Personal identification tags bearing the names of four Jewish children who were deported to the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland have recently been retrieved in an archaeological excavation at the site.

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The metal tags, worn around the neck, carry the names of young Dutch Jews Lea Judith De La Penha, Deddie Zak, Annie Kapper and David Juda Van der Velde, all from Amsterdam, who ranged in age from five to 11.

Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Yoram Haimi, who ran the dig in conjunction with colleagues from Poland and the Netherlands, said that as far as he knew, ID tags bearing the names of children had been found only at Sobibor.

Haimi said that it is likely that the tags, which also note the children's birthdates and hometown, were prepared by their parents.

"They probably wanted to make sure they could find their loved ones. The metal tags allow us to attach faces and stories to the names [of the murdered Jews]."

To find out more about the children who wore the tags, researchers reached out to the memorial center at the Westerbork transit camp.

"I've been digging at Sobibor for 10 years. This was the most difficult day. We called the center and gave them the names. They sent pictures of young, smiling kids to our phones. The hardest thing is to hear that one of the kids who tag you're holding in our hand arrived at Sobibor on a train full of children ages four to eight, who were sent here to die alone," Haimi said.

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More than seven decades later, Dey is going on trial Thursday on 5,230 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court. Prosecutors argue that by standing guard at the camp from August 1944 to April 1945, the 93-year-old helped Stutthof function and was thus "a small wheel in the machinery of murder."

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"The accused was no ardent worshipper of Nazi ideology," prosecutors say in the indictment, reviewed by The Associated Press. "But there is also no doubt that he never actively challenged the persecutions of the Nazi regime."

Dey, a baker by training, told prosecutors he was deemed unfit for the front at age 17 in 1944 because of a heart problem, so instead was sent as a guard to Stutthof, and suggested that with or without him the killing would have taken place.

If he hadn't been there, "they would have just found someone else," he said.

Dey's attorney, Stefan Waterkamp, said his client stood by his statements to police and prosecutors. But he noted that the indictment did not link him to any specific killing and that it would be up to the court to decide whether standing guard in a watchtower alone is enough to convict him.

"Many people were killed in many ways at Stutthof," Waterkamp said. "Some were directly killed, some were killed by starvation, some were killed by typhus – the question is who is immediately responsible?"

In recent years, prosecutors have successfully convicted former death camp guards using the argument that by helping camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor function, they were accessories to the murders there even without evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

The 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening on such reasoning was upheld by a German federal court, solidifying the precedent.

In Dey's case, the reasoning is being applied to a concentration camp rather than a death camp. Still, prosecutors have expressed confidence it still pertains, since tens of thousands of people were killed in Stutthof even though – unlike at the death camps – the site's sole purpose wasn't murder.

Stutthof was established by Nazi Germany in 1939 east of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk, and was initially used as the main collection point for Jews and non-Jewish Poles removed from the city.

From about 1940, it was used as a so-called "work education camp" where forced laborers, primarily Polish and Soviet citizens, were sent to serve sentences and often died. Others incarcerated there included criminals, political prisoners, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses.

From mid-1944, when Dey was posted there, it was filled with tens of thousands of Jews from ghettos being cleared by the Nazis in the Baltics as well as from Auschwitz, and thousands of Polish civilians swept up in the brutal suppression of the Warsaw uprising.

In the end, more than 60,000 people were killed there by being given lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot or starved. Others were forced outside in winter without clothes until they died of exposure, or put to death in a gas chamber.

Asked if he knew who was being killed, Dey told prosecutors his SS comrades talked of the "extermination of the Jews" and said he had "done people wrong" by serving there.

"I did not know why they were there," Dey told prosecutors. "I knew well that they were Jews who had committed no crime, that they were only there because they were Jews. And they have the same right to live and to work like any other person. But it was just that Hitler or his party were against that, who had something against the Jews."

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In 1940, at age 18, Rosenfeld enlisted in the Soviet army. While he was fighting the Nazis, his entire family was murdered and buried in a mass grave near the Ukrainian village where they had lived.

In 1941 Rosenfeld was taken captive by the Germans and sent to a concentration camp in Minsk. In 1943, the camp at Minsk was dismantled and the prisoners were sent to the death camps at Majdanek and Sobibor in Poland.

On Oct. 14, 1943, Jewish laborers at the camp shot and killed 11 SS officers and three Nazi prison guards. After the uprising, 300 prisoners escaped the camps and fled to the surrounding forest. Only 50 survived.

With the help of friends, Rosenfeld escaped the forest and was able to continue fighting the Nazis. When the war was over, Rosenfeld returned to his native Ukraine, where he married and started a family. In 1990, he made aliyah to Israel.

Between April 1942 and October 1943, some 250,000 Jews met their deaths at Sobibor. The Germans razed the camp at the end of 1943 and planted a forest to help obscure their genocidal acts.

Chairman of the Jewish Agency Isaac Herzog expressed "great sadness" at the news of Rosenfeld's passing.

"Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, he became a hero. Semyon fought the Nazis as a member of the Soviet Army and was later sent to the Sobibor death camp as a prisoner of war. There, he saw death daily until the famous uprising.

"We have an obligation to remember and pass on to future generations the story of Semyon Rosenfeld's life and heroism, as well as that of everyone of his generation, of whom fewer and fewer remain," Herzog said.

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said, "Even when Semyon was taken prisoner and, because he was Jewish, sent to the Sobibor death camp, he took part in an uprising that today still serves as a symbol of Jewish heroism. Only a few survived the uprising and escape from Sobibor, and now that the last eyewitnesses are gone, the responsibility to tell the story of their heroism falls on us. We are committed to continuing our commemorative activity for the sake of the victims, the survivors, and humanity as a whole."

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