Prisoner Number A26188: Henia Bryer

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

I always felt that having my grandparents around me is very important, um...

I knew that she hadn't spoken about the Holocaust much in her history,

in her past, to her family and she always told me

and my sister, like, "Whenever you want to pick up the phone

"and say, 'Listen, Granny, can I speak to you about something?'"

Um...in school whenever a teacher would ask,

"Did any of you have a Holocaust survivor in your family?"

I would raise my hand straightaway and tell them the story.

My dad had a shoe factory so we lived very well -

had an apartment in a very nice part of the city.

We were a family

of two parents and four children -

an older brother, myself, then there was a younger brother

and a little sister.

She was very bright and very pretty,

very beautiful,

and she adored me - I was the hero.

My older brother was physically handicapped.

He was damaged during birth and he couldn't walk,

but there was nothing wrong with him mentally.

1st September, we were coming back to school, we were

coming back from vacation with the whole family and all the coffers

with the stuff in and the helpers and everybody was on the train.

And the train was full, everybody was panicking

and wanted to be at home when the war started.

Within eight days, they came to the town.

I mean, the Poles were fighting with...they didn't have any defence.

They had sabres.

And these were big tanks and the army was like, you know,

the German army was organised, they...

They were...they were...within 14...

I think... I don't remember the days,

but within, I think, 14 days they occupied half of Poland.

They were wearing these black uniforms with a skull on top and...

..and they installed loudspeakers all over the town...

..spreading hate propaganda.

Hitler's speeches went on for hours and hours,

so if somebody says that they didn't know what was going on,

that was impossible, whether they liked it or not,

because he never made any secret of what he was going to do to the Jews.

We had white armbands with a blue...

this Magen David, the Star of David, ja.

At that time and all the time afterwards,

I looked not like a Jewish girl.

I looked like the advert of Goebbels for a German.

Every second German stopped me in the street, "Why are you wearing this?"

They didn't see a Jew looking like this.

They had all these propaganda pictures picturing Jewish people

like...they looked like monkeys, I've never seen anybody like this,

and looking like animals, not like people.

My dad was still working.

They didn't pay him, but he had a collection of gold...

of gold roubles

and that saw us through a lot.

The ghetto was established in '41.

There were 30,000 people - they had to get us there

and the one that we were in was called the Big Ghetto

but it was really a small, erm... place.

It was around the Jewish quarters where the synagogue was,

ten people in a room.

It was... They were terrible conditions.

They would come and knock on doors

and take people out and shoot them there and then

and they would do the most terrible things,

and they used to send people to work.

Up till now, we survived because of my father's job that he had.

My mother worked in another place there,

but my older brother was still with us

and my little sister was with us...

not for long.

My younger brother was taken to the, erm...

to the armament factory.

We never knew what happened to him

during the war,

we never saw him until the end of the war

and two years later,

after the end of the war, and he never talked about it.

His own family doesn't know where he was, what he did.

In 1942, there was...

They took out...

out of the 30,000, they took 20,000 people out of the ghetto

and they had to stand there,

and most of them went straight to the death camps.

And the small ghettos, they shot everybody

and some other people had to bury them in mass graves.

I had to get to work at that stage

because, if not, they would have deported me with the next lot.

I had an, erm...

an abscess on my tooth that was supposed to be filled

and had a temporary filling,

but there wasn't a dentist in town any more

so I developed a big abscess here.

I was going to the hospital to lance it or to do something

and my uncle who lived with us there -

it was a small little place, erm...

helped to dress me, it was winter, it was very cold.

And he pressed on this and, as a result, it burst,

so my mother said, "You don't have to go to the hospital now,

"because we will treat it ourselves."

And that same morning, they took everybody from the hospital

and they killed everybody.

And my brother went to the hospital,

but they shot all the people that were physically disabled.

He knew exactly what was happening.

He wasn't mentally retarded, he was bright.

And he said... He took off his winter coat and he gave it to my mother

and he says, "Give it to someone who will need it.

"I won't need it any more."

And she came home with a coat.

It was March 1944, they closed the Little Ghetto

and we were the last remnant of that place.

