This week marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz
After 80 years, it's still hard to imagine what went through people's minds when they first read about the horrors of Auschwitz.
It wasn't until Saturday, January 27, 1945, that the advancing Soviets arrived at Auschwitz. Inside its gates, 7,500 prisoners were found still alive, as well as 600 corpses. In the weeks and months following its liberation, newspapers began to report the scale of the horrors of the concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany in Poland.
More evidence of the atrocity of Hitler's Final Solution was found as more camps were liberated: Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Auschwitz. In May 1945, just months after the camp's liberation by the Soviets, The Guardian newspaper told one 14-year-old Jewish boy's story of how he managed to escape the gas chamber.
"There was no will and no realisation of what I was doing. We all stood completely naked in the corridor leading to the gas chamber and waiting for the order to march in, when suddenly what looked like a high-ranking SS officer of the crematorium personnel arrived. Abraham added: "Three hours later the furnaces of the crematorium were already burning. We watched its thick smoke and knew its terrible meaning."
Other former staff, including camp leaders, were also executed after earlier trials. Still, some of the worst sadists of the Holocaust were not brought to justice until decades later, and some never at all. Josef Mengele, the camp doctor, conducted inhumane experiments on its prisoners. Mengele managed to avoid capture and several extradition requests by West Germany. The man dubbed The Angel of Death suffered a heart attack and drowned while swimming off the coast of Bertioga, Brazil, in 1979.
We feel just as strongly as ever the importance of preserving their voices in perpetuity. And on the his poignant anniversary, it's vital we have the chance to hear them tell their stories again. Ibi Ginsberg was just a teenager when she arrived at Auschwitz. Her strict Orthodox Jewish family were forced to leave their Hungarian home for the ghetto in 1944. Ibi, 84, previously told the M.E.
She was spared death and put to work sorting the clothes of everyone who arrived at the camp. But her mother, father, two younger brothers and grandmother were all murdered at Auschwitz. "I worked there sorting all the clothes that came in with people, putting them in bundles with sheets all over.Eva frequently heard the chilling sounds of others in the camp being taken to their deaths in the gas chambers.
After the war, Eva lived with her cousin for a time before meeting her husband in Switzerland before moving to Salford. For decades, she spoke to no one about her experiences at the camp, not even her late husband, who himself had lost his family at Auschwitz.Icek Alterman was just 13 years old in 1942 when he watched his mother, sister and little brother being marched away at gunpoint, "never to be seen again".
In the following days, Ike was one of around 700 Jewish children sent to Great Britain. He had only heard of the country because of a 'Made in England' logo stamped on the wheels of bikes built by his father. After a few months, Ike and some friends moved to a hostel on Middleton Road in Crumpsall, Manchester. Ike married, had two daughters and set himself up as one of the most successful jewellers in Manchester, renting three floors above Mappin-Webb near St Ann's Square.
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