A stranger’s kindness and pure luck saved Mindu Hornick’s life when she walked through the gates of Auschwitz.
Surviving Auschwitz and Neuengamme slave labour camp, now 95, it took 40 years before she spoke publicly about the atrocities she witnessed.
But she has since made educating people about the Holocaust her life’s work – receiving an MBE for her endeavours in 2019.
Transported from her happy orthodox Jewish family near Prague in the former Czechoslovakia, via a ghetto, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mindu is speaking exclusively at her Birmingham home to mark the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation on January 27 – Holocaust Memorial Day.
Determined to teach people about the past, in the hope of improving the world in the future, she says: “People have to respect differences for things to change.
“Hatred has catastrophic consequences. Humanity is not learning the lessons. My dream is that one day it will.”
After the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, her dad Morris, a hay merchant, was enlisted in the army and made to wear a Star of David armband, while he dug trenches and loaded trucks for the Germans.
Only once returning home for a tearful reunion with his family, he then disappeared – never to be seen again.
Two years later, Mindu, then 14 , her sister Eva, 16, her mother Helen and her two younger brothers Josef, 11 and Samuel, six, were evicted to the ghetto of Kosice – before being herded onto cattle trains for the suffocating three day journey to Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people are estimated to have perished.
When they arrived she says: ” A Polish man stepped into the train carriage and told my mother to ‘let the girls go ahead. You will see them later.’
“He also told us to lie about our ages at the camp’s gate—to say we were older and that we were both seamstresses.“
As he spoke Yiddish, Mindu’s mum trusted him and obeyed.
“I can remember looking back at my mother. She was wearing a spotted scarf around her head. I waved, and she waved back. It was the last time I saw her and my brothers.”
Disembarked, Mindu and her sister soon walked through the gates of hell.
She says: “I saw corpses piled high on trolleys, guards in watchtowers pointing rifles at us and the greasy grey ash from the burning bodies from the crematorium.
“Emaciated people in striped uniforms wandering around aimlessly. I knew my old life was gone forever
“Those not viewed as useful were sent straight to the gas chambers.
“ A lady in front of us had a daughter about our age and several siblings. The mother and the siblings were immediately sent to the left and the girl of our age was pushed through.
“She started screaming, and the SS man pushed her with the butt of his gun and said: “Okay if you want to go with your mother, go!”
At that moment, Mindu realised the man on the train had separated them from their mum and brothers to save their lives.
“The Polish man knew what would happen—like the girl in front of us—we would never have agreed to leave our mother. And we would have had to go to the gas chamber with her.”
Now a great grandmother, Mindu will never forget the fear and dehumanisation, as she was stripped naked, her head shaved and tattooed with a number.
“From then on, we had no name,” she says.
Sent to prison quarters, they were woken at 4am for the first of two daily selections made by Nazi doctor Josef Mengele – dubbed the ‘Angel of Death.’
She says: “He was always in a very shiny uniform, immaculately dressed – a good-looking man carrying a pair of white gloves. When he waved those gloves at you, you had to step out of line.
“Those who stepped out of line that first morning we never saw again.
“It was a selection to live or die..”
Notorious for conducting inhumane medical experiments, while those selected by Mengele did not return, those who remained also died in droves from typhoid, dysentery and starvation.
“Every day, we were given turnip soup – with bromide to stop us menstruating,” says Mindu.
Desperate to look strong and fit, so they would be seen as useful, sickly girls would cut their fingers and use their own blood as rouge.
Mindu adds: “Whoever was next to them was hold them up – so they wouldn’t be selected for the gas chamber.”
She and Eva’s job was to sort through clothes and belongings that Jews had been forced to leave on the train – searching for anything the Nazis could sell.
“We had to tear open the linings of jackets and coats, because people brought gold, silver, sometimes currency or diamond rings, that they had hoped would provide them with a new life.”
