[MUSIC] I'm here today because I'm a survivor
of the Holocaust. I'm a survivor but only
just because I was born in a concentration camp right at the very end of
the Second World War. But that comes right at
the very end of my story. I start my story with this map
you can see on the screen. This is one of Sir
Martin Gilbert's maps. He was a very well-known
English historian of the Holocaust of Churchill. This map shows, certainly not all because
there were hundreds of camps, but it shows quite a
few of the main camps that existed in
Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. As I say, it doesn't
show all of them. It does show all the death camps, the red ones on the right. Everywhere where you
see the swastika, the Nazi emblem,
there you see a name, and that name indicates
either a transit camp, a concentration
camp, a death camp. The three camps that my
family were involved in are the three names you
can see in boxes. The first one is
called Theresienstadt. That is the German word for
a town in a country that used to be called Czechoslovakia and is now called
the Czech Republic. The Czech word for
that place is Terezin, which I tend to use simply
because my mother was Czech and I find it less of a mouthful than saying
Theresienstadt. The second place you
will all know of the Auschwitz Birkenau
death camp in Poland. But I'm not sure how many of you know the name Mauthausen. Certainly, I think more of you being in the
United States will know of this place as opposed to where I speak most of the
time which is in the UK. Well, I'm getting
ahead of myself. Sorry, you'll hear
that at the end. Now because I also
mainly talk in the UK, the other reason why I use this particular map is to
bring to your attention the inset in the circle in the top left-hand
corner where you can see a map of part of
the British Isles. There you can also
see a swastika. The swastika is over
the Channel Islands, over Jersey and Guernsey and Alderney because they were
invaded by the Germans. There were Jewish
people living there. They were either imprisoned
on the islands or they were sent to
concentration camps in Europe. So that shows how closely the whole thing
came to mainland Britain. Now because I'm telling
you a family story, it comes naturally to me to
show you family photographs. This is a photograph
of my German family. My father was German but Jewish. It has an interesting
place and date, Berlin, 1913, so just one year before the start of
the First World War. I'm sure you're all well aware of the fact that we are now in the last year of commemorating
100 years since that war. Up to December of 2013, there was one person still
alive on that photograph, and that was the little girl. Her name was Carla. She lived in New York and she
died in December of 2013, but she had reached the
venerable age of 100. I understand this was
a family gathering. It was where the
whole family gathered every summertime on one
of the lakes near Berlin. The people you're going
to see highlighted from that same photograph now, the adults in the background are my grandparents with their three children
in the foreground. My father is the little boy
on the right-hand side. Now in 1933 when Adolf Hitler
came to power in Germany, all those three children
by then were grown-up. They were all grown up and they all realized that it would be advisable if they could
get out of Germany. The first one to leave
was my uncle Rolf. He left Germany and
first he came to live in Holland where he met and married a Dutch lady
who was also Jewish. When the Germans invaded Holland, they managed to escape
to Switzerland; Switzerland being
a neutral country during the Second World War. There my uncle joined
this particular army. I want you to tell me what the uniform is
that he's wearing. Come on. What nationality? No. It's American. After the war, my uncle was very proud
of this photograph. He would say to us, "Look at me in GI
uniform in front of in 'my jeep'," so they were safe. My father's sister, Margot, she and her husband
and my cousin, they managed to escape
Germany quite late in December of 1938. But nevertheless,
they still managed to get on the ship that was headed for Sydney in
Australia, so they were safe. My cousin was about five
years of age at the time, but I don't happen to
have a have photograph of him at that age. Here, I think he
was graduating from medical studies at
Sydney University. He is, and I'm glad
to say, still alive. He's in his 80s now
and still in Sydney. My own father, he left Germany in 1933 and he came
to live in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia. He thought that was far
enough to be safe, it wasn't. But if he hadn't
have come to Prague, he wouldn't have met
my mother and I would not be standing in
front of you today. [NOISE] Now, I like to think of this as being
my star photograph. I hope you might agree with me by the time you've seen them all. This is a photograph of my
parents on their wedding day. They were married on
the 15th of May 1940, which was already under Nazi occupation of
Czechoslovakia. My father had been an architect
and interior designer. When he first came to Prague, he managed to get a job working for a furniture
manufacturer. Initially, he was employed
to build film sets at the Barrandov film studios
which are still there. My mother had been a law
student at the university, but when the Germans invaded, they closed all
Czech universities. Nobody was allowed to study. She decided she was going
to try to find a job that had more immediate
practical use. She decided to become
apprenticed to a milliner. Now when I talk in
schools in the UK, I think I could say 90 percent of students have no idea
what a milliner is. I imagine that several of you here might know
what a milliner is. For those of you who don't know, a milliner is a hat-maker. Now, you may think
that was rather a strange thing to go and do
to learn how to make hats. But I can assure you that in the 1940s women always wore hats. Even if they've just went
down to the local shops, they'd be properly turned out. So that was that. Now, as I'm sure, a lot of you know, when the Germans
invaded any country, they immediately
imposed various rules and regulations
upon Jewish people. There are hundreds and hundreds of those rules and regulations, and they all come under
the general heading of the Nuremberg laws. I will tell you of a few just
to give you a few examples. First and foremost, Jewish people immediately lost
their citizenship. They were no longer
allowed to vote. No intermarriage
was allowed between Jewish people and
those of other faiths. There was a curfew. Jews were not allowed to go
out in the evening. Jewish children were immediately expelled from mainstream schools. They had to go to
special schools. Jews were immediately thrown
out of the professions. They could no longer be
