We have only just met – I have barely sat down – when Ivor Perl confesses a profound doubt. “How much has it helped in the 80 years, us talking?”
By “us”, he means fellow survivors of the Holocaust who have testified to the horrors they witnessed. He wants to know if all the talks at schools, all the media interviews, have achieved anything. “Can you tell me?”
I ask him to answer his own question.
“I think: nothing.” He urges me to “look around the world” – at Ukraine, at Sudan, at China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslims. “So I would like to know, is there anything the world has learned from us?”
It’s a bleak way for our conversation to begin. Yet there is nothing bleak about an encounter with Perl. He is 91, but looks 10 years younger. His handshake is strong, his humour warm, his engagement total. And, on this bright morning, in a room at the Jewish Care campus in north London, where he has a “retirement living apartment” close to the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre, he has come ready to talk – about the year or more he spent, from the age of 12, as a prisoner in Auschwitz and in the network of Dachau subcamps known as Kaufering nearly eight decades ago.
Not that he was always so willing to tell this story. For most of his adult life, it remained largely unmentioned. He would talk about it when he met up with his older brother, Alec; they would reminisce about life in the old country, in the Hungarian town of Makó, where they played in the snow in winter and swam in the Maros river in summer, and remember the family that was taken from them – their mother, their father, their four sisters and three brothers, all murdered by the Nazis. But to others he said little.
Even with his wife, who died in 2016, he did not talk about it “in depth”. With his children, even less so. They didn’t ask him and he didn’t tell. “They didn’t want to hurt me and I didn’t want to hurt them. And, anyway, I thought: there’s only one way to go forward.” Which is? “Brush yourself down and carry on with life as best one can.”
And so, like so many Holocaust survivors, he concerned himself with the present and the future rather than the immediate past. Brought to England in November 1945 as one of a group of orphans, he started forging a new life. “In my younger days, I was more concerned about making a living. I mean, come on, I started off with nothing.”
It worked. He built a successful – “relatively”, he insists – clothes manufacturing company; he had four children (and now six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren). For half a century, the past stayed in the past – until it could be contained no longer.
In 1995, his synagogue organised an event to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the war. They had invited a survivor to speak about the Holocaust, but, with a fortnight to go, he dropped out. The synagogue turned to Perl. What followed was “two weeks of soul-searching and interrupted sleep”. But he spoke. And he kept on speaking, to schools, mainly, eventually setting down his memories in an account initially meant solely for his family. That text has now been published as a slim, memorable volume of Holocaust testimony: Chicken Soup Under the Tree.
It tells the story of a boy caught by the final sweep of the Nazi’s net. In the spring of 1944, weeks before the D-day landings, when the end of the war was in sight, the Nazis took their war against the Jews into Hungary, where they would round up and deport more than 400,000 Jewish men, women and children in just 56 days, loading them on to freight trains bound for Auschwitz.
For the young Yitzchak Perlmutter, that prospect was not terrifying but, he is embarrassed to admit, almost exciting. He had seldom been on a train, so it was a novelty – albeit one that would wear off after several days without food, water or sanitation. Besides, he and the others believed that whatever this mysterious place called Auschwitz held in store for them, “we had suffered such a lot that anything must be better than what we’ve got now”. So when they were told: “You’re going into Poland,” he thought: yes, let’s go.
As the train pulled into Auschwitz, Ivor was one of those who heard – and understood – the Yiddish warning whispered into the wagons by prisoners on the railway platform, urging the children within to say they were older than they were. He pretended to be 16 and so was directed to the right, to be a slave. Those sent to the left, including his mother, younger sister and little brother, would be herded into the gas chambers.
In Kaufering, he would be worked hard, building an underground bunker and tasked with carrying bags of cement that were too heavy for his 12-year-old back. (Other prisoners directed him to sit out the shift by hiding in a nearby cave, so that he might dodge the impossible work.) But, in Auschwitz, the hard labour had mostly dried up by the time he was there. He remembers it as a holding camp, where prisoners would wait until an order came from another camp, or factory, demanding a fresh supply of slaves.
So the boy from Makó spent much of the day “wandering about”, coping with lice, disease and all-consuming, relentless hunger. He is candid about this, speaking matter-of-factly about how starvation changes a person, ridding them of any consideration except a base instinct for survival. “I was an animal. I just wanted to live … The person next to you died, you woke up in the morning, you were happy. Pinch his shoes, take his clothes. I was so young.”
Of course, this was the Nazis’ intention. “They gave me a number. For what reason? Obviously, to dehumanise us. And they were so successful about it.”
Perl’s number was 112021, but it is not tattooed on his arm. When the day came to brand the digits on his skin, there was a long queue and no time to get everyone done. The next day, the tattooists ran out of ink. A week later, he was lining up when an air-raid siren sounded and the prisoners were ordered back to barracks. The moment had passed.
He then tells me something remarkable. About a decade after his arrival in England, in the 1950s, he seriously considered getting the tattoo done himself. “Many, many times. I’m ashamed of myself. I was going to put my number on there. Because I felt I hadn’t paid the price.” Without a tattoo, he felt as if he wasn’t “a fully fledged survivor”.
We come to the question that often makes those who endured the camps uncomfortable: how did they survive? In my experience, Holocaust survivors dislike the question, because if they name a specific character trait or quality, then it implies that those who died in their millions lacked that quality, which feels painfully close to suggesting the victims’ deaths were their own fault, that their fate was in their hands. It never was.
