For today's look back into the Advertiser's archives, we're travelling back 10 years to a visit to Hermitage Academy by a survivor of the Holocaust.
Here's how we reported on Rudi Oppenheimer's visit in the Advertiser on January 28, 2010...
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THE horrors of the Holocaust were brought home vividly to Hermitage Academy pupils on Friday.
Rudi Oppenheimer, who survived the Nazi death camp of Bergen-Belsen, told a hushed audience of pupils and guests of his appalling experiences in the Nazi concentration camp during a visit to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
Rudi was held in the camp with his parents, brother and sister, his grandparents having already been transported to Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland where they were gassed on arrival.
A slight man, now aged 78, Rudi spoke strongly and eloquently, and at times with humour, about the German occupation of Holland and how it affected the lives of Jews living there, specifically in Amsterdam where his father was a banker.
The gradual introduction of anti-Jewish laws by the Nazis made life increasingly difficult; they were not allowed on public transport, were not allowed phones or radios, could not leave Amsterdam, and had to observe a curfew from eight o’clock at night until six the morning.
Nor were they allowed into public places such as parks, zoos, restaurants, hotels, museums, libraries and swimming pools.
And, of course they had to wear the Jewish star.
Rudi recalls playing as a child in the same little square in Amsterdam where Anne Frank used to play, but they never met.
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“Perhaps if I had known one day she would be famous, I would have paid more attention and spoken to her,” he said with a smile.
But his account of what lay ahead that was most harrowing - first the family’s removal to Westerborg transit camp and ultimately to Bergen-Belsen in January 1944 where his parents would die before the camp was liberated by the Allied forces.
He said: “I wanted to be in charge of food in Bergen-Belsen, so I got a job handing out mugs of lukewarm turnip soup. I realised that if I didn’t stir the soup too much the turnip and potato peelings sank to the bottom.
“So I kept the peelings to the end and shared them with my brother Paul - it gave us extra nourishment and that’s one reason why I am here today.”
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But every day they were getting thinner and all around them people were dying like flies as starvation took hold, and lice and typhus were rife.
When liberation eventually came, they were like skeletons and he remembers the horrific scenes of bulldozers filling pits with decomposing bodies.
He told the pupils: “It could even have been your grandfathers in the Allied forces who had to witness these terrible things.
"My parents’ bodies went into one of these pits, and so did Anne Frank’s but, of course, no one knows which ones they lie in.”
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