Holocaust Survivor Reveals Horror of Concentration Camps | This Morning

today marks 75 years since the auschwitz concentration camp in poland was liberated by the allied troops well as commemorations take place across the country on holocaust memorial day in just a moment we'll be hearing an incredible story from someone who survives the atrocities and we're joined now by holocaust survivor stephen frank and good morning to stephen thank you very much for joining us today um i wanted to talk about your life before the war you were born in amsterdam in 1935 and your father who i have to say sounds like an incredible man a respected lawyer just explain what life was like then it was blissful we lived in a lovely part of southern amsterdam in a fairly new house and um even in the attic we had a swing in the attic would you believe it we had central heating in this house it was an ensuite bathroom for my for my parents it was a three-story house and we the children were up at the top and my parents were the guest room were in the middle and then there was a sitting room in the kitchen and things like that downstairs life was good life was great life was good we played with our friends in the street yeah that's what we didn't do well your father was leonard your mother at beatrix and the netherlands was neutral at the time but still invaded by uh the german army in may 1940 and were you immediately affected do you did you immediately sense that life had changed not immediately it was quite exciting because you know we saw soldiers marching down the street with guns over their shoulders and packs on their backs something that we'd not seen before that was quite exciting we had no idea of the sinister intentions that while they were there when did you become aware of the sinister intentions we became aware when when the restrictions started to come in for example i had started in in september 1940 i started in my little primary school which was by the way it was the very first primary school that was built like what primary schools look like today nice airy classrooms and suddenly i was thrown out of the school and i was put into a sort of victorian looking school where only jewish children were and the strongest thing there was that you tended to sit next to the same person in class and then suddenly that person next to you wasn't there he wasn't sick he'd been taken away oh gosh your um your mother was a british national and she gave up her citizenship when she married your father um they did have an opportunity to leave but your father chose to stay it was important to him he had work that he wanted to do yeah just explain that well he was very humanitarian man i mean he was one of the a group of lawyers that set up in amsterdam an organization called our house which is much like our legal aid system helping the poor of amsterdam and he was always very much interested in those who were not as fortunate as we were and particularly he was interested in mental health and physical disability and he was on the board of many uh hospitals um who dealt with these people particularly a very famous one called at april dawn so boss in the town of apple universe he joined the dutch resistance didn't he yeah and uh and for that after a period of time um they arrived at his office yeah that's right and uh and what happened well he he was um he was heading an organization that helped german jews who'd fled into holland helping them to find somewhere to live and perhaps even work and that was taken in under the jewish council which was an organization the germans had set up something he was very reluctant to do but under that umbrella he was able to find hiding places for jews to hide in all sorts of places we even hit jews in our own home from time to time yeah jews hiding jews is something you're very very sold on yes yes and so they so that the uh the the military the nazis burst into his office and yeah he was um he was taken away that's right yes um when did you find out what had happened to him because your your mother always believed that he survived that's right yes she had a great belief that he would be strong enough to survive and but he was in first of all he was interrogated by the ss and then he was sent to a camp in arms for it and it was in that camp that my mother last saw him having gone there disguised as a man wow um scrubbing the floors having changed places with one of the cleaners could you imagine doing that with three young children as well that's extremely amazing and that's where he told her that he'd been tortured but he'd given nothing away and so again today and obviously you you watch that footage with horror and sadness but also this is a really important day for you because you can remember how courageous your father and mother were absolutely and my father was gassed in auschwitz on the 21st of january which is so very very close to holocaust memorial day which makes it very important for me and um as i said you didn't know that that had happened until till long after and that records were found um which is why you want to pay tribute to your family these remarkable parents that that you had um you were sent to westerbork camp in september 1943. um and uh and then um actually how long were you how long were you there for because it was quite unusual we were there for a year which was very unusual but prior to vesterbach we were in another camp called bernefeld and that was a camp that was set up for prominent jews my father had three friends who wonderful wonderful people who were prepared to plead with the nazi authorities a dangerous thing to do because they were married and they had children and they managed to get us into this particular camp and i basically i presume this was for political reasons the germans could always barter us for others and from there we went to westerbuck and that's why we were there for such a long time investor mark for a year because you were bartering we were bartering chips yeah and then with the allies now yeah on the rhine in september 1944 we were transported to teresa because a lot of people went through that camp and went to auschwitz yeah most of them went to auschwitz or sobibor and even i mean the horror of what you witnessed when you were there but the journey