Published in the Huddersfield Examiner on January 27, 2009
THEY sit in the front room of their semi-detached home in a quiet Elland cul-de-sac and Ibi and Val Ginsburg seem like any other pensioner couple, quietly enjoying their retirement.
But the pair are part of the dwindling band of survivors from the greatest crime in the history of humanity.
Ibi, 84, and Val, 86, came through the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Dachau during the Nazi Holocaust - but both lost nearly their entire families in the mass killing.
They are keen supporters of Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place today and aims to educate young people about human rights abuses, both past and present, and to encourage greater tolerance.
Val said: "I've had my bellyful of hatred. I can tell you the consequences of prejudice."
Waldemar Ginsburg - known as Val - was born in 1922 and grew up in Kaunas, the capital of Lithuania at the time.
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He remembers a happy childhood. Val said: "I was the only child, I lived with my mother, step-father and grandparents so I was spoilt rotten."
However, life in Lithuania wasn't easy for the Jewish people like Val. He said: "About one-third of the population of Kaunas was Jewish. Relations between Jews and Gentiles were pretty reasonable but we lived parallel lives. There was anti-Semtism, Jews had restricted access to higher education and government jobs."
For Val, the Second World War began in 1940 while he was studying architecture at Kaunas University.
He said: "We in Lithuania were hoping to survive the war but we had neighbours from hell - Hitler and Stalin. In 1940 the country was occupied by Russia and the communists started their purges right away against anyone who owned land, property or a business.
"My family had property so we were put on a list to be arrested and deported."
But the Nazis invaded and occupied Lithuania in 1941, before Val could be sent to Russia. As German tanks neared Kaunas, his family gathered to decide what to do.
Val said: "There were 14 of us, including my mother, step-father, grandparents, aunts and uncles.
"We had to decide whether to stay in Lithuania or escape to Russia, where we would probably end up in a slave labour camp. We decided to stay put because we assumed the Germans would be more civilised than the Russians."
Of the 14 family members who gathered to make that decision, only Val would survive
the war.
Hot on the heels of the advancing German Army came the SS and Gestapo.
Val said: "There were 35,000 Jews in Kaunas when the Nazis came and they murdered 5,000 within the first two months.
"The rest of us were sent to a ghetto in a suburb of the town. Seven thousand Lithuanians were moved out of the area and 30,000 Jews were moved in.
"The conditions were atrocious, we were starving."
But just as it seemed Val would die of hunger, salvation came in an unlikely form.
He said: "The Nazis threw us a lifeline that saved our lives. They told us to register for forced labour, which meant we could leave the ghetto and go to town where we could scavenge food.
"We used to do things like digging and laying drains, but I would also smuggle food back to the ghetto. I had a huge anorak with deep pockets that I would cram full of potato peel. My mother would clean the peel and then cook it. It kept us alive."
By 1944, most of Val's family had been executed. His mother Pauline was taken to Stutthof concentration camp in Poland where she died of hunger the following year, aged 45.
Val was taken to Kaufering, a satellite camp of Dachau in southern Germany.
He said: "There was no way to scavenge food anymore. After just a fortnight we looked like walking skeletons."
Val worked 11-hour shifts six days a week, building an underground bunker about two miles from the camp.
He said: "We were building a factory to replace the ones that had been bombed. It was going to be used to build the brand new jet-powered Messerschmitt fighter plane. It was very difficult to survive on starvation rations."
Somehow, Val managed to keep himself alive until American troops liberated the camp on May 1, 1945.
He said: "All of us were euphoric because we had survived. But then the information about our losses came in. Of the 35,000 Jews in Kaunas, only 2,000 were alive at the end of the war and many of these 2,000 were so weak that they died shortly after they were liberated.
"I realised I had no family, no community and no country anymore. I was a physical and mental wreck."
While recovering in a hospital near Dachau, Val met fellow Holocaust survivor Ibi Davidovics.
She was born in the Hungarian town of Tokaj in 1924.
Ibi said: "It was a town about the size of Brighouse and it was a wine-growing centre. There was quite a sizeable Jewish community and relations with non-Jews were fine.
"I mixed with Christian children when I was growing up, but slowly things started to
change as anti-Semitism came over from Germany."
Ibi lived with her three younger sisters and their parents.
She said: "I wanted to go and study German in a school in Vienna, but it closed during the war so I became an apprentice tailoress."
Compared to other countries, wartime conditions in Hungary were tolerable.
