Julius will write the foreword to my book about Kinderheim children. Thereafter, in a preface, I will explain why I choose him, a child born in Piotrków Ghetto.

Julius

Why did I choose Julius to write the foreword to my book about Kinderhein children that were liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp in April 1945?

At the end of July 1945, Julius came alone from the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen to Sweden on UNRRAs White Boat S/S Kastelholm. He was 2 1/2 when he arrived in December 1944, in a boxcar (cattle wagon) at the Buchenwald concentration camp from the Piotrków ghetto. From Buchenwald, he was thereafter transferred to Bergen-Belsen. He was born as an inmate of Piotrków Trybunalski Ghetto.

Normally a foreword is just a short piece of writing placed at the beginning of a book written by someone other than the primary author of the work. I wanted that Julius starts his foreword with a description of our first email contacts followed by our first, recent meeting, Spring 2022, in Stockholm. The description of this interaction between the writer of the foreword and the book's primary author or the story of the book is an important part of my book for several reasons. Although Julius belongs to the Kinderheim children he was and is still making research about his past. This is due to so-called childhood amnesia. Some define it as the age from which a first memory can be retrieved. This is usually at the age of three or four, but it can range from two to seven years for a few. Julius will write about his first memories that are actually from Finland. Investigating the past of Julius and of other children from Piotrków Trybunalski is also what I am doing even if I am not a Holocaust survivor, not even born in his home city Piotrków Trybunalski. Although Julius was an inmate of the ghetto and thereafter in two concentration camps he remembers, due to his age, nothing from that time. He had actually to do the same type of research as I am doing, to find out the fate of his parents and also what happened to himself.

I want that Julius's foreword to be extended and cover part of his story. The story like the rest of the book will be based on the Polish, German, British and Swedish documents. It will actually cover the story of how the book came into being, or how the idea for the book was developed.

Most of the children that arrived in Sweden "from the camps" in 1945 landed in Eretz Israel.

Children from the Kinderheim are watching "the funeral procedure" of thousands of bodies in one of the numerous mass graves close to their hut in Bergen-Belsen.