As such, the first answer often consists of one word: luck. The Nazis were so arbitrary in their cruelty that which inmate was beaten to death, or shot, or sent to the left, could be the result of a whim. Survival was utterly random.
Sure enough, when I put the question to Perl, he recalls a discussion he heard 20 years ago between two scholars of the Holocaust. “They came to two conclusions, which I thought were so true. Nobody survived the camps without luck. But not everybody that had luck survived.”
In his case, the explanation has a lot to do with his older brother. At one point, Ivor was in the camp infirmary, a clinic patients rarely left. He had typhus and had been in there for two days when Alec, helped by a Polish Jewish prisoner, came to rescue him. His brother carried him out over his shoulder. “We supported each other. I mean, I’m alive for a number of times that he saved me literally from the jaws of death.”
His brother was also at the centre of an episode that lingers in the memory. The two were squabbling when one of the kapos – enforcers picked from among the prisoners, often convicted criminals – ordered them to fight. The kapo made them hit each other hard, until they stood with “tears running down our faces from the shame and pain, hitting each other until he was satisfied”. They were 13 and 15.
What else, besides luck and the presence of an older brother, does he think enabled him to survive?
“Hope, you had to have. I’m convinced that all of us, without hope, wouldn’t have lasted a day.” Faith played a part, too. He recalls a moment when, crammed into that cattle truck on the train, he and his fellow Jews spotted what he now knows were a plane’s vapour trails. “Not having witnessed such a phenomenon before, we thought it was a sign from God,” he writes in the book. “Of course, most wanted to believe it was a good omen. The situation was so grim that we grasped at anything that could make any sense of our predicament.” Somehow, Perl’s faith did not leave him entirely, despite all he had seen. He still prays in a synagogue, although he is not sure if that is “from the heart or from the head”.
I ask whether he believes in God. He calls that a “very good, dangerous question”. Can he answer it? “All I can tell you is, when they put the lid on me and I hear the nails knocked down, I can find and ask Him, the one above, or whatever it is, what was it all about. Because here I can’t tell you.”
A willed blindness may have played a part in Perl’s survival. Plenty of testimonies from the time suggest Jews not only had no inkling of the fate that awaited them when they arrived in Auschwitz, but also that they chose to repress the knowledge once they had acquired it.
Perl says that he didn’t know people were being gassed, their bodies being turned into smoke and ash, even when he was inside Auschwitz – that he only fully understood that after the war. As a prisoner, he had seen the huge chimneys of the crematoriums, but when he asked a fellow inmate what they were, he was told the building was a bakery. Call it a coping mechanism, or a survival strategy, but the repression of that knowledge – and the knowledge that most of his family had been murdered – may have helped him live from one day to the next.
Even after the war, awareness of his bereavement came gradually, as different avenues of inquiry – seeking information on his parents and siblings from the Red Cross and others – hit dead ends. It was during a Yom Kippur service in a displaced persons camp, in a congregation of thousands of similarly bereaved Jews, that he finally realised that his family was gone for ever.
Once in England, there was no counselling or therapy for those who had endured the greatest imaginable trauma. “I keep on thinking to myself: I wish we had that as soon as you came from the camps, rather than that they wait until after you bring up your family.” He is referring to the therapy he has had in more recent years. Did that help? “If I want to be honest, no. Because the pain that’s there, it’s there. It’s not … I’m managing it. I’ve got to manage it. I’ve managed it. And they can’t answer the question, like I ask: does it help talking about it?”
He tells me he does not feel angry, not even when he came face to face with the Nazis and their collaborators. I wonder, again, if this has helped him live. He recalls how, after the liberation, the Americans brought some SS men back to the camp, allowing the former prisoners to hit or throw stones at those who had been their tormentors. But young Perl did not take part. Instead, he felt “a mixture of pity and guilt”. Why on earth would he have felt guilty? “Guilt to have that need to kill, to hurt someone, to kill someone.”
Decades later, he was a witness in the war crimes trial of the Auschwitz guard Oskar Gröning. “In walks a frail, old man with a walking frame, one nurse either side. What was the first thought I had?” His answer is pity.
He does not claim an exceptional gift for compassion. When he is asked by schoolchildren: “Do you hate the Germans?” he replies: “Why do you say ‘the Germans’? Who were my guards? Hungarians, Ukrainians, Poles, French, Estonians.” If he went down that road, he says, he would end up hating everyone. “No, I think what I hate is what human beings allow themselves to do.”
This should not be misread as a state of philosophical calm. Perl is clear and frank that he is haunted by that year of his life. He describes a visit to Sandringham: “You’ve got a beautiful garden with a wire fence and forests at the back. What do you think the first thing came to my mind?” The subcamp of Dachau, fenced off in the middle of a forest, where Perl was held nearly 80 years ago.
He lives comfortably now, although his wife and brother are gone. He has friends; he can eat lunch sitting outside in the campus garden. There are young people around, including boys wearing the same religious garb he wore in Makó. “For the first few weeks, I loved it. But now I keep on thinking to myself: I was their age when I was taken away. And my sisters, my mother. It always rears its head. You can never forget it.”
Chicken Soup Under the Tree by Ivor Perl (Lemon Soul, £8) is out now
