Magda Oranich

SHE WAS ONLY THREE YEARS OLD WHEN AUSCHWITZ STOLE HER CHILDHOOD. FOR EIGHTEEN MONTHS, SHE ENDURED THE HORRORS OF JOSEF MENGELE’S EXPERIMENTS. Her name was Lidia Maksymowicz. At an age when a little girl should have been playing with dolls, holding her mother’s hand and discovering the wonders of childhood, Lidia was imprisoned behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her family’s crime? Resisting the Nazis. Her punishment? Eighteen months in a world where children were treated not as human beings, but as objects for medical experimentation. Injections. Hunger. Disease. Terror. And behind it all stood Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who turned innocent children into victims of unimaginable cruelty. Imagine being three years old, surrounded by death, desperately searching for your mother’s face. Her mother risked her life to visit her secretly, offering what little comfort and love she could in a place designed to destroy both. When Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, Lidia was alive. But her family was gone, and her mother was believed dead. A Polish woman took the frightened little girl into her home. The Nazis had stolen her childhood, but they had failed to steal her life. Lidia survived to tell the world what happened behind those gates. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, including approximately 1.5 million children. NEVER FORGET. NEVER AGAIN