(somber music) - [Arnost] What makes a man a man is his dignity.

But it's the most fragile part of man.

And the Nazis based their new order on the fragility of human dignity.

They knew that it's very easy to destroy human dignity.

Now, not everybody accepted this, so people try to fight against the Nazis for their rights.

And this is what the resistance people are.

They understood that their life without certain values is not life and they were ready to die and ready to help.

And here they are, memories of four people who went through the harshest test of our generation.

They were in camps.

- I joined the resistance when I was a teenager and we were really idealistic and we believed that truth must prevail, we believed in democracy and we simply hated Nazis, Nazism and everything that they stood for.

And so we helped smuggle Jewish people across the border to freedom.

Myself and my companions could speak the languages without an accent.

And actually we carried all kinds of false papers and the Slovak paper in the right hand pocket and the Hungarian papers in the left hand pocket.

And that's how it all started.

- There was poster all over France, helping a prisoner, an ally soldiers, you were shot.

We would take those guys, bring them to a certain place, hide them for a few days or a week or two, feed them, clothe them, change of identity, and then send them to another group.

Well, when I was arrested, the first thing I was asked by the Gestapo, "Where are the Americans?"

"I don't know."

And that persistent thing, "I don't know."

I was in the dark.

His face was close to mine, and all of a sudden he puts the lights on and said, "You don't know the Americans, right?"

And he hit me.

I said to myself, if they ask me so much question about the American is because they don't know.

If they knew, they wouldn't ask me.

So as long as they don't know, I'm not gonna tell 'em they were 100 yards away.

So that's just the way.

(Irina speaks Russian) - [Interpreter] I was studying at the Moscow Institute at that time.

And a large group of us went into the army as volunteers.

This was in the very beginning of 1942.

And after our training, we were ordered to parachute on the territory of Belorussia.

The forest where we landed was being searched by German soldiers with dogs.

They surrounded us, captured us, and took us in this Belorussian forest.

- My work in the underground was varied, until I was assigned to a shipyard.

My job at the shipyard was to see to it that the two ships, two freighters that we were building were not to be finished.

Everything you did in Norway during the occupation you did for the Germans.

If you built a ship, the Germans would get the ship.

So one day we received a note from the German high command, that Grossadmiral Raeder, the chief of the Navy was coming to Norway, and on that occasion, his wife wanted to baptize these ships, so they better be ready.

We got the ships ready for launching, but when they were launched, they sank.

I went home to my house, which is on the outskirts of town and I put my key into the door and opened the door and into the front room of the house.

And three men in civilian clothing stood up and said, (speaks German), "Are you Mr. Dittman?

You are under arrest."

(gentle somber music) - They put us 100 in each box car, in each car 100.

Luckily, I was one of the last ones to jump into the wagon.

I was able to be against the wall with a little bit of breeze.

And it was so hot in those strands, so hot.

The cold and the heat from our bodies, we had water ripping from the top and that's all we had to drink the water.

But then it was an awful thing.

I think it was the most awful thing that ever happened during my captivities, the trip.

Imagine 100 men in a small compartment like this, those like me, lucky one who were against the wall with a little bit of air coming through that door.

I maintained, I was five days and five night we left on Wednesday, we arrived on Sunday with no food, no water, no sanitation, nothing.

So those who were in the center who couldn't stand up for too long, they would fall.

And those who they fall on, they were fighting.

So fighting erupted.

We became savage.

We became animals.

Everybody was fighting one another.

Murdered, killing one another.

See?

It was awful.

- There is nobody who could have predicted how people would behave.

You had people whom you knew in the other world, in the outside world as very strong energetic women, for instance.

And they collapsed like a wheat, morally, I mean, and then, of course, physically, because if your moral backbone didn't hold out, it was very hard to survive.

On the other hand, you knew some weaklings who you imagine that if the wind would blow, they would faint.

And they stood it and they became indirectly leaders of others.

(gentle somber music continues) - The actual initiation process, it was grotesque.

We were hauled out 100 at the time, pushed inside the gate, and then we were told to run.

And then you ran from the roll call area into the first place where your clothes were taken off, everything stuffed into a sack.

Then when this was done, and it probably was done in a minute, then you ran to another area where you go into showers, then they showered you.

Then you ran from there to another place where somebody stood with clippers and stripped your hair and all your bodily hair with the same stripper from one person to the next.

Then you ran from the area into another room where there was a bath of carbolic acid and you had to dive underneath the carbolic acid.

Then all of you, this is not happening, when you're naked.

Then you run from there into the clothing depot and you get yourself dressed into the striped clothes.

Then you run to the next place and you pick up your red triangle and your number, 32,232 in my case.

- Came out of that, no hair, no nothing.

They give you a pair of trousers and a shirt, and that was it.

And then you went to a barrack and always "schnell" and "schnell" and "schnell" with a gummi.

The gummi is a piece of a rubber, like a hose that you garden.