And they marched us to the railway station, there were no other Jews.

From 30,000, they were the last 300.

It was our first concentration camp

and the trip was as they describe - in a cattle truck, no ventilation,

no water, no toilet facilities, tiny little window

and packed people, only standing places.

And they locked the doors, no light, no nothing,

and from Radom we were taken to the first concentration camp

which was Majdanek just outside Lublin.

We were having one little suitcase each and we arrived in Majdanek

and it was dismal.

Everything was stripped.

You had to strip naked in the snow

and they were standing there in full uniform looking you up and down.

Then they send you to the...to the showers and then you were given

a wooden pair of...sort of shoes, they were not shoes

but they had material on top and a thick wooden sole like that,

and a striped uniform, a striped dress,

and a white handkerchief on the head,

and that was all you had in this winter, freezing cold weather.

And there for the first time we saw the women SS.

And in a way they were terribly cruel, they were awful women.

I don't know where they get women

with such...hatred in them, for what?

There were five different camps in Majdanek.

The fifth camp was a crematorium.

We were totally separated from the men,

so we didn't know where my father was and what he was doing.

Six weeks in Majdanek and then they sent us somewhere else -

the same story with, erm..

cattle trucks with closed wagons, no air,

no anything and we went to the next camp which was Plaszow.

They had an enormous camp there.

My mother was sent to another camp, and I had a friend.

Most of the people there were from Krakow

and from the vicinity of Krakow,

which was a big, big country there - the whole south of Poland.

It was a big camp and in charge of it was this horrible man

that was depicted in the film Schindler's List.

I think it was the best film that portrayed that camp,

that was the camp where it took place.

He was sitting there amusing himself by shooting at people.

If he didn't like somebody, he shot them.

They divided us into groups of ten, so...like the Romans.

Ten women, ten in a team.

And we had to push these terribly heavy and difficult wagons

on the rails to take the stones to the quarry.

It was a hell of a job, we could hardly manage.

There were shootings and hangings, and there was no crematorium there...

..only a hill where they used to burn the people

and all the ashes used to fly over us -

every day we had this, these ashes flying over us

and we knew it was from the hill where they were burning the bodies.

Doesn't matter stand and wait for them to come and count us

about eight, half past eight.

You had to stand to attention for hours in this freezing weather.

And one day the woman... chief of the SS women -

her name was Else Ehrich - and she had the most steely eyes...

I've never seen such cold eyes in my life.

They were wearing a uniform with a divided skirt and like a...

not a hat, but like a little army sort of cap without a thing,

like the soldiers used to wear.

And they were...

in many ways, they were worse than the men, they were terribly cruel.

And this particular Elsa took delight in punishing children

or hitting them, or sending them off somewhere.

She was worse than anybody.

She was not normal, she was like a wild animal.

She was a terrible woman.

Anyway, she was looking for a...

a help in the house, a domestic servant.

And of all these thousands of people, she picked me,

maybe because I didn't look Jewish, maybe because... I don't know,

I have no idea.

"How old are you?" "18." "Where are you from?"

I could speak German obviously.

There was the head, this Else Ehrich,

then there were two young SS women,

one was called Meindl and the other was called Tustich.

The Meindl girl was from a farm up north and she was taking pictures

of me to send home, that the Jews don't look all like in the pictures.

The soldiers in Russia needed blood, who do you think they took it from?

The prisoners in the camps.

So they used to raid on a Sunday

when nobody was working, just resting.

They used to come to the barrack and empty a barrack and take them

to the Red Cross, there was a Red Cross part, and take blood

from them as much as they could, not just one pint or half a pint,

but a lot of people died

because they didn't have food or liquid to replace the blood.

One morning, I was lying on the top bunk

trying to rest a bit from the heavy work and there is the raid.

So, first comes the SS

with a Red Cross on his arm with two guards

and they're emptying the whole barrack.

People trying to run away, the women knew what was waiting for them

if they came from the Red Cross barrack,

but it was like a death sentence because it was very difficult

to recover from this when they emptied you of blood.

And, erm...

and I was thinking, "What do I have to do?