to that camp that sort of how it was like a 39-hour cattle truck where i mean that in itself is just so horrific yes it was described what that was like the smells and conditions overcrowded packed in there like sardines um the stench that built up if you could imagine a smell of vomit of human sweat of urine and feces all in there in fact the oxygen level within the actual cattle truck was dropping people had difficulty in breathing we had four tiny little windows in our cattle truck we would clamber up the rucksacks that had been piled into two corners so that some could sit yeah to get some air but then the adults of course would pull us back and so as a child living in one of these camps i guess do you even think about the future i mean it must be so frightening well strange enough you know as a child you never think about the future you're always thinking just about the present right it was my parents and that generation who thought about the future who thought about where we're going to go next are we going to be gassed are we going to be shot where are we going to be taken to as children i think you just sort of accommodate where you are and get on with the system that you have and live with the hunger did you play i mean with children children you actually think children are sort of playing together oh we played yes we played all sorts of games we managed to find for example buttons on clothes particularly women's winter clothes nice big buttons made good football we played flick football on the floor using shirt buttons as the ball you know we played that sort of game and chess you know we we managed to make our own chess balls and chess sets but at the same time were you were you witness to acts of cruelty investor bark i was witness where i met my where i came to across my first death the death of a man that we'd come to love very much and this was in the barrack where i was um we'd been um i just entered the barrack having played outside when there was a howl from the sky and a rat attack and i looked up at the ceiling and i saw holes appearing in the ceiling and i couldn't understand what was going on and i ran in a hail of bullets to my table and at that table was this this lovely couple where he was a teacher and he was a great anglophile and would reminisce with my mother about holidays they'd had here and there he was completely riddled with bullets and blood pouring out of his body and this man who loved england so much was killed by british bullets what age were you when you saw that i would then have been um seven and it was at um it was at vesta book where um was that where where the you grew tomatoes it was invisible yes what happened then that barrack was completely destroyed and the group were now dispersed among all the other barracks and i found myself in barrett number 71 where i met this man who was growing this whole row of tomatoes outside the barricade windows he'd managed to get hold of rotten tomatoes and picked out the pips for the center and he'd managed to germinate them and i was fascinated by what he was doing so i became his little helper bought of these tomatoes and then he showed me how you pick out the side shoots so that the tomatoes grow up nice life grows great from that that's right um you you find out that the war is over though i think it was your mother that actually was translating churchill's speech on the radio to everybody but again you think that this would be this sort of euphoric it's over moment but you didn't know what was going to happen actually absolutely not this was about six o'clock in the evening when my mother heard winston churchill's broadcast from the cabinet war rooms and she'd been asked by some russian prisoners of war to go into their house and they'd got this radio up in the attic which they'd managed to get going and she wrote it all down you know yesterday morning at 2 41 a.m and so she was the first to know but it was another six hours before the actual end would come and the gas chambers had been built interracial shut where they're not going to use them you uh you say you um you've spent your whole life um obviously not being able to forget the horrors that you saw but also wondering how did you survive why you absolutely why did i survive you know i was one of less than a hundred of fifteen thousand children that were there why did i survive and at the end of the war i went down with mumps and i was unconscious for three days no medical attention but i came around why was there something i had to do in my life i was a scientist i never i never won the nobel prize never did anything very special why should i have lived have you ever found the answer to that yes i did the answer was that when i retired i started giving talks in schools and i've been doing that now for 24 years over 800 schools i've been to and the effect it has on the young people is absolutely remarkable yeah so there's the reason and there's the reason yeah um the the duchess of cambridge um has been uh taking photographs of holocaust survivors um and uh and she photographed uh photographed you um and who are you with uh i'm there with my two grandchildren maggie the older one and trixie the younger one it's a beautiful beautiful photo but the thing that i really loved is maggie's little teddy bear lies there so peacefully in her life it sort of made the whole photograph for me yeah and so when you leave here you're up to westminster i'm going to westfield so yes the holocaust memorial day been going every year virtually since it started i think there are 10 000 events taking place across the uk um and the duke and duchess of cambridge duchess of cornwall is at auschwitz um to meet survivors and uh and so um we'll let you get on with the rest of what's going to be a very busy and emotional day i would have thought thank you very much indeed and and stephen has been it's been an extraordinary pleasure yeah it really has thank you thank you thank you thank you very much you

Channel: This Morning

Views: 1,687,612

Keywords: this morning, holly willoughby, phillip schofield, this morning funniest, Holly & Phillip funny

Id: sUE4j-oia0w

Length: 12min 27sec (747 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 27 2020

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