Connect with us

Published

on

An Auschwitz survivor who was just 13 when she arrived at the concentration camp says the recent rise in antisemitism is driven by “ignorance”.

Separated from her mother as she passed through the gates, Susan Pollack told Nazi guards she was 15 so they would keep her alive.

“Somebody whispered to me, your mother will be gassed. How could I respond? I was just hopeless.”

Susan, now 94, shared her story with Sky News presenter Sarah-Jane Mee ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day.

Undated handout photo of Susan Pollack, who is a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, has said helping others has been "the greatest therapy" to cope with the weight of the memories of the Holocaust.
Image:
Susan Pollack as a young girl, now 94 years old and an OBE. Pic: PA

Born Zsuzsanna Blau in 1930 in Hungary, Susan became aware of antisemitism around her from a young age. Her uncle was murdered by fascists. His attacker was sentenced to just two years in prison.

After Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, the Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators organised the deportation of Hungarian Jews, under the supervision of high-ranking SS officer Adolf Eichmann.

In May that year, Susan and her family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland by cattle truck. In less than two months, almost all of Hungary’s Jewish population, some 825,000, was deported.

More on Holocaust

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

How was Auschwitz liberated?

“On arrival we scrambled out of the trucks, and men and women were separated immediately,” Susan says, recalling her first moments at the concentration camp.

“I was left on my own, surrounded by shouting. I felt pure terror and devastation.”

Inside Auschwitz, she says she was “dehumanised” and survived by behaving as a robot.

She described having to stand in front of Dr Josef Mengele, the infamous camp physician, every morning, who would look at their naked bodies. Those who were deemed to be losing weight too quickly were sent to the gas chamber, Susan recalls.

(dpa files) - Prisoners from Hungary arrive at the Auschwitz concentration camp, about 50 km west of Krakow, Poland, spring 1945. In the background are seen the chimneys of the crematory (R and L), in which the bodies of the murdered prisoners were burnt. The Nazi SS had the concentration camp established in 1940 and enlarged to an extermination camp in 1941. It is believed that 2.5 to 4 million people, mostly Jews, were killed here by the Nazi regime until the end of World War II in 1945. Photo by: dpa/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Image:
Prisoners from Hungary arrive at the Auschwitz concentration camp in spring 1945. Pic: AP/DPA

Oswiecim - Brzezinka, Auschwitz II - Birkenau concentration camp, Poland, January 17, 2024. Photo/Drahoslav Ramik (CTK via AP Images)
Image:
The railway leading to the concentration camp. Pic: AP

“You don’t think that you live in a world which does those things.”

Amid the advance of Allied forces in 1944, Susan and others were put on a “death march” from Auschwitz, like tens of thousands of others.

Prisoners were moved out of camps near the front and forced to walk long distances in the bitter cold, with little or no food, water or rest. Those who could not keep up were shot.

Read more:
Queen evokes ‘deadly seeds of Holocaust’ in warning
Auschwitz survivor dies aged 100

Oswiecim - Brzezinka, Auschwitz II - Birkenau concentration camp, Poland, January 17, 2024. Photo/Drahoslav Ramik (CTK via AP Images)
Image:
The ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Sets You Free) gate at Auschwitz. Pic: AP

Susan was taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where she suffered from tuberculosis and typhoid.

“I wanted to die. I had no energy anymore,” she said.

“When I was liberated in Bergen-Belsen I couldn’t walk, I could hardly talk and I just crawled out to die,” she continued.

“I felt a gentle pair of hands, lifting me up. A gentle pair of hands. And he was a British soldier.”

She and others were then taken to Sweden, where she says they were given regular food.

Auschwitz Anniversary promo 16x9

“And we had a Jewish man in his 20s, and he played music every night,” she says.

“The lights were turned off and he played classical music every night, and that is what saved my life as well, in terms of thinking and hope and understanding.”

Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player

Auschwitz remembered 80 years on

It is estimated that 1.1 million people were killed at the Auschwitz extermination camp in the less than five years it existed. The majority, around a million, were Jews.