doctors, lawyers, teachers. Jewish people were
only allowed to go shopping at certain
times of the day, and very but the late afternoon
when there would have been as little fresh produce
available as possible. In Prague, there are trams. Jews were only allowed to go on the outside but not
inside undercover. Jewish people were no longer
allowed to keep animals. They had to hand them in. They were no longer
allowed to keep their cars or their bicycles. They were no longer
allowed to keep their telephones or their radios. There were no televisions. They were also forbidden
to go to parks, theaters, swimming
pools, concert cinemas. All those things were forbidden. Their lives were meant
to be more and more restricted within
their own communities. But because none of
these restrictions in itself initially was
life-threatening, people tended to think, well, if this is the worst
it's going to get, we can cope with this, we can live with this. But by the same token, sometimes some people would
test these restrictions, very common human reaction. I'm sure you've all
experienced it. I know I have. If you are told you are
forbidden to do something, your gut reaction
is to go and do it. Whether you actually
do is another matter. One day my mother decided
that she was going to go to the cinema despite the fact
that it was forbidden. She was sitting in the
cinema watching the film. When the Gestapo came in, the secret police, they came
in, they stopped the film, and they started to go
through the audience row by row looking at
their ID papers. My mother was terrified because she had no idea how
they would react when they got to her and when they saw the large J for
Jew on her papers. They got to about halfway through the auditorium and they stopped, but they left the cinema. They had stopped just one row in front of where my
mother had been sitting. Boy, did she breathe
a sigh of relief? Ever since she told
me about this, I was always trying to get her to remember what the
hell the film was. [LAUGHTER] She also would've dearly like to have
known what it was, but it was such a
frightening experience and it was the first, far worse was to come, but she didn't know that. It was such a frightening
experience that she obviously blanked out that memory and she never remembered. But what I can tell you is
that when we first came to the UK and when I was safely in school trying to learn English
as quickly as possible, I think my mother used to go to the cinema every single day. It was fantastic light relief for her after her
wartime experiences. She had this need, it was almost like an obsession, to catch up with the
frivolous things of life. Now one of the later restrictions
that was imposed upon Jewish people that I'm
sure you know about was the fact that they
had to wear yellow star. Although this is quite
a dark photograph, you can see the stars
on their coats. This is a photograph of my mother's older sisters
Zdena and a friend. I have a genuine yellow
star to show you, but because of the filming, I'm not allowed to move around. If any of you would like to see it closer afterwards,
you're very welcome. This is a genuine yellow star. It has the word Jude which
means Jew in German. Everybody in the
family had to wear yellow star every time they went outside their own front door. You had to buy as many
yellow stars as there were members of the family
aged six and above. My mother distinctly
remembered what she was wearing the first time she
ever had to wear one of these. She was wearing a
dark green skirt, a tan suede jacket, hat, gloves, and she
was going to the shops. She said it actually didn't look that bad on the suede jacket. But nevertheless, she was
very, very apprehensive. She was very worried
as to how people might react to her when she
went outside wearing it. But every time my mother went outside wearing yellow star, nothing ever happened to her. People just ignored it and that was the
best possible news. Nobody pointed at her, nobody laughed at her, nobody was rude to her, nobody spat at her. All those things happened
to other people, but it never happened to her. We speculated as
to why not and all she could think was
she was a young woman, she was full of self confidence and she was not
going to be cowed, she was not going to
be bullied by anybody. I think the fact that she
wasn't a bad looker must have. [LAUGHTER] But that first day when she went outside wearing yellow star
for the first time, she met another friend of hers also wearing one
for the first time. This friend was very unhappy and very ashamed
of having to wear it. This lady was walking
down the road and she was bent over double because
she was trying to hide it. My mother went up to her and basically gave her a pep
talk and said to her, "Stand up straight, be
proud to be Jewish. Don't let the bastards
gets you down." That was very much
my mother's attitude which helped her enormously. Now there's a second reason why I use this particular photograph, and that is simply to show
you that they are smiling. They are smiling because
they were out for a walk, obviously before curfew. They were engaged to be
married. They were happy. I assume that the instant that
the photograph was taken, they had forgotten that they were wearing the yellow star with any implication that it might have for them
in the future. Very fortunately for them, they had absolutely no
idea what was to come. I will tell you about them later. My mother had another sister
and her name was Ruze. Ruze means Rose. This is my aunt Rose with my cousin Peter when
he was about five. The next picture shows
Peter a bit older with a photograph of his
father, my uncle Tom. I just wonder if any
of you happen to know what the uniform
is that he's wearing? [inaudible] Sorry. British. Yes,
British Army uniform. The reason for that is in 1939, my uncle managed to escape
from occupied Czechoslovakia. He got to the UK, he
joined the British Army. He also managed to get a visa for his wife and for his child, but tragically my
aunt refused to come. The reason she
refused to come was because basically was a
very unhappy marriage. She said to her husband,
she said no, we'll be fine. We'll stay with my parents, with her parents,
my grandparents. That was the attitude I would suggest of most Jewish people in occupied countries
because initially nobody had any idea that they might
be sent away anywhere, let alone to something
called a slave labor camp, a concentration camp
or a death camp. They had no idea. They just thought if they
kept a low profile, more or less stuck
to those rules and regulations, they'd be okay. That is human nature, you hope for the best. Again, I'll tell you what
happened to them later. Also what I wanted to say is
yes, some people escaped. A lot of people came
to the United States. Yes, some people were hidden, but they were by far
