I've always been fascinated by railways and by war, probably
mainly because Dad fought right through from 1939.
He was at Dunkirk. He was lucky to survive.
He was at D-Day.
The railways were an essential part of modern warfare.
Hitler certainly knew it, and he raced from one country
to the next to the next as he invaded most of Europe,
using the railways to basically transport his troops at high speed.
Each time they invaded a new country, they absorbed
that country's railway system
so, by the end, 1.6 million people were working on Hitler's Reichsbahn.
What happened then was that this vast network was used
for a much more sinister purpose. And it wasn't just one mad dictator,
all these people helped to accelerate the complete
destruction of the Jewish nation.
The railway speeded things up, and over six million Jews, we know,
were murdered in the Holocaust.
I want to go across Europe to see
what part the railways played in this evil plan.
I want to go to the ghettos, I want to go to the death camps
and I want to talk to experts.
I want to talk to survivors of the Holocaust.
It won't be an easy trip, but I do think that it's a terrible chapter
in history that we should just never, EVER forget.
I'm starting my journey in the city where many believe the Holocaust
began four years before the outbreak of World War II.
This is the quaint medieval city of Nuremberg.
It's so typically German, which is why Hitler chose
it as the perfect backdrop for his own vision of nationalism.
Every year, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe up to a million
supporters of Hitler came here to witness the annual Nazi rally.
And nearly all of them arrived on the train.
Today, I want to see the site of the rallies.
I want to find out how the railway was used to bring in the Nazi hordes
with the same methods that would be repeated for the mass
deportation of Jews in the coming years.
Puzzlingly, it was very difficult to get permission to go in here,
but just look at the state of this place.
Graffiti everywhere, dirt.
What a tip!
First, I'm visiting the abandoned station that was built
just before the war to handle the extraordinary volume of people
who travelled to the rallies.
This is very much the disused Bahnhof Marzfeld station.
It was going to be the Nazis' ultimate station for taking Nazi
supporters to the rallies.
They had seven platforms, and the train would arrive here,
bringing people on their way to the rally, and they would
then storm down there in their thousands, down the subway.
The idea was this subway would take tens of thousands of frantic Nazi
supporters all the way along this tunnel to a specially
designed camp for them at the end.
The idea of using railways to transport thousands directly
into camps would be adopted time and again during the Holocaust.
Of course, those passengers wouldn't be baying Nazis
but imprisoned Jews.
Once they'd set up camp, the masses would walk a few hundred yards
to the rallies, which happened here, Zeppelin Field.
It's really chilling to follow in the footsteps of Hitler
and his adoring followers in the place where he made his
ranting speeches of hate.
Unser Deutschland, Sieg heil!
Sieg heil!
There's something very eerie about standing here.
This is the spot where Hitler addressed these huge rallies.
There was always a giant swastika up there and tens and tens
of thousands of worshippers out there, all in uniform, the SS,
Hitler Youth...
It's now a sports field, but I would not like to be
here at night. It's really kind of spooky.
I'm being joined by an expert on the history of the Nuremberg rallies.
Alex. Hello! Chris. How are you? I'm fine, fine. Am I unusual?
I find it really spooky standing here, that Hitler was here,
ranting away at everybody. Yes, it's really spooky.
You can't actually imagine, can you? Just here. Here, yeah.
How many people would have come?
200,000.
Would you say it was a preparation for war?
It was a preparation for war, because the people here learned
to follow the leader, and the railway learned to transport
a huge crowd to a place here in their exact time.
So this was also useful for the war, to transport soldiers to the front.
But was not that the same knowledge used for transporting Jews
to the Holocaust? Yes. They learned to transport in a very fast way.
Every train has to have 1,000 people.
It's exactly the same number as deportation trains.
So without railways, there's no party, really.
There's no war and no Holocaust.
In 1935, Hitler chose the Nuremberg rallies to announce
the first anti-Jewish laws.
Overnight, Jews lost all citizenship rights and were banned
from marrying non-Jews.
These racist Nuremberg Laws were just the start.
It's difficult to imagine why Hitler actually hated the Jews so deeply.
In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, there are all sorts of contradictory
statements by Hitler, but he did say one very revealing thing.
He said the elimination of the Jews would necessarily
be a bloody process.
Whatever Hitler had in mind, the railway would play a critical
role, as discrimination evolved into segregation, deportation
and eventually genocide.
I'm following the path of Hitler's railway, as he used it to achieve
the first of his goals, to expand the Reich.
In 1938, Hitler was preparing for war, and he couldn't do
that without an effective railway.
So he used the Reichsbahn to quickly transport thousands of troops
to occupy Austria and the area that I'm going into today.
My journey is going to take me across Europe, to the ghettos
and death camps of Poland.
First, I'm travelling from Nuremberg into what was then Czechoslovakia,
to the capital, Prague.
On the way, I'm passing through the country's mountainous
perimeter, the Sudetenland.
The Sudetenland was populated mainly by ethnic Germans, and Hitler felt
this gave him a right to claim it for the Reich.
