Today I received an e-mail from the Bureau for Former Prisoners at the Archive State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. In response to my request for information about whether it was possible to determine precisely when Moissey Kogan was killed at Auschwitz, they kindly wrote to inform me that, as I suspected,
“during the evacuation and liquidation of KL Auschwitz by order of the camp authorities, almost all important documents of KL Auschwitz, including prisoners’ personal files, were destroyed.”
Kogan’s name is mentioned only on the list of deportees from Drancy to KL Auschwitz on 11 February 1943.
On 13 February this year, the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter feed detailed the arrival of this transport from Drancy to Auschwitz:
“on 13 February 1943, a transport of 998 Jews deported from Drancy in occupied France arrived at Auschwitz. SS doctors sent 802 people to be murdered in a gas chamber. 143 men and 53 women were registered in the camp.”
At the age of 63, and after 2 years and 7 months in hiding in Paris, Kogan must surely have been one of those selected to be murdered on that day.
So many people’s lives obliterated, and obliterated over again.
Photo credit: Prisoners’ glasses at KL Auschwitz, (cc) CC BY-SA 3.0.de (Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R69919)