This year marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and one of the survivors, Bernard Marks, recalled memories of his time at the camp, in the hope that the younger generation will prevent history from happening again.
Born in 1932 into a Jewish family in Poland, Marks and his family were sent to the concentration camp in 1939, after Germany occupied their country.
At the camp, children that under the age of 10 were sent to the gas chamber, instead of being put into slave labor.
Marks' father learnt this and changed his son's year of birth to 1927, enabling his son to work rather than to be killed.
The endless labor tortured the body of the then 8-year-old Marks.
Marks said that he was transferred to five different concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Dachau, along with his father.
"At Auschwitz I was working building a road. Sometimes we would take stones from one side, in the heat, and carry them to the other side. And then some people would take it from this side to put it back over there. Another way to exterminate you, because they used the word 'arbeit macht frei', work makes you free. Actually that was not the case, they should have used 'work will exterminate you'. Instead of putting you into the gas chamber, they just worked you to death without giving you any food," said Marks.
In 1944, Marks and his father were ordered to build air-raid shelters and arsenals for the Nazis in Kaufering concentration camp, a sub camp of Dachau, where many memorials have now been erected to commemorate the people died there.
If they became sick, they would be shut in a hut with the windows nailed shut, and the Nazis would spread gasoline and set them on fire, Marks said.
Marks and his father were later sent on a "death train", which the Nazis used as a target to draw firepower from the allies.
"It could have been military, they didn't know it was just us, slave laborers, on that train. So we jumped out into the forest, and we were greeted from the top by machine guns by the allies, from machine guns from both sides from the forest by Nazis, that was on the 26th of April. And we survived, wounded as we were, we survived overnight in the forest. And they collected us again the next day and took us back to the camp. The day after, we were liberated by the United States Army 12th Armored Division," said Marks.
After they were liberated from the camp, the father and son moved to the United States.
A total of 200 people in Marks' extended family were placed in concentration camps, but only five, including Marks and his father, survived.
In 1995, Marks became a volunteer telling people about what happened in the concentration camps in his spare time. He also visits Dachau twice a year, where he tells the younger generation of his life in the camps.
"The only time in history that you can say a government, like the Nazis, by law designed to exterminate people. All done democratically. So my goal is to tell the younger generation don't let this happen again," said Marks. More on:[ Ссылка ]
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