Sick and pregnant women, without even elementary medical care, trudged along at the back of a column of exhausted female prisoners who were marched out Birkenau barracks. These miserable, suffering human skeletons, dressed in inadequate clothing, hungry for months, pressing loaves of rough black bread under their arms, trudge plodded with great difficulty through the snowdrifts. They stumbled frequently over the frozen, snow-covered corpses of prisoners.

I remember that we were coming to a settlement in the evening of the first day. The dark shape of a hill rose before us, and at top of it a lighted house.

We suddenly heard the shrieks of a prisoner seized by birth pangs. Unable to go on, she climbed down into the ditch and sat there. Dread came over us. We could do nothing to help her, because we had nothing, and besides that, stopping was forbidden. The pregnant woman's mother wanted to stay with her while she gave birth, but an SS man shoved her away and she returned in despair to the column.

A young girl - prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp

My friend Helena Pachecka, number 88202, and I were hoping that the pregnant woman would stay in the ditch and crawl under cover of darkness to the nearby house, where she might find someone to help her.

But the malevolent Nazis would not give even a mother in labor a chance. When we had gone a dozen or so steps further, we heard shots. The SS man had murdered the mother and the baby in her womb. This was something horrible for all of us, but especially for those who were pregnant.

Source: Archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Zespół Oświadczenia, t. 91, k. 10. Relacja byłej więźniarki KL Auschwitz nr 87947 Aliny Cielemięckiej-Naciążek, która (sama ciężarna)została dołączona została do marszu pieszego.

In the evening of January 18, the dull thud of artillery on the front lines was distinctly audible in the distance. They marched our column to the Auschwitz I camp. There were adults mixed in with us. We passed the guardhouse near the gate along the way. They were setting the records of the murdered people alight; they were burning the death register. In a cold, starry January night, we set out on our procession of death westward along the roads of Silesia, escorted by SS men alongside us carrying rifles. After a couple of kilometers we started passing the corpses of murdered women at the roadside. Women were marching ahead of us. They killed the weak along the way.

We walked along with grown-ups until morning, scurrying to keep up all the time because the head of the column was setting a good pace. We kept tramping our frozen feet to warm them up. I was wearing rubber-soled canvas shoes and they were stiff, icy and soaked through with snow. Later, we walked arm in arm because we knew what it meant to lag behind. An older boy I knew had a tragic situation: his father could not go on. For a long time, we took turns dragging him. On the end, he insisted on staying where he was in the middle of the road. We heard increasingly frequent rifle shots from the tail of the procession.

We kept marching till morning. To this day I can still see the horrifying spectacle of a woman lying across the road with her head blown apart. We had to jump, but the army vehicles drove right over her.

After walking all day they herded us late in the evening into a large barn where, deathly tired, we slept like stones. It was still dark when they roused us back onto the road in the morning. I had a lot of trouble putting my frozen shoes back on. It cost me a real effort. And again the long procession of beggars struggled along the snowy Silesian road all day, pausing for only two or three short breaks. We spent another night at a farmstead and started off again at dawn.

A boy - prisoner of Auschwitz-Birkenau Camp

In the afternoon, we reached a small train station, probably Wodzisław, and here, after covering about 80 kilometers on foot, they shoved us 100 at a time into open coal cars. Only late at night did the transport begin to move, but it hadn't gone far when it stopped for a short time, and then it continued rolling in the opposite direction for a couple of hours. The next day, the train didn't cover a single kilometer. At night, it repeated the previous escapade. Following day the situation was the same.

We realized what a tragic situation we were in. Many of us did not have a bite of bread left. SS men walked along the wagons asking "How many dead?" We wondered whether it would be better to jump off the train and die from bullets than to starve to death. Finally, the train moved during the night and on the morning of the seventh day of the evacuation, we stopped at Bogumin, a larger station in Czechoslovakia. The residents of the city tossed several loaves of bread into the coal car, which was just what we needed to keep our strength up. That day, the train ran full speed ahead, our spirits improved, and after several hours we were in Austrian territory.

The train reached Mauthausen station in the afternoon of January 25, 1945. We climbed out of the coal car with difficulty and walked through the city on the hard uphill road to the camp, spat on and bombarded with snowballs by brown-shirted youngsters from the Hitlerjugend.

Source: Lech Szawłowski, Z przeżyć warszawskich dzieci w obozach hitlerowskich. "Przegląd Lekarski - Oświęcim" 1972 nr 1, ss. 161-162. Wspomnienia 12-letniego chłopca Leszka Szawłowskiego, byłego więźnia obozów koncentracyjnych: Auschwitz-Birkenau nr 192799, Mauthausen i Melk.

Photos: The children liberated in KL Auschwitz on 27.01.1945. The photographs were taken immediately after the liberation of the camp, showing the saved children, the remaining camp buildings and objects related to their fate, and items that belonged to the murdered children.