Holocaust survivor interview, 2017

this is a photo of me in my first year of school there are about 38 children in this class and of whom six survived my name is Lydia Tisha uh I am 88 years old from September 42 until May 45 I was in various concentration camps aitz was hell aitz really was hell we were on the last but one transport to aitz the last transport where all the prominence in terine who went straight into the gas chamber there were about 50 of us in a kettle truck with a bucket that was it uh we arrived

in the middle of the night and uh in aitz you could smell the fear you really could smell it and we had to go through selection which I mean we didn't know it was selection but that's what it was mangel whom you may have heard was standing there and he looked at you and then sent you to the left or to the right the left was the side for living and the right was the side for for gas I knew that our mother because she didn't come to the left she went to the right but

I after the war I Had A Sort of hope that maybe she was in some displaced person's Camp you know that she wasn't dead that somehow by a miracle she escaped we were HED into a huge Hall and told to Andress and then somebody came and shaved all our hair and then we were hearded into a another room where we were sat on benches like in a theater stacked and by then people were people who had been there for some time told us you know you will go the gas Chambers and so we sat there

and I must say I sat there and didn't know whether it would be water or gas it was water I remember when I was when I came to aitz in this room where they to took everything away from us there was a wooden board with the nationalities of all the of all the uh uh nationalities that were in Camp and I think on top were I don't think there were any English people French and the bottom two were the Gypsies and the Jews and I remember I have to remember this for some reason it seemed

to me important where they are putting us day to day life somehow one just took every day as it came I worked in the uh Market Gardens we were able to smuggle Sometimes some of the fruit for instance cucumbers if they were nicely bent you could stick it into your bra and bring it into the camp and luckily you know nobody nobody was uh taking our clothes off to see what we had hidden potatoes you could put in your stockings uh Tomatoes were not safe because they could uh squash and that was it paradoxically I

I got acquainted with cultural life in teresin I heard for the you know music there were of course all the well-known actors musicians writers professors uh were also in Camp so there was a rich uh Rich cultural and intellectual life as far as it was possible uh I heard Veris reum for the first time in my life in terine I would not have heard it if I had been at home at the age of 12 in ostrava life for people like me wasn't the worst it was much worse for older people who felt the hunger

and felt uh you know they had already had a life that they were deprived of usually usually when people have to deny something it's because they have to deny something because he's a nasty man and he doesn't want to feel nasty so he has to deny that anybody you know he he perhaps would have liked to do it himself uh this is how I understand when people have to deny the horrors in fact when I came to England and I managed to find a school and I went went to uh it was Brony and kilan

High School for Girls and when the girls heard where I came from and they asked me questions I thought how can they ask me these questions they've seen the films but then when I studied psychology I understood that when things are so so outside Human Experience you you really can't believe it we managed I disc discovered later on when I studied psychology and psychoanalyses how useful defenses are you know that you could believe it and not believe it you kind of told yourself no they made a mistake it's not can't be true so people just

as went to to aitz and very few survived I think one person escaped from aitz a check man who escaped and nobody believed in what he told them the best way to remember it would be if people could learn from this experience uh so that it's not repeated and in fact uh it's something that I've never felt that I needed to Revenge myself I also haven't felt a victim uh they didn't succeed in making me a victim I'm a Survivor which is something very different we thought of them as in human but I think they

never made me feel that I'm less than human I could you know I I had to put up with what they did to me you know when they told me to undress if I said I'm not undressing that they shot me or don't know what they would have done and although the Germans were able to take away all my physical almost everything except my life they left me alive but you know whatever could be removed from my body they removed from my body they couldn't remove my soul they could my soul they couldn't remove my

Integrity my inner self that I managed to maintain all of us have you know all of us have the capacity to be sadistic and horrible to other people we manag to find the we manag to to not not do it you know we we we but the potential for destructiveness is in all of us I actually believe that uh people are born well they born neither good nor bad and that the uh the the Badness is something that is the way that one is treated as a child that you know if you're treated well as

a child uh you can't become a Hitler