Prisoner Number A26188: The Holocaust In Their Own Words | Henia Bryer | Timeline

I always thought that having my grandparents home is very important I knew that she hadn't spoken about the Holocaust with match in the history in a pass to a famiiy and she always told me and my sister like whatever you want to pick up the phone as I listen granny can I speak to about something [Music] in school whenever and whenever teacher would ask if any of you have a Holocaust survivor and your family I'll raise my hand straight away and tell them the story [Music] my dad had a shoe factory so we lived very well had an apartment in a very nice part of the city we were a family of two parents and four children an older brother myself then there was a younger brother and a little sister she was very bright and very pretty very beautiful and she adored me I was the hero my older brother was physically handicapped he was damaged during birth and he couldn't walk but there was nothing wrong with him mentally first of September we were coming back to school as we were coming back from vacation the whole family and the whole the coffers were the stuffing and they've helped us and everybody was on the tray and the train was full everybody was panicking and wanted to be at home when the war started within eight days they came to this to the town I mean the poles were fighting with Ruth they didn't have any defense they had Sabres and these were big tanks in the arm you and flakka you know the German army was organizing they were and they were within 14 I think up don't remember the days but within I think 14 days they occupied half of Poland they were wearing these black uniforms with a skull on top and and they installed loudspeakers all over the town spreading hate propaganda and Hitler's speeches went on for hours and hours so if somebody says that they didn't know what was going on that was impossible whether they liked it or not because he never made any secrets of what he was going to do to the Jews we had white armbands with a blue this mug and of it the Star of David yeah at that time and all the time afterwards I looked not like a Jewish girl I looked like the advert of Gabor's for a German every second German stopped me in the street why are you wearing this they didn't see a Jew looking like this they had all these propaganda pictures picturing Jewish people they looked like monkeys I've never seen anybody like this and looking like animals not like people my dad was the working they didn't pay him but he had a collection of gold of gold more robust and that saw us through a lot the Decatur was established in 41 or 30,000 people they had to to get us there and the one that we were in was called the big ghetto but it was really a small place it was around the the Jewish quarters where the synagogue was ten people in a room I was there with terrible terrible conditions they would come and knock on doors and take people out and shoot them there and then and they would do the most terrible things and they used to send people to work up to now he survived because of my father's job that he had my mother worked in another place day but my older brother was still with us and my little sister was with us not for long my younger brother was taken to the to the armament Factory we never knew what happened to him during the war you never saw him till the end of the war and two years later after the end of the war and he never talked about it his own family doesn't know where he was what he did in 1942 there was they took out out of the 30,000 they took 20,000 people out of the ghetto and they had to stand there and most of them went straight to the death camps and the small ghettos were shot everybody and and some other people had to bury them in mass graves I had to get to work at that stage because if not they would we would have deported me with an ex of not I had a abscess on my tooth that was supposed to be filled and had a temporary filling but there wasn't a dentist in town anymore so I developed a big emphasis here and I was going to the hospital - to launch it or to do something and my uncle who lived with us there it was a small little place helped to dress me it was when Tet was very cold and he pressed on this and as a result at bursts so my mother said you don't have to go to the hospital now because we will treated ourselves and that same morning they took or everybody from the hospital and they killed everybody and my brother went to the hospital that they shot all the people that were physically the say but he knew exactly what was happening he wasn't mentally [ __ ] he was bright and he said took off his winter coat and he gave it to my mother and he says give it to someone or need it I won't need it anymore and she came home with a coat it was March 1944 they closed that little ghetto and we were the last remnant of that that place and and they marched us to the railway station there were no other Jews from 30000 they were the last 300 it was our first concentration camp and the trip was as they described and a cattle truck no ventilation no water no toilet facilities tiny little window and begged people on his standing place and they locked the doors no light no nothing and from morado we were taken to the first concentration camp which was melanic just outside Lublin [Music] we were having one little suitcase each and Twitter raft and my dunnock and it was dismal everything was stripped you to strip naked in the snow and they were standing there in full uniform looking you up and down then they sent you to the to the showers and then you were given a wooden pair of sort of shoes they were not shoes but had material on top and a thick wooden so like that and strapped uniform a strap dress and a white handkerchief on the on the head and that was all you had in this winter freezing cold weather and they for the first time we saw the women assess