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Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion: Remember What Happened the Last Time Fascism Met Capitalism?
In February 1933, the future Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring sent out telegrams to 25 of Weimar Germany's leading businessmen, inviting them to a secret meeting with Adolf Hitler—to discuss a potential alliance. Despite their growing success in the polls, the Nazi party was as good as broke, and desperately needed investment; Hitler was subsequently able to secure it by convincing his wealthy guests that they shared the same interests—stopping the spread of communism, protecting private enterprise and breaking up trade unions. More alluring still was his oxymoronic belief that 'private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.' The connection between German industrialists and Nazi leaders—until recently a grossly overlooked aspect in World War II studies—resembles the relationship that's currently developing in the U.S. between MAGA Republicans and big tech CEOs, Silicon Valley elites and hedge fund moguls like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the latter of whom not only facilitated Trump's return to the presidency in part through his donations (and ownership of the social media platform X), but has since obtained a key role in the White House. As Musk's DOGE continues to decimate the federal workforce—gutting anti-Trump opposition under the guise of making the country's political apparatus more productive and cost-effective—many Americans are wondering what comes next. Historical precedent gives us a possible answer. It isn't pretty. The industrialists who answered Göring's call for help went on to benefit from the Nazi regime in three big ways. First and foremost, they received lucrative government contracts for the production of arms, chemicals, food and textiles—contracts that grew in scale and scope once World War II got going. Günther Quandt, whose ex-wife Magda married Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and infamously poisoned herself and her children inside the Führerbunker, provided the Third Reich with rifles, ammunition, and batteries. Pharmaceutical conglomerate IG Farben produced Zyklon B, the cyanide-based pesticide used in concentration camp gas chambers, while 'Pudding Prince' Rudolf August Oetker, of Dr. Oetker fame, was the German army's go-to caterer. Through Aryanization, the industrialists grew their empires, buying out Jewish competitors—at fractions of the companies' actual worth—and then folding them into their own. The twin heads of automobile manufacturer Porsche for example, used the Third Reich's antisemitic policies as a pretext to oust their Jewish cofounder, Alfred Rosenberger, before going on to develop the Volkswagen and, subsequently, military vehicles like the amphibious Schwimmwagen and armored Kübelwagen. And they were able to save vast amounts of money by replacing paid employees with slave labor from concentration camps and PoW prisons. Not only did these workers work for free, but they did so for longer hours and with minimal rations. Those who couldn't perform their duties due to exhaustion or illness were killed—and replaced. While many Nazi leaders were executed at Nuremberg (or committed suicide to avoid such a fate), the vast majority of German industrialists were never brought to justice. Some, like Quandt, went on to claim that they, much like the German population in general, had been tricked or coerced. Others offered to make themselves useful to the Americans, who came to see German capital as a valuable asset in the looming Cold War with the USSR, by helping rebuild the West German economy and supporting transatlantic trade. (Porsche, for example, began selling Volkswagens in the U.S. as early as 1949.) As a result, many formerly pro-Nazi companies are still around today. Despite assertions like Quandt's, or arguments that they had no choice, their relationships with the Nazi party were more than merely transactional, with many becoming honorary SS officers and entering the inner circle of Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler. Musk and other big tech CEOs, meanwhile, are not just cozying up to Trump for financial reasons, but because they appear to genuinely share the president's worldview—or, at least, are willing to make it seem like they do. In the U.S., Zuckerberg has firmly planted himself on the side of Trump's culture wars, axing Meta's independent fact-checking services, loosening rules on hate speech, and claiming companies need more 'masculine energy.' Musk, having secured his place at Trump's side, is using his wealth and influence to support far-right movements in other countries, notably Germany, where he urged supporters of the Alternative for Germany (AFD), which won a record 152 seats in the German Bundestag following recent elections, not to 'focus on past guilt.' The story of the German industrialists, then, serves as a warning for today's America and the Western world at large. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither the German industrialists nor their 21st-century American counterparts seem to care much about free markets and capitalism, at least not in the contemporary, neoliberal sense of the word. (Certainly they seem indifferent at best to many of the democratic institutions that guarantee these systems' existence.) Rather, their business practices and goals increasingly appear to be pushing for an economic order more akin to colonial-era mercantilism or a kind of 'technofeudalism,' as the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis argues in his 2023 book of the same name. Although they claim to champion meritocracy and free speech, the capitalists who have joined hands with Trump—whether Musk, Zuckerberg or many others—appear to dream of a world that's more about a free-for-all than freedom for all. That comes with quite a cost.
