Holocaust survivor watched her mother being shot

we are very very fortunate to have a holocaust survivor hannah lewis here in the studio good morning good morning and it is a privilege to have you here hannah if you don't mind me saying because this is a part of our history that a lot of people my age and younger are becoming less and less familiar with and i think we do need to become more aware about what happened to stop it happening again so can you tell us what your situation was how you got caught up in the labor camps well i was born in a very small town called whatever on the court on the borders of the river bog and i think that probably the camps came quite late to us my family were very established there and very happy and quite well known quite well to do i think we were probably rounded up at first it became a ghetto because more and more refugees from big cities wanted to find comparative safety so at that point our house began to fill up with other with other jews looking for somewhere somewhere to live and a ghetto was formed and i actually have photos of my grandfather and my uncle in the ghetto we were rounded up i think it must have been 1943 and we walked to a camp a fourth labour camp called adam pol which was probably if you can call it lucky luckier than being sent to sobibor i was actually born very close to savvy boar and if you were sent to savvyboy you had a very short very short term two days at the most to survive hannah how old were you at that point i was born 37 so i must have been 43 uh six seven do you remember that walk i do i remember that walk very well i remember that the weather was nice and i remember that when i got tired either my mother or my aunt or my father somebody carried me part of the way we actually were rounded up as a family and we ended up in a forced labour camp in a small village called adampo and i've been back there twice since because i just wanted to make sure that what i remembered i actually remembered and it's not very much changed at the time that we were there there was no electricity and there was no running water because i remember my mother when she was working having to carry big buckets of water umpteen times a day because you know you use a lot of water you don't realize how much we use and so what happened in the camp itself and what happened to you in the camp itself my grandfather was killed in the first einzatz group my father eventually managed to escape with his cousin and joined the partisans which was good my mother was allocated to work for a very old well he seemed old to me i always remember him as stari pan which means old man he was somebody that my grandfather and my father knew because my parents had a big shop in voidava and they owned properties and they owned the flour mill the sawmill so they knew a lot of polish people because in the villages or townships because they were either milling their flower or doing something for them so they knew them and when my grandfather heard because there was no escape that there was going to be a work camp there or nobody really knew what a forced labor camp was he and my father went to see this old man who was purported to be the sort of go-between between the germans and the and and the population and asked him he gave him whatever he could and asked him not for himself he didn't know where we would be sent but if we were sent there would he do his best to protect his two grandchildren i had one little cousin who was born deaf and mute and the old man did his best i don't think he had any power but i think probably in fif by 43 i think the war wasn't going quite as smoothly as they would have liked and he um he was an old bachelor he had a his niece and her family helping him run the farm which was sort of his biggest farm and my mother and i were allotted to work for him we still slept in the camp and what i can only describe as sheds with drawers you sort of laid and but all of that actually was okay as long as i was with my mother and it was brutal so it was just you and your mum at that time together well only yes in the all the men for some reason had either escaped or been or been killed and what happened in terms of did your mother survive the camp my mother survived to almost the end she was very always very calm and very capable but towards the end of the war we didn't know was the end of the war i got typhus i think i mean typhus was right because there was absolutely no hygiene or doctors and my mother asked if we might spend one night in the kitchen because there was a big oven which gave heat and we were we were allowed we were we were allowed by the over the the old man's um yeast to do this so my mother made up the bed and it was very very cold and we settled down for the night and i was restless and she was restless and sometime during the night there was a little tap tap on the back door window and my mother sat up and listened and it happened again so she went to the window and it was so frosty that she couldn't she couldn't wipe it so she opened the little window and there on the doorstep was my father who as i said had escaped and joined the partisans and one of the things that partisans did would be to warn camps if they could or get a message that there was going to be a nines that's grouping and that's what he was doing can you just explain what that is and einsatzgruppen were elite squads who would go to places and do executions so they would line people up they'd line you up by whatever they wanted you to and the horror of that is is we know it happened i get the horror is still very very hard to perceive how important is it that we hear not only your story but also look back in the the the films and the textbooks and the the museums that there are and what have you to actually understand this what happened that this was human beings acting against human beings for no good reason well to make sure that this does not cannot happen again i think what happened was an extraordinary crime because the jews weren't at war with hitler i think that the cold-blooded extermination of a whole section of community was awful i think it has to be education i think i mean i'm very involved with the holocaust educational trust and i go into schools and universities and banks and all sorts of places and sometimes i'm quite taken aback at how little knowledge they have so if it is it is short in schools now but i think it's very difficult in three sessions or four sessions to get what led up to it what happened and the awful atrocities was your mother then taken away about that no well what happened is they were having this there was this roundup and my father said to my mother that she should come with him and my mother said no panic was not well and he said bring her with and she said she won't make it and whether it was the searchlight or whether it was a patrol or whatever my father obviously disappeared and my mother would die just stay there and very early in the morning there were the usual sounds there are sounds that are somehow relevant with what they did and we just laid there and then i don't know how long this was but there was a whack on the door and my mother who was very calm always got on her knees gave me a huge hug and a kiss and then very calmly without hurrying went to the door opened it and closed it behind her and i just waited for her to come back i thought she was bound to come back but the noise continued and she didn't come back so i opened the door and i stood in the steps and i saw them marshalling them all to this well that she always drew water from and we always made contact eye contact but we didn't this particular time and i was just deciding whether i should go and take a hand when somebody barked out an order they were all lined up by the well and they started to shoot and i saw her fall and i saw the blood on the snow and i knew that one moment why she wasn't looking and i knew i could not i could i could not scream or do anything so then i went back and put myself on this pellet and somehow survived the war and after the war we weren't ever actually liberated we were just left alone and nobody knew what was happening and nobody came for me how old were you at this at this point it was 45 so must have been eight but you were left completely alone in that labour camp yes and yes but there were people and people were kind i mean you know people not haven't lost all their sensitivity um and then one day my father appeared he had walked from i don't know where he was dirty and skinny but it was my father and so another part of our life started we left adam pole we went back to foreign where i was born my father and my grandfather had obviously foreseen what was happening because he dug up suitcases which held family albums and and artifacts and we eventually made our way to woods and in 1949 i came to england on my own without my father to live with his aunt and uncle can i ask you just to finish how you've how have you managed to to move on i mean obviously you're doing a tremendous amount of educational work on a subject which is in incredibly um hurtful and and sad for you are you able to do that without bitterness looking is there a benefit to almost a sense of forgiveness i know it's a very difficult word in a way but it's do you just do you understand what i mean i know what you're saying are you asking me do i forgive yes in a way okay well i don't know that i have forgiveness i don't think i'm empowered to forgive for the people who were tortured and killed i don't speak for them and for myself i don't know that i have forgiveness but i have acceptance i can't change it hannah it it is quite something to talk to you and it is very very important to hear your story i think and i hope that it will resonate with people actually as we remember all that happened in the holocaust thank you very much indeed for talking thank you thank you

Channel: Sky News

Views: 603,910

Keywords: Holocaust, Nazi, Poland, Hannah Lewis, Sky News, skynews, news, Holocaust memorial day, Adampol, Germany, War, Jews, labour camp, concentration camp

Id: 0fFxWKFHpdM

Length: 13min 55sec (835 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2018