Murdered children's ID tags found at Sobibor

From The History Blog 

Annie Kapper was the oldest of the four. Born in January 1931, she was all of 12 years old when she was sent to Sobibor with her family on March 30, 1943. The trains arrived on April 2nd and all 1255 Jews on board were sent to the gas chambers. Her aluminum tag was discovered near one of the camp’s mass graves.

David Yehuda Van der Velde was part of the same transport as Annie Kapper. He was 11 years old when he and his family were deported from Camp Westerbork to Sobibor on March 30th and gassed to death on April 2nd. His aluminum tag, the right side broken off, was discovered just west of the gas chambers.

Deddie Zak’s tag was found at the site of one of Sobibor’s crematoria. Heartbreakingly, the tag had been burned. Deddie had been imprisoned at Camp Vught, a concentration camp in the southern Netherlands, and was part of the mass deportation of Jewish children from Camp Vught to the transit camp at Westerbork on June 6th and 7th, 1943. More than 1,000 children from age 0 to 16 were transported to their deaths, including 119 small infants, 55 babies and 123 toddlers. On June 8th, they were loaded onto freight trains and sent to Sobibor. They were gassed to death immediately upon arrival on June 11th.

Lea Judith de la Penha, her mother Judith and father David were arrested and held in Westerbork in July 1943. On July 6th, they were deported to Sobibor in a transport of 2,417 Jews. They arrived on July 9th. Mother, father and little girl were murdered that day. She was six years old. Her tag was found near the camp’s railway platform.

Yoram Haimi [of the Israeli Antiquities Authority[said: “As far as we know, identity tags with children’s names have only been found at Sobibor, and nowhere else. Since the tags are very different from each other, it is evident that this was probably not some organised effort. The children’s identity tags were prepared by their parents, who were probably desperate to ensure that the children’s relatives could be located in the chaos of the Second World War.”

http://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/60759

The Jews murdered on June 11, 1943, included 155 small infants, 55 babies and 123 toddlers. How was it done, preparation for murder? Were the children carried into a gas chamber and laid out or perhaps told to sit on the floor? Were the babies thrown into the gas chamber? Perhaps the children were carried by Jewish caretakers, who remained in the chamber with the children, telling them, "Ssh, ssh. Everything will be all right." If there were caretakers for the babies, they were from a different generation, people who believed in God, and they prayed for the children as the carbon monoxide seeped in from outside.

After the war, we did not kill enough Nazis, not enough camp guards, not enough SS officers who ran the camps, certainly not enough civilians who gladly assisted Germany in rounding up Jews in villages, towns and cities.