Barbara Stimler

Barbara Stimler
Barbara Stimler. Photograph: David Levene
Barbara Stimler lives in an immaculate bungalow in Stanmore, north London. "All my life I wanted to have a nice home," she says, "because I lost my home when I was 12 years old." Stimler is 77 but looks younger in her smart grey suit. She cries when she relates her experiences, but despite the stress she is a regular speaker at schools. "The children listen to me as if they are glued on," she says. "They don't move. I get myself very exhausted when I talk to them, but I somehow feel lighter in my heart. After I have spoken, the children shake hands with me and hug me and thank me for coming. The boys are even more emotional than the girls."

Stimler was born in Poland, in the town of Aleksandrow Kujawski, close to the German border. There was no phony war here: the Germans invaded on Friday September 1, 1939. "We were straightaway bombed," she recalls. "The corner of our house was hit immediately and our neighbours were killed."

She was 12 years old, the only daughter of Sarah and Jakob, who owned a small textile shop. She was, she says, "the apple of my father's eye". She has a photograph of the two of them walking hand in hand in her home town, her proud father, dark and thick-set, in his man-of-the-world homburg.

After the invasion, the family moved from town to town in increasing desperation. Her father was arrested, her mother beaten up, she was molested by SS guards. Routine terror. They spent some time in a concentration camp in Kutno, central Poland, where the gates were locked and bread thrown over the walls to the starving inmates. They were among the few who escaped Kutno, but it was a brief stay of execution. In March 1941, all the Jewish men in the town of Lubranec, where they were staying with her uncle, were suddenly rounded up. This included her father, her uncle and his two sons. They were taken to a camp near Poznan - she and her mother received a postcard - and then silence. She assumes her father was killed in Auschwitz.

Two months later, she and her mother were transported to the 140,000-strong Lodz ghetto. Stimler got a job in a children's hospital - "If you were not working in the ghetto, you didn't get a [food] token and the soup was the most important thing of the day" - and her mother worked in a kitchen. They ate; they lived. Then her mother became ill and went to hospital. Treatment was rudimentary and an operation left her paralysed. Now Stimler, still barely 15, had to fend for the two of them.

"One day, when I was going to work, they were closing the street," she says, her voice breaking. "I said, 'What am I going to do with my mother?' I carried her into the garden and put her into a hole in the ground, covered her up and went to work, praying to God that she would be there when I got back because I knew when they got her they will finish her off ... I come back in the evening and she is there."

If Stimler's later experiences in Auschwitz-Birkenau were grotesque, the Lodz ghetto was its own corner of hell, one made more hideously draining by her mother's condition. In Auschwitz, at least, the battle was only to keep herself alive. Caged like animals, treated worse than animals, the prisoners relied on instinct. In the ghetto, there was a community of sorts, though governed by terror.

"One day," recalls Stimler, "two lorries came to the children's hospital. They told all the children to go into the lorries. The children don't want to go in the lorries; they are hiding themselves behind us. I didn't know what they're going to do with the children and I can't go with them because my mother is at home. Eventually the children left, and do you know what they did with them? They finished them in the lorries, gassed them. Now I have to look for another job."

After the Wannsee conference in January 1942, at which the SS determined on the "final solution", the ghetto clearances and deportations accelerated. Auschwitz-Birkenau beckoned. "One Sunday in the summer of 1943, two SS men came to our house and took me away," says Stimler. "I just stood in the door and said, 'Mamma, God should be with us.' " She never saw her mother again or discovered what happened to her. She assumes she was shot immediately. Now Stimler was alone.

"They took me to the cattle trains, gave us each a loaf of bread, put us in these trains, we were like sardines. In the middle was a barrel with water. When the train was going, the water was splashing everywhere; the stench, nobody can imagine. Two women were feeding me with sugar. I didn't know where we were going, but they did. I'd never heard of Auschwitz, I thought we were going to work.

"Eventually the train stopped, everybody should get out. It was night when we got there. We had to go one after the other to the gate; Mengele was standing there [Josef Mengele, a senior doctor in the camp and the arbiter of life and death, notorious for his experiments on prisoners]. I didn't know who Mengele was; now I know. These girls are still feeding me with sugar. He takes your hand and looks at the front and back, and out. I go to the right. They put us in fives and start counting us, counting us for ever.

"I can see a big chimney and the stench coming out from it is incredible. I still don't know where I am. It gets a bit lighter and I can see the barracks surrounded by electrified wire. A woman comes out of one of the barracks. She has no hair, she has no shoes, she wears a short dress. How could I think that in two hours I would look exactly the same? I thought maybe in this barracks they have mentally ill women."

Stimler spent a year in Auschwitz until, in the summer of 1944, she was moved to a work camp called Pirshkow on the Polish-German border, where she and 1,000 Polish and Hungarian women, all Jews, had to dig anti-tank ditches, fortifications against the advancing Soviet army. The following February, with the German army in flight, the contingent began a march to Bergen-Belsen, one of the "death marches" faced by many of the surviving prisoners as the Nazis sought both to hide the evidence of their crimes and to fulfil Hitler's "prophecy" that no Jews would survive in Europe.

Each night, the exhausted marchers, who had no food and lived on snow, would bed down in barns. One morning, Stimler hid beneath a covering of straw. German soldiers would bayonet the straw to make sure no one was hiding there, but she was far enough down to evade the blade. She was free and eventually fell into the hands of the Russians. Before the war, her extended family in Poland numbered around 80. She had so many cousins, she couldn't even remember all their names. She was the sole survivor.

Stimler came to the UK in 1946, married in 1948, built up a clothing business with her husband (who had fought in the Polish army, under British command, in the war), and had two sons. She built the home she craved. She had a nervous breakdown in 1956, a year after her younger son was born; she had her tattoo removed on the advice of her psychiatrist; she rarely talked of her experiences, not even to her husband.

Then, 10 years ago, she recorded her story for the British Library. "The interviewer sat opposite me. I just looked at one spot, and I was getting redder and redder, but it was very helpful," she says. Her granddaughter presented flowers to the Queen at the opening of the permanent exhibition on the Holocaust in the Imperial War Museum in 2000 (an event that, Stimler noticed, was sparsely covered by the mainstream media). Since then she has retold her story in many schools. "When I speak to the children, I ask myself, 'Do they believe me?' Because sometimes I don't believe it myself."