Despite this horror, Mindu felt lucky when, in August 1944, she and Eva were sent, as part of a group of 500 women, to Lubberstedt Bilohe – a slave labour facility that formed a satellite to the main Neuengamme concentration camp, cited in woodland just outside Hamburg, northern Germany.
She says: “It was a beautiful rural area – with pine trees. And the smell of the air – if nothing else could help us survive, I was sure”.
Instead of bromide, the soup contained pulses, to provide energy to work like slaves in the ammunition facility, where many girls had to pour boiling hot gun solution into containers, with no protective clothing, leaving many women with perforated lungs.
“Luckily as Eva and I were not tall enough to pour in the solution, we tested the grenades instead. It was still dangerous but we didn’t suffer like the others,” Mindu says.
Additional danger came when the allies, trying to locate the underground factory, started bombing it heavily in spring 1945.
Then, in early May, leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler gave the order to evacuate surviving slave labourers from Neuengamme’s 84 satellite camps to facilities further inside Germany, so they would not fall into Allied hands.
On May 2 1945, she and Eva were loaded onto a passenger train with their Nazi officers, only for the Allies – unaware of the presence of Jewish slaves – to bomb it.
“The roof of the train was blown off, and there were bodies everywhere,” recalls Mindu.
Ordered off the train, the remaining Jews were marched toward the Bay of Lubeck.
“Our guards sat us on a hill, and the head of our camp came over, he put his hand on his chest and said, ‘We are going into captivity, and you are free.’ He even put his hat down on the hill.
“It was very surreal and for years I thought I’d dreamt it, until another survivor confirmed it happened.”
Germany had surrendered the day before, on May 7 1945.
Two days after their SS guards fled, the British 6th Armoured Brigade arrived in Plön, the German town where Mindu and Eva found themselves.
In a report, army officers addressed a “particularly urgent problem” – a group of 350 liberated Jewish Hungarian women “who had had to live under appalling conditions on their trek to the West and who were now half-starved.”
Rescued, the sisters eventually returned to Prague, but were forced to flee in 1948, during the Soviet occupation.
Mindu eventually came to Birmingham, moving in with an aunt and uncle.
She adapted well, marrying a Brummie called Alan Hornick and having two daughters, Nicola and Jackie.
The couple opened an electrical store, which Mindu continued to run after Alan’s death, aged 49 – remaining a successful businesswoman until she sold the store in the 1990s.
Speaking with dignity and calm, it is only when Eva, who died two years ago, aged 95, and was known by her Hebrew name, Bilou, is mentioned that Mindu’s tears start.
She emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, and Mindu did not see her for 20 years.
She says: “I survived through luck and through being with my sister. Those of us in pairs had a better chance of survival than those who were alone.”
Mindu returned to Auschwitz in 2014 and again in 2019 – feeling it was important to face her past.
Admitting that the first time was incredibly tough, she adds: “It was very hard for me to talk about it (Auschwitz) for a very long time without bursting into tears.”
While she hopes that sharing what happened will help to prevent such horrors from being repeated, Mindu is deeply saddened by what is happening in the world today.
“Today, we live in a world where people are still being persecuted in the most horrific circumstances,” she says. “It is painful for me to see. ”
Surrounded by thank you cards from school pupils she has spoken to about the Holocaust, she says: “Our main aim is to stop hatred, prejudice and segregation.
“I know I survived to tell our story and make sure people never forget.”
Michael Newman, CEO of The Association of Jewish Refugees says: “Hearing Mindu’s account of the horror of Auschwitz and disseminating the resources we have built, including The Holocaust Testimony UK Portal and 80 Lives/ 80 Objects exhibition, will help combat increased antisemitism and stem Holocaust distortion, as we all look to secure ‘a better future’ for society – the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day.”
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80 Lives/ 80 Objects is a digital Social Media exhibition that presents 80 objects from filmed testimonies of Holocaust survivors and refugees who settled in the UK .For more information visit www.ajr.org.uk