Raquel Rutman: "The Nazis lost the battle with me"

Raquel Rutman was born in 1928 in Lodz, Poland. His prisoner number during the Second World War was 58,032. He lives in Buenos Aires today, but spent most of his life in Córdoba.

He welcomes me with the table in his house full of food. "Never miss again," he says.

His lips show an almost permanent smile, but it is inevitable that he is interrupted in some parts of his narrative.

"I was small when I saw Nazi troops entering my city, I lived with my mother and my brother Leo, and I saw many of my neighbors wave the flags with me." swastika, celebrating the arrival of the Germans, "he says.

A mangele

Raquel has lived many different situations that day, although she has not imagined what she should live in the near future.

The confinement in the ghetto, the hunger, the misery, the diseases, the suicides, the rebellions contained by the Nazis by the blood and the fire, the executions, the humiliations, the hangings, the piles of corpses. Also the selection of people to walk to the death camps.

"First they took the children and the elderly, my mother sore my finger to paint my face as a make-up, then I went up on a stage behind my aunts to make her look older and so avoid being taken in. He was only 12 years old, "he says.

And he continues: "We spent four years in the Lodz ghetto, then we were all transferred to Auschwitz."

"For me, it's seconds," he says. When we arrived at Auschwitz and opened the floodgates of the freight cars, we left quickly; We were out of breath and we traveled in a hurry. They separated us by bad and age and I could see neither my mother nor her sisters. My brother Leo went to another line. "

"Immediately, I met Dr. Josef Mengele, I remember perfectly his face, his guards, his well-kept dogs.Two more times, I chose the doctor of death, who separated those who went to the gas chambers, worked as slaves or served as guinea pigs for their experiments, "remembers Raquel.

"When we arrived at the barracks, people like walking ghosts told us that the showers were fake, that gas was coming out and that the chimneys came from ovens used to burn corpses," he says.

And he goes on to say: "It was months of forced labor, my strength was at an end, the diet consisted of half a slice of bread and a black liquid every day, and I could never taste a similar bread again. to that one. "

March and release

The phone rings and I hear it speak in Polish. Another call and service in Yiddish. "Surviving friends, we meet sometimes …", he explains, and continues his story: "The Nazis asked for workers for a factory in Germany and I introduced myself, I did not know if the reason The transfer was real, but I did not have much time in Auschwitz and decided to take the risk.They took me with a group to Gubel, an aircraft parts factory. The work was atrocious, the treatment was inhuman. "

"When they started to feel the bombardment of the allies, the Germans of the factory, mostly the elderly, took refuge in a basement prepared for this purpose, and the slave workers forced us to stay in the center of the town. "Where a bomb falls here, you will be the dead," they told us, "he said.

"When the Soviet troops approached, they took us on foot to Bergen Belsen.It was the death march, few of us survived and, when I arrived, I 've survived. I saw the high piles of corpses.It was that it was not an extermination camp, it was a job; there are therefore neither crematoria nor gas chambers, the prisoners died of hunger, "he recalls.

"We were eventually released by the British and the Haganah (British-occupied illegal army of Israel) placed us young people and children in a house that functioned as a hospital and an orphanage in Germany to be able to recover. I found my brother a few months later, my father, who had emigrated to Argentina before the war, saved us, "he said.

The Nazis in the country

"It was worth seeing in the newspapers photos of Adolf Eichmann imprisoned, handcuffed and then tried in Jerusalem, to see Josef Schwamberger arrested in Huerta Grande and tried in Germany," said Raquel.

"I knew that there were enough Nazis in Argentina, many of them in Córdoba, but I do not worry, it is neither the state nor the army of this country that wanted to eliminate all Jews, "he said.

"Sometimes I saw Hakenkreuz (swastika) or painted that hired Hitler in the city of Cordoba or in the Sierras, but these murderers would not hurt me anymore, nor to me, "he says, and continues:" I was not afraid to find myself in the street with Nazis that I would have known; I would have immediately denounced it in my community because the government authorities were tolerant of these criminals. I never looked for them. I devoted myself to living my life and making the most of it, it was the best, it was what I learned, it was what I owed to my murdered family. "

"The Nazis lost the battle with me: I was happy, I have two children and several grandchildren," he concludes.

He shows me the fake Uruguayan document with which he was able to enter Argentina to meet his father and his brother. "That's because (Juan Domingo) Perón had blocked the entrance of the Jews," he said.

With his warm smile, always present, and with his keen and worried look, he thinks the world has not learned, that genocides continue to happen … He says goodbye with a kiss and a caress, and I go out in the rain of Buenos Aires. The sky cried, once more.

The survivors

I have known Raquel since I was little, since I go to school with her son, my friend Eduardo. I've always known that she was a survivor of this atrocity, but she never talked to us about it. Only a few years later, when Holocaust deniers began to appear, he decided to tell what he had experienced. "I'm one of the few who can get out of this hell, the world needs to know what happened there," he said.

I met several survivors of the Nazi mbadacre. When I asked them how and why they could survive, they answered that it was "only by chance", and I do not doubt it, but I found in each of them something in common: their spirit positive, their desire to live, their knowledge to do the little things, the strength of your soul.

Holocaust Day

Every January 27, the International Day of Remembrance for Holocaust Victims is commemorated. On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp and extermination of Auschwitz-Birkenau, now Polish territory. The United Nations General Assembly set this commemorative date in November 2005.

The survivors

I have known Raquel since I was little, since I go to school with her son, my friend Eduardo. I've always known that she was a survivor of this atrocity, but she never talked to us about it. Only a few years later, when Holocaust deniers began to appear, he decided to tell what he had experienced. "I'm one of the few who can get out of this hell, the world needs to know what happened there," he said.

I met several survivors of the Nazi mbadacre. When I asked them how and why they could survive, they answered that it was "only by chance", and I do not doubt it, but I found in each of them something in common: their spirit positive, their desire to live, their knowledge to do the little things, the strength of your soul.