The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, and other
European leaders were anxious to avoid war at all costs,
so they met in Munich to thrash out a deal and listen
to Hitler's territorial claims.
Pathetically, they agreed to all his demands and handed
all these lands over without any sign of a fight.
The really scandalous thing about the Munich Agreement
is that the Czechs were not invited to the conference at all.
Neville Chamberlain said
that the agreement would bring "peace for our time".
But for many living in the Sudetenland, only
bad times lay ahead.
In autumn 1938, the countdown to war had begun
as Hitler annexed the Sudetenland.
Sudeten opponents of the Nazis left their homes and poured
into what was left of Czechoslovakia.
In Prague, teams of volunteers were working hard to find escape
routes for those most at risk.
There was a huge refugee problem and a growing fear that the Nazis
just might take over the rest of the country.
But in this part of town, there were one or two hotels
where they were compiling secret lists of the most vulnerable people,
who needed to get out of this country, and quick.
One of the volunteers was a British academic who stayed in this hotel.
Doreen Warriner had come to Prague to help political refugees
but ended up playing a significant role in rescuing Jewish children.
She drew up lists of thousands of men and women who would almost
certainly be killed if they fell into Nazi hands.
She arranged trains and visas for them to get to the UK and even
accompanied some of them on the journey.
Warriner worked tirelessly and often ended her day in this very hotel bar
with a stiff tomato juice.
But in January 1939, her drink was interrupted by disturbing news
that would jeopardise her work.
One night, a party of Germans were laughing and drinking,
obviously celebrating, but a pale, young Jewish barman
looked positively worried.
When Warriner asked him, "Why are the Germans so happy?", he said,
"Because they are coming for Czechoslovakia next."
And she said, "When?"
And he said, "March."
That shocking prediction came true on the 15th of March.
Hitler's ambitions hadn't stopped with the Sudetenland.
He wanted ALL of Czechoslovakia.
Czech Jews lost their rights, and Warriner was inundated
with families who were desperate to get out.
Britain promised to help, but there were strings attached.
The British Home Office agreed to take some children in,
but there were a number of conditions.
They had to be under 17, the parents had to stump up £50,
which was an absolute fortune in those days, and foster homes
had to be found and guaranteed in Britain.
That meant children had to be separated from their parents.
Max Spitzer and his wife Pavla made this painful decision and applied
for their three daughters to be transported to Britain.
The youngest, Zuzana, was only seven.
Nearly 80 years on, I'm meeting Zuzana on the platform
from where she left for England in July 1939.
The modern station's so noisy, we've moved to the state rooms next
door to see an extraordinary home movie her father made
days after the Nazis invaded.
Now, we've got the swastika... That's the castle.
..from when the Germans took over. Yes.
My father filmed that secretly, you know.
He took films of the guards, the Germans, outside the castle.
If they had caught him, they would have shot him.
I don't understand that he didn't realise that.
Look, there's the change of the guard.
Germans in a Czech castle, that is something terrible.
Terrible. Nobody really seemed to have any idea then just how bad
it was going to become. No.
I think people, they didn't want to believe it at the beginning,
that there was danger,
but stories seeped through and they started to be afraid.
Unbeknown to Zuzana, an associate of Doreen Warriner's
was planning her rescue.
Nicholas Winton was a stockbroker who volunteered to help by arranging
trains and foster homes in Britain
for children like Zuzana and her sisters.
When we got on the train, one of the most poignant memories
is looking out of the train window, onto the platform, and seeing
all those adult people crying. And we didn't know why.
We didn't know why they were crying. But it was contagious,
and...we started crying.
Nicholas Winton is remembered
on the platform from where his trains departed,
commemorating the 669 children he rescued from almost certain death.
It's a beautiful sculpture. They look so sad, don't they?
Little girl, beautiful little girl.
Obviously separated from her parents.
And this little boy, just clinging on to anybody.
It's very moving. He looks such a kind man, as well.
Zuzana and her sisters were later reunited with their parents
in the UK and survived the Holocaust.
But most of the children who waved goodbye to their parents never
saw them again.
On the 1st of September 1939, any hope of further rescue trains
to Britain came to an abrupt end when Hitler invaded Poland.
The borders were closed and Britain declared war on Germany.
ARCHIVE: It would have been quite possible to have arranged a peaceful
and honourable settlement between Germany and Poland.
But Hitler would not have it.
I want to find out how the outbreak of war affected the Jews who hadn't
escaped Prague and were now completely at the Nazis' mercy.
This train is taking me 40 miles north of Prague, where I'm hoping
to meet an extraordinary lady who wants to tell me
about the terrifying journey she took 77 years ago.
Good morning. Good morning. Are you Helga? Nice to meet you. I'm Chris.
You look very smart. Thank you.
Helga Weissova was the daughter of a prosperous banker
until her family, and all of Prague's Jews, were forced
to give up their homes and wealth
and herded onto trains to live in a ghetto.
Helga, what do you remember of this journey 77 years ago?
I remember everything. They are things that I cannot forget.
But I remember how we travelled at the time.
But it was not such a nice day.
It was cold, snow, it was December 1941.
