Oskar Groening trial Susan Pollack, A British Auschwitz survivor testifying at the trial of 'the bookkeeper of Auschwitz' has given a graphic account of her 'time in hell' in the Nazi extermination camp where 1.2 million people died.
Susan Pollock, 84, born Zsuzsanna Biall in 1930 in Hungary and now living in North London, said her experience left her so dehumanized that she was unable to cry for her dead relatives.
She was speaking at the trial of Oskar Groening, 93, a former S.S. officer at Auschwitz, dubbed the bookkeeper because it was his job to catalogue the valuables taken from victims and send them back to the Nazi regime.
Speaking at the trial in Luneburg yesterday, said: 'I was so dehumanised by my experience there that I could not even cry when I learned my mother had died in the gas chamber there.
'We spent day after day in a dark, closed wagon, no hygiene, no food or water, people dying to get there. My mother was gassed on arrival; my brother survived, in the "Special Commando" squad moving bodies to the ovens.'
She was singled out by the perverted 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele, the S.S. doctor who went down in infamy for his sadistic medical experiments upon people using no anaesthetics in his bid to clone 'supermen' for the Reich.
'He had a stick in his hand and was using it to say, go this way or go that way,' she said.
'I knew by then that one way led to a gas chamber, and that my mother had been gassed on arrival. But I wasn't crying. All normal and natural feelings had left me.
'We were dehumanised completely. I just wanted to recede into myself, never to be seen. That was my experience in Auschwitz.'
She is present as one of 48 co-plaintiffs in the case - either Auschwitz survivors or people who lost loved ones in the camp - at the trial of Groening, who is charged with complicity of the deaths of 300,000 Hungarian Jews during a 48 day period in the summer of 1944.
After Auchwitz was evacuated in the path of the advancing Red Army she was force-marched to Belsen in Germany, where the teenaged Holocaust diarist Anne Frank died early in 1945.
'Many died from exhaustion,' she said. 'If you fell down you were shot. We struggled. There were hundreds of corpses there when we arrived, absolutely no hygiene, nobody cleaned up.
'Infectious diseases were raging. On liberation, I was virtually a corpse, unable to walk, and would soon have died.'After her testmony she said: 'I saw him [Groening] briefly, just a glance. He's a broken man, an elderly man. Forgiveness? Who am I to forgive him? I'm lucky I survived.'
With other young people she was sent to Sweden and then to Canada, where she married fellow-Hungarian Abraham Pollack, a survivor of Mauthausen.
They have three daughters and six grandchildren and have lived in London since 1962. Susan has worked as a librarian and lately as a Samaritan volunteer.
She published her story in the book Witness and continues to bear Holocaust testimony.
She added: 'Because I was there, I speak for those who can't. The great evil that pervaded so many minds in a civilized country destroyed more than fifty members of my family.
'It is a lesson for all time: will later generations stand up for the rights of others, or remain the silent majority? My hope is for a unified protest against all evil, which diminishes not only the victim, but humanity as a whole.'
Susan Pollock, 84, born Zsuzsanna Biall in 1930 in Hungary and now living in North London, said her experience left her so dehumanized that she was unable to cry for her dead relatives.
She was speaking at the trial of Oskar Groening, 93, a former S.S. officer at Auschwitz, dubbed the bookkeeper because it was his job to catalogue the valuables taken from victims and send them back to the Nazi regime.
Speaking at the trial in Luneburg yesterday, said: 'I was so dehumanised by my experience there that I could not even cry when I learned my mother had died in the gas chamber there.
'We spent day after day in a dark, closed wagon, no hygiene, no food or water, people dying to get there. My mother was gassed on arrival; my brother survived, in the "Special Commando" squad moving bodies to the ovens.'
She was singled out by the perverted 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele, the S.S. doctor who went down in infamy for his sadistic medical experiments upon people using no anaesthetics in his bid to clone 'supermen' for the Reich.
'He had a stick in his hand and was using it to say, go this way or go that way,' she said.
'I knew by then that one way led to a gas chamber, and that my mother had been gassed on arrival. But I wasn't crying. All normal and natural feelings had left me.
'We were dehumanised completely. I just wanted to recede into myself, never to be seen. That was my experience in Auschwitz.'
She is present as one of 48 co-plaintiffs in the case - either Auschwitz survivors or people who lost loved ones in the camp - at the trial of Groening, who is charged with complicity of the deaths of 300,000 Hungarian Jews during a 48 day period in the summer of 1944.
After Auchwitz was evacuated in the path of the advancing Red Army she was force-marched to Belsen in Germany, where the teenaged Holocaust diarist Anne Frank died early in 1945.
'Many died from exhaustion,' she said. 'If you fell down you were shot. We struggled. There were hundreds of corpses there when we arrived, absolutely no hygiene, nobody cleaned up.
'Infectious diseases were raging. On liberation, I was virtually a corpse, unable to walk, and would soon have died.'After her testmony she said: 'I saw him [Groening] briefly, just a glance. He's a broken man, an elderly man. Forgiveness? Who am I to forgive him? I'm lucky I survived.'
With other young people she was sent to Sweden and then to Canada, where she married fellow-Hungarian Abraham Pollack, a survivor of Mauthausen.
They have three daughters and six grandchildren and have lived in London since 1962. Susan has worked as a librarian and lately as a Samaritan volunteer.
She published her story in the book Witness and continues to bear Holocaust testimony.
She added: 'Because I was there, I speak for those who can't. The great evil that pervaded so many minds in a civilized country destroyed more than fifty members of my family.
'It is a lesson for all time: will later generations stand up for the rights of others, or remain the silent majority? My hope is for a unified protest against all evil, which diminishes not only the victim, but humanity as a whole.'
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