Sergio De Simone

De Simone's mother, of Jewish origin, was born September 23, 1904, in Vidrinka, a town that no longer exists (possibly in Belarus, though more likely, Ukraine).

The two met in Rijeka (on the Istrian Peninsula of what then belonged to the Kingdom of Naples), where Perlow's family lived.

After marrying, the couple settled in Naples, on Via Morghen, not far above Piazza Vanvitelli.

[[File:Hamburg-öjendorf-italienische-kriegsgräberstätte-gedenkstein-kinder-bullenhuser-damm.JPG|thumb|265px|Commemoration of Sergio De Simone, at the Italian War Cemetery, Hamburg-Öjendorf Friedhof

Translated:

Although almost initially lost in the wake of WWII, the story and identity of the children was ultimately uncovered through the research of German journalist, Günther Schwarberg (1926-2008) and his wife, attorney Barbara Hüsing.

Today the children are remembered internationally; numerous books and films document their story, as well as a foundation: Children of Bullenhuser Damm.

On the street where Sergio De Simone's family lived in Naples, a memorial plaque and a pavement Stolperstein mark his life, which is commemorated annually on January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Sergio De Simone (born Naples, Italy November 29, 1937, died Hamburg, Germany, April 20, 1945) was a Neapolitan child victim of the Holocaust who was arrested with his Jewish family while summering in Rijeka (now Croatia, then part of the Kingdom of Italy).

He was then deported to Germany, where he was subjected to human experimentation and subsequently murdered.

At age seven, De Simone was one of the children of the Bullenhuser-Damm Massacre.

Twenty children of disparate nationalities were selected by Joseph Mengele as human subjects for medical experimentation by Kurt Heissmeyer at the Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg.

As the Allies closed in on Hamburg and the perpetrators sought to destroy evidence of the experimentation, all 20 children, their four adult caretakers and 24 Soviet prisoners were taken to the basement of Hamburg's Bullenhuser Damm School and murdered.

Sergio De Simone was born in the Vomero district of Naples, Italy, on November 29, 1937 to Eduardo De Simone (unknown-1964), a Catholic, non-commissioned officer in the Italian Navy and Gisella Perlow.

SERGIO DE SIMONE, born 1937, Napoli, deported during the war to Germany, transferred to Neuengamme concentration camp, subjected to experiments by a fanatical Nazi doctor.

In August 1943, with her husband called to the Navy (later taken to Dortmund as slave labor) and Italy having entered the war alongside Nazi Germany, Gisella Perlow was alone with her six-year-old son in Naples, which now experienced heavy bombings and where she risked being discovered in the hunt for Jews, by Nazi-fascists.

Gisella unwittingly moved to Fiume (Rijeka) with Sergio to join her mother, brothers and sisters at their home at Via Milano 17.

Rijeka was, at the time, part of the Kingdom of Italy.

Almost immediately, by September, Rijeka fell under German control.

On March 21, 1944, betrayed by an acquaintance, Germans arrived up at the Perlow home and arrested the family, including Gisella, Sergio (then aged 6), and seven other family members, including his cousins (photo) Andra (6) and Tatiana Bucci (4).

The latter would ultimately be the youngest Italian survivors of the Holocaust.

The Perlow family was taken to the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp and immediately joined the group of deportees leaving on 29 March and arriving in Auschwitz after six days in by convoy.

Gisella and Sergio survived the first selection and Sergio was assigned with his cousins in the Kinderblock (Children's hut).

Sergio's cousins Andra and Tatiana Bucci were with Sergio, had begun to understand German and had been warned that the guards could exploit the children's greatest vulnerability: they would line up the children and ask those who wanted to see their mother to step forward.

In this way, the experimenters could easily walk their subjects away without resistance.

The sisters had warned Sergio, but with a single step he had unknowingly volunteered as one of Joseph Mengele's human subjects.

The cousins would survive.

Having been chosen in November 1944 by Joseph Mengele as one of the twenty children (10 boys and 10 girls) to be sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp, Sergio was made available as a human subject in Kurt Heissmeyer's tuberculosis experimentation.

As early as April 1944, Heissmeyer had conducted medical experiments on Russian POWs.

On November 29, 1944, Sergio's seventh birthday, he and 19 other children, from France, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, and Poland, arrived at the Neuengamme concentration camp, accompanied by Dr. Paulina Trocki and three nurses.

In Neuengamme the children were entrusted to four deportees, charged with taking care of the group: the French doctors, René Quenouille and Gabriel Florence, and two Dutch nurses, Anton Hölzel and Dirk Deutekom.

For several weeks the children experienced a period of relative calm; the experiment required their good health.

In an attempt to erase any trace of this criminal ferocity he was transferred together with 19 other children to the Bullenhuser Damm School in Hamburg and hanged there on April 20, 1945, a few days before the end of the Second World War.

His body, like that of the other little martyrs, was never found.

So that this atrocious madness may never repeat itself.]]

On January 9, 1945, Heissmeyer began the experiments: he had the skin on the chest of 11 children, under the right armpit, incised with X-shaped cuts, three to four centimeters long, to introduce tuberculosis bacilli with a spatula — causing rapid spread of the disease.

In early March the children, sick and feverish, were operated on to remove their axillary lymph nodes, which according to the doctor's theories should have produced antibodies against tuberculosis.

As the court expert would later testify during the subsequent trials of the early 1960s, Heissmeyer had no scientific expertise or background in immunology or bacteriology, but based his work on pseudo-science, studies already considered scientifically unreliable at the time.

But Heissmeyer was convinced that by injecting tuberculosis bacilli under a subject's skin, infection would form that would generate immune defense responses, leading to vaccinations against pulmonary tuberculosis.

He was not discouraged by his first negative results and with influential support among the Nazi leaders, he insisted that the experiment continue, now with Jewish children.