Imagine being the youngest surviving in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. Well, Sam Banhalter was fourteen years old when he was captured. According to Banhalter, “I was just a kid, tickled to death when I was issued a flashlight and gas mask.” This statement proves that Banhalter went through the experience more than once at a young age. In fact, when Sam was captured, it was more of a “wrong time and wrong place” type of situation. This is because just like every other day Same ran errands for his father when then was captured by Nazis and taken to Auschwitz. Sam was one of many to be the first ones at Auschwitz after them building it. Later that day, the prisoners were given their clothes that they had to wear. For example, “striped pants and the striped jackets, no underwear, no socks.”(Lewin 6) Sam was assigned to work in the crematorium for the first year, sadly with this job he has seen experiments done on children by Dr. Mengele, Ilse Koch, in Buchenwald, with a hose on with high pressure to get a hole in a woman's stomach, cutting Greeks into pieces, and about 25,000 Russians being shot. …show more content…
He had met families come in together to Auschwitz but knew they were walking themselves into gas chambers when Dr. Mengele yelled, “Right, left, left, right”. Banhulter was lucky enough to see his family in 1944, he soon found out his sister had a one year old boy that his mother took to keep her alive. This was because whoever carried children were automatically taken to gas chambers so his mother took the baby. The following year, Germans liquidated Auschwitz before it got