Yeah. I was 12.
There were SS men, they were screaming on us and gave us orders,
how to do, and all the time, "Hurry, hurry along."
Helga and I are taking the same journey she and her family took
in 1941 to a garrison town called Terezin.
When you started your journey, what did you think it would be like
at the other end? We were, perhaps, a little naive.
They told us we would be somewhere concentrated, in a ghetto.
We didn't expect the war would be so long.
And so we supposed somehow we would survive it.
What were you allowed to take with you, to bring?
It was very few things. We were allowed to take 50 kilo luggage.
50 kilo luggage is not so much.
I was very fond of drawing since my childhood,
so I put inside my luggage a box of watercolours, some crayons
and some paper.
We're arriving at the station where Helga disembarked.
It's nearly two miles from the Terezin camp.
Yeah, be very careful. I'm carrying your handbag.
OK?
And this is the same... Is that the same station building
as when you came? I think so.
From here, we had to walk to Terezin.
How far was that? Three kilometres. Three kilometres? And was it cold?
It was cold and it was snow. So there was snow everywhere,
you'd have been freezing. It was in December. Yeah.
It's a long way. Yes.
The prisoners were forbidden to keep records of their time in Terezin,
but this didn't stop Helga from using the pens and papers
she'd packed to keep a diary, which she illustrated with drawings,
like this one of the prisoners walking to the camp.
"A bumpy road and a thaw. Our heavy feet sink into the mud, and dirty
"yellow water squirts out from beneath the carriages,
"laden with luggage.
"We learn lots of unpleasant things.
"The worst is that men and women live separately."
Everybody who was able to walk had to walk.
Some old or ill were carried.
So, this is coming up to Terezin, isn't it?
So, we are inside. Mm.
Terezin suited the Nazis' purpose.
As a former garrison town, it was separate from other settlements
with a clear perimeter to prevent the inhabitants escaping.
Before the war, 7,000 people lived here, but the Nazis threw them out,
so more than eight times that number of Jews could be crammed
into the same space.
Always, the memories come back. I recognise the buildings.
Is this the original door? Yes. This was the entrance we came inside.
But only women.
Women and men were separated.
My father was somewhere else, but we didn't yet know where.
So you and your mother must have been very worried
about your father, what was happening. Yeah, we were,
sure we were.
We weren't allowed to go outside.
Helga's painting of the corridor inside the barracks
gives a flavour of how grim life was.
The little girl in the makeshift bed has tuberculosis.
Which one do you think was your window, your dormitory?
Somewhere here.
Locked in the building, Helga sketched the view of the courtyard.
But one day, this would be the scene of unspeakable cruelty, when the SS
caught nine boys who'd tried to send letters to their mothers.
I remember this moment - it was terrible -
because we were not allowed to go out, but we watched it.
It was one of the worst moments.
"My hand is trembling so much from just thinking about it.
"We saw a small group. In the front and the rear were the SS...
"..in the middle, nine young men with shovels on their shoulders...
"..so they could dig their own graves.
"Nine, condemned to death.
"What did these boys do that was so terrible to be dealt
"with so cruelly?"
And they were hanged here.
They only wanted to let their parents know they are alive.
Helga witnessed the hangings from a small room shared with 20 others.
Cramped, three-tier bunk beds, some sort of a bucket for basic washing.
Bedbugs, lice, all sorts of disease. I can't imagine thousands of people
living in conditions like this for several years.
And of course, every single one of them
had to wear the Jewish Star of David.
Did you have many people sick? Of course.
In such conditions, epidemic broke out
and there was a lot of infections.
So we did our best, but, of course, many people died every day.
In 1943, the railway was extended directly into the camp.
But this wasn't to make the Jews' journey into Terezin easier.
The trains arrived to take the Jews away
to a place rumoured to be even worse,
a camp called Auschwitz.
Did you, in this camp, have any real idea what was happening
in camps like Auschwitz?
We didn't know. We hoped...
..or believed that it would be a new ghetto, similar to Terezin.
Or maybe better? No, we didn't suppose that... You didn't think
that? ..would be better.
We supposed it would be worse, but we had no idea it
would be so terrible as it was.
Helga lived in fear of being selected for "Transport",
which often happened at night.
Her diary recalls the moment her father, Otto, was selected
and saying goodbye, before he was forced onto a train.
"Your eyes glittered, strangely, and your hand shook
"as you pressed me to yourself for the last time.
"What did it mean? Goodbye or farewell?
"Daddy, did you believe we'd ever meet again?"
Did you ever find out what happened to your father?
We didn't know where he died, but probably he went directly
to Auschwitz and directly to gas chamber.
So, nobody noticed his name anywhere.
So the last stop is when he left Terezin. Mm. My father was 46.
Terrible. Bless you.
Five days after her father left,
Helga and her mother were also transported to Auschwitz.
Most of the deportees would be murdered on arrival,
but, miraculously, Helga and her mother survived.
Amazingly also, her pictures and her diary survived.
They were bricked into a wall
by her uncle after she'd left these barracks.
The railway brought 150,000 prisoners to Terezin.
