My 2005 photo of the gas chamber in the main Auschwitz extermination camp
Every day, it seems, there is another story in the news about an 11 or 12 year-old Jewish child who was saved from the gas chambers during the Holocaust. Today’s story is about Mala Langholz, who is still alive, and is currently out on the lecture circuit, telling her heart-warming story.
Holocaust survivor Mala Langholz was an 11-year-old Jewish child who survived the Holocaust
As everyone knows, children under the age of 15 were gassed by the Nazis, so how did Mala manage to survive?
Young children waiting for their turn in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau
Begin quote from news story:
In an article published by the Jewish Journal in last year’s commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Ms. [Mala] Lanholz [Langholz] said it was only by the will of God and the humanity of those around her that she survived her ordeal.
Born in 1931 in Lodz, Poland, she was the second youngest of six children. Her family was gathered up and relocated to a ghetto where her father was murdered by a member of the SS. Not long afterwards they were all rounded up and sent to Auschwitz. Of the 60 members of her extended family, 58 were murdered.
In her story in the Jewish Journal, she said, “The horrors of Auschwitz will always live in my memory. I remember classical music playing to camouflage the cries of those in the gas chambers. Each evening, instead of saying good night to each other, we would say goodbye, not knowing whether we would live through the night. I’d often wake up to find a frozen or starved body next to mine.”
The Nazis would line them up to determine who would go to the gas chambers next. “At that critical moment, the older women in the camp would lift me—a child of just 11-years old—up on their shoulders so that I’d look older. They saved my life,” she said.
End quote
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