You know how many children survived? Just a few survived.

Hitler and the Nazis planned to murder every Jewish child in Europe.

Kids.

We were kids.

I was quite the cookie.

I I think I was a wild little girl.

Children don’t die.

Old people die.

As many as one and a half million children perished in the Holocaust, but Maxwell, Helen, and Rose survived.

There were seven dead bodies, red blood on the snow.

Two guards grabbed my brother and took him away.

And these holes were made by bullets.

He was only, I think, 5 years old.

Why do people kill little children? How can it be possible? Today, they are among the last survivors and have lived a lifetime with unanswered questions.

I have no idea what happened to the baby.

Would be nice to know what happened.

So, where did you separate from your dad? Right here.

They took them away with rocks.

Where could they have taken them? We found Refa’s brother.

Oh, what are you telling me here? 75 years after the end of the Second World War, these children who survived the Holocaust are about to make some remarkable discoveries.

You mean it’s a possibility? Shut up.

Oh my god, this is like a dream.

She must have been holding my little brother in her arms in the gas chambers and thinking that she cheated them of one me.

She cheated Hitler of a child.

[Music] I came here to tell you a story that really happened.

I kept this story of mine hidden for 60 years.

I didn’t tell it to anybody.

I didn’t want to relive the horror of my life.

My name is Maxwell Smart.

I was born in 1930 in Poland, [Music] but from 8,000 Jews and butchers, only 100 survived.

Only 100.

I am one of 100.

Two years into World War II, in June 1941, the Nazis invade Soviet occupied eastern Poland and rapidly advanced towards Maxwell’s home city.

At this point, the Nazis are systematically rounding up and persecuting Jews.

Within days of the Nazi occupation of Bhut, Maxwell’s father is taken away and never seen again.

And then in a series of roundups in early 1943, 12-year-old Maxwell, his mother, and little sister are forced towards waiting trucks.

I’m working with my mother, my sisters in her arms.

She says, “You have to run away.

” What do you mean run away? Where am I going to run? You’re my mother.

You You’re supposed to protect me.

I can’t protect you.

I can’t help you.

Please, she said, walk away from the truck.

All of a sudden, I am not in the circle of the trucks.

I’m on the bridge walking towards freedom and they never saw my mother, my sister again.

Where do you think the trucks went with your mother and your sister? What are they going to do with children? They can’t go to labor camps, but they went to Federal Hill.

I didn’t hear shooting because it’s probably done later on.

I don’t know if the graves were duck or the graves were prepared.

I have no idea.

I have no answers.

Nobody could tell me anything about it.

Nobody was there.

Evidence of what happened to Maxwell’s mother and sister can be found on a wooded hill on the edge of Puch.

There are very few records of the murders that took place here nearly 80 years ago.

But now, a team of investigators is trying to piece together the crime, and they have found a witness, someone who saw it with their own eyes.

They were always children.

We have been working for uh now 15 years on the so-called Holocaust by bullets by interviewing what we call the bystanders.

So non-Jewish witnesses of the shooting of the Jews here.

Patrice and his team at Yahad and Unum identify and investigate Holocaust execution sites.

And it’s the testimonies of women like Regina that reveal the true horror.

[Music] She was already in the pit.

She told that and after that she was shot.

Jews were brought to woods and ravines and killed one by one in mass shootings.

This wasn’t the Holocaust of camps and gas chambers.

This was the Holocaust by bullets.

[Music] And the children were also shot or they were just alive.

What we try to do going in the field is to understand how the killers implement the crime.

And on the sides, what we do is kind of rebuilding the crime scenes.

Could this be the place where Maxwell’s mother and sister were brought just hours after he escaped? Patrice is doing a forensic examination of the site, searching for any actual physical evidence of the massacres.

So, it’s a German cartridge from 39.

I think like in 15 minutes, we found about four cartridges.

So, it’s not that difficult to find evidence.

So, we found before cartridges and now we just found a mirror.

So, we believe it was something that belonged to one of the victims because we believe that they were shooting from here and the Jews were um down below.

I think that the sister of Maxwell and her his mother were killed here.

We have like at least three or four mass graves here uh that where you have at least 5,000 people from Butch and the bodies are still here.

So far, Patrice and his team have documented more than 2,800 such sites all over Eastern Europe.

That’s the story of my mother.

She refused to take me with her and by refusing I live today.

Young Maxwell escapes the mass killings on Fedor Hill, but with nowhere else to turn, he ends up in these forests.

A 12-year-old boy with no family, alone in hiding.

About 6 months, I was by myself, alone in the woods.

My clothing was gone, ripped to pieces.

My shoes were gone.

I I used racks on my feet tied up with strings.

I was lying in a hole.

I became like a sort of animal, a human animal.

In my whole life, I can never till today forget the misery of being alone.

I think I was a wild little girl.

Didn’t sit still for a minute.

Had very long curly blonde hair.

My mother used to put them in braids.

But you know me running around the braids went loose and I went loose.

[Music] My name was Roua Handlesman as a child and I was born in Lublin, Poland in 1929, May the 27th.

Well, that gets me to be of age.

[Music] A lot of my days were spent on the sidewalks playing hopscotch.

My mother didn’t like it too much.

All my shoes went to hopscotch.

Oh gosh, I must have been quite a cookie.

Rose grew up on Groska Street in the once vibrant Jewish quarter of Lublin.

80 years later, she’s returning to her family home with her granddaughters.

And I remember those are the windows of our home.

That’s where we lived and that’s where my father worked.

And now it’s such a fancy place.

Beautiful hotel.

Oh my god.

Do people live up there? Like there was more Oh yes, the people live there.

I remember they always used to come to our apartment to talk to my mother because my mother liked politics.

and they knew what was happening in Germany.

I guess my mother was said if we had the money we would run from here, but we didn’t have the money to do that.

So, we didn’t run, so we stay.

Rose has a single photograph that shows her entire family.

Out of 21 relatives, parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, only two would survive.

It brings back those memories of my childhood that you never want to forget, really.

I had a little brother.

His name was Henik.

Oh, I used to carry him around.

I loved him so much.

My father was a tor.

What a gentle soul he was.

He really was.

And my mother was quite a bright woman.

I always thought they going to keep me safe because parents are supposed to keep the children safe.

In a scene repeated countless times across Poland, the Nazis rounded up Rose, her mother, father, and brothers, together with thousands of other Jews in this market square outside of Lublin.

Oh my.

It’s the first time Rose has been back.

Is that place? since October 14th, 1942.

There were so many people here.

Oh my god.

There were just people carrying their bags and then they started dividing us.

Men and women here, children and women here.

And then when they divided came trucks and they took the man away.

I’m afraid I’m not going to sleep tonight.

I don’t know.

The nightmares might come back.

I had a lot of them many years.

I remember some nightmares that I was running from the Germans, but I was running with my children.

Like it never goes away completely.

It’s always there.

So, where did you separate from your dad? Right here.

Right here.

They took them away with rocks.

Did you have a chance to say bye to him? No, I don’t remember.

You think you were going to see him again? No.

Where did you guys think you were going? Where did you go? I don’t know.

They were settling us like they always said they resettling you.

This is the last place Rose and her mother would ever see her father.

They took my father away with the truck and somebody that told me they took him to my Danic, the concentration camp on Danic.

This is the only snippet of information Rose has ever had about what happened to her father.

Now she wants to find out if it’s true.

I used to have long long discussions with God.

I used to tell him, “Look at me.

” I say, “I don’t wash myself for for months.

” I say, “I drink water with my dirty hand like an animal.

” Why did you create me to be a Jew? In 1943, after his mother and sister are murdered by the Nazis, 12-year-old Maxwell flees to this forest and digs himself a hole to hide in.

Today, investigators are looking for that hiding place.

Maxwell was hiding not far away from Bdan.

A local hunter will uh show us the way to bunkers.

He has encountered several times uh when he was hunting in this forest.

I didn’t build this hole.

