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On February 12th, 2010, I blogged about the “New born babies at Dachau.”  Yesterday, I was very happy when I read in a news article that all seven of the Dachau babies are alive and well and even some of the mothers are still alive. Six of the Dachau babies will be attending a Reunion at Dachau as part of the celebration of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau on April 29th.

New born babies at Dachau camp, May 1945

Shown from left to right in the photo above are: Iboyla Kovacs with her daughter Agnes; Suri Hirsch with her son Yossi; Eva Schwartz with her daughter Maria; Magda Reich with her daughter Judit; and Boeszi Legmann with her son Gyuri.

Dachau mothers with their babies in the barracks at Dachau

Shown from the left in the photo above are Iboyla Kovacs with her daughter Agnes; Suri Hirsch with her son Yossi; Eva Schwartz with her daughter Maria; Magda with her daughter; Boeszi Legmann with her son Gyuri; Dora Loewy and her daughter Szuszi; and Miriam Schwarcz Rosenthal with her son Laci (Leslie).

According to the news article, a German TV station is going to air “a documentary which explores the miracle of how these three infant boys and four infant girls slipped through the cracks of the Nazi killing machine.”

As proof that Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, “was determined to exterminate all Jewish children,” the article quotes from a famous speech made by Himmler on October 6, 1943 at Poznan in which he said:

“Es trat an uns die Frage heran: Wie ist es mit den Frauen und Kindern? Ich habe mich entschlossen, auch hier eine ganz klare Lösung zu finden. Ich hielt mich nämlich nicht für berechtigt, die Männer auszurotten- sprich also, umzubringen oder umbringen zu lassen – und die Rächer in Gestalt der Kinder für unsere Söhne und Enkel groß werden zu lassen. Es mußte der schwere Entschluß gefaßt werden, dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen.”

English translation:

“We came to the question: How is it with the women and children? I decided to find a clear solution here as well. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – that is, to kill them or have them killed – and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be taken to make this people disappear from the earth.”

So it is truly a miracle that all seven of these babies survived and lived to the age of 65.  Somehow, the mothers must have had nutritious food during their pregnancies.  How did that happen? The Holocaust survivors, who are out on the lecture circuit today, always tell about how they were starving and how they weighed only 75 pounds when they were liberated.

This quote from the news article explains how Miriam Rosenthal managed to survive Auschwitz before being sent to one of the eleven Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau:

The Nazis deliberately killed children: the toll of minors in the Holocaust is estimated at as much as 1.5 million.

Miriam Rosenthal also remembers the moment when she narrowly escaped being put to death.

“An SS man came round with a loudspeaker and he was shouting, ‘All the women come outside. You have been given a double ration of bread.'”

Most of the women obeyed, but Rosenthal stayed indoors. A voice inside told her to stop. “All those women ended up in the crematorium,” she said.

Rosenthal was shipped from Auschwitz to Kaufering at the age of 22.

The young mothers survived in Kaufering thanks to the solidarity of other women prisoners, who cared for the newborns when the mothers were summoned to work. Fellow prisoners hid the babies and gave them water and food.

Gisella Perl was a Jewish doctor from Sighet, Romania (Elie Wiesel’s home town) who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. According to a book that she wrote, I was a doctor in Auschwitz, Perl saved the lives of hundreds of pregnant mothers by performing abortions at Auschwitz. A movie about her life, “Out of the Ashes,”  was released in 2003 starring Christine Lahti as Dr. Perl.

In the news on 04/28/10, there was an article in The Jewish Press with the headline “Miriam Rosenthal, Living Proof of Divine Miracles,” which you can read here.

Miriam Rosenthal was a prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, but she was not selected for the gas chamber.  Instead, she was transferred to a sub-camp of Dachau in Augsburg, Germany where she was assigned to work in a Messerschmitt airplane factory. One day in December 1944, while at work in the factory, two SS men saw that she was pregnant; they escorted her on a passenger train to one of the Kaufering sub-camps of Dachau near Landsberg am Lech, where she was placed in a barrack with six other pregnant women who would soon be ready to give birth. Even though they were pregnant, the women were forced to work in the camp laundry.

In the article is a quote from Miriam herself:

“When the two SS men took me to the train they told me they were supposed to take me to Auschwitz where I would be put in the gas but because of Russian bombing they were compelled to take me to a punishment camp Kaufering.”

The following quote is from the article in The Jewish Press:

Miriam was put into a small wooden hut with six other pregnant women and they were dubbed the “Schwanger Kommando” (“Pregnant Commando”) All seven Jewish women gave birth there in February 1945– without medical help or nursing assistance, shivering from cold, suffering from starvation and appalling sanitary conditions — to seven healthy babies. […]  Miriam gave birth to two other children, daughter Lillian and son Murray. The baby born during the war, Leslie Rosenthal, is now a grandfather of nine, blessed off-springs of a Divine miracle.