Original subtitles

Images of Auschwitz... ECHO: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor...

..and Nazi attempts to annihilate the Jewish people

were originally filmed almost entirely in black and white.

But for the first time,

some of these images are being transformed into colour.

Colourisations can get the image closer to what it actually was.

I've seen it, and I can't erase it in my mind.

Auschwitz is a story

that should never be allowed to fade from memory.

I couldn't talk about what I went through for about 50 years.

Once we entered there, we thought we'd entered hell.

All I see is guards yelling at us,

"Get out quickly. Take nothing with you."

In the distance, I see flames coming out of chimneys.

I said, "When will I see my mother?"

And she looked at the chimney,

and she said, "Your mother is burning there.

"You'd better talk about her in past tense."

Anybody that survived the camp will live forever.

Among the last remaining survivors of the Holocaust

are the stories of a world lost...

..and a life denied.

I grew up in this shtetl in the Carpathian mountains.

There was a very vibrant Jewish Hasidic community.

Life was good.

I was born in Sieradz in central Poland.

My father was a bootmaker.

Made officers' boots.

My mother's family came from Spain.

In 1394, they came to Poland.

My father was the hazzan of the town, the cantor.

My mother was a housewife. We were 11 children,

and you can imagine, every meal, what it took to prepare.

I was born in Czechoslovakia.

Our family was in that area about 100 years.

In fact, a town in one of that area,

which means "where God was born".

Most survivors alive today

were children at the time of the Holocaust.

But they did not escape being brutally uprooted from their homes,

witnessing appalling horrors, and having their childhood denied.

These are stories about resilience, defiance,

and the enduring human spirit.

They are the voices of those who lived.

They made holes in my skin and then they put ink over it,

and then the numbers stuck.

37608.

INTERVIEWER: Had you ever thought of having it removed?

No. I have nothing to be ashamed of.

The Germans should be ashamed of what they did.

I've nothing to be ashamed of. Why should I remove it?

Eastern Europe was home to about 7 million Jews,

a majority of the world's Jewish population.

Poland had the largest community, of around 3 million.

By 1945, after 12 years of Nazi rule,

the vast majority of Europe's Jews had been murdered.

The seeds of Auschwitz may have been planted

in the dust of World War I.

Germany's defeat in 1918 was followed by national humiliation,

economic collapse, and political chaos.

Die-hard nationalists and a World War I soldier

named Adolf Hitler set out to rewrite history.

They slandered 70,000 Jewish soldiers,

claiming cowardice on the front lines

led to a collapse of morale and Germany's defeat.

My father in 1919 was a decorated hero.

25 years later, I, his son, was in a cattle car to Auschwitz.

In 1933, Hitler seized power,

and a Nazi culture war against Jewish influence intensified.

It included attacks on prominent writers, artists,

musicians and intellectuals.

In 1933, new Nazi laws would lead to the total

exclusion of Jews from the German economy.

Similar laws would be adopted by Germany's European allies.

Nazi party comes into power in January of 1933 and April 1st,

Germany declares a boycott against Jewish businesses.

In time, virtually all Jewish-owned businesses were

confiscated and most Jews forced out of work.

This social and economic hell would precede the hell of Auschwitz.

In 1935, the Nazis decreed the infamous racial supremacy

Nuremberg laws, designed to protect the purity of German blood.

The Nuremberg laws stripped Jews of German citizenship and outlawed

sexual relations and marriage between Jews, Roma and Germans.

These laws justified racial breeding

and the forced sterilisations of Roma women.

The Roma way of life would face annihilation by the Nazis.

HE CALLS OUT TO HORSES

HE SPEAKS FRENCH

Some Nazi scientists believe the Roma were genetically

predisposed to criminality and traditional Roma families,

who freely travelled round the countryside,

were considered a security threat.

In November 1938,

any doubts about the Nazis' violent intentions

towards the Jews ended.

