Ceremonies - Women in Auschwitz

Selection

“No mother anymore. No mother with me. Mengele separated us. No mother no little sister. The three of us from the family, the three sisters. When we looked there after the selection, we saw my brother. That’s who came to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Not the father, not the little brother and not the little sister.”
Source: The testimony of Lea Kahana-Grunwald, Yad Vashem Archive O.3/11914, Jerusalem 2000, p. 23.

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About the Selection:
On their arrival at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, the people were divided into two long lines: men in one line and women and children in the other. As they stood there, the selection began.
Sick people, old people, children and many other men and women were marked for death by the S.S. doctor who performed the selection, and sent them to immediate execution.
Nazi ideology determined that Jewish women were to be condemned as “unworthy” mothers of equally “unworthy” future generations of Jews. Accordingly, the Jewish mothers of small children were to be exterminated immediately upon their arrival at the camp. Indeed, most of the young mothers were sent directly to the gas chambers, the same fate applied to pregnant women, whereas fathers of the same age were kept in the camp as prisoners, with a chance of survival.
Most of the people who arrived the camp didn’t understand that in the selection process they were facing a life or death decision. In a desperate attempt to save, at least some of the young mothers, the veteran inmates tried to warn them, even though they were risking their own lives. The veteran inmates begged them to give their children to the older members of the family. Some of the women understood, many although didn’t. This selection process presented the women with their first experience of what Lawrence Langer termed, “choiceless choices” - impossible choices - choices that characterized their lives to varying degrees throughout their incarceration. Here, women had to “choose” between saving their own lives or going to death with their children. Most of them went with their children, a minority chose not to.

Lea Kahana
Lea Kahana, nee Greenwald, was born in Sucha-Bronika, Czechoslovakia, on March 2nd 1922, the second of seven children. Her father was a teacher and her mother was a housewife. As a child, she went to a Czech school, where most of the pupils were Jewish. At the age of eight, the family moved to the town of Beregsas, so that the children could have a secondary education. Her parents’ home was a warm, religious-Zionist home, charitable and welcoming to guests. In 1938, after the partition of Czechoslovakia, Beregsas, the town in which she lived, was annexed to Hungary. After the occupation, certain restrictions were applied to Jews and the education of children over fourteen was halted. After this, prior to the move into the ghettos, Lea and her sister were offered the chance of being saved, but they both refused. In 1942, her friends began to be sent to work camps and other forced labor. Her brother Yosef moved to Budapest in 1944 to look for work, and after a short time was sent to forced labor, while the family moved into the confines of the ghetto.
On May 15, 1944, Lea and her family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the morning on May 18, the transport arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival, Lea’s parents were sent to the crematorium with her two younger brothers, while she passed the selection with her two sisters and then discovered that her brother was also in the camp. After a period of quarantine, she was sent to work in the “Canada Commando” (A special section of the camp known as "Canada. Here Veteran inmates were sorting out the personal belongings of the recent arrivals at Auschwitz under the constant supervision of their SS guards). On January 18, 1945, when the camp was evacuated, her sisters went out on a Death March. Lea, who was in the camp hospital at the time, hoped to join the marchers, but did not have the strength. After liberation, she moved with her friends to Auschwitz 1 and stayed there for a short period, until she left with a group of Czech soldiers going towards Beregsas. She stayed briefly in Beregsas and then emigrated to England, where she married David Kahana and the couple had three daughters. In 1979, after her husband died, she immigrated to Israel with her family.

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