Euronews
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Euronews
102-year-old Frenchman seeks €43,000 in reparation for WWII forced labour
A 102-year-old Frenchman is seeking €43,000 from France for the forced labour he carried out in Germany during World War II. "I want to feel proud to be French and be able to put this Franco-German history behind me. I feel betrayed by politicians," Albert Corrieri, who will turn 103 this year, told Euronews. Corrieri was only 21 years old when German officers took him from the restaurant in Marseille, where he worked as a plumber. He was sent to Germany as part of the Compulsory Work Service (STO) programme enacted by the French Vichy government in 1943. Corrieri worked at the IG Farben chemical plant in the Ludwigshafen camp until it was liberated by American soldiers on 15 April 1945. Almost eight decades after the end of his forced labour, the centenarian has brought a case against the French state, arguing that he should be paid €43,000 in compensation — equivalent to roughly €10 per hour — for the more than two years of work that he carried out against his will during the war. Corrieri told Euronews that he had been fighting to receive a reparation since the 1950s. "I never got anywhere, but last year a historian friend recommended I take the case to court", he said. "Time is not on my side, I can't afford for this to go on for much longer. Getting the money is about dignity, it is what I am owed and I will pass it onto my children if I can't spend it all", added Corrieri. The 102-year-old attended a hearing for his case in Marseille on Tuesday. During the hearing, the court's public rapporteur stated that a 1951 law — which allows forced labourers to demand reparations from the French state — operates under a statute of limitations from 1955 onwards. Under these terms it would be too late for Corrieri — who is awaiting a court ruling on 18 March — to file his reparation claim. Michel Pautot, Corrieri's lawyer, told Euronews that he believed any such decision would be a breach of international law. "My client was deported and enslaved, both of which are crimes against humanity. These crimes are not time-barred, so should the court refuse our request it would mean that there is a double standard for crimes against humanity," he said. 'Fight for history and rememberance' Documents seen by Euronews, which include Corrieri's deportation card and his "victim of deportation card," provide proof that he was deported and forced to work as part of the Compulsory Work Service. Pautot said the case was important because it was "a fight for history and remembrance". "The victims of the STO must not remain the forgotten victims of history," he added. While hundreds of thousands of French citizens were deported to work in forced labour camps, many died on site and only a handful of survivors individuals are still alive. This is not the first case of its kind, as Pautot filed a compensation case in Nice in February on behalf of another centenarian, Erpilio Trovati, who also carried out forced labour during the war. Trovati's application was rejected because the case was deemed to have been brought too late due to the 1955 statute of limitations for forced labourers. He has, however, appealed against the decision.
Al Jazeera
27-01-2025
- General
- Al Jazeera
‘Hell on Earth': Who were the victims killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz?
'The sky was red, and the air smelled like burned meat. I didn't understand it then, but my mother told me it was people. People like us.' — Ceija Stojka, Auschwitz survivor Eighty years ago, the Soviet Red Army liberated survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi extermination camp in the Silesian region of southern Poland. The arrival of the Allies gave the world its first real glimpse of the horrors of the camp — even though there is evidence that British and American intelligence agencies knew of the industrial-scale killings in Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps. More than one million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered at the Auschwitz camp, which operated from May 1940 until its liberation on January 27, 1945 – now observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in honour of the victims. Other victims included the Roma, Polish political prisoners, homosexuals, communists, Soviet prisoners of war and disabled people. We look back at what happened at Auschwitz, the way different categories of victims were treated, and the testimonies of some of the survivors. What were the different German internment and death camps? The Nazis, driven by their ideology of racial supremacy and territorial expansion, established more than 44,000 camps that served a range of purposes across Germany and its occupied territories from 1939 to 1945. This vast network was known as the 'Lager', where between 15 and 20 million people were imprisoned or killed. It included concentration camps for 'undesirable' ethnic groups and political prisoners; labour camps where enslaved prisoners carried out industrial or agricultural work, including for German firms such as the IG Farben chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate and the Krupp engineering company; transit camps for holding detainees before deportation to other camps; and six extermination camps where people were taken to be murdered. Auschwitz was a complex that had many of these types of camps. It was also the largest of the Nazi death camps. People were sent to Auschwitz from transit camps