Tales from Auschwitz: survivor stories

Tuesday 27 January is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Six survivors, some of whom will be returning to the site for the last time, tell Kate Connolly their stories

Irene Fogel Weiss, born in 1930 in Bótrágy, Czechoslovakia, now Batrad, Ukraine. She lives in Virginia, US. She will be returning to Auschwitz for the third time, as part of the US presidential delegation, along with her daughter, Lesley Weiss

We lived in Bótrágy, a very small, mostly poor town in Czechoslovakia with a population of approximately 1,000 mainly farming families, including about 10 Jewish families. The town was a typical low-income community with a tailor, a shoemaker, a grocery store, where people struggled to get by, but where everyone knew each other and there was easy communication between the neighbours, though that didn’t mean we were equal.

When I was eight years old Czechoslovakia broke apart and we became part of Hungary. That was when our problems started, because the Hungarians were allied with the Nazis. It was a difficult time for Jewish families, as suddenly the law no longer protected us and overnight we lost our civil rights. My father’s lumber business was confiscated and given to a non-Jew, and we received no compensation. Jewish children were thrown out of Hungarian schools, so right away we had no choice but to concentrate on hunkering down and trying not to bring attention to ourselves. We couldn’t ride the trains and we had to wear the yellow star. It was a free for all. With no law to protect us, it was common for Jews to get beaten up or thrown off the train.

It’s an incredibly scary feeling when you’re exposed to anyone’s raw feelings and enmity. These young Nazis habitually roamed around and did tremendous damage to many individuals. But at least we were still in our community and were not evicted from our home, so that was some comfort.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Irene Fogel Weiss holds a photo of her that was taken at Auschwitz by two Nazi guards. Photograph: Jocelyn Augustino/The Guardian

We didn’t have radio or much access to newspapers, so all the children were reliant on listening to their parents for information. But I remember many things about the course of the war, who was winning and losing, and the repression of Jews elsewhere.

Hungary didn’t give up its Jewish population until it was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1944. The very first task the German government gave the Hungarians was to round up Jewish families and deport them to Auschwitz. There was a huge rush to take half a million Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and it was completed in just six weeks, in 147 cattle cars. So in the spring of 1944 my family – my parents and their six children, the oldest of whom was 17 and I was 13 – found ourselves in the Munkács ghetto and from there being taken on cattle carts to Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Auschwitz: a short history of the largest mass murder site in human history Read more

Imagine it like this: three generations of your family have lived in the same house in the same town. They’ve struggled to raise a family, put kids through school, to feed them all. You have your friends and family. All of a sudden you are told to leave it all and walk out with a single suitcase.

I remember the night of the packing very well. Things went in the suitcase, things were taken out of the suitcase. In the end my mother filled it with food she had cooked and warm clothing and bedding. Then it was full. Plus we took a watch, some earrings, a wedding ring with us to exchange for food if necessary. The next day my father was forced to hand over his remaining money to a delegation that included the mayor and the school principal as they rounded us up at the town hall.

We had been absolutely unaware of such a place as Auschwitz. It was a stunning reversal of the life we had had up until then. And I cannot emphasise enough how utterly scary it is to be at the mercy of your fellow human beings. As a child I could not understand what we had done to deserve going there.

My father surveyed the scene from the train and could see prisoners, uniforms and barracks so we immediately thought it was a work camp, and that was reassuring – if we can work, it can’t be such a dreadful place. We had heard about the stories in Poland of lots of mass shootings of Jews or people being taken into the forest and shot, so it was a relief to see out the window that there was actually a system. Even though we were victims of discrimination at that stage that’s all it was, as we had no clue then that this was a very carefully orchestrated plan of genocide. We could not have imagined that they would kill little children, until we realised that killing children was their primary goal to prevent any new generations. Because desperate people will always look to find some sign of hope, we thought to ourselves even if we have to work, at least we’ll see each other occasionally.

But the German system was full of this sort of deception. It counted on people’s normal perception of things. Thinking we were going to a work camp. Thinking that you were going to take a shower when in fact you were going to the gas chambers – that was the ultimate deceit.

All of a sudden you are told to leave it all and walk out with a single suitcase Irene Fogel Weiss

When we arrived it was, as I later found out, the usual story, though not to us at the time. Our family was torn apart on the platform on arriving. My sister, Serena, was chosen for slave labour. My mother and the younger children were sent off to one side and my father and 16-year-old brother to the other side. I held tightly on to the hand of my 12-year-old sister and for an instant I was mistaken for being older than I was, probably because I was wearing a headscarf that my mother had given me.

