Remembering the horrors of the Holocaust

Now, in the second and final part of an extended feature on the Holocaust, we look at the far-reaching impact of the Nazi’s ‘final solution’ – and the scars that remain on the generations which followed. ADRIAN IMMS interviews the relatives and descendents of those who were there

‘My husband grew up in a split second’

AS a young teenager, Alfred (Abram) Huberman thought his journey at the hands of the Nazis was a big adventure.

He had already suffered at the hands of the Germans when his hometown of Pulawy in eastern Poland was bombed and his house destroyed in September 1939.

Yet, despite this and the killings of his uncle and older sister in Warsaw some 80 miles away, he was still a boy at heart.

The Germans rounded up all the Jews and separated the men from the women.

Mr Huberman lost his family and, before being loaded on to a lorry, had to help bury the body of a dead Jew.

“One of the men onboard the lorry bribed the German guard to let him jump off. But when he did, the guard shot him,” said Shirley Huberman, Alfred’s wife.

“That’s when Alfred grew up,” she added, “That’s when he knew it was real and not an adventure anymore.”

What followed for Alfred was a series of gruelling terms at concentration camps.

On entering his first camp, Skarzysko Kamienna in Poland, in 1942, Alfred had to drill holes in shells to insert detonators.

The job gave him tuberculosis and the yellow TNT powder in the shells ate into his skin.

From her home near Old Shoreham Road in Hove, Shirley told The Argus: “You were nothing, you were worthless, you weren't human.

“The survival rate in the camps was just six weeks but he lasted 18 months.

“He said it was out of sheer luck.”

His journey continued to Czestochowa and then to Buchenwald.

When he first went into Buchenwald his captors plunged him in a vat of disinfectant, with the Germans using sticks to push heads under the surface.

His ordeal was then extended to Remsdorf, a camp that was not finished, meaning his first night was spent sleeping in a field in the snow.

Once, when Alfred had an abscess in his tooth, he had to pass it off as toothache after a guard questioned his swollen face.

Shirley said: “When you were sent out to work you couldn't come back empty-handed. You either had to carry back a dead body or some bricks. And there was no reason, it was just cruelty.”

Towards the end of the war Alfred was taken from a camp and put on a train.

Shirley said: “The train was bombed and they were so pleased. I mean, they were frightened but they knew it was the Allies.”

The prisoners were then taken on a death march where those who could not keep up were shot and pushed into a ditch.

They marched through the Sudetenland, Hitler’s annexed part of Czechoslovakia.

Alfred’s journey ended at the Theresienstadt camp, where he was liberated by the Russians.

On liberation day he looked out of the window and saw a Russian tank.

The driver waved at him and said hello.

Shirley said: “He said it was the most wonderful feeling when the Russians came into the camp.

“The first thing he did was go for a walk around the town. He wanted to feel freedom.”

He was made to wait, though. His liberation came on the last day of the war, May 8, 1945, some three-and-a-half months after Auschwitz was captured.

Shirley said: “The Nazis kept moving the prisoners.

They didn’t want the Allies to know what they were up to.”

Indeed, when the Russians turned up in the Theresienstadt camp, they opened a cupboard and a pile of dead bodies fell out.

Shirley said: “Normal people like us couldn't imagine why people would want to do that.

“He was there and, living through it, even he couldn't understand.

“He said if one guard was watching them he was nice to them, but if there was more than one...”

What worked in Alfred’s favour was his age. He did not know how old he was.

Being about 13, he was able to pass himself off as old enough to work for the Germans, and avoid being sent to the gas chambers.

Before the war Alfred had more than 50 relatives. None survived except his sister, who somehow live through Auschwitz.

After the war, the British pledged to accommodate 1,000 survivors.

Following a spell in the North of England, Alfred, inset left, moved to Hove in 1946.

Shirley met him at a Jewish youth club in Hove in 1953 when she was 19.

They married and had three children together: Bryan, Caroline and Maurice.

Alfred worked as a tailor in Hanningtons in North Street until the shop closed in 2001.

He died in 2011, aged about 83.

Shirley, 80, said: “He had all these scars from the things that happened but he was the kindest person you could know. He wasn’t bitter.

“He said if you are bitter it eats you up. You would imagine he had all sorts of hang-ups but he didn’t.

“He didn’t want to talk about it but he thought he should do because he wanted the world to know what was going on.

“A lot of people didn’t know anything about it and he was pleased to tell it.

“Of course, he never made it as bad as it obviously was, because it was hell.”

‘My father was bitter – he lost his whole family’

AFTER Julie Rosehill’s father died, she opened a small metal box handed down to her. The contents made her shiver.

She said: “There was a yellow star in there, possibly belonging to my great uncle.”

The box also contained letters from her grandfather to the Red Cross, trying to find his family (Julie’s great-grandparents) along with a number of Jewish prayer books.

The 60-year-old, who lives near Hove Park, said: “I had no idea there would be a yellow star in there. Can you imagine how I felt? The shivers ran up my spine.

“I knew they had been murdered.”

Her grandparents and related-family lived in Holland and were killed in the Holocaust.

