Auschwitz survivor: ‘You worked until you could work no more – then you went to the chimney’
There are few who can say they’ve seen the inside of hell, but Albrecht Weinberg is one of them.
From the safety of his living room, the 99-year-old describes how, as a teenager, he survived three concentration camps including the Nazi’s biggest extermination centre, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“Jews were only for the gas chamber. You worked until you could work no more. Then you went to the chimney,” he explains in a soft Brooklyn twang he picked up after years of living in New York.
Born into a Jewish family of five in the East Frisia region of Germany, Albrecht was a teenager when the Nazis first sent him to do forced labour in 1939.
Albrecht Weinberg survived three concentration camps
He was moved to various places in the next few years until, in April 1943, he and his sister were loaded on to a wagon to Auschwitz.
The Third Reich was accelerating its extermination of Jews as part of its “Final Solution” which would see more than six million killed in the Holocaust.
Albrecht had already been separated from his parents, who had been immediately sent to gas chambers.
Now, he was being unloaded at a place where they, and ultimately more than a million other people, were murdered.
Albrecht remembers that around 950 men, women, children and the elderly were on the train but he had no clue what Auschwitz was.
“I’d never seen a prisoner in a striped uniform and cap,” he says.
As the train doors opened, he remembers soldiers shouting, “Out! Out!” in German.
A photo taken by the Nazis in the early days of World War Two shows victims arriving at Auschwitz. File pic: AP
Terrified, exhausted and dehydrated after days on the train, people rushed out, stepping over one another.
The group was then forced to march in front of one of the commanders so they could be selected.
Some would be sent to work, the rest to their deaths.
“He sorted us like big and small potatoes,” Albrecht tells me, “[If] he thought maybe that you could do a day’s work, he gave you a sign that you should go to the right and the others had to go to the left.”
Albrecht was one of around 250 chosen to be kept alive so that they could work.
He was sent to Auschwitz III (Monowitz) camp where by day he had to do backbreaking labour, laying cables in the freezing weather.
Albrecht’s father, Alfred (sitting) with his brother Jacob during World War One
By night he had to sleep in a shared bunk in cramped, cold wooden huts, riddled with disease and with little sanitation.
This is how he spent almost two years.
“They came and they beat the daylights out of you and then you had to get outside. You can’t stay alive very long and do that kind of work with that little bit of food that you got,” he says explaining what his days were like.
In the camp, he met his older brother Dieter, who had been sent there before him.
The detainees weren’t seen as humans, he says they were reduced to less than animals.
‘Every day when I wash myself, I see my number,’ says Albrecht
Rolling up his sleeve, Albrecht shows me the now-faded grey tattoo scrawled onto his skin by the Nazis when he arrived.
“1-16-9-27: that was my name, my number, that was everything,” he says, lightly tapping his arm.
He remembers the SS guards would inspect them; if they looked too skinny, had sores or were too weak, they were executed.
“He wrote your number down, the next day you went to the chimney.”
Albrecht explains, quietly: “People died, that was their policy. Over a million people got burned.”
Somehow though, Albrecht managed to survive until January 1945 when the guards told him and a group of others they were leaving.
As Soviet troops closed in, the Nazis forced thousands of Auschwitz detainees on so-called “death marches”, moving people they thought could still work to other areas.
Albrecht was among them and remembers seeing starving and sick people die on the route.
Wearing thin clothes and ill-fitting wooden clogs, the detainees marched for miles.
Anyone who stopped or fainted was shot or beaten to death.
After the march, Albrecht was forced to work in a factory making rockets and bombs before finally being sent to Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany.
Years of forced labour, beatings, malnutrition and trauma meant by this time he was dying.
The filthy conditions of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. File pic: AP
He remembers lying on the ground among a sea of corpses, too exhausted to go on.
That’s where he was when British forces arrived and liberated the camp.
“I must have moved my arm or something. I was 90% a dead man,” he says as he describes the scene that greeted the soldiers.
Albrecht says the Bergen-Belsen camp had become a “cemetery”.
“There were thousands of dead people lying on top of the ground. They were not buried, some of them were decomposing. The smell was awful,” he says.
After being worked as a slave and then left to die like an animal, Albrecht was finally free.
After the war, he was reunited with his brother and sister who also managed to survive Auschwitz.
Left to right: Albrecht, his brother Dieter and his sister Friedel
He later relocated to America, only returning to Germany in 2011.
Albrecht will be at home as the world gathers to remember the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
He has only returned to the camp once – “once was enough,” he says.
Instead, he is one of several survivors whose memories are being broadcast online as part of a project by the Jewish Claims Conference to mark the anniversary.
In total, around 41 members of Albrecht’s family were murdered by the Nazis.
He says he “cannot forgive” Germany.
He knows that younger generations are not responsible for the crimes of their grandparents, but he’s also deeply concerned about ongoing antisemitism.
Last year, someone knocked over the gravestones in the Jewish Cemetery in Leer where he lives.
Albrecht was so terrified he couldn’t go out.
He says he thought it was a “second Holocaust”.
