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Amber Sound News
Holocaust survivor speaks of her ordeal to students at Mill Hill School
A Holocaust survivor has spoken about her ordeal to Mill Hill School students and the local community in an event organised by a former pupil.
Mala Tribich, 84, was just nine years old when she was forced, along with 28,000 Jews, into the Trybunalski ghetto in Poland at the start of the Second World War.
The 84-year-old visited Mill Hill School, in Ripley, with the Holocaust Educational Trust and spoke to a packed room of students and community members.
She said: “The ghetto was absolutely enormous but the rooms we lived in were very cramped, there were 10 people living in every room. Conditions were very harsh and a lot of epidemics would break out. They deprived us of everything.
“There were regular round-ups when the Germans would just turn up and surround a building, you could hear them coming from the window. We knew they were coming for us, sometimes they took children and sometimes they took people for work but when somebody went you never knew if they would return. You could be shot even if you just looked the wrong way. The Germans were very easy with their guns.”
Mala and her young cousin were sent to stay with a couple who had been recommended to her parents and who would look after them in return for money.
Mala said: “We were very scared and vulnerable, my cousin was terrified. She was 10 and I was 11 at the time. She asked to be taken home and said her parents had some good friends who would take her in, so one day they left with her and I was on my own.
“Some time after that I was taken to meet my father and my uncle and my uncle asked where his daughter, my cousin, was. The man said they had taken her to stay with friends but my uncle said she was not there. Nobody knows what happened to her.”
After the ghetto was liquidated, Mala, who by now was caring for her five-year-old cousin, was among those who were taken outside to be deported.
She said: “I went up to a German officer and said I had been separated from my brother and father and could I go back to them. He had a kindly face and he sort of smiled. I think he was flabbergasted that I had the courage to ask him that and he let me back in.”
Later, Mala was herded into a cattle truck and taken to Ravensbruck concentration camp.
She said: “We had no food, no water or sanitary provisions. People were dying of hunger and disease. The dead and the living were travelling together and the journey took so long. I later found out that it took us four-and-a-half days to reach our destination. When we arrived at Ravensbruck we had to give up everything. We had our heads shaved and we all wore the same clothes, we couldn’t recognise each other. We felt like they took our souls.”
By 1945, Mala was deported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
She said: “What we saw there defies description. There was a terrible smell and a smog. People were like skeletons shuffling along, some would just collapse and die in front of you. There were dead bodies everywhere, it was unbelievable, it was like something out of hell.”
Remembering the day the camp was liberated, Mala said: “I was lying on my bunk looking out and I remember seeing people running to the gate and all I could think was how did they have the strength to run. It was because the camp was being liberated.”
Former Mill Hill student, Orianne Brown, 19, of Ripley, organised the talk as part of her work as a volunteer regional ambassador for the Holocaust Educational Trust.
She told the audience: “I’m absolutely flabbergasted by the turnout and I hope that Mala’s talk will show us what can happen if prejudice and hatred take hold of society. Mala is an absolute inspiration.”
Students from Mill Hill attended the talk and among them was Hannah Johnson, 17.
She said: “The most interesting thing about Mala’s story was that it was from a child’s point of view. Someone who, if it wasn’t for the Holocaust, would have been playing with dolls in the garden but instead was separated from her entire family, losing loved ones and having to act as a motherly figure to her five-year-old cousin at just the age of 12.
“One of the courageous things she did was to ask a Nazi solider if she could go back into the ghetto with her cousin to be reunited with her family. That showed incredible courage for someone of such a young age to ask for something which was taken away from so many people, her family. I believe it was the love she and her cousin so desperately wanted which allowed her to survive such a tragic event. Her story showed us the importance of hope, bravery and courage.
“This is why I loved listening to her; for such an innocent girl to do such courageous things gives us all inspiration.
“I think it is important that Mala and other survivors are given the opportunity to speak because without them this tragic event could be forgotten and she also encourages us and future generations to treat people as equals.”
23 July 14 | Amber Sound FM News
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