Dudley College hosted their annual Holocaust address, with a survivor there to talk to students and public about her journey in life.
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00:00my father could do, because it had become the law.
00:05And at the end of the first month after the Auschwitz,
00:12a Nazi family came to our home and said,
00:17you have a week to get out.
00:21This is our home now.
00:24And there was nothing my parents could do
00:27because it had become the law.
00:31So from then on, we were homeless,
00:34and my dad didn't have a job, I had to go to school.
00:38And we kind of camped out wherever we could.
00:42Anybody who had a room to spare for a week,
00:45or a weekend sometimes, a month,
00:49we would just wait from place to place.
00:52And there were other laws.
00:55Jews were no longer allowed to shop in certain shops,
01:00and only allowed to shop in other shops
01:03from certain times of day.
01:06Jews were not allowed to go to any public places.
01:09We weren't allowed to go to a cinema,
01:11or a theater, or a concert.
01:15Jews were not allowed to go swimming.
01:16Jews were not allowed to go ice skating.
01:19Jews were not allowed to go to the public park.
01:22We and I were no longer allowed to play in the park,
01:25and we were no longer allowed to go ice skating or swim.
01:30Life became scary.
01:34Because we never knew what was going to happen next.
01:39And one of the things that was happening next
01:43was that we had to register.
01:45Wherever we were staying, we had to register
01:49with the local Nazi police.
01:53And that was because the thugs,
01:55the Nazi thugs of the party, of the Nazi party,
02:00the SA they were called, the brown shirts,
02:06they were ordered every night to go to places
02:10where Jews had registered they were staying,
02:13and they would take the men, sometimes the women,
02:16but mainly the men, out of their beds
02:20in the middle of the night,
02:21and they would take them down into the street
02:23and make them scrub the pavements
02:27and clean the public lavatories,
02:31sometimes with a toothbrush.
02:36Now, you could not get more humiliated,
02:40and he took that shirt off, and he raised it up,
02:45and then he never really hurt them,
02:48but he pretended to hurt them.
02:52And that used to make all the other children laugh,
02:56and the worst thing was, it made the teachers laugh.
03:01So, I'm sure you can imagine that life at school
03:06for a Jewish child was not a party.
03:12I love the lessons he took during the school year.
03:17And then, that was something called Kristallnacht,
03:25the November Poveron, when all the synagogues
03:32in Vienna and Berlin, and in all the big cities
03:37in both countries were set on fire,
03:40and all the windows were smashed,
03:44all the windows were smashed of any Jewish properties
03:47or anything that was left that they thought was Jewish,
03:50and it was set on fire.
03:52And at the time, we were staying in somebody else's flat,
03:56in a block of flats, and I can't remember
04:00whether it was the second or the third floor,
04:02but we were high up, and we heard this eerie noise.
04:08We didn't know what it was, and we went to the window,
04:14and we saw flames, and then we opened the windows,
04:17smelled smoke, and it was a long time
04:20before we realized that the windows were being smashed,
04:25and residences and synagogues were set on fire.
04:31It was such a terrifying event
04:35that the rest of the world took notice.
04:39They saw what was happening, and they either could not
04:43or would not dismember any father, my aunt and uncle,
04:47but they began, our own mother lived with them as well.
04:53So there were four of them, and it was more difficult
04:57for four people to get visas or permission
05:01to any other country than it was for three people.
05:05They had also tried from the beginning after the Auschwitz
05:10to try and get visas, but it had been more difficult
05:15because there were four of them, and one of them
05:18was considered to be an old woman.
05:23They had almost completed all those papers
05:27and all those things, and they did have visas
05:30to come to England.
05:32They were about to come.
05:34We were expecting them, and then the Second World War
05:39broke out, and all the borders were closed.
05:43There was no way for people to move between two countries
05:49that were at war with each other, and of course,
05:52England had declared war on Austria as well as on Germany.
05:58So they were truly stuck.
06:02They could no longer leave.
06:07And they were taken first to a kind of collection point
06:15for Jews where they were shoved together,
06:19and my grandmother, our grandmother, died there
06:24very quickly.
06:26And Bubi and his parents were then sent to Auschwitz,
06:35and my aunt was gassed on arrival.
06:43Bubi and his father were then made to be slave laborers,
06:50and they were sent from one place to another,
06:54and only Bubi survived that.
06:59And as the Allies began to advance towards the end
07:04of the war and liberated camps, Bubi was sent
07:08from one camp to another, and he finished up
07:13in a small sub-camp called Gunskirchen,
07:18where they were sending prisoners who could no longer work,
07:26and they had no longer the facility to gas them.
07:32So they dumped them into this small kind of place
07:37that had enough space for, I think it was 3,000 people,
07:44and maybe 30,000 people.
07:48And he was liberated on May the 5th, 1945,
07:57and the American officer who liberated the camp
08:02wrote his impression in a diary,
08:10and Charlotte is going to read it, because I can't.
08:15We entered the first building, which was originally built
08:21for 300 prisoners, and now housed approximately 3,000.
08:28Row upon row of living skeletons jammed so close together
08:34that it was impossible for them to move,
08:37even if they could have generated enough strength to do so.
08:43The place was crawling with lice.
08:48A little girl, doubled up with the pains of starvation,
08:54cried pitifully for help.
08:57A dead man rotted beside her.
09:02An English-speaking Jew from Ohio hummed,
09:05the Yanks are coming, and then burst out crying.
09:11Few of those remaining alive could stand on their feet.
09:17A rabbi tripped over a dead body
09:20as he lifted his face towards heaven.
09:24I could not understand what he said, but it was a prayer.
09:34To be was one of those skeletons that could not be moved.
09:40He could no longer stand.
09:43He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died,
09:48about two days before his 17th birthday.
09:56Now, he and his family were four of the six million
10:07who were murdered.
10:11Six million is, as somebody said to me this morning,
10:16it's a number, it's a funny word.
10:18What's six million mean?
10:19Six million, what does it mean?
10:23Would you please be kind enough to stand?