Buenos Aires, 7 Jan. (askanews) -“Lea, run!”. These are the last words he heard his mother say upon arrival in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Holocaust survivor Lea Zajac de Novera, now 98 years oldin a long interview with AFP in his home in Buenos Aires, talks about that day in which he lost his entire family, while January 27 marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps.
“He shouted to me ‘Lea, run!’. AND I saw my aunt running. I ran after her. They hadn’t selected me because I hadn’t turned 18 yet and I could not be sent to the labor camp. I slipped… into that pandemonium,” recalls the lively former history teacher with an iron memory showing the identification number tattooed on his arm.
“Children and mothers were screaming, looking for each other… I managed to dodge everything. I ran after my aunt and stood next to her.”
Lea was born on December 31, 1926 in Michalowoa city in the province of Bialystok, Poland. At the outbreak of the war he lived with his family under Soviet occupation until 1942, when they were relocated to the Pruzhany ghetto. In 1943, she was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
The little sister, however, didn’t make it: “My little sister saw me running and started chasing me, but they saw her, beat her and put her in the truck. They took her away along with our entire family. And I stayed there. I will never forget the last look of my mother.”
At Auschwitz, he worked collecting rubble and sorting the clothes of those killed in the gas chambers. Then, remember, she was freed on 23 April 1945 near the Elbe river which she was supposed to cross.
“It is important for you, for all of us, for our great-grandchildren, ensure that something like this never happens again, because it could happen“, he warns, recalling that messiahs like Hitler arrive especially during periods of economic crisis.
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