I met a holocaust survivor. And I'll admit, until now, I hadn't quite realised just how serious the holocaust was, and how much it had affected the lives of so many people... Actually, that's not strictly true, I thought I understood but I really didn't, and to be honest I probably still don't now.
The lady we (my entire school year) met was called Susan Pollack and she was born in Hungary a few years after the end of the First World War. As she grew up, she and her family were persecuted more and more for following Jewish faith, and when she was 13 her father was taken away and killed by the Nazis.
Not long after that, she and the rest of her family were told of the arrival of one of the architects of the holocaust; it took just 6 weeks for most of the Jewish population to be deported or otherwise disposed of.
Susan and her family were taken to Auschwitz, where immediately her mother was taken away to be gassed. Someone in the line with her told her to say she was 15, which she did. Lucky for her, since those under that age were immediately killed. It was at this point that she was separated from her brother, who she would not be able to contact or even know the fate of for several years.
Susan then described the long days in the barracks of Auschwitz, where she was starved and stayed in a small room with 8 other girls. Every now and again Josef Mengele, sometimes described as Auschwitz's "Angel of Death" for his experiments on children and twins, would come and examine them naked, and would send those who looked strong to do forced labour and those who were weak to be shot or gassed. Susan was lucky and was chosen to do forced labour.
I'm not sure what she did other than it was building things from blueprints, largely because some dooooouchebags were talking and laughing; what there was to laugh about I don't know.
Anyway, she was lucky. The place where she worked fed her better (though since before she was getting two "meals" a day, isn't hard), but it was barely enough. Here I'll skip a bit because the people behind me were talking again.
When I could next hear what was being said, she was being forced to do a "death march". She told how occasionally they found food or were given some by kind farmers, but otherwise there was little to eat or drink the entire time. They eventually arrived at Belsen, which she described as a place where corpses were piled high and it was hard to tell the living from the dead. She was reunited with a friend from her village here, who died in the days leading up to the liberation.
Days passed and finally the Allies arrived, and once they got there they were very good and set to work commandeering ambulances and vehicles, setting up camps and distributing food. A few days after their arrival a Swedish (or Swiss, she said both and I'm not entirely sure whether that was intentional or a mistake) medical boat arrived and took around a 1000 survivors including her back to their country( Switzerland or Sweden) where they received medical treatment and psychiatric help.
After all this time Susan had come to view herself as less than human and despite all the help from the doctors and the help from the Red Cross to contact her brother she could not shake that feeling until one day, a doctor who was doing some checks on her simply said "I have a daughter like you.". As she said, the effect was not instantaneous but slowly that statement gave her hope and made her think that she was human like everyone else.
Eventually she got in contact with her brother again thanks to the help from the Red Cross, and it turned out he had been forced to work as a Sonderkommando, someone who brought the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematorium where they were burnt. At this time Hungary was under the control of Russia and he urged her not to come back as conditions were terrible. She took his advice and the Allies sent her to Canada where she stayed for around 15 years. Here she met her husband, Abraham.
Eventually they moved to England and for the past 15 years she has been travelling around the country, telling people her story. 5 years after moving to England she visited her brother in Hungary with her 3 children, who have each found their way in the world. One is a set designer, one is a teacher and uhh... I can't remember what the third does.
Yeah...I thought I'd share that with you all.
