Only British Holocaust survivor to have travelled to Auschwitz on Memorial Day reveals devastating reason for going back
At 94 years of age, Mala Tribich is the only British Holocaust survivor who has travelled to the Auschwitz concentration camp for Memorial Day.
She will meet with King Charles there today (27 January) to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Yesterday, Mala walked the grounds of the site were 1.1 million people were murdered ahead of the 80th anniversary of its liberation. During World War II, she was taken as a child by cattle truck to Ravensbruck concentration camp before being moved to Bergen-Belsen.
Making visits to Auschwitz must take great strength from the woman who lost family and friends in the Holocaust, but she has explained the devastating reason why she does so.
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Speaking to The Mirror, she says being at the concentration camp gives her terrible 'flashbacks' and says it’s a 'painful experience'.
Three of Mala's grandparents died at Auschwitz and she also lost her parents, her younger sister, aunt and best friend because of the Nazis.
"It is easier to count who remained because there were so few," she said. "Of all my immediate family there were two of us left, my brother and I."
But it is because of those who lost their lives that she visits the site of ‘horror’.
"I keep coming back because I don’t want them to be forgotten. I feel like I’m visiting them, it is their resting place," Mala explained. "I don’t know how much longer I will be coming and it is painful but if you don’t do anything they are just forgotten. I want them to be part of my life still."
Looking across to the red bricked barracks in Krakow, Poland, she added: "Being here does give me flashbacks, the buildings themselves are scary for me."
The woman, who was born in Piotrkow, Poland, went on to say it is 'difficult' because of the way people died there.
"It was not a natural death. They didn’t have a normal burial," Mala said.
"This was so abnormal. Some people died of sheer heartache because they had been left here alone, having lost all their family in the next door crematorium. They had such a painful death, dying of hunger or beaten up."
After spending much of her childhood in captivity, Mala was 14 years old when Auschwitz was liberated with her own freedom coming some months later. Until then, much of it was a life of horror and pain and hunger, as she recalled: "There were so many different emotions and they are all painful and unbearable. It was just such a terrible life."
When she was freed, she was ill with 'deadly' typhus but was getting better when she looked outside and saw people running.
“We were liberated by the wonderful British forces. I cannot describe what it meant to be treated with kindness," she said. Mala was eventually reunited with her sole surviving family ember, her elder brother Ben, and has lived in the UK since 1947.
With visits to the camp taking her back to that horror and pain, Mala works with the Holocaust Educational Trust and shares a message to the next generation.
"They must be vigilant; read the papers, watch the telly and if they see anything that is the beginning of something horrible like the Holocaust, try and do something about it," she explained.
And she told how it was important to keep hopeful: "I don’t want to give up hope, in concentration camps if you gave up hope you died.”
Jess Battison