A night of Nazi terror left 1,000 German synagogues

burned down or vandalised, leaving about 100 Jews dead.

It was called Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.

The path towards Auschwitz and the Final Solution was foreshadowed.

That's the Germans coming into Poland.

One year after Kristallnacht, in September 1939,

the Nazis invaded Poland.

Hitler promised to regain Germany's lost empire

following its defeat in World War I.

I was a boy of 10.

The Germans came with tanks and the Polish army went in with horses.

It was wonderful to see all these Polish soldiers.

Unfortunately, within about two days,

they were overrun by the German army.

Germany invaded Poland from the west but also from the south.

Slovakia was in the south of Poland

so the German army marched under my window.

All of a sudden, you couldn't buy

a piece of chocolate in my whole town.

To feed a voracious war machine, the Nazis began to round up

thousands of able-bodied Jewish men and older children.

My father was taken to a work camp in Krakow.

My mom didn't want to go into hiding.

She brought my son, my brother, with her

and she wanted a way to take care of him

and herself and she volunteered to cook in the work camp.

And the irony is that my parents had a professional cook.

I don't even know if she knew how to cook.

They were transferred from at least three camps.

When they moved, they moved together to another camp.

Middle of the night, a German policeman

and a Jewish policeman came and they said because your father

escaped and your brother escaped, you will have to come.

Within months, the Nazis established dozens of forced labour camps

across occupied Poland.

At 11 years old, I went to that camp. It was called Otoschno.

I didn't know what I was getting in for because I remember camps,

we used to go, we used to stay in tents

and we used to enjoy ourselves,

and I thought that was a camp.

They were building a railway line for the attack on Russia.

The Otoschno camp was in west central Poland,

near the city of Poznan.

We started with 2,500 men, all Jewish.

Within 18 months, there were only 11 people left alive.

Every week, they were hanging people for just next to nothing.

People threw themselves on the railway line.

As the railway line passed,

they just threw themselves under. They couldn't take it any more.

Soon after invading Poland,

the Nazis established the first urban prison zone

they called a ghetto.

The ghettos were encircled with walls, fences and checkpoints.

Eventually, over 800 were established in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Jewish families would be forcibly uprooted from their homes

and sent to the nearest ghetto.

Conditions of extreme overcrowding, starvation

and disease deteriorated rapidly.

The Nazis filmed these scenes

of extreme human misery and degradation

to prove that Jews were really no different from vermin.

The ghettos were midway between a world that was lost forever

and the hell of the death camps to come.

Within a year after the invasion of Poland, Auschwitz was open.

In June 1941, Germany invades the Soviet Union,

helped by rail lines laid by Jewish forced labour.

Go into villages, towns and cities to gather the Jews,

march them out into the field or into a ravine or into the forest and

they begin the process of doing what they said they were going to do -

eliminate the Jews of Europe.

Arek beat the odds to survive 18 months at the Dachau work camp.

While he was away, his family were forced to settle

in the Lodz Ghetto where he rejoined them.

When I arrived in Lodz Ghetto, it was surrounded by barbed wire,

guarded by German SS men with guns.

There were 160,000 people in the large ghetto.

The Germans picked some people with beards,

Hasidic people and they cut their beard off

and the other soldiers stood around and laughed and joked about it.

I watched that in the square.

I've seen it a few times.

Ordinary people died in the street, on the pavement.

People just passed by, didn't do anything about it.

Conditions in the ghetto were terrible. Starvation and disease.

And I was home for two weeks, then they liquidated the ghetto.

Eventually there were 4,000 people in a church, quite a small church.

In search of water, Arek slipped outside.

The SS men shouted at me, one SS man,

and he says, "What's your profession?" I said I was a tailor.

"Raus!"

Arek was ordered to join a small group of men being sent

back to the ghetto.

By pretending to be a tailor when only 13 years old,

he cheated death, again.

My mother was in the church with my brother and my two sisters.

On that day I lost about 18 of my family.

