Holocaust Memorial Day – I lived among rotting bodies at Bergen-Belsen & was examined naked by Dr Mengele at Auschwitz

WHEN Susan Pollack arrived at Bergen-Belsen death camp in 1945, she had already witnessed countless murders and been subjected to naked examinations by 'angel of death' Dr Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.

But nothing could prepare the 14-year-old Hungarian Jew, by then a self-described "living corpse", for the horror of living among piles of rotting bodies, with no idea if or when she would join them.

Sharing her story to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, the 91-year-old grandmother, who lives in London, tells Fabulous: "Bergen-Belsen was a place of death and indescribable suffering.

"There were rotting bodies all over. There was starvation and infectious diseases everywhere, even the people who were alive were no longer people.

"I couldn't walk after my death march, I had to crawl everywhere and I recognised my former neighbour, a Jewish woman, in the next barrack over from mine.

"It was the first time I had spoken to someone in my language for months. She asked me ‘are we going to survive?’ and I said ‘just hold on a little bit’.

"But when I crawled back to see her the following day, she had died. Bergen-Belsen had lice which infected everyone with typhus.

"The camp's smell was diabolical, I can’t really describe it, of corpses that were rotting. It was filthy, it was a place unfit for people to live in. A place of terror, fear, indescribable suffering and no help.

"Nobody cared about us. We were like fodder (food for livestock). Sweep us up and throw us into the gas chambers to be burnt, I suppose that's what the Nazis were getting ready to do."

Susan believes she lived in Bergen-Belsen for two to three weeks, although she had no way to tell day or night by then.

She adds: "It couldn’t have been longer than that, because there was no food. It's not that I wanted to die, but your very brain doesn't function anymore."

Mercifully for Susan, the camp was liberated in April 1945, when she was days from death.

She says: "I crawled out of my barracks, away from the smell and the filth and the crying, as I couldn’t take it anymore.

"I felt a hand picking me up, but doing so gently, and I didn't get shot, not that I would have cared.

"I was placed in a small ambulance and that’s how the British liberated me. The first thing they did was wash me, because I was filthy. They called in the local German women, made them wash us down and give us some clean clothes.

"I had my life back, but nowhere to go. I had no illusions of my family's survival and I knew I did not want to go back to Hungary."

Susan's early years

Susan was born Zsuzsanna Blau in September 1930 in Felsögöd, where she lived with her parents and brother, Laci, who was two years older than her.

She had a seemingly idyllic upbringing - a small village life with her father selling wood and coal, the family raising horses, geese and ducks, and growing their own vegetables.

But antisemitism was always a dangerous undercurrent to their lives, despite attending mixed schools.

Susan says: "There was a gradual build-up of antisemitism during the 1930s, long before we were transported. There were no other ethnic groups in Hungary, only us and the Gypsies.

"One day in 1938, my uncle was riding his horse and wagon when another man, his neighbour, jumped out of the back of the wagon with an axe and chopped off his head.