It was just a natural rock hang over from the mountain.

I dug it a little bit out to make it a little bit deeper.

I I covered the front with some with some branches not to be too much visible and that was my place of hiding.

Bulgdan leads Patrice to a hiding place he believes dates back to World War II.

It fits with the description of the mountain and the fact that the entrance was quite close to the to the ground.

Could have been dug by a with shovel done with very basic tools like Maxwell described.

One day I heard a noise, not a familiar noise.

All of a sudden, I see a little boy walking in the woods.

I walk out.

I stop him.

I asked him, “Are you Jewish?” He says, “Yes.

” And I told him, “I’m Jewish, too.

” “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I asked him.

And he tells me this story what happened.

He is in hiding about a year and a half.

One day his mother disappeared.

She went to find food.

She never came back.

His father went out to find food and he never came back.

I’m walking he says for two days and I’m so happy.

He says, “I found you.

” He was a good-looking kid, mind you, smart.

He was excellent and arithmetic.

His name was Yanuk.

I was the first time really, really happy.

I didn’t care if we would stay in the woods for a year or two.

I had a friend These forests were by no means safe.

Ukrainian police and peasants hunted Jews here in return for sugar and vodka from the Nazis.

For Patrice and his team, this entire area is a crime scene that needs to be thoroughly swept.

Yeah.

The year of production is 40.

So it’s war time.

So German cartridge from 1940.

We have traces of the perpetrators.

It’s clearly there were some shootings here.

So it could be shooting of Jews who were hiding here.

The killers didn’t expect that people would come back and look for the evidence of that crime.

Yanuk was my friend, but he didn’t survive the war.

I still feel responsible because of me.

Yanuk died.

We played hopscotch or hide and seek and whatever.

Kids, we were kids.

My full name is Kaya Verblun Kite.

I was born in Lithuania.

I was born in the city that was the capital city at those days by the name of Kas or Kovven.

[Music] Ha, who now calls herself Helen, was just 10 when the Nazis occupied her city of Kavnau and forced the entire Jewish population into an enclosed district called a ghetto.

subjected to overcrowding, hunger, and disease.

Jews were forced into slave labor, and children forbidden from going to school.

Helen lived in the ghetto for 3 years with her parents and little brother, little Abraham of in Yiddish.

I was the one who took a look after him when the ghetto started.

These rare photos are of Jewish children in the Cauno ghetto.

The Nazis called them useless eaters too young to work.

They were the future of the Jewish race.

They were the [Music] enemy.

I was here probably between 10 and 11.

My biggest regrets of this photo is that I didn’t have my brother at my side at that time.

That would have been a perfect thing.

Why would that have been perfect? Because there is no picture of my brother.

There’s nothing that he ever existed.

[Music] On the morning of March 27th, 1944, just after most of the Jewish parents had left for forced labor, trucks full of soldiers rolled into the Cauno ghetto.

They had orders to seize all the children.

They called it a Kinder action.

There are trucks.

There are dogs.

There are soldiers with guns.

You think we’re the worst enemies.

And people are told to get on the truck and people go, mothers with kids.

And I am standing with my brothers back to me.

And I heard them let him go.

The dog jumped on my wrist and bit me.

The blood spurted out and inadvertently.

I let him go.

Two guards came and grabbed my brother and took him away.

One thing and I never let this go.

My brother was turning his head when he was dragged away.

His head was looking whether I was following.

I wouldn’t be sitting here if I would be following.

For some reason, the Nazis did not take Helen that day, but they seized around 1,300 children.

Loud music was played to drown out the screams.

They were never seen again.

Helen has not been back to Lithuania since 1944.

She has vowed never to return.

But there are unanswered questions that she has lived with for 75 years.

There are places that I would have liked to visit, but I just couldn’t make myself go.

But my grandson Andrew took it upon himself to represent me.

The places where I dare not go.

The guilt about losing her brother is on my grandmother’s shoulders and it has been since the day he was taken.

And I think that last look of him being taken away is been on her mind and it will be for the rest of her life.

