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In 1939, Slovak fascists took over Topol'cany, where Miso lived. In 1942, Miso was deported to the Slovak-run Novaky camp and then to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, he was tattooed with the number 65,316, indicating that 65,315 prisoners preceded him in that series of numbering.

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Fences surround the concentration camp at Auschwitz. An estimated 1,000,000 to 2,500,000 people were exterminated at the camp. A row of chimneys tops the crematorium, were bodies were burned.

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auschwitz-fences-and-crematorium - Holocaust Concentration Camps Pictures - The Holocaust - HISTORY.com

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Fences surround the concentration camp at Auschwitz. An estimated 1,000,000 to 2,500,000 people were exterminated at the camp. A row of chimneys tops the crematorium, were bodies were burned.

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גדעון הואזנר

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Holocaust Survivor Testimonies: Hunger in the Concentration Camps

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Holocaust survivor Walter Zwi Bacharach describes the hunger he felt in the concentration camps. The video is an excerpt from the film "Daily Life in Concentration Camps" in the Holocaust History Museum.

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For those who survived selection, life in the camps was a daily struggle for survival.

For those who survived selection, life in the camps was a daily struggle for survival.

Deportation and transportation to camps often took days. Individuals, families and whole communities together with their personal belongings were packed into cattle trucks. They were locked in and transported for days. They had no information. They did not know where they were going, the length of the journey or what would happen to them when they eventually arrived at their destination.
The conditions on the journey were appalling.

We can learn about these journeys from the many child survivors who wrote of their experiences:

Agnes, an 11 year-old girl from Czechoslovakia, wrote: "Later we were moved and driven into railway wagons - the sort that transport animals - which were part of a long train. Some of the wagons were open-topped, some closed."

Jack, 15 years old, from Greece, talks of his experience at the start of what must have been a very long journey: "Some 20 railway cars were waiting for us... There were 70 to 80 people in a car... After a while, there was a muffled sound of closing latches... the whistle blew and the train started moving slowly. It was April 7, 1943. Penned in and cramped, we departed from our homeland, without being able to see it."

Moshe, aged 17, from Hungary, then explains that: "the doors were shut, leaving us almost in darkness. The grills, too, were closed to prevent escape. Air entered only through the cracks. So we travelled for 24 hours, without food or water. We were hungry and thirsty. But the desire and hope to see our families made us forget everything else."

David, a Polish Jew aged 13, graphically describes how cramped it was on the train: "There is no room to sit. In order to make room we are forced to stand with our hands above our heads.... Suddenly, the door is slammed shut and sealed. A water bucket is tossed into the car for use as a disposal container for human waste."

The packed railway wagons would often be shunted around from one railway siding to another for days on end, and for what must have seemed like an eternity. Many of the very young, the old and the sick would die because of the inhumane conditions during the journey. Those who did survive were severely traumatised by the experience.

Arrival at the camp

Eventually, after days of travelling in the most cramped conditions, the railway carriages arrived at a camp. The doors of the carriages would be pulled open to give the prisoners their first glimpse of daylight, at a place they had never seen before.

In this video Freddie talks about his journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau during October 1943. Freddie talks about how people were squeezed into cattle wagons for a journey of three days and three nights with no food, water or sanitation.

Listen to Freddie's testimony, and then read the rest of this section. Reflect on how the Nazis treated other human beings during the period we now call the Holocaust.
Please note that the lead in may take a few moments to allow the video to begin.

Dehumanisation

Having arrived at a concentration camp and been unloaded from the cattle trucks, men and women were separated, children staying with their mothers. After registration, prisoners had to undress and have their hair shaved before showering. They usually had their own clothing taken away, which would be replaced by a striped uniform.

This process was designed to remove any remnants of human dignity or personal identity.

Anna, aged 11, from Poland, describes the effect of having her hair cut: "I look around and I see young girls with scissors and clippers cutting hair off clean to the scalp... when the cold scissors touch my scalp and my hair slowly falls down, I can't help it, my tears fall down, mixed with my black curls." Mel, aged 15, from Czechoslovakia, goes on: "We all looked alike... Rich, poor, young, old. We shared the same fate as in no way before. I hardly recognised my father. Friends would pass you by. It was a nightmare."

Jacob, aged 17, describes the clothing he was given: "From there we went to the next room. We were handed a striped jacket, striped pants, wooden shoes and a striped cap."

Jack, aged 17, who had travelled from Greece to Auschwitz in Poland, says "They gave us striped pyjamas. Some of us got sizes too big or too small, but we changed among ourselves."

Daily routines

Daily routines were also designed to reduce prisoners to mere numbers.

