She was so young and so terrified. The girl didn’t understand why she was there and didn’t understand what was being said to her. Then a Kapo woman, that is to say a guard inmate, took a stick and hit her in the face. This German only took out her anger on the young girl. A young girl so beautiful, so innocent. She cried, but there was nothing she could do. Before the photo was taken, the girl wiped away her tears and the blood from her severed lip. Truth be told, I felt like I had been hit myself, but I couldn’t intervene. It would have been fatal for me. We could say absolutely nothing.
The words of Wilhelm Brasse, a young Polish inmate at the Auschwitz concentration camp responsible for photographing all the prisoners, refer to Czeslawa Kwoka.
Czeslawa, Polish, born in 1928, is deported to the camp with her mother. Poles are in fact persecuted in the same way as Jews, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals and other categories considered inferior.
Shortly before the liberation of the camp, Brasse received the order to destroy all the negatives in his photos, but he managed to save a few, including those of the young girl.
Czeslawa is one of around 230,000 minor children and adolescents deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She died on March 12, 1943, at the age of 14, less than a month after her mother.
His photos are now on display at the camp museum and have become very famous because they have been reproduced in numerous books and articles, in eternal memory of the madness of the Second World War.
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