IT was a lesson that the pupils of Thornleigh Salesian College were unlikely to forget in a hurry.

Year Nine history pupils have been learning about the Holocaust, but last week they came face to face with Berlin-born Joanna Millan, now aged 65, who survived one of the Second World War's notorious concentration camps.

And Joanna's first-hand account of life under the Nazis brought some shocking revelations.

"People willingly participated," she told the pupils. "This couldn't have happened if all those people hadn't helped the Nazis."

"It really shocked everyone," said 13-year old Charlotte Holt. "There was silence in the room."

Theresienstadt, as the Germans called it, was established in the Czechoslovakian garrison city of Terezin. The Nazis did their best to present it as a model Jewish settlement, but in reality it was known as the "gateway to hell".

Of the more than 140,000 people who entered the walled town between November, 1941, and April, 1945, more than 90,000 were sent to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death camps, and another 33,000-plus died in the ghetto itself. Only about 16,000 people survived.

Hidden behind a veneer of respectability - many of the elite members of Jewish society, including artists and musicians, were sent to Theresienstadt - conditions were horrendous.

The camp supplied the German war effort with a source of Jewish slave labour, and prisoners were forced to split the mineral mica, mined from Czechoslovakia. Other prisoners manufactured boxes and coffins, or sprayed military uniforms with a white dye to provide camouflage for Nazi soldiers on the Russian front.

The Red Cross became concerned about conditions in Theresienstadt and made plans to visit the camp in June, 1944.

However, the Nazis, who were aware that the Scandinavian organisation was on its way, made the Jews work round-the-clock to make flowerbeds, build shower blocks and even construct a children's playground - although it was never used.

The ashes of inmates, who had died or been executed and then incinerated, were dumped into the River Ohre and a fake cemetery built to give the illusion that the ghetto of Theresienstadt was a functioning town like any other.

But there were no bodies in the graves and the names on the headstones bore no relation to anyone who had ever lived or died in there.

Joanna was taken to the camp under her birth name, Bela Rosenthal, with her mother, Else, in 1943. Her father, Siegfried, was sent to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.

Bela's mother died in May, 1944, and Bela, who was not yet two years old, was left on her own.

However, thanks to the kindness and bravery of other camp inmates, tiny Bela managed to survive.

She told pupils that during the war, 97 per cent of Jewish children were murdered - 1.5 million of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Asked by one Thornleigh pupil what she remembered of the camp, Joanna said: "Every day was much the same and I was very ill much of the time.

"But I remember one woman in the camp who worked growing vegetables for the Nazis and who would always wear very baggy clothes.

"The guards never noticed that she came to work every day looking thin and left looking fatter.

"She would hide vegetables in her clothes to supplement her own and the children's diets. If they had caught her, she would have been executed. She probably saved my life."

The camp was liberated in 1945 and Bela, along with five other surviving children, was flown to England in British bomber planes which had been used to return Czech pilots, who had been training with the RAF.

After transferring through a series of children's homes, Bela was adopted and her new parents decided it would be better for her that she have a less German-sounding name. So, Bela Rosenthal became Joanna Millan.

Despite the fact that the Allied forces had liberated Jews from the concentration camps, there was still a lot of antisemitic feeling in Europe. Joanna was told not to mention that she was Jewish, or that she was born in Germany, and she was not allowed to keep in touch with the other children from the home.

"I had to cut all my ties with my past and live as their daughter," she said.

"Growing up wasn't easy - somehow Bela Rosenthal was hiding. I wanted to bring her out of hiding, but I didn't know how."

Nowadays, it seems impossible to imagine having to hide one's identity in a country as progressive as Britain.

But Joanna says that the scale of the antisemitism was such that Jews were not even safe here.

Her adopted parents confided in Joanna, just before they died, that during the war they considered committing suicide because they were so afraid of the consequences had their religious beliefs been discovered.

"It would have been nice to think that the British people would have supported the Jews had the Nazis won," she says. "But I'm not so sure."

She explained that the extermination of the Jews throughout Europe was not a closely guarded secret. "People knew what was going on," she said.

"In Berlin at the weekends Nazis would round up Jews and as they marched them to the woods they would shout, Come and watch, we're going to have some fun. We're going to kill some Jews'."

The pupils were visibly moved by Joanna's experience.

Lewis Gorse, aged 13, said: "It made us feel shocked, especially when she told us that they did the camp up for the Red Cross, but actually people were still suffering and they couldn't tell them.

"It was very different from reading about it in textbooks."

Beth Campbell, aged 13, said: "It's different when you hear about it from a personal view.

"You hear the number six million, but this is very different."

Liz Tucker, aged 17, whose grandfather suffered during the Holocaust in the Ukraine, said: "It gives you more of a perspective. You hear and read about these huge numbers, but it's different to hear a personal story."

There were plenty of hands raised during the question-and-answer session, with many intelligent queries.

But the most poignant moment came when one pupil asked Joanna if she believed that an atrocity of that scale could happen again.

"In a way it is doing," she said. "There are genocides going on around the world and people aren't doing anything about it.

"But I hope that by us coming and talking to people, your generation will do better than ours did."

Visits to Auschwitz could help cut racism'

THE most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps is Auschwitz, in southern Poland.

The largest Nazi concentration and death camp complex, Auschwitz is known as the camp where Dr Josef Mengele practised his barbaric experiments on prisoners and where more than one million people were killed.

Earlier this month, the Government announced that two sixth-form pupils from every school in England are to visit the camp in a government-funded initiative to spread understanding of the Holocaust among the younger generation.

They will meet people who survived the camp, will be shown around the barracks, gas chambers and crematoria, and see documentation and piles of victims' shoes, clothes and hair.

They will then speak to other pupils at their schools about their experience.

Thornleigh sixth-former William Nice, aged 17, visited Auschwitz with the school.

"It's very hard to describe the experience," he said. "It's worthwhile, but you need to visit it to know what it's like. I found it very hard to connect what we saw with what we know went on - it's very anonymous.

"There's a lot of racism around now, and events like this could help to cut it out a bit."

Pictures

  • Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum
  • Courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives