Holocaust Memorial Day: 'Nobody believed their accounts'

BBC News

27-01-2025

Eighteen-year-old Mascha Nachmansson, an outstanding student and rabbi's daughter, is dreaming of going to university. But Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany has just invaded Poland and his troops are about to descend on the city, tearing apart Mascha's life forever. It is the first days of September 1939 in the Polish city of Lodz (Łódź), the bustling heart of the country's textile industry. One of 12 children raised in a loving family, Mascha has already witnessed the antisemitism that has followed her community for hundreds of years. But the horror of what happened to her next will not be revealed for decades, her daughter Jeanette Marx said.
"Some survivors used to say they did try to talk to people immediately afterwards, and say what had happened to them, but people just looked at them as if they were totally mad, delusional," Jeanette says. "'These things can't happen, you know. You grew up in in the civilized world. You grew up in Europe. These things don't happen in Europe.' "So nobody believed them, and they stopped talking."
Jeanette says it was only through a recording made by a school in the 1970s, showing Mascha describing her experiences to a group of children, that she learned the full truth of what had happened. The powerful footage shows a middle-aged Mascha sharing the horror story of her family being forced to move to the overcrowded Lodz ghetto with more than 200,000 people - her parents and two siblings later perishing from the rampant disease. Another sister was murdered in the gas chambers at the Chełmno concentration camp, she explained.Surviving the horrific conditions for five years, Mascha was then sent to Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps towards the end of the war, describing them as "hell on earth".She left Auschwitz after being "bought" by an ammunitions factory near Berlin to carry out forced labour. Allied forces were now bombing Nazi Germany, with the area where the factory stood heavily targeted and the management abandoning Jewish prisoners to fend for themselves because, as Jeanette explains, "they knew once these prisoners had been killed there would be others" to replace them.
After rescue finally came in early 1945 at Ravensbrück, Mascha was taken by the Swedish Red Cross to Malmö, where she was granted refugee status and later met her husband, a Swedish Jewish man.For much of Mascha's later life, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was not recognised, her daughter says, and she was instead "diagnosed with all sorts of things".Mascha went on to educate herself in multiple languages, became a kindergarten teacher and raised two daughters. But the signs of PTSD were clear and she would "immediately stiffen up" if she heard a dog bark, her daughter remembers. "Dogs to her meant barking when she arrived in Auschwitz - the cattle wagon doors were unbolted, they were greeted by dogs barking and Nazis shouting 'get out quick'."Sometimes, my dad called us into the the kitchen, where my mother was sitting shaking, crying," Jeanette said."He didn't know what to do. We didn't know what to do. All we could do is hug her and sit with her."
The long decades of silence about the Holocaust also followed Dr George Garai, a Hungarian Jewish man raised in Budapest. He too was 18 when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944.George was forcibly sent to a labour camp and then Mauthausen Concentration Camp, before he was forced to undertake a four-day death march to Gunskirchen Concentration Camp where he was struck down with typhoid.He never spoke about the horrors he faced during the war but, as a journalist, he wrote what he called his "CV" - a hugely detailed autobiography - in the 1990s.Even in this document, he could not tell the full truth of what he had experienced. He had hidden his account of the death march - a time during which, he wrote, he had been "touched by death". These were details he felt were too painful for his family to know.His memoir of the horrors he faced was only revealed in the last few days of his life, when he urged his family to share what he had been through with the world. It is from this extraordinary account that his granddaughter, Ella Garai-Ebner, now shares the story of his life with thousands of people through the charity Generation2Generation.
"He spoke about three miracles in his life," Ella said. "The first was that his dad, who was extremely unwell, was able to make it to his Bar Mitzvah when he was 13. "The second miracle was that he survived, in his words, the horrors of Mauthausen and the murderous death march."The third is the one that really gives me chills, which is, in his own words, that despite everything he went through he was able to have a wonderful life and meet an incredible woman and raise two beautiful daughters."In May 1945, having managed to survive to the final days of the war, George was liberated from Gunskirchen. "He really acknowledged the the miracle of his survival, and also the miracle of everything that came next and he had a happy life," Ella adds.That life saw him flee Hungary in the mid-1950s, eventually settling in England - where he worked at the Jewish Chronicle - after time spent in Sydney embarking on a journalism career and meeting his wife, Anna, a fellow Hungarian Jew who had herself been hidden in an orphanage during the Holocaust.
But genocide in the 20th Century did not end with the defeat of Nazi Germany. Holocaust Memorial Day also remembers the victims of more recent atrocities; in particular, this year marks 30 years since 1995's Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.Una Srabovic-Ryan never got to meet her biological father, Salčin, who was just 17 when he was murdered during the genocide.Her mother, Azmira, also a teenager at the time, was three months pregnant. She was transported to the city of Tuzla where, having lost most of her biological family, she gave Una up for adoption.A Bosnian-British couple raised her before moving to the UK for Una to attend school.
She had no contact with her biological family until a Facebook message sent by her adoptive mother in 2012 to her birth mother finally reached her four years later in Australia, where she had settled after the conflict and started a family."It was so surreal, because I had kind of accepted at this point that I wasn't ever going to meet her," Una says. "But it was kind of the opposite, she did really want to find me."In 2017, Una was finally able to travel to Australia to meet her biological family and, after continuing her search, managed to find her paternal family still in Bosnia, who had never known she existed. "I'm the only child my father had and I'm kind of the main thing left from my father," she said. "So I think they look at me and they think 'wow, like you are the piece that's connecting us to him', and I just hope that they can see my father in me."
Growing up in the UK, Una says there was little understanding - and somewhat downright disbelief - from people about her previous life in Bosnia, echoing the experiences of Mascha before her.It is part of why, she says, its is so important for her and other survivors to share their stories. She says Holocaust Memorial Day is "not just to remember people who have died", but "the survivors as well, and the resilience of those survivors".
Una, Jeanette and Ella will share their loved ones' stories at a ceremony at Bristol's City Hall later.Ella says - 80 years on from the liberation of the Holocaust survivors - there is a "fear that such a horror could be repeated or forgotten, and history is doomed to repeat itself."I think through education, through sharing my grandpa's story, through knowing that survivor stories are being shared and heard, and the awareness and tolerance that I hope this teaches, that fear lessens bit by bit."Una, from Yate, says it will be "an opportunity for us to educate ourselves about the dangers of what hatred can do"."After the Holocaust, they said 'never again' but the Bosnian genocide happened 30 years ago and there have been other genocides since such as Rwanda and Cambodia."
Jeanette says her "message" to others "is that the murder of six million Jews and many other minorities carried out by the Nazis and their collaborators did not happen within a week or two, or even a year."There was a slow development of exclusion, lack of respect, looking at somebody who's not like you as as somebody who's not worth the same as you. "I particularly feel that the young generation who are exposed to social media I hope they understand that certain messages that are pushed through social media need to be challenged, because if one doesn't challenge it, it won't take long before these sentiments and these ideas that people throw around will take hold, and from one small act it builds up."She hopes for a world in which her mother Mascha's philosophy can win through: "You concentrate on what's valuable in life, and that's family good values, charity, friendship, education and respect."