"There is no other entrance, only this door that they came in

"and there are two guards there

"so there's no ways I can go through that door

"and try and escape."

All the women that tried to escape through the window,

it was impossible, you couldn't.

So I stayed on that top bunk and I didn't move,

I said, "What will be will be."

So they emptied the whole barrack and this SS man noticed

that I was still there so he comes to the bed and he says,

"What's wrong with you? Why aren't you there?"

So I said, "I've got typhus,"

which wasn't the truth. I didn't have typhus, I didn't have anything.

So he puts his hand on my forehead and it's as cold as a cucumber.

So he says, "Really?" so I said, "Yes."

So he left me and he went.

So that was another escape.

My father was killed there.

And he was an upright citizen,

he was always fair with his workers.

He couldn't come to terms

with this whole situation.

And his family were dispersed, he didn't know where and what,

and, er...

the child was gone and my mother was gone to another camp.

He was killed by one of the kapo, one of the overseers there.

He was beaten to death.

And then from Plaszow, we were sent to Auschwitz.

And that was an experience.

Just before Yom Kippur, October,

it was snowing, it was freezing cold,

it was nearly the end of the war, it was 1944.

And I met my mother there, at Birkenau, and my friend,

my best friend from Poland was there in Birkenau

and they both came running to me but they were really...

they were very hungry.

I was very happy that they were alive - that's the first thought.

My mother was sent to another camp.

I was sent with another hundred young girls

to the proper camp Auschwitz, to the...

It was called Musterlager.

They took us off the train and we had to line up and again strip.

and this terrible...

and the men were separated from the women immediately -

women and children on one side, men on the other side.

And there stood Dr Mengele and his cronies

fully dressed in uniforms

and we had to parade in front of them.

You can imagine what that felt like.

He was just flicking his finger.

If he flicked the finger to the left,

the people were going straight to the crematorium.

If to the right, they were going to the camp.

So we were "sorted out", in inverted commas, that way.

And those that were strong enough to work,

they sent them to the proper Auschwitz.

My sister wasn't there.

My sister was already gone with the children's transport.

All the mothers were there crying and the fathers

and everybody stood on the platz where they counted us

and they had loud music blaring over the loudspeakers

when they took all the children away.

And we knew they were going. I mean, where could they take children?

She was sent into the ovens.

The children were singing when they left.

We were given a number, everybody gets tattooed. There's mine...still.

I wouldn't let them remove it after the war.

They came to shave every woman's head

and they're also divided in groups of ten.

I cannot describe to you how a girl looks without hair

and this is the last thing they were sort of holding onto.

The woman...came to cut my hair.

The German SS woman has a look around and she looks

and looks, "Uh-uh! Stop.

"Don't cut her hair."

I was the only one that didn't have their hair shaved, just cut shorter.

It was a matter of surviving every minute.

And it was for me because, OK, they didn't cut my hair,

but then everyone of us got a bundle of clothes

and they were not these striped clothes, they were civilian clothes.

And, you know, they took it from the people obviously

that were killed before.

And I got a parcel of clothes - I was tall by then -

that would have fitted a 12-year-old girl,

and the shoes were these... so there my luck ended.

The clogs...

these clogs that they wear in Holland,

you know, those wooden clogs, but they were too small,

I couldn't put my foot into them.

So I thought to myself, "Now this is the end.

"They didn't cut my hair but they'll bury me now with my...

"they'll burn me with my hair."

As I stood there in the courtyard and I cried,

I don't know how I'm going to survive here in these clothes.

I couldn't wear these shoes stood in the snow, a micro-mini dress,

nothing on my head.

And in the middle of my tears -

and this is as true as I sit here - I hear a voice calling my name.

I can't see who it is because my tears are all over my face

and my eyes, and on the other side of the fence

there was...a young chap was standing and calling my name.

So he says, "Come to the fence."

So I'm coming near the fence and he says,

"Wait right here for five minutes."

So I said, "Who are you?

"What are you doing, who are you?"

So he says, "Never mind who I am, I'm in a hurry,

"I used to work for your dad."

So he recognised me,

but I didn't know who he was, I had no idea, he was a Jewish chap.

He went away and he came back.

