After 77 years, they identified two boys who survived the Jewish Holocaust

On May 19, 1944, the death train began its march towards the Nazi concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen, Germany. The hierarchs asked another detainee to film the deportations and thanks to him he reached us one of the saddest and most iconic photographs of the 20th century: that of two children behind the window of the train that would take them to their fatal destination. You never knew who they were, if they had survived the extermination or if they had died with their parents, in a gas chamber.

However, they have just been identified. These 1 and 3 year olds were Marc and Stella Degen. And life!

Marc Degen just turned 80 And when the press approached their home in the peaceful Dutch neighborhood of Amstelveen, Amsterdam, to check if the rumor was true, they were greeted saying: “Now I feel like I can cry out: I’m still here! The Nazis didn’t capture me!”, As if I were being reborn again.

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Her sister, Stella Degen is in New York. With them he also traveled on the same train one of his cousins, Marcus Simon. The three they managed to survive thanks to the compassion of another detainee who, when he sensed that his parents had been murdered, hid them and kept them alive until international help arrived. Simon died in 2006.

Their anonymous and infamous little faces have toured the world in countless documentaries about Nazi barbarism, but they have finally recovered. the identity that history owed them and his case came to light thanks to the investigation of two Dutch people who did an immense job of collecting archival images to publish the book Westerbork Camp filmed, which was released at the same time as the restoration and digitization of the movie Westerbork, a detailed historical preservation work carried out by the Dutch multimedia company Sound and Vision.

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Westerbork it was the name of the Nazi transit camp from which the Dutch Jews were deported to the last extermination camps. Anna Frank and her family were also taken there, on August 4, 1944, when someone denounced hiding in the famous house at 263 rue Prinsengracht, opposite the canal of the same name.

The Dutch followed in the footsteps of several Jewish prisoners, not just the little brothers Dough. The New York Times then published the moving story Dough to accompany the appearance of the film Westerbork which will be shown at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – Living Holocaust Memorial, in Battery Park.

“Naming a face makes this enormous tragedy really understandable and easily recognizable,” Lindsay Zarwell, film archivist at the Jewish Museum, told the New York newspaper. “Thave a first and last name and knowing where a person comes from and what happened to him makes him real, ”he concluded.

The original documentary was 80 minutes long, but thanks to new contributions lasts 150 minutes.

mm / ds