Resistance to the Nazis in the ghettos risked arrest

and public hanging.

Armed resistance developed in the Warsaw ghetto as well

as in Minsk, Bialystok, Krakow and outside Vilna.

TRANSLATION:

Vilna, now called Vilnius, had its own underground resistance movement.

And 18-year-old Fania escaped the Vilna ghetto the day before it

was liquidated to join the Jewish partisans in the forest.

In 1944, the Nazis faced military defeat.

Hitler's ally Hungary was under threat from the Soviet army.

There was two wars going on.

One against the Allies, and another war against the Jews.

Two separate sets of people are working the problem.

In spite of the Nazis beginning to lose the war,

their efforts to annihilate the remaining Jews in Europe escalated.

The Jews of Europe, by the spring of 1944,

there were no masses of Jews left anywhere except in Hungary.

Passover in 1944,

the Hungarians announced that all the Jews have to gather

in the yard of the synagogue.

They are allowed to take only 25lb per person.

It was 6.30 in the morning.

We were suddenly told to pack our luggage.

Take with us only our valuables in a small suitcase.

Take all your money, take all your jewels.

We were packing feverishly documents,

religious items.

We had Passover dinner.

My father got up and kissed us,

and then in the morning, we were picked up.

They were taking us. We were four children.

My mother, my father, my grandfather, my grandmother,

and my uncle.

My father took his prayer shawl and his prayer book.

My mother didn't want to go.

She said, I don't want them to kill me.

I'm going to drink something.

And I said, "Mummy, you always have time to die."

And so we convinced her. And we started marching.

They took us through Main Street,

and that's one thing that I'll never forget.

And there are people working on both sides of the street,

and they looked at us as if we were ghost. They completely ignored us.

And that was terrible. That was a terrible feeling.

My mother, myself, my two sisters, my aunts,

my cousins, and their children,

we were all board into that so-called ghetto.

They made us wear a yellow star. We felt terribly humiliated.

People made fun of us.

I did wear it, but I covered it up.

My mother was a blonde woman with blue eyes.

People told me many times,

"You're so lucky because you don't look Jewish."

The nightmare of the ghettos was a glimpse of what was to come.

I don't think I was developed emotionally well enough

to understand the impending doom.

It seemed to be...

..incredible. It was the day I was supposed to get married.

I found myself pushed into a cattle wagon.

I think we were just stunned.

Certainly, I was, because I thought this is just not happening.

I couldn't believe it was happening.

There was about... 100 people in the wagon.

We had to stand up. We couldn't even sit down.

Body to body, no water, no sanitation.

That bucket was the only sanitation.

There was no windows.

The only light which came through

the wooden cracks of the cattle truck,

and I cannot tell you what a terrible journey that was.

The train was going very slow.

The first night a man dies.

We ask the SS man, "What do we do with the body?"

"Put them in a corner."

There was no corner.

People were screaming, and then berserk.

They were screaming, they were hitting others.

They went out of their mind.

My mum in the cattle cart hugged me,

and said, "We don't know where we're going,

"we don't know what's going to happen, just remember,

"no-one can take away from you what you put here in your own mind,"

and that's exactly what happened.

Everything was taken away from me.

Once we entered there...

..we thought we'd entered Hell.

Cattle cars crammed with several thousand people

arrived at the Nazis' most notorious extermination camp...

..Auschwitz.

We just...

..couldn't...couldn't breathe.

We couldn't... We didn't know where we were.

We didn't know what was happening.

The SS man yelling in German,

"Raus! Raus!" - "Out! Out!"

"Schnell!" - "Fast! Fast!"

In Yiddish, in German, in Hungarian, in every language -

"Get out of the cart!"

The elderly and the children had a big problem how to get off

and they were clubbed by the SS.

All I see is guards yelling at us.

"Get out quickly. Take nothing with you."

In the distance, I see flames coming out of chimneys.

Out comes this tall, very handsome man

with shiny boots and a rubber stick in his hand.