After an early wake-up, daily concentration camp routines would begin with the Appell, the daily roll call. During the Appell prisoners had to stand in rows, completely still, for hours at a time, and in all weathers. Long lists of orders and instructions would be read out. The number of prisoners would be counted. Often, the kapos would announce that the total number of prisoners in a block was inaccurate, leading to a recount at the whim of the SS. After waking and before roll call, up to 2,000 prisoners at a time would have to share toilet facilities. The toilet would be a concrete or wooden board with often 100 holes for seats. No privacy and no real sanitation was provided. Prisoners would have to wash in dirty water, without soap and with no change of clothes for weeks or months on end.

After eating a meagre ration of watery soup, a piece of bread and some imitation coffee, a prisoner's day would follow with work details.

For prisoners, meal times were the most important event of each day. After morning roll call the prisoners would be given their morning 'meal' - imitation coffee or herbal 'tea'. For lunch prisoners may have been given watery soup. If they were lucky, they might find a piece of turnip or potato peel.

In the evening prisoners may have been given a small piece of black bread; they may also have received a tiny piece of sausage, or some margarine, marmalade or cheese. The bread was supposed to last the prisoners for the morning also, so prisoners would try to hide it on their person whilst they slept.

Kity Hart-Moxon, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, remembers the high value placed on food, and so much wanting to survive the camp. She would sometimes take the piece of bread from the body of someone who had died during the night:

"The dead body had a piece of bread..." "... I'm taking this piece of bread from this dead body... ... and I'm taking this one pair of boots and I can sell it. With this I can buy myself a place to live. I can buy myself a place to sleep. With this bread I bought myself a bit of access [to wash]. Your bowl was your life, without your bowl you didn't eat." (Kitty - Return to Auschwitz, YTV 1979)

Hunger was one of the greatest problems. The meagre rations were merely intended to keep the prisoners alive. The Nazis did not provide prisoners with sufficient nutrition to carry out heavy manual work. Many thousands died from starvation or illnesses brought on by lack of nutrition. Others became too weak to work and were then murdered in the gas chambers.

Depending on the type of camp, prisoners were assigned to a whole range of different duties. Some remained inside were the camp, working on a variety of jobs, from administration tasks to heavy manual labour. Most prisoners worked outside in one of the many factories, construction projects, farms or coal mines, owned by German companies and for whom they now provided free slave labour.

Most prisoners worked outside the camps in one the many factories, construction projects, farms or coal mines. They would quite often have to walk several kilometres to their place of work.

Sonderkommando

The Sonderkommando (Special Work Unit) consisted of Jewish prisoners who were selected to work in the crematoriums in camps. They were selected due to their strength and fitness. The life-expectancy of a Sonderkommando was about four months in the camp.

Processing belongings

While the prisoners were being processed after their arrival, their belongings were taken away. A group of prisoners was assigned to collecting the valuables, while others sifted through the possessions. These were then transported back to Germany. The prisoners working on this task were in a privileged position. They were able to 'organise' (steal) extra food on which to survive, a pair of shoes or extra clothing to protect themselves from the severe winter weather.

There were examples of prisoners smuggling valuables which could be used to bribe guards. However, if caught, they risked death.

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Freddie remembers his journey to Auschwitz

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For those who survived selection, life in the camps was a daily struggle for survival. For those who survived selection, life in the camps was a daily struggle for survival. Deportation and transportation to camps often took days. Individuals, families and whole communities together with their personal belongings were packed into cattle trucks.

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When the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz death camp 70 years ago many of the prisoners had been killed or marched away by the retreating Nazis. But among those left were some twin children - the subject of disturbing experiments by Dr Josef Mengele.

Vera Kriegel and her twin sister Olga were just five years old when they were taken from their village in Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz.

Transported in cattle cars which were so tightly packed that the dead were still standing, she recalls the "sheer terror" of arriving at the camp and treading on "dead people like steps" as she left the train.

New arrivals at the camp were sorted into the weak, who would be gassed straight away, and the strong, who would be made to work. But Mengele and his assistants were there too, looking for twins.

Vera, her sister, and her mother were taken straight to SS Captain Josef Mengele. He was intrigued, she says, by what he described as her mother's "perfect Aryan features" and blue eyes, while Vera's and her sister's were brown.

Mengele selected them for experimentation.

Another woman who remembers her arrival at the camp is Jona Laks, who was taken as a teenager from the Lodz ghetto. She was not immediately recognised as a twin and was initially sent off in the direction of the gas chamber - when her sister told Mengele they were twins he had her brought to his laboratory.

Josef Mengele was an assistant to a well-known researcher who studied twins at the Institute for Heredity Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt - he started working at Auschwitz in May 1943.

There he had an unlimited supply of twins to study, and he wouldn't get in trouble if they died.