33,000 died here and many more died in Auschwitz.
By 1941, the Nazis' approach had changed from persecuting Jews
at home to deporting them to ghettos like Terezin.
Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, wrote of the policy
in his diary. He wrote, "The Fuhrer is of the opinion that the Jews
"must be removed from all of Germany.
"Berlin is the first in line, and I am hopeful that, in the course
"of this year, we are able to transport a substantial part
"of Berlin's Jews to the east."
And in order to achieve this aim, of course, he'd need trains...
..and lots of them.
I've come to Berlin to meet a rabbi and Holocaust railway expert
who can help me understand the sheer scale of the Nazi railway
infrastructure built for the war,
starting with the Kriegslok, the war locomotive.
God, that is just enormous, isn't it? What is that? Big train, no?
Well, the technical term would be a Kriegslok Type 1,
which was built for war purposes.
The tender is a special design for the war, designed to have fewer
man-hours involved in making it.
It's just half of an oil wagon cut in half, really.
And they were built in their thousands...
..for conveying what needed to be conveyed.
I mean, obviously, tanks and munitions and troops...
But also people. Also people. They were built by slave labour.
They were built in Austria, in Poland, in Skoda, in Pilsen.
In other words, the Germans got occupied countries building exactly
the same type. So they would have had slave labour
building the locomotives to take... Of course. ..to take Jews...
It's a totalitarian system. ..to the camps. You didn't have a choice.
That's a horrible thought. It's a very horrible thought.
You do get a sense of the scale of this massive locomotive.
Look, I'm six foot two, and I'm still miles under just this bit.
And look at that up there! It's just huge!
This old battle relic wasn't built to last.
Nimble as an antelope.
But such is the quality of the engineering and the preservation
work of enthusiasts that, of the 7,000 that were built,
about 30 of these locomotives still run.
This one takes people on what are described as "cultural excursions"
out into the countryside.
It all feels rather odd, and I have to assume at least some
of the people on board have very little idea
about the Kriegslok's history as an instrument of war
and particularly of the Holocaust.
It's full of people, but, of course, in the 1940s,
it would have been so, so different.
Today, they just seem to be rejoicing.
But in actual fact, there were over 1,000 on each train.
They would have been travelling in converted cattle trucks.
There would have been one window, one toilet.
It would have been so, so different.
Since I started out on this journey, I've been struggling
with a question, a question about the Holocaust that perhaps
only a rabbi can answer.
Why do you think...it happened?
What was the point of it?
I'm sorry, there you get me. There is no answer.
The people I fear are those who have answers.
I think a lot of life, in Judaism especially, is a religion with a lot
of questions, and I really believe in asking questions, and I fear
those who have answers, because those who have answers
stop asking questions.
I still have plenty of questions, like how could the Reichsbahn,
which employed more than a million people, collude with the Nazis
to deport so many Jews?
Did all those train workers know what they were doing?
Did they know where they were taking the Jews or what would
happen to them? Did civilian Germans know what was happening?
These days, this is a memorial but, in 1941, it was a huge synagogue.
But the Levetzowstrasse synagogue's days
as a place of worship were over.
The Nazis decided that it should be a transit camp, where Jews
would be ordered to report before they were deported.
Thousands of Jews camped here, often for several days, in quite appalling
conditions, until one day they were told their train was ready
and their new home was waiting.
What would have been particularly degrading, I think, is that many
of the Jews would have come from very smart homes.
They would have been very wealthy. And most of this walk,
this great march to the station, is through a really well-to-do area.
But no-one seems to have seen anything.
There isn't a single eyewitness account of Jews being led
to this station and platform 17.
This part of the station clearly hasn't been used for many years.
Look at the trees now growing up between the sleepers.
I can almost feel the ghosts of the 50,000 Jews who were deported
from Berlin, their humiliation complete when they were forced
to pay for their own one-way tickets.
Since 1991, this platform has been a memorial
with a plaque commemorating each Transport.
So, this is the very first train, the very first one that transported
the Jews from here.
18th of October 1941,
1,251, 1,251 Juden, Jews, were transported
from Berlin, which is Grunewald, where we are, Grunewald, Berlin,
to a city 300 miles east from here in Poland, Lodz.
I do think, though, looking round all this - and it's beautifully
done - how many people actually ever notice this memorial?
Trains no longer run from Grunewald station to Poland.
So I'm going to take the modern route, via Berlin's
plush main station.
I'm heading to Poland to follow the path of the Jews
who were transported there in 1941.
That path will take me 300 miles east to Lodz, but first
I want to stop off at a place called Gniezno, to look at the remains
of a vast train yard that was built as part of Hitler's plans
to conquer the east.
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for the invasion
of the Soviet Union.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote the German people needed more space
and he wanted to form German territories in the Ukraine.
"What India was for England, he wrote, "the territories of Russia
"will be for us."
In June 1941, Nazi stormtroopers entered the Soviet Union.
They shot dead around a million Jews and Communists in cold blood.
These massacres marked a new phase in the Holocaust,
euphemistically called the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
But Hitler had a problem. The Soviet Union was enormous,
far bigger than anywhere he'd invaded before.