My sister was sent with my mother, while I went to the opposite side. That was the first chance I had to survive. Unbeknown to any of us at the time, two Nazi soldiers had been asked to make a photographic document of the deportation of Hungarian Jews from the moment they got off the train – through the entire system of arriving, going to the bath house and getting their prison clothes – so I ended up in a picture at the very moment I was separated from my sister. It captures me standing alone without my family on the Auschwitz platform, and I’m leaning inwards to see where my little sister has gone.

Another picture we discovered shows my family waiting in line for the gas chamber. Two little boys, my brothers Reuven and Gershon, are shown dressed in hats, one struggling to put on his winter coat. For a long time I failed to find my mother and was very unhappy. But I spent hours looking at these photos with a magnifying glass and one day I found her little face sticking out.

The pictures only came to light 25 years ago and, despite them showing moments from around 45 years before that, they completely captured the entire experience as it had been in my mind all that time. I was dumbfounded and devastated, having had no idea they existed, and I have spent literally hundreds of hours scouring them, trying to find my father and brother. The pictures have reassured me that I was not imagining it all, as I sometimes thought I might have done.

The reality of where we were, struck home fairly quickly. I was stationed near crematorium number four, and we witnessed the columns of unsuspecting women and children entering the gate of the crematorium; they would have been dead within half an hour. When the Hungarian Jews arrived they had the gas chambers going day and night. How can you wrap your imagination round that? I still can’t.

I was with my older sister Serena and we were sent to be forced labourers together in the Birkenau section of Auschwitz. Many times we were threatened with separation but somehow we managed to stay together. Later on, to our great relief we ran into my mother’s two younger sisters, our aunts Rose and Piri, who were in their early 20s. It was like finding our parents. They were such a huge moral and emotional support for us.

On about 17 January or 18 January 1945, the SS dragged thousands of us out of the camp to walk to Ravensbrück concentration camp deep into central Germany. I don’t really know why. We were in terrible straits with no proper clothes, nothing suitable for marching through the snow. It was as if the cruelty would never end. If anyone sat down out of exhaustion, they were shot. Later we were transported yet again, and my aunt Piri became ill and was killed.

As the Soviets approached, the SS left and I, Serena and Rose took shelter in an empty house nearby. The Russians came but for some reason left again immediately, so we were left to fend for ourselves.

We spent months trying to get to Prague where we knew we had some relatives and from there we went to the Sudetenland. I got to go to school, my sister found work in a factory and Rose was sick at home with tuberculosis.

Some of the 600 children who survived Auschwitz show their identification numbers. Photograph: Reuters

We initially had no idea what had happened to the rest of the family and had no access to a phone. But on buildings everywhere lists were put up stating who was still alive. Everyone you met you asked, every meeting of refugees was dominated by trying to find out where your relatives were.

Eventually I discovered that of around 100 people from my town who were deported, only about 10 survived, only two of whom were children – my sister and me. But there was not one parent and child who lived. All of them were killed.

This is my last chance to make sure this tragedy is not forgotten Irene Fogel Weiss

Serena now lives in New Jersey with her family, including three children and grandchildren. We’ve both managed to hang on in there, but she can’t come to Auschwitz because her elderly husband is sick. For years when we talked about our experience she’d say to me: “You probably don’t remember, you were too young,” as I was four years younger, but some things I remembered even more sharply than her and my aunt.

I’m often asked how I have coped. I never went to a psychologist and I never will. Quite simply, I kept it at a distance. I saw and understood, and yet I didn’t. I’ve never cried over the columns of children and mothers I saw. When I was in Auschwitz I thought: ‘This is not actually on earth.’ It was a system of masters and slaves, gods and subhumans and I thought to myself: ‘No one knows about it. It’s the forest, surrounded by multiple layers of fence, it’s not actually real.’ I never let it penetrate that my parents were killed and I even thought: ‘After this we’re going home and everyone will be there again.’ Those who never managed to keep it distant killed themselves.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Child inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp after liberation in January 1945. Photograph: The Weiner Library/Rex

I threw myself into family life. I married young, I had three children, (I now also have four grandchildren) and then I went to college and became a teacher. You fall into a routine and do the best you can. But I’ve never lost the feeling of how unreliable human beings are and neither am I fooled by superficial civilisation. But I realise that loss of faith in people is more devastating than loss of faith in God.

