Holocaust survivor | Iby Knill | TEDxYouth@Bath
Translator: Elisabetta Siagri Reviewer: Tanya Cushman Where to begin? Where and how did it start? One day, Gretel, my schoolfriend - we had shared a desk - greeted me with an embrace. The next day, she ran across the road and turned her head away so as not to acknowledge me. I wanted to call out, but I turned my head away in embarrassment. Shamed, but not ashamed. Neither of us had changed in that short a space of time, or had we? Now I was stigmatised, visibly differentiated, marked with a yellow star on my left breast. But that was on the outside. Under the coat, under my skin, I was still the same person. I was angry, very angry. And that anger stayed with me through the next years, through persecution, torture, imprisonment, humiliation. But I decided I had not changed, and I wasn't going to let them change me, and under the skin, I would stay the same. It was then no longer safe to stay there if you were a girl and wore a yellow star. So one cold February night, I and my guide crawled across frozen no-man's-land from Slovakia into Hungary. My destination, my aunt in Budapest. She was a little, timid person, and harbouring an illegal immigrant was a punishable offence. So, she's frightened and panics. Márton, my cousin, comes to the rescue, and he says, "Well, I've had girls staying overnight before. You'd just be more than my occasional girlfriend. But in the meantime, in the day, don't move about - the walls are thin, neighbours may hear you. And it's very cold in the empty flat." Márton is called up for Labour Service, the alternative to military service for Hungarian Jewish men, so I'm passed on to someone else to look after me. To help others escape, many people are involved, so it's not surprising when I'm captured along with 428 others. And the investigators are not exactly kind. They feel they have to get admissions of guilt, one way or the other, and I'm vulnerable. I'm travelling under false papers. Perhaps I'll break under torture. There is nothing I can tell them that they don't know already. After time at the police station, I spent three months in prison. Investigations continue on a weekly basis. Eventually I'm told that they are going to let me go with a warning, but on leaving the prison, I'm released as an illegal immigrant. And so the merry-go-round continues: detention centre, immigration centre, eventually refugee camp in the North of Hungary. It is now November 1943, and I find out that my parents have also managed to escape and are now in the same immigration centre in Budapest in which I had been. I get permission to go to Budapest to see them at Christmas, and I meet a young man who wants to marry me. And this will solve our problems: I'll be allowed to leave the camp and live a normal life. And in March 1944, I'm allowed out on parole, have to report to the police every week, stay there in a little town in Hungary where there's a distant family connection. My designation: an illegal immigrant, a political prisoner out on parole. Just a month later, Germany occupies Hungary, and things change dramatically. The Nuremberg Laws apply yellow stars on Poles, but that doesn't apply to me - I'm a political prisoner, a different category. Will it make any difference? One night, in the dark, during an air raid, on the 6th of June,1944 - D-Day - they round up all the Jewish people in Székesfehérvár, and I have been staying with a young Jewish family, so I'm included. Every single valuable I have, including my papers - and by this time, I'd even bought my wedding rings - are taken, and on the list is marked my name, date of birth, profession: nurse, status: political prisoner. It might have saved my life. We're herded into a brickyard. I don't really know anybody there, and in a bay of the brickyard, there's an improvised hospital. Women with newborn babies, people with wounds and scars, the insane - I'm wandering about the sick moaning and crying; I go to help. There are few of us; most people have joined their families. There's very little we can do. After a few days, on the 12th of June - the day which was to be my wedding day - a train with cattle wagons appears, and the sick are put in the last wagon with us - a few doctors and helpers - and one bucket with water in one corner, one bucket for human waste in the other. On the second night of our journey, an elderly doctor crawls over to me, and he says, "Please let me hold you because I know that I'll never again be able to hold, to embrace anyone." We hold each other closely. Maybe it's the last time I will hold someone. He seems to know where we are going; I don't. Then the train stops. Men with shaved heads and