'The sights beyond those gates will stay with me for the rest of my life,' Auschwitz survivor tells LBC
27 January 2025, 09:57
80 years to the day since Auschwitz was liberated, a survivor now living in Birmingham has told LBC of the horrors she faced surviving the concentration camp and ‘Neuengamme’ slave labour camp.
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Mindu Hornick was taken to Auschwitz at the age of 14 and spent eight months there - telling LBC it was “luck and one hundred miracles that kept me alive.”
Arriving on a cattle truck, Mindu recalls around 80 women of all ages being crammed in.
"We travelled for three days and three nights, with just two buckets on the floor. One for water, and one for sanitation. We never knew where we were going.”
She told LBC: “The sight that greeted us beyond those gates will stay with me for the rest of my life. There were watchtowers, with machine guns pointing down at us, blaring loudspeakers, and soldiers with Alsatians - but then we saw a trolley piled high with dead bodies. They were just skin and bones. Then there was the thick grey ash falling over us from the crematoria.”
Mindu heard from a Jewish Guard, known as a ‘Kapo’ that she needed to tell them she was 17, and bring a skill to the camp. She said: “I told them I was a seamstress, but really I was just a schoolgirl, as was my sister.”
Hours after walking underneath the sign “Arbeit macht frei” (Work Makes You Free) Mindu Hornick, and the other women and girls from her carriage on the train were taken to a block to be showered. “When we came out our clothes and everything had gone. They just threw us a garment, but with no underwear.”
We were taken to a barber, where men roughly began cutting all our hair from everywhere on our body. For young girls, in those days even our mothers hadn’t seen us naked. They did everything to dehumanise you.”
Each day, the groups living in different huts would be made to come outside for a roll call, and it was then that Mindu first set eyes on Dr Josef Mengele, who became known as the Angel of Death for his cruel and inhuman medical experiments on inmates.
“He would walk along, immaculately dressed with shiny boots and buttons, carrying a pair of white leather gloves. As he was standing in the rows if he waved a white glove at you, you had to step out of line. We never saw those people again and they had either been chosen for the crematoria if they looked unwell, or for an experimental operation.”
After almost 8 months in Auschwitz, Mindu was sent to work in a munitions factory where the conditions seemed to be “much better” - she said: “We could shower, it was freezing cold water, but it was a shower. We had a much better meal each day. It was a German soup that had some pulses in it. I maintain to this day that soup is what kept me alive.”
By this time, Auschwitz had been liberated by the Allied Forces, but for Mindu the struggle continued. With the Nazis retreating, the women working at the munitions factory were put onto another train through Northern Germany, which was bombed killing the driver and many of the imprisoned women onboard.
“They tried to get us into a second train, telling us the excuse they were handing us over to the Red Cross, but by that time we refused to move from the hill we were on. They needed to destroy the slave labour camps, and the slave labourers to get rid of the evidence of what they had done.”
After being liberated, Mindu spent three years in Prague, before she came to live in Birmingham. The West Midlands was badly hit with significant bombing between 1940 and 1943. Over 2,000 people died and more than 12,000 homes were destroyed in ‘The Birmingham Blitz.”
Ms Hornick said: “It was a very depressing place when I first arrived. People had lost their husbands, sons, brothers in the war. Nobody wanted to talk about the war or hear about what had happened to people. It took 40 years before I told anyone I’d been in Auschwitz.”
“Now, I talk about it a lot. Speaking at schools, universities. I’m very busy telling this story.”
In 2019, Mindu Hornick was awarded an MBE for services to holocaust education.