I won’t be going back to Auschwitz again after this visit. So it’s my last chance to make sure this tragedy is not forgotten. I found out only about a week before I was due to leave that I will be one of two survivors who will be part of the US presidential delegation, headed by the secretary of the treasury, Jack Lew, and I feel very honoured, but it has much to do with the fact that many others who could go are ill and unable to travel.

Joseph Mandrowitz, born in Czemierniki, Poland in 1923. He now lives in Toms River, New Jersey, and is returning to Auschwitz for the second time with his second cousin

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joseph Mandrowitz, Auschwitz survivor Photograph: Tim Knox

We had a quiet life until the day they took 1,000 Jews away from my village of Czemierniki, a typical Polish village with a big square around which community life took place. My father was a bootmaker, my mother was a seamstress and everyone worked hard. There was always some antisemitism, but it was mainly fairly harmless, consisting of kids at our school who during religious education taunted the five or six Jewish kids in the class with “Jews killed Jesus.”

I had trained as a tailor and had left home before we were deported, when I went to work four miles away on a ranch. It was taken over by the SS, so suddenly I found myself working for them. In May 1943 they lined us up one day and told us to empty our pockets. If they found even a single zloty in anyone’s pocket, they were shot on the spot. We were transported to Majdanek, which was only 19 miles away – a torture camp in the true sense of the word. For 500 metres there were just ditches full of bodies, legs, heads. We were deported to Auschwitz four weeks later. We arrived in the early morning and they gave us a bed, a real shower, they cleaned us well with disinfectant and shaved us. After that they gave us striped uniforms and tattooed us. I was given the number 128164 on my left arm and from that point on I was a number, no longer a name.

From there we were sent to Buna (an Auschwitz sub camp) and were set to work. After a few months there, I went for a walk one day and saw a few tomatoes growing. I was starving by then so tried to take them and was given a beating so severe, I don’t know how I survived it. I still have the scars from it today. I was taken to hospital and knew the rule: if you didn’t heal in four to five days, they’d take you to Birkenau and you’d be gassed.

I was 20, about 1.7 metres (5ft 7in) tall, blond, not bad looking and, despite the beating, in pretty good shape. When my limit in the hospital was up, they sent me to the gas chambers. There I met Dr Mengele, who asked me what was wrong. I said: “You can see, I’ve been beaten up.” Instead of sending me to the gas chambers, I was sent back to the hospital, presumably he saw the potential for labour in me. As I had trained as a tailor, he decided I had my uses there. The soldiers wanted to look nice, so they’d come to me in the hospital if they wanted their uniforms fixed up. The very fact that my new job meant I didn’t have to get up in the morning in the harsh winter in thin clothes standing around for hours for the headcount was a big thing. It meant that being a tailor saved my life.

That Mengele – they call him a doctor, but he was as much a doctor as I’m an army general. A complete fake of a man who I was too scared to look in the eye. I saw him day in, day out for months and was one of 152 Jews in his “care”. One of the experiments he carried out on me was to take blood from my arm and inject it in my rear end. I’ve no idea what that was trying to prove.

For some astonishing reason he “saved” me a second time, after the decision was made to clear the hospital and 150 people were sent to the gas chambers except for me and a boy from Saloniki. That’s not to say I liked him at all – he was a hateful man, who hated himself first and foremost and then everyone else around him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joseph Mandrowitz just before he went into the camp. Photograph: Tim Knox

In 1944 we were sent on a death march from Birkenau to Oranienburg and from there to Buchenwald. Then to a quarry, where we were ordered to drill into the mountains to make some sort of secret city. From there we walked back to Buchenwald. Whoever was incapable of walking was shot. From there, big trains took us to Theresienstadt just as the Soviets were bombing the rails. We could sense that the Germans were almost destroyed. For 17 days we had no water, no food, nothing. Despite the hardship I was doing OK compared to others. I still had the capability to clamber on to the cattle trains without help.

We were liberated from the Russians at Theresienstadt on 9 May. I developed typhus and spent several weeks in hospital before I could go anywhere.

