Padresteve survivors of auschwitz history

Mindu Hornick, 13, peered through a crack in the door of her stopped cattle car and read a name: Auschwitz.

“I spelt it out for my mother,” Hornick recalled recently. “She says, ‘I don't know where it is, I've never heard of the place.’ And then suddenly all this clatter of the doors opening, and when the doors opened I mean there was, just, all hell let loose.”

They had traveled for days in the dark, 70 women and children packed shoulder to shoulder in a cattle car, with little food and a single sanitation bucket to share.

Now they saw piles of rotting bodies, barking dogs, Nazis shouting in German, thick gray ash clotting the air.

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An official scrambled into their car.

“I think that a kapo must have known that this train of mothers and children—that were no use to them for work—would end up in the gas chambers,” said Hornick. “And that's why he must have looked in that coach and thought to himself, ‘well perhaps I'll try and save a couple.’”

He advised Hornick’s mother to let Auschwitz Untold: Survivors Speak | HISTORY Channel POZU