He was working with the clothes of the dead people

that they just killed, erm... in the ovens and they gassed them.

So he came back and he threw over the fence

a parcel for me with clothes,

and this was a life-saver.

I'll never forget what was in that parcel

because now I know that I can carry on.

There were wonderful shoes with laces, leather shoes.

There were stockings, there was underwear,

there was a warm dress and a black velvet coat.

The worst thing I remember from Auschwitz was the cold,

the freezing cold that used to stand for hours outside

and without any purpose,

pushing these stones from one place to another.

And some people recited poems. That was my job

because we had to learn everything off by heart in those days.

And so we kept our minds sort of...

..away from this horrible prison.

You had to have a break from it.

Hunger is a terrible thing.

It's not just being hungry that you come home and eat.

It's starvation.

There's nothing the next day, nothing the following day,

and you feel weaker and you look like a skeleton.

It's a horrible, horrible feeling.

The medical block I did see, because we had two girls from my town

who were identical twins, and they were very pretty.

But you couldn't tell the difference between the one and the other,

and he had them there up in the experimental block.

We saw the girls upstairs in that experimental block,

and I said, "You're lucky, you're warm there

"and we sit in the frost and we're absolutely freezing."

So she said - I'll never forget it - she said, "Don't envy us."

On 10th of December it's my birthday.

I would have had a big party

and I would have been getting ready for university,

I was put down to go to Rome, to Italy to study.

And now sitting in Auschwitz,

and I don't know what tomorrow will be.

I had my future mapped up and it was a lot.

And I said, "I'm too young to die, I can't die.

"I'm too young, I haven't seen anything,

"I haven't done anything yet.

"So I've lost everything, but I'm too young to die, I don't want to die."

So there was about three months altogether in Auschwitz,

and then they evacuated.

Can you imagine, the Russians came, I think, two days after we left.

And why are we being marched to another concentration camp?

Why? Why? Why?

That question never ever left me.

And there were lots of people being killed on the way,

just shot because they couldn't walk any more.

The road on both sides was just full of dead bodies.

And the snow was red.

And that was the biggest shock I've ever had

since the beginning of the war. I saw plenty of people dying,

being shot, being hanged,

being punished, being tortured,

but I've never seen a sight like this

when we came to the gates of Bergen-Belsen.

A huge mountain of dead bodies was in front,

right to the left of the gate.

But if I say huge, it was huge.

Partly decomposing, that was our first impression of Bergen-Belsen.

I just remember the shock of the conditions

that even by standards of Auschwitz, this was the pits.

I was clean and free of any vermin till I arrived in Bergen-Belsen,

and then you couldn't help it. I got sick with typhus.

There was no work to do because...there was no work.

There was nothing to do. There were hundreds of people.

There were Russian prisoners, there were Poles, just sitting and dying.

They were sitting and starving

and didn't have strength to get up.

There was a girl next to me, a Hungarian girl,

and all she could say in her broken German was,

"I don't want to die. I don't want to die."

So I said to her, "Then stop shouting! Preserve your energy.

"Don't shout all the time."

She was shouting, "I don't want to die," until she died.

And people were being burned and people were being shot,

and there was no order.

It was just...

Prisoners had to carry the corpses to where they were burning them.

But we didn't budge from that one big hall.

And eventually that hall was nearly empty.

"I'm not going to die, I'm too young to die."

That was a mantra that I was repeating all the time.

I have just returned from the Belsen concentration camp,

but beyond the barrier was a whirling cloud of dust,

the dust of thousands of slowly moving people,

laden in itself with the deadly typhus germ.

And with the dust was a smell, sickly and thick.

The smell of death and decay, of corruption and filth.

I passed through the barrier

and found myself in the world of a nightmare.

Dead bodies, some of them in decay, lay strewn about the road

and along the rutted tracks.

On each side of the road were brown wooden huts.

There were faces at the windows,

the bony, emaciated faces of starving women

too weak to come outside,

propping themselves against the glass

to see the daylight before they died.

But there were not enough doctors,

and they established a hospital outside the camp.

