Teacher's Holocaust camp account

The former teacher says it is her duty to tell people what happened

A former teacher who survived the Nazi German death camps in Poland has said it is her duty to speak on behalf of the voiceless and dispossessed.

Trude Levi, a Hungarian-born Jew, opened an exhibition to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in Canterbury, Kent.

She described to schoolchildren how people were taken to camps in cattle trucks and how the Nazis tried to dehumanise their victims.

Ms Levi, now in her 80s, has written books and given nearly 2,000 lectures.

People travelled with the dead and the mad and the screaming for five days and five nights Trude Levi

She told how the cattle trucks used to transport people to concentration camps normally carried 70 to 90 people, but sometimes as many as 120.

"People started to scream. They started to go mad. They started to have heart attacks and they died.

"People travelled with the dead and the mad and the screaming for five days and five nights."

She uses her accounts of the concentration camps to give an insight into the tactics used by her tormentors.

Factory work

On Monday, at the exhibition in the cathedral city, she explained to an audience of pupils and church leaders how the Nazis aimed for "efficient utilisation of the corpse".

"They tried to dehumanise us. That was the worst part. They did not succeed with me, only physically.

"Physically, they could dehumanise me. Mentally, they could not."

During her years at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II, she was made to work in the factories. She was taken there at the age of 21.

"First of all I am still here. Secondly, I kept my integrity. I won the war."

The exhibition in Canterbury, organised by the city council, is touring the area during January and February.

"Another Time, Another Place," is at the Undercroft, Edenbridge Hospital, Canterbury, until 25 January, and will be shown later in Whitstable and Herne Bay.