across Europe and from labour camps if they were deemed unfit to work. Some were sent from Auschwitz to other locations to be used for forced labour elsewhere. What was Auschwitz used for? After the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, they converted Auschwitz, an army barracks, into a set of more than 40 camps, of which Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau were the two most significant facilities. Auschwitz became a central part of the Final Solution, the German plan for the genocide of Jews. Auschwitz I was established in 1940, primarily for Polish political prisoners, and later expanded to include Jews and others. It also served as the administrative centre of the complex. Situated near the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland, the camp was strategically connected to a dense network of railways, allowing the efficient transport of those it imprisoned from locations across Europe. Auschwitz II-Birkenau was built in 1941 and 1942 in the nearby village of Brzezinka (Germanised as Birkenau), about 3km (1.9 miles) from Auschwitz I. It functioned as the largest extermination and forced labour camp in the Nazi system, equipped with gas chambers and crematoria. Along with Einsatzgruppen paramilitary death squads, Auschwitz was the single biggest killing machine during the Holocaust. Approximately 1.3 million people were held in Auschwitz over its four years of operation – at least 1.1 million of them, the vast majority Jewish, were murdered. Auschwitz handled up to 90,000 prisoners at any one time. Inmates carried out various duties within the camp, such as cleaning, administrative work, supervising other inmates or performing the grim task of pulling bodies out from gas ovens, removing any gold teeth and women's hair, and burning bodies. They were also marched off to do hard labour in outside locations such as factories, quarries and farms, where inmates would work by day and return to their camps at night. Auschwitz was also a site for medical experiments and pseudo-scientific research, using the inmates as guinea pigs. Dr Josef Mengele, known as the 'Angel of Death', was infamous for his horrific experiments at Auschwitz, particularly on twins and individuals with physical anomalies. These experiments involved injections of chemicals into the eyes to attempt to change eye colour, deliberate infection with diseases to study immune responses and the dissection of one twin after death to compare with the surviving sibling. In mass sterilisation programmes targeting minorities such as the Roma and people with disabilities, victims underwent forced exposure to radiation targeting reproductive organs, injection of caustic chemicals into the uterus or testicles and surgical sterilisation without anaesthesia. Who was held at Auschwitz and what happened to them? Jews made up 90 percent of the victims of Auschwitz while other groups were also sent to the camp. Each was targeted for specific reasons, and life in the camp differed significantly depending on the group to which prisoners belonged. Jews 'It is not possible to sink lower than this. No human condition is more miserable than this.' — Primo Levi, Italian Jewish chemist, author, and Auschwitz survivor Jews were the principal target of the Holocaust and the worst sufferers – by far – of Nazi brutalities. Between 1939 and 1945, some six million Jews were murdered across Europe. They were gassed, shot, or starved and worked to death. Of those murdered, nearly 1.1 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz alone – about 85 percent to 90 percent of the camp's victims – making it the deadliest Nazi extermination camp. Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz faced some of the harshest and most brutal conditions of all the prisoner groups. The Nazi racial ideology targeted Jews for extermination above all others. In his 1947 memoir, Survival in Auschwitz (If This Is a Man), Primo Levi described how he was immediately subjected to the 'selection' process on arriving at the camp in January 1944. Those who failed the fit-to-work test deemed unfit for labour were sent to the gas chambers. In all, 75 to 80 percent of Jewish deportees were immediately sent to the gas chambers on arrival. Jews had to live in overcrowded barracks, with as many as 1,000 prisoners crammed into spaces designed for 400. They received minimal food rations, leading to starvation and extreme malnutrition. Sanitation was almost non-existent, with limited access to water or latrines, leading to rampant disease. Levi, on arrival stripped of his personal belongings, shaved, tattooed and given a uniform, was assigned to gruelling forced labour, enduring starvation, freezing temperatures, disease and the constant fear of death. 