and in a way they were they were terribly cruel of it they're awful women I don't know where they get women with such hatred in them for what there were five different camps in my donek the fifth camp was a crematorium they were totally separated from the men so we didn't know where my father was and what he was doing six weeks in my Dannic and then they sent us somewhere else the same story with the cattle trucks with closed wagons no alien or anything and we went to the next camp which was blush of [Music] I had an enormous kemplay my mother was sent to another camp and I had a friend most of the people they were from Krakow and from the vicinity of Krakow which was a big big country there the whole south of Poland was a big camp and in charge of it was this horrible man that was depicted in the film Schindler's List I think it was the best film that portrayed that camp that was the camp where it took place and he was sitting there using himself by shooting at people if he didn't like somebody he shot them and they divided us into groups of ten so like the Romans of ten women ten ten in a team and we had to push this terribly heavy and difficult wagons to on on the rails to this to take the stones to the quarry was a hell of a job we couldn't we could hardly manage and there were shootings and hangings and there was no crematorium babe only here where they used to burn the people and all the ashes used to fly over us every day we had this Pastis a she's flying over us and we knew it was from the hill when they were burning the bodies doesn't matter stand and wait for them to come and count us about eight half-past eight and he had to stand to attention for hours and this freezing weather and one day the woman chief of the earth SS women her name was Elsa Eric and she had the most steely eyes have never seen such cold eyes in my life and they were wearing a uniform will be divided skirt and rocker not a head but like a little army sort of kept without thing after soldiers used to weigh and there were in many ways they were worse than the men they were terribly cruel and this particular Elsa took the light in punishing children or hitting them or sending them off somewhere and then she was worse than than anybody she uh she was not normal she was like a wild animal he was a terrible woman anyway she was looking for help and a house a domestic servant and of all these thousands of people she picked me maybe because I didn't look Jewish maybe because I don't know I have no idea how old are you 18 where you from from the Anna could speak German obviously there was the heads Dallas tells a hurry and they were two young SS women the one was called mine doll and the other was called to stitch then my little girl was from a farm up north and she was taking pictures of me to send home that the Jews don't look or look in the pictures the soldiers and Russia needed blood who do you think they took it from the prisoners in the camps so they used to read on a Sunday when nobody was working just resting they used to come to the barrack empty a barrack and take them to the Red Cross there was a Red Cross part and take blood from them as much as they could not just one pint or half a pint but a lot of people died because they didn't have food of or liquid to replace the blood when one morning I was lying on the top bunk and trying to rest a bit from the heavy work and there is the right so first comes the SS with a red crosses on his arm with two gods and they emptying the whole barrack people are trying to run away the women knew what was waiting for them if he came from the from the Red Cross barrack but it was like a death sentence because it was very difficult to recover from this when they emptied your blood and sorry key and I was thinking what do I have to do there is no other entrance only this door that they came in and they had two guards there so there is no ways I can go through the through the door and try an escape and all the women that tried to escape through the window it was impossible you couldn't so I stayed on there on that top bunk and I didn't move what will be will be so they all emptied the whole barrack and this s Osman noticed that I was still there so he comes to the bed and he says what's wrong with you why aren't you - I said I've got typhus which wasn't truth I didn't have telephones I didn't have anything so he puts his hand on my forehead and it's as cold as a cucumber so he says really so I said yes so he left me and he went so that was another escape my father was killed day and he was an upright citizen he was always fair with these workers he couldn't couldn't come to terms with this whole situation and his family was dispersed he didn't know where and what and the child was gone and my mother was gone to another camp and he was killed by one of the couple one of the overseer says he was beaten today [Music] and then from blush off we were sent to Auschwitz and that was an experience [Music] just before Yom Kippur October jostle a it was snowing it was freezing cold it was nearly the end of the war it was 1944 and I met my mother there at Birkenau and my friend my best friend from from Poland was there in Birkenau and they both came running to me but they were really they were very hungry I was very happy that they're alive that's the first thought [Music] my mother was sent to another camp I was sent with another hundred young girls to the proper camp Auschwitz to them it was called Mostel Agha they took us off the train and we had to line up and again strip and this understand and the men were separated were separated from the women immediately women in children on one side and the men on the other side and they stood dr. Mengele and his cronies fully dressed in uniforms and we had to parade in front of them you can imagine what that felt like and he was just flicking his finger if he flicked the finger to the