He points to my knees, to go to the left,

to me to go to the left,

and the rest of them are marching on.

And as I passed my father's row,

he put his hand on my head

as he did every Friday night after he came back from the shul.

And he blessed me. He said, "Judy, you will live."

These were the last words that I heard from my father.

This is the last time that I saw.

He asked, "Is this your mother or is this your sister?"

And I did not forgive myself by saying, "That's my mother."

So he points, Dr Mengele, points, my mother to go this way,

and my sister and I, and there I was with a kapo.

An inmate.

She drew my earrings out, and I was bleeding,

and I said, "When will I see my mother?"

And she looked at the chimney.

And she said, "Your mother is burning there.

"You'd better talk about her in past tense."

The spirit never dies.

These photographs were originally shot in black and white

and are part of a unique album of photos shot by an official

Auschwitz camp photographer.

It is the only photographic record known to exist...

..of Jews arriving at a Nazi extermination camp.

It was discovered by chance soon after liberation

by a Hungarian survivor named Lili Jacobs.

Some of those in the photos were from the town

of Bilke in Czechoslovakia.

I know that I was in the same train because I know that my family

and I were in the same transporter the rabbi of Bilke was.

He still had his beard because he didn't want to shave it

while we were in the ghetto, even though they ordered

all the Jews to shave it.

My father was the cantor of the town

and he was very friendly with the rabbi.

I recognised many Bilke there.

But I didn't see anybody of my family.

Here are the two brothers of Lili Jacobs, who died in Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was only one of six extermination camps in a vast

network of concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Apart from Jews, Roma, political enemies,

homosexuals and disabled people were transported to Auschwitz.

A new train platform was built in 1943 in anticipation of a surge

of close to half a million Hungarian Jews that would arrive

over a two-month period in the spring of 1944.

Here we see two columns.

Women and children and men separately, also in another column.

Decisions about who would live and who would die would be made

in an instant with camp physician Dr Josef Mengele often playing God.

Women to the left, men to the right, make four rows of five.

They seemed to have been obsessed that, immediately,

people should form into rows of five.

Giving orders - "Get out. Line up in row of five."

My mother, my sister,

my niece, my aunt, myself

and my aunt's little children,

two, four and six in front of us.

You always had to line up, rows of five,

and my brother, Joseph, would always try to make sure

to line up in the same row of five.

And this went on for months and months.

You heard sometimes that families were separated at the roll call.

One night in the middle of the night, they woke us up

and, in the confusion, we did not line up in the same line.

An SS officer came and he started to count,

"Eins, zwei, drei," meaning, "One, two, three," above face.

They took me and the rest of it to the train station

and that was the last time that I saw my brother.

They tried to take a child from the mother.

They wanted the mother, but they didn't want the child.

And she started screaming and the SS man run towards her.

I made a move from my queue,

went over to the side where fit people are being selected.

A hairdresser called us in

and they shaved our heads off.

The fright, the degradation.

I mean, for young girls like ourselves,

possibly even our mother didn't see us undressed.

We had to sit there naked for men shaving our heads.

You just... You couldn't believe that was actually happening to you.

Jewish prisoners had yellow stars stitched to their uniforms.

It was part of a colour-coded scheme of sewn-on triangles

used for prisoner ID.

Green was for criminals.

Pink for those deemed to be paedophiles, rapists and gays.

Red for political prisoners.

Black triangles were for drug addicts, prostitutes and Roma.

Here is a picture of some Bilke Jews arriving in Auschwitz.

And I know their names.

This is David Heisler.

And there are two brothers, Berger, Yaakov.

Some people were dressed in Shabbat clothing

because they wanted to look nice.

We lost our name from that day onwards.

B7608.

Well, I could see the people before me were wincing

because they weren't very gentle with those needles,

so whether he broke the needle

or whether he had no ink, I don't know.

I don't know.

But I just walked round the bed

and took up the...the line as we were walking away

and nobody realised that I hadn't got a number.

