Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz by Alwin Meyer (review)

Reviewed by: Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz by Alwin Meyer Joanna Sliwa Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz. By Alwin Meyer. Translation by Nick Somers. New York: Polity Press, 2022. 512 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Photographs of Jewish children and their families deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau from Hungary in the summer of 1944 have come to symbolize the suffering of Jewish families and the process of destruction in the Nazi killing center. The common understanding held that nearly all children, especially the youngest, who arrived at the camp were sent directly to the gas chambers and that babies, if they were born inside the camp, either did not survive due to the dire conditions or were killed immediately. Yet, a little over 500 children under the age of 14 remained in the camp until liberation. Video footage of former child prisoners walking in a barbed wire tunnel while stretching out their arms to show their tattooed numbers belongs to the iconic images of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945. Individual stories of child survivors of Auschwitz have been shared in memoirs, oral [End Page 154] histories, exhibits, and weaved into scholarly books about children during the Holocaust and World War II. They have been subjects of articles in the popular press and featured in documentary films. Missing was a volume devoted solely to the experiences of children in Auschwitz. Alwin Meyer, a writer and journalist, embarked on a project to collect several stories of child survivors and present them in the book, Never Forget Your Name: The Children of Auschwitz. Meyer's book was published originally in German in 2015. It is not stated what, if anything, was changed or added for English-language readers. The book consists of a preface, 17 chapters and inserts with photographs, including of some of the child survivors featured in the book. The preface provides an overview of the history of Auschwitz and highlights some of the main aspects of existence in the camp and the challenges that child survivors faced upon liberation and later in their lives. It lists 28 names of child survivors whose stories are collected in the book. The author conducted 40 interviews in total with both child survivors and their relatives. The chapters roughly correspond to chronological and thematic arcs. The first three chapters center on children's lives before deportation and on the history of the places where children lived before the war. The following two chapters focus on the interim places of incarceration and on the train journeys during deportations. Six chapters concern children's experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Two other chapters relay the situation of child prisoners on the cusp of liberation. The four last chapters follow the child survivors after they were freed from the camp and provide information about their later lives. Never Forget Your Name is a compilation of personal stories of child survivors drawn primarily from interviews that the author conducted over the years. In this way, the book fits into the genre of telling children's histories during World War II and the Holocaust through collections of narratives by and about child survivors. The book is written in the form of a report. This extensive study foregrounds the many dimensions of children's lives during and after incarceration in Auschwitz. Meyer has done wide-ranging research to trace the trajectories of the children whose stories he follows. [End Page 155] The children, both boys and girls, were of different religious, social, and economic backgrounds. In this story, age becomes a common denominator for the victims who were Jewish, Roma, Polish, and Belarussian. As Meyer explains, the reasons why children were deported to Auschwitz and the ways in which they were treated in the camp differed based on a child's race as defined by Nazi ideology. All of the children experienced a loss of childhood. In bringing together the recollections and experiences of a range of children, this book takes a broad geographical perspective. It moves from Greece, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Belarus to discuss the waves of deportations at different times during the war. In charting...