I decided to go back to my village as I had nowhere else to go. But of the 1,000 or so of us who had been deported, only eight to 10 had survived. Some people had warned me not to go back, saying there had been attacks on those who had returned, including the Jewish woman I had worked for when I’d done my tailor apprenticeship. She’d gone back to reclaim some possessions she had left behind in somebody’s house and they killed her rather than return the items. She and her husband had been the only couple in Czemierniki to survive and then they went and murdered her when she came home.

I had had parents, two brothers, three sisters, two nephews, two nieces, an aunt, an uncle, and all of them died. I found out the rest of my family were taken to Treblinka in 1942.

When I finally returned to Czemierniki in 1993, despite the years in which Jews had lived there I could not find a trace either of my family or of Jewish life. Even the cemetery where my grandfather had been buried had been razed. The synagogue was gone. I went to ask the local priest, who said they had taken the tombstones and crushed them for building materials or something like that. I believe they deliberately destroyed any sign of Jewish life so as to be rid of us for ever.

When I watch programmes on the Holocaust it’s as if I’m watching some made-up horror film

The Jewish Federation brought me to America. I deliberately chose against going to Israel as it would have meant I would have had to fight and kill and the US seemed the next best choice. They put me up in a hotel on 35th and 36th street until I got myself sorted out. I was desperate to get to work and make up for all those wasted years.

I started looking for work as soon as I arrived, finding a job earning $35 (£23) a week and by 1955 I had opened up my own business in Brooklyn, Queens, as a tailor and I think I did OK. I worked for some dignitaries, including Henry Kissinger and Nancy Reagan, and I also did a lot for the Johnsons. I’d be putting together the garments designed for them by the likes of Oscar de la Renta and Geoffrey Beene.

The US gave me a pretty good life. In fact I’d say I found my heaven here.

Of the 1,000 Jews taken from my village, only three of us are still alive, one living in Israel, one in Baltimore and myself. We stay in touch.

I still drive my car, though not at night any more. I get jumpy when someone honks their horn, and occasionally I have bad dreams and wake up at night, my wife asking me: “What’s up?”, and I tell her I’m being chased by Germans. But that’s the story of my life. I still can’t believe it happened. When I sit down and watch programmes on the Holocaust on the History Channel it’s as if I’m watching some made-up horror film.

I have to go back to Auschwitz one last time. I feel like I own the place, having spent almost two years of my life there. I never forget it and I don’t want to forget it because it’s effectively the story of my life.”

Eva Umlauf, born in December 1942 at a labour camp in Nowaky, Czechoslovakia, in what is now Slovakia. She now lives in Munich, Germany, and works as a psychotherapist. She is returning to Auschwitz for the third time. Her book on the Holocaust is due to be published in 2016

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eva Umlauf in her Munich apartment Frank Bauer Photograph: Frank Bauer

I was not even two when we arrived at Auschwitz in 1944. I have no conscious memories of that time, but plenty of subconscious ones. My mother told me later how when they tattooed my arm with a needle, it was so painful that I passed out. The number they gave me and that I still have was A26959. My mother’s ended in 8. I was probably the youngest child to have been tattooed who survived.

My mother was four months pregnant when we arrived. My sister Nora was born there in April 1945.

Had we arrived just two days earlier, we would have been gassed immediately. Our transport was the first from which no one was taken to the gas chambers, probably because they knew by then that the Russians were very close. We arrived on 2 November and on 30 October, 18,000 mothers and children who had arrived from Theresienstadt were killed.

On the two occasions I have returned to Auschwitz, in 1995 and 2011, although I haven’t got memories as such of the time I spent there, something is triggered deep inside me, both physically and in my inner being. I get very nervous and the death, the cold, the expanse and the emptiness of it swamps me – it’s a feeling that it’s hard to explain but it’s everywhere. I can feel the burnt earth everywhere I walk.

When Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, we were already extremely sick, so we had to stay there. A Jewish paediatrician from Prague said my mother and her baby would not survive. She had rickets, TB and jaundice. But in April, against the odds, my mother gave birth to my sister, helped by prisoners who were doctors.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eva Umlauf with her mother. Photograph: Frank Bauer

My mother never talked very much about our time there, mainly to protect us and herself. She was 21 when we were finally able to leave, with a two-year-old and a six-week-old. She also took with us a four-year-old boy who was parentless and she spent months searching for his relatives, who she did finally track down. At the same time, she had lost her husband and was mourning him. There was an unspoken ban on speaking about any of it. We went back to live in Trenčín, the small town in Slovakia where my mother had moved when she married my father, and where the Red Cross found us a room.