Yes, and the one thing that annoyed us most of all

was that we were closed in the camp and we were not allowed to go out

because they didn't want the neighbourhood

to get all these diseases -

that means the Germans or the people that lived around us.

So they locked us into the camp and we were not allowed to come out.

But they didn't have enough doctors.

They didn't have medicines. They had nothing.

And they didn't have suitable food for all these people.

They were starving and they fed them on this fat, fat meat and things,

and people got sick all over again.

And the people were dying.

There were 30,000 people that died after the liberation.

I felt terrible. I lost the only friend I had right through the camps

when I was separated from my mother and from my whole family.

She looked after me. She was an intelligent, bright girl.

We always had talks about what we learned at school.

She studied French and I studied German. We compared notes.

It was terrible.

And I heard that most of the people

that survived from Radom were in Stuttgart.

So I went by train.

A friend came to fetch me, and we went back to, we went to Stuttgart.

And there my mother came from Poland,

so I met her there for the first time after the war.

So it was very tearful,

but it was happy in a way too that the two of us at least survived.

The times after the war were very difficult.

You had to start rebuilding your life.

You had to deal with all the past, the terrible past,

with all the losses that we...

We didn't have time to deal with it while we were in the camps,

but after the war was finished,

then we started to think of all the things that happened to us.

And there were no psychologists. There were no psychiatrists.

There was no help, and we had to work it all out by ourselves.

But then my uncle in Paris,

he knew that we were there, so he sent for us.

Everybody there in France was busy building their lives

from the beginning again after the war,

and sort of in a way recovering, recuperating,

but it wasn't the future.

I knew that this wasn't our future.

And then we had to find my brother. We didn't know where he was.

Eventually we found out from the family that he's in Israel already.

There was an American woman from the WIZO,

from the Zionist Organisation who gathered...

She collected a lot of young children

and young...youngsters, teenagers from...

that survived the camps, and she brought them to Israel.

He was a teenager still.

I can't remember, he was about...

That was already one year after the liberation

and then it was two years after the liberation. He wasn't 20 yet.

And he was taken to this kibbutz on Lake Hulata.

For two years he stayed and worked on this kibbutz,

and then we spent two years in France

living with my uncle and...

..and until one of my uncles in Palestine,

he organised two false passports for us, for me and for my mother.

We were determined to get to Palestine,

because that's where the rest of the family was.

So we had to get to Marseille,

and there was a camp of all the Jewish refugees.

Some were trying to get illegally to Israel,

and we helped pack this famous boat, Exodus.

I was in Marseille at the time, and a couple of us

who were in the camp went to...

There were about 1,000, I think about 1,000 people on that boat,

and that was the famous book and the picture that they made

of this boat that came to Palestine and they wouldn't let them in.

Eventually we went on a little Greek boat.

It wasn't a very, very big boat, but it was a nice comfortable boat.

And we arrived in Haifa.

My little brother was six foot tall by the time we met him

and we could hardly recognise him.

He didn't meet us in Haifa. He couldn't come.

But soon afterwards

the War Of Independence broke out in '48 straightaway,

and then I went to the army for two years

and then a year later my brother went into the army.

It was just a matter of get hold of yourself and get on.

The time in Israel was a healing process.

Financially we were very poor, we didn't have much,

but as soon as the state was announced,

my mother opened a canteen at the police station in Haifa.

And she was doing very well there.

We were very close, but it was a rule in the house,

we are not talking about the camps.

I... No, I had a...

I had a bad time with my nerves.

There were times that I couldn't cope with everything and, erm...

He was different. He was quiet.

He wasn't noisy like the Mediterranean people.

And he loved music, which I also did.

A lot of things. And we spoke Hebrew. I couldn't speak English.

I took her out a few times before I really fell for her in a big way.

And, erm...

He never let me go.

He phoned, he went out, and my mother said, "Look..."

He came with two little nylon shirts that were washed every day

and she couldn't get over it how poor he looked

and where, you know, what is it. He looked really...funny.

We got to know each other better.

I proposed to her, and she agreed to marry me.

So I had to do something

in order to maintain her friendship and be there all the time,

so I had to take a job in Israel in Haifa

and I stayed there for six months, just to be close to Henia.

