Prisoner A26188

Henia Bryer

The German invasion of Poland in 1939 marked the beginning of the Second World War and the escalation of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. It was also the beginning of one of the war's truly inspiring and remarkable stories.

Prisoner A26188 tells the story of a young Polish girl Henia. Born into a middle class Jewish family her harrowing personal testimony starts with her family's removal from their home in Radom Poland to the ghetto then Plaszow concentration camp made famous by Schindler's List onto Majdanek then Auschwitz and finally Bergen-Belsen. Henia describes with calm dignity the terrors of the camps the cruelty of the SS the Death March and how through a combination of her own resourcefulness and luck she survived.

In this extraordinary testament Henia explains how after being reunited with her mother and brother she makes her way to Palestine sees in the birth of Israel falls in love and moves to Africa to start a new life. For years Henia has lived with the memories of the horrors she lived through but is determined to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.

"You can't live with hatred and grief because... you can't live with it and you can't cope with it" she explains saying that many survivors of the Holocaust went on to commit suicide. "You can't forget things like that; flashes come back of the past. A tragedy of this enormity must never be forgotten... this is not compatible to anything in the world."

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