While Julie’s grandfather came to England before the war, his brother (Julie’s great uncle) was hidden by his German wife, who was not Jewish, in a wall cavity.

His hiding place was just down the road from renowned Holocaust victim Anne Frank.

Julie said: “My father would not talk about it so, although I knew our family had been murdered in the camps, I did not really appreciate it until I saw the letters in Dutch and mainly the yellow star.

“My father was very anti- German – he wouldn’t buy a German car. He was bitter because he was an only son and lost his family.

“The SS had such a sadistic streak – how could they kill people like that?

“There were lots of doctors and scientists among the Jews.

“Just think what we could have achieved if those people had survived.

“A rabbi said I should bury the box with my father out of Jewish custom but I do believe the world should know, especially in these difficult times.

“You look at ISIS beheading people and you think it could so easily happen again.

“I just don’t understand why people can’t live with each other.

“I think Teresa May did a lot by standing up [after the Paris gun massacre] and saying she can’t believe how bad it’s got that Jews have to say they don’t feel safe.

“My son and I visited Krakow last year and it is so chilling to think your family were there and what the Nazis did – it should be shouted about and never forgotten.”

‘Holocaust reinforces my family bond’

IT was one hurdle after another for Marianne Jakabfi and her sister Eva during their five-month pilgrimage to escape the clutches of Auschwitz.

Growing up in Oradia, Transylvania, they found themselves in a Hungarian ghetto in May 1944.

Marianne’s granddaughter, Julie Green, of Upper North Street, Brighton, retells her escape.

She said: “When rumours started in the ghetto that people were being transported to Auschwitz, my grandma’s parents told her and Eva to escape.

“Of course they did not want to leave but their parents said it would give them hope.”

Julie, 37, explained their plan to get out: “There was a visiting day where non-Jews were allowed to visit the ghetto to say goodbye to their friends before they were shipped to Auschwitz.

“The sisters began to unpick the threads of their yellow stars so they were just hanging off and could be ripped off quickly and easily.

“As the visitors were leaving, they began walking and talking with a family they didn’t know, ripped off their yellow stars and got out.”

Trekking through woods, they eventually arrived at their school teacher’s house. After crossing the border into Romania, they went straight to a police station. But Romania had since joined the war and the girls were arrested and imprisoned with their belongings confiscated.

Julie said: “By an unbelievable stroke of luck one of the guards recognised them through their father who had helped him a few years earlier and let them go.”

They went to the coast and got on one of three boats used for Jewish refugees. Two were torpedoed by German submarines, while theirs was shipwrecked in Bulgaria.

After being rescued, the two girls walked and hitched-hiked through Turkey and Lebanon, living off bread and olives, to get to Israel.

After the war was over, the girls were reunited with their mother through the Red Cross. Julie’s father, born in Israel in 1950, moved to England in 1966.

The journey has made Julie appreciate her freedom.

She said: “I have been raised with a strong sense of Jewish identity and family roots.

“Traditions made our family close and the bonds between us are strong. This is undeniably reinforced by the Holocaust.

“Has the world at large learned anything? I think we know the answer to that. There has been more genocide since and we stand by, incapable of doing anything.

“We continue about our lives while people are being tortured the world over.”

‘Kristallnacht was enough for me’

THE Night of Broken Glass was enough for the parents of Hans Levy to send him away from Germany.

In November 1938, the Nazis stepped up their campaign against the Jews with an assault on their shops, houses, belongings and identity.

The 88-year-old, who now lives in Hove, remembers the attack on their home in Bielefeld in western Germany.

He said: “Our house was completely destroyed.

“All the windows were smashed. They came in the middle of the night while we were living with my grandmother.

“My father and uncle were attacked with horse whips.

“Nobody knew Kristallnacht was coming. It was only later that we got to know it was a national thing. It was the prelude to the Holocaust, really.”

It was after this that the Germans decided to let children leave the country.

Hans told The Argus: “We thought the persecution couldn’t last forever.”

His parents were left behind in Germany and eventually ended up in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

His sister, also in Auschwitz, lived through it before moving to California.

In January 1939 Hans embarked on a train journey from Bielefeld in western Germany to Amsterdam in Holland on “kinder transport”, eventually getting out of Holland as the Germans invaded.

On a cargo boat called the Bode Graven, he escaped as a 13-year-old, with 80 other children, to England.

On the first night, the boat was machinegunned by German planes but luckily no one was injured.

He arrived in Liverpool, where the captain handed the boat over to the merchant fleet.

But his war wasn’t over – he was later involved in the Blitz in Manchester.

Hans said: “It’s now three quarters of a century ago and I sometimes think about it.”

He moved to Brighton in 1972 and now lives in Hove near the County Ground. His brother, 87, lives in Rugby.

Hans visited Germany five years ago and read a “boastful” newspaper cutting in an archive which said the Germans sank the Bode Graven with children onboard.

He said: “That wasn’t quite true – I am still here.”

Having been to Germany, which is a “different country now altogether”, he acknowledges the countries are allies and said: “Hopefully it will stay that way.”