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 which six survived my name is Lydia Tisha uh I am 88 years old from September 42 to May 45 I was in several concentration camps aitz was hell aitz really was hell we were on the penultimate transport to aitz the last transport where all the prominence in terine that went straight to 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 could really smell it and we had to go through selection, which I mean, we didn't know it was selection, but that's what mangel, who you may have heard of, was He would stand there and look at you and then send you to the left or to the right, the left was the living side and the right was the gasoline side.

I knew that our mother, because she didn't come to the left, went to the right. but after the war I had a kind of hope that maybe she was in a displaced persons camp, you know she wasn't dead, that somehow by a miracle she escaped, we went to a huge room and told Andress and Then someone came and shaved off all our hair and then they heard us in another room where we were sitting on benches like in a stacked theater and by then the people who had been there for a while told us, "You know, you're going to go to the accelerator." Chambers and then we sat there and I have to say I sat there and I didn't know if it was water or gas, it was water.

I remember when I arrived at Aitz in this room where they took everything from us there. There was a wooden board with the nationalities of all the nationalities that were in the camp and I think they were at the top, I don't think there were any English, French, and the two at the bottom were the gypsies and the Jews, and I remember. I have to remember this, for some reason, it seemed important to me where everyday life puts us in a way, one just took each day as it came. I worked at Market Gardens, we were able to smuggle.

Sometimes part of the fruit, for example. The cucumbers, if they were folded right, you could put them in your bra and bring them to the camp and, fortunately, you know that no one, no one was taking off our clothes to see what we had hidden. Potatoes you could put in your stockings. Tomatoes were not safe because they could uh crush and that was all paradoxically. I became familiar with cultural life in Teresin. I heard because of the music, you know, there were, of course, all the well-known actors, musicians, writers, teachers, uh were also in the camp, so there was a rich cultural background. and intellectual as far as 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 was not the worst it was much worse for older people who felt hungry and felt, you know, that they had already had a life that they were deprived of, usually when people have to deny something it's because they have to deny something because he's an unpleasant man and he doesn't want to feel unpleasant. so you have to deny that someone you know might have liked to do it themselves.

That's how I understand when people have to deny horrors. In fact, when I came to England and I made it. To look for a school and I went to Brony and Kilan Girls' High School and when the girls heard where I come from and asked me questions, I thought: how can they ask me these questions? They've seen the movies, but then when I studied psychology I understood that when things are so outside of the human experience, you really can't believe it, we did it. I discovered later, when I studied psychology and psychoanalysis, how useful defenses are.

You know you can believe it and not believe it. If you told yourself no, they made a mistake, it can't be true, so people went to Aitz and very few survived. I think one person escaped from Aitz, a verifier who escaped and no one believed what he told them. The best way to remember it would be if people could learn from this experience, so that it is not repeated and in fact, it is something that I never felt and that I needed to get revenge. I haven't felt like a victim either. They failed to make me a victim.

I am a

survivor

, which is something very different. We thought they were human, but I don't think they ever made me feel like I was less than human. You might know I had to hold on. what they did to me you know when they told me to undress if I said no I undressed they shot me or I don't know what they would have done and although the Germans were able to take away my entire physique almost everything except my life they left me alive but you know whatever could be removed from my body they removed it from my body they could not remove my soul they could my soul they could not remove my Integrity my inner self that I managed to keep all of us Do you know that we all have the ability to be sadistic and horrible to other people that we managed to find and what did we manage not to do?

You know it's us, but the potential for destructiveness is in all of us. In fact, I think uh. people are born good, they are not born good or bad and that evil is something that is the way they treat you when you are a child and you know that if they treat you well when you are a child you cannot become a Hitler