‘Of those who lived to see freedom, now there is only a handful’published at 15:21 Greenwich Mean Time
We are now hearing from Marian Turski, a survivor of Auschwitz. He is a member of the International Auschwitz Council.
He begins by giving his “warmest thoughts and feelings” to fellow survivors, “who have shared this misery with me. The inmates”, he says.
“It is absolutely understandable, if not downright obvious, that people, that the media, turn to us, to those that survived, so that we share with them our memories,” he adds, according to a translation.
He says this small minority of survivors “went though all those selections”.
“Those who lived to see freedom, there were hardly, hardly, none. So few. And now, there is only a handful.”
Turski says this is why he believes their thoughts should go towards the millions of victims “who will never tell us what they experienced or they felt, just because they were consumed by that mass destruction.”
He mentions a poem that has survived, which he says “goes beyond anything that the mind can imagine”.
He reads a bit of the letter that the poet wrote to her friend, she was killed.
The letter reads: “‘I’m going to a very distinct place, a station which is unknown for it is not on any map. There is the sky hanging over the station like a huge black lid.”