The children of Auschwitz speak - we should listen while we still can
Play
Paula Lebovics well remembers the happiest of her days as a child in Auschwitz. "We were on the top bunk and we were laughing when the planes came and bombed the live wire," she says.
“It was probably the first time in a long while we were laughing and I can’t forget that.”
The small woman with a blonde pageboy cut laughs as she recalls that January day precisely 70 years ago. She seems to exude the light-heartedness of the 11-year-old she was when Russian troops liberated the camp.
Lebovics, born in Poland but now living in California, has come to the former Nazi death camp to commemorate the event with other survivors.
“I remember too many things,” she says. “But I am glad I have the memories, because it is all we have.”
Unlike Lebovics, her friend Miriam Ziegler, 79, has come to revisit Birkenau for the first time since 1945.
She was also born in Poland but has made her life in Canada. “I was in Auschwitz with the March of the Living, but when I saw the displays of the hair and of the shoes and of the suitcases, I could not go on, and I could not go to Birkenau,” she says.
Birkenau was where she saw her father for the last time, the same father that she looked for and never found every time she saw half-starved men in the striped suits the inmates wore.
The carefully groomed woman with white curls no longer remembers being brought to the white tiled room with other children for the notorious Doctor Josef Mengele to carry out his pseudo-scientific experiments on. But she does remember waking up in pain back in the wooden barracks where she was housed with the other children.
For years Birkenau appeared in the nightmares that have robbed her of sleep her whole life long. Ziegler visited Birkenau on Sunday with her daughter Adrienne and is happy to have been there, despite the snow and icy wind.
“There were all the people and the many young people, from all over the world, speaking English and German and Polish and Hebrew. And I saw the shock in their faces and I saw their tears. Last night I could sleep, for the first time,” she says.
Eva Umlauf, at 72, is too young to have memories. She was 23 months old when she arrived from Slovakia with her pregnant mother. “Of course at the age of two and a half you don’t have conscious memories, but all of us carry this burden of Auschwitz on her backs,” she says. “You’ve got a number on your arm for life.”
Umlauf, who has lived in Munich since 1967, has spent her working life as a psychoanalyst. For her, returning to Auschwitz is part of the healing process, an acceptance of the past.
“It’s an obligation, as in a few years’ time the last survivors will fall silent and will no longer be able to bear witness,” she says.
“When you are here, you encounter not life, but death. This is coldness, this is emptiness, this is scorched earth. But it is nevertheless my biography,” Umlauf says.
Turning to the debate about Vladimir Putin’s decision to stay away, she says she would have invited the Russian president.
“It’s a two-edged matter. On the one hand, one asks oneself whether he ought to be here, given what’s happening in Ukraine, but it was Russia and the Red Army that liberated Auschwitz.”
Although top politicians were not specifically invited by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, French President Francois Hollande and German President Joachim Gauck were present, along with representative from around 40 countries.
Romanian-born Eva Kor recalls the liberation by the Russians, just days before her 11th birthday.
“I could not see in the unbelievable snow storm, and then in the distance we saw lots of people and they wore white camouflage and were all smiling,” Kor says. “We ran up to them and they gave us chocolate, cookies and hugs.”
Along with her twin sister Miriam, she too was among the children abused by Mengele, who specialised in experimenting on twins.
“We survived against all the odds,” she says, recalling how they had just one aim after the liberation – to go home.
The twins are shown on a famous Russian photograph for which they were asked a few days later to don their striped suits once more.
“Some of the children refused. They found it demeaning to wear the prison uniform again,” she says.
Lebovics is also in the photograph. They were wearing layers of clothes that were taken from the stores after the electrified fence stopped working.
“It was not like that, so for me it feels not like the real picture – and shoes. I can’t remember that I wore shoes in Auschwitz.”
