The sheer enormity of the horror is impossible to grasp…but grasp it we must.
I’ve listened in horror to the stories of Holocaust survivors in the UK, who told me: ‘If you listen to a survivor, you become a witness”. They told of losing their entire families, being marched for hundreds of miles, sent in cattle trucks to concentration camps where they would have their head shaved and be left to starve.
Some saw their mum and dads dragged away to their deaths from their homes, others watched their loved ones get sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz. One told how she watched her mother shot dead in front of her, falling to the snow in a pool of blood.
While the remarkable Mala Tribich, the only UK holocaust survivor to travel to Auschwitz on Monday, told me she hasn’t counted how many loved ones she lost in the Holocaust. “It is easier to count who remained because there were so few. Of all my immediate family there were two of us left, my brother and I.”
She spoke to me about her desperate need to keep the memory of her loved ones and all the other survivors alive, as she walked under the formidable gates in Auschwitz. All of these survivors stressed to me, their desperate desire to relive this hell to make sure it never happens again.
They quote Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel to me, who said: “I believe firmly and profoundly that whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness, so those who hear us, those who read us must continue to bear witness for us. “Until now, they’re doing it with us. At a certain point in time, they will do it for all of us.” With the march of time, the number of survivors has been shrinking and the ones left, only too aware of their own mortality, say they were lucky to escape death many years ago but it is catching up on them now.
Source : https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/powerless-victims-watched-loved-ones-34560879