Ibi said: "The war broke out when I was 15, but I wasn't affected because Hungary was an ally of Germany. Jews weren't persecuted."
But all this changed when the Nazis invaded the country in 1944.
Ibi said: "They told the Hungarian police to round up all the Jews in the county outside the synagogue in the town centre. Then we were taken, all 11,000 of us, to the ghetto.
Unlike Val, Ibi spent only three weeks in the ghetto.
She said: "The Germans knew they were losing the war, so everything was going very, very fast. They told us we were going to Germany to work.
"Seventy-two of us were crammed in a cattle wagon. After three days the doors opened and I saw a row of SS men with rifles over their shoulders. We had no idea where we were."
Ibi and her family had arrived at the most notorious death camp of all - Auschwitz.
The Nazis immediately separated the prisoners into groups.
Ibi's father Herman was taken away with the rest of the men aged 15 to 45. He survived the war, but his wife and two of his daughters did not.
Ibi said: "My mother and I were standing with arms linked when we got to the head of the queue. An SS man pulled my arm away from my mother and said she and my younger sisters would go to a different camp where they wouldn't have to work.
"All the time they were lying. The old, the children and the mothers were taken straight to the gas chambers."
Ibi's mother Emily, 46, and her two younger sisters Rachel, 10, and Miriam, 7, were taken away and killed.
Ibi and her other sister Judith, 13, were taken to the showers. She said: "They shaved all our hair off and then gave us soap. It wouldn't lather. I found out later that the soap was made from human skin."
Ibi and Judith stayed in a huge barrack housing 1,200 women. She said: "We would sleep 10 to a bed. In the morning they would bring us a cooking pot full of coffee and we
would have to drink it like animals.
"At lunchtime we would get soup which had stones in it. You had to hold your nose as you ate. For dinner we each got 200 grammes of bread with a little margarine in the corner.
"The Nazis didn't make us work, they were just waiting for the crematoria to come free so they could do away with us."
By this stage the Red Army was advancing steadily towards Auschwitz, which is in modern-day Poland.
Ibi said: "At night we could hear the Allies bombing. In August 1944 we were taken from Auschwitz to Kaufering in southern Germany.
"It was a slave labour camp rather than an extermination camp. Every day we marched for two hours to the site of an underground factory.
"We made soup for the men working there, then in the evening we marched back to the camp."
Like Val, Ibi remembers liberation on May 1, 1945 as a bittersweet day.
She said: "When I saw the US Army coming up to the camp in their jeeps I was euphoric. But then I realised my community was dead and I felt guilty for surviving."
Ibi went to work at a hospital near Dachau, helping fellow survivors from the camp. It was there in November 1945 that she met a young man from Lithuania.
Val said: "That meeting was a turning point for both of us. We fell in love and decided to start a new life for ourselves."
The couple married in 1946 and moved to Munich, where Val trained to be a radio technician. Two years later they heard that post-war Britain desperately needed workers.
Val said: "They were looking for miners, domestics and textile workers.
We got permits to go to England as textile workers. I have very pleasant memories of arriving in England."
The couple settled in Elland and went to work at James Thornton Mill, Val as a weaver and Ibi as a burner and mender.
Val believes England is a tolerant country. He said: "I have never experienced anti-Semitism in this country. I was welcomed with open arms everywhere I went."
The couple have two daughters, Pauline, 59 and Amanda, 52. Like many children of Holocaust survivors, Pauline and Amanda grew up without the extended family that other people take for granted.
Ibi said: "When Pauline was young she used to ask why she didn't have grandparents like her friends did. You can't tell a five-year-old about the evils that her family went through.
"We told our daughters about the Holocaust when they were about 14."
Val and Ibi are both keen to educate the next generation, including their three grandchildren, about the Holocaust. In 1992 Val wrote the book And Kovno Wept about his experiences.
The couple, who are members of the Holocaust Education Trust, regularly visit schools to explain what happened to them. This month they have visited Moor End Technology College in Crosland Moor and Colne Valley High School.
Val said: "We're trying to instil tolerance among young people. I want to point out to young people how privileged they are to live in a stable democracy.
"It's a privilege only granted to a minority of people and we must value it and be forever vigilant.
"Democracy is a tender flower which can be easily killed."
Val and Ibi support Holocaust Memorial Day and hope the event brings attention to more recent mass killings as well.
Ibi said: "In the 1990s we saw the Balkan war on the TV night after night. I thought back to when I was in Auschwitz and I used to think: Is there a world out there? Do people know we are suffering?
"We thought it would never happen again."
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