A Nazi concentration camp survivor has urged people to end a culture of blame and instead learn from the past to put an end to atrocities we continue to see around the world.
Marking Holocaust Memorial Day, Susan Pollack told The Standard: “Hate has a way of spreading. It isn’t just against the Jews, but any other form of people. We’re a mixed community, and we have to treat each and every one equally, and look back and learn from the past, so we can create a good future.”
In 1944, Hungarian Jews were deported, many of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Along with her mother and older brother Laci, Mrs Pollock was sent to Vac in Hungary in the hope they would be resettled.
They were taken from a prison camp to Auschwitz, and Mrs Pollack was separated from the pair on arrival. She discovered later that her mother was sent to a gas chamber.
She later worked as a slave labourer in an armaments factory in Guben, Germany. But when the Allied forces advanced, she and the other prisoners were forcibly marched to Bergen-Belsen, another concentration camp in northern Germany.
She described her feeling of terror: “Infectious diseases were raging, and dead bodies were left all over. It was a place of death.”
Recounting her experience, she described crawling out of one barrack and into another, before seeing a familiar face: “Who do I see for the first time? I knew my next-door neighbour. She recognised me, and she managed to ask me, ‘Are we going to survive?’ And I said, ‘Yes, just hang on; just hold on.’ The following day, when I crawled back to her, lice was all over; she was dead.”
They were liberated on 15th April 1945.
“I crawled back; I was ready to die. I crawled out, and I felt a gentle pair of hands, picking me up. A miracle. He lifted me up and put me in a waiting ambulance. They were the British army.”
Mrs Pollack was awarded the ‘Freedom of the City of London’ award in 2019 in recognition of her work with the Holocaust Education Trust, speaking at schools in the UK and around the world to relate her testimony.
She hoped “much has been learned” but emphasised antisemitism “hasn’t entirely disappeared”.
Speaking on the growing antisemitic environment in her home village in Hungary before the Second World War began, she said: “My late brother loved going to football matches, and when he came out, he was beaten up because he was wearing the yellow star. When we went to the police, they shrugged their shoulders.”
“Antisemitism grew daily, and in fact, it was so distorted; it was so hush-hush.”
Mrs Pollack lost more than 50 members of her family to the Holocaust.
“It isn’t just personal […] There was no revenge; we walked away - those who were able to walk. And against many odds, we managed to rebuild our lives, through work ethic, and worked hard”
Her message to people today is to “learn, reflect, and do what you can to improve”. She is hopeful that in the future, “genocides will gradually disappear”.
The charity’s CEO, Karen Pollock said Mrs Pollack’s testimony is a “powerful and stark reminder” of the atrocity’s “brutality”.
“Susan was taken from her home and the family she loved, forced to endure unimaginable horrors and beyond all odds survived to tell her story.”
At 8pm on Friday, people will light candles at their windows to remember those who were murdered.
