the red crosses painted on them. Kapos, head prisoners who helped the Nazis maintain order and discipline, hovered all around. Shaven-headed, strange-looking men in their striped uniforms whispered furtively, “Don’t go into the trucks,” to the uncomprehending and disbelieving new arrivals.

“A detachment of SS men with guns, whips, and clubs in their hands attacked us, separating the men from their wives, parents from their children, the old from the young. Those who resisted…were beaten, kicked, and dragged away. In a few minutes we were standing in separate groups, almost unconscious with pain, fear, exhaustion, and the unbearable shock of losing our loved ones.”

Otto Frank, frantically struggling to make visual contact with his family, saw only his daughter Margot and the look of terror in her eyes.

“Now, with a handful of SS officers, the camp physician took over the direction of this infernal game. With a flick of his hand he sent some of us to the left, some to the right. It took some time before I understood what this meant. Of every trainload of prisoners, ten to twelve thousand at a time, he selected about three thousand inmates for his camp. The others, those who went ‘left,’ were…carted away.”

Those judged able to work as slave labor for the Third Reich were spared. Those who weren’t – anyone who was sick, disabled, over fifty, under fifteen (89 percent of the Jewish children in Europe were murdered in the death camps), pregnant, or mothers who refused to be separated from their children – were taken directly to the gas chambers.

Some were able to act transcendently:

“I came to Auschwitz August 22, 1944. I came with my mother, my brother, my father, my aunt and uncle, and my cousin. A neighbor of ours was with us…He had a four-year-old child with him; he had lost his wife in the ghetto.

We got off the trains in Auschwitz and they separated the men right away. The women and children were on one side and the men on the other. When we got off the train and they separated the men, this little girl, the neighbor’s child, was left alone. My mother (she was a saint) walked over to him and she said, ‘Don’t worry, I will take care of the child.’ She took his child by the hand and she kept her, wouldn’t let go of her. The child was alone and my mother wouldn’t let go of her. The child was alone and my mother wouldn’t let the child stand alone.

Everything happened very rapidly…My aunt was with her little boy in the front and my mother with this little girl by the hand and my brother, and I was the last one. My aunt and her little boy he motioned to the left, and when he asked my mother if this was her child and she nodded yes, he sent her to the left. My brother, being only twelve at the time, he sent to the left and me he motioned to the right.
I realized my mother was on the other side and I wanted to run to my mother, I wanted to be with her. A Jewish woman who worked there caught me in the middle and said…’Don’t you dare move from here!’ Because she knew that if I was on the other side I would go to the gas chamber. And she wouldn’t let me move… 

This was the last time I saw my mother. She went with that neighbor’s child. So when we talk about heroes, mind you, this was a hero: a woman who would not let a four-year-old child go by herself.”

Those sent “left” were told to undress and keep their clothes and shoes tied together. They were handed soap and the children were given toys. All to create the illusion that nothing bad was about to happen.