History of Sorts

Henri Kichka was 16 when he was deported to Auschwitz. He was born in Brussels, Belgium 14 April 1926, into a Jewish family that had emigrated from Poland. Below is a transcript of his interview with the BBC, where he describes that he no longer had a name but a number.

“Henri Kichka: 1-7-7-7-8-9.

My name? No name. My address? No address. No school, no family. All my family died there.

They were arrested by Hitler with me. I was one year in Auschwitz. It was horrible. It was not a life. It was dead. Only dead. My father, my mother, both sisters. They died in Auschwitz. They were gassed and burned.

The worst of all—was the march of death. The death march. La marche de la mort. With the feet to march.

Reporter: No shoes?

Henri Kichka: It was horrible. All my feet are kaput!

I was 90% dead. After the war, I was in a hospital because I was very, very… a skeleton. I was a skeleton. I was in a sanitarium for [my] lungs and in a hospital, and two years later I was married and I built a big family.

Antisemitism is an idea from crazy people. What for [the] enemy is a Jew? He has no gun. He has no arms. They don’t do the war. And I don’t never understand why they hate so much the Jews. We are innocent.

The first days where I had to go in the school to tell my history, my horrible history, it was very difficult for me. I am crazy when I have to tell something [about] what happened in the concentration camps.

But I know—I knew—that I had to tell it. And I told 10,000 people what I suffered there.”

Henri Kichka died at age 94-years-old on 25 April 2020, eleven days after his birthday, in Brussels, the result of COVID-19 during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium.

source

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zk94jxs/articles/zt48dp3#zk76trd11