Susan, who now lives in London, regularly talks about her experience and was made an OBE for services to Holocaust education and awareness in the 2023 New Year Honours.

Asked about the recent rise in antisemitism, and how it makes her feel, she says she thinks it is down to “ignorance”.

But she said the “kindness and helpfulness” of individuals will make us “stronger”.

Susan Pollack’s full interview will be aired on The UK Tonight with Sarah-Jane Mee programme on Sky News at 8pm this evening.

Continue Reading

World

Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote – and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Published

on

By

Global markets have given Trump a clear no-confidence vote - and his fickleness is making the problem worse

Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.

The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.

The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.

Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID

Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.

Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 2, 2025. REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
Image:
On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced global tariffs, ratcheting up protectionism. Pic: Reuters

04 April 2025, Hesse, Frankfurt/Main: Stock exchange traders watch their monitors on the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange while the display board with the Dax curve shows falling prices. US President Trump had issued a huge tariff package against trading partners around the world. The European Union and China have already announced countermeasures. Photo by: Arne Dedert/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images
Image:
Traders at the Frankfurt stock exchange watched the DAX plummet on Friday. Pic: Picture-alliance/dpa/AP

Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.

More on Donald Trump

He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?

Read more:
No winners from Trump’s tariff gameshow
Trade war sparks ‘$2.2trn’ global sell-off

These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.

China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.

Aerial view of a ro-ro terminal for vehicle shipment in Yantai in eastern China's Shandong province, Thursday, April 3, 2025. (Chinatopix Via AP) CHINA OUT
Image:
Vehicles destined for export, like these in Yantai in eastern China, face massive US tariffs. Pic: Chinatopix/AP

Cargo containers line a shipping terminal at the Port of Oakland on Thursday, April 3, 2025, in Oakland, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Image:
Container ports like Oakland in California might expect activity to fall. Pic: AP

That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.

Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.

Continue Reading

World

Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Published

on

By

Hundreds of names removed from official Gaza war death list

Gaza’s health ministry has removed 1,852 people from its official list of war fatalities since October, after finding that some had died of natural causes or were alive but had been imprisoned.

The list of deaths currently stands at 50,609 following the removals. Gaza’s health ministry records do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Almost all of the names removed (97%) had initially been submitted through an online form which allows families to record the deaths of loved ones where the body is missing.

The head of the statistics team at Gaza’s health ministry, Zaher Al Wahidi, told Sky News that names submitted via the form had been removed as a precautionary measure pending a judicial investigation into each one.

“We realised that a lot of people [submitted via the form] died a natural death,” Mr Wahidi said. “Maybe they were near an explosion and they had a heart attack, or [living in destroyed] houses caused them pneumonia or hypothermia. All these cases we don’t [attribute to] the war.”

Others submitted via the form were found to be imprisoned or to be missing with insufficient evidence that they had died.

Some families submitting false claims, Mr Wahidi said, may have been motivated by the promise of government financial assistance.

It is the largest removal of names from the list since the war began, and comes after 1,441 names were removed between August and October – 54% of them originating in hospital morgue records rather than the online form.

chart

Mr Wahidi says his team audited the hospital data after receiving complaints from people who had ended up on the list despite being alive.

They found that hospital clerks, when operating without access to the central population registry and lacking full names or dates of birth for the dead, had marked the wrong people as dead in their records.

In total, 8% of people who were listed as dead in August have since been removed from the official death toll. Many of those may later be added back in, as the judicial investigations proceed.

‘It doesn’t look like manipulation’

Gabriel Epstein, a research assistant at US thinktank The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said there’s no reason to think the errors are the result of deliberate manipulation intended to inflate the share of women and children among the dead.

“If 90% of the removed entries were men aged 18-40, that would look like manipulation,” he said. “But it doesn’t look like that.”

Of those entries removed since the start of the war and whose demographic information was recorded, 41% are men aged 18 to 60, while 59% are women, children and elderly people.

By comparison, 44% of remaining deaths are working-age men. This means that the removals have had the effect of slightly reducing the share of women and children in the official list.

chart

Names were previously added to the list without verification

Until October, Mr Wahidi said, names submitted via the online form had been added to the official list of registered deaths before undergoing a judicial confirmation process.