There was a frantic search to see who had survived and to look for relatives. But none of our relatives were still alive. My grandmother, great-grandmother and great-grandfather, my mother’s three siblings – all had died.

Probably my earliest memories of anything at all are of walking through the streets of Trenčín and people stopping in their tracks and saying with amazement: “You’re back!” “What a miracle that you’re alive!” I understood as a three-and-a-half to four-year-old that I was a miracle because I got to hear it so many times, but I didn’t really understand what the word meant. Only much later could I recognise what a miracle it really was that I had survived, when I learned that of the thousands of Slovak men and women who were deported to Auschwitz, only a few hundred returned.

My mother put every effort into giving us a normal life. She sent us to school and made sure we studied. She was loving and resourceful. It was only later when she got old that she was gripped by depression. Having held everything together and been so capable and diligent for so long, she just fell apart as if under the burden of it all, and she died at the age of 72. It’s no accident that I and my sister became doctors – we had an absolute primal need to help people and save lives.

I later qualified as a psychotherapist, a job which I enjoy immensely, but which confronts me with the suffering caused by the Holocaust on a daily basis. My patients are from “both sides” – either victims or perpetrators, or their relatives – and many are what you’d call transgenerationally affected – carrying around with them the issues and traumas that their parents or grandparents never dealt with, and which unless cured are like a contagious disease that they’ll pass on to the next generation.

I married a Polish Jew and we settled in Germany, the “Täterland” – the land of the perpetrator – after being forced out of Czechoslovakia after the collapse of the Prague Spring in 1968. It does sometimes feel like a strange decision to live in Germany because the Holocaust is just so omnipresent here and there is a growing antisemitism that scares me, especially when you feel it in Germany, of all places, which is why I always repeat what Primo Levi wrote: “What happened can happen again.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eva Umlauf’s numerical tattoo, still visible today. Photograph: Frank Bauer

That’s why I go into schools and talk to 15 year olds in and around Munich because we have to repeatedly confront it. That’s why I’m returning to Auschwitz on Monday. It will be the last time many people return, the end of an epoch. The wounds might heal, but they leave scars which are still very visible.

Susan Pollack, born Zsuzsanna Blau in Felsogod, Hungary in 1930. She now lives in London. She is returning to Auschwitz for the first time, with her grandson Anthony, 33

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Susan Pollack at her London home Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian

From the moment I arrived in Auschwitz with my mother and brother in May 1944, the terror of it just invaded my whole being. My mother was immediately taken away and I later learned that she had been gassed. I only recently discovered that my father had been there too.

My whole world was turned upside down by the brutality of it. We had not in any way understood what had been going on, only later recognising all the sources and streams that led to the Holocaust. In my small Hungarian village, information had been very restricted. We didn’t know about anything, like the Wannsee conference (where the Final Solution was planned), and neither could we have imagined it. We were told by the authorities that we were being resettled, which is why I took my sewing machine with me. I took my sewing machine!

The process of losing any kind of hope was a very gradual one. We were transported in cattle wagons in which many babies and children suffocated, in what it turned out was the last transport of Hungarians. We had no water, no food, there was no hygiene. That diminished our hope and increased the feeling of being trapped. But despite that, you always retained a glimmer of hope. Always.

I had become aware of antisemitism from a young age, when my uncle had his head chopped in two when he was attacked by fascists while driving up to Novograd where he lived. While his attacker was convicted, he was hardly punished, and continued to live opposite my uncle’s wife and child. But as a child you don’t think about these things all that much. My family had a wood and coal business and, like most people in those days, my father was self-employed. As they started to restrict us, he lost his licence to operate and then he faced the enormous task of trying to find work. Meanwhile, my mother was at home trying to keep the family together, with all of us all involved in domestic life.

I recall the time in Auschwitz as single moments, short encounters, smells. We tried to distract ourselves from the reality of it by trying to recall our home lives in what turned into a game of momentary escapism. Quietly, the children would huddle together and ask each other: “What will you have for breakfast?” And I remember saying: “Maybe an egg or a piece of bread and butter,” and tried to conjure up memories of home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Susan Pollack’s parents. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian

I vaguely recall the death march to Bergen-Belsen. I was so weak by then. The conditions were appalling and they’d put us in a barracks. I remember crawling out of it – because by that time I was too weak to walk, but I couldn’t bear to stay among the corpses any longer – and bumping into a neighbour who was as surprised to see me as I was her.

