Out Of The Darkness

It is 60 years this month since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. To commemorate this year's Holocaust Memorial Day, we talk to the people still living with the ghosts of Europe's bleakest hour

The survivors

Anka Bergman, 87, was a 23-year-old law student in Prague when the Nazis took Czechoslovakia. Her daughter, Eva Clarke, now 59, was conceived during Anka's three years of imprisonment in Terezin, a Jewish ghetto, 30 miles from Prague. Eva's father, Bernd Nathan, was a German-Jewish architect who was shot near Auschwitz a week before liberation. He never knew Anka was pregnant with Eva, who now works for the Holocaust Education Trust, telling her story in schools

I had no idea then what Auschwitz was for. When we arrived we saw the smoke and the chimneys and smelt that indescribable smell. Dr Mengele was there deciding with a flick of his gauntlet gloves who would die and who would live. I was already pregnant but not showing and I was separated, like most young people, into the work group. Then they shaved our heads. We were frightened without knowing why.

We soon learnt that we were in a mad house, a snake pit. One girl went to some inmates and asked if they knew if her parents were there. They screamed with laughter. We thought they were mad and they thought we were mad for not knowing. They told her that her parents were already up the chimney.

Mengele called his line-ups to decide people's fates several times a day. I survived for 10 days before being sent to a munitions factory in Germany. Mothers, grandmothers and children went straight to the gas chambers.

I spent about six months working in the factory with other Jewish women. Then, early in 1945, we were told we were to be transported south by rail to Mauthausen concentration camp. By now, I was about nine months' pregnant and the journey in open coal wagons took three weeks. In the rain, I became a pregnant skeleton covered in soot and coal dust. In Czechoslovakia, we stopped in a field and local people just stared at us. All these skeletons with well-fed SS officers.

One farmer rushed off and came back with a glass of milk for me. When the SS officer raised his whip as if to hit me, the farmer was so shocked. For some reason the German guard allowed me to drink the milk and I believe it saved both me and Eva. We'd had nothing to eat and little to drink on the journey. I didn't know it then, but I've discovered since, that while I was travelling across Europe, the Nazis were losing the War and were busy blowing up gas chambers.

When we finally reached Mauthausen, I had to climb out of the truck and into a cart. The cart was filled with dead and dying women and infested with lice. By now I was in labour. I remember screaming in the final stages and the Nazi driver saying, "You can scream as much as you like."

Eva came out without crying, moving or breathing. It was so cold. In the camp, someone called for a professor of gynaecology from Belgrade. There was never any shortage of doctors in the camps. The doctor took Eva, smacked her and wrapped her in newspaper. No doctor has ever been able to explain it, but my milk came through even though I weighed perhaps just five stone.

Eva gave me the will to survive. Sometimes, when I speak of these things, even I cannot believe they happened. I was never a great believer in God and the camps confirmed my doubts. Where was God at Auschwitz?

Eva Clarke adds: I believe that I owe my life to my mother's courage. One day, as part of my work for the Holocaust Education Trust, I was asked by one little boy what I would say to Hitler if I could meet him now. I told him that I would simply ask him why. Mary Braid

The counsellor

Judith Hassan, 58, is the director of the Holocaust Survivors' Centre and Shalvata, a Jewish Care-funded organisation for survivors living with the aftermath of severe suffering

I was working as a social worker in London, and elderly people were coming to me with practical problems: wanting help moving house and things like that. But I began to realise there was a hidden agenda that I was never going to reach by sitting in an office and expecting them to come to me for counselling.

Then a Holocaust survivor came to see me and said, "We don't want therapy, we just want to meet together and you to help organise it." So I did, and it was a way to build a bridge with people who, for over 40 years, had never come forward to ask for help. Out of that group, survivors could come and say they wanted to talk. I had to adapt the way I worked. I was trained to work with psycho-dynamic boundaries, but this had to be an equal relationship - for people who've lived in authoritarian regimes, anything to do with authority is an anathema.