I think we need to know where he was taken because that I think for her might be not closure but at least be able to know what happened for sure.

The only reason why he was killed it was because it was a a little Jewish boy.

I have no idea where my little brother Abraham was taken to die.

I was talking to God.

He listened to me.

Maybe maybe he did send me Yanuk.

Late 1943, two friends, Maxwell and Yanuk, were hiding in the woods outside Bhutach.

They were being hunted by local Ukrainians employed by the Nazis to find Jews.

One day we heard shooting.

We heard yelling.

We heard commotion.

When it got quiet, Yanek, should we see what happened? I don’t know.

He says, I’m scared.

I don’t want to go any place.

This is Yanek, you have to go and take a look at least.

Let’s peek.

Okay.

Maybe 500 ft away from our bunker, we saw a sight unforgettable.

There were seven bodies in one place.

Red blood on the snow.

We go into the first body dead.

The second body dead.

We checked all the bodies.

All dead people.

We look around and across the river I see a body lying.

I say, “Yanik, there’s somebody across.

She’s moving.

Yeah, Yanek, we have to go over and see.

No, he says, I cannot go over and see.

I am not going to go into the cold water.

But Yanek, this person is alive.

I grab Yanuk by his hand and I pull him into the cold water.

I don’t want to go.

We cross the river outside.

It’s freezing.

We come over to the body.

The body wasn’t moving.

The body was a mother holding a baby in her arm.

The mother was dead.

She was shot in the back.

And the baby started to move.

I grab the baby.

I take Yanek and we go to the other side.

As soon as I touch the baby, the baby starts yelling and crying.

And we went into the bunker and she’s crying.

So what do we do? Yanik, you see, he says, you see, he was shivering from the cold.

He was wet.

He was started to cry.

Two young boys have saved a baby.

But its crying puts them in danger of discovery.

Maxwell finds a Jewish family hiding nearby.

Miraculously, one of the women is the baby’s aunt.

She takes her niece and Maxwell never sees her or the child again.

Back in the bunker, Maxwell’s friend Yanuk has fallen ill.

Yanick was sick and he didn’t feel good because I pulled him in to that water.

I figure maybe maybe he will revive.

I don’t know.

Yanick is not moving.

[Music] He is dead.

He died.

He was my life.

He was my s person that I needed till today.

I cannot forget Yanuk.

Yanuk.

It’s a name.

It’s a name and a boy who stayed with me for six months.

What else is there about him? Whom did I lose? My brother, little Abraham, a family, friends that will never grow up and become anything they wanted.

I feel very isolated because I am here and they’re not.

Helen’s little brother Aram was taken from her arms in a kinder action in the Cauno ghetto in 1944.

Now her grandson Andrew has returned to Lithuania to find out what happened.

He wants to know if little Aram could have been brought here.

the ninth fort outside Kess.

On these fields, thousands and thousands of Jews were murdered.

When Kis ghetto was established in 1941, there were 30,000 of of Kish Jews and the Jews of Kis region.

and survived only 500 of them about 500 in 1944.

Most they were killed here during these three years.

So how did the Nazis decide like who is coming to the ninth fort? because you know Nazis use Jewish population forced labor you know strong people who can work uh and the older ones uh and also children they were selected to to be killed.

A handful of disturbing photographs of the killing operations here exist and very few documents detailing the murders.

The only physical evidence of the victims are a few artifacts pulled out of the ground, including a toy bucket and a child’s shoe.

It’s really difficult to think that Nazis killed young children.

They killed babies.

It’s really difficult.

You You can see now that wall also.

You see these holes and these holes were made by bullets and probably a lot of people they were so people standing right there.

They were standing right here.

Uh the executors stood over there.

That view probably was the last one for a lot of people.

That’s really haunting to be standing here because over 70 years ago I would have been next.

So if Kindera action victims were brought to the ninth floor, where would they have been killed? It’s possibility that they were killed here.

Yeah.

It just strikes me that I’m standing here right now and it could have been the place where little Abraham was killed.

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