MONTREAL – Seventy years later — Hermann Gruenwald still feels extremely fortunate to be alive.
The Holocaust survivor escaped death at the worst concentration camp in Poland — Auschwitz.
“We all believed we were all going to be killed. The question is when,” he said.
The Hungarian born Jew still talks with vivid memory about how his family was uprooted and sent to Auschwitz in 1944.
Gruenwald was 18 at the time.
He was hand picked by the Nazis to be a cook — the only Jewish person in that position — and one he thinks helped keep him alive.
But it also gave Gruenwald a window on the horrors happening right under his nose.
“I was in a position that I was able to observe and see everything that was going on in Auschwitz,” he said.
More than one million Jews alone were killed at the world’s deadliest concentration camp. Crematoriums were built that could burn more than four thousand people in one day.
READ MORE: Infographic: Auschwitz remembered
The worst atrocities ever committed against human beings was being remembered at a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz at the exact location where the murderous events occurred.
The Israeli Consul General is the son of holocaust survivor.
Ziv Nevo Kulman warns antisemitic actions are still very alive today. But he thinks the world has learned a hard lesson that needs to be passed on to younger generations.
“We’re so lucky that we didn’t have to go through all these things and I think it’s an important day to make sure to listen and never again,” he said.
Gruenwald spoke at a ceremony hosted by the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies.
The organization recognizes that atrocities against humanity still continue, but nothing to the scale of the Holocaust, especially Auschwitz — which was liberated by the Soviet army on January 27, 1945.
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