'We had to move like automatons,' he wrote, 'following orders mechanically, to avoid attracting attention and punishment'. Jewish inmates worked under constant abuse and beatings from SS (Schutzstaffel, a paramilitary organisation) guards and 'kapos' — fellow inmates who agreed to work as supervisors for the Nazis — often until they collapsed and died. Jews were also singled out for especially humiliating and dehumanising treatment, such as being forced to witness or participate in public executions, stand naked for hours or endure beatings. Jewish women often faced sexual violence. Though he eventually survived and later went on to become a highly acclaimed author of many books, Levi remained haunted throughout his life by the traumas he had experienced during the Holocaust. He eventually took his own life in 1987. Roma 'The screams of the children still echo in my ears. They screamed until they were no longer there.' — Ceija Stojka, Roma Auschwitz survivor An estimated 23,000 Roma were deported to Auschwitz, mostly between February 1943 and July 1944, of whom 19,000 perished. Defined as 'racially inferior', the Roma were placed in a designated 'Gypsy family camp', or 'Zigeunerlager', located in the southern part of Auschwitz II-Birkenau and adjacent to the gas chambers and crematoria. Among those sent to Auschwitz was Stojka, the fifth of six children born to Roman Catholic Roma parents who made their living as itinerant horse traders. Their family wagon travelled as part of a Roma caravan that spent winters in the Austrian capital of Vienna and summers in the Austrian countryside. In her 1988 memoir, Stojka relates that she was five years old when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. Her parents were ordered to remain in Vienna and convert their wooden wagon into a permanent house. Stojka remembers them having to learn how to cook with an oven instead of an open fire. In 1940, Roma families received new orders from the Nazi regime to register as members of a non-Aryan race. The settlement where Stojka lived was fenced off and placed under police guard. Stojka was eight when her father was taken away to the Dachau concentration camp; a few months later, her mother received his ashes in a box. Soon afterwards, Stojka, her mother, and siblings were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the mother and children were crammed with thousands of others into overcrowded barracks with little food or water. They lived in the shadows of a smoking crematorium. 'Auschwitz was like hell on Earth,' Stojka said. 'The smell of burning flesh was constant, and it became part of our lives – part of our breath.' The camp was overcrowded, filthy and rife with disease. Roma prisoners were kept on the edge of starvation and often subjected to brutal medical experiments, particularly the children. Death rates were extremely high due to disease and malnutrition. Stojka described how she would helplessly watch as prisoners, including children, were selected for medical experiments or sent to be eliminated by gassing. 'In Auschwitz, we were no longer people,' Stojka wrote. 'We were numbers, things to be disposed of, with no value except the work we could do before we died.' In mid-1944, Stojka, her mother, and siblings were transferred to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in central Germany – miraculously escaping the so-called 'liquidation' of Birkenau's Roma. On August 2, 1944, SS guards, with their rifles and dogs, surrounded the camp. The inmates initially resisted, with whatever tools, sticks and rocks they could use as weapons. They were soon overpowered, dragged to the gas chambers and murdered with the Zyklon B cyanide-based pesticide. The Roma Family Camp massacre was part of the broader Nazi genocide of Roma people, known in the Romani language as the Porajmos ('Devouring'). At least 220,000, and possibly as many as 500,000, Roma were murdered in the course of the Porajmos, representing 25 to 50 percent of their pre-war population. Stojka and her family members were moved from Ravensbruck to yet another facility, Bergen-Belsen, in north-central Germany, from which she was liberated on April 15, 1945, weighing just 28kg (62 pounds). Polish resistance 'The hardest part was the psychological terror – the idea that you could be executed at any moment for any reason made the fear constant.' — Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, member of the Polish resistance, Auschwitz survivor Some 150,000 Polish intellectuals, clergy, educators and resistance members were sent to Auschwitz in a German effort to suppress any opposition to Nazism and hinder the country from rebuilding after the war. While harsh, their treatment was generally less brutal than that of Jewish prisoners. Even then, about 75,000 Poles were killed at Auschwitz. Many Polish political prisoners were given administrative roles within the camp, which sometimes meant privileges like better food or clothing. Among the Polish resistance members held at Auschwitz was Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to Auschwitz. In a 1988 interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bartoszewski described that immediately on arriving in the dead of night, he and others on his train were 'thrown into a muddy yard, and immediately subjected to the brutality of the SS guards'. 'They shouted at us, beat us with clubs, and forced us to strip. We were herded into the barracks like cattle, overcrowded and filthy. There was no space to sleep, and the smell of death was already present.' Bartoszewski was assigned to work in the commander's kitchen. But despite that job, he and his comrades were fed barely enough to survive, and he witnessed many prisoners dropping dead from exhaustion and hunger. Some imprisoned Poles succeeded in forming underground resistance networks to provide mutual aid and sabotage camp operations, making use of the fact that Auschwitz was situated in their own country. They gathered information about the Nazis' plans, movements of goods and extermination efforts, and smuggled this data to Polish resistance leadership and Allied forces. 'I remember one night, during roll call, when we overheard some SS officers discussing a mass transport of prisoners being sent to the gas chambers the next day,' Bartoszewski, who later became Poland's foreign minister, recalled. 