To maintain the assault, he'd need huge railway projects to keep
the supply lines of men and weapons intact.
I've come to Gniezno to see one of the extraordinary structures
that made the invasion of the Soviet Union possible.
Well, you can see it just over there.
It's a massive Nazi rail yard.
At its height, 3,000 people worked here...
..many of whom were Jewish prisoners.
Today it's a deserted ghost town, a vast, crumbling relic of the war.
It's something like three miles long from top to bottom,
and it would have been heaving with armoured cars, jeeps, personnel
carriers and, of course, thousands of men, all pouring
up to the Russian front.
This 450-yard siding with its water pumps, sand hoppers and this giant
crane for lifting coal could refuel 12 locomotives at the same time.
Incredibly, 24 engines would have been in those sheds at any one time.
And this - pretty rusty - but nearly 80 years since it first worked,
this turntable still actually works.
So one bloke can actually turn a 110-tonne locomotive.
It still works. It does.
HE STRAINS AND LAUGHS
Throughout this depot, there are reminders that here in Poland,
more than 150,000 Poles and Jews were forced to work
for Hitler's railway.
Embossed on a lot of the rails in this workshop you can see
the famous brand name Krupp,
a big, massive German steel and ammunition company.
After the war, the Krupps were found guilty at the Nuremberg trials
of war crimes and the use of slave labour.
I suppose Hitler was fighting two wars,
one against the Allies and the Russians and one
against the Jews, but without the Jewish and Polish slave labour,
this place would never have been built.
And without this railway depot, there wouldn't have been the trains
or the rolling stock or any of the infrastructure
to invade Russia.
And in the end, this whole place says it all about whatever
did happen to the Nazis' idea of world domination.
But in 1941, the threat was still very real, and the railway
was central to the Nazis' plan of getting rid of the Jews.
I've reached Radegast station in Lodz, where 1,200 Berlin Jews
arrived in October 1941 to be concentrated with other Jews
in the ghetto.
This is the first place where the Jews heading for the Lodz
ghetto would actually have emerged.
Basically, the deportees, maybe even tens of thousands, would have
all arrived here.
They would have made their way a few hundred yards up there
to what they were promised were new homes and lots of work.
But it was a lie.
Nearly a thousand such ghettos were set up across the Reich.
They were places of death and horror.
Like most ghettos, Lodz was created next to a railway station.
A perimeter was built to keep the inhabitants segregated
from the rest of the city's population.
Just two fenced-off roads ran across the ghetto
for the convenience of non-Jews to pass through.
The tram route that ran down one of those roads still operates today,
and I can get a bit of a sense of what the ghetto must have been like.
Now, this green area here is where the Germans razed
this whole bit of the city to the ground to make sure
they had a gap between the Germans and the Jews.
There were wooden fences all the way along this route, and 164,000 people
were crammed into this one-and-a-half-square-mile area.
So little has changed that it's easy to picture what life was like.
The wooden footbridge was built so the ghetto's inhabitants
couldn't access the road.
Overcrowded, overworked, full of disease.
Nazi police had orders to shoot anyone who approached the perimeter.
This fairly innocuous-looking building that's now a chemist,
that was actually the Gestapo headquarters.
This morning, I have an appointment with an incredible man who survived
the horrors of this place,
a man who cheated death so many times, it's remarkable
that he's here to tell me his story.
I'm in a part of the Polish city of Lodz that once was a horrific,
overcrowded and brutal ghetto.
Arek Hersh was still a child when he arrived.
He'd already been orphaned by the Nazis...
You're Arek. I recognise you.
..and he'd worked as a slave building the railway.
What age were you when the Germans had you working on the railway?
They took me... I was 11 years old.
So only a little boy, really? Yes, that's all I was.
How did the people working on the railway
handle their situation? They were very, very badly treated.
Many people jumped onto the train as it passed by, got killed,
and I had to bury them.
So you were still a little boy and you were scraping
up body parts and... Yes, I had to do that. Oh, dear.
And people were hanged. I had to bury them as well.
We started with 2,500 men.
Within 18 months, when our railway line was finished,
there was only 11 people left alive.
11?! 11.
In his previous ghetto, 80 members of Arek's family and extended family
had been taken away and murdered.
Arek was now 12 years old and all alone in a place
where he witnessed death every day.
There were three hospitals.
And just one day, the SS came and they threw the bodies
from the first floor and the second floor onto trucks.
What, people from the hospital? Yes. Were some alive?
They were still alive, and they killed them.
They emptied all the hospitals? Yes. Why?
No idea.
And you saw dead bodies all the time? All the time.
There were carts that took bodies away from the street.
People used to drop in the street, children used to drop in the street,
died from malnutrition.
These sick crimes are almost unimaginable.
But the city's Jewish cemetery says it all.
Most of those who died in the Lodz ghetto are buried
in these paupers' graves.
43,000 people are buried here,
and that's just people who died in this Lodz ghetto.
And then on the walls are the people who were taken
from the ghetto and killed.