They ran out of ink so they sent somebody off for ink,

but, in the meantime, there were so many of us

there were actually trains queuing up.

They just pushed us through, so I didn't get tattoo, that's why...

I didn't get my tattoo and when I asked, they told me

they don't want to waste the ink on me. I'm going to the gas chamber.

The long row of people along the top edge of this photograph

are on their way to their deaths.

The only way we could tell the passing of the time,

once a week we were taken to be showered

and the showers, with the gas chamber, were side by side.

Until you... Cold water came down,

you didn't know if it was going to be gas or water,

whether you were going to live or not.

When cold water came down, you realised you were going to live,

probably, for another week.

LOUD EXPLOSIONS

Auschwitz had 40 sub camps, about ten of them were devoted

to making arms for the Nazi war machine.

As an 11-year-old, I was making food for the military.

As a 12-year-old I was making

armament for the military.

RAPID GUNFIRE

500 women were chosen to work in an ammunition factory.

Sent me to work in the armament factory.

We were making machinegun bullets.

The factory was devoted entirely to one product -

the anti-aircraft gun Flak - something - 38.

We made bombs and grenades.

You had to file off any rust.

If you filed off too much, it would loose in the case,

didn't fit in the case.

So tremendous facilities of sabotage in there.

You had to put it in and turn it round and round.

And if it went smoothly,

that means that the gum solution had settled and they were ready.

But very often they didn't go round smoothly,

but we still send them through.

I don't think I made any of mine ever made it.

The factory owners paid the German government a mark a day for

every one of us.

First time we were worth something.

A meal consisted of one slice of

rock-hard black bread

and one cup of painted water.

And that was for 24 hours.

Their plan was they called it...

HE SPEAKS GERMAN

Um, "destruction, through hunger."

People developed three different philosophies of how to eat

this little portion of bread.

Some of them took it and just ate

a crumb and hid the rest in their bosom.

Others cut it into three pieces -

one for breakfast, one for lunch

and one for supper.

And there were others that ate it at once because if you ate it,

there was a cure in your stomach

because there were prisoners who used to attack you

and take the bread from you.

Food was constantly on our brain.

I think the hunger, you never forget it.

I visualised that in Auschwitz,

my mother doing the challah

and make her noodles.

And she did it so fast that I thought she was gonna

hurt her fingers, but she never did.

We could smell.

We could smell and dream of the wonderful dinners that we had,

of the wonderful food, particularly on Friday night, the chicken soup

and the fresh challahs, and all of that.

We were dreaming about food.

We were talking about food and reminiscing about home.

I was assigned to work with horses and it had some advantages.

A, you were outside so you weren't cooped up someplace.

But the other advantage was the fact that horses get fed.

Horses can't speak.

So if you take some of their food, they can't tell anybody.

And, of course, oats are not very edible for man, but they got

supplemental stuff like sugar beets. They have a slight problem.

You eat a lot of raw sugar beets, you get dysentery, which is deadly.

However, if you bake them or cook them or boil them,

so all we have to do is find a place to have a barbecue.

We had a blacksmith and, of course, a blacksmith has fire.

You took two sugar beets to the blacksmith,

one for him and one for you.

We had dreams of eating and all

sorts of different things, yes.

And people died next to me.

We were ten people on a bunk and during the night one or two died.

They came with a cart and the morning, took the bodies out,

threw them on the cart and took them to the crematorium.

SS women announced if there are any girls, women, that can carry

the dead bodies from those mountains of bodies

to a mass grave, is going to earn a bowl of soup.

I got a girl from my hometown.

The arms are breaking, the legs are breaking.

And carry them, one by a hand and one by the legs and we'd walk

to the mass grave.

We did get a bowl of soup at the end of the day,

and we divided it in three.

There was love in Auschwitz among us.

If you were just for the me, me, me, you didn't make it.

We were a family of inmates.

We had to care for each other.

When people say, "How did you survive?"