Our British liberators were amazing – they were heroes for me in the real sense of the word. After their long battle to reach Belsen, they had a campaign to organise a rescue mission. To this day I’m aghast that they were so saintly. They brought little ambulances in and drove around picking us up. I was trembling and virtually lifeless, lying near the barracks, the stench of corpses everywhere, and unable to walk or lift myself up, when they arrived with a little ambulance. I don’t think I was able to talk to the soldier who approached me, my comprehension had long gone, but I remember the gentleness in him. We couldn’t eat and I remember fainting when I tried to get out of bed. Gradually they administered the food, but I didn’t trust anyone and I hid the food in my bed, afraid that they would suddenly take it away. Even now I feel that sense at every meal time of how lucky I am, and I often say to those at the table: “Isn’t this wonderful?” and “ Aren’t we lucky?”

After our liberation I went to Sweden where we were looked after marvellously. The physical recovery was not as bad as the emotional and mental one, which I’m still working on. I am still touched by the memory of a doctor who taught me how to walk again, as through the malnutrition I was incapable. Such a simple thing, but he told me: “I have a daughter like you,” and how vital that statement of his was to my sense of becoming a human being again. It was amazing to be compared to someone having felt completely dehumanised for so long.

After what happened, and having lost 50 members of my family, it was very important for me to have my own little family, to have again that sense of belonging. I really wanted to have children and was just 18 when I got married to a fellow Holocaust survivor from Transylvania. But I’ve always been careful not to tell my children too much about what I went through so as not to traumatise them. They’re entitled to a carefree youth, I always thought, and I didn’t want to be spreading bitterness and hate.

I’ve always been careful not to tell my children too much about what I went through so as not to traumatise them Susan Pollack

I have had a good life. I was a Samaritan and I’ve been going to schools and talking to 15-year-olds for the past 20 years. I try to tell them how small streams of hatred can quickly lead to unstoppable, horrific things, so they should stand up to any type of persecution or discrimination, whether bullying or malicious gossip.

I did go back to my village, in 1995. But there was never any sense of any culpability and it seemed a futile exercise for me to try to find out who had betrayed us.

Returning to Auschwitz is going to be a cold, painful and tearful experience. It is a shadow that has always been with me and I’m hoping that by facing it for one last time at the age of 84 I will be able to live my life more peacefully, but I am extremely anxious. I lost my husband just days ago and I’m hoping I’ll finally be able to release my emotions when I’m there, as I’ve never really been able to cry much about anything. I’m comforted by the thought that there will be strength in numbers and that I’ll be there with perhaps 100 or so other survivors, which makes it easier. I would not go on my own. I appear to be a strong person, but inside I’m really quite fragile.

Mordechai Ronen, born in Dej, Transylvania, in what is now Romania, in 1933. He now lives in Toronto with his wife, Ilana. He is returning to Auschwitz for the third time. His autobiography is due to be published in September

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mordechai Ronen is overcome with emotion as he arrives at Auschwitz. Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images

We lived in a white-painted brick house on Kodur Street in Dej, which had a population of about 15,000, around a quarter of whom were Jewish. I was the youngest of five, and we spoke Yiddish within the community and Hungarian and Romanian outside. We had a garden and backyard, full of plums, peaches, cherries and apples. Among the smells of my childhood were my mother’s goulash and the scent of Shabbat candles. My father was a merchant, a travelling salesman. My mother had the full-time job of keeping the house and family. I remember the lullaby she used to sing me, Schaefeleh, schluf mein tier kind (Sleep well, my precious little child). The synagogue or shul was the centre of communal life, and the centre of my life from three years upwards. I don’t remember any overt antisemitism, just my parents warning me to be inside before dark: “Lest some Christian kids decide they don’t like the look of your sidelocks and pick on you.” I just thought my parents were being overprotective.

We had no daily paper, no radio or phone, so the only news we got of the second world war was from newcomers to town. The change started at the end of 1942-43, when people began expressing their anger towards us, especially the Hungarian neighbours. We’d hear: “Zsidók, menjetek ki, Gyerünk haza!” (“Jews, get out of here, Go home!”) I was in the synagogue singing when a rock shattered the stained-glass window. The rabbi tried to convince us it was just some drunk, but as a 10-year-old, I knew better.

