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'We thought we had entered hell': Auschwitz survivor shares harrowing story with Walsall pupils

"We thought we had entered hell." The words of 86-year-old Auschwitz survivor Mindu Hornick,  speaking on Holocaust Memorial Day, 71 years after the death camp was liberated.

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Twelve-year-old Mindu Hornick was greeted at Auschwitz by corpses, starving prisoners and the smell of the burning bodies.

Leaving her happy childhood behind, Mindu, along with her mother and sister and two brothers, was rounded up and taken to the concentration camp by the Nazis.

While she and her sister Eva, then aged 14, would survive – Mindu, who now lives in Edgbaston, Birmingham, would never see her mother and brothers again.

Speaking at Joseph Leckie Academy in Walsall, Mindu, now aged 86, told pupils of her haunting experience.

Students at Joseph Leckie Academy listen intently to Mindu Hornick

"As soon as I was admitted to the main camp the sight that greeted us will stay with me for the rest of my life," she said. "There were corpses everywhere, emaciated people in striped uniforms wandering around aimlessly.

"The smell from the burning crematorium, the dead all around us. The entire area was enclosed by electrified barbed wire fence. We thought we had entered hell. The realisation we would not see our mother and little brothers again is too painful to describe."

Mindu explained how she became 'less than human' as she was marched off to be prepared for almost inevitable murder.

"We were stripped naked, our hair was shaven and we were tattooed with a number," she said. "From then on we had no name. We were given a dress and clothes but no underwear.

"The sleeping quarters already held one thousand women. The beds were three tier and slept eight people. But that night they were all occupied. We had no choice to sit all night on the stone floor. We had no water to wash or drink. No sanitation. There were all kinds of diseases including an epidemic of Typhoid."

Mindu had enjoyed a happy childhood in a small town in Czechoslovakia with her family until her father was drafted to dig trenches for the German army in 1941.

After one visit she never saw him again. Then a year later her family, with other Jewish members of the community, were rounded up, loaded into lorries before being packed into cattle carriages on a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mindu, now a grandmother of two, explained how upon arrival Jews were either sent left to be put in the main camp where they may be put to work, or to the right where they would be immediately killed.

The latter was the fate which befell her mother, but before that a Polish officer had convinced her to send her two daughters ahead and instructed Mindu and Eva to lie about their age claiming they were 17 and 19. Ultimately it saved their lives.

Mindu Hornick, now 86, was talking as part of Holocaust Memorial Day 2016

After several months Mindu and Eva were transported to an underground ammunition factory in the woodlands. Whilst there they were exposed to dangerous working conditions having to pour boiling hot gun solution into containers with no protective clothing, which left many women with perforated lungs. But at least it was not a death camp.

And they did not have to endure the hellish daily roll calls which Mindu described as the 'selection to live or die'.

In May 1945 they were loaded onto a passenger train with their Nazi officers not knowing whether their next destination would be their last. But Allied troops bombed the train unaware that Jewish slaves were on board. Half of the women being transported were killed in the attack a day before liberation.

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War Mindu and her sister returned to Prague in desperate hope to locate other survivors. But in 1948 she was forced to flee during the Soviet occupation which is when she came to Birmingham to live with an aunt and uncle.

When asked by students how she survived Aushwitz Mindu's simple reply was 'sheer luck'.

Two years ago Mindu returned to the concentration camp. She said it stirred up 'terrible' feelings but the visit ultimately gave her a semblance of closure.

Mindu added: "When I was younger I didn't think about the experience a lot but as I got older time makes them memories come back.

"Survivors like me tell their personal stories in hope that the people who hear them remember and do not stand by in the face of injustice in the future."

The 86-year-old visited the school in Walsall with the Anne Frank Trust UK.

Mindu said: "My painful sharing of what happened to me is me playing my part in trying to stop modern day genocides and to reflect on the lessons which should have been learned from the Holocaust. But humanity seems incapable of learning from the past."

She lit a candle at the talk as part of the assembly in which students gave a presentation highlighting the heroic actions of people such as Oskar Schindler and Nicholas Winton, whose actions helped thousands of Jews to escape Nazi persecution.

The theme this year for memorial events throughout the country is 'Don't Stand By' encouraging people to act in the face of injustice.

Head of history at Joseph Leckie, Joe Greaves, said: "We did a project before Christmas involving 16 of our Year 9 pupils.

"We chose those because they were the same age as Anne Frank. They did a fantastic project presenting the Anne Frank story to 800 students across the school. It is a real honour for us to have Mindu come in.

"I think the fact we have got such a diverse population of students primarily Muslim, to have a Jewish survivor here exposes them to real stories and draws parallels to modern conflicts in Syria."

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