JERUSALEM -- When the two Gestapo men brought back her beaten father and dumped him at their gate, 12-year-old Gita Fridman saw him cry.
"We knew we were lost," she recalls.
It was Czechoslovakia, 1939. For millions of Jews like Gita, it was the start of a harrowing journey to Auschwitz, a place whose very name would carry the ring of evil 50 years later.
The Jews were caught in a slowly killing squeeze. Their business licenses were revoked; young Gita's father was arrested for trying to sell a few bottles of mineral water. Her older sister disappeared, taken to a camp. They had to wear yellow stars. The Germans began moving Jews to ghettos.
"You sit at home. There is nothing to do. No work. Families are being picked up every day, and you sit waiting for the henchmen to come," said Gita, now Giselle Cycowicz, 67, and living in Israel.
"You sit there waiting for something awful to happen. Finally they come and say take whatever you have with you."
The cattle-car train ride to Auschwitz in May 1944 was grueling. The arrival was pure terror.
"We were so frightened when we arrived at Auschwitz. It was so eerie. We never saw anything like it. Barbed-wire fences, guard towers wherever you looked. We were completely dazed, and people began howling at us . . . dump your things here . . . run there . . . get undressed . . . get shaved. Where is mother? Where is father? You don't recognize your sister, right next to you without her hair and her clothes . . . the shame of being naked. . . .
"Everyone is running. It's freezing. It's night and dark. I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to my father."
Russian forces arrive
Fifty years ago this week, the dreaded SS guards disappeared. On Jan. 27, 1945, Russian forces came upon the ghostly puzzle of Auschwitz. A few thousand sick inmates staggered to their feet and stared at their liberators with flat eyes, too deadened by horror for joy.
The others already were gone: 56,000 prisoners in long, desperate columns, force-marched into the frozen countryside. Many would die in the snow or be shot when they fell; still others would freeze on rail cars as the Germans tried to sweep the human leftovers of Auschwitz back into the collapsing Third Reich.
The crematoriums had been shut down and destroyed, the hair and clothes and gold fillings from their victims burned or shipped away. One and a half million people never left, the success of German industrial murder. Those who survived are the victims of memory.
Mengele's selections
Some say they passed by Josef Mengele himself. The Nazi doctor flicked his wrist: left for the old and weak, and mothers with small children. Left to the gas chambers. Right for the healthy and young, to the work barracks.
"They took us to a bath, and shaved our heads, and took all our possessions. They gave us prisoners' clothes," said Moshe HaElion, now 70 and retired near Tel Aviv.
The next day they tattooed a number on his arm: 114923.
"I didn't know they exterminated people. One day I saw a family friend. I asked if he had seen my mother and sister. He said the Germans had killed them. I thought he was crazy. Who could think the civilized Germans can do such a thing?"
He dug latrines for a month, then tended gardens of the SS men and their families.
"The Germans always made a point of killing Jews on Jewish holidays. On the eve of Yom Kippur, the SS came into the hospital block and began to read numbers. We knew if they called your number, you are going to die. And so the whole block was completely quiet. Everybody just held their breath. The next number could be your number."
Labor in the cold
Marcel Levy was 17, a strong Greek Jew. He was sent from Auschwitz to a nearby pit mine. For 12 hours a day, he shoveled stones, to be crushed for cement, into a rail car. He had to fill three cars each day or be beaten. Or killed.
"It was very, very cold. We had just a jacket and trousers, and it was freezing most of the time. We tried to steal cement sacks to wear under our clothes, but if we were caught we were beaten. Many people only lasted a month or so. I lasted two years.
"We had a piece of bread and maybe margarine in the morning. We had soup and bread at night. We walked to work, and sometimes farmers would leave us a potato to eat. If we found a hot coal from the rail line, we put it in the potato to try to cook it. People who tried to run away were usually caught and brought back. They were shot, or hung, in front of us."
The fate of boys
"My father asked the prisoner who opened the train door where we were. He said, 'Have you heard of Auschwitz?' I felt my father's hand tighten on mine," said Jehoshua Robert Buchler.