And all the (indistinct) were, that's the way they used to give you orders.

If you didn't understand German, it was too bad.

You had to fast...

The gummi was the translator, interpreter.

And so you learn fast.

(Irina speaks Russian) - [Interpreter] We were standing at this bath house, as they called it, although it was never a bath house, and we heard this strange sound filled with the bravado of march.

It was very strange to us that in such a horrible place such loud and beautiful music was being played.

We were standing by the windows watching prisoners returning to the camps.

Each column was holding dead bodies on their shoulders, marching in time to this music.

The corpses were swaying in time to this beautiful music.

This was the first and a horrible impression to experience things, which should never be in unison.

The beautiful music and the corpses swaying to the tempo of that music.

This was the first impression that has remained in my mind, in front of my eyes since that time.

(gentle somber music continues) - Okay, you go in a commando, you go to work, we call that a commando.

You live in the morning, you are counted, counted, counted.

You've got 500 Stock.

Because we had no names, we were not men.

We were Stock.

In English, stick.

Okay?

You live in the morning, you have 500 Stock.

When you come back at night, you must have 500 Stock.

You may have 20 dead in those 500 Stock.

Nevermind, you bring them.

The Appelplatz, you put your five, the 480 standing up and the 20 dead, you put them in front, so they're counted 500.

The count is there.

Then you take those 20 dead, you put 'em to the crematorium and you make a subtraction from 500 less 20 is 480.

The count is there.

- To see as I did see on several occasions some of my close friends just dropping, literally standing roll call, appel as it was called.

And you just suddenly see, next to you, a figure goes down.

And either she was dead, which was the easier solution, I guess, for her.

Or she became sick of, I dunno, typhus or diarrhea or whatever, which was a very dangerous thing, because sickness had no place in Auschwitz or in concentration camps.

And you knew that sometimes that when somebody got sick, chances were much better that she or he would go up the chimney.

So that was very tough to take.

- We had in Mauthausen, like in every camp, selection for the gas chamber.

It usually was on Monday.

The barrack came out, all the gas in the bank came out and you had to pass in front of an SS, and he would look at at those guys passing in front of him and he would point like this.

The minute he had his finger like this, you were a dead man, because somebody, a couple was there, took your number right away, and you passed.

I went six time, I passed that selection.

And on Saturday, those who had been selected on Monday came to my barrack.

One day I had a father and son, a Frenchman, father and son.

What could I say to this guy?

I knew what was gonna happen in five, 10 minutes, but I had to lie to them.

I said, "Don't worry guys, nothing's gonna happen.

Ah, I've been here six months.

I used to lie, you know.

I've been here six months.

You're taken to a camp, special camp for..." They would look at me and trust me, you know?

And deep down, you know, I was ashamed.

I had to lie.

I couldn't tell them the truth.

I said, I couldn't tell them, "Listen, guys, in five minutes, you're finished."

- I somehow figured in my immature simple mind that few people ever die on their birthdays.

Do you ever think of it this way?

It just went through my mind.

So I figured if on the day of my birthday they will again ask in Auschwitz for volunteers for factory work or elsewhere, which could have been a sham and half of these transports went up the chimney, if they would ask on my birthday, I said, I will volunteer, which is exactly what happened.

And as we were marching out the camp, about 500 of us, for the first time we saw color, for the first time in many months, we saw color because Auschwitz was gray.

Our uniforms were gray, and the ground was gray and the barracks were gray, and our faces were gray, and we saw green grass.

And my girlfriend from Yugoslavia really risked her neck and stepped out of line and grabbed for that grass.

And you know how you grab a lot.

And she remained with two blades of grass in her fist.

And she handed them to me as a birthday bouquet.

The first instinct prevailed, and I ate the two blades of grass.

I ate my birthday bouquet.

- In the center of the camp is a gnarled, almost petrified oak tree.

And even during our stay in the camp, there was an old brass plate on this tree that said, "Under this oak tree, sat Goethe when writing his poems about this beautiful part of the world."

And you know, Goethe lived in Weimar and this was his hiking area.

But we saw this strange converging of the summit and the pit of German culture, right in the camp.

(dark somber music) There were in the camp prisoners in a variety of categories and they were identified by the triangle.

The red triangle was the political, the green triangle was worn by criminals, and a green triangle would have a K on it, meaning (speaks German), small petty criminal, or it'd have an S meaning (speaks German).

In addition, we had homosexuals wearing a pink triangle.

- And then you had a F for French, R for Russian, and so forth and so on.

The Jews, unfortunately, unfortunately had no mention of their nationality.

They didn't have a P like Polish, no, or R like Russian.

So all they had was the star of David.

- The Germans, in their absurd claim for racial supremacy would treat prisoners on the basis of their racial background, which of course in Buchenwald placed everyone of Slavic background at the lower rung of the ladder.

The Jewish prisoners weren't there, except for their march to the gas chambers, but within the hierarchy of prisoners, the lowest ones were the Polish prisoners.