striped pyjamas open the door, "Schnell, schnell. Raus, raus! Leave the sick, leave the old, leave the children. Men to the right, women to the left." A collective moan from the patients, arms stretched out, pleading, but there is nothing we can do; there's no time. There are five of us. The doctor has grey hair. We tie a scarf over her head, jump out of the wagon, link arms, herd in the middle, and singing the Hungarian national anthem - I still think crazy - march up and pass Doctor Mengele, who points his stick at us, rolls with laughter as he sends us through the gate which proclaims, "Arbeit macht frei" - "Work gives you freedom." We arrive in Auschwitz-Birkenau on the 17th of June, 1944. There is nothing about Auschwitz-Birkenau that you haven't heard before. So why tell you again? Why agonise about something that can't be changed? Why should I tell you? You've heard it all before. About the dehumanising indignities inflicted on us. The way the weak, the sick, the unable and unstable, they gradually eliminated. The beatings, the hunger, the thirst. However hard I try, these images cannot be eliminated even if they're buried at times and for a time. Yet, against all the odds, we still hope. We hope we will survive somehow. At the end of July, we five doctors and nurses volunteer to go with a slave-labour camp. If you get away from Auschwitz-Birkenau, you have a chance to survive. With 530 Hungarian women, we go to Lippstadt, in the Ruhr, to an armament factory. My knowledge of German leaves me in charge of the camp hospital. It's quite miraculous: three babies are born, but we hide the mothers and babies because we are afraid what would happen if the Germans knew that they were there. And by now, air raids are nearly continuous. At the end of March, the factory falls violent, a wagon train arrives, and we are told by the SS men to put all the sick, the weak into the wagons, and they would be taken to safety, to Bergen-Belsen; we would have to march there. We have a problem now. The three women with the babies, they can't possibly march. So we tell the SS men that we've got three mothers and babies, and they say, "Put them in the wagon. They'll also go to Bergen-Belsen." One of the mothers puts the baby just by the doorway, perhaps to get fresh air. And when the SS man has them all marked off on his list, he swings himself up into the wagon and accidentally, or on purpose, steps on the baby and kills it outright. You can imagine the response of the mother. You can imagine all our responses, but he turns to me and tells me in German, "Tell the woman I've probably saved her life because if she went with the baby to Bergen-Belsen, they'll both finish up in the gas chamber. As it is, she has a chance to survive." And some years later, I find out, yes, that she did survive. We ourselves now have to walk, and if we walk, we march. And if we walk at night, we are hidden in the daytime in barns. We hear the air raids. Seems to us as if we are going round in circles. Anybody who lags behind - a soldier gets detached, you hear a shot, the soldier comes back, the other person doesn't. And this happens several times every night. After about some nights walking, we come to a place called Karwitz, and there are no barns, so we are told to lie down in a field, and the guards lie down in the ditches. And in front of the field, there's this village square, and we can hear church bells ringing and see white sheets hanging from the windows, and there are planes overhead. And then, along this line, the lane, we see tanks, American tanks, and they stop in the square. The comrades run screaming towards them, surround them, and catch our guards - who, by now, were trying to edge their way back towards a little wood - and lock them into the crypt. I crouch in the field; I'm unable to move, and I'm taken to a nearby farmhouse, lie on a wooden settle. In the centre of the table, they're having breakfast; grandfather, mother and the little girl. And the little girl whispered something to her mother, and the mother nods her head, and she gets off her chair, and she comes to me with her hands like that, and in her hands, there is a brown egg. And she says, "It's Easter Sunday." Now, any day is nice to be liberated; Easter Sunday is rather special. What happened next is another story, but it took me over 60 years before I could talk about this, and I had locked those years away, good memories as well as bad ones, and I didn't think I would ever talk about it. Then something happened, and I had to stand up to my past and own up to it. It's 2010 - and I'm a writer, so I started off. I wrote a book, which is called "A Woman Without a Number," the reason being that at