Holocaust survivor remembers: 'I was a living corpse'

On the day she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Susan Pollack pledged to spend her life educating people about the horrors of the Holocaust.

“I was a living corpse,” she said, speaking last week at the European Jewish Congress ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day at the European Parliament. “And I thought, health permitting I will teach at schools – which I have done for 30 years – to inform... That is the commitment I made when I was liberated from Bergen-Belsen.”

Pollack, a native of Hungary who now lives in London, told the gathered group of politicians, diplomats and communal leaders how the horrors of the Holocaust were prefaced by creeping antisemitism and dehumanization.

“We had exclusionary laws, long before I was taken to Auschwitz,” she said. “We weren’t part of the society. We were dehumanized. We had our political rights, economic rights taken away. We had to give up the little business we had, our social life. My brother – two years older than me – couldn’t go to football matches anymore because he was beaten up. And it was all dismissed.”

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“That’s how it starts – with small attacks,” she said. “There were 10 stages to the Final Solution. And that’s why we have to fight it at the very beginning.”

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