In March, he will celebrate his 100th birthday.
He doesn’t know for how much longer Auschwitz survivors will be able to tell their stories and he’s worried the world is already forgetting the horrors of the Holocaust.
Albrecht’s mother Flora and her sister Carolina
For this extraordinary man, a survivor of indescribable trauma and a witness to some of the darkest acts in history, there is no peace.
“How can I forget when I think about my family, my mother, my father, my grandma? Every day when I wash myself, I see my number,” Albrecht says.
“How can I forget?”
World
In the idyllic Cognac region of southern France, Trump’s tariffs threaten a centuries-old way of life
The impact of Trump’s tariffs is reaching deep into every economy.
We travelled into the French rural heartland, heading for Cognac – the home of French brandy.
It is only half the size of Surrey but its exports to America are worth €1bn a year and that trade is now severely threatened.
The first buds are out on the vines of Amy Pasquet’s vineyard.
An American, she has married into the industry and with her French husband owns JLP Cognac.
She knows more than most the bond brandy has formed between their two countries that goes back to the war.
Tariffs latest: Follow live updates
Ms Pasquet said: “A lot of the African-American soldiers had really loved their experience here and had brought back the cognac. And I think that stayed because this African-American community truly is a community and they want to drink like their grandfather did.”
The ties remain with rappers like Jay Z’s love for cognac.
However, Ms Pasquet adds: “There’s also this other community of people who have been drinking bourbon for a long time, love bourbon, but find the prices just outrageous today. So they want to try something different.”
Amy Pasquet owns JLP Cognac with her husband
JLP’s products were served at New York’s prestigious Met Gala.
They were preparing to launch new product lines in the US. But now that’s in doubt.
It is hard being an American in France now, Ms Pasquet says.
Her French neighbours are appalled by what US President Donald Trump is doing.
She continues: “They’re like, okay, America’s forgotten how close France and America are as far as (their) relationship is concerned. And I think that’s hurtful on both sides. I think it’s important to remember that the US is many things, and not just this one person, and there are millions of inhabitants that didn’t vote for him.”
A fresh challenge for a centuries-old tradition
Making cognac takes years, using techniques that go back centuries. In another vineyard we met Pierre Louis Giboin whose family have been doing it for more than 200 years.
In a cellar dating back to the French Revolution, barrels of oak sit under thick cobwebs, ageing the brandy.
The walls are lined with a unique black mould that thrives off the vapours of cognac.
They have seen threats come and go over those centuries, wars, weather, pestilence. But never from a country they regard as one of their oldest allies and best of customers.
Read more:
What China could do next as Trump’s tariff war
How tariffs will affect your money
Could Trump’s tariffs tip the world into recession?
Pierre Louis Giboin’s cellar dates back to the French revolution
Mr Trump’s tariffs, says Mr Giboin, now threaten a way of life.
“It’s at the end of like very good times in the Cognac region. It’s been like 10 years when everything’s been perfect, we have good harvest, we sell really easily all the stock, but now I mean it’s the end.”
Ms Pasquet and Mr Giboin are unusual.
Most cognac makers sell their produce through the drink’s four big houses, Hennessy, Remy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier.
Some have been told the amounts they can sell have been drastically reduced.
Independents though like them must find new markets if the tariff threat persists.
Confusion away from the chaos
Outside in the dappled light of a Cognac evening Mr Giboin and I toast glasses of pineau – the diluted form of cognac drunk as an aperitif.
In this idyllic corner of France, a world away from Washington, Mr Trump’s trade war on Europe simply makes no sense.
“He’s like angry against the whole world and the way he talks like that Europe the EU was made against the US to cheat on the US. It’s just crazy to think like this,” Mr Giboin says.
It’s not just what Mr Trump’s done. It’s how Europe now strikes back that concerns the French. And it’s not just in Cognac where they’re concerned
France exports more than €2bn worth of wine to America.
In the heart of the Bordeaux wine region, Sylvie Courselle’s family have been making wine since the 1940s at their Chateau Thieuley vineyard.
It’s bottling season but they can’t prepare the wine headed for America while everything is up in the air.
Showing me the unused reels of US labels for her wine she told me she was losing sleep over the uncertainty.
Later she was meeting with her American distributors.
Gerry Keogh sells Ms Courselle’s wine across the US.
He says the entire industry is reeling
Sylvie Courselle with distributers
The Chateau Thieuley vineyard in the Bordeaux wine region
“I think it’s like anything. You don’t really believe it’s happening. And even when you’re in the midst of it, it was kind of like 9/11.
“You’re like… This is actually happening. It’s unbelievable. And when you start seeing the repercussions from the stock market, et cetera, and how it’s impacting every level, it’s quite shocking.”
They know the crisis is far from over and could now escalate.
“We feel stuck in the middle of this commercial war and we don’t have the weapons to fight, I think,” Ms Courselle said.
It is, she says, very stressful.
Gerry Keogh
The histories of America and France have been intertwined for centuries through revolutions against tyranny and two wars fighting for liberty.