I was completely smitten then.

We didn't go out for a long time, about three or four months,

and then we got married and I said,

"I'll come to South Africa for one year only

"to meet the family and then I'll go back home."

But that never happened.

When we arrived in Bloemfontein, it was on a cold winter's morning.

It was freezing cold and I'm coming from this hot climate in Israel.

And it was grim.

All the smoke from all the chimneys was coming up

and the station was so miserable.

And the town looked like a little hick town, like a little village.

I had to get a taxi to take us to my parents' home.

I looked around and I said to Maurice,

"Are you sure you didn't miss the station?

"Is that the place that we came?"

"No," he says, "this is Bloemfontein."

Dead silence.

I wanted to go right back into the train and go back.

I brought her to a land where English was the language,

and she couldn't speak English.

The problem was to get her... to teach her how to speak English.

And I stayed for 42 years.

Eventually I became a principal of the school and I carried on.

While I was courting her,

she told me she had been a Holocaust survivor.

It...

It was a, erm...

..a bit of a shock to hear about what had happened to her.

I wanted children, I really did.

Even during the war I always said to myself

"I haven't lived yet,

"I don't know anything about anything. I want children.

"I want to make up for all those millions of children

"that were killed, murdered."

We were aware of what happened.

We were aware of which family members we had lost.

We knew this was always in the background,

but the detail we didn't know.

I didn't talk about the Holocaust to my sons, not to my husband.

Of her time in the concentration camps

she often had nightmares and she woke up screaming,

and I had to sort of console her

and, er...and try to settle her down

during the nights.

My 24-year-old son Richard, when he was still at school,

I think he was 17 years of age,

he had the privilege of going on the March Of The Living.

And he went first to Israel,

and then he went to the various camps that my mother had been in.

And it was quite poignant

because he celebrated his 17th birthday at Majdanek,

which is where my mother had her 17th birthday.

So she was there as an inmate

and he was there as a visitor to see where she had been.

And then subsequently I think he also, I forget the exact sequence,

but he also visited Auschwitz,

the camp Auschwitz, which I think is better preserved.

And I subsequently heard that he phoned his grandmother

and said, "I'm standing at the gates of Auschwitz.

"Where were you in Auschwitz?"

And she said, "I will direct you to the bungalow."

And he was able to, on the cell phone, get directions

to where his grandmother had been within the camp.

I didn't want to influence their lives with my past and my suffering.

If they asked a question I answered it,

but I never discussed it and I could hear everywhere

people talking about second generation syndrome of the Holocaust

and the kids were affected if the parents both were in the camps

and never stopped talking about it.

And I didn't want them to grow up with any complexes.

I don't know if I made a mistake or not, but that's how it was.

She gave me a birthday present and said,

"Do you know what the best birthday present I ever received?"

I always thought at that age, what was it? Was it a jersey,

was it a sweatshirt, was it this?

And she said, "No, it was a piece of bread."

And I know if she told you the story of one day in the Holocaust

where it was her birthday and her closest friend had disappeared for the whole day.

And she was cross with her friend

because she wanted her friend to spend time with her in the camp

and it was freezing and it was cold

and her friend completely disappeared.

And at six o'clock at night the friend came back and said,

"Yeah, I've been working in the labour environment

"to earn you an extra piece of bread for your birthday, as your birthday present."

And I think for me that was the most telling story

that she told me at my early days of manhood.

That little story made me realise the values of life.

And still I tell my children today when it comes to presents,

and gifts are not real gifts, but it's a gift of love

and it's a gift of just being yourself and enjoying life.

And that one story stood with me and still sticks with me today

as the one little lesson of many thousands

one can learn from the concentration camps.

And you know, sometimes I wonder myself, was I there? Was it true?

Was I really there at that time in such places

and lived through all these things?

It can't be. It can't be. But it is.

She came out of it. She started a new family.

She started a new life and she decided to give new messages.

There are lots of stories to tell, and they're so vivid.

I want to say, just say that I'm just so crazy about her

and I still want to be with her and...

I'm not a hero. I don't want to be remembered for anything special,

just a good mother and a grandmother, and a friend.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd