“The gates of hell: Auschwitz 75 years on”, The Observer
by Harriet Sherwood, Observer Speical Report, London, Sun 12 Jan 2020
The Nazi death camp where more than one million people perished was liberated on 27 January 1945. As one survivor, now aged 90, prepares to commemorate the date, she explains why the Holocaust must never be forgotten … especially in an age of rising antisemitism and nationalism
Renee Salt had just turned 15 when she arrived at the gates of hell. Her journey with her parents to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp near Kraków in Poland, was by cattle truck, wedged in with hundreds of other Jews, no food, water or air for 24 hours. On arrival, the men were separated from women and children; Renee, who was born in Poland, never saw her father again.
She and her mother stood in line. The “Angel of Death” – Nazi SS officer Josef Mengele, a doctor who conducted cruel experiments on prisoners – stood at the head of the queue. “Whenever he saw two people holding hands he would split them up with a flick of his hand, one to die and one to live,” she told the Observer. Those sent to the right were taken straight to the gas chambers. By a miracle – “God’s will, I suppose” – Renee and her mother both went to the left.
“I remember everything. In my mind, I can see everything that happened,” she said. “We were taken to a hall, everyone was stripped and had their heads shaved. They took all our possessions, jewellery, watches, everything. We were all saying prayers, hugging and kissing one another as we thought this was our last hour.”
Instead they were given a piece of white linen with a number printed on it, which they had to pin to the clothing they had been allocated – in Renee’s case, an oversized skirt and a man’s pyjama jacket. No shoes or underwear were provided. For several weeks, the prisoners sat in rows on the stone floor of a hut, day and night.
“We were taken to the latrines once a day. Also once a day they brought soup in a pan, one for every five people. There were always arguments – ‘you’ve had three sips already’. Everyone wanted the soup from the bottom of the pot because it was a bit thicker. We were not allowed to talk. We had to sleep as we were sitting.
“Twice a day we had roll calls outside the hut. Very often people collapsed from weakness. Sometimes someone would die. We were treated just like animals.”
Now aged 90, Renee will soon again stand at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Along with up to 200 other Holocaust survivors and scores of heads of state, political leaders and dignitaries, she will mark the 75th anniversary on 27 January of the camp’s liberation by Russian soldiers. A ceremony will include speeches by survivors, and by Andrzej Duda, the Polish president, and Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress. Britain will be represented by Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.
Among other events to mark the anniversary and Holocaust Memorial Day is a global forum on Remembering the Holocaust: Fighting Antisemitism, at Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial in Jerusalem, on 23 January. It will be attended by dozens of world leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, the French president, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Mike Pence, the US vice-president, and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president. The Polish president pulled out last week, claiming he had been denied the opportunity to make a speech.
At least 1.1 million people – mostly Jews – were murdered at Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps. In the weeks before Red Army troops arrived on 27 January 1945, thousands of prisoners were shot, tens of thousands more forced on to death marches, and most of the gas chambers destroyed. About 7,000 prisoners remained.
Renee Salt and her mother had been moved about four months earlier. They were first sent to do back-breaking demolition work in Hamburg, and then to the Bergen-Belsen death camp, which was liberated by British troops on 15 April 1945. Renee’s 42-year-old mother died 12 days later and was buried in a mass grave; Renee was hospitalised for several weeks.
From a huge extended family – including aunts, uncles and cousins, two sets of grandparents and even a great-grandparent – only Renee and three aunts survived the Holocaust. In 1949, she married a British soldier who had been part of the Bergen-Belsen liberation force, and the couple had two children and five grandchildren.
For decades, she never spoke of her experiences even to her immediate family, enduring frequent nightmares in isolation. But eventually she accepted an invitation to tell her story to schoolchildren, and in 2005 the BBC broadcast a documentary, Grandchild of the Holocaust, about Renee and her grandson, Adrian, then aged 13.
She returned to Auschwitz for the first time while making the programme. “I didn’t really want to go. I was shaking, I was so frightened, it was terrible. But I sort of buried the ghost,” she said.
Since then, she has returned dozens of times – but this visit may be one of the last. Seventy-five years after the end of the second world war, inevitably the number of Holocaust survivors is rapidly dwindling. At a time when antisemitism is rising once again in Europe, “this may be the last significant anniversary we commemorate with eyewitnesses who endured the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust,” said Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust.
As well as all the facts, dates and numbers relating to the Holocaust, the world has, for many decades now, been able to “see the faces of people who did not learn about Auschwitz from books and films but actually, tangibly and physically, experienced this hell”, said Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial and museum.
Survivors have become “moral symbols – not just of survival but also of resilience”, said Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar at the American Jewish University in California. “They bore witness to the worst humanity can be, and became voices for dignity, tolerance and decency. The idea that we’re going to lose that generation is enormously painful; we will lose the authenticity that comes from someone who can say ‘I was there’.”
But, he added, “no generation has left behind as great a historical record”, including memoirs, art, music and video testimony. “And we have been planning for a decade or so how to teach about the Holocaust in the absence of living witnesses.”
Yad Vashem holds an extensive archive of video, oral and written testimonies. In 2016, the UK National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Newark launched an innovative way of preserving the responses of survivors to children’s questions. The Forever Project has created lifesize images of survivors which, using digital technology, can “answer” questions in real time from hundreds of pre-recorded replies. The centre has also produced a short film, telling the story of one survivor through the medium of hip-hop, as a means of engaging young people.
“In a climate of ignorance, trivialisation and denial, the primacy of first-hand testimony cannot be overstated,” said Marc Cave, the centre’s chief executive. “The Forever Project is the single most important thing we’ve done to future-proof Holocaust education for generations to come.”