America used to call France its oldest ally, but under Donald Trump its now seen here as turning on France and the rest of Europe in a reckless and unjustified trade war.
It is all doing enormous harm to relations between the US and its European allies.
How Europe now decides to retaliate will help determine the extent of that damage.
World
In the idyllic Cognac region of southern France, Trump’s tariffs threaten a centuries-old way of life
The impact of Trump’s tariffs is reaching deep into every economy.
We travelled into the French rural heartland, heading for Cognac – the home of French brandy.
It is only half the size of Surrey but its exports to America are worth €1bn a year and that trade is now severely threatened.
The first buds are out on the vines of Amy Pasquet’s vineyard.
An American, she has married into the industry and with her French husband owns JLP Cognac.
She knows more than most the bond brandy has formed between their two countries that goes back to the war.
Tariffs latest: Follow live updates
Ms Pasquet said: “A lot of the African-American soldiers had really loved their experience here and had brought back the cognac. And I think that stayed because this African-American community truly is a community. and they want to drink like their grandfather did.”
The ties remain with rappers like Jay Z’s love for cognac.
However, Ms Pasquet adds: “There’s also this other community of people who have been drinking bourbon for a long time, love bourbon, but find the prices just outrageous today. So they want to try something different.”
Amy Pasquet owns JLP Cognac with her husband
JLP’s products were served at New York’s prestigious Met Gala.
They were preparing to launch new product lines in the US. But now that’s in doubt.
It is hard being an American in France now, Ms Pasquet says.
Her French neighbours are appalled by what US President Donald Trump is doing.
She continues: “They’re like, okay, America’s forgotten how close France and America are as far as (their) relationship is concerned. And I think that’s hurtful on both sides. I think it’s important to remember that the US is many things, and not just this one person, and there are millions of inhabitants that didn’t vote for him.”
A fresh challenge for a centuries-old tradition
Making cognac takes years, using techniques that go back centuries. In another vineyard we met Pierre Louis Giboin whose family have been doing it for more than 200 years.
In a cellar dating back to the French Revolution, barrels of oak sit under thick cobwebs, ageing the brandy.
The walls are lined with a unique black mould that thrives off the vapours of cognac.
They have seen threats come and go over those centuries, wars, weather, pestilence. But never from a country they regard as one of their oldest allies and best of customers.
Read more:
What China could do next as Trump’s tariff war
How tariffs will affect your money
Could Trump’s tariffs tip the world into recession?
Pierre Louis Giboin’s cellar dates back to the French revolution
Mr Trump’s tariffs, says Mr Giboin, now threaten a way of life.
“It’s at the end of like very good times in the Cognac region. It’s been like 10 years when everything’s been perfect, we have good harvest, we sell really easily all the stock, but now I mean it’s the end.”
Ms Pasquet and Mr Giboin are unusual.
Most cognac makers sell their produce through the drink’s four big houses, Hennessy, Remy Martin, Martell and Courvoisier.
Some have been told the amounts they can sell have been drastically reduced.
Independents though like them must find new markets if the tariff threat persists.
Confusion away from the chaos
Outside in the dappled light of a Cognac evening Mr Giboin and I toast glasses of pineau – the diluted form of cognac drunk as an aperitif.
In this idyllic corner of France, a world away from Washington, Mr Trump’s trade war on Europe simply makes no sense.
“He’s like angry against the whole world and the way he talks like that Europe the EU was made against the US to cheat on the US. It’s just crazy to think like this,” Mr Giboin says.
It’s not just what Mr Trump’s done. It’s how Europe now strikes back that concerns the French. And it’s not just in Cognac where they’re concerned
France exports more than €2bn worth of wine to America.
In the heart of the Bordeaux wine region, Sylvie Courselle’s family have been making wine since the 1940s at their Chateau Thieuley vineyard.
It’s bottling season but they can’t prepare the wine headed for America while everything is up in the air.
Showing me the unused reels of US labels for her wine she told me she was losing sleep over the uncertainty.
Later she was meeting with her American distributors.
Gerry Keogh sells Ms Courselle’s wine across the US.
He says the entire industry is reeling
Sylvie Courselle with distributers
The Chateau Thieuley vineyard in the Bordeaux wine region
“I think it’s like anything. You don’t really believe it’s happening. And even when you’re in the midst of it, it was kind of like 9/11.
“You’re like… This is actually happening. It’s unbelievable. And when you start seeing the repercussions from the stock market, et cetera, and how it’s impacting every level, it’s quite shocking.”
They know the crisis is far from over and could now escalate.
“We feel stuck in the middle of this commercial war and we don’t have the weapons to fight, I think,” Ms Courselle said.
It is, she says, very stressful.
Gerry Keogh
The histories of America and France have been intertwined for centuries through revolutions against tyranny and two wars fighting for liberty.
America used to call France its oldest ally, but under Mr Trump it is now being as turned on, as France, along with the rest of Europe, finds itself in what many would argue is a reckless and unjustified trade war.
It is all doing enormous harm to relations between the US and its European allies.
How Europe now decides to retaliate will help determine the extent of that damage.
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