The smell of smoke from incinerated bodies is still very present in the memory of the only two survivors of the Auschwitz extermination camp left in Ecuador, where only a few years ago they decided to open up and tell the horror they experienced.
«Three months after my arrival (to the camp) we heard at night how they were taking people out of other barracks with shouts and the Shema Israel (the main prayer of Judaism). In the morning there was nothing left, only a ferocious smoke of burned bodies," recalls Gerti Zentner, 96 years old, at her home in Quito.
Accompanied by her two daughters who help her understand the questions, this survivor, born in Prague in 1923, kept her story captive until a grandson pulled the thread and managed to reveal a past that had become taboo.
This Friday he will light one of the six torches in memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, in a solemn ceremony at the National Assembly on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the largest Nazi extermination center.
Zentner was the daughter of a Germanophile doctor from a town near Germany but, after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the family moved to Pilsen, in Czech Bohemia.
The fact that his father worked as a doctor, he argues, helped lead to their initial deportation in 1939 to the Theresienstadt camp, where he managed to steal what he could to eat.
"We knew that every three months they sent 10.000 Jews, arriving from all over Europe, in transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau," explains a nonagenarian, then a 15-year-old girl.
When his name and that of his brother appeared on a list to be deported, there was nothing more to do. He believes it must have been at the end of 1942 among memories that are already beginning to mix.
He does remember the "animal wagons" in which he traveled to the fateful countryside, how they were separated into men and women, and those people who had arrived three months earlier whom he saw "melancholic because they knew that in three months they would be executed." .
After their arrival at Auschwitz, the well-known procedure of stripping them of all possessions, including clothing, "striped uniforms", cold showers, those moments when they had to stand and wait for roll call.
And that number, 72896, forever marked on his left arm and that over the years already appears cracked on his fine skin, like those indelible memories that he still keeps although somewhat disfigured in his mind.
A few days after completing six months in the camp, she was called to "parade" before the gaze of the feared Doctor Menguele, known as the "angel of death" for his medical experiments on humans and who was in charge of selecting those who could still work.
«I had to die and I was saved. Luckily, they sent me to the right (row),' he says.
Fate moved her from the gas chambers to clear debris in a factory near Hamburg and then to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where she hid in a tent filled with decomposing corpses. There she was rescued by British troops in April 1945.
She met her deceased husband and also a survivor of the Shoah through relatives in Auschwitz, where both of her parents perished.
And he arrived in Ecuador in 1946, like many other German and Central European Jews who escaped from the Nazi hell and saw in the South American country a long-awaited refuge.
Today, Zentner is the grandmother of five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, which she proudly displays in a family photograph as a vindication of life.
Asked what it feels like to be faced with the dread of death, she assures with absolute clarity: "You don't think anything, your brain runs out, you live from one day to the next waiting for a miracle."
For Eva Ehrenfeld, 91 years old, and a native of Kosice, near the border with Hungary in the former Czechoslovakia, that miracle or coincidences of life also accompanied her.
At the age of 14, she moved to Budapest with an aunt to study, until the Germans took the city in 1944 and she returned to her hometown now converted into a ghetto, with a yellow Star of David hidden so that she would not be stopped along the way.
He did not see his mother, who went to help give birth to an aunt, after the raids and deportations began, and he saw his father for the last time in Auschwitz in June 1944, shortly after arriving at the camp in the last train coming from Hungary.
"They took us like little sheep," says this tall woman, today the mother of two children, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
More than 400.000 Hungarian Jews died in Auschwitz, a third of all people murdered in that camp.
"We smelled smoke, we saw smoke and we didn't know what it was and they didn't want to tell me," Ehrenfeld recalls, convinced that she managed to survive absolute dehumanization and certain death thanks to the fact that she was always "a scoundrel."
Her complexion saved her from extermination when she was sent to Latvia by the Nazis to work digging trenches and she was rescued by Soviet troops near Danzig (now Poland).
After the war he tried to return to his city to reunite with his parents until a man told him of his fatal fate. She emigrated to Ecuador with her husband in 1948.
"I never imagined I would live so many years," he reflects before concluding that destiny "is prescribed." EFE
