Auschwitz survivor shares horrors and liberation story 75 years later | New York Post

Auschwitz survivor Sally Yassy shares her horrific memories from inside the death camp — 75 years after its liberation. "I didn't have a chance to say goodbye to my mother and father," the 93-year-old Queens, NY, resident told the Post. "After two weeks, Mengele came and took my sister away." Watch her heart-wrenching story here, including the inspirational moment British soldiers arrived to free the prisoners.

Weeks after Yassy arrived at Auschwitz, she had a memorable encounter with another young prisoner in an adjoining bunk.

“Anna Frank was next to me,” said Yassy, recalling the young writer, who was briefly in Auschwitz in the fall of 1944. “She looked like me — a little girl — but she had longer hair than I did. We were talking that maybe we’ll find our parents, maybe someone will be alive.”

But days later, 16-year-old Anne Frank, whose diary of the years she spent in hiding in Amsterdam would become a global bestseller after the war ended, was shipped to the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany, where she died in 1945.

Yassy, who was 17 when British soldiers saved her life, lost everyone in her family at Auschwitz.

“We felt the smoke but we didn’t know what it was,” said Yassy, recalling the moment she arrived at the camp.

Only an uncle survived, she said. “When I was liberated, I didn’t have a stone, a grave to go and talk to my mother, to cry and tell her what happened,” she said. “So I am going now to Auschwitz to honor my parents and my uncles and my cousins and everybody that died.”

Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, more than 200 elderly Holocaust survivors, many of them from New York, will gather Monday at the scene of one of the worst atrocities in modern history in a somber remembrance of the nearly 1 million Jews who never made it out of the Nazi extermination camp alive.

Many of the Auschwitz survivors, now in their late 80s and 90s, say they are returning to the largest of the Nazi death camps in southern Poland to honor their families who perished in the gas chambers.

“It’s the only cemetery where I can visit my family,” said Yassy, 93.

The participation of the survivors was organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, a New York non-profit that chartered a commercial plane to fly 105 of them living in the tri-state area from Newark Airport Saturday. The group is paying the travel costs of each survivor plus a companion or family member. The group partnered with private donors, including World Jewish Congress president and billionaire Ronald Lauder to raise more than $2 million.

For Lauder, who will be among the Jewish leaders and dignitaries from around the world to speak at the anniversary ceremony, growing anti-Semitism around the world is making the event particularly relevant.

“Anti-Semitic incidents and expressions of violence have proliferated of late in the United States as well as in Europe,” Lauder said in a statement. “As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles and eyewitness memory of the Holocaust fades, it is more important than ever for us to ensure that the facts of the greatest crime in humanity are remembered accurately and widely. Through knowledge and education, we can avoid a tragic repetition of past horrors.”

There are fewer than 2,000 Auschwitz survivors worldwide, and 250 living in the tri-state area, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Inc.

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