the time when I was taken to Auschwitz, for reasons that I never found out, although I was given a number - it was 25,245 - I wasn't tattooed. So I wrote a book, and I also wrote a poem, and I will read you the poem, and it's called, "I Was There. Auschwitz-Birkenau, June-July 1944." Hundreds of women, their head shorn, in ragged clothes, standing in rows of five for hours and hours in the rain, in the heat, being counted. We are thirsty, so thirsty, but there is no water. Thirst is worse than hunger. Some fall down, limbs contorted; we do not dare to do more than this, but, 'Get up! You have to get up, get up! If you don't get up, you'll die!' Mengele goes past, sees the fallen, points to others to pick them up. Where have they gone? They're never seen again, but I was there. Nighttime, the hut, the girl frantic, diabetic, knew she couldn't survive, no medication - only the healthy might survive. Taken to the end of the hut. Doctors among us attend to her, talk to her - there's no hope for her. Went into a coma, died at dawn. Taken away. I didn't even know her name, but I was there. Everyday we stood and were counted again and again, morning, noon, evening, for hours, and nerves stretched to breaking point. Some couldn't bear it. Run to the perimeter fence, got stuck, like spread-eagled butterflies on a specimen board. The fence was electrified. The factory of death was Auschwitz-Birkenau; I was there. We stood, past being hungry, past being thirsty, got thinner, feebler. More fell, more disappeared. Only the strong and the healthy now remained. One day, we are told to strip, to hold our rags above our heads, prodded like cattle. Don't move. Moving is dangerous. It singles you out; it makes you vulnerable. The secret of survival is not to be noticed. I'm still there. Now Mengele asks for doctors and nurses to go with a labour transport. Could we trust this evil man with his perverted sense of humour, the man who rolled with laughter when we got out of the wagon, we five doctors and nurses, linking arms? A scarf on the grizzled head of our aged doctor, hiding her in the middle, marching ahead, singing, through the portal which proclaimed, "Arbeit macht frei," - "Work gives you freedom," but led to death. We five are still together, supporting each other. You need friends to survive. Now we stepped out together, volunteering. We knew if we stayed, we would not live long. Nobody does here in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Sooner or later you end up dead. Gassed, burnt, ashes. Made into grey coarse soap with bits of bones sticking up, to scratch, to remind you that you are still there. This transport, was it real or one of his jokes? We might get out or be sent to the gas chamber. We took the risk, wouldn't you? We were the fortunate few, the 500, went to work in armament factories, constantly bombed, but still alive. Now living in hope. Our hope was justified, our hope was their despair, but this was not to be the end. March in the dark, walk and totter towards perdition, "Don't stop, don't fall, or they'll shoot you!" I am here today. What have I learned? What do I now know? I do know that human cruelty knows no bounds, but I still don't know why I survived when so many died. Perhaps I survived to keep the memory alive, to bear witness, to talk to you, hoping you will listen. So listen to me, please. Be aware, be vigilant. Do not let differences in people's colour or religion, ethnicity, gender or class be the deciding factor on how they are treated. Differences should be valued and respected. I am different from you; you are different from me. But that doesn't make me worth less than you, just, perhaps, makes me more interesting to you, and you more interesting to me. I am not going to flay you, make a lampshade out of your skin - as they did in Auschwitz-Birkenau - to see what's under the skin, because I know that under the skin we are all the same. So listen to me, please. We all have rights and responsibilities: the right to be heard, the right to be listened to, but we have to take responsibility for what we are saying, what we are doing or failing to do. Now, I have faith in you, the young people of today, that you will listen and not make those mistakes which led to the Holocaust and are leading to genocide even today. I believe that you will build bridges, not frail ones which will break in the slightest wind, but strong, sturdy ones based on understanding and respect for each other, and the desire we all have for mutual trust and genuine peace. Remember two things: under the skin, we are all the same, and each of you can make a difference. So don't disappoint me. Thanks for listening. (Applause and cheers)