I had to learn to use touch, not to be concerned if a survivor wanted to give me a kiss when they left. Shalvata was founded in 1990 and, in 1991, we set up the Survivors' Centre. There was nothing like that in existence. After the War, there was too much chaos. People just got on with their lives - and did it extremely well. But although the survivors were liberated in 1945, emotionally they still carried the impact of that trauma.

It's a natural part of ageing that we remember things from the past. So when they retired, or the family left home, what wasn't finished in terms of the grieving and the massive losses they'd been through started to come back. Most were carrying their wounds very deeply. Survivors say it's like carrying around a stone lodged in you. The trauma would come out, in nightmares, in their relationship to food, to being cold, to authority.

Hospitals are particularly traumatic. In a death camp, being ill was a one-way ticket. Seeing people in uniform, getting a number put on your wrist - they find it very difficult. And a survivor isn't easy to spot; many were educated here, they don't have an accent. It takes a particular doctor to tune in to that. Everything at the centre is designed to help them live beside the trauma, without reliving it. The rooms are light, because people who have been incarcerated don't like the dark. In the café, they don't have to queue, because that's what they had to do in the camps. There, when they were starving, they were given a thin watery substance called soup. So every day we make a thick, nourishing soup to counteract that.

I don't think I do this work by chance. My mother came here as a refugee from Germany in 1939. My father worked with Jewish refugees and he'd often bring them home. Some stayed for years. I remember them living with us and my mother's food and warmth. She created a haven and I like to think this place is an extension of that. People ask if it's depressing to work here and, of course, you hear heart-rending things. But in spite of that, this is a very positive place. Rose George

'A House Next Door to Trauma', by Judith Hassan, is published by Jessica Kingsley, priced £19.95

The archivist

Ben Barkow, 48, is the director of the Wiener Library, the oldest Holocaust and Nazi-era archive in the world

We've got 60,000 books and journals, and we're acquiring 2,000 titles - 40 metres of shelf space - each year. Most people in London have never heard of the Wiener Library - it's better known in New York than London. The library is open to anyone who wants to use it, except [Holocaust denier] David Irving. He's barred, though it took a year of arguing with the Charity Commission before we could ban him.

We get a lot of students, and some people researching their family background. Some survivors come, but they're dying out now. We once had a father and son turn up. The father wanted to consult memorial books, which list people who were deported, for example, and he had a complete breakdown. We took him into another room and called a doctor, and we were left sitting with the son, who was completely mystified. His father had never mentioned that he had been in a camp or that he'd lost any of his family. He'd woken up that morning and said, "Today we have to go to the Wiener Library and I need you to come with me."

Those kinds of stories are very powerful and depressing. I feel very engaged with the subject matter, partly because of my family background. I was born in Berlin and I have German nationality. Half my family were happy to live with the Nazi regime, some too enthusiastically. On the other side, my great-grandfather was Jewish but converted to Christianity. Two of his daughters converted back to Judaism and another became a Roman Catholic nun. She worked with Jews, including one of her sisters, who had to live underground to hide from the Nazis. She was arrested in 1943 and this great-aunt was killed in Auschwitz, while the nun lived out the war in Ravensbruck. So one way or another I have always lived with this kind of horror.

The collection was started by people who were living alongside the events they were documenting. In the 1950s, for example, Dr Alfred Wiener and his staff collected 1,200 eyewitness accounts of Holocaust events when people didn't want to hear about it, and not that many people were interested in talking about it either.

We also have three copies of a game called Jews Out, which comes from the mid-1930s and is incredibly rare. You throw the dice and you're aiming to land on a Jewish business. The winner is the one with six Jews in the collection point, who are then deported to Palestine (the game predates the idea of murdering everybody). It was commercially produced and sold a million copies. It's vile, but it's a very effective way of communicating something to younger people.

We're still getting bequests all the time. We're accumulating documents faster than ever because survivors are dying, and often the younger generation can't read the documents, aren't interested in them and will then destroy them. In one extreme case recently, our librarian was called out on a Sunday morning because someone who knew about the library saw a neighbour's flat being cleared and all this correspondence being put in a skip.

We got 12 boxes of very interesting correspondence and papers that we had to literally fish out of the skip. If we don't take them, they will be lost. We are maintaining a heritage here. Even now, the level of ignorance around the subject is unbelievable. There was a public-opinion survey done around one Holocaust Memorial Day where an amazing number of people thought the Holocaust was a Jewish holiday." RG

The liberator

Brigadier Ronnie Nightingale MBE, 86, (then a lieutenant) was commanding A Platoon, 404 Company, Royal Army Service Corps, when, in April 1945, he received orders to take relief supplies to Belsen

I and the 60 NCOs [non-commissioned officers] and men serving under me were not new to war. We'd been in the Western Desert, we'd worked our way up Italy, we'd crossed the Rubicon. In April 1945, I received orders to go to a map reference in Germany, to somewhere called Belsen. There was no preparedness. It wasn't till the officer commanding B Platoon warned me, that I had some idea of what I was driving towards.

He suggested I set up a safe harbour for the vehicles away from the camp. There was a whole gaggle of people out there who were very weak and unwell, so what we had was treasure. If you saw the way people clung to the last of their belongings before they succumbed themselves, you'd understand that everything was precious.

So I set up the harbour, then went into the camp to let them know I'd arrived. I have no difficulty in recalling going along the connecting road to the main gate of Camp Number One. On the left side of the road, German civilians were relaxing in front of their bungalows. Nonchalantly, like they were extras in a play. They were so close to the perimeter of the camp, it was horrifying. Inside the actual camp, I was struck by the enormous piles of compressed clothing and footwear. There were corpses lying about all over the place, too, in advanced states of emaciation. It's hard to believe how much a body can shrink and still remain a living body.

I saw one soldier carrying a corpse under each arm, to give you some idea of the weight loss. I'm an inquisitive person, so I went to look into the hutments. Some people have talked about the living and the dead sharing beds. I can't say anything like that. All I know is that within these hutments, they were in bunks three high. There was the stench, there was the racking, and these penetrating eyes. I started to vomit and I never went back into a hut again. I remember being tugged at, and I remember people trying to cook something on little fires. And I remember the smell - it never leaves you.

On 20 April, I received an order to withdraw, and went to the camp again to inform them I was leaving. Someone offered to show me a building near the camp commandant's office. Inside were personal effects of value that had been taken from the inmates, all stored in little packets, carefully placed in trays. There was meticulous attention to detail. I think that building had the greater impact on me. This was all that remained of so many people, God knows where they'd gone.

But I had my orders to withdraw and I complied. My men were campaign-hardened veterans, but of course they were upset. We were all very quiet, but we moved on to the next assignment because that's what you did. Some years later I commanded a regiment not far from Belsen. I never went near the place. Deliberately.

I never talked about Belsen. It's something I wanted to forget. I didn't jump at the idea of doing this interview, but I thought that it wouldn't be amiss for young people to be acquainted with my experiences. Since I decided to speak, though, the thoughts of those times have taken over this house, and I haven't been easy to live with. My wife and I have been married for 57 years, and she's still the girl of my dreams, but the first time she really learnt about my experiences was this morning when she took some documents to be photocopied.

I met one other person who'd had similar experiences, who'd gone into Belsen with the Medical Corps. His wife only learnt about this when he died. It's something he and I chose never to discuss. I still can't square my thought processes with how those human beings in that camp were treated. Those two days were the most horrific of my life. But it didn't damage my hope in mankind. It's something to be surmounted. RG

'Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution' is on BBC2 on Tuesday at 9pm. Holocaust Memorial Day is on 27 January