'We managed to secretly alert others, which allowed many to avoid the selection process. It wasn't a victory, but it was a small act of defiance that gave us hope.' Resistance figures also destroyed or altered records to delay the identification and deportation of prisoners, and played a key role in documenting the systematic killings at Auschwitz. They sabotaged industrial operations, slowing down work and damaging equipment, organised escape routes and smuggled food, medicine and other essentials into the camp – all at great personal risk, as those caught helping prisoners were usually executed. As the war progressed and supplies depleted, conditions worsened for Bartoszewski and all the other prisoners in Auschwitz. When the Nazis ordered inmates to line up and walk out under the shadow of their guns in January 1945, as the Soviets approached, many, like Bartoszewski and Levi, were too weak to leave. Both survived until the Soviet troops reached Auschwitz. Most people held in Auschwitz did not. Conscientious objectors Many conscientious objectors were held in Auschwitz, including some 3,000 Jehovah's Witnesses who refused to serve in the military or swear allegiance to Hitler, even under torture. Jehovah's Witnesses were not kept separately from other prisoners, but could be identified by a purple triangle on their uniforms. Although treated less harshly than other groups, they too were subject to starvation and forced labour. Jehovah's Witnesses conducted secret Bible readings and prayers, both of which were strictly forbidden, and often shared their meagre rations with other prisoners who were weaker or in worse condition. They also refused to engage in the camp's hierarchical brutality, such as becoming kapos – supervisors of forced labour – or participating in acts of violence against fellow inmates. Simone Arnold Liebster, a Jewish French survivor of Ravensbruck (another concentration camp located in central Germany), would later describe the kindness and spiritual strength of the Jehovah's Witnesses she knew during her imprisonment, noting: 'Their steadfastness and peace gave me strength to endure. They reminded me that even in the darkest places, kindness and faith could survive.' Prisoners of war Tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were held in Auschwitz, treated as 'subhuman' according to Nazi ideology, and often kept in dire conditions, with little food and no medical attention. Although positioned near the bottom of the Nazi hierarchy of prejudice, they were not subjected to the systematic genocide directed at Jews and Roma. However, they were usually assigned to the harshest forms of slave labour, such as construction or forestry work in sub-zero temperatures, with many, if not most, perishing from starvation, cold and disease. Aleksei Vaitsen, one of the few Soviet prisoners of war to survive Auschwitz, later said: 'We were stripped of everything – our uniforms, our dignity and our humanity. To them, we were not soldiers. We were animals.' Other minorities Other Auschwitz inmates included homosexual men, who were identified by a pink triangle sewn onto their uniforms and subjected to brutal experiments to 'cure' their sexual orientation. Also held at Auschwitz were people with disabilities, deemed 'unworthy of life' under Nazi eugenics policies that aimed to create a 'racially pure' Aryan population by promoting selective breeding and eliminating those deemed 'unfit'. This included the forced sterilisation of some 400,000 individuals with hereditary conditions, mental illnesses or other disabilities. Under the 'T4 Programme' of euthanasia, about 300,000 disabled people, including children, were systematically murdered in gas chambers, with injections or through starvation. At Auschwitz, many of these disabled prisoners were subjected to horrific medical experimentation at the hands of Mengele and his associates. Another class of Auschwitz prisoners were German and Austrian common criminals, arrested for theft, murder or other non-political crimes, who were identified by the green triangles on their uniforms. As Aryan citizens, these inmates occupied a higher status among those imprisoned, with many being appointed kapos, allowing them benefits such as better food rations. The kapos were notorious for abusing other prisoners, especially Jews and political detainees. However, a few of these criminal prisoners resisted, helping fellow inmates or refusing to carry out SS orders. When and how were the victims of Auschwitz liberated? In mid-January 1945, approximately 60,000 Auschwitz prisoners were marched westwards to other concentration camps, ahead of the Soviet advance. On these so-called 'death marches', they staggered for days in freezing temperatures with little food or clothing. Thousands died from exhaustion, starvation or exposure, and many others were shot by SS guards along the way. The liberation of Auschwitz itself took place on January 27, 1945, when Soviet troops from the 60th Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front entered the camp. They discovered about 7,000 remaining survivors, including 700 children, most of whom were severely emaciated, sick or dying – those too weak or ill to join the death marches. The Soviet troops found piles of corpses and ashes, gas chambers and crematoria, as well as warehouses filled with victims' belongings, including shoes, clothing and human hair. The liberation exposed the scale of Nazi crimes to the world and became a defining moment in the history of the Holocaust.
