Meet the Sussex survivors of Nazi Germany's 'final solution'

SEVENTY years ago today, the Allies liberated Auschwitz, one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps.

The camp became a monument and reminder of the cruelty perpetuated on an industrial scale. In the end, as part of Nazi Germany’s “final solution”, about six million Jews and members of ethnic minorities were exterminated.

Holocaust Memorial Day, today, exists to commemorate those who suffered and remember what happened.

Shindy Perez, 86, who survived Auschwitz

THE most traumatic experience of the Holocaust for Shindy Perez was not being forced on to the cattle trucks that drove millions towards their fate.

Nor was it lying on her stomach while German soldiers randomly killed prisoners in the open air.

Nor, even, was it being stripped naked and driven into a gas chamber. It was the moment she was separated from her grandparents.

“We couldn’t even say goodbye to them. They were ushered and gone, and that was it,” she remembers.

It was May 1944 when Shindy arrived at the gates of Auschwitz. She held hands with her grandmother but the Germans wanted to separate those who could work, aged 18 to 45, from those who couldn’t.

Shindy said: “My grandmother wasn’t educated but she knew what was happening.”

Aged 15 at the time, her grandmother pushed her into the workers’ queue and said she was 18.

Shindy tried to run back and hold her grandmother’s hand but she was pushed away again.

Shindy said: “If my grandmother had said I was 15, I would have gone off towards the gas chambers with her.

“We didn’t believe when we were separated from our grandparents that we would never see them again. My grandparents said, ‘We are old, we have lived our lives. You are young – you will survive whatever happens.’ But we said no, we’ll go with you. We would never separate from them.”

Until that moment.

Pictured: Shindy Perez, middle row third from left

She left with her two aunties, who were also teenagers, then had to get through an alphabetical listing process. She became a number, with her new identity printed on her clothes – when they finally came.

She said: “We were taken to a place to undress and were standing naked in a line all day until it was our turn to get shaved: our heads, under the arms and over our private parts.

“If they pinched the skin with the clippers, they put petroleum on the cuts and it was stinging all over the body. When they were finished with us we were taken into a shower room with the men. We couldn’t recognise each other; a lot of the men had beards before.

“No water came through. If we were older they would have pushed the gas through, but we went through the other end.”

They spent the night on the concrete floor of a brand new toilet block: “We huddled together to stay warm but we were numb.”

Born in April 1928, Shindy, a Hungarian Jew, lived in the town of Tiszaujlak, then part of Hungary and now in Ukraine. They had to walk 20km to a ghetto when removed from their home.

Shindy, now 86 and living in Hove, remembers being put in the wagons to go to Auschwitz in Poland.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” she said.

The sheer horror of what Shindy saw at the concentration camp in Poland means memories are at times vivid and at other times vague.

“Everything shut down in my mind. There was nothing registering, you were protected. It may have been a shock to the system, everything was shut off.

“The mind was protecting the body somehow.

“It was like taking animals to the slaughter – worse than animals, because at least animals are killed and then they are gone.”

She was given a job making bullets on a lathe. Her auntie at one point tried to make a knife to kill herself but the others intervened.

Shindy said: “You don’t know what day it is. You had SS men watching you – you couldn’t talk. You had to stand there with this nutcase shouting and screaming at you.”

During her two-week stay, working 12 hours a day, they stuck together, even when they had to stand in rows for roll call.

From Auschwitz, they went on a train to Riga in Latvia, where Polish Jews had been kept for three years already.

She stayed there until October, working in a factory in the industrial town of Kiviõli in Estonia.

She said: “It was survival of the fittest. They made you stand in a line and would pick out the ones who looked weak or pale.

“I especially stood next to my friend who looked pale. It made me look stronger.

“They picked her out and took her away in a lorry.”

On its return, a message scrawled on the lorry read: “They are shooting people.”

From there Shindy went to Talin and spent a torrid journey on a ship with Russian prisoners in the hold for two nights and a day before arriving in Danzig.

Still with her aunties, she was put on a barge to Stutthof concentration camp, where the lack of food was showing.

Her last stint was spent as a worker in Germany between October 1944 and March 1945.

This included a month at the concentration camp Belsen.

Her freedom was bought when Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg, made a deal with the Germans in April 1945 to take 10,000 prisoners to Sweden.

A year later she flew to England with a Swedish passport and settled in Brighton.

Now 86, she lives near Cromwell Road in Hove.

She said: “Thinking about it today you don’t know how it could have happened.”

Survivor Ceska Abrahams

“THERE is nobody left here but me. There is no need to search any further.”

Those were the last words Ceska Abrahams heard her mother say to a German soldier.

Her mother was led out of the house and into the square of the Polish town they knew well.

Ceska had been pushed into the loft space above a toilet with several other children. From there, she then heard machine gun fire from the square.

She said: “They were killed on the spot. The Germans called it an ‘action’. They weren’t shouting or anything. They were very quiet.

“We knew if they found us they would kill us.”

They cried in the roof space until the evening, and then stayed in the house for two days.

It was late 1942. The ghetto they were in, in the square of Tarnow, near Auschwitz, had just been emptied.

Of Polish descent, Ceska was ten years old when the war started in 1939.