According to Prof Paul Weindling of Oxford Brookes University, author of Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments, hundreds of children were used in Mengele's experiments.

"I found a record of a prisoner doctor and bacteriologist who was forced to work for Mengele that there were 732 pairs of twins," he says, and suggests the doctor was interested in genetics. "I think Mengele might have been interested in the inheritance of the propensity to having twins."

He believes many of the twins survived Auschwitz, although he thinks Roma twins were almost certainly killed.

Some of the children, now elderly, have little memory of the experiments, others have memories that may not be 100% accurate.

Jona Laks says Mengele removed organs from people without anaesthetic, and if one twin died the other would be murdered. Vera Kriegel says that he killed people with an injection to the heart, and then dissected them.

Find out more

Watch more about how Josef Mengele experimented on twins at Auschwitz on Newsnight or on BBC World News at 23:30 GMT on Friday 30 January.

She remembers being ushered into his laboratory. "I was looking at a whole wall of human eyes. A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes. These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down on the floor."

The first experiment she was subjected to involved being kept in a small wooden cage with her sister and being given painful injections in her back - she doesn't know why, but thinks it may have been an attempt to change the colour of her eyes.

In another experiment, she says, the pair of them and more than 100 other twins were given injections of bacteria that cause Noma disease - an infection of the mouth or genitals, which causes boils and often turns gangrenous.

Some twins became feverish, and some died, she says. She also remembers Mengele reacting angrily when twins went missing - once when this had happened she stared him out to prove he could not completely dominate her.

As well as twins, Mengele experimented on dwarves, giants and Romas.

Moti Alon, who arrived in Auschwitz aged nine in 1944, remembers being forced to watch a dwarf and a Roma woman being made to have sex.

He remembers having a number tattooed on his arm. The same happened to his brother, though the tattooist made a mistake. "Instead of writing 17 they wrote 10 so they erased it and did some dots," he says.

For Menachem Bodner who arrived at the camp with his brother as a three -year-old, this number became his identity.

When he left the camp in 1945, he had no idea who he was.

With the help of Israeli genealogist Ayana KimRon and a Facebook page set up to help, he has recently discovered that his real name is Elias Gottesman and that he and his brother, named Jeno, were born in a small town east of Munkacs, then part of Hungary, now in Ukraine (and known as Mukacheve).

KimRon also discovered that his father had died in a camp and that his mother, Roza, had returned to Hungary following a death march from Flossenburg concentration camp - only then to be murdered in her home town in 1946 during an anti-Semitic riot.

Now aged 74, he continues to search for the twin brother he last saw when the camp was liberated in 1945.

On 26 January 1945, Vera Kriegel remembers, the guards "were in a big panic. So they poured petrol over the barracks and tried to destroy all the evidence."

Grabbing a big pack of family photos, Vera, her mother and sister, fled the camp, only to be caught and beaten and thrown back into the barracks.

The following day, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz. The soldiers, she says, "brought these striped coats and told us to put them on and roll up our sleeves, so we could show our numbers.

"They filmed us, the children. They wanted to know what happened to us [and] Mengele's experiments. Everything was written down."

As for Mengele, he fled West and was arrested by the US Army. But he had no SS blood group tattooed on his arm so he was released by a unit that was unaware that his name was on a list of major war criminals.

He worked as a farmhand in Bavaria before escaping to Argentina in 1949.

Though the West German authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in 1959, Mengele remained in South America before his death from drowning following a stroke at a holiday resort in Brazil in 1979. He was buried in Sao Paulo under the name Wolfgang Gerhard.

The children coped with the appalling ordeal of Auschwitz and Mengele's experiments in different ways.

Moti Alon, his mother and twin, eventually made their way back home, arriving in Budapest on 5 May 1945. He now lives in Israel. "I have no traumas, not from this," he says.

Vera Kriegel emigrated to Israel with her mother after the war, where she lives today. Seventy years later, she still has nightmares.

Jona Laks became an activist, the head of a group of Mengele twins. She has been back to Auschwitz many times, and says what she experienced there has never left her mind.

Menachem, the boy with no name, eventually returned to his home town in Ukraine.

"I told the driver to stop and got out of the car, and something was familiar to me, very familiar.

"I remembered the road, I remembered two Gestapo approaching or arriving from my right side... and then they come to my home."

Above all, he recalled his parents, carefree before the war and the Holocaust.

"It was noon. my mother wore a green skirt with white flowers... I remember her from the back, not the front.
Watch Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox. Newsnight's report on the twins of Auschwitz - or watch a longer report on BBC World News at 23:30 GMT on Friday 30 January.
"This is what I remember."

