Lidia Maksymowicz: The World’s Largest Necropolis

Photo by Andrzej Banaś

Lidia Maksymowicz is the longest KZ Auschwitz child survivor. She still carries the injection and vaccination scars on her body that are the marks of Dr Mengele’s inhumane experiments. I was one of the lucky few to survive. Apparently, it was God’s will for me to bear witness to the place that the Germans converted into the world’s largest necropolis, says Lidia Maksymowicz.

Minsk, Belarus: a cold November night in 1943. German soldiers are leading hundreds of people to cattle wagons, which are soon to depart for German-occupied Poland. The train is heading for KZ Auschwitz. A three-year-old girl, at that time called Lyudmila Botcharova, is one of the ill-fated crowd. Children like me were taken to Auschwitz because they were needed as guinea pigs for Dr Mengele and his pseudo-medical experiments, explains Lidia Maksymowicz.

A small child at the time, Lidia Maksymowicz has a very good memory of what happened in the camp. The Germans wanted to extract as much as they could from the prisoners. The children, for example, were used as blood donors for the German soldiers. All this was just dreadful, she recalls. She managed to survive only because she was strong and healthy when she arrived in KZ Auschwitz. Starving and emaciated, children from the ghetto had no chance of survival. They were fated to die at the hands of German murderers, explains Lidia Maksymowicz.

Little Lidia (at that time Lyudmila) was separated from her mother, who was evacuated from the camp and forced to join the Death March heading for the West. The girl remained in KZ Auschwitz until the arrival of the Red Army on 27 January 1945. Following the camp’s liberation, the child was taken in by the Rydzikowski couple from the town of Oświęcim. After fifteen months of the KZ Auschwitz ordeal she finally had a family home.

Lidia Maksymowicz found her biological mother 17 years later. However, she decided never to return to Belarus. She says she is too grateful to her Polish foster parents.

Lidia Maksymowicz believes that her duty as a survivor is to bear witness to what really happened in KZ Auschwitz. The camps were set up by the Germans, after all; and it’s the Germans who invaded Poland. They established torture camps for many European nations. I think that writing and speaking about “Polish” camps is a disgrace. Those who do so offend and harm Poland and the Polish people, says Lidia Maksymowicz indignantly.

That is why Lidia often attends meetings with young people. She does this to tell them the truth. I sometimes speak to young people from Germany. When I tell them about the atrocities, they find it very difficult to believe. They are surprised that this hell on earth was their grandparents’ doing. Lidia admits that she does not know the cause of this terrible tragedy. How is it possible that a nation as refined as Germany, with so many eminent writers, artists and composers, could have bred people capable of such atrocities? she wonders.