photo #7068108

The harrowing story of the ‘smiling boy’ of Auschwitz Istvan Reiner, aged 4, had his portrait photographed in 1944, smiling and in his striped uniform. Two weeks later, he died with his grandmother in the gas chamber. Istvanka or “Istvan” Reiner was born into a Jewish family in 1940. The child himself was not Jewish, as his mother had converted to Protestantism. Nevertheless, the boy was taken with his parents to the Hungarian ghetto of Miskolc, after which he was deported with his family to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In Auschwitz concentration camp, Istvan was immediately separated from his mother and accommodated with his grandmother. Not much later, he and his grandmother died in the gas chamber as did 11,000 other people who had been transferred from Miskolc. Istvan’s mother and brother survived Auschwitz and were liberated in 1945. They migrated to the United States in 1947.