We have returned to hell to stop the world forgetting
Survivors’ tears as they send urgent message to world
The sun had barely risen and the frost was still thick as they made a poignant pilgrimage back into the pit of hell. They passed the crematorium where thousands of corpses were flung into the flames each day.
They filed beneath the iron gates topped with that poisonous lie “Arbeit Macht Frei” – work brings freedom.
Then the old men and women, wearing striped caps and scarves, reached the Wall of Death where Nazi firing squads executed thousands.
As they laid wreaths and red roses, the last witnesses to the greatest crime in human history let the tears flow.
At the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, dozens of survivors paid tribute to 1.1 million Jews, Poles, gypsies and other prisoners murdered by Hitler’s henchmen.
Ukrainian Igor Malickij, 94, prisoner number 188005 who became an engineering professor, wept as he recalled the horrors he saw as a 17 year old.
“I was assigned to take the bodies out of the gas chamber,” he said. “In addition to a dead naked woman I saw a child crawling around who had apparently not been killed by the gas.
“I said, ‘Mr SS man, the child is not yet dead’. So the henchman hit the child’s head against the ground and threw it on the pile.”
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda joined the survivors as they stood between two notorious buildings.
Block 10 was the lair of Dr Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, who carried out barbaric experiments on women and children and killed more than 1,500 sets of twins.
Block 11 was the punishment block where prisoners were tortured, forced to stand for weeks in basement “standing cells” or left to starve.
It was where, in 1941, the Germans trialled Zyklon B, the poison used to gas the victims of their Final Solution.
“We want the next generation to know what we went through and that it should never happen again,” said survivor David Marks, 93.
Thirty-five members of his family of Romanian Jews were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest and most lethal of the Nazi’s death camps.
Like the band of 200 survivors who gathered in Poland, he feels a sense of urgency to tell the world to “never forget”. Anti-Semitism is spreading through Europe and North America, while a poll revealed one in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% claim the scale was exaggerated.
“The Holocaust was sponsored and okayed by a government,” said Benjamin Lesser,
92, a Polishborn Jew whose
Young Renee and Charles
Guests walk with candles at camp family was sent to Auschwitz in 1944. “Not only did they allow it to happen but they enforced it and encouraged regular people to become killers.
“I’ve returned so I don’t forget any of what happened to me, so I can keep the memories alive, and stop the world from acquiring amnesia.”
Yesterday afternoon the Duchess of Cornwall placed a candle for the victims, as she joined heads
of state and representatives of more than countries at the commemoration.
A marquee had been erected over Birkenau’s Gate of Death – the brick tower through which cattle trucks carried the doomed to the chambers.
Survivors sat in rows on either side of the railway line – a poignant reminder of how Nazi guards would divide those disembarking, sending the old and weak to instant death. The survivors, many making their last 40
Polish-born Benjamin Lesser pilgrimage, had travelled from Australia, Israel, Canada and America and ranged in age from 75 to 101.
The youngest was Angela Orosz, of Montreal, whose mother Velska gave birth to her secretly in December 1944.
She hid her under a blanket for six weeks until Russian troops arrived.
Poland’s President Duda said survivors were “victims of the most horrendous crime in history”. The world had an obligation to bear witness because
David Marks lost 35 of his family
Holocaust denial was “desecration of the ashes of those scattered here”.
Bathsheva Dagan, 95, was sent to the camp in 1943 after her parents and sister were murdered in Treblinka.
She called it “this devilish world where human dignity was treated as it if was dirt”. She and 60,000 prisoners were forced on a death march by Nazis fleeing the advancing Russians.
Liberated by the British in May 1945 she settled in Israel and became a