"The world is experiencing terrible atrocities, proving that lessons are not learned with a few memorials to the hell of the past, such as the Nazi camps, among them the hell of Auschwitz." This is the message of Agnes Darvas, the 92-year-old survivor, as January 27 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation by British troops of the camp where she was held.
From a stolen sweatshirt in the ghetto and her mother's haircut to ward off parasites. That's how Agnes Darvas escaped being sent straight to the gas chambers with other children when she was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944. That sweatshirt and temporary hairstyle made her look older to Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz. "He determined who was fit for camp work and who would be executed," Darvas, now 92, told Reuters.
"During the selection, Mengele was fooled by my short hair and sweatshirt, even though I was only 12 years old," she said at her home in Budapest, ahead of the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation on January 27.
She and her mother were sent to the Plaszow camp to work as pickaxes in a quarry and then transferred to another concentration camp, Mauthausen. By the time they reached the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp, she could no longer walk; she could only move by dragging herself, due to typhus and cholera she had contracted from contaminated water.
In the days before this camp was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945, there was no water at all. She describes it as "the hell of all hells." "The British came... using loudspeakers from cars saying you are free now and we will get you out of this hell," she said. "We were surrounded by piles of dead bodies."
More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz, the death camp set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland to implement what Hitler called the "Final Solution" to exterminate European Jews. Half a million Hungarian Jews were killed there and in other Nazi extermination camps in 1944, including Darvas' entire extended family.
"We had a pretty big family, 72 of us were relatives, cousins, aunts," said Darvas, flipping through photos of her happy and, as she says, spoiled childhood in the family villa.
But Agnes says the world has yet to learn the lessons of the horrors so many people have experienced. "People believe that if we remember, these things will never happen again. Well, it happens every day, maybe not with Jews, but with some other ethnic groups... there has never been so much cruelty in the world." (A2 Televizion)
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