I am here because I am witness to the horrific events
that befell European Jewry during the Second World War.
And I experienced some of them:
life in a ghetto, life as a hidden child, as a slave labourer
and in two concentration camps.
I'm one of those fast disappearing numbers of Holocaust survivors
who can say, "I saw it. I was there."
My task this morning is to condense five and a half years and aftermath
into 18 minutes, so I've had a very difficult job to select.
I was born in Poland in a town called Piotrków,
actually Piotrków Trybunalski,
which had a population of about 55,000,
of whom some 15,000 were Jewish.
There were several synagogues.
This is the Great Synagogue,
a splendid building which dates back to 1793.
It was badly damaged during the war.
I was the middle child of three,
with an older brother, Ben, and a younger sister, Łucja.
My father had a flour mill - he was a partner in a flour mill.
My mother was a housewife who looked after us at home.
I had relatives in several nearby towns,
and we used to visit and spend holidays together.
I started my education at nursery, the equivalent of infants, when I was four
and made many friends.
I moved up to junior school at the age of six.
We observed the Jewish festivals,
and in short, I was living a normal happy life in a loving family
at the age of eight.
But in 1939, on the 1st of September,
when the German army invaded Poland,
my world collapsed.
My hometown, being near the border,
was attacked immediately by Stuka dive bombers,
which had small sirens attached to the wings
to make a frightening noise.
The bombs had whistles attached to them at the fins,
all designed to create panic, which they did.
The Polish army was no match for the Germans,
so Piotrków was very quickly overrun.
The occupying troops started a campaign of looting and terror.
People were attacked for no reason at all.
Someone we knew, my father's accountant, was shot,
and his body was left lying in a block of flats for a whole week.
The German authorities quickly imposed restrictions:
all radios were confiscated,
so we were isolated from the outside world,
and valuables had to be handed in.
Jews were placed under curfew
and were not allowed to walk on certain streets,
as this sign shows here.
We were also required to wear an armband with the Star of David,
that is shown here.
Piotrków was the first town in Poland to have a ghetto.
At the beginning of November, all the Jews were removed from their homes
and herded into a small area of the town
into which some 10,000 Jews from surrounding areas were also packed,
so it immediately became very overcrowded.
There could be as many as three families to a room.
Malnutrition and the inadequate sanitary conditions
caused much illness and many epidemic diseases,
which in turn caused thousands of deaths.
This street sign with skull and crossbones,
which I remember very well,
points to the ghetto.
Although there were frequent round-ups
and people were being sent away to various camps,
the main deportation came in the autumn of 1942,
and I only managed to avoid it because my father and my uncle
paid for my cousin Idzia and me to stay with a Polish family, the Maciejewskis,
in a nearby town, Częstochowa,
where we lived as Christians.
Now, this is a slide of my cousin Idzia.
This shows you where Częstochowa was in relation to my hometown.
We felt very vulnerable and scared
because there was actually a reward for turning in hidden Jews,
and Idzia, an only child, was very homesick
and begged to be taken back.
So after some time,
the Maciejewskis supposedly took her back to Polish friends
who she said were hiding her parents' valuables.
In the meantime,
22,000 people had been deported to the extermination camp of Treblinka,
where they were murdered immediately.
And what came to be called "the big ghetto" was liquidated.
The remaining inhabitants, mainly those with work permits,
were confined to a much smaller area,
and when it felt safe,
my father arranged for me to return to what we called "the small ghetto."
When I arrived, I found that although the valuables had been collected,
Idzia had not been returned.
There was nothing my distraught uncle and aunt could do about it,
and we never found out what happened to Idzia.
Then, after only a few weeks, in early December,
more than 500 women and children, including my mother and younger sister,
were rounded up and imprisoned in the desecrated synagogue
for about a week
without food, water, warmth or hygienic facilities.
And at dawn, on Sunday, the 20th of December, 1942,
they were marched in groups of 50 to the nearby Rakow Forest
and brutally murdered in front of newly-dug mass graves.
Only my mother's quick thinking saved me from being among them.
