Children from the Soviet Union

More than a thousand children and young people from the occupied Soviet Union arrived in Auschwitz in 1943-1944.

The majority of them came from Byelorussia. They had been captured along with adults in various pacification operations, above all in the region of Minsk and Vitebsk, carried out by the German police units in Einsatzkommando 9. Some of the people detained in this way were murdered on the spot, but others were sent to Auschwitz. Most of them died within a short time. Some of the children were sent to camps for children from the east in Potulice near Bydgoszcz and Konstantynów near Łódź.

Byelorussian and Russian children were also transferred from the Majdanek and Stutthof concentration camps in 1944. Young Russian and Ukrainian boys and girls who escaped from slave labor in Germany were also imprisoned in Auschwitz.