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 tishler
i am 88 years old from september 42
until may 45
i was in various concentration camps
auschwitz was held auschwitz really was
hell
we were on the last but one transport to
auschwitz the last transport
where all the prominence in terezin who
went straight into the gas chamber
there were about 50 of us in a kettle
truck with the bucket that was it
we arrived in the middle of the night
and in auschwitz you could
smell the fear you really could smell it
and we had to go through selection which
i mean we didn't know it was selection
but that's what it was
mengele 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 leaving and
the right was the side for
for gas i knew that our mother
because she didn't come to the left she
went to the right
but i after the war i had a sort of
hope that maybe she was in some
displaced person's camp you know
that she wasn't dead that somehow by
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 theater stack by then
people were 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
was when i came to auschwitz in this
room where they
took everything away from us there was a
wooden board
with the nationalities of all the
of all the uh
[Music]
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 somehow 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 you know nobody nobody was
[Music]
taking our clothes off to see what we
had
potatoes you could put in your stockings
tomatoes were not safe because they
could
squash and that was it paradoxically
i i got acquainted with
cultural life in terezin i had for the
you know music there were of course all
the
well-known actors musicians writers
professors were also in camp so there
was a rich
rich cultural and intellectual life as
far as it was possible
i had where this requiem for the first
time in my life in terezin
i would not have heard it if i'd 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 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
and i managed to find a school and i
went
went to it was bronzeberry 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 then when i
studied psychology i understood
that when things are so
so outside human experience
you you really can't believe it
we managed i discovered later on when i
studied psychology and psychoanalysis
how useful defenses are you know that
you could
believe it and not believe it you kind
of told yourself no they made a mistake
it's not can't be true so people just
as went to to auschwitz and
very few survived i think one person
escaped from auschwitz
a czech man who escaped and nobody
believed in what he told them
the best way to remember
it would be if people could learn
from this experience
[Music]
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 i had to
put up with what they did to me
you know when they told me to undress if
i'd said i'm not undressing then they've
shot me or
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 they could 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 managed to find out we managed to
to not not do it you know we
we but the potential for destructiveness
is in all of us i actually believe
that uh people are born
well they're upon born neither good nor
bad
and that the
the the badness is something that
is the way that one is treated as a
child that you know
if you're treated well as a child
you can't become a hitler
you