The Guardian
26-01-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Auschwitz: 80 years after its liberation, three survivors tell their stories
Monday 27 January is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Three survivors, two of whom were interned there as teenagers, tell Kate Connolly their stories. Albrecht 'Albi' Weinberg, 99, grew up in the village of Fehndorf Rhauderfehn in East Frisia, northern Germany, where his father, Alfred, was a livestock dealer and butcher. He and Albrecht's mother, Flora, were deported in October 1944 via Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. Weinberg was forced into Nazi slave labour in 1939, and he and his sister, Friedel, were sent to Auschwitz in April 1943 at the same time as, but separate from, their older brother, Dieter. All the siblings survived and were reunited after the war. Albrecht and Friedel emigrated to the US, returning to live in Germany after 65 years. Dieter moved back to East Frisia, but was killed in a motorcycle accident in Leer in 1947 in suspicious circumstances, having been asked on his return by townsfolk: 'Why didn't they gas you?' Since 2013, Albrecht Weinberg has regularly given talks in schools. He has lent his voice to the Jewish Claims Conference's digital Holocaust memorial campaign, I Survived Auschwitz: Remember This. Before the Nazis came to power, life was idyllic. We lived happily alongside our neighbours. When they celebrated Christmas, we were invited, when we celebrated Hanukkah, they came to ours. Then the Nazis came to power and antisemitism raised its ugly head. The square opposite our house was renamed Adolf Hitler Platz, and Hitler Youths would hoist and lower a flag there every day, and sing Deutschland über alles. On Kristallnacht they chased us out of our beds, hounded us through the streets and locked us up in the local slaughterhouse, forcing the men to muck out the pigsties. They took my parents – who we never saw again – and I and my siblings were forced into slave labour, then in April 1943, rounded up and transported in furniture removal vans with no windows, so Berliners couldn't see what was happening, to Grunewald train station where cattle wagons were waiting for us. There were no toilet facilities onboard. We thought we were being sent to the east to work for the military effort, but we arrived in Auschwitz and had no idea what it was. People in striped prison uniforms screamed: 'Get out, get out!' and because there were no ladders or steps, some of the older people and those with disabilities fell on to the ground, and the younger people just stepped over them because they didn't want to get hit. Most of the women and children went in one direction – I lost sight of my sister on arrival – and they picked those of us they thought were physically fit and took us to Monowitz [known as KZ Auschwitz III Monowitz] to work for the company IG Farben producing methanol and rubber for the military. I got tattooed with the number 116927, and was no longer Albrecht Weinberg. I worked there for two years … After several death marches I found myself lying amid the dead and the living on a wagon in Bergen-Belsen. Our bodies were tipped out. Two days later, a tank drove in. I thought: 'Now I'll finally be freed by death,' but it was British soldiers coming to liberate us. They later told me I'd weighed 29kg (just under 4st 8lb). I and my sister, Friedel, with whom I'd been reunited, decided we wanted to emigrate. I felt nothing but hatred for Germany. We were taken to Bremerhaven and took a ship in February 1947 to New York City, where we lived for more than 60 years. I ran a butcher's shop – Jack and Al's Meat Market – with another survivor. Friedel and I vowed to each other that we'd never marry and would not put Jewish children into the world. At some point I received 5,000 deutschmark compensation from IG Farben. I never thought of trying to get our family house back or compensation for it and neither did I ever want to return to Germany. When my sister had a stroke, we took up the offer to move back to Germany in 2011 as we had no one to take care of us in New York and medical care was beyond our means. I spoke German – albeit speckled with English – and thought: 'Even if they took away my passport, and I don't feel it's my heimat because they stole that from me, and murdered my family, it's still not a bad move.' At the start, I struggled in the retirement home – I was suspicious of everyone my age: 'Were you maybe a concentration camp guard? Did you taunt me on the streets as a child with antisemitic slogans?' Not a day goes by when I don't think about my family. There are now Stolpersteine in front of our former family house, which are the closest thing I have to a gravestone where I can feel close to them. I'm taken back to Auschwitz every day when I look in the mirror while washing my face and I see my tattoo. I returned for real to Auschwitz once in 2011. I was able to say the Kaddish at