Arriving at Auschwitz, children and their mothers, along with the old and infirm, were taken directly to the gas chambers. Those exhausted by slave labor and the appalling conditions joined them, while camp doctors, including the notorious Josef Mengele, selected thousands of prisoners for cruel, crippling and life-threatening experimentation. By 1944, so many were being killed that the bodies had to be burnt on huge pyres, fueled, partly, by the victim’s own fat.
