European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I was invited as a witness to a school.

I had a teacher friend and as we talked he said:

“You should come talk in schools, otherwise it will be forgotten history.”

I agreed, but hadn’t really thought about what that meant.

So I went.

It was difficult.

When you are with 30 students, it is very difficult to talk about all these things:

about the arrival of Jewish or Gypsy convoys, the children, sometimes babies in their mothers arms.

I wondered if one should talk about it or rather not talk about it.

I decided to talk about what National Socialism had done,

about what we had gone through and about what we had seen with our own eyes.

In Birkenau,

the first big camp we went to, these convoys arrived, filled with Jews, with Gypsies.

There were men and women, but children as well, and babies in their mother’s arms.

We saw them, we were not far away and we knew what was going to happen. That hurt a lot, it still does.

Whenever I go to a school and have to talk about these subjects, concerning children…

the soup doesn’t taste as good in the evening.

What is remarkable when you go into a classroom is that you never have to ask for silence.

They are very attentive to what one says. That encourages us to go to the schools.

I want to show what National Socialism was about, with all its horror and its atrocities.