Born in Dabrowa Tarnowska, a “typical little town” in East Poland, about 20km from Tarnow, she recalls her ordeal for The Argus from her home in Hangleton.

“My brother and I were very distressed not finding our mother and sister amongst the survivors,” she said.

“We could not stop crying. Father did his best to comfort us by saying: ‘They are all right. They were taken to the camp.’ “We knew better. We heard the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun in the square.”

After three days of hunger they made their escape as clearing squads set to work.

Ceska said: “We had to pass through the square with the machine gun.

“There was a pool of blood on the ground.

“Father covered our eyes and did not let us look.”

The children hid in bales of straw until later that day when their father figured out an escape.

The Nazis used Russian soldiers to guard the ghetto and their father bribed the guard to turn his back while they jumped the fence. They made their way to an underground bunker on a farm.

It was not the first time they had visited the bunker – before a spell in the ghetto the whole family had hidden in the shelter for one-and-a-half years.

The bunker was owned by Antosia Wojcik, who Ceska says was her saviour.

Pictured: Ceska Abrahams, left, with Antosia Wojcik

They had come out when it was rumoured that the Germans were searching farms and villages for Jews.

After considering suicide they decided to take their chance in the ghetto, so they returned to break in and then the massacre happened.

Ceska remembers the ghetto. She said: “No one ventured out in the street during the day as there was a danger of being caught and lined up for target practice.

“The soldiers used to come to the ghetto frequently to shoot innocent people for fun.”

She stayed on the farm until the end of the war with her brother, father and a man from the ghetto who had some money, with the last six months spent largely in the bunker.

She said: “We had an added responsibility to survive and keep alive the memory of our murdered family.”

Finally, the Russians over-ran the farm and drove off the Germans.

Ceska remembers: “We saw them running. I was happy but also not happy because my mother couldn’t be with us to see it.”

Ceska, now 85, worked at a nursery until she was 70.

She moved to Sussex from London in 2001.

She said: “I couldn’t sit at the table with Germans now. If I see a young German now, they can be very good but how do I know that their grandfather didn’t kill my mother.

“So how can I feel good about them? I know the children shouldn’t suffer because of the parents but, you know...

“But thank goodness we are all right – I have my family, two daughters and a son, my grandchildren, and that’s the main thing. For years I couldn’t talk about it,” she added.

Eventually she wrote a memoir to catalogue her early life.

“Nowadays you are free. I like my garden, the flowers, the daylight,” she said, savouring the brightness flooding the room after her memories underground.

“People should know. Of course, you don’t want to blow it up too much or glamorise it, but they should know. The trouble was that the nation that perpetrated it was very high on culture and very intelligent.

“It’s very important for young people to know. It’s my duty.”

LADISLAUS LOB, born in Transylvania, was just six at the outbreak of war.

In 1944, aged 11, he was rounded up into a ghetto with his father and taken to northern Europe.

He said: “My dad knew it wasn’t good and together we escaped from the ghetto.”

Bribing policemen and using forged documents, he managed to smuggle them to the relative safety of Budapest where they heard about a man called Rudolf Kastner, who was said to be doing a deal with the Nazis.

In return for payment, Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust, promised to save 1,700 Jews.

“We were in the right place at the right time,” said Professor Lob, a retired University of Sussex lecturer.

Thrown in the back of a cattle truck, the men, women and children were told they would be taken to Palestine. After eight nightmarish days crushed together, they arrived at their destination but soon realised it was not what they were promised. They were at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Despite the harsh realities of the camp, Kastner’s deal saved Professor Lob and his father.

Now in Brighton, Professor Lob brought out a book called Dealing With Satan, covering the affair of Zionist-Nazi relations in Hungary in 1944.

Professor Lob remains sceptical of what people will learn from the Holocaust.

Pictured: Ladislaus Lob, aged 11, on his arrival in Switzerland

He said: “The world is a big place and it takes all sorts to make it. What happens in one corner may not happen in another. The Holocaust devastated some parts of the globe, but impinged less on others.

“Some aspects of the Holocaust – in particular hatred of the “other” – were common to all humanity.

“Others – in particular the ancient prejudices of anti-semitism leading to mass murder on an industrial scale – were unique.

“So far the horrors of the Holocaust of 70 years ago have not been duplicated. In that sense perhaps there has been a change for the better, but we can’t be sure that it will last.

“And as for the new horrors of our own day there is no guarantee that given the right circumstances they couldn’t evolve into new Holocausts.

“What can we do? Sit back and close our eyes or try to keep the horrors alive in people’s memory and hope that they will recognise the signs and avoid them?

“I am not sure if education is the best way to achieve anything, but I can’t see any other way.

“There is too much ignorant talk in both private and public life. British Jews (or for that matter French or Hungarian) need not be afraid of a Holocaust in the foreseeable future but they should beware of fanaticism abusing the British idea of fair play, which may be self-deception or hypocrisy under a different name.

“For every beneficial development in the world there is something equally hostile.

“Unfortunately to destroy is easier than to build. Which of the two ultimately wins is a matter of chance, but I hope we can give a nudge here and there to help the constructive forces.”

•  Don’t miss part two tomorrow, featuring interviews with descendents of Holocaust survivors