left the people were going to the straight to the crematorium if to the right they were going to the camp so we were sorted sorted out in inverted commas that way and those that I was strong enough to work or then they sent them to the proper outfits my sister wasn't there my sister was already gone with the children's transport or the mothers were there crying in the father's and everybody stood on the on the plots where they counted us and they had loud music blaring over the loudspeakers when they took all the children away and we knew they were going I mean where could they take children she was sent into the ovens my children were singing when they left we given a number everybody gets tattooed there is mine still I wouldn't let them remove it after the wall [Music] they came to shave every woman's head and they're also divided and groups of ten I cannot describe to you how a girl looks without her and this is this is the last thing they were sort of holding on to the woman with a it came to cut my hair the German SS woman as I look around and she looks in haha stop don't cut her hair I was the only one that didn't have the hair shaved just cut shorty it was a matter of surviving every minute and it was for me because okay they didn't cut my hair but then every one of us got a bundle of clothes and they were not these straps clothes they were civilian clothes and you know they took it from the people obviously that the other that were killed before and I got a parcel of clothes I was told by then that would have fitted a twelve-year-old girl and the shoes were these so they Malik ended the clocks these clocks that they were in Holland you know those wooden clogs but they were too small I couldn't put my foot into them so I thought to myself now that this is the end they didn't cut my hair but very mean how would my they'll burn me with my as I stood there in the courtyard and I'll cry and I don't know how I'm going to survive here in these clothes I couldn't wait issue stood in the snow and a micro mini dress nothing on my head and in the middle of my tears and this is as true as I sit here I hear a voice calling my name so I can't see you it is because my tears are all over my face and my eyes and on the other side of the of the fence though as a young chap was standing and calling my name so he says come to the fence coming near the fence and he says wait right here for five minutes wait so I said who are you you know what you're doing who are you so he says never mind Who I am I'm in a hurry I used to work for your dad so he recognized me but I didn't know who he was I had no idea I was a Jewish chap and he went away and he came back he was working with the clothes of the dead people that they just killed and the ovens and they guessed them so he came back and he threw over the fence a parcel for me with clothes and this was this was a life saver I'll never forget what was in the in that past robe because this now I know that I can carry on wonderful shoes with laces leather shoes there were stockings there was underway there was a walrus and a black velvet coat the worst thing I remember from Auschwitz was the cold the freezing cold that used to stand for hours outside and without any purpose pushing these stones from one place to another and some people recited poems that was my job because I had to learn everything of part in those days and so we kept our minds sort of away from this horrible presence you had to have a break from it hunger is a terrible thing it's not just being hungry that you come home and eat it's starvation there's nothing the next day the nothing the following day and you feel weaker and you look like acha skeleton it's it's a horrible horrible feeling the medical block I did see because we had two girls from my town who had identical twins and they were very pretty but you couldn't tell the difference between the one and the other and tickle he had them they're up in the experimental block and and we saw the girls upstairs and that's an experimental block and I still say you're lucky warm there and we sit in the frost and we're absolutely freezing so she still shall never forget it she said don't envy us [Music] on the 10th of December is my birthday I would have had a big party and I would have getting ready for university I was put down to go to Rome to Italy to study and now I'm sitting in Auschwitz and I don't know what tomorrow will be I had my future mapped up and it was a lot less I'm too young to die I can't died too young I haven't seen anything I haven't done anything yet so I've lost everything but I'm too young to die I don't want to die so there was about three months altogether in Auschwitz and then they evacuated can you imagine the Russians came I think two days of after we left and why are being marched to another concentration camp why why why this is that question never ever left me and there were lots of people being killed on the way just shot because they couldn't walk anymore the road on both sides was just full of dead bodies and the snow was red [Music] and that was the biggest shock of ever had since the beginning of the war I saw plenty of people dying being shot being hanged being punished being tortured but I've never seen a sight like this when we came to the gates of Bergen Belsen a huge mountain of dead bodies was in front right to the left of the gate but if I say huge it was huge partly decomposing that was a first impression of Bergen Belsen I remember the shock of the conditions that even by standards of Auschwitz this was the pits I was clean and free of any vermin till I arrived in Bergen Belsen and then you couldn't help it I got sick with typhus there was no work to do though because there was no work there was nothing to do there were hundreds of people there were Russian prisoners there were poles just sitting and dying nobody they were sitting and starving and didn't