"Hatred never built anything"

OTTO Grunfeld sits in the comfortable living room of his home in the picturesque village of Oswaldkirk, near Helmsley, and talks calmly of another world.

This is a place where he once lived and very nearly died, a world of such savage and evil brutality that it still beggars belief 60 years later. His parents died there, and so did his brother, in the gas chambers.

About six million Jews are believed to have been killed by the Nazis, but Otto can tell the human and tragic story behind the statistics and he is happy to do so to mark today's Memorial Day.

The former Ampleforth College teacher and University of York external tutor, who has lived with his wife, Rosemary, in North Yorkshire since 1961, fully supports the decision to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.

He said: "I think it is very important we don't forget what happened. The whole thing is so unbelievable. The lesson we should be learning is that mankind can be swayed by a madman, a totally ruthless megalomaniac."

He knows from personal experience how some people, through ignorance or more sinister motives, not only forget what happened, but even try to deny it.

He once met an American in a supermarket who, after a brief conversation, told him there was no such thing as concentration camps and the Holocaust, saying: "That's a lot of Zionist propaganda."

That experience prompted Otto to write a book, The Survivor's Path, in the 1990s describing his experiences.

Otto, a sprightly 80 year old, began his life with a happy and uneventful childhood in a middle class family in Prague. His father, Morris, ran several textile factories.

The first sign of the terrible trouble to come was in the late 1930s, when the rise of anti-Semitism gradually led to the loss of the family's prosperity and human rights.

As Jews started being transported away, Otto's father was told he could save his family by paying money to someone. Otto was sent on a series of trips to the man, handing over much of the family's remaining wealth. "He wanted currency, preferably dollars, and jewellery."

But eventually, as the money ran out, so did the family's time together. "He betrayed us. He was a double agent," said Otto.

The Gestapo crashed into the family home one morning and took them away. Otto never saw his father and mother, Hilda, again. He later learnt they had died, although he never discovered the manner of their death.

He and his brother, Paul, were temporarily freed but later transported to the ghetto of Terezin, where they lived until being transported in cattle trucks to the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944.

"The cattle trucks were lined up with German armed guards patrolling up and down, people herded in," he said.

"There was weeping and last embraces, families split, couples parted, squeezing I don't know how many into the trucks."

On arriving at Auschwitz, an SS officer pointed Paul in one direction, to the gas chambers, while Otto was sent the other way. He thinks the decision was taken because Paul, who wore glasses, looked more intellectual, while Otto had blond hair and blue eyes - "Almost Aryan!"

A week or so later, he was sent to another camp at Kauferin, near Dachua, where a massive construction project was underway to build underground bomb-proof factories where German fighter planes could be made.

It was a life of immense physical toil, with food consisting of a slice of bread for breakfast, and a thin cabbage soup for lunch and again for tea, "if you were lucky".

Life took an even bleaker turn when Otto was transferred to the night shift, which involved the movement of heavy bags of cement. The toil left him broken both physically and psychologically.

He found himself unable to stop crying. He expected to die on the second night, but says he was saved by Allied bombing which prevented trains arriving with cement bags.

"I had so many miraculous escapes," he said. "I don't give myself any credit for surviving, except that until the end, I didn't give in to despair. Only at the end was my spirit literally broken."

He said his weight dropped until he was almost skeletal, to the extent that it even hurt to sit down. "There was no muscle."

The camp was liberated by the Americans, but liberation brought its own tragedies. Some internees who were still alive when the Americans arrived were literally killed by kindness, through the distribution of unlimited quantities of food. Terrible outbreaks of diarrhoea killed many in their weakened state.

Otto said the Americans allowed inmates still strong enough to walk to go out into the surrounding countryside and take revenge on the local population. He played no part in this, saying he had no feelings of revenge, hatred and bitterness and never has done. "Hatred never built anything."

Otto said he has forgiven the people who ran the camps, who he believes were brain-washed by a monstrous regime. "Forgiveness is essential," he says simply.

It took Otto a long, long time to recover physically and mentally from his experiences, helped by undergoing a counselling course.

He said he will take time out today to remember and reflect on what happened 60 years ago, and hoped the people of North Yorkshire will do likewise, in the hope that this will help ensure that the Holocaust never happens again.

The Survivor's Path is available from Sessions of York.

Updated: 09:18 Thursday, January 27, 2005