July 1944: Majdanek concentration camp is liberated by Soviet troops. Rose Lebor, age 4, was there with her mother:

At liberation I was four. All the executions, the beatings that they had to watch. These are things that my mother could never bring herself to tell me directly. She was lucky to have survived, but she made her own luck. Which I think some people did. They found a way, a little niche, a little something to say or to do, that would make them survive another day.

She managed to get one of the Kommandants to let her out of the camp and go & work in a family in Lublin, who would give her scraps of food. It allowed us to have a little bit more & survive another day. One day at a time.

She kept me with her all the time. The roll call, she would put me under the bench, then she would go out. She would stand near German women, that were not Polish, here in prison for other reasons. That probably helped her not to be selected. So it was each time hoping that she wouldn’t be selected. Hoping she can go out & do a little work & bring back a little scrap of food. Having survived such horrors, who wants to talk about it? You really want to forget about it.

In ’44, when the war was nearly finished, she said that she realised that something big was happening, because all the Germans were in the courtyard burning documents. But it all happened so very quickly; they didn’t have time to burn the documents. Then all the inmates were put on trains to be taken to Auschwitz. They were emptying the camp in this way.

She then pretended that she was ill. That she couldn’t possibly stand on her feet. So she was allowed to go in the van that the German was driving with the seven remaining children.

This is really what saved our lives, because instead of going by train directly to Auschwitz, he went by road. And, as they were crossing, outside Krakow, in the woods the Russian tanks came through. So when the German saw the red flag, he knew his time was up. So he took out his gun & just shot himself, next to my mother. And the tank drove into this van, thinking that it was probably full of German soldiers, but it wasn’t.

It was the few children & one wounded woman by that time, because she got wounded by all the glass, the splashing that happened.

They didn’t know what to do with us, so they took us out of there. Put us on the side of the road. [half-laughs at the absurdity] The tank drove off.

They must have gone into Krakow & told the Red Cross. Because they came & took us to an assembly place in Krakow itself, where they put everybody that they could find there, & where later on, people would search for their families. Little bits of bread. That’s all there was. Nobody had much food. A lot of them just died of hunger. They died of overwork, they died of hunger, they died of disease.

She said, 'I was ill, but I got over it'. So… yes, surviving was luck, and surviving was also that I had a very strong mother. A very, very strong woman.

Krakow

Memories

Subscribe to our newsletter