Auschwitz survivor returns to brave a harrowing past

BRZEZINKA, Poland — For about 80 years, Ruth Cohen would not come here.

BRZEZINKA, Poland — For about 80 years, Ruth Cohen would not come here.

This is Auschwitz-Birkenau, a place where the Nazis treated people like animals caged in by electrified barbed wire, where prisoners died slowly by a combination of slave labor, human experimentation, starvation and disease. Most were quickly exterminated in gas chambers.

The Nazis forcibly sent Cohen and her family here by way of cattle cars in May 1944 — just for being Jewish. She was 14 years old at the time. And when she got off the train, she didn’t know it would be the last time she would see her mother, 12-year-old brother and two young cousins; they were likely sent to the gas chambers.

“It’s awful and it’s terrible, and the way I was told that they are dead was terrible, and I didn’t believe it. I believe it, of course, now,” said Cohen in an interview with NBC News.

Jewish people disembark from a train as they arrive at Auschwitz-Birkenau in German-occupied Poland in 1944.Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty Images“I didn’t know about the death chambers. I didn’t know about the crematorium. Now, now that I know about it, it hurts even more.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/auschwitz-survivor-returns-brave-harrowing-rcna189762

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