"My father said, 'If anyone asks you how old you are, always tell them 16.' " The boy was 14. He was sent to a youth barracks for work. Weeks later, he saw his father at a distance across the barbed wire, motioning that he was going somewhere else. He never saw his father again.
On Oct. 25, 1944, the SS stormed into the boys' barracks. They ordered the boys to undress and to pass by the officers for "selection." Young Buchler passed and scrambled to a top bunk to watch the scene.
"The boys knew what was happening. They kissed the boots of the SS and cried, 'Look, sir, I am strong. I have muscles. I can work.' Those selected were kicked and beaten. They were actually thrown into the back of lorries that had backed up to the gate of the barracks.
"It was the cruelest thing I have ever seen in my life," said Mr. Buchler, who now lives on a kibbutz in Israel. "It was only one week before they closed the gas chambers. Maybe it was the Nazis' intention to liquidate all the young boys before they
closed the chambers.
"Years later somebody dug up some bottles near the crematoriums. They contained diaries of the Jews who worked at the crematoriums. One of them referred to that date and said, 'Cremated 1,000 boys today. They were so pretty. The boys had to be pushed into the gas chambers.' "
A death march
Zvi Michaeli survived on a maintenance crew at the Buna industrial complex at Auschwitz. As the war neared an end, Allied bombing closed the synthetic fuel plant. In January 1945, the Germans began moving prisoners out of Auschwitz.
"We walked for 77 kilometers [48 miles] in the snow. It was a death march. We had only wooden shoes, with no socks. We dragged the sick along. If they fell, they were kicked or shot to death by the Germans."
They finally reached a train station and were loaded onto open coal cars. "There were 120 of us standing in each wagon. I thought, if I am going to live I must stand in a corner. The weak stayed in the middle and fell on top of each other. They died.
"Some tried to climb out or jump out of the cars. They were immediately shot by the Germans. Others would start screaming until they were exhausted.
"There was a terrible stench from human excrement and filth. At night, the war of survival began, and people beat and pushed each other to try to save themselves from suffocation." The trip lasted eight days.
"In comparison to this horrible hell, all of our suffering the last two or three years in the concentration camp looked like child's play," he said. In his train car, 75 of 140 died.
On April 15, 1945, at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany, Mr. Michaeli awoke to find the guards gone. Too weak to walk, he bumped down steps to watch British jeeps approaching.
Liberation
The Auschwitz prisoners were herded into Germany, inconvenient cargo tumbling amid the growing rout of German forces. They were scattered to other camps throughout Germany, driven in a last fit of hopeless slavery before their liberators arrived.
About 7,000 were too weak to leave Auschwitz. Menashe Lorenzi, 10, and his sister, Leah, had been among the twins that so fascinated the twisted Mengele. In the confusion, they remained.
"The Germans started destroying the camp around us," Mr. Lorenzi said. Everything was chaotic. I do remember seeing lots of planes over Auschwitz. Sometimes we would yell up, 'Bomb us! Bomb us!' "
The guards fled, but "we were afraid to try to escape. We thought we might get caught," he said. "Suddenly, a group of Germans broke into the camp. They wore black uniforms, SS uniforms with skull and crossbones. They were death squads.
"They started screaming in German for all Jews to come forward. They said anyone who stayed behind would be shot. They led us out of the camp. We were terrified.
"Suddenly, as we marched, as if coming out of the snow we saw soldiers wearing white coveralls. They had machine guns. It turned out they were Russians. And in that way we were liberated. They were the first Russians to arrive."
'A tremendous trauma'
"Commemorations like this create, for part of the survivors, a tremendous trauma," said Manfred Klafter. A Jewish resistance fighter in Holland, he was captured but escaped on his way to Auschwitz. He founded "Amcha," an Israeli counseling service for Holocaust survivors.
More than 2,000 Auschwitz survivors are expected to gather today in Jerusalem to commemorate the liberation of the camp.
They will sign a roster with their names beside the tattooed numbers that had been identification enough for the Germans.
They will inspect a cattle car donated by Poland for the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
Amcha will have counselors on hand.
"The survivors have learned to live with it. But it's like a rubber band, stretching all the time. As they get older, they lose elasticity mentally and physically," he said. "Eventually it breaks."