When Ivor Perl was a child, he would walk to school every day in the small, southeastern Hungarian town of Mako.
The route was familiar to children in the area, and often their journeys were unremarkable.
But for Ivor and his siblings, it was a source of pain. As young Jews, they were subjected to Antisemitism – even as children.
The group of nine youngsters would have rocks hurled at them and hear the words ‘Dirty Jew’ spat their way.
Growing up in the late 1930s Hungary, Antisemitism was the norm for him and his siblings.
But nothing could prepare them for the cruelty the family would soon face when they were moved to the ghettos of Hungary and later placed onto a train to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was 1944 when Ivor was separated from his family at the concentration camp. He and his brother Alek were left to fend for themselves.
At the end of his ordeal, when he was liberated by the Allied Forces in Dachau, he and Alek were the only ones in their family to survive.
It’s now been 80 years since Auschwitz was liberated and the true horror of what took place inside the camp’s walls was revealed to the world.
Ivor spoke with Metro ahead of the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, to speak about his experience, his thoughts on the world today and his worries for the future.
‘I couldn’t run anymore’
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For 50 years after his ordeal, he didn’t speak about what he witnessed, except to his wife and children.
That changed on the 50th anniversary of VE Day in 1995, when his local synagogue held a commemoration and he was the only survivor on the board.
‘I had to represent the Holocaust. I told them – I don’t talk about it. I had this feeling of wanting to get on with life,’ he said.
Ivor even suggested someone else speak about the genocide on his behalf as he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it, but the other survivor was not available.
‘After it was over, people went by me and shook my hands. These were friends of mine, who said to me: “We knew about the Holocaust. We never knew you were one of them. And we never knew the extent of what you went through,’’’ he said.
‘That’s when I realised, I can’t run anymore.’
Ivor began speaking at synagogues and schools around Britain, eventually being awarded with a British Empire Medal for sharing his testimony and helping Holocaust education.
‘Everything is the same’
At his heart, Ivor is a realist. He told Metro: ‘Can you think of a time in your life, in humanity’s lifetime, when the whole world was at peace? There’s always been a war of some sort or another.
‘The problem is – why do people have to have something at the cost of someone else? I’m talking about everything. Husbands and wives, businesses, families, countries. Why do people have to have something at the cost of something else?’
Hundreds of other survivors of the Holocaust, like Ivor, have spent their lives sharing their stories in an attempt to make sure humanity learns from it and never repeats it. But ‘everything is still the same’, Ivor says.
‘Unfortunately, I can see this is what life is. It’s a vicious cycle. I don’t think the Holocaust, per se, won’t happen again – but it will come in a different overcoat.’
He added his ‘job’ was to tell the world his story and hopefully ‘one or two dozen people will listen, and it might help.’
‘My job is to plant the seed, not to make sure people learn to live with it,’ he said. ‘But history is repeating itself, over and over and over again. As a Jew, as an immigrant, as a Muslim.’
Hatred isn’t the answer
Referencing Kristallnacht, a night in 1938 when Nazis torched synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, schools, libraries and homes of Jewish people, Ivor references a quote from Heinrich Heine: ‘Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.’
‘How right he was,’ Ivor said.
In the six months after the attacks on October 7, which sparked a war between Hamas and Israel, more than 1,000 Antisemitic incidents were recorded by the Metropolitan Police in London.
Antisemitism and Holocaust denial have risen sharply in the past two decades, partially due to misinformation widely spread on the internet.
‘If someone comes to me who’s a Holocaust denier, I’d rather shake the hand of an SS man who was my guard at Auschwitz rather than them,’ Ivor says. ‘
At least they had the courage to say, “I hate you”. But to tell me the Holocaust didn’t happen? No way.’
Despite his harrowing experience in Auschwitz and Dachau, Ivor said he never had a ‘deep hate’ inside of him – even when SS officers were put on trial.
‘I went back to Germany to be at the trial of Oskar Gröning. When he was brought in and I first saw him in the court by two nurses, guess what I thought?
‘‘The poor bastard’. Hate will hurt you as much as it hurts the other person. I don’t think hatred is the answer to anything.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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