The Midwife of Auschwitz

Soon after Adolf Hitler’s ascension to power and the rise of the National Socialist party in Germany, the Nazis built encampments intended to sequester citizens they deemed unfit, particularly Jews. Following World War II, the Nazis said these camps were based on the US government’s reservations for Indigenous Americans in the 19th century. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Nazis created Jewish ghettos throughout the country, confining Jews to small spaces. Smaller community ghettos closed, causing those sequestered to move to larger cities. As explored in the text, residents of these ghettos experienced deprivation of all resources, intense scrutiny by hostile police forces, and summary executions.

As the Polish Jewish ghettos grew worse, the Nazis built rural encampments and began shipping Polish Jews from Łơdź to these camps early in 1942. The first of these camps was at Chelmno. Soon afterward, the Nazis created the notoriously inhumane Auschwitz-Birkenau. Located about 140 miles south of Łơdź and 43 miles west of Krakow, the camp sat in southern Poland. In The Midwife of Auschwitz, when Ana and Ester arrive, the population of the camp is approximately 100,000 people. Prisoners walk past a doctor who determines, based upon appearance, whether they will experience hard labor or immediate execution. As the war progresses, an increasing stream of prisoners arrives daily: three or four trains of cattle cars from across occupied Europe. Most prisoners are immediately killed in gas chambers, and their bodies burned in crematoria. This process continues until November 1944, when the Sonderkommando—Jews working in the crematoria—blow up the structure and attempt to escape. After this, the facility becomes an air raid shelter for the Germans.

An estimated 1 million Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau in its five years of operation. Approximately 70-75,000 non-Jewish Poles, 20,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet POWs, and 10-15,000 POWs of other nationalities perished there (“The Number of Victims.” Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum). As Stuart notes, while Ana and Ester are fictional characters, there were in fact 3,000 babies born in the camp, and the handful that survived were surreptitiously tattooed with their mothers’ registration numbers.