One day, four or five men came to our synagogue. They had escaped from Poland and came with stories we found impossible to believe – of Nazis rounding up Jews, looting their possessions, murdering them. People said the men were meshuggah (crazy).

The only impact these stories had on my family was the cache of extra potatoes and bread that I discovered stashed away in our basement. But by 1943, we started getting clearer signs.

My father’s beard was shaved by some locals, who grabbed him. I stopped going to school. My parents gave me a lantern to carry with me after dark. Then I wasn’t allowed out at all.

One day the Hungarian gendarmes came to our house and ransacked it. In 1944, the Nazis ordered all Jews living outside Budapest to be rounded up and placed in ghettoes. Then it was our turn and that was the day our misery truly began. In the spring of 1944 we were part of a contingent of 7,500 Jews who were corralled into a makeshift ghetto in the Bungur forest. We had to wear the yellow stars of David. That was the day when almost one-and-a-half centuries of Jewish life in Dej came to an end.

In our forest ghetto I remember a local man, Mihai, who brought his cow to help us out with milk, having heard we were starving. He was arrested and beaten to a pulp and remained a paraplegic for the rest of his life. Two weeks into our ghetto life, we were sent to Auschwitz, 435 miles north-west of Dej.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Auschwitz fence. Photograph: Mondadori Collection/UIG/Rex

At this point my family was still together. They told the women and children to go to the left, and that’s what my mother and two sisters did. My father and I were inspected by [Josef] Mengele, who was holding a baton, and went to the right. It was the last time I saw my mother and sisters alive.

Other Jews responsible for telling us the rules approached us and said: “Farvos inem gehenem zayn’ du kumen aher?” (“Why the hell did you come here?”) “Didn’t you hear the warnings?”

I saw some soldiers toss a baby up and shoot it in mid air for fun and from then on I had no doubt about what awaited us here.

I worked out pretty quickly certain survival tricks. That if the guards called us to line up in front of the barracks, I should hide or sneak into another barracks. The safest place I could find to hide was in the yard near the bathrooms where all the dead bodies were brought and piled up … I would get on the pile, lie down next to the dead bodies and pretend I was one of them.

They gave us food in barrels. When the barrel was empty, I could get inside and scrape the leftovers from the bottom. In that way my dad and I got extra food.

I remember the chimneys with dark, thick smoke rising from them; dogs barking all the time. From Auschwitz, they moved us to Birkenau, then to Mauthausen-Gusen. Every morning there were dead bodies along the barbed wire fences around the camp. The electrified fences instantly killed anyone who touched them. Perhaps these were simply acts of suicide.

When we were in Gusen penal camp, my father, who was 50, one day just gave up and said he couldn’t continue. From that moment I was totally alone. In February 1945 they moved us to Gunskirchen, Upper Austria. It was here that I witnessed starving people eating human flesh. We were liberated by Americans and Canadians in Gunskirchen. The Germans had simply left the camp, and with an absence of drama we just walked through the gates. The first thing I did was to knock on a local resident’s door and ask for permission to take a shower. Somehow, I managed to meet up with my brothers, David and Shuli. We had no desire to return to Dej, to the people who had betrayed us.

I wanted to go to Israel, as that had been my father’s dream, but it wasn’t easy to get there. There was no independent Jewish state then and it was run by the British, who wanted to limit immigration.

In Italy I joined the Irgun, the Zionist underground organisation fighting for Israeli independence led by Menachem Begin (later prime minister of Israel), and travelled with an arms smuggling ship, the Altalena, to Tel Aviv. All the time I kept with me my prison uniform, as proof of what had happened to me. We arrived on the shores of Tel Aviv on 20 June 1948 and I found myself at a pivotal moment in Israeli history, in a boat full of weapons that Ben-Gurion would not let on shore. It could easily have turned into a civil war. I was shot at by Israel Defence Force troopers as I jumped into the water and the Altalena was set ablaze and sunk by the IDF. With it sank my suitcase of clothes and my striped prisoner uniform, including my hat, coat, shirt and a knife.

Henry Korman, 94, born in Radom, Poland. He now lives in Hanover, north Germany. He will be returning to Auschwitz for the first time, with the 17-year-old son of his nephew, Ethan.

“I had just finished high school in 1939 and had had all sorts of plans for my future. My family ran a hat factory, making hats for every occasion and purpose. But as the authorities began clamping down and the antisemitism grew, much of it fuelled by the Catholic church, gradually everything was confiscated – our house then the business.

