‘I’m alive, Hitler is dead. That’s my satisfaction’
It was once described as the place where Europe reached the darkest ends of Hell. Seventy five years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the remaining survivors of one of the most evil chapters in modern history returned yesterday to the ‘‘Gates of Death’’ to remember more than a million murdered there by the Nazis.
Wearing blue and white striped scarves – echoing the colour of the uniforms they were forced to wear by Adolf Hitler’s sadistic SS – they recalled the horrors of the Holocaust during what, for many, would be the last major commemoration on the site of the world’s biggest mass extermination site.
Survivors wept and held their heads in their hands as memories were recounted of the crimes committed at the camp in Nazioccupied Poland from 1940 to 1945.
As royalty including Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, and the King and Queen of the Netherlands, plus world leaders joined delegations from 61 countries at the complex 50km south of Krakow, survivors gave heartbreaking testimonies of the cruelty they endured and witnessed there.
Batsheva Dagan, 94, a Polish Israeli who was deported to Auschwitz in May 1943 told how she barely recognised herself after being tattooed with the number 45554 and having her head shaved. ‘‘Human dignity was treated as if it was dirt,’’ she said.
Covered in lice, her hands would bleed as she was forced to pick nettles. She described how Josef Mengele, the camp doctor, would make children ‘‘stand in rows naked and be driven to death’’. She said: ‘‘I hid under a bed and somehow I saved myself.’’ She was applauded as she asked: ‘‘Where was everybody, who could hear that, who could see that, but still did nothing?’’
Elza Baker, 83, was eight when she was taken to Auschwitz in 1944 from her home in Hamburg because the Nazis considered her to be a gipsy.
Sight-impaired, someone read a speech she wrote ‘‘from the heart’’ on behalf of the 21,000 Romany people murdered: ‘‘We saw a large area of open fire blazing. I overheard adults saying, ’They must have run out of gas and are burning people alive’.’’
In August 1944, Lodz-born Marian Turski, 93, was sent to Auschwitz with his father and brother, who were murdered upon arrival. He admitted younger generations ‘‘can find talk of the Holocaust and genocide boring’’, but pleaded, ‘‘do not be indifferent.’’
Opening the event, Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, praised his nation for preserving the site. Despite being the first target of Nazi aggression, he said Poland had established the largest underground resistance movement.
Half of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis were Polish and six million Poles perished altogether.
‘‘We are speaking about numbers but these numbers represent people, their life stories and their suffering. We will certainly never get to know the exact figures but we are speaking about numbers because we are in the factory of death – that is the industrial nature of the crimes committed here.
‘‘For years the factory of death operated at full capacity – smoke bellowed from chimneys, people walked in their thousands to meet their deaths. The magnitude of crime perpetrated is terrifying, but we must never walk away from it and we must never forget it.’’
Ronald Lauder, 75, the American heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics empire, reminded the audience that 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered.
The president of the World Jewish Congress, which paid for many of the 200 survivors to be at the ceremony asked: ‘‘What could they have created for us all, what symphonies, what new technologies, what medical breakthroughs?’’
Pointing out that ‘‘not one German was killed in retribution’’ by the 200,000 Jews liberated from the camps, he called for tougher laws to combat a rising tide of anti-Semitism.
Survivors at the ceremony included survivors Renee Salt, 90, and Hannah Lewis, 82, who made their homes in Britain after the war.
Salt said this would probably be her last visit to Auschwitz.
‘‘It breaks my heart every time I come back here. I say I’m still alive, Hitler is dead. That’s my satisfaction.’’
She said her father ‘‘disappeared into thin air’’ when they left the train.
‘‘Without a kiss, without a goodbye. I never saw him again,’’ she said.