have strength to get up there was a girl next to me a Hungarian girl and all she wishes she could could say in a broken Jemima's I don't want to die I don't want to die so I a set and then stop shouting preserve you energy don't shout all the time she was shouting adorned to die until she died and people were being burnt and people are being shot and there was no order it was just when your prisoners had to carry the the corpses to where they were burning them but we didn't match from that one big hole and eventually that hole was nearly empty I'm not going to die I'm too young to die that was a mantra that I was repeating all the time I have just returned from the Belsen concentration camp but beyond the barrier was a whirling cloud of dust the dust of thousands of slowly moving people laden in itself with the deadly typhus germ and with the dust was a smell sickly and thick the smell of death and decay of corruption and filth I passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of a nightmare dead bodies the sum of them in decay lay strewn about the road and along the rotted tracks on each side of the road were brown wooden huts there were faces of the windows the bony emaciated faces of starving women too weak to come outside propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before they died [Music] but there were no not enough doctors in the established hospital outside the companyís and the one thing that annoyed us most of all was that we were closed in the camp and we were not allowed to go out because they didn't want the neighborhood to get all these diseases that means the Germans oh the the people that lived around us so they locked us into the end the camp and we were not allowed to come out but they didn't have enough doctors they didn't have medicines they had nothing and they didn't have suitable food for all these people they were starving and they fed them on this fat fat meat and and things and people got sick all over again and the people were dying there are thirty thousand people that died after the liberation I felt terrible I lost the only friend I had right through the through the camps when I was separated from my mother and from my whole family and she looked after me she was an intelligent bright girl we always had talks about what we learnt at school she studied French and I studied German we compared notes it was terrible and I heard that most of the people that survived from radom were in Stuttgart so I went by train a friend came to fetch me and we went back to we went to Stuttgart and then my mother came from Poland so I met her there for the first time after the war so it was very cheerful but it was happy in a way too that the two of us at least survived the the times after the war were varied God you had to start rebuilding your life here to deal with all the that past the terrible past with all the losses that he's you know we didn't have time to deal with it while we were in the camps but after the war was finished then we started to think of all the things that happened to us and there were no psychologist who knows our cultures there was no help and we had to work it all out by ourselves but then my uncle in Paris and he knew that we will be so he sent for us everybody there in France was busy building their lives from the beginning again after the war and sort of in a way recovering recuperating but it wasn't the future I knew that this wasn't our future and then we had to find my brother we didn't know where he was eventually we found out from the family that he is an Israel already there was an American woman from the video from the Zionist Organization who gathered she collected a lot of young children and young young Stettin ages from the that survived the camps and she brought them to Israel he was a teenager though her country member was about that was already one year after the liberation and then it was two year of the deliberation he wasn't 28 and he was taken to the ski boats on the lake who Lata for two years he stayed and worked on the ski boots and then we spent two years in France living with my uncle and and until one of my uncle's in Palestine he organized two false passports for us for me and for my mother we're determined to to get to Palestine because that's where the rest of the family was so we had to get to Marseilles and there was a camp of all the Jewish refugees some were trying to get illegally to Israel and and we helped pack this famous boat Exodus I was in Marseilles at the time couple of us who were in the camp went to there were about a thousand I think about a thousand people on that boat and that was the famous book and the picture that they made of this boat that came to Palestine and they they wouldn't let them in [Music] eventually we went to a little Greek but wasn't a very very big boat but it was a nice comfortable about and we arrived in Haifa normal little brother was six foot tall by the time we met him and we could hardly recognize him he didn't meet us in Haifa he couldn't come but soon afterwards the war of independence broke out and 48 straight away and then I went to the to the army for two years and then a year later my brother went into the armies was just a matter of get hold of yourself and get on the time in Israel was a healing process financially we were very poor we didn't have much but as soon as the state was announced my mother opened a canteen at the police station in Haifa and she was doing very well there we were very close but it was a rule in the house we're not talking about the Kemp's I know I had a bad time with my nerves there were times that I couldn't cope with everything and he was different he was quiet he was noisy like the Mediterranean people and he loved music which I also did a lot of things and we spoke Hebrew he could I couldn't speak English took her out a few times before I really fell for her in a big way