And I've never seen this - the word "murder" is everywhere.
Grandmother Ester murdered in 1942.
Mother murdered in Auschwitz, '44.
Sister murdered in Treblinka. Brother murdered.
The whole Talmud family murdered during the war.
I've never seen anything like this,
and all because of one evil little maniac.
Perhaps most sinister of all was that many of those who died
were selected for death not by the Nazis but by fellow Jews.
The Nazis forced this council of elders to select people
to be relocated from the ghetto.
They PROBABLY had no idea
of the fate that awaited the people they'd chosen.
In September 1942, Arek heard rumours
that he might be chosen next, so he fled to a cemetery to hide.
First of all, the president of the ghetto, he asked the parents
to hand over 10,000 children.
And what parents would hand over, to know that they're going
to be killed? Mm. Nobody did.
A lot of the parents hid the children.
And a lot of parents were killed
when the SS found the children hiding. Yeah.
And I hid behind a tombstone and was praying to God that I'm not
captured, because I was the age group from which they would
take me away.
If the SS found children hiding, what did they do?
They shot them.
The next evil chapter in the Holocaust was being written.
And if Arek was going to live, he'd have to hide among the dead.
As he hid, thousands of children and adults were rounded up, marched
to Radegast station and taken deep into the countryside.
The man who chose to transport the children here was one
of the greatest criminals of the Holocaust,
SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Herbert Lange.
He already had form for murdering mental patients for the Reich,
and now he was going to turn his attention to the Jews.
Lange chose this remote area with a small population and dense
forest that allowed him to operate in secret.
There was also the convenience of a narrow-gauge railway.
It's really hard to imagine, but this is actually the end
of the narrow-gauge railway that brought them here.
From here, they were loaded into these lorries.
Now, you can see the German soldiers
very gently moving everybody into the trucks.
See, it's all very calm. They have no idea what's ahead.
They think they're going to rest
and then go on to work in a new place.
These are actually some sort of fruit and veg truck, a forerunner
of the cattle trucks that were to follow.
But at the moment, nobody has a clue that anything untoward's
going to happen.
And that calmness has been deliberately created by the Nazis.
The prisoners were taken to a mansion on the edge
of a village called Chelmno.
Here, they would be met by a commandant who greeted them
with a reassuring welcome.
This place gives me the creeps.
You have to imagine it with a great big, high wooden fence all the way
round and barbed wire on the top of that.
But there is a beautiful church over there looking
down on the valley. There was a granary over there.
And then all this was a magnificent mansion that the Germans blew up
when they'd finally completed their work.
It's now an archaeological site where historians are piecing
together the camp's modus operandi.
Up to 100 people at a time would come through here,
down these steps, hand over all their valuables
and actually get a receipt for them.
Then they would go into a much larger room here. They would
remove their clothes.
There would be cynically reassuring signs everywhere saying things
like "bedrooms", "bathrooms", and they would go down into
the basement for a bath.
They would then come down this narrow corridor,
which, as you can see is being excavated at the moment.
And at that point, all pretence would suddenly stop.
They were forced along this narrow corridor here with rifle butts
and whips, raced along the corridor.
They were pushed up a ramp here into vans and the doors
were slammed shut.
These were no ordinary vans.
They were hermetically sealed with heavy bolts on the doors.
Gas from canisters and from the van's exhaust was pumped
into the trailer. In a matter of minutes, everyone inside was dead.
And once the bodies had been stripped of any remaining
valuables, they were dumped somewhere in the nearby forest.
This was an experimental camp
where the Nazis learned how to murder efficiently...
..and in huge numbers.
This was the first actual death camp, wasn't it?
No work or anything, just death. It was the first death camp
the Germans established in occupied Poland.
It was the first place where the gas was used for mass-killing the Jews.
We know the time from arrival to death. It was about one hour.
I'm really struggling to get my head around this.
I've been to genocide sites in Rwanda,
and you see blood on the walls, a little child's shoe, and yet here,
there's nothing really to see and yet you know what happened -
the commandant making his welcome speech about ten times a day
to another truckload of Jews that he knew were going to die
within a matter of minutes.
Something like, I don't know, 200,000, maybe even 300,000 people
died in this site.
100,000 people died, probably were gassed where I'm standing now.
And that's a horrible thought.
Behind a tombstone 60 miles away in Lodz, a terrified orphan
was still in hiding.
Arek's quick wits had saved him from being murdered at Chelmno,
but now he had to concentrate on staying alive.
When he felt the danger was over, he snuck back into the ghetto
and looked for a new place to live.
He moved into this orphanage here for two more years,
but by 1944, the war looked like it was beginning
to turn against Germany.
About 180 children were here.
But it's still part of the ghetto? Yes.
In the road over there, that was where the wire was.
Guards? Yes, with guns. The SS? Yes.
What did you do here? Did you have a job of any sort? Yes.
I used to work in a factory. Yeah? It was a textile mill.
So, what did you do? I used to help the mechanic.
They took me to learn about the machinery, and I also
did a bit of weaving from time to time.
