Their bewildered faces appear for a few seconds behind the fogged window of the train that will take them to a Nazi extermination camp. It is May 19, 1944. And those few seconds in black and white will go around the world in most of the documentaries on the Shoah.
They are two children aged 1 and 3, who remained nameless for decades but with a fate that appeared dramatically certain, that of the anonymous victims of Nazi barbarism. Until two Dutch researchers managed to track them down, both alive, both with indelible memories of the death camps. The New York Times tells their story.
Marc and Stella Degen were deported with their parents to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. And they managed to survive thanks to a prisoner who, after the death of their parents, took care of them, hiding and protecting them. "Now I feel I can shout: I'm still here! The Nazis haven't caught me!" Said Marc Degen, who recently turned 80, in an interview from his home in Amstelveen, a suburb of Amsterdam.