When Teresa Regula arrived at Auschwitz at the age of 16, the first real pain she experienced was that of her ears burning.
“They shaved us to the skin, and it was a scorching hot day, August 4… That was the first real pain I felt,” said the 96-year-old Jewish survivor from her home in Krakow, ahead of the 80th anniversary. of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27.
Their recollections illustrate the suffering of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to the Nazi death camp established in occupied Poland as part of Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” to annihilate European Jews. Most of the Auschwitz inmates perished there.
The Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police, took Regula and her mother from their Krakow home in 1944 and sent them to the Plaszow camp, where her mother was executed. Teresa was transferred to Auschwitz and received number 22011.
After being a healthy girl, she contracted chickenpox, measles and scarlet fever in the countryside.
What kept her alive was the idea that “my father, who I always believed could do anything, would come and get me out of there.” He later learned that Russian forces had mistakenly shot him dead when they liberated the Gross Rosen concentration camp, in what was then eastern Germany.
“When I came back (from the countryside), I thought: ‘I’m never going to have children, ever.’ “If they had to go through what I went through, even a fraction of what I went through, I didn’t want that,” said the retired sociologist.
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Auschwitz survivors remember suffering 80 years after camp’s liberation
Married but childless, Teresa repressed all memories of her stay in Auschwitz for many decades. “Now it all comes back to me,” he said.
Janina Iwanska, a Polish Catholic woman sent to Auschwitz around the same time as Teresa in 1944, has also had no children.
“I won’t live much longer. But when I look at the young people and the little ones… what will their future be? “I see it as bleak,” the 94-year-old said, citing the “hatred” and divisions of modern society and predicting another war.
Janina, transported to Auschwitz from Warsaw on a freight train, remembered coming out to the smell of burning bodies. In the countryside, she looked after the children of the block she lived on, earning rewards such as hot milk soup.
“The children were treated differently; They didn’t have to work. They just had to wait patiently for their mothers or for the war to end,” he says.
Janina did not witness the liberation of Auschwitz because she was evacuated days before by the Germans. She was finally liberated by American forces on May 2 from the Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp in northern Germany.
On Monday, the retired pharmacist will return to Auschwitz once again to share her story before an audience that will include England’s King Charles, French President Emmanuel Macron, and numerous other heads of state and government.
With information from Reuters.
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