By 1944, did you kids start to get a sense that maybe
the war was turning? We had a feeling that the war was turning.
It came through from certain people.
I think they had radios.
So we knew in 1944 that the Germans are losing, the Russians
were already in Warsaw, which is not so far away. No.
But Arek's hopes of liberation were suddenly dashed when the Nazis
decided to liquidate the ghetto
and unleash new horrors on its inhabitants.
In August 1944, the Nazis cleared the Lodz ghetto.
Over three weeks, 68,000 inhabitants were marched to Radegast station
for a journey on the railway of death.
When people think about the Holocaust, this is the image
that most of them conjure up, line after line of cattle trucks
crammed with desperate people inside.
One of the reasons why they used these boxcars was because so much
of their rolling stock was tied up with the war effort,
this was all that was left.
So this is how you travelled? Yep. Oh, dear, oh, dear.
That was our journey. Barbed wire on the window?
Yeah, all the windows had barbed wire.
But nobody's going to escape anyway, are they?
How are you going to get out of that? You couldn't,
but they put barbed wire on to make sure that we don't.
What was it like? I just think it must have been...
Horrific. Yeah.
Yes, 100 people standing. You couldn't even sit down.
One lavatory? One bucket? One bucket, yes.
And a blanket to cover...
Cover your modesty.
Did anybody die during the journey? One person.
Who was that? A woman.
She collapsed, but the train just went on and nobody took
any notice of her. They kept her in the corner, and that was it.
Arek has agreed to retrace the terrifying journey he took
in August 1944 with 184 other orphans...
..from Lodz to a town in southern Poland called Oswiecim.
Back then, this was a busy, centrally located railway junction,
with lines stretching all over Nazi Europe.
They were used to transport over a million Jews and other
prisoners to this area.
I was worried, because they told us we're going to work in factories.
Yeah. So I didn't know what to expect.
When you first all arrived, even though you've been cramped
for two days and you were starving, can you remember
what your first impressions were?
I looked through a crack of the train and noticed
SS men with dogs. That got me worried right away,
because I knew the most horrendous people were waiting for us.
Ooh, take it easy. This is a long way down.
Yeah, take it easy.
When Arek passed through here,
he would've been in trucks similar to these,
exhausted, hungry, anxious and oblivious to what awaited him
just a mile up the line.
From this footbridge, you can see this is such a focal point.
So many rail lines converge on this one spot, and that's one
of the main reasons why the Nazis chose this place for the largest
of all their death camps. The Poles call it Oswiecim.
The Germans called it Auschwitz.
There were actually over 40 different Auschwitz camps,
the two largest being the original Auschwitz
and the colossal Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Boguslaw Starzecki is a veteran of the Polish railway.
Hi. I'm Chris. How are you? Boguslaw. Pleased to meet you.
He's spent his life studying the rail network in this region.
It's so overgrown now, but this would be the line
that thousands of Jews came going towards the gas chambers.
Up an abandoned siding 500 yards from the camp is the Judenramp,
the ramp of the Jews.
Where we are now, is this what they called Judenramp?
Until 1944, the wagons would stop here and the Jews could be herded
on foot to the camp.
But then the Nazis forced the prisoners to build this spur.
Arek's packed cattle truck would have travelled along this spur
and eventually through a gate
that has become one of the Holocaust's most infamous sights.
It's called the Gate of Death because virtually everybody
who travelled along this track and went through that gate
was murdered.
At its peak in 1944, in just eight weeks, over 430,000 Jews went
through that gate, and hardly any of them were ever seen again.
Birkenau is where the lessons learned in Nuremberg, in the ghettos
and at Chelmno were combined with unprecedented evil and efficiency.
It's an enormous place, and the scale of what the Nazis actually
did is still pretty colossal.
The women's quarters are over there on the left.
The men's quarters are over there on the right.
Now, those are the ones who were selected to work.
But the rest, the very young, the very old and the sick
have already gone to the end of the platform up there
to the gas chambers.
As the arrivals disembarked on this platform, they'd be
subjected to selection.
This was overseen by Dr Josef Mengele, known
as the Angel of Death.
His team chose between life, death or being sent
for cruel medical experiments.
Arek and the other children from the orphanage were too young
for work, so it seemed certain to Arek at least
they'd be selected for death.
The train stopped there on this line,
and we walked towards three high-ranking officers.
They stood here.
Because one of them, we now know, was Mengele. Mengele, yes.
So what did Mengele and co do at that point?
They picked you to die...
..or live.
This side, you died.
They selected women, children, old men,
and all those people went to this side.
That got me frightened, and I've got to try and find a way out.
What did you do?
I heard a commotion with a child. A mother had a child on her arm,
and they wanted the mother, they didn't want the baby.
And she didn't want to give the baby up? She started screaming
the moment they tried to pull the child, and she screamed.
This is the time when, basically, I got stuck in the middle
here for a few seconds because I didn't know what was going on here.
In the confusion, 14-year-old Arek approached an SS officer
and thought up a lie.
One of the officers asked me how old I am.
Yeah. So I told him a lie.
I said 17. And I told him that I was a locksmith.
