Auschwitz survivors remember horrors

A group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms behind barbed wire fencing in the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. Photo / AP

Jozef Paczynski recalls the "welcome" speech the deputy commandant of Auschwitz gave on his arrival in 1940, down to the last chilling word.

Surrounded by SS guards with machineguns, the then 20-year-old Polish POW stood with other new prisoners at the camp railway station.

"Karl Fritzsch was the name of the deputy commander," Paczynski, now a spry 95, said. "He said to us: 'This is not a sanatorium, this is a German concentration camp and you can expect to live three months ... there is only one way out of here and that's through the crematorium chimney.'"

Paczynski spent most of World War II in Auschwitz but was spared the chimney, unlike 1.1 million others. He took part in the infamous death march of January 1945, when thousands of emaciated prisoners were forced to march away from the camp to escape the advancing Russians.

Tomorrow he will join a dwindling group of survivors for a ceremony on the grounds of the former death camp, marking the 70th anniversary of its liberation. The number of survivors continues to dwindle: from 1500 10 years ago, to 300 this year.

Paczynski was known simply as prisoner 121. He survived because he was ordered to work as personal barber to the SS commandant, Rudolf Hoess.

"The first time I was taken into his villa, I was so afraid that my hands shook and I had spots before my eyes," he said. "He came in and I cut his hair. He didn't say a word. I must have done a good job because I was called back time and again."

One day Paczynski climbed on top of a large building next to the gas chambers, removed a roof tile and peered below. From there, he watched hundreds being ordered to strip naked and guards herding them into the gas chambers: "The door slammed shut - there were loud screams, but they got less and less until there were whimpers and then just silence ... in Auschwitz you got used to anything."

Tadeusz Smreczynski, now 91, says his day "is wrecked " if he hears anything from the opera Tosca on the radio. It reminds him of the afternoon in Auschwitz when he heard the strains of an aria from the opera emerging from a camp barrack room.

"The SS just went in and shot him - just for singing. He was the star tenor in the Brussels opera. His entire family had been gassed that morning."

Smreczynski still sees ditches in the camp piled high with burning bodies during the Nazi attempt in 1944 to exterminate all Hungarian Jews who had arrived en masse.

"The crematorium couldn't keep up, so they burned bodies in the open."

Like Paczynski he survived by the luck of securing a privileged position - kitchen work which kept him from the brutal outside labour that would almost certainly have killed him.