the site of the crematorium with a group of Jewish visitors and it gave me some peace for the first time. Mindu Hornick, 95, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 in a shtetl – a small Jewish village – called Rusky Pole, home to 50-60 people in the Carpathian mountains, in what is now Slovakia. When she was 10, her father, Moses, was drafted into a forced labour battalion and she and the rest of the family were sent to a ghetto in Košice. In 1942, now 14, she was put on a cattle wagon to Auschwitz. She and her sister, Bilou, were separated on arrival from their brothers – Josef, 11, and Samuel, six – and their mother, Chaya, all of whom were murdered. Mindu and Bilou spent the rest of the war enduring forced labour before they were liberated in 1945. Thanks to a transport of child-survivor war orphans arranged by Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, one of the last to leave eastern Europe, Mindu was able to emigrate to England, where she lived with her uncle and his family in Birmingham. She married, had two sons, ran a successful electronic goods shop with her husband, Alan, and was awarded an MBE for her role as a Holocaust educator with the Association of Jewish Refugees. When we arrived in Auschwitz, we hadn't got a clue what it was. There were partitions in the wooden slats, and my mother said: 'Have a look and see what you can see'. I just read the Polish word: 'Oświęcim' [the town next to the camp]. She said: 'I've never heard of it.' A kapo [Jewish prisoners forced to stand in as guards for the SS] told us in Yiddish that I and my sister should pretend to be older than we were – 17 and 19 – so that we could have a chance of surviving. My mother looked very fearful but said to do what he said. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion When they pushed us out of the cattle trucks at Auschwitz we really thought we had entered hell. I looked back into the crowds. I couldn't see my brothers, but I saw my mother, who was wearing a spotted scarf. I waved at her and she waved back. That was the last time we saw her. We walked on, and came to the main gate and realised it was a selection. I remember [the SS doctor] Josef Mengele, wearing leather gloves. Some went to the left, some to the right. I asked when we were likely to see our mother. We were told by other prisoners: 'You're not going to see your mother again.' Extraordinarily, we found our aunt, Berta, who managed to swap blocks so we could stay together. Without her support and my cousins, Lily and Elsa, I believe we wouldn't have survived. We stuck together throughout. They sent us to work in the so-called Kanada section of the camp, where our job was to find the jewellery in the possessions people had brought with them. It took us days to realise that the ash that filled the air was from the crematoriums. Only afterwards did we find out the slimy bit of soup we got, made of turnips, also contained bromide to stop our periods. In all, we were there for just under six months but it felt like an eternity. I think it was my biggest piece of luck to get taken out of Auschwitz. We were taken to Neuengamme concentration camp, to Lübberstedt-Bilohe, 15km outside Hamburg, where the work in a factory in the forest was dangerous – filling bombs, grenades and mines with explosives for the Luftwaffe – but the air was better due to not having the crematoriums burning day and night. The lack of sickness around us helped us to survive. Unlike in Auschwitz, the bunks were not just hard wood but covered in straw, and we had blankets, and a soup made from pulses. In spring 1945 we boarded a transport and our train was twice attacked by British Typhoon fighter jets who didn't realise it was carrying prisoners. The roof of the carriage was ripped away and about 50 girls in my group were killed. It was one of many occasions where I was helped or got lucky – my sister pushed me under the seat so we both survived. We had been due to be put on ships heading to Lübeck, which the Germans planned to destroy to get rid of evidence ahead of their surrender, but due to the attack we were delayed. Because the RAF pilots thought the ships contained leading SS personnel they bombed them, and thousands of prisoners – slave labourers collected from all over Germany – were killed. I'm still incredulous that we survived. I arrived in the UK in April 1948 to a Birmingham which was full of smog and miserable people, no street lamps, ongoing rationing and no proper coffee – none of the post-war elation that I'd experienced in Prague. But the warmth I received in my uncle Zolly and auntie Hety's house was wonderful. My sister Bilou got one of three visas to go to Australia. I was heartbroken. We didn't see each other again for about 20 years. I only started speaking about the Holocaust after 40 years, but to do so I had to start digging very deep into my subconscious to reach what had really happened. I first returned to Auschwitz in 2014. I had