A survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and Auschwitz has told how she survived the dehumanising conditions.
Hungarian-born Susan Pollack, now 91 and living in London, has recalled the death and sorrow she encountered at the Nazi-run camp to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
When she arrived at the concentration camp, she had already survived through much horror - she was just nine when her father was herded into a lorry and taken to a concentration camp never to be seen again.
In 1944, Susan was transported by cattle truck to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp along with her mother and brother Laci after SS officer Adolf Eichmann ordered that every Jew in Hungary be deported.
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Her mother was murdered immediately in the gas chambers but young Susan spent about 10 weeks there.
Describing her time there, she told the Sun : "We were starving, that was all that was on my mind. There was no food, just some watered down slosh or soup in the morning.
"The starvation, day after day, ravaged our bodies. Us girls were examined by somebody called Dr Josef Mengele, stark naked, little girls.
"We were regularly inspected and if you were seen to be losing weight rapidly, you went taken straight into the gas chambers, not suitable for work anymore, useless.
"On one occasion, I was selected. But it wasn't for the gas chambers, it was for slave labour."
She was then sent to Guben in Germany and forced to work as a slave in an armament factory testing components.
But then in the winter of 1944/45, aged just 14, she was forced on a Death March to Bergen-Belsen, where hundreds of people walked across frozen fields for weeks to get to the death camp.
She told the Sun: "[It] was a place of death and indescribable suffering. There were rotting bodies all over. There was starvation and infectious diseases everywhere, even the people who were alive were no longer people.
She previously described it as being filled with "mountains of corpses" - a place of complete devastation, filled with rotting bodies.
Mercifully, the camp was liberated in April 1945, when Susan was just days away from death.
Describing the moment she was freed, she said: "I crawled out of my barracks, away from the smell and the filth and the crying, as I couldn’t take it anymore.
"I felt a hand picking me up, but doing so gently, and I didn't get shot, not that I would have cared.
"I was placed in a small ambulance and that’s how the British liberated me. The first thing they did was wash me, because I was filthy. They called in the local German women, made them wash us down and give us some clean clothes."
After the war, she found out that more than 50 of her relatives had been killed and that only her brother Laci had survived.
Susan moved to Sweden before ending up in Canada where she met and married fellow survivor Abraham Pollack.
The couple were married for 60 years and had three children and six grandchildren together before Abraham died in 2015.
Meanwhile, Susan continues to work with the Holocaust Educational Trust, sharing her story.
Talking about life now, she told the charity: "Life is precious – you can go in one of two ways – up or down. I chose to walk away and rebuild my life. There was no revenge and no justice.
"In my case, I think I rebuilt my self-esteem through the joy of having children and building a family. I also chose to exercise my free will. I find that trying to make a positive contribution to society, such as through volunteering, helps greatly."
