Susan Pollack remembers very clearly the brutality of the “long, long” death march she endured to Bergen Belsen 80 years ago this month.
The 94-year old Holocaust survivor spoke to Jewish News ahead of the landmark anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp that claimed the lives of an estimated 52,000 Jewish and Polish prisoners.
“Some of us, of course, due to lack of food and lack of proper clothes were dying along the way, or were shot. We always had a Nazi with us. I don’t know exactly how long it took, but there were many casualties.
Liberated prisoners interact with the British soldiers on the site of the newly liberated Bergen Belsen Camp. April/May 1945. Pic: The Wiener Holocaust Library Collections
“The few of us who got there, where we were we did not know, the doors, the big gates, opened up and we managed to get in.”
Her arrival at the camp in north-west Germany was the culmination of seven years of terror and brutality for Susan. Born Zsuzsanna Blau on 9 September 1930 in Felsőgöd, 15 miles from Budapest, Hungary, her uncle was murdered by fascists in 1938 and her brother Laci forbidden from attending university due to the inexorable rise of antisemitic sentiment.
Pic: Susan’s Pollack’s family. Courtesy
When the Germans invaded Hungary in March 1944, its Jews were forced to wear yellow Stars of David to identify themselves. Susan’s father was one of many invited to a council meeting to discuss the welfare of Jews in the city. Rounded up into lorries and sent to concentration camps, he was one of many who never returned.
From May of that year, the majority of the country’s Jewish population were deported in cattle trucks, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau, including Susan, her mother and brother.
Pic: Susan Pollack. Courtesy
Her mother was immediately sent to the gas chambers; Susan was forced to work as a slave labourer for ten weeks before being sent to an armaments factory in Guben, Germany.
It was from there, as the Allies advanced, that she was sent on the death march. She was just 15.
Left outside the gates of Belsen, she “looked for a place to be inside, perhaps to warm up a bit, not that there was any heating. And remarkably, I met somebody from home, from my village in Felsőgöd, where I was born. And she recognised me. It was an absolute, unpredictable, state of mind. And she asked me, ‘Zsuzsanna’, my Hungarian name, ‘are we going to survive?’ And speaking to her for the first time in many years, I said, ‘We’re almost there’. But I had to crawl back. I wasn’t able to walk any more.”
Susan returned the following day.
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (Jewish News)
“I crawled back to her, and she had, I remember that quite clearly, she had lice all over her face, an indication that she wasn’t alive anymore.”
When the Allied Forces arrived on 15 April, she remembers hearing “shouting all over, that we were free. It didn’t mean anything to us, most of us, of course, because it was almost two years that I’d been incarcerated in different places. The barracks where I was, there were a lot of rotted bodies. I just had to escape from there and I crawled out to the grass. And that’s when I wanted to die having realized, as I said, that my friend wasn’t alive anymore.”
She recalls feeling “a pair of hands, a gentle pair of hands, lifting me up and placing me in a small van. And that’s how I was liberated.”
Susan was hospitalised for tuberculosis, typhoid and severe malnutrition, then sent to Sweden to recover, before moving to Canada where she met her future husband, Abraham, a fellow survivor.
Susan Pollack and her family. Pic: Courtesy
With three children and six grandchildren, Susan has devoted her life to Holocaust education. She says it’s now for the world to learn about antisemitism. “Not us. We want to be accepted where we were born. We want to be accepted like everyone else.We hope that that violent, violent behavior in the countries where we were born will disappear. That is what we hope for. That there won’t be any more exclusion as we had in Hungary and many other countries in Europe.”
Susan says she doesn’t “know about human behavior. I don’t know about the extent that people are willing to go to to destroy us. I don’t know. I don’t know,” she repeats.
Pic: Courtesy Susan Pollack
“It’s very difficult. I think we have to teach, and that’s why I devoted my life practically, to teach at schools, to go abroad and talk about my experiences of the Holocaust. So it’s for the others to learn, and not only that but to teach the churches and other religions. And to continue teaching.
“It’s catastrophic that in this day anti-Semitism should still take place, because is it through ignorance. Each and every one of us are responsible for each other. Enough of antisemitism; enough of any kind of hatred towards each other, because it has the potential to grow and become unstoppable.”
Fifty members of Susan Pollack’s family were murdered in the Holocaust. She and her brother Laci were the only two survivors.
