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Holocaust hell
I was sent to Auschwitz at 12 where my mother and seven siblings were gassed
IVOR Perl was just 12 years old when he came face-to-face with notorious prison doctor ‘Angel of Death’, Josef Mengele, who was known for the sick experiments he carried out on Jewish prisoners.
The young Jewish boy had been torn from his home in Mako, Southern Hungary, and taken 270 miles to Auschwitz - and his fate was now in the hands of Mengele, who decided with the point of a finger on his white-gloved hand who would live and who would die.
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“Suddenly he saw me. He asked: ‘How old are you?’ I said ‘sixteen’," Ivor tells Sun Online.
"For a millisecond, he stopped, then he said: ‘Alright, go to the right,' meaning to the workers’ side."
It was a lucky escape for the young Hungarian who would've been sent to his death if Mengele realised he was only a child - and no use for hard labour.
Ivor's mother and seven of his siblings were sent left to their deaths in Auschwitz' gas chambers— he never saw any of them again.
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Today, 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, 87-year-old Ivor still can’t comprehend the horrors of the worst extermination camp the world has ever known.
“The truth sounds so horrific - it’s very hard to comprehend what happened," Ivor says .
"But it’s even harder to believe it could happen again if one is not careful."
An army of slaves
Growing up in Southern Hungary in the 1930s, Ivor was no stranger to anti-Semitism.
“Going to school was, literally, like running the gauntlet. There was nothing unusual about being cursed at or spat at or even punched.
“But, somehow or another, that was part and parcel of life. You accepted that you were a Jew - so you were entitled to suffer for it.”
As an ally of the Axis powers, Hungary fought alongside the Nazis during World War Two.
Leading up to and throughout the war, the Hungarian government passed a raft of anti-Semitic laws emulating those introduced by Hitler in Germany.
Jews were forced out of their jobs, had to abide by a curfew and were forbidden from marrying Christians.
They stopped short of enacting Hitler’s final solution — the planned genocide of the Jewish people — but still sent thousands of working-age Jews, including Ivor’s father and elder brother, to labour battalions.
These groups were Nazi Germany’s army of slaves staffed by the regimes’ racially persecuted populations.
They were forced to carry out back-breaking work on the frontline, forbidden from defending themselves with weapons, and they were even made to clear minefields with their bare hands.
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Crammed into cattle trucks
By 1944 it was clear Germany would lose the war. Knowing this, Hungary made peace overtures to the Allied forces.
When German High Command got wind of the negotiations they invaded and annexed Hungary, bringing their murderous campaign of anti-Semitism with them.
“Literally, within two or three months the whole Jewish population was practically wiped out,” Ivor says.
“Everything was very gradual, and everything that happened gradually, you would say: ‘Well, we can manage, it’s not too bad,’ until it was too late to do anything about it.”
Ivor remembers the Nazis telling them they would be put on trains and transported east, where there was farmland waiting for them to live and "be free of anti-Semitism".
In reality, the trains went straight to Auschwitz.
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Ivor and his family, along with hundreds of other Jews, were crammed into cattle trucks for the long journey to the camp.
Without food, water, or adequate ventilation many didn’t live to see the doors open at the other end.
Burning bodies
After three nightmarish days, the train pulled to a halt. Ivor could see inmates in striped uniforms through the slats of the cattle truck shouting at the new arrivals in Yiddish.
He heard them yell: “Eat all the food! Don’t save any food! Children, who are asked, must say they are at least sixteen years or older!”
It was advice that would save his life.
Ivor had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of a number of sub-camps that comprised the Auschwitz complex.
More than 1.1million people lost their lives inside its barbed wire fences.
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Stripped of their belongings, then shaved, Jews and other persecuted groups were sent straight to the gas chambers on arrival.
After all had perished, the SS guards forced other Jewish prisoners to clear the bodies from the chambers and move them to the crematorium to be burned — Ivor’s elder brother was one of the tragic inmates forced to carry out this gruesome task.
“I don’t know what happened to him, but none of those people survived more than four weeks. After four weeks they rotated them, and they themselves were burned,” Ivor says.
Mother and seven sisters sent to gas chambers
As well as extermination, Auschwitz was used as a holding camp for those deemed healthy and old enough to be sent to the Nazi’s network of slave labour camps inside Germany.
Selection took place on arrival, often overseen by head camp doctor Josef Mengele.
Mengele’s sickening legacy has earned him the macabre moniker ‘the Angel of Death’.
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A former SS captain, he was sent to Auschwitz in 1943 by Hitler’s second in command, Heinrich Himmler.
As head camp doctor, Mengele oversaw a program of barbaric and inhumane medical experiments, often on children, in particular twins, by which he hoped to prove the Nazi’s crackpot theory of Aryan racial dominance.
