Page 128 - Witness

The Youngest Survivor of Auschwitz
Angela Orosz was born in Auschwitz on Dec. 21, 1944 – the youngest prisoner ever to survive the notorious death camp. Her survival is a testament to the power of love – in this case the love of a heroic mother – to overcome even the endless horrors of
Auschwitz.
It was at the age of seven, when asked at school
to write down her name and place of birth, that Angela Orosz was first made aware she had been born in Auschwitz.
“I really had a hard time with that word. I was begging my mother, ‘Can we change it?’ She said,
‘No, I’m not going to change it; this is what you have to know.’”
According to Orosz, her survival is due to the determination and heroism of her mother, Vera Bein, who underwent medical experiments by the notorious Dr. Mengele and was never able to have any more children.
Angela herself was almost never born. When her mother was seven months pregnant, Mengele’s team injected a burning substance into her body, near her uterus. “Right behind, in her uterus was the foetus, me. These injections were terrible, painful. Injection one, the foetus moved to the left side...the next day, another injection, and the foetus moved in the other direction.” Since Angela was so small, the doctors did not notice the pregnancy. “If not for this we would both have been killed before I had taken my first breath.”
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Orosz weighed only one kilogram at birth and was even too weak to cry, but that inability to make a sound saved her life.
“I was so malnourished, I was unable to cry. That saved me. But still she believed I would live. She said to me I looked like a little bird without feathers, and that I was really ugly – though not to her.”
Even after her liberation, doctors in Hungary did not believe she would live, but her mother never gave up on her, even though she was unable to walk until age seven.
“She was so happy to have survived and to have saved my life. I want to make sure her fight to save my life is not forgotten. In spite of giving birth to me in the worst nightmare imaginable, she never gave up. She planted in me the need to be happy, too, to see the sunshine, to see a flower, and to be happy to be alive.”
Her mother also saved another child’s life in Auschwitz – Gyorgy Faludi, who was born on liberation day – January 27, 1945. His own mother was too malnourished, so Angela’s mother breastfed him instead.
“His mother was so weak she didn’t have enough milk, so my mother fed us both. My message is: don’t be a bystander; the opposite of love is not hating, it’s indifference.”
Angela Orosz sharing her story with students in Auschwitz where she was born.