Then my aunt Irene Helfgott, whose husband had been shot,
was deported to a labour camp,
and I was left to look after my cousin Ann,
my aunt's five-year-old daughter.
Then, there was the final selection.
Everyone without work permits, which included me and Ann,
were lined up outside the ghetto, waiting to be loaded onto trucks.
We were guarded, none too gently,
by police and soldiers with rifles
supervised by a German officer.
I don't know what gave me the idea or the courage,
but I stepped out of line,
walked up to him,
explained that I had been separated from my father and brother
and asked if I could go back into the ghetto.
He looked at me with amazement,
then smiled
and told one of the policemen to take me back inside.
On the way, after an argument, I managed to collect my cousin Ann too.
All those remaining had work permits and were sent to two local labour camps,
and the ghetto was liquidated.
My father and brother were allocated to the local plywood factory,
where, through an unbelievable stroke of luck,
I also managed to go together with them.
So at the age of twelve, I became a slave labourer.
For almost two years,
I was working with machines that made plywood huts for the German army.
We did not live together as a family; men and women were housed separately.
While I was out at work, other women in the barracks kept an eye on Ann.
Living conditions were grim, and food was at barely subsistence level,
but somehow we managed to keep going.
Then, towards the end of 1944, the final deportation took place.
My father and brother were sent to Buchenwald with the men,
Ann and I, two aunts and a number of my friends
were deported with the women to Ravensbrück concentration camp,
which was in Germany, north of Berlin.
Although conditions had been constantly deteriorating
and at times we felt that they could not get any worse,
somehow we managed to retain our hope.
But when we arrived in Ravensbrück, we felt that we would not survive.
We had to queue up and all our details were recorded.
Then we had to undress,
everything was taken away from us,
our heads were shaved,
we went through cold communal showers
and were given the concentration camp garb,
which consisted of a thin striped skirt, jacket and a pair of clogs.
When we emerged at the other end, we could not even recognise one another.
We all looked the same.
Our personalities, our very souls had been taken from us.
And at that moment, we lost hope.
One of my aunts, Frania Klein, died within a few days,
and my best friend, Pema Blachman, died soon after that.
People were just giving up.
I was in Ravensbrück for a little over two months,
and my main memories are of the interminable Appells -
when we had to stand on the parade ground and be counted repeatedly
until the numbers were correct -
and the meagre daily rations -
half a slice of something dark called "bread,"
some grey liquid called "soup"
and some brown liquid called "ersatz coffee."
But little did we know what was to come.
In February 1945, as the Russian army was approaching,
the Germans became anxious to hide the evidence of their evil deeds.
So we were marched to the cattle trucks again,
and at the end of that journey, we found ourselves in Bergen-Belsen.
When we arrived, the place was so overcrowded
that we were put up in a large tent on bare ground,
and this in mid-winter with temperatures well below freezing.
Next morning, we entered the main camp,
and the scene that faced us defies description.
It was like something out of hell.
There was a kind of smog and a smell
and skeletal figures shuffling around aimlessly like zombies.
There were dead bodies everywhere
and large piles of twisted, decaying, decomposing corpses.
Typhus and other diseases were raging.
Food was almost non-existent.
We were allocated to a hut, but the accommodation was so overcrowded
that the hut which would have held 80 might contain hundreds of people,
as many as a thousand.
Then, quite by chance,
I heard that there was a children's hut somewhere in the camp,
so I set out to find it.
This is the hut, 211, the children's hut.
When we got there, we were interviewed by the people in charge,
Doctor Bimko and Sister Luba.
And although at first they would not accept us,
because they also were very overcrowded,
with some persistence, I managed to get my cousin and myself admitted.
The children were mostly Dutch,
but there were some other nationalities too.
I still have a vivid picture
of the view from my window:
there was a shed for dead bodies right opposite us
and a constant procession all day.
At first, bodies were brought in rather dilapidated carts,
but after that, they were dragged along in blankets,
and then it finally degenerated into a body being just dragged along by a limb
and just thrown into this hut.
Just as awful was that the people who were forced to do this
were barely alive themselves.
Although the conditions in these children's homes were marginally better,
I went down with typhus and was extremely ill.
