Appendix I – Lydia Tischler’s story
Read Lydia’s story and think about the following questions:
- What did you feel while reading? Did you experience any new emotions?
- What made the biggest impression on you? Why?
- What do you remember the most?
This is a photo of me in my first year of school. There are about 38 children in this class, out of whom 6 survived. My name is Lydia Tischler. I’m 88 years old. From September ’42 until May ’45, I was in various concentration camps.
What was your experience of Auschwitz?
Auschwitz was hell. Auschwitz was really hell. We were on the last but one transport to Auschwitz. In the last transport were all the prominent people from 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. 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 sat on benches like in a theatre. And by then, people who had been there for some time told us, you know, you will go to the gas chamber, 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, to a room where they took everything away from us, there was a wooden board with all the nationalities that were in the camp. And I think on top, I don’t think there were any English people, or any 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 were putting us.
How did you cope from day to day?
I just took every day as it came. I worked in the market gardens. We were sometimes able to smuggle some of the fruit. For instance, cucumbers, if they were nicely bent, you could stick them into your bra and bring them 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 then that was it. Paradoxically, I got acquainted with cultural life while I was in Terezin. You know, all of the well-known actors, musicians, writers, professors were also in the 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.
What do you think about people who’ve denied the Holocaust over the years?
Usually, when a person denies something, it’s because he feels he has to deny it, 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 liked to do it himself. This is how I understand, when people have to deny the horrors. In fact, when I came to England, 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 coped. 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.
As a survivor how do you want the Holocaust to be remembered?
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 noteworthy that I’ve never felt that I needed to get revenge myself. I also haven’t felt like 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 don’t understand” 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 belongings – 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 a result of the way someone is treated as a child. I believe that if you’re treated well as a child, you can’t become a Hitler.
Source: ‘Holocaust survivor interview, 2017’, YouTube Channel 4 News, accessed 12 July 2022.
