History of Sorts

There are no photographs of the two babies—just death certificates. Elisabeth Jeanne Petzal was born with her twin brother Robert Harry on 10 August 1943 at Camp Westerbork. They were children of Werner Petzal and Fanny Betsy Oppenheim. Both were murdered at Auschwitz on 18 October 1944. They were just a year old when they were murdered. It was eight years later when their deaths were registered. On 28 November 1952, the then-Dutch Minister of Justice ordered their deaths to be documented.

It doesn’t say how they died, nor does it give the exact place of death. It only has written somewhere near Oświęcim.

The language on the certification is typically cold and bureaucratic. It tells us where they were born, their parents’ names and that the babies held no jobs. There was not one mention of how they died. It was as if their death was a natural occurrence. What puzzles me is that it took eight years to register their deaths. The same Dutch bureaucracy that assisted the Nazis so efficiently to locate and round up all the Jews in the Netherlands—took their time registering their death.

There are side notes on and for both documents. (It is hard to decipher the third word.) Anyway, it seems to say that the strikethrough was approved. The only relevant strikethrough I can see is the year 1945, which was corrected to 1944 by pen.

Their mother and an older brother, Bernard Wolfgang Petzal (aged 3), were also murdered on 18 October 1944 at Auschwitz. Their father was murdered on the day Auschwitz was liberated, murdered on 27 January 1945, at the Fürstengrube Subcamp. On that day at about 4:00 p.m., a dozen or so SS men entered the Fürstengrube Subcamp and killed most of the remaining prisoners; some they shot, and some they burned to death by setting their barracks on fire.

A young family with so much to offer was murdered, all because of a warped ideology.

Sources

https://www.openarch.nl/nha:fd442be1-580d-47a8-9d46-f6186d5a4b1f

https://www.joodsmonument.nl/nl/page/112845/elisabeth-jeanne-petzal

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/auschwitz-sub-camps/frstengrube/