I was unaware of my surroundings for quite some days
and must have been starting to recover
when one day,
in an upper bunk by the window,
I saw some emaciated people running towards the gate,
and all I could think of was, How did they have the strength to run?
That was the moment of liberation,
when the British troops entered the camp on the 15th of April, 1945.
Within two days, a hospital was set up,
and the medical nursing and relief teams
under the command of Brigadier Glyn Hughes
gave themselves body and soul to the task of saving lives.
Thanks to their dedication, commitment and compassion,
I was nursed back to health.
I still remember their kindness
after suffering years of cruelty and deprivation.
When the British took over,
the German commandant Kramer was immediately arrested,
and the guards were forced to collect the bodies,
which could only be buried in mass graves.
Then, all the huts were burnt,
and a temporary memorial was set up.
In July 1945,
Ann and I were sent to Sweden with a group of children
for rehabilitation,
and subsequently I learnt
that my brother Ben was the only other survivor of my immediate family.
He was among a group of children survivors
who had been flown to England in August 1945.
And from him,
I heard that our father had been shot
trying to escape from a death march,
and that was only four days before the end of the war.
Ben and I were reunited when I came to England in 1947.
There was no financial support for immigrants in those days.
I was sponsored by a Jewish charitable organisation,
and my first task was to learn the language
and sufficient skills to support myself,
which I was able to do within 12 months.
I joined a social club
which had been set up to help survivors to integrate with the community,
and through friends, I met Morris Tribich,
a young architect
who had spent five and a half years in the Royal Engineers,
some of it in the front line in North Africa
and at Montecassino, in Italy.
We were married in 1950, had two children, three grandchildren
and enjoyed a happy life together for 43 years
before he sadly died.
Once my children were at school,
I set about working at the education that I had missed
and took O and A levels
and eventually obtained a degree in sociology from London University.
Some years ago, to help me prepare a PowerPoint presentation,
my friend David, a retired doctor and a very old family friend,
did a computer search for information about my hometown,
and he found the original typed list
of the names and ages of transport 132
of 277 Jewish women and 9 children
who had deported from Piotrków to Ravensbrück
at the end of November 1944.
And on that list, he found my name and the names of my aunts, my cousin Ann,
and he told me that although he had heard me tell my story several times,
to see the actual physical evidence of what had happened to us
left him in tears.
Yet there are still people who say that it never happened.
About 20 years ago,
I started to speak in public about my experiences during the war,
mainly at schools under the auspices of the Holocaust Educational Trust (HET)
and at Beth Shalom, the Holocaust Centre in Nottingham.
More recently, since the appointment of HET ambassadors,
I find that I'm speaking quite often at universities.
So contrary to the rumours that come back to us from overseas,
Holocaust education is very active in the UK
and is strongly supported by the government.
When we speak about the Holocaust, we have to remember
that is was not only the Jews who were the victims.
The extermination programme started as early as 1940
with the mentally and physically handicapped,
on whom, by trial and error, the man who became the notorious commandant
of the extermination camps at Sobibór and Treblinka, Franz Stangl,
learned his trade and how to square his conscience.
And when it was in full swing,
the victims included also the Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses
and other groups who did not conform to the Nazi ideal.
One would have thought that the revelation of the hideous crimes against humanity
that took place in Germany and the occupied countries
during the Second World War
would have been such a shock to humankind
that any resurgence of such destructive racial and religious hatred
would be inconceivable.
Yet, in spite of the Holocaust being the best documented atrocity
in the whole of human history,
there are people who claim that it never happened.
So this, to me, is the value of what we remaining survivors are doing:
remembering the victims and teaching the generations that follow us
to be ever on their guard
against the denial and the repetition of such evil.
When I did my first trial run of this talk, David said,
"You can't finish with that slide, you need something more upbeat.
Would you ever have dreamt when you were queuing up and shivering
when you arrived at Ravensbrück
on that freezing November day in 1944,
that almost 60 years later
you would be doing what's on the next slide?"
And I said, "Not in a million years."
Thank you very much.
(Applause)