Don’t call Liselotte Ivry an Auschwitz survivor, she’s a witness to history
MONTREAL – Liselotte Ivry rests in an armchair at her Côte-st-luc home, her knitting on a footstool, a photo album in her lap, a collection of medical paraphernalia on a side table, her cane within reach.
At 94, she is frail now. But when she takes a visitor’s hand in her long, thin, freckled one, Ivry’s grip is ironclad. It’s a lingering trace of the steely constitution that brought her through the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust as a teenager. And when the sleeve of her pink housedress slips back, it exposes another indelible sign: a blue tattoo on her left forearm.
Number 70,663.
She recalls very clearly the time and place where she was inked: upon her arrival at Auschwitz, the most notorious Nazi death camp, in the fall of 1943.
“You arrive and they put you in the barracks and then all the other things follow. They took us 10 or 20 at a time. The girls were sitting there, and then they give you the tattoo,” Ivry said. “You know, it didn’t even hurt. Nothing hurt. You were just in a trance.”
Ivry was a prisoner in multiple camps set up by the Nazis to detain, kill or enslave Europe’s Jewish population during the Second World War. These include Theresienstadt in her native Czech Republic, three different parts of the Neuengamme labour camp network, and Bergen-belsen in Germany.
But it is what she witnessed at Auschwitz, the epicentre of the Nazi genocide and the place where the Germans perfected mass murder on an industrial scale, that she spoke about in a recent interview.
Monday marked 75 years since Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army. It is also International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Over a million Jews, along with Roma, Poles, Soviets, Jehovah’s Witnesses, sexual minorities and political prisoners were killed at Auschwitz between 1941 and 1945. In total, six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
Ivry — born Liselotte Epstein in Listany, Czechoslovakia — was just 18 when she arrived at Auschwitz. She reunited with her mother Elsa and younger brother Hans, who had been transported from Theresienstadt before her.
But her mother was seriously ill.
“The only way I could help her was to give her more to eat. So I volunteered to carry the soup. Do you know how heavy that thing was?” Ivry said, describing cast iron pots on a wooden brace, she balanced over her shoulders. “I said I would do it because at the end, you got to get the scrapings from the pot.”
Unfortunately, her mother got dysentery. In the crowded barracks with bunks three levels high, those suffering from diarrhea were moved to a cot with wooden slats at the end of the room.
“My poor mother was laying on these wooden boards and she just couldn’t die,” Ivry said. “It was terrible. I was with her when she died” in January 1944.
Ivry was able to get word to her brother to come meet her in order to tell him their mother was gone.
“He turned around and walked away from me,” she recalled.
Soon after, Hans was also executed.
A few thousand emaciated souls were freed on Jan. 27, 1945. They had been left behind when the Nazis forced most Auschwitz prisoners on a death march as the Red Army approached. But Ivry was not among them.
In the spring of 1944, she was “selected” by Josef Mengele himself for transport to a labour camp near Hamburg. An officer and a physician at Auschwitz, Mengele was known as the “Angel of Death” for performing inhumane medical experiments and determining who was sent to the gas chambers.
“You had to get undressed completely and carry your clothes on your arm. The left arm had to be free so they could see the number. In you walked and there was Mengele and two guards. They were watching what he did,” she said, gesturing with her thumb. “One was life and one was death.
“I was saved,” she said. “I’m a miracle because I was in Auschwitz and I went though selection. I know what Mengele looks like.”
To what does she attribute her survival of sickness, starvation, falling bombs, shrapnel, forced labour and coming face-to-face with evil at Auschwitz?
“In Jewish you say ‘davke’: ‘I’ll show you.’ You made up your mind that you’re not going to die like this. You’re not going to give them this pleasure,” Ivry said. “This is not on your mind, it’s deep within you. I wasn’t going to give up.”
Ivry is a lover of beautiful things. After learning English and making contact with an uncle in Montreal (she had memorized the address of his beauty parlour — 1448 Bishop St. — so she was able to write to him in the chaos after the war), Ivry came to Canada and studied art at Loyola College, now Concordia University. She got married, had a family and taught art to preschoolers.
Her home is decorated with her work, including an abstract light panel, paintings and mosaics. She smocked dresses for her granddaughters when they were young and knits squares that become afghans for cancer patients at the Jewish General or women at the shelter Auberge Shalom.
She also made it her mission over the decades to speak out — to children as well as adults — about her experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
“I wish I could do it still,” she said. “People have forgotten there was a war.”
Although “survivor” is a label she detests. Ivry prefers “brave soul” or “witness to history.”
“You can survive drowning. You can survive a snowstorm. You can survive a car crash. But this is not surviving,” she said. “It’s takes much more. It take strength. It takes friends. It takes luck. And also faith in God that he will look after you.”