Holocaust survivor, 95, reveals one thing that kept her alive through horrors of Auschwitz
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A stranger’s kindness and pure luck saved Mindu Hornick’s life when she walked through the gates of Auschwitz. Surviving Auschwitz and Neuengamme slave labour camp, now 95, it took 40 years before she spoke publicly about the atrocities she witnessed.
But she has since made educating people about the Holocaust her life’s work - receiving an MBE for her endeavours in 2019. Transported from her happy orthodox Jewish family near Prague in the former Czechoslovakia, via a ghetto, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Mindu is speaking exclusively at her Birmingham home to mark the 80th anniversary of the death camp’s liberation on January 27 - Holocaust Memorial Day.
Determined to teach people about the past, in the hope of improving the world in the future, she says: “People have to respect differences for things to change. “Hatred has catastrophic consequences. Humanity is not learning the lessons. My dream is that one day it will.”.
After the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, her dad Morris, a hay merchant, was enlisted in the army and made to wear a Star of David armband, while he dug trenches and loaded trucks for the Germans. Only once returning home for a tearful reunion with his family, he then disappeared - never to be seen again.
Two years later, Mindu, then 14 , her sister Eva, 16, her mother Helen and her two younger brothers Josef, 11 and Samuel, six, were evicted to the ghetto of Kosice - before being herded onto cattle trains for the suffocating three day journey to Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people are estimated to have perished.