Ironically, it was Ivor’s strictly religious Jewish upbringing, and subsequent understanding of Yiddish, that saved his life.
Standing face-to-face with Mengele, the words of the Jewish prisoners fresh in his mind, 12-year-old Ivor lied, telling Mengele he was sixteen.
“If I hadn't known Yiddish, I wouldn’t have known what he meant. So when he asked me, ‘How old are you?' I would’ve said 12.
"He would never have let me live if I had said I was 12.”
Instead, Ivor was sent to Birkenau’s labour camp, along with his brother Alec.
His mother and seven of his sisters were sent straight to the gas chambers.
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Remembering the Nazi’s cruelty, Ivor still can't believe how callous they were when confronted with human suffering.
“My youngest sister was herded into a gas chamber and into a fire," he says. "Even now, I think: 'How could people do that?'”
After the selection process, Ivor and his brother were marched to the camp’s barracks where they were met by a kapo — a prisoner, usually a German criminal, who supervised the camp’s slave labour workforce.
He told them: “You have arrived at a place called Auschwitz, don't you forget it. You’re being given a number now.
"You do not exist without this number. Forget this number and you will not live.”
To prove his point, two other kapos then brought a prisoner into the barracks and held him spreadeagled on the ground in front of the new arrivals.
As the prisoner was ‘punished’ he told them: “This is what’s going to happen to you anytime you do something you’re not supposed to.”
Suddenly Ivor began to cry.
'The fleas flew from the dead bodies'
Life in the Nazi work camps was brutal and often short. Back-breaking slave labour, lack of food and horrific camp conditions killed many thousands of prisoners.
Ivor says the desperate struggle for survival dehumanised him — which is exactly what the camps were designed to do.
“You didn't have any clothes, you didn't have any food, you didn't have anything so anything you could get hold of you grabbed.
"So, if you went to bed with someone and the person died next to you the first thing you kept on saying is: ‘Can I use their clothes?’
“How you knew that someone had died next to you, you could see the fleas flying away from the body, then you realise the person next to you is dead.
“I feel ashamed of what humanity can do, and scared, if people don’t take notice, what they can do again.”
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Wheelbarrows full of bodies
In Early 1945, German defeat was in sight. Soviet troops were bearing down on the camp from the east while Allied forces fought their way across Germany from the west.
Hoping to conceal the horror of their crimes from the eyes of the world, the Nazis moved the prisoners, abandoning Auschwitz as they attempted to destroy evidence of the camp.
Prisoners were taken to Allach, a work camp in the heart of Germany, then on to Dachau — the first of many concentration camps built by the Nazis during World War Two.
Ivor recalls the sickening scenes that prisoners arrived to at both camps.
“The first thing that greeted you when you went to another camp was the amount of wheelbarrows with dead people on them. In other words, death was always in front of you.”
In Spring of 1945 after a year in the Nazi’s clutches, Ivor and his brother were liberated by American troops.
They were taken to a displaced persons camp where it was confirmed that, out of their entire family, they were the only two left alive.
In November 1945 the two brothers came to Britain, where Ivor met his future wife, Rhoda.
WHO WAS JOSEF MENGELE?
Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, began the Second World War as a medical officer in the SS - the Nazi organisation which enforced the party's sick racial policy and ran concentration camps.
In 1943, Mengele applied to be transferred to the camps and he was given a job in Auschwitz.
It was here that his sadistic legacy was cemented as he gleefully volunteered to run the selection process - where new arrivals were sent into slavery or straight to the gas chambers.
Most Auschwitz doctors found the selection process unpleasant - but Mengele smiled and whistled a happy tune as he sent millions to their deaths.
Mengele was partly interested in running the horrific selection process so he could find subjects for his notorious medical experiments, looking especially for young twins.
His cruel experiments disregarded the safety or wellbeing of their participants - who he made call him "Uncle Mengele".
Twins would have limbs unnecessarily amputated, have forced blood transfusions with each other, and had chemicals injected into their eyes so they would change colour.
Mengele also sewed two Romani twins together in a bid to make them conjoined - both children died from rotting flesh after days in agony.
It's unclear how many children he killed, but in just one night Mengele is known to have killed 14 twins by injecting chloroform into their hearts.
After the war, he fled to Brazil where he lived the rest of his life in hiding.
He died in 1979 when he had a stroke and drowned while swimming in the sea - he was buried under a false name, but DNA testing on his exhumed remains confirmed his identity in 1992.
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Together they have four children.
Seventy-five years since Auschwitz's liberation and his ordeal there, Ivor is adamant the best antidote to hate is love.
“I can genuinely say that, in human nature, in life, in marriage, in everything, love will get you a lot further and a lot better results than hatred.”
Ivor shared his story in conjunction with the
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