We lived for each other.

You survived in...

It's a notorious thing that...

..people in the camps survived in pairs. We lived for each other.

In defiance of women stripped of their humanity by the Nazis,

Edith proposed a competition

among her friends for the nicest breasts.

A boob contest.

We were doing many things there, silly things, joking.

And the boob contest was designed that somebody

is going to have a little piece of the bread.

And I won, but I didn't eat it alone.

I shared it with everyone.

The people are so hungry that they literally

engage in cannibalism.

It is unbelievable to believe

that human beings can be so terribly

hungry as to cut a human being.

The camp next to us.

There was a hedge of about ten feet, so we couldn't see.

That's where the Dutch Jews were there.

They were not fed any more.

No water, nothing.

that they were eating the dead.

They were cutting off from here, from the thigh.

That's the only place where they still had some...some meat.

That's where Frank died.

Cannibalism broke out and people were eating other people's flesh.

I was talking to guard to please help me.

I was so hungry.

And I'm not gonna touch human flesh.

And God told me to look down.

And I realised I had grass to eat.

We truly did everything

in our power not to be dehumanised.

our barracks were taken up by gypsies

with whole families.

On one occasion, I saw Romani women with, in their original clothes...

..breaking stones on the way

when we were going to go to the showers.

In August of 1944, to make space in Auschwitz

for the expected flood of Hungarian Jews,

over 4,000 Roma, in the so-called Gypsy family camp, were murdered.

Several days before I arrived,

they were taken to the gas chambers and the crematoriums

and they were all burned

and then we took their barracks.

Even inside Auschwitz, there was resistance.

The crematorium workers known as the Sonderkommando

lived and breathed the mass killings daily.

These people knew what was happening.

They knew they worked in the gas chambers,

they worked in the shower rooms,

and, very often, they had to direct their own families

out of the shower rooms into the gas chambers.

These workers smuggled in a camera and risked their lives

to take several photos of bodies being burned

and a group of naked women about to be gassed.

The film was smuggled out to the Resistance

in a tube of toothpaste.

I'm, again, out in the field ploughing fields

and suddenly I hear this huge boom,

I see smoke coming out from an area

where the gas chambers are.

The people who work in the gas chambers and the crematorium

revolted and one of the gas chambers were blown up.

How do you get explosives in Auschwitz?

The ladies from the ladies' camp, they work in an ammunition factory.

Gram by gram...

..smuggled out explosives to the people who were involved

in actually doing all the physical labour necessary

to get the bodies into the oven and all this other stuff.

And the leader of that group was a woman by name

of Roza Robota.

Roza was from Ciechanow, Poland.

She joined the underground resistance movement

after Germany invaded Poland.

She arrived in Auschwitz in 1942.

The 1944 prisoner revolt also left three SS officers dead.

But they were caught and they were,

all the girls were hanged in Auschwitz.

The camp had to watch the hanging.

They saw these females being murdered.

You do everything in your power...

..to stay alive.

People either attacked the guards and they were shot right away...

..or they touched the barbed wires and they were electrocuted.

I never, never thought or tried to escape

because we've seen people being hanged, people who tried to escape,

they hanged them, and we had to stand around in the square

and watch them being hung.

"That will happen to you if you escape."

Whenever there was a hanging, we were all called out to watch it.

I remember shouting, "For God's sake, where is God?"

A young boy was hung

because he'd picked some bit of food up.

There were over 900 escape attempts from Auschwitz...

..with almost 200 prisoners...

..successfully breaking out.

My parents were transferred from at least three camps.

They went to camps where they were poisoned

with doing chemicals for bombs and they were making munitions.

They went to munition camps.

For two years, Estare's parents, Abraham and Anna, survived together

in brutal work camps in Poland.

My parents knew that, at this point, they were going to be separated

in August 1944, so they wanted to be together.

They wanted to say goodbye.

And they had this young man and he watched out for them.

They would have some time together.

