There are still about 150,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel Olaf Scholz hesitates, but he was right about the tank issue

According to the latest figures, 150,600 contemporary witnesses to the Holocaust still live in Israel. More than a thousand of them are more than 100 years old, the responsible authority announced on the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Jerusalem.

One of the survivors is Hannah Malka, a Jewess from the Czech Republic: the 99-year-old survived the Theresienstadt ghetto, the Auschwitz extermination camp and the Oederan subcamp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Like many other contemporary witnesses, Malka kept the horror she experienced there to herself for decades. “I wanted my children to grow up normally,” Malka told journalists in Tel Aviv. However, noticing that people’s general intercourse with each other was getting worse and worse, she broke her silence. To raise her admonishing voice, she also traveled to Germany several times.

“It pains me to hear how people who belong together treat each other today,” said Malka, referring to her time in the Theresienstadt camp. “Life was so hard, we had so little to eat, you never stole, you never did anything bad, you always helped when someone needed help.”

Malka was deported in 1942 together with her mother to the Theresienstadt ghetto. There they lived for about two years with tens of thousands of other Jews in a confined space under appalling conditions. Both were later deported to Auschwitz. She never saw her mother again after that.

She can hardly remember her time in the extermination camp, Malka said. “I just remember how bad people looked and I thought it was impossible to live like that.” Today it is clear to her that she must not have looked any different herself. Malka was taken from Auschwitz to Germany to work as a maid and in a munitions and weapons factory. After the war, she reached present-day Israel in 1946.

On January 27, 1945, Red Army soldiers liberated the survivors of the German Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. The Nazis had killed over a million people there, mostly Jews. Since 1996, the date of liberation has been celebrated in Germany as Holocaust Remembrance Day. (sda/dpa)