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When the Soviet army liberated the Auschwitz death camp 70 years ago many of the prisoners had been killed or marched away by the retreating Nazis. But among those left were some twin children - the subject of disturbing experiments by Dr Josef Mengele.

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Nazi human experimentation or nazi medical experiments was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners (including children), largely Jews from across Europe, but also Romani, Sinti, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs and disabled Germans, by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust.

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A Holocaust Survivor Recalls The Day He Was Liberated

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A Holocaust Survivor Recalls The Day He Was Liberated

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A Holocaust Survivor Recalls The Day He Was Liberated

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The Nuremberg Trials After the war, the top surviving German leaders were tried for Nazi Germany's crimes, including the crimes of the Holocaust. Their trial was held before an International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany. Judges from the Allied powers-Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States-presided over the hearing of 22 major Nazi criminals. Subsequently, the United States held 12 additional trials in Nuremberg of high-level officials of the German government, military, and SS as well as medical professionals and leading industrialists. The crimes charged before the Nuremberg courts were crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes.

In all, 199 defendants were tried at Nuremberg, 161 were convicted and 37 were sentenced to death, including 12 of those tried by the IMT. Holocaust crimes were included in a few of the trials but were the major focus of only the US trial of Einsatzgruppen leaders. The defendants generally acknowledged that the crimes they were accused of occurred but denied that they were responsible, as they were following orders from a higher authority.

The Nazis' highest authority, the person most to blame for the Holocaust, was missing at the trials. Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in the final days of the war, as had several of his closest aides. Many more criminals were never tried. Some fled Germany to live abroad, including hundreds who came to the United States.

Trials of Nazis continued to take place both in Germany and many other countries. Simon Wiesenthal, a Nazi-hunter, provided leads for war crimes investigators about Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann, who had helped plan and carry out the deportations of millions of Jews, was brought to trial in Israel. The testimony of hundreds of witnesses, many of them survivors, was followed all over the world. Eichmann was found guilty and executed in 1962.

Key Dates

August 8, 1945
Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) announced at London Conference
The International Military Tribunal (IMT) is composed of judges from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Leading Nazi officials will be indicted and placed on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, under Article 6 of the IMT's Charter for the following crimes: (1) Conspiracy to commit charges 2, 3, and 4, which are listed here; (2) crimes against peace-defined as participation in the planning and waging of a war of aggression in violation of numerous international treaties; (3) war crimes-defined as violations of the internationally agreed upon rules for waging war; and (4) crimes against humanity-"namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war; or persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated."

October 6, 1945
Leading Nazi officials indicted for war crimes
The four chief prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal (IMT)-Robert H. Jackson (United States), Francois de Menthon (France), Roman A. Rudenko (Soviet Union), and Sir Hartley Shawcross (Great Britain)-hand down indictments against 24 leading Nazi officials. The indicted include Hermann Göring (Hitler's former deputy), Rudolf Hess (deputy leader of the Nazi Party), Joachim von Ribbentrop (foreign minister), Wilhelm Keitel (head of the armed forces), Wilhelm Frick (minister of the interior), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (head of security forces), Hans Frank (governor-general of occupied Poland), Konstantin von Neurath (governor of Bohemia and Moravia), Erich Raeder (head of the navy), Karl Doenitz (Raeder's successor), Alfred Jodl (armed forces command), Alfred Rosenberg (minister for occupied eastern territories), Baldur von Schirach (head of the Hitler Youth), Julius Streicher (radical Nazi antisemitic publisher), Fritz Sauckel (head of forced-labor allocation), Albert Speer (armaments minister), and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (commissioner for the occupied Netherlands). Martin Bormann (Hitler's adjutant) is to be tried in absentia.

October 1, 1946
Verdict at Nuremberg
The International Military Tribunal (IMT) announces its verdicts. It imposes the death sentence on 12 defendants (Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann). Three are sentenced to life imprisonment (Hess, economics minister Walther Funk, and Raeder). Four receive prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years (Doenitz, Schirach, Speer, and Neurath). The court acquits three defendants: Hjalmar Schacht (economics minister), Franz von Papen (German politician who played an important role in Hitler's appointment as chancellor), and Hans Fritzsche (head of press and radio). The death sentences are carried out on October 16, 1946, with two exceptions: Göring committed suicide shortly before his scheduled execution, and Bormann remained missing. The other 10 defendants are hanged, their bodies cremated, and the ashes deposited in the Isar River. The seven major war criminals sentenced to prison terms are remanded to the Spandau Prison in Berlin.

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The Nuremberg Trials After the war, the top surviving German leaders were tried for Nazi Germany's crimes, including the crimes of the Holocaust. Their trial was held before an International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany. Judges from the Allied powers-Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States-presided over the hearing of 22 major Nazi criminals.