Financial Times: Survivor recalls the horrors of Auschwitz before returning for anniversary
Dozens of former inmates are going back 80 years after camp’s liberation
Now 91, Doniecka still remembers the German phrase “schneller, schneller, polnische Schweine”, or “faster, faster, Polish pigs”, she said during an interview in her Warsaw flat.
Today she will be among some 50 survivors who will return to Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops at a special ceremony with heads of state, including Britain’s King Charles III.
They will pay homage to the estimated 1.1mn victims who died at the camp, the epicentre of the Holocaust built by the Nazis near the town of Oświęcim in occupied Poland. Most victims were Jewish, but many Polish, Roma and Russian prisoners of war also died there.
Doniecka, who goes to Auschwitz every year on the anniversary of its liberation, said that it was important for her to attend these events especially given she was in good health, unlike other survivors who were too ill or frail to travel.
“Of course we [the last survivors] will not be living forever, but there is a museum, recordings and archives, so I can only hope this tragic and sad history will never be forgotten,” she said.
The ceremony comes against the background of resurgent far right parties across Europe, with some politicians using Nazi tropes and gestures and questioning who was responsible for the Holocaust.
“This is the last round anniversary with a noticeable group of survivors present, but it is also an anniversary that takes place in our times, permeated by antisemitism, xenophobia, growing populism and demagoguery,” said Piotr Cywiński, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum.
Herbert Kickl, who could become the next Austrian chancellor, has described himself as “Volkskanzler”, a term used by Adolf Hitler. Far right politicians in Italy and Germany last year made the Nazi salute in public. Elon Musk was also accused of making the gesture at the inauguration parade of US President Donald Trump.
A senior member of Alternative for Germany had to resign from his position as group leader in the European parliament after claiming that many members of the SS had been “simple farmers who didn’t have another choice” in an interview with the Financial Times.
Doniecka and her mother were detained in August 1944, shortly after the Polish resistance launched the Warsaw Uprising, which the Germans took two months to quash, also destroying much of Poland’s capital in retaliation.
Her family had been hiding in a cellar, and Doniecka’s father, who was repairing guns for Polish fighters, was outside their building at the time and escaped arrest.
In Auschwitz, Doniecka was crammed into Block 16A alongside 250 other children. They were allowed outdoors only for two daily roll calls. She shared her makeshift bunk bed with four others, one of whom was a fiveyear-old girl who soon died after refusing to drink water without seeing her mother.
In January 1945, as the Red Army was advancing into Poland, the Nazis transferred some of the prisoners by train, including Doniecka and her mother, to a forced labour camp near Berlin. Many others who were forced to go on foot perished in these so-called “death marches”. By the time Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz on January 27 1945, only about 7,000 prisoners remained.
“We knew nothing except for the fact that, wherever we got sent, just leaving [Auschwitz] was a reason to feel some kind of hope again,” Doniecka said.
At the new camp, children were made to clear rubble from bombed buildings nearby. Doniecka clasped her hands tightly when recalling how much they hurt from having to pick up bricks and debris in the middle of winter.
“The days were very long and painful, but at least I could then sleep once more next to my mother,” she said.
Doniecka’s last traumatising memory of the war was watching the captured German camp commander swing from the gallows, shortly after Soviet soldiers released her and other inmates in April 1945.
The gratitude Doniecka feels about the Soviet liberation of Nazi camps does not extend to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the second world war.
“I’m still grateful to the specific soldiers who liberated us but I’m living again in fear when I watch Putin and his war in Ukraine,” she said. “How can you not feel fear when you see what Putin has now been doing?”