Which you weren't. Never was, no. Never.
Why did you pluck locksmith out?
I just thought a locksmith, mechanical, anything mechanical
the Germans wanted, and so on.
But he told me to go to this side.
And all the others went left.
All of them went.
There were about 182 children... From the orphanage?
..from the orphanage, and they were all sent to this side.
Your friends? Everybody. You never saw any of them again?
No. No.
Arek didn't know where his friends had been taken.
He was alone again, surviving in a world even more hostile than before.
Starvation was going on all the time. Yeah.
Grass, you see grass now. There wasn't a blade of grass here.
People picked it and cooked it. You know, it was a death machine here.
Arek had saved himself from certain death by lying about his age.
He now had to live as an adult in a men's barracks
with up to 500 others.
After you've been selected for work, what happened then?
Head shaved, had a shower and got clothing.
Yeah. This is the striped pyjamas?
The striped pyjamas, yes, and then we got a pair of clogs.
Yeah. Tattoo? Did you get the tattoo then, and a number? And the tattoo
and the number, yes, and I got B7608. Which you must remember all
your life, every day of your life, that number.
Every day. Did they ever call you by your name, or did they just call
you by your number? By the number.
So you were just a number? My name has been lost here altogether.
So this is... This is just plywood. We slept on the wood, yes,
no mattress. Sheets? No sheet, no. Pillow? No pillow.
We just took our clothes off, wound the trousers around, put
it on our head, and that's how we slept.
And how many of you in here?
About ten people on each bunk.
What was it like at night-time?
People snored, people cried,
people coughed from all the beds. It was dreadful.
Horrific. Can you imagine? No, I can't.
Did people die during the night? Many people. Yeah? Yes.
Every morning, they had a cart and collected the bodies.
Did you sometimes find yourself lying next to somebody you thought,
"I think this person's died beside me"?
I've had quite a few situations like that.
But then, that's how it went every day.
Sometimes it seems like every detail you give me is worse
than the last one. Well, that was life here.
As Arek struggled to survive, every day more and more trains arrived
bringing more Jews to their deaths.
I think it's amazing that Arek's come back to Auschwitz at all,
but I certainly wouldn't expose him to this next bit.
If he'd turned left instead of right, he'd have come here.
It's the gas chamber.
Because you know the history of this place and what happened
in there, it's just almost beyond belief.
You can see where the gas would have been dropped in.
You can imagine them screaming, terrified, gasping for air,
desperate to get out, fighting over each body to try and get
that last little gasp of air. It's just...monstrous.
The dead would have then been loaded into these furnaces and incinerated.
The chimneys were burning.
There were four chimneys burning day and night.
So, when you saw that black smoke coming out of the chimneys,
did you know what it was? No.
Somebody told me these are the gas chambers and these are crematoriums
that kill the people that arrived here.
But the Nazis' grip was weakening.
By January 1945, the Soviet Red Army
was advancing on southern Poland and Auschwitz.
Did you begin to think just maybe the war was coming to an end?
Yes, we've seen about 500 planes, bombers flying low.
Over Auschwitz? Over Auschwitz, yes.
And also we've seen tanks going back on the way to Germany.
So it looks like they're leaving Poland?
Yes. And we could hear Russian artillery from a distance.
On the 27th of January 1945, the Russians finally liberated
Auschwitz and were horrified at what they found.
Prisoners were helped to freedom, but Arek wasn't among them,
because a few days earlier, the SS had started evacuating
the prisoners at gunpoint.
And they just took you out of the camp? Yes. Minus 25 degrees.
Snow? Heavy snow, heavy snow, and we were in pyjamas and clogs
and we marched. And they say, "We're taking you to a different camp."
How many people are we talking about? Hundreds.
I mean, everybody would have been very weak by then. They were.
Did anybody fall by the wayside? Anybody who couldn't walk was shot
in the back of the head and the body was thrown on the side of the road.
And what did you have for supplies? Did you have food? Water?
What did you have? Absolutely nothing.
The Germans were in retreat, which meant fewer and fewer
camps were available.
For three months, Arek and thousands of other Auschwitz prisoners
were moved from camp to camp.
This remarkable amateur footage
shows Auschwitz prisoners in coal trucks.
They were being evacuated west through Czechoslovakia.
What do you remember about your last journey?
They put us onto a train - open wagons, no roofs -
and we ate grass.
We cooked grass. And I also ate my shoe.
You ate your shoe? I cut it and I bent the leather.
And that was food? That somehow sustained you, eating your shoe?
Yes, just bits of leather. So you were desperate by then.
Yeah, very desperate. They gave us no food.
Most people died on the journey.
Arek's final rail journey was in April 1945 from another
concentration camp in Germany.
He was sent on a train with 3,000 others for a month.
Only 600 survived.
Arek somehow ended up in Terezin, Czechoslovakia,
and from there, he was liberated
by the Russians on the 8th of May 1945.
It was a miracle Arek survived, but six million others didn't.
For a few terrible years, these were the railways of death.
This was a chapter in human history that must never be repeated
and never, EVER forgotten.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media