We tried to get out – we’d seen the signs of what was to come, not that we could really have known the full extent of what would happen. My uncle had worked in Palestine in 1917 but had been forced to return to Poland when he got sick. We tried to use the contacts he still had there to escape, but the British (who were in control of it) wouldn’t give us permission to go there. In my mind they carry a lot of the blame for the deaths of many of the Jews – especially the Polish Jews – who perished.

We were sent to the Radom ghetto, where I spent the first years of the war working for the Jewish committee. But when they started taking the ghetto leaders to Auschwitz, I quickly changed jobs and began working in a munitions factory instead, hoping that if I kept my head down, I might be OK. But after moving from one factory to another, I too was deported to Auschwitz when the ghetto was liquidated in 1942. I was separated from my parents and three sisters, all of whom were taken to Treblinka.

The Auschwitz gate bearing the words Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free). Photograph: Mondadori Collection/UIG/Rex

On our arrival at Auschwitz they chased us off the cattle wagon, which stopped right in front of the gate with the sign Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free). I thought I was entering a labour camp, but little did I know. They asked me my profession, and I said painter as I’d picked up the advice en route to say something practical and useful. If I’d said I’d just finished high school they’d have sent me straight to the gas chambers.

One of the first people I encountered was Mengele. He told us to undress and stand in line and he went through the ranks deciding who was strong and healthy and fit for work, and who was only fit for the gas chamber. After inspecting me, he put his thumb up high, so they gave me the striped uniform and sent me to get a number tattooed on to my arm. I don’t remember the number. It’s there still, but I never look at it because it brings back too many painful memories.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Josef Mengele, left, with Rudolf Hoss, Commandant of Auschwitz, Josef Kramer, Commandant of Belsen and an unidentified German officer. Photograph: Universal History Archive/UN/Rex

After Auschwitz they transferred me to Mauthausen, then Gozen and Hanover. From there they sent us on foot to Bergen-Belsen, where I was finally liberated. It was 14 April (1945). I was so weak I could hardly stand and it was all I could do to lift my head slightly from the ground where I was lying as British army tanks started arriving to save us. But for all the great things the British did then, I can only say they made many other mistakes and what’s going on in Israel now is largely Britain’s fault.

I also resent the Americans for knowing what was going on but doing nothing about it until 1944. As soon as Hitler wrote Mein Kampf they should have known what was going on.

So I ended up in Sweden where I learned that my sister had also been in Belsen. In Stockholm I studied chemistry and it was there I found out, having lost all my family in Europe, that I had relatives in America, an aunt – my father’s sister – who had emigrated in the 1920s, so I went to live with them.

I’ve never sought any counselling or professional help – I never thought it would help. My therapy has been to go and talk to schoolchildren about my experiences. My advice to them is to respect their teachers and have a clear plan for the future.

I did go back to my home town, Radom, just once in 1996 or 1998. I saw our house, and stood in the backyard, but my heart was bleeding so much, I didn’t dare go in. I walked up the street and it was like walking on history – something lost and far away, but also very close. Here was the road on which I used to run to school, to the factory, but I had to get away very quickly. I was thinking: “I’m here, but where are all of them, my family?”

Auschwitz has been in my head all these years. I just need to close my eyes and instantly the horror comes back to me Henry Korman

I now live in Hanover, Germany, which doesn’t feel strange to me to be living in the land of the murderers, because it’s a different country now. At least people listen to my story here. When I travel to the US nobody asks me, so I never say anything. But I have a hunch that as soon as his feet touch the ground in Auschwitz, my nephew’s son will start to ask questions.

I never dared to start my own family or have children of my own. I was just too afraid of making those close bonds.

When your relatives die, there’s usually a place you can go to pay your respects, like a cemetery with a grave where you can lay a stone and talk to them. The only place I have is Auschwitz and going back there for the first time will be the first and last chance I have to be able to return to the people I loved who I lost there and in other concentration camps.

My family are always with me. I carry pictures of them in my pocket the entire time, wherever I go, even when I go to sleep they are with me. To this day I still don’t know the circumstances of their deaths or even where they died.

Auschwitz has been in my head all these years. I just need to close my eyes and instantly the pictures of the horror come back to me. I worry what will happen when I and others like me are no longer here to tell the story. I want people to keep reading about it and for them to leave tears on the paper.