and he never let me go if I went out and my mother still looked he came with two little nylon shirts that were washed every day she couldn't get over it how poor he looked and where you know what what is it he looked really funny we got to know each other better I proposed and riddled Angie she agreed to marry me so so so I had to do something in order to remain maintain a friendship and be there all the time so I had to take a job in Israel in Haifa and I stayed there for six months that's just to be close to India I was completely smitten we didn't go out for a long time about three or four months and then we got married and I said I'll come to South Africa for one year only to meet the family and then I'll go back home well that never happened and it wasn't a cold winter's morning it was freezing cold and I'm coming from this hot climate in Israel and it was grim all the smoke from all the chimneys were coming up and the station was so miserable and the town looked like a little hick town like a little village and I had to get a taxi to take us to my parents and look around and I said timorous are you sure you didn't miss the station is that the place that we came no he says this is bloom Fontaine did silence I wanted to go right back into the training and go back is he a proto-tool and we well in English was the language and she couldn't speak English the problem was to get it to teach her how to speak English and I stayed for 42 years eventually I became a principal of the school and I carried on while I was courting her she told me she had been survivor I wanted children I really did even in during the war I always said to myself I haven't lived yet I don't know anything about anything I want our children I want to make up for all those millions of children that were killed murdered we were aware of what happened we were aware of which family members we had lost we knew this was always in the background but the detail we didn't know I didn't talk about the Holocaust to my sons not to my husband over time in the in the in the concentration camps she often will had nightmares and she would well up screaming and I - sort of consoling him and and just try settle there John that's during the nights my 24 old son Richard when he was still at school I think he was 17 years of age he had the privilege of going on the march of the loving and he went first to Israel and then he went to the various camps that my mother had been in and was quite poignant because he celebrated his 17th birthday at my dunnock which was where my mother had a 17th birthday so she was there as an inmate and he was there as a visitor to - to see where she had been and then subsequently I think he also I forget the exact sequence but he also visited Auschwitz the camp Auschwitz which i think is is is better preserved and I subsequently heard that he fell his grandmother and said while I'm standing at the the gates of Auschwitz where were you in Auschwitz and she said I will direct you to the bungalow and he was able to on the cell phone and get directions to where his grandmother had been within the camp I didn't want to influence their lives with my past and my suffering if they asked a question I answered it but I never discussed it and I could hear everywhere people talking about second-generation syndrome of the Holocaust and the kids were affected if the parents both were in the camps and never stopped talking about it and I didn't want them to grow up with any complexes I don't know if I made a mistake or not but that's how it was she gave me a birthday present said you know what the best birthday present I ever received and always thought at that age what was it was it a jersey what's the sweatshirt was at this and she said now was a piece of bread and I know from she told you the story of one day and the Holocaust wait was a birthday and her closest friend had disappeared for the whole day and she was cross with her friend because she wanted a friend he spent our mother in the camp and it was freezing in was cold and a friend completely disappeared and at six o'clock at night the friend came back and said yeah I've been working in a labor environment to earn you an extra piece of bread for your birthday yes your birthday present and I think for me that was the most telling story that she told me at my early days of manhood that little story made me realize the values of life and still I tell my children today when it comes to that presents and gifts are not real gifts but it's a gift of love and it's a gift of just being yourself and enjoying life and that one story stood with me and still sticks with me today there's a one little lesson of many thousands one can learn from the concentration camps and you know sometimes I wonder myself was I there was a truth but I really then that time it in such places in through all these things it can't be it can't be but it is she came out of it she started a new family she started in life and she decided to give new messages there are lots of stories to tell and they so vivid then I want to say that I'm just sad I'm just so crazy about her and and I still want to be with it and I'm not a hero I don't want to be remembered for anything special just a good mother and a grandmother and a friend you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 1,737,083

Keywords: holocaust survivors, holocaust documentary, auschwitz concentration camp (film subject), nazism (political ideology), documentary (tv genre), concentration camps, the holocaust, holocaust survivor interviews, auschwitz survivors tell their story, auschwitz survivors, auschwitz survivor, auschwitz documentary, the holocaust documentary, prisoner number a26188, holocaust movies, auschwitz tour with survivor, the holocaust survivors, holocaust documentary pbs

Id: AXlbU5ZENy0

Length: 43min 22sec (2602 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2017