The red leather shoe from the Military Medical Museum belonged to a four-year-old child. It was found in the shoe warehouse of the Majdanek concentration camp. That warehouse in one of the barracks of the sixth field was where the prisoners who were sentenced to gassing were undressed, regardless of their age and gender.
The Majdanek death camp was initially intended as a labor camp for the Poles who resisted the German occupation. However, soon Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, and children were also brought there.
The personal numbers of prisoners who died at Majdanek were reassigned which makes it almost impossible to calculate the exact number of victims. Researchers agree that about 150,000 people were murdered in the concentration camp, of which 80,000 were executed, mostly in the gas chambers.
Olga Klimenko, a former Majdanek prisoner, recalled, “There were five crematoria, but it was not enough, and the Nazis made a cage of electrified barbed wire. Inside, they put naked men close to each other and electrocuted them — everyone wriggled and died. Then the Nazis would light a fire in a pit and throw the corpses and the half-dead out of the cage. Children were burned alive.”
The first children arrived at concentration camps in 1939. They were gypsies who were brought along with their mothers from Burgenland, the easternmost area of Austria. Later, the concentration camps were filled with children from occupied territories.
When children entered Nazi concentration camps, they were separated from their parents and used for forced labor and experiments. The Salaspils camp near Riga was particularly notorious. Between 1941 and 1944, a “factory for aiding German soldiers” was established there: child prisoners served as donors of blood and skin.
Children were also used to test various kinds of poisons by adding arsenic to their food and giving them lethal injections. Nazi doctors amputated the limbs of some of the test subjects. Children were forbidden to cry, and they forgot how to laugh. A child’s shoe from the collection of the Military Medical Museum is a silent witness to Nazi crimes.
The Majdanek death camp was initially intended as a labor camp for the Poles who resisted the German occupation. However, soon Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, and children were also brought there.
The personal numbers of prisoners who died at Majdanek were reassigned which makes it almost impossible to calculate the exact number of victims. Researchers agree that about 150,000 people were murdered in the concentration camp, of which 80,000 were executed, mostly in the gas chambers.
Olga Klimenko, a former Majdanek prisoner, recalled, “There were five crematoria, but it was not enough, and the Nazis made a cage of electrified barbed wire. Inside, they put naked men close to each other and electrocuted them — everyone wriggled and died. Then the Nazis would light a fire in a pit and throw the corpses and the half-dead out of the cage. Children were burned alive.”
The first children arrived at concentration camps in 1939. They were gypsies who were brought along with their mothers from Burgenland, the easternmost area of Austria. Later, the concentration camps were filled with children from occupied territories.
When children entered Nazi concentration camps, they were separated from their parents and used for forced labor and experiments. The Salaspils camp near Riga was particularly notorious. Between 1941 and 1944, a “factory for aiding German soldiers” was established there: child prisoners served as donors of blood and skin.
Children were also used to test various kinds of poisons by adding arsenic to their food and giving them lethal injections. Nazi doctors amputated the limbs of some of the test subjects. Children were forbidden to cry, and they forgot how to laugh. A child’s shoe from the collection of the Military Medical Museum is a silent witness to Nazi crimes.