By the age of seven, I have seen more dead people than live people,

because in the camp, every morning,

I've seen between 800 and 1,200 corpses.

Death did not mean anything.

People lost hope.

And if you lose hope and you are already starved,

it's go down, lay down, and you die.

You know that tomorrow and the next day and the next day,

it's going be the same.

Eventually, they're going to kill you, if not then,

the starvation is going to kill you. So I suffered another day.

I think I was angry, all the time, angry,

and I think that's what kept me going,

being angry about it, because...

..there was no right for this to happen.

I question if there is a God.

I started with...

11 years old, I went in my first camp.

I went in my first camp,

and then I went to Lodz ghetto, I was on my own,

and then I went to Auschwitz

and I went to Buchenwald.

What on Earth did I do?

There was a debate between those that believed in God

and those that didn't believe in God.

Where was God that allowed a thing like this to happen?

I shook my fist at God. I was told...

..many times, "Where was God in Auschwitz?"

And I say, "God did not kill my parents.

"People did."

I knew what was happening to me...

..was done by man.

I did not see God around. I saw men.

It happened.

I've lost 80 people in my, from my family, cousins, uncles, everybody.

What did they do?

I lost every one except my sister, Magda.

My whole family was wiped out,

my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles.

The failure of man...

..and the enigma of God's silence.

Maybe God made the mistake of giving man free will.

If God was omnipotent,

the Holocaust wouldn't happen.

But God is omniscient.

He knows everything that goes on.

And I can see him wringing his hands.

"My God, what have I done to make humans like this?"

It was a contest between who was going to come earlier,

the death or the Americans.

We couldn't envisage what the end was going to be.

What was going to happen to us.

There were rumours that the Americans were coming closer.

As we heard in the distance,

the duel of the artillery.

My mother got a message out to my father, because the camps

were not that far away initially in Buchenwald,

they were near Leipzig.

So there were some people that were going from one camp to the other.

So she got a message and said, "You have reason to live."

And he understood that to mean that she was pregnant.

And his brother, who was in camp with him, said,

"What did you do to her?

"What a horrible thing to do.

"She's going to get killed."

A pregnant woman was a...

..not a situation that was survivable.

It was immediate death.

In the summer of 1944, a massive Soviet offensive threatened

to overrun Nazi strongholds throughout Poland.

The Russian Army is getting close. They're within 50 miles.

Concentration camp commanders across Poland were ordered

to evacuate with prisoners and head to the German interior.

They took us on a death march.

The reason it's called a death march

is because you either march or you die.

Anybody who couldn't march, couldn't follow, was shot

and the body was thrown on the side of the road.

Some of us were very sick

and we didn't know whether we would make it.

I was about to stop.

I was getting weaker and weaker.

Friends grabbed me, like in a fireman's lift, and put me

in the centre of the column and dragged me along.

They truly saved my life.

The girls that I shared the bread with...

formed a chair with their arms

and they carried me so that I won't die.

Isn't that amazing?

People who were too weak or too old or too sick,

who couldn't go on a forced march, were put in a basement

in an infirmary and left.

And that was my mother.

The Nazi regime was reluctant to give up its prisoners,

in the belief they might still be useful in armament factories.

They still believed, even in January 1945, that they will somehow

win the war.

There was a possibility prisoners could be used as a bargaining chip

to save the Nazi regime.

And they also didn't want stories of mass murder

revealed to the rest of the world.

When we came to Buchenwald,

only 400 of us,

of 10,000, remained alive

and I was one of them.

The Buchenwald command got an order to eliminate the entire camp.

There were 80,000 prisoners in Buchenwald at that time.

60,000 prisoners were executed.

Now came our turn. The children's barrack.

Just before we reached the gate, the sirens started to sound.

The Germans closed the gates and they ran for cover.

The tables had turned.

It was beginning to dawn on us that we hadn't seen a German now

for a day or maybe two.

