Susan Pollack OBE: Holocaust Survivor tells her story for memorial day

A Nazi concentration camp survivor has urged people to end a culture of blame and instead learn from the past to put an end to atrocities we continue to see around the world.

Marking Holocaust Memorial Day, Susan Pollack told The Standard: “Hate has a way of spreading. It isn’t just against the Jews, but any other form of people. We’re a mixed community, and we have to treat each and every one equally, and look back and learn from the past, so we can create a good future.”

In 1944, Hungarian Jews were deported, many of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Along with her mother and older brother Laci, Mrs Pollock was sent to Vac in Hungary in the hope they would be resettled.

They were taken from a prison camp to Auschwitz, and Mrs Pollack was separated from the pair on arrival. She discovered later that her mother was sent to a gas chamber.

She later worked as a slave labourer in an armaments factory in Guben, Germany. But when the Allied forces advanced, she and the other prisoners were forcibly marched to Bergen-Belsen, another concentration camp in northern Germany.