The publication of unverified deaths submitted via the form had previously led to issues with the data, with 1,295 deaths submitted via the form being removed from the list prior to October. This included 474 people who were later added back again.

Sky News previously understood that names from the form were only published after undergoing judicial confirmation. However, Mr Wahidi says this practice only began in October.

“This does cause me to downgrade the quality of the earlier lists, definitely below where I thought they were,” said Professor Michael Spagat, chair of Every Casualty Counts, an independent civilian casualty monitoring organisation.

Read more:
Analysis: Gaza aid workers’ deaths
What happened to the ceasefire?

A Ministry of Health document from July 2024 confirms that names submitted through the online form were, at the time, included in the official fatality list before being verified.

These names “are initially included in the final count of martyrs, but verification procedures are undertaken afterward”, the document says.

“They basically said that they were posting these things provisionally pending investigation,” said Prof Spagat.

“There may have been literally zero people, including us, who actually absorbed this message, but they weren’t hiding it either.”

More than 1,200 Israelis have been killed in the 7 October attack and ensuing war.


The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.

Continue Reading

World

Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy’s home city

Published

on

By

Children among 19 killed in Russian attack on Zelenskyy's home city

At least 19 people, including nine children, have been killed in a Russian attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s home city, according to Ukrainian officials.

Around 50 people were also wounded in the attack, according to emergency services, and regional governor Serhiy Lysak said more than 30, including a three-month-old baby, were in hospital.

Ukraine’s president said Friday’s attack on Kryvyi Rih showed Russia “does not want a ceasefire”.

“The whole world sees it,” said Mr Zelenskyy.

“Every missile, every strike drone proves that Russia only wants war.

“And only on the pressure of the world on Russia, on all efforts to strengthen Ukraine, our air defence, our forces – only on this does it depend when the war will end.”

Russia’s defence ministry claimed it had struck a military gathering – a statement denounced by the Ukrainian military as misinformation.

Mr Lysak wrote on the Telegram messaging app that 18 people were killed when a missile hit residential areas and sparked fires.

Later on Friday, Russian drones attacked homes and killed one person, Oleksandr Vilkul, the city’s military administrator, said.

Latest updates: President’s home city hit by missile attack

Local authorities said the missile strike damaged about 20 apartment buildings, more than 30 vehicles, an educational building and a restaurant.

They said emergency responders were at the scene and psychologists were helping survivors.

Confirming the “high-precision strike”, the Russian defence ministry said on Telegram it targeted “a meeting of unit commanders and Western instructors” in a city restaurant.

“As a result of the strike, enemy losses total up to 85 servicemen and officers of foreign countries, as well as up to 20 vehicles,” the ministry added.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
Image:
Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says at least 14 people have died, including six children, following a Russian missile strike on Kryvyi Rih. Pic: Telegram/Zelenskiy
Image:
Pic: Telegram/Zelenskyy

US ‘not interested in negotiations about negotiations’

It comes after the US secretary of state issued a veiled threat to Russia as talks about a ceasefire with Ukraine continue.

Speaking in Brussels during a NATO meeting, Marco Rubio said the US was “not interested in… negotiations about negotiations”.

“We’re testing to see if the Russians are interested in peace. Their actions – not their words, their actions – will determine whether they’re serious or not, and we intend to find that out sooner rather than later,” he said.

Read more:
Israeli troops expand ‘security zone’ in northern Gaza
UK in talks with Brazil over ‘potential sale’ of warships

In March, the US agreed a proposed 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine after talks in Saudi Arabia. Later, Washington negotiated a limited ceasefire about energy infrastructure with Russia.

Since then, the warring countries have accused each other of violating the energy ceasefire.

UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who was also in Brussels on Fridaym said Vladimir Putin “continues to obfuscate, continues to drag his feet” on ceasefire talks.

He added that while the Russian president should be accepting a ceasefire, “he continues to bombard Ukraine, its civilian population, its energy supplies”.

“We see you, Vladimir Putin. We know what you are doing,” he said.

Continue Reading

Trending