Face of the Day

Transported from her happy orthodox Jewish family near Prague in the former Czechoslovakia, via a ghetto, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mindu is speaking exclusively at her Birmingham home to mark the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation on January 27 – Holocaust Memorial Day.

When they arrived she says: “A Polish man stepped into the train carriage and told my mother to ‘let the girls go ahead. You will see them later.’

“He also told us to lie about our ages at the camp’s gate – to say we were older and that we were both seamstresses.”

As he spoke Yiddish, Mindu’s mum trusted him and obeyed.

“I can remember looking back at my mother. She was wearing a spotted scarf around her head. I waved, and she waved back. It was the last time I saw her and my brothers.”

Disembarked, Mindu and her sister soon walked through the gates of hell.

She says: “I saw corpses piled high on trolleys, guards in watchtowers pointing rifles at us and the greasy grey ash from the burning bodies from the crematorium.

“Emaciated people in striped uniforms wandering around aimlessly. I knew my old life was gone forever.

“Those not viewed as useful were sent straight to the gas chambers.

“A lady in front of us had a daughter about our age and several siblings. The mother and the siblings were immediately sent to the left and the girl of our age was pushed through.

“She started screaming, and the SS man pushed her with the butt of his gun and said: ‘Okay if you want to go with your mother, go!’”

At that moment, Mindu realised the man on the train had separated them from their mum and brothers to save their lives. [...]

Desperate to look strong and fit, so they would be seen as useful, sickly girls would cut their fingers and use their own blood as rouge.

Mindu adds: “Whoever was next to them [would] hold them up – so they wouldn’t be selected for the gas chamber.” [...]

Despite this horror, Mindu felt lucky when, in August 1944, she and Eva were sent, as part of a group of 500 women, to Lubberstedt Bilohe – a slave labour facility that formed a satellite to the main Neuengamme concentration camp, cited in woodland just outside Hamburg, northern Germany.

Instead of bromide, the soup contained pulses, to provide energy to work like slaves in the ammunition facility, where many girls had to pour boiling hot gun solution into containers, with no protective clothing, leaving many women with perforated lungs.

“Luckily as Eva and I were not tall enough to pour in the solution, we tested the grenades instead. It was still dangerous but we didn’t suffer like the others,” Mindu says.