Horror Gamp Victims Find Haven in N.Z.

Northern Advocate, 13 March 1948, Page 6

Horror Gamp Victims Find Haven in N.Z.

Miss Hansi Silverstein, formerly of Berlin, and an Austrian, Mrs Alice de Buton, arrived in Auckland yesterday in the Tasman plane. They are two of the few survivors of the concentration camps at Belsen and Auschwitz. Miss Silverstein will stay with her uncle (Dr H. Tichauer), who has been living at Mt Eden, Auckland, for some time.

Ker parents were taken with her to the camp and marched straight to the gas chambers, where they were murdered.

The first news she had of her 15-year-old brother was to hear, after the war, that he was still alive. The notorious Kramer and Irma Greise (who were hanged after the post-war trials) were stationed at Auschwitz when she was there, said Miss Silberstein, and the world already knew how the inmates were treated. She was forced to work at treefelling in the forests, in stone quarries and munitions factories, and on farms, in all weathers. Miss Silberstein narrowly escaped death herself, as she was one of .a party due to go to the gas chambers when the were within a day’s march of the. camp. The place of her party was taken by a batch of prisoners from France. Miss Silberstein and her party marched through the snow for three days under aerial bombardment to Breslau, where they were placed in open trucks and conveyed to Belsen, where prisoners died of hunger and typhus.

CONTRACTED TYPHUS She contracted typhus and was compelled to live on a bowl of swede soup a day. When the British troops arrived she could not walk. After the liberation, the prisoners were cared for in a'displaced persons’ camp, run by American forces. Large numbers left for the United States every month, to be replaced by nonCommunist elements escaping from Russian domination in Rumania. Mrs de Buton, who is staying with her sister, Mrs C. Popper, of Mt Eden, said that she was in Vienna before she was taken by the Gestapo to the ghetto at Lodz in 1941. AT AUSCHWITZ After three years there she was sent to Auschwitz, where she stayed four weeks. She was then sent to Hamburg and she worked there until March, 1945.

She had to help to dismantle bombed buildings, carry rails, dig drains, carry stones and do other manual labour for up to 14 hours a day without any protection from the snow and rain.

She spent her final month under the Nazis at Belsen. She said she was more dead than alive when the liberation force arrived. She had no , idea what was happening.