Auschwitz survivors have told Sky News of their pessimism that lessons have not been learnt from history, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp.
“I hope I’m wrong,” says survivor Ivor Perl. “But there’s […] a saying that if one doesn’t learn from history, you’re cursed to live through it again.”
Ivor is nearly 93 years old and it took half a century for him to feel able to talk publicly about his time at the Nazi concentration camp.
“When I was younger I thought to myself, ‘I arrived in this world in a terrible time, 1932, at least when I leave it the world will be in a better place’,” he says. “But I’m doubting it very, very much.
“It’s not my job to cure the problem – my job is to tell you what the problem can be.
“I haven’t got any sign to see that the world has learnt [any lessons from] the Second World War.”
More than a million people, mostly Jewish, were murdered at Auschwitz – just one of the numerous death camps the Nazis built across mainland Europe. On Monday, world leaders will gather at Auschwitz-Birkenau to mark 80 years since its liberation.
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Ivor was deported to Auschwitz from Hungary at the age of 12. He pretended to the Nazi guards that he was older and found himself sent to do slave labour. His lie almost certainly saved him from the gas chambers.
Out of his parents and their nine children, only Ivor and his brother Alec survived.
“You know why I’m alive today? Because I spoke Yiddish,” Ivor says. “Yiddish is very akin to German.”
When the cattle trucks arrived at Auschwitz, one of the first things Ivor saw was “people working in striped uniforms”.
He explains: “They were Polish Jews and they kept saying [in Yiddish] ‘eat all the food, don’t save any food’ and ‘if they are asked, children must say they are 16 years old at least’.
“We started marching and I went over to my mother’s side. And she said, ‘no darling, go back to your brother, don’t come to me’. I said: ‘Please mum, let me stay’.
“An officer with white gloves, who later said he was Dr Mengele, pointed people, right or left. The ones on the left, for death.”
Dr Mengele asked Ivor how old he was. “I said, ’16’. I can see his face even to this day.
“He said: ‘Okay, go to the right’. If I told him I was 12 years old, I wouldn’t be alive today.”
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‘How could I tell my children what happened?’
Sky News is meeting with Ivor at the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in north London, run by the health and social care organisation Jewish Care. He’s joined by another Auschwitz survivor, Susan Pollack.
Susan’s recollections of the camp have not faded over the years. “The memory of Auschwitz and the train to Auschwitz will never lose itself in my mind,” she says. When Susan arrived at the camp, her head was shaved and her clothes were changed.
“My mum was sent to the gas chamber,” she says.
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Susan, now 94, lives in London and spent years giving her testimony in schools.
After the war, she moved to Sweden and then Canada, where she met her husband Abraham, also a survivor. They had three children.
She says her husband was reluctant to discuss what they saw during the Holocaust. “He didn’t want to talk about it, he said we have to start a new life – we had the children, we didn’t want to poison [their lives].”
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Sometimes, her children would ask why they didn’t have a wider family, including grandparents. “I couldn’t tell them that they were gassed, as they were,” she says. “I said they died natural deaths.
“They would ask us why they didn’t have uncles or aunts, [and] ‘why don’t we have a normal life?’
“How could we tell them what happened?”