in the minority. Now this is an aerial photograph of this place called
Terezin or Theresienstadt. It's about 40 miles
outside of Prague. Before the war, it was a garrison town where Czech
soldiers was stationed. But when the Germans invaded, the Czech army was disbanded
and the Germans turn this place into a ghetto
and to concentration camp. Jewish people from all over Europe were sent there
in their thousands. When I was growing up and I was asking my
mother how she was taken prisoner because I had
various images in my mind, I had read the Diary of
Anne Frank, I'd seen films, I'd seen documentaries, and I had this picture in my mind that perhaps in the
middle of one night, three o'clock in the
morning, there would have been soldiers
banging on the doors, soldiers with guns and dogs dragging people
out of their beds. I said to her, "Is that
what happened to you?" and she said, "no,
nothing like that." She said, we received a card in the post and the card said that on a certain day
at a certain time, we would have to report
to a warehouse in Prague near one of the mainland railway stations
and that's what happened. At the end of November, the beginning of
December of 1941, my father received
his card and he left. You were told you could
take a small suitcase. You were advised to
take warm clothing. You were also advised to
take a few pots and pans which indicated to
them that they were going somewhere where they
would be able to cook, they'll be able to
look after themselves, and they assumed
that they were being sent to some labor camp. A few days later, my mother received her card and she left. Not only was she carrying her
handbag and her suitcase, she was also carrying
a large cardboard box. It was about that big,
was about that deep, and it was tied
together with string. I said to her, "What on earth
did you have in the box? You have enough to worry
about, enough to carry." She said, well, I
think I had between two or three dozen
donuts in the box. I said, why donuts? She said, well, you
father like donuts. It was a very sensible
thing to do as she had no idea where their
next meal was coming from, so she was bringing food, just happened to be donuts. I said, did they get to him? She said, yes, they weren't
terribly fresh anymore, but they're perfectly
edible and he was pleased. Now my mother had to spend
three days and three nights in that warehouse with hundreds and hundreds
of other people. They weren't given
much food or water. They had to sleep on the floor. At the end of those three days, they were marched to
the railway station and the route was lined with young German
officers, 18, 20-year-old. There was one young German
officer who knew he had a bit of power
and he wielded it. He didn't harm my
mother physically, he was just a bit
sarcastic with words. I don't know if any of you, I'm sure lots of you
might speak German. I will say what he
said in German. I will then translate it. I apologize for the swear
word, but it's what he said. This soldier could see
that my mother was having great problems not only
carrying her luggage, but mainly carrying the
box with the doughnuts. Certainly cake boxes
haven't changed much at least in England. They're still made
with cardboard, although nowadays are tied
with ribbon, not with string. After three days, the moisture from the donuts was making
the cardboard soften. The whole box was coming
adrift, it was coming apart. This soldier could see
this was happening. She was having problems
with it and he said to her, which means I couldn't give a dot dot dot if that box
goes with you or not, implying that it
wasn't going to do her much good where
she was going. Now he couldn't have had any idea whatsoever what was
going to happen to her, all he knew was that it
wasn't going to be anything good and metaphorically speaking, he just wanted to
twist the knife. But she ignored him, she got on the train, she arrives in Terezin. I'm now going to show you two drawings of Terezin
because I think they're more evocative of the place
that it was at the time. These drawings were done secretly by professional artists who
themselves were prisoners. These drawings were
discovered after the end of the war
quite by chance. They were discovered buried under the floorboards and in
cracks in the walls. I use this particular
one to try to give you the impression of a
very crowded place. Because before the war when
it was a Czech garrison town, there would have been a few thousand soldiers
station there. But during the war when it was a ghetto and a
concentration camp, there were thousands and
thousands and thousands of people crammed into very,
very crowded conditions. On the inside it
looked like this. People basically lived on bunks. They would try and
to make a niche, a den for themselves with a few personal belongings that they had been able to bring. When families first
arrived in Terezin, that is the first time that those families would
have been split up. Men was sent to one part, women to another part, elderly people to another part, children to yet another part. They were able to meet up
sometimes during the day, but to large extent they
led separate lives. When my mother
arrived in Terezin, she was fortunate enough
to be given a job. The jobs weren't
paid or anything, but life was a bit
easier if you had a job. Her job was working
for the man who had the responsibility for
sharing out the food. There wasn't much food there, but what there was they tried to share out in a fair fashion. That meant that she
had access to food. When I say she had access
to food, she would steal. She would steal a
potato, a carrot, an onion, just
something with which to make a more substantial soup. That was literally of vital importance because at one time my mother had
the responsibility every single day for
trying to find food for 15 members of her close
family every single day. That was her main worry, how
on earth was she going to find enough food for
all those people? That was quite apart from
the greater worry as to what on earth was going to happen to them all in the future. Amongst the people she
was trying to find food for were her parents, my grandparents
Ida and Stanislav. The next picture shows my father as a young man
with his mother Selma. The next picture shows his
father, my grandfather Louis. Now my grandfather Louis
was the only one of my four grandparents to
have survived the war. We believe there is a
specific reason for that, although we don't
actually have any proof. I mentioned at the beginning
that my father was German, his father was German. In the First World War, my grandfather was
in the German Army. In the First World War,
my grandfather was given the Iron Cross First Class. That is the highest
military honor that the Germans bestow
upon their soldiers. What happens to him in
the Second World War? He's thrown into a
