FROM AUSCHWITZ TO AFRICA

When her children were young Ella Blumenthal told them the scar on her arm was the result of a car accident. But this wasn't true. It was what remained of the tattoo shed been given by the Nazis. In this extract from her new memoir the 101-year-old shares her incredible story of survival

Soon they were given Czechoslovakia on a platter; they thought it would satisfy Adolf Hitler’s appetite. Still we said it can’t happen to us.

They crossed our border on the 1st of September 1939, marching towards Warsaw. Then everyone woke up! Warsaw stood up against them for three weeks. And then fell.

Right away there were announcements. All Jewish land was requisitioned. All Jewish bank accounts were frozen. All public gatherings were forbidden. Schools and synagogues were closed.

Every few days there was something new. A curfew was imposed. Food was rationed.

A few months before the end of 1940, there was a proclamation: all Jews were to move into a ghetto in Warsaw. But where do we go? There were only certain streets that were included in the ghetto.

We managed to rent a large room where we all lived together: my parents, two of my brothers and me. My sister Golda and her children got a place elsewhere.

My father ran a business that supplied tailors with everything from buttons to the cloth of a suit, but as his shop fell outside the ghetto limits, he had to close it. So, there was no work to go to every day. I was 19 and had already finished school.

Every morning when you got up and went out into the street, you could see corpses. They were put out during the night by their families who couldn’t even give them a funeral. They were picked up on carts. Sometimes the bodies were covered with newspaper held down by bricks; the bodies were naked underneath because the family needed the clothes they had been wearing.

Eventually, when there was no paper, they were lying naked. And they weren’t corpses; they were skeletons – so thin were they.