This is a photo of me in my first year of
school.
There are about 38 children in this class
and, of whom, six survived.
My name is Lydia Tischler. I’m 88-years-old.
From September ‘42 until May ‘45, I was
in various concentration camps.
Auschwitz was hell. Auschwitz really was hell.
We were on the last but one transport to Auschwitz.
The last transport were all the prominents
in Terezin who went straight into the gas
chamber.
There were about 50 of us in a cattle truck
with a bucket. That was it. We arrived in
the middle of the night and in Auschwitz you
could smell the fear. You really could smell
the fear.
And we had to go through selection which - we
didn’t know it was selection but that’s
what it was.
Mengele, of whom you may have heard, was standing
there and he looked at you and then sent you
to the left or to the right.
The left was the side for living and the right
was the side for gas.
I knew that our mother... because she didn’t
come to the left she went to the right.
But after the war I sort of hoped that maybe
she was in some displaced persons’ camp.
You know, that she wasn’t dead. That somehow,
by a miracle, she escaped.
We were herded into a huge hall and told to
undress.
And then somebody came and shaved all our
hair. And then we were herded into another
room where we were sat on benches like in
a theatre, stacked. And, by then, people who
had been there for some time told us, you
know, you will go to the gas chambers and
so we sat there and, I must say, I sat there
and didn’t know whether it would be water
or gas. It was water.
I remember when I came to Auschwitz in this
room that they took everything away from us,
there was a wooden board with the nationalities
of all the nationalities that were in camp.
And I think on top, I don’t think there
were any English people, French. And the bottom
two were the Gypsies and the Jews. And I remember,
I have to remember this. For some reason it
seemed to me important where they are putting
us.
Day to day life someone - one just took every
day as it came.
I worked in the market gardens. We were able
to smuggle sometimes some of the fruit. For
instance, cucumbers, if they were nicely bent,
you could stick it into your bra and bring
it into the camp. And, luckily, nobody was
taking our clothes off to see what we had
hidden.
Potatoes you could put in your stockings.
Tomatoes were not safe because they could
squash and that was it.
Paradoxically, I got acquainted with cultural
life in Terezin. You know, music, there were
of course all of the well-known actors, musicians,
writers, professors were also in camp. So
there was a rich cultural and intellectual
life, as far as it was possible.
I heard Verdi’s Requiem for the first time
in my life in Terezin. I would not have heard
it if I had been at home at the age of 12
in Ostrava.
Life, for people like me, wasn’t the worst.
It was much worse for older people who felt
the hunger and felt, you know, 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 a nasty man and he doesn’t
want to feel nasty so he has to deny that
anybody - you know, he perhaps would have
like to do it himself.
This is how I understand, when people have
to deny the horrors. In fact, when I came
to England and I managed to find a school
and went to Brondesbury and Kilburn high school
for girls. And when the girls heard where
I came from, and they asked me questions,
I thought, “How can they ask me these questions?
They’ve seen the films.”
But, when I studied psychology, I understood
that, when things are so outside human experience,
you really can’t believe it.
We managed, I discovered late-on when I studied
psychology and psychoanalysis, how useful
defences are. You know, you could believe
it and not believe it. You kind of told yourself,
“No, they made a mistake. It can’t be
true.” So people just went to Auschwitz
and very few survived.
I think one person escaped from Auschwitz,
a Czech man who escaped and nobody believed
him, what he told them.
The best way to remember it would be if people
could learn from this experience so that it’s
not repeated. And, in fact, it’s something
that I’ve never felt that I needed to revenge
myself. I also haven’t felt a victim. They
didn’t succeed in making me a victim. I’m
a survivor which is something very different.
We thought of them as inhuman but, I think,
they never made me feel that I’m less than
human. I could, you know, I had to put up
with what they did to me. You know, when they
told me to undress, if I said “I’m not
undressing” they’d have shot me or, I
don’t know what they would have done.
And, although the Germans were able to take
away all my physical - almost everything,
except my life, they left me alive. But, you
know, whatever could be removed from my body,
they removed from my body - they couldn’t
remove my soul. My soul, they couldn’t remove
my integrity, my inner-self. That I managed
to maintain.
All of us have, you know, all of us have the
capacity to be sadistic and horrible to other
people. We manage to not do it, you know,
but the potential for destructiveness is in
all of us.
I actually believe that people are born - well,
they’re born neither good nor bad and that
the badness is something that is the way someone
is treated as a child. That, if you’re treated
well as a child, you can’t become a Hitler.