concentration camp and most of his family is killed. My grandfather was not sent East. To be sent East was a euphemism, another way of saying
you're going to be sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. He remained in Terezin throughout the war and
at the end of the war, he was found to be
alive just about. While the Red Cross
contact was made between him and my
uncle and aunt, who by that stage had returned from
Switzerland to Holland, no wonder there was
a knock on the door and there was my grandfather in the rags that he stood up in and he lived with them
for the rest of his life. When I was little girl, we used to go and visit
them quite often. It was very sad because I would come into the
room and my grandfather couldn't see me
because he had been blinded by the gas in
the First World War. He couldn't speak to
me because he spoke German and Dutch and I only
spoke Czech and English. But nevertheless, I'd
come into the room, I'd give him a kiss, I'd
say hello grandfather, and he knew that I was the only surviving
child in the family. The next photograph I'm
sure is familiar to you. It shows you the gateway to the Auschwitz Birkenau
death camp in Poland. But before I start that
part of the story, I have to tell you about
two other things that happened to my
parents in Terezin. To a large extent, Terezin was a transit camp for the death
camps because there were various categories of people who would have been
sent to Auschwitz, to their deaths, quite quickly, and amongst those groups
of people would have been, the old, the sick,
mothers with children, pregnant women, the
mentally disabled, the physically disabled,
they would have been sent to their deaths
quite quickly. But because my parents
were young, strong, and well capable of work, so they remained in
Terezin for three years. That was a remarkably long, very unusually long
period of time and my mother said luck had an
awful lot to do with it. But at the end of
September of 1944, their luck ran out, because it was on that day that my father was sent to Auschwitz, and incredibly, my mother actually volunteered to
follow him the very next day. The reason she
volunteered to follow him was because she had no
idea where he'd been sent, and being the eternal
optimist, she thought, well, as they had survived three
years up to that point, she thought, well, nothing
could get any worse. Little did she know, but she thought nothing
could get any worse, they would survive, but in fact, she never ever ever
saw my father again. She heard from an
eyewitness after the war, quite soon after the war, that my father had actually
been shot dead near Auschwitz on a death march
on the 18th of January 1945. As I'm sure you know, it was liberated
by the Russians on the 27th of January 1945. That is why certainly,
I'm not sure about here, but certainly in
Europe we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day
on the 27th of January. The other thing I have
to tell you about is I'm sure you will appreciate
rather important, because it concerns my conception and my brother's conception. I mentioned the fact that when families first came into Terezin, the sexes were segregated. In 1943, my mother
discovered that she was actually pregnant,
and when I was about, I don't know 12, 13, no doubt when it would have been at this most embarrassing, well, I'm sure you'll agree
it's embarrassing at any age. I said to her, ''So how can you got pregnant with my father?'' And she replied in a very
clever way, well, she said, "It was very dangerous but your father and I got
together as when we could, and to hell with the
consequences," end of story. But it was not the end
of the story and it had very very serious consequences. Because to become pregnant in a concentration
camp was considered by the Nazi's to be a
crime punishable by death, because they were
trying to annihilate, they we're trying to murder every single member
of the Jewish race. They couldn't prevent
women coming into the camps pregnant
but the reason for the segregation was
so that they could not become pregnant while there. When the Nazi's
discovered that my mother and four other women
were also are pregnant, they made these five couples sign a document that said that
when the babies were born, they would have to be
handed over to be killed. Except they didn't
use the word kill, they used the word euthanasia. My mother had never heard
the word euthanasia, she had to go and ask
somebody what it meant. If you look it up
in a dictionary, it'll say something
like mercy killing, this would not have been mercy killing, this
would have been murder. In the event the other
four babies were born, we don't actually know what
happened to those families, we think they all
perished in Auschwitz. When my brother [inaudible]
[FOREIGN] means George, he was born in February of 1944. He was not taken away from my parents but he
actually died of pneumonia two months later and his death meant my
life and my mother's. Because had my mother arrived in Auschwitz Birkenau death camp holding my brother in her arms, she would have been sent
straight to the gas chambers, but because she arrived in Auschwitz not holding my brother, and although she was pregnant again this time with
me, nobody knew, she knew but nobody
else knew and didn't show because it was
very very early on. Again, she lived to
see another day. I'm sure that you
have seen lots of images of Auschwitz of the horrendous train journeys that people were put
through to get there. In fact, I'll ask of you
because I'm interested as well. Have any of you seen Schindler's
List or The Pianist? When Schindler's
List first came out, my mother was given
a private showing of it with another
survivor and she was interviewed afterwards
and asked her opinion. Opinions vary, but
in her opinion, she felt at least the
scenes within the camp, she felt they was
so true to life. She felt as though she'd been transported back to those days, those times and those conditions, and when we came on to
seeing The Pianist together, she was actually trembling. I don't know if a book
which is much read in English schools or British
schools is also read here. Do you know The Boy in
the Striped Pyjamas? Well, because most
certainly younger people nowadays know that book as opposed to those other two films. What I would like to
say about that is, it's a good book,
it's a good film but as I'm sure you appreciate, there's a very big but, absolutely nothing in the
book or the film could have happened because
it was based on a false premise because that little Jewish boy who was meant to be about
eight years of age, he would never have
survived a death camp more than a few hours
a day at the most, and also he would never have
met the little German boy. But John Boyd, the author, he was not writing a
historical document, he was writing a novel, he was writing
fiction and as such, I think it does have its place, but if young people come and say, this is exactly what happened. No, it is not. The train journeys, people were herded into these cattle trucks, they were so crowded that
people couldn't sit down, they were given no
food and no water and sometimes these
journeys took several days. There were no toilet facilities, there might have been a
bucket which would have been totally inadequate very quickly. By the time the trains
actually arrived in Auschwitz, in buried with the
people inside them, would have been in a very poor mental and physical condition especially the elderly
and the children. Have any of you
been to Auschwitz? Auschwitz itself consisted
of several different camps. Auschwitz I was brick built, and that is where all the
Polish prisoners were sent. That is where today it is not
only a place of memorial, but also a museum where
you have the collections. The collections of luggage, the collections of hair, the collections of spectacles, the collections of pots and
pans, all those things. But this Auschwitz II, Auschwitz Birkenau, this is
a place purely of memorial. This is where all the Jews were sent and were all the
Gypsies were sent. This photograph was taken
at the end of the war. The next photograph
shows you what it looks like today behind that gateway. This is a vast area right
back to the tree line that would have been filled
with wooden huts such as you can see
in the foreground. But because Auschwitz
Birkenau was not preserved in any way
until many years later, most of those wooden
huts just disintegrated or the wood was stolen as
firewood after the war. But what you can see
in the distance, those uprights make
for a very poignant, a very sad memorial to all those thousands and
thousands of people who died, who were killed there, because those uprights are
brick chimneys. They are nothing whatsoever
to do with the crematoria, but they are brick chimneys, because inside each hut you would have two of
those chimneys, well, that height, and they'd be joined together by
a brick tunnel, and there's a
greater tie the end. The idea was that you'd have
fuel that you burn in the great and the heat generated
would pass along the tunnel, thereby giving warmth to the hut, but of course, they
weren't given any fuel. Their lives were meant to
be to all comfortable. As I was saying, it is a
very poignant memorial to all those people
who died there. As I'm sure you know, when the trains arrived in Auschwitz, that is the first time
that the people on them had to go through what
was called a selection. Selection always
meant life or death. My mother got through a
selection because she was still considered to be
strong enough for work. This was despite the
fact that she'd been somewhat malnourished during
the previous three years. To give you an idea of my
mother's physical strength. When she was 14 years of age, she was schools junior backstroke swimming
champion of Czechoslovakia. That gives you an idea of
her physical strength. She always maintained that if this whole experience
had to happen to her. She was at the right age, not only physically but
psychologically and emotionally. She was in her mid 20s. She was tough, she was strong. She gets through a selection, and the people who did various procedures
happened to them. First of all, they were told if they'd managed to bring
any luggage with them, to put their suitcases on the ground to write
their names on them, that they would be
reunited with them later, well of course they weren't. They then were sent
into real showers. Well at this stage they
had absolutely no idea at all that anything other than a real shower existed, i.e. gas chamber. They then had
all their hair shaved. They then we're given
a striped uniform and a pair of shoes
if they were lucky. Then they were tattooed with
a number on their arms. After that, there were
sent into these huts. On the inside it
looked like this. These huts were
incredibly crowded. Some of them before the war might have been stables
that would've had say, 60 or 70 horses, but at the time that
I'm talking about, they housed hundreds
and hundreds of people, 500, 800, even up 2,000 people. When my mother and her friends arrived in a hut like this, they were so frightened
and so bewildered, they just could not work
out what this place was, and I said to the women there, what happens here,
what goes on here? When will we see
our families again? The women actually laughed at them because they
couldn't understand that anybody arriving now would have no idea what went on there. They said, "Well
we'll all go up in smoke and you never see
your families again." In that instant, they
knew what went on there. People were given hardly any
sustenance on a daily basis. They were given a
liquid in the morning, which was called coffee,
and they we're given another liquid in the evening,
which is called soup, and if they're very lucky, perhaps they might have
been able to dredge up the odd potato peeling from
the bottom of the bucket. They were given one
piece of bread. That is all they were given. An awful lot of people
just died of starvation. You would often wake
up in the morning to find corpses on
either side of you. Now apart from the selections
that happened every day, the other thing that
happened at least twice daily was
called the appell. Appell means registration. Sounds like a very
mild word, doesn't it? I think you all might have had to register to come
here. I don't know. But anyway, what it
actually meant was that every day at four o'clock in the morning and six
o'clock in the evening, everybody would have to stand outside their
hut to be counted. If the numbers
didn't tally there, we just have to stand
there till they did until there was some explanation. My mother said it was
very hard to stand stock still for hours and hours on end, regardless the weather. You tried to keep
as lower profile as you could because you had no idea how the Nazis might react to you if for some reason you drew
attention to yourself. My mother actually fainted several times during
these appells, and that could have been
very bad news for her. But she was always so relieved
when she came around to find that she was
actually being held up by her friends on either side, which meant that she hadn't
slipped to the ground, she hadn't drawn
attention to herself. Then again, she lived
to see another day. The next picture will
show you a selection. In the far distance, that long row of people
they are walking to the gas chambers to their deaths but they
don't know that. In the foreground the longer
row of people are men, the shorter row women. They are walking towards
a group of Nazi officers where they will be selected
for life or for death. My mother distinctly
remembered one of these selections where Dr.
Mengele was presiding, she only found out that it was
Dr. Mengele after the war. He was presiding and she said it was a terrifying experience because she guessed
what was happening. She heard him say, [FOREIGN] which means this time we have very good
material in front of us, not people, units of slave labor. They did not consider
the people in front of them as being human beings. Now, all the rest of my family, except for my one grandfather
and my own parents. My three other
grandparents, my two aunts, my cousin Peter and most of the other members of
the extended family, they were all sent to Auschwitz a long time before my
own parents were. When they arrived there, none of those initial
procedures took place. They were able to
keep their luggage, their clothes, they
weren't shaved, they weren't tattooed,
and they were sent to what was called
the familienlager. That meant a family camp. All it meant was
that one or two of those huts had families together. There was just one very
cynical reason why, and that was so that
they could be forced to write postcards home. My aunts, the lady wearing the yellow star in that
earlier photograph, she wrote this postcard to her cousin who still
happen to be in Prague. I want you to try to remember the first name and this lady, I will now put up
the German text. Some of you may be
able to read it and I will read you the
English translation. It starts off with the
words meine lieben. "I'm here, my dear ones, I'm here with my husband, my sister, and my nephew. All are well and in good health. My husband received a
parcel yesterday from our housekeeper and I would ask you to
confirm this to her. Please also thank
[inaudible] [FOREIGN]. I hope you're well and happy. Your parents were very
well at the time of our departure, right soon. Peter looks well." Peter is
my eight-year-old cousin. "Peter looks well and looks forward to receiving
news from you. Greetings and kisses yours Dena." Now I imagine that
you will agree with me that that basically
sounds like, having a wonderful time
wish you were here. [BACKGROUND] My aunt was desperate to get a
message out in code. She got the message
out. It was understood. It was acted upon. Several of you may have already noticed what the word was. The postcards had
to be written in German so that the Germans
could censor them. In the top left-hand corner you can see the
sender's full names. Sidonie Isidore. She'd married that man
in the first photograph. Underneath that is her birthday, the 21st of March, 1904. Underneath that it says Birkenau. Does anybody remember
the first name of the lady to whom it was sent? Olga The word Olga does not feature. Where the word Olga
should be is the word [FOREIGN] which is not
German. What language? Hebrew. Hebrew. What does it mean? Bread. Bread. My aunt was telling her cousin that
they were starving. Her cousin understood,
her cousin sent a parcel, but the contents of
it would have been stolen long before it
got anywhere near them. I'm afraid I have to tell
you that even before the postcard was sent
from Auschwitz to Prague, they were all dead.
All of them were dead. I have just actually donated this postcard to
the Imperial War Museum, Holocaust Galleries in London and I'm very glad that I'm no
longer responsible for it. Now, my mother was
sent out of Auschwitz. She was sent to a slavery camp, to an honors factory in
a place called Freiburg, which is fairly close
to Dresden in Germany, where she was made to work on this and what's
this, do you know? The V1, it was the
unmanned flying bomb. When my mother and
the other women arrived in this
factory in Freiburg, the very first
impression that they had was one of bed bugs. The place was crawling,
on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling
and they were delighted. Why? You're very close. They didn't actually
have to eat them, but it meant there
was some food there, not much, but there was some. It also meant there was
warmth there and they very quickly ascertained that there were no gas chambers there. After a few days and
went quite simply, isn't the bug starts
to bite them, but after what they
had been through now shoots, it was negligible. Unknown to my mother she was to spend the next six
months in Freiburg. That is from October of
1944 to the end of March, the beginning of April of 1945. As I'm sure you know, the end of the war in
Europe was the 8th of May. During those six months, she was becoming progressively
more and more starved, and more and more obviously, pregnant, which was
very dangerous for her. But fortunately, none
of the Germans realized she was pregnant because
had they done so, they might well have sent her back to Auschwitz to be killed. We do know of cases
where that did happen. Mengele took the most
unspeakable revenge on them because he felt
they'd got away with it. But they did not
send my mother back. Or when they discovered it, it was actually had
already been liberated. During the six months that
my mother was in Freiburg, that is when the
Allied bombing raids of Dresden took placed. I'm sure you know about
the Dresden raids. It's been a lot of controversy
about them since the war, but I hope that you
will appreciate that in this particular context, I'm talking to you from my mother's very
personal perspective. From her perspective, the
raids were just fantastic. What happened when the
air raid started was the Germans locked
all the prisons of the factory and they went
to the air raid shelter. The prisoners, even though
they knew the next bomb could fall on them and kill a
lot of them, nevertheless, they were very
pleased because they realized it was the allies, and they hoped and prayed
that wouldn't be too much longer before they
were actually rescued. This is where my
father-in-law comes into the story very indirectly. Do any of you know
what this uniform is? What nationality first of all? British, and what is it? You have three guesses. Army, Navy, or Air Force? My father-in-law, Kenneth Clarke, he was in the RF. He was a navigator. He was in Bomber Command and
he was on the Dresden raids. After the war, when he
first met my mother, well, long term after the war,
when my husband and I got engaged and the two
families got together, and when he heard my mother tell what had happened to her, he was absolutely devastated at the thought that he could have actually killed her,
which he could have done. The next picture sometimes is
clear and sometimes isn't. Well, it's sort of. It's the
front cover of his logbook. It reads Royal Air
Force, Navigator's, Air Bomber's and Air Gunner's Flying Log Book, Flight
Lieutenant Clarke . The next picture shows
a page from his logbook and you will now see a line highlighted from that
page and it reads, "On the 13th of February 1945, 1740 hours, 20:00 to
6:00 in the evening, Lancaster," that
was the airplane. On the right-hand side
is the word Dresden. So he really could have
killed her, but he didn't. At the end of March, the
beginning of April of 1945, this is when the Germans realizing they were
losing the war. This is when they began
to evacuate the camps. They were trying to
empty the camps of living witnesses as to what has been going
on inside them, and this is when the notorious
death marches happened. My mother wasn't
on a death march, but she was put on
yet another train. But this time, it didn't
consist of cattle trucks. This time, it consisted
of coal wagons, open to the skies and filthy, and would have looked
something like this. My mother was on a
train like this for 17 days with no food
and hardly any water. After the war, when similar trains were
discovered and opened up, they were discovered to just have piles of corpses in them. During this 17-day
nightmare of a journey, the train was stopped, the doors were open, dead bodies thrown out, and a farmer walked
by where my mother was and he saw her and
he had such a shock. She always said you can never forget the expression
on his face. She described herself
as looking like a scarcely living,
pregnant skeleton. She weighed 70 pounds and she
was nine months pregnant. This farmer brought
her a glass of milk. But there was a Nazi
officer standing next to her and he had a whip. He raised his whip to
shoulder height as if to beat her if she accepted
the glass of milk. But he didn't, he
lowered his arm, and he let her have
the glass of milk. She maintained that saved
her life, who knows? Perhaps it did.
The train went on. It eventually arrived in this
place called Mauthausen. Mauthausen itself as a
beautiful village on the banks of the Danube
in Austrian Netherlands. The concentration camp was up the very steep hill
behind the village. When my mother saw the name
Mauthausen at the station, she had such a shock because as opposed to when she
arrived in Auschwitz, not knowing what that was. This time, she knew because
she had heard about this appalling place very
early on in the war. She said the shock was so great that you always thought
that it probably, possibly provoked the
onset of her labor. She started to give birth
to me on that coal wagon. She had to climb off
the coal wagon unaided. She had to climb onto a
cart because the prisoners who were not strong enough to walk up the steep
hill to the camp, they had to get onto a cart and it was pulled up by others. She had people
lying all over her, people with typhus
and typhoid fever, and she proceeded to
give birth to me. There was another Nazi officer
who saw that she was in the midst of child labor
and he said to her, [FOREIGN], which means you
can carry on screaming. Because presumably, she had been and she always maintained that she screaming not only
because she was in labor, but because she thought this was a very last minute on this. She thought she was about to die. But we both survived experience. I was born, I didn't
move, I didn't breathe. Incredibly, the Germans allowed a doctor to come to my mother, a doctor who was also a
prisoner and presumably, the Germans allowed
it because they could hear the guns in the distance. The doctor came, he cut
the umbilical cord, and he smacked me to make me cry, to make me breathe. There are three reasons
why we survived, and the first is a
very chilling one. On the 28th of April 1945, the Germans had run out of
gas for the gas chamber. My birthday is the 29th. Presumably had the train
arrived on the 26th or 27th, again, I wouldn't be here today. The second indirect reason is because Hitler committed
suicide on the 30th of April. The last and the best reason, and I do occasionally speak to American soldiers and I usually cry at this point was
because the American Army, the 11th Armor Division liberated the camp
about four days later, my mother said she wouldn't
have lasted much longer. They think I weighed
three pounds. A three-pound baby nowadays is put straight
into an incubator. There were no incubators, or perhaps I had
the best incubator. My mother just held
me all the time. The Americans came, they had
food and they had medicine. But as I'm sure you know it, it is very dangerous
to give starved people food because their
bodies just cannot take it. My mother spoke fluent
English and she tried to tell as many people
as possible who didn't, what the Americans
were saying to her. They were saying to eat very slowly and very small amounts. But you can imagine, can't you? That if you've been staffed
for months and years, and suddenly you're handed an American chocolate
Hershey bar, where you tend to scuff a lot. An awful lot of people at that
stage collapsed and died. But one hopes that
perhaps some of them, a few of them, might have realized that they
were actually free. The main form of torture in
Mauthausen was the fact that prisoners had to work all daylight hours in a stone quarry. Those are people on
the left hand side. They are carrying
large blocks of stone that they've had to
dig out the quarry. Again, you have to
remember these are not young, strong,
able-bodied people, these are prisoners who have been starved and tortured
for months and years. So many of them died or
were killed on those steps that the prisoners themselves nicknamed them the
stairway of death. They are very steep. I've seen them, I've
even been on them. The next picture shows after
liberation when some of the prisoners who were
strong enough they're pulling down the Nazi emblem, the eagle with the
swastika underneath. Now, after about three weeks when my mother was
strong enough to travel, the Americans asked her
if she wanted to be repatriated to Prague, she did. So we will put on
yet another train, an ordinary train this time. We arrive back in Prague, it was at night and it was dark. My mother said that was
the worst moment of her 3.5 years incarceration in camps. Because up to that moment, she'd never allowed
herself to think as to what would probably happened to all the rest of the family. She just never let
herself think about it. But arriving at
your home station, you wonder if there might
be anybody there to meet you, and of
course there wasn't. But nevertheless, she
still had a vestige of optimism at the
back of her mind, and she thought that if any other member of the
family had survived, there was a chance that
it might be her cousin, the lady who received
the postcard, and a ditchy hat. Because my aunt, Olga, she had come back from Dresden, she was in Dresden for the
last six months of the war, and she had come back to Prague a few days before we
came from Mauthausen. My aunt had even heard on the grapevine that my
mother had survived, and that incredibly,
she had a baby. My mother asked somebody for some money to
go on the train, we arrived at my aunt's flat. My mother was a very
practical woman. The first words she
said to my aunt were, ''We haven't got any lice.'' Well, we were riddled with
lice and we had scabies. The second thing she said was, please could we stay for
a few days to recover, but we actually stayed
for three years. That was fantastic because we had our own family support group. It was a tiny family
because we were almost the only
survivors from what had been a very large
extended family. Because my mother was given
closure quite soon after the end of the war when she was told after death of my father. So three years later, she was able to consider a
new life and a new marriage, and this is where my stepfather
comes into the story, and for the last time, tell
me what the uniform is. So what is it? British and its RAF,
Royal Air Force. My father, like my uncle, he managed to escape
Czechoslovakia in 1939, he got to the UK, he joined the RAF. He was too old to be trained as a pilot but because
he spoke languages, he was made an
official interpreter. After the war, he came back to Prague to pick up the
pieces of his family, most of whom had also
been killed in Auschwitz, and he met my mother whom he had known as a family
friend before the war. They decided to get married and they also decided to leave because this was now 1948 and that is when the
Communists took over, and they did not want to
live under Communist regime. So we left Czechoslovakia in
'48 and we came to the UK. Although we came legally, I would like to stress, we might have come as refugees, we might've come
as asylum-seekers, we might have come as
migrants, immigrants. We arrived in the UK and
because my stepfather, well, I call him my
father because he officially adopted
me, he was my daddy. He managed to get a job in South Wales and it's all because of Bob's father that
I grew up in South Wales, but that's another whole story. We can tell you but in a minute. We arrived in Cardiff
and my father had a job there in this Textile Factory and that's where we settled. We were actually
headed for Montreal but Robert's father persuaded daddy to stay in
Cardiff. Guess who? I know I've changed, just a bit. I don't have platts anymore. Well, I do have the platts
but they're different color. As you can see, this is
a very happy picture. We're on our way to
my first school prize giving where my mother
shed a lot of tears. Well, all parents
and grandparents shed tears at prize givings. But I think she
might have cried a bit more because unknown to her, I was about to receive
a prize for reading, and I hadn't spoken a word of English several months before. But again, I'm sure, you know, little children learn other
languages very quickly. Then when people say to me, well, what did she look like
in more recent times? So I don't know if this
may mean something to some of you because when I'm made talking in English schools, I say to them, "So
tell me where we are." So when I put up
the next question, I will still ask the question
some of you may know. So where are we? Any ideas? [BACKGROUND] Yes,
we are on the London Eye. When the London eye opened, I asked my mother what
she would like to do that year as a birthday treat. She was then 85, and she said, "Well, everybody's going on this London eye, I wanted to go." So we did and she
thoroughly enjoyed it. This is my mother 10
years later on her 95th. Not bad for 95? My almost, well, yeah,
my last picture. This is my four
generation photograph. I have two sons and they have three now children between them. My mother could never
get over the fact that she had survived her wartime
experiences I survived, and that she ended her life with three great-grandchildren. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. But bear with
me for one more minute because I'd like to tell
you why I tell the story. I tell the story, first of all, for reasons of
commemoration, to remember, to remember all
those millions and millions of people who died, who were killed in the Holocaust. The second reason is to
tell one family story. Because as many as there are
survivors and as you know, there are dwindling
group nowadays, there are that many
different stories and they are all unique. They may have common elements,
but they're all unique. The third reason is
to try to enable us all to learn the lessons, but just think about
all the genocide since; Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur. Now what's happening in the
Middle East or Myanmar. The last reason is to try to counteract racism and prejudice. Any form of racism and prejudice. What I would like
to ask of you now, I'd like you to relax, first of all, for a
couple of minutes. If you would like to ask me
any questions afterwards, I'll be happy to
answer them if I can, and I would like to thank
you very much for listening. [APPLAUSE] [MUSIC].