And a notch above were the Russians.

A notch above the Russians were the Bulgarian and the Romanians and the Hungarians.

Then the Czechs, and the Czechs came closest to those of us who were from the western world.

And in the western world, the lowest rung on the ladder were the French.

The Germans had an innate hatred for the French.

And next to the French came the Belgium.

And then you began to enter into the Germanic groups.

And in the Germanic groups, the lower, but these are now very high up where the Dutch, the Danes, and the Norwegians - And there were gypsies.

There was no doubt about it that there were gypsies, men, women, children, family groups.

And I so remembered, etched on my memory this one gypsy girl, she might have been between 20 and 25, was wearing a white angora bolero, which was the cat's meow in those days.

And she was wearing that.

And she looked me straight in the eye, you know, there was direct eye contact between that individual and me as if she had asked me, "Tell me quickly, what do I expect?"

And of course I couldn't tell her expect everything and nothing.

- [Interpreter] We saw the caravans arrive, and we saw the gypsies in the distance.

We all assumed they probably lived a better lives than we did, because they were all together.

But they had a terrible fate.

One night, all of them, thousands of them that were in the camp were taken to the crematory.

It was a terrible night.

We heard that something terrible was happening.

Sounds of people who knew what their fate was going to be, that they were going to be burned, all of them were going to be taking out, the children, the old people, the men, the women.

We heard the trucks coming.

They were taking in one night to the crematory.

It was awful because we understood what was happening and we were unable to help in any way, to stop what was happening.

This is a terrible feeling.

And in the morning, we saw by the barracks, by the gypsy barracks, their things left behind.

Nothing was left of their camp except this empty barracks and the broken scattered things.

- The majority of the prisoners were from Poland and the majority were Jews.

I have seen thousands of people arrive at the station, march in long lines into the gas chambers.

And within 15, 20 minutes, the soot started belching out through the chimneys and the the suit was greasy.

And that fell on us.

If you didn't just blow it away, if you tried to take it away with the other hand, you smeared it and it was greasy.

And that I think is the one of the strongest memories I have.

I have others.

I have memories of smells, of scorched flash, of hair burning, and that somehow people usually don't remember smells.

I remember the smell and it's in my nose.

And this is, what, 40 years later, and it's still in my nose.

- [Interpreter] The fate of the Jews is difficult to speak of because theirs was the most terrible fate.

They were doomed from the moment they arrived in the camps.

They waited every day for something terrible to take place.

At any moment, any second, the crematory was awaiting for them.

- In the course of a night, we knew that there was a new contingent of the prisoners arriving into the (speaks German), into the small camp.

In order to get into (speaks German), you had to pass the avenue by our barracks.

And this kept on and on during the night.

And these, by the way, were brought from the box cars into the (speaks German) without going through the initiation process.

And that in itself was very strange, but was of course related to the destiny of these prisoners.

As we woke for (indistinct) at 4:30 in the morning and went out in front of our barracks, we heard from the lower camp the shuffling of clogs against the frozen gravel, something I call a gray sound.

And it mounted somewhat in intensity as the marchers approached our place in the camp, and then passed us by, and we saw in the dimness of this morning, people in prisoner uniform, infants to the very, very old.

And we began to hear the grinding of the engine of the arriving mobile gas chambers, which were huge vans that moved in through the camp and stopped at the roll call area.

And we knew, and these prisoners knew that they were walking into the gas chambers.

And for the rest of the day the smoke bellowed forth so thickly from the crematory chimney, that daylight really never broke through.

It was a leaden cloud that hung over the camp.

And we learned, while this was going on, that these were some 10,000 Hungarian Jews who had been on transport for weeks or months.

We don't know.

They looked emaciated and despaired as they walked to their death.

And it's the sharpest memory I have from the camp.

(Irina speaks Russian) - [Interpreter] Probably the memories of the children are the most horrible.

One couldn't even call them children anymore, because nothing was left of them.

They were only skeletons with skin covering the bones, huge eyes staring at you.

And it was frightening to look into them, because we had no answer for those eyes.

But to witness and to watch the dying children, there can be nothing more frightening in life.

This is the worst.

- As I stood on the sideline and knew what was happening, I felt very guilty.

I felt guilty for being part of the ethnic background of the people who perpetrated the crime.

I felt further guilty because I would perhaps survive, and I would ask myself the question, why are we what we are?

And why are they what they are and they're not allowed to be?

And I have had people come up to me and say, this is not true.

This could not have happened.

And of course, it is far beyond the truth, but it was only a fraction of what happened.

And I am not glad that I saw it, but I am satisfied that I can bear witness to this event and see to it that within my power, it will not happen again.

- [Arnost] These people were fighting for their memory.

They understand the importance of truth and are not ashamed for the most naked memories by that regaining the dignity which they lost.

And this is what the Nazis didn't know.

This is a triumph of memory.

(gentle somber music) (gentle somber music continues)