Concentration camp survivor brings German parliament to its feet

AUSCHWITZ survivor Arno Lustiger brought the German parliament to its feet yesterday with a vivid speech describing his trip through “hell” in the waning weeks of World War II and his emotional rescue by US troops.

Speaking in front of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, government ministers and members of the Bundestag, Mr Lustiger told of a spontaneous uprising of Auschwitz prisoners in October 1944 in response to mass gassings of Jews.

“The prisoners attacked the SS with axes and rocks and set one crematorium on fire,” said Mr Lustiger, a Jew and Holocaust historian. “The SS mobilised, rounded everyone up in groups and killed them all with shots to the neck.”

Mr Lustiger’s cousin is converted Catholic Jean-Marie Lustiger, Pope John Paul’s representative at ceremonies in Poland yesterday commemorating the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

Arno Lustiger passed through seven death camps in all. He was one of 4,000 prisoners sent on a death march from Auschwitz in January 1945 along the frozen streets of Silesia in what is now Poland. Only half survived the journey, only to land in the living “hell” of another camp, Gross-Rosen.

Eventually Lustiger ended up at Langenstein, where crippling forced labour in underground tunnels killed the average prisoner in four weeks. He survived it all and, after being discovered half-dead by American troops, celebrated the end of the war and his 21st birthday on May 8, 1945.

“This double-celebration, I will never forget it,” Lustiger said, his harrowing tale greeted with an extended, solemn ovation.