a terrible reaction, a rush of memory. It was also very traumatic. I came home and lay motionless on the settee, thinking of my parents. When I went again in 2019 I managed better. I had no desire to return to Germany, but did so in 2018 on what became a big family pilgrimage with children and grandchildren in tow, and it was very rewarding. Eva Clarke, BEM, and her mother, Anka, were the only members of their family to survive the Holocaust; 15 others were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her mother, who had been a law student and then an apprentice milliner in her native Prague, became pregnant with her when she and her husband, Bernd Nathan, an architect and interior designer from Hamburg, were incarcerated in Theresienstadt, where they had been sent in December 1941. She only discovered she was pregnant with Eva once she had arrived in Auschwitz, having followed her husband there on 1 October 1944, when they were immediately separated. She gave birth to Eva on a wagon in Mauthausen concentration camp on 29 April 1945. Returning to Prague after the war, she learned that her husband had been shot dead on 18 January 1945. In 1948, Eva, Anka and Anka's new husband, Karel Bergman, escaped communist Czechoslovakia and emigrated to the UK, settling in Cardiff. Eva, who was a university administrator, married an academic in 1968. She lives in Cambridge and has two sons. She regularly gives talks organised through the Holocaust Educational Trust. Her mother died in 2013, aged 96. When the Nazis discovered in Theresienstadt that my mother was pregnant with her son, Jiří, my parents were forced to sign a document stating that they would hand him over to the Gestapo to be murdered after his birth. My brother died of pneumonia and his death meant both my mother's and my life. It was a sign of the eternal, innate optimist she was – she had even taken a box of doughnuts with her to Theresienstadt – that she volunteered to follow my father to Auschwitz, not having a clue as to what it was. Had she arrived in Auschwitz with a baby she'd have been immediately sent to the gas chambers. As it was, because she arrived there without a baby – and unbeknownst to anyone except herself, because it didn't yet show, was pregnant again, with me – she survived. She was in Auschwitz for 10 days, until 10 October, 1944, but said it was like 100 years. She remembered the selection over which Mengele presided. She compared the place to Dante's Inferno and said it was terrifying. Having been deemed fit for work, she and others were soon sent to a slave labour camp at an armaments factory near Dresden. At first they all thought they were about to be killed, until they were given a piece of bread. I first started asking her questions when I was quite young. She never failed to answer any of my queries. In fact I think I was something like a sounding board for her. She never used the word 'cathartic', but I think that must have been the effect this constant questioning, my need to know details, had on her. Lots of people have asked me if she was bitter, but you can't move on if you're bitter. She also said she was lucky to have learned early on about the death of my father – she was pushing me in the pram shortly after arriving back in her native Prague, and a friend of his came up to her and told her. It gave her closure, which many survivors never have. She said after all she'd been through, I gave her a real reason for living again ... I was a miracle baby after all. This was at no time more important than when she arrived back in Prague and realised what had happened to her parents, sisters, the whole extended family. It was the worst moment for her, she said. But she had no time to mourn because she had to live for me. She had given birth to me after a 17-day journey to Mauthausen camp in an open coal train, having had no food and very little water, but having been allowed by a soldier poised with a whip to accept a glass of milk from a farmer en route who was shocked to see she was pregnant and skeletal. During the birth she was surrounded by people with typhus and other sicknesses. A soldier told her: 'You can keep on screaming', probably in the expectation that she would die. A doctor came, a prisoner, cut the umbilical cord, and smacked me to make me breathe. They wrapped me in paper and said I'd weighed just 3lb, my mother about 5st (35kg). Emotionally, I feel more connected to Mauthausen and Theresienstadt, but Auschwitz has always been an important place for me to return to. When I was about to celebrate my 50th birthday and Malcolm, my husband, asked what I wanted to do, I said: 'If I'm ever going to go to Auschwitz, this is the year.' In hindsight I'm very glad I did. Now that I'm soon to celebrate my 80th birthday I plan to go back again in spring, for the March of the Living. I will continue to tell my mother's story for as long as I can. I'm aware that I have a story to tell that's unique to me – to us.'