There was a barbed wire -

we were told that there was high voltage in the wire

and some Jew was desperate enough

to throw himself at the high voltage fence,

only to discover that there was no high voltage.

All the guards disappeared.

And 3.00 in the afternoon on April 11th, 1945,

two American soldiers walked into our barracks.

The messiah just arrived.

Our train was taken to Terezin, Theresienstadt,

was a ghetto of German Jews and Czech Jews,

and we were liberated four days later by the Russian Army.

We had typhoid, had all sorts of diseases.

We heard the sound of a tank. A very large sound.

We thought they were going to kill us there.

The first thing we noticed is the turret was not aimed at us.

And this soldier jumped out.

My father yelled, "Americans!"

The American soldier was a Jew.

And he was from Brooklyn.

He was our messiah.

And everybody singing and yelling and hooting and so forth.

By then, I was eight years old.

One beautiful spring morning, it was April 15th,

we woke up, there's daylight

and there are these soldiers in a different uniform.

And they said, "You are free."

I spoke English.

I said, "Are you sure you are not disguised Germans?"

"No, you are free."

The German soldiers threw their rifles away.

There was church bells ringing

and white sheets hanging out from the windows.

And the little girl came to me and put her hand

like this and in her hand was a painted egg.

And she says, "It's Easter Sunday."

40 days and 40 nights in Auschwitz-Birkenau and we were liberated

Easter Sunday. Can't make it up, can you?

In early May of 1945, a tank unit

of the American 71st Infantry entered Austria

on its way to Berlin.

They arrived at a subcamp of Mauthausen at Gunskirchen.

The German officers had already fled.

I was not really fully, humanly, a 17-year-old girl.

I was among the dead.

And then I looked up and it was a man,

I saw tears in the eyes

and M&Ms in hand.

I was liberated by a black person.

I never saw a black person before that.

The US Army was still segregated.

The soldiers in the 761st Tank Unit were predominantly African-American.

Three American tanks and a jeep

broke through the gate and they came into the camp.

The chaplain came in, into the children's barrack and he said

in Yiddish, "Idishe kinde, ir zent frei."

"Jewish children, you are free."

I was 16 years old.

The day of liberation was my happiest day and my saddest day.

Because I found out that nobody's around,

I am the only one, at that time, that I knew, was alive.

We thought we shall be reunited with the men of the family,

and we didn't realise they were already dead,

that they had been dead for years by then.

When they came to Bergen-Belsen, they found 13,000 corpses.

On the ground, there was barely room to walk.

Contaminated barracks were burned to the ground to contain

the spread of disease,

and bulldozers moved bodies into mass graves.

Allied forces, the US 2nd Division came in and liberated the camp.

A day before the liberation of the camp,

I was born.

Actually, I'm surprised it didn't happen before.

Western Pennsylvania is the largest concentration

of white supremacist groups.

11 people have been killed in the American city of Pittsburgh

after a gunman opened fire in a synagogue.

This is the most horrific crime scene I've seen

in 22 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Members of the Tree of Life synagogue

conducting a peaceful service...

The day that it happened, I came to synagogue...

As an ex-soldier, by instinct,

I hear shooting, I've got to find out where it comes from.

I moved my head to the passenger side

and I was facing him, eye to eye.

But I guess he figured that I don't pose a threat to him.

So he didn't shoot me. Because he said,

"All Jews must die." Why didn't he shoot me?

So I survived.

Double survival.

The worst of the worst happened to me already.

My family went through a lifetime of pain

and we don't need it any more.

Then I came to America and I worked in a factory.

I always went to the coloured bathroom.

I joined the NAACP, I marched with Martin Luther King.

See, love is not what you feel, it's what you do.

Best news I can give you,

that my grandson's wife is expecting twins.

So I'm going to have six great-grandchildren.

The best revenge to Hitler.

It is my legacy that I was born in a camp.

It's a possibility that I will be the last survivor alive.

Last living survivor of the Holocaust.

It's possible.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media