this is bbc news. the headlines: one of the greatest basketballers of all time, kobe bryant, has been killed in a helicopter crash in california. he was 41. the aircraft in which he, his 13—year—old daughter and seven other people were travelling came down outside the town of calabasas. there were no survivors. china has confirmed around 750 new cases of the coronavirus, raising the total to more than 2,700. more than 80 people have died, mostly in hubei province, where the epidemic began. more than 300 others are critically ill with pneumonia caused by the virus. shia cleric moqtada al—sadr has called off demonstrations in iraq. saying he wanted to avoid internal strife. he had earlier urged supporters to take to the streets of baghdad and other cities. the backdown comes after protesters were injured.

now on bbc news, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz seven sucker dogs to a survivor. —— stephen sucker. welcome to hardtalk, i'm stephen sackur. it is 75 years since allied troops entered the nazi death camp at auschwitz. the very word auschwitz still stirs a unique level of horror. it was the place where hitler?s genocide of european jewry was industrialised with evil precision. my guest today, mindu hornick, is one of the remaining auschwitz survivors. now 90 years old, she continues to speak of the past in the hope that we will learn from her experience. that is her challenge to us — to listen and to draw the right lessons.

mindu hornick, welcome to hardtalk. i want to begin by asking you how you feel about this moment, where there is so much sombre reflection and ceremonial marking of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz. for you, as a survivor, how do you feel? for me, as a survivor, it's very important. memorials, school events, and commemorations are really important to me, because my fear

is always that with the passage of time, if we don't remember, we don't commemorate, and we do not teach children, that the memory of the 20th century, which was horrific, would erode and would disappear with the passage of time. let's make it personal. yes. over the 75 years, have your own memories in any way faded, or not at all? well, have they faded? for instance, for over a0 years, i could not speak about it. really? yes, i could not speak about the holocaust. you mean you didn't want to? you simply couldn't — it was too difficult? there are several reasons. first of all, to begin with,

i think in the first ten years, people didn't want to know. the media didn't want to know. the publishers — there were books published in yiddish and polish and russian, and they weren't interested to do translations. and the second reason is, i think when you're traumatised from a place such as auschwitz, you need a healing time in between, before you could speak. some people took less time and some people took more. but because of my life, how things worked out, it took me perhaps longer than some other ones. and we are going to get to that period, when you felt able to speak of your experience, but let us do it chronologically. let's take you back to your girlhood, being raised in a rural

environment in slovakia, what is now slovakia. yes, yes. close to prague, in fact. yes, yes, it was. you are 12 years old. nearly 13, 13 years of age. and the nazis, of course, were occupying your place of — of residence. they were, yes. they rounded up thejews. and as i understand it, in the end, your father was already taken. but in the end, your mother, your siblings and you were put on a transport, a train. we were put... first of all, we were taken in lorries to a ghetto in kosice. and as you know what these ghettos were, because they would take... they were to sectioned—off part of the city, and we would... we had curfew, we couldn't allow —

we weren't allowed to go out there. and what i remember, we — it was again a part of slovakia. we were in a hayloft for some weeks, and then suddenly they asked us to pack our luggage and took us down to the railway station and put us all into cattle wagons. i mean, at no point did we know where we were going or what was happening, because communication was not as we have it now, i mean, 75 years later. we didn't have mobiles. of course. we didn't have facebook, or anything. so really our communication was nothing, zero. and you were crammed, huge numbers crammed, into these railway wagons. 70 of us were in those wagons,

and they put a bucket in the middle. and there were mothers and children. there were no men. you arrived on the platform at the dreadful auschwitz railway stop. stop, yes. and you and yourfamily were offloaded. yes — well, we heard this terrible clatter. yes, the gates opened, and i mean, the shock and disorientation that set in was unbelievable. and was there selection straightaway? no. wellfletme tell you. and he said to my mother in yiddish, which are your children? and she said, well, these two are my little boys and these two are my girls.

and he said to her in yiddish language, you must let these girls go ahead. let them go ahead. you will see them later. he was so persuasive. and i think the fact that he spoke to her in her language, she looked at us and she said we'd better do it this man says. because you can imagine the disorientation. there were ss men marching up and down with guns on their shoulders. there were barking dogs and blaring loudspeakers. they always had this noise. so he was helping us down these carriages, and we weren't very tall, helping us down this cattle truck. and he said to me, he asked me how old i was, and he said, you say you are 17.

my sister says you are 19, and you are a seamstress, that you have to be. which wasn't true. which wasn't true, but that's what he told us to say when we got to — where? at that point, we never knew. but is it is extraordinary for me to think of you as that girl of 13, separated at that point from your mother. i know. and did you ever see her again? never saw her again. so let me tell you, as we joined this enormous trail of people, we did look back. and i think my mother had a spotted scarf, and we waved to them. so we proceeded. the selection came when we came to the main gate. the gate with arbeit macht frei, works make you free, the gate with arbeit macht frei, works makes you free, inscribed over it.

the german sign. the german, yes. and we were directly proceeded to the main gate, through the main gate to the main camp. in all honesty, years later, i thought about it, i never remember giving my name. i don't, because the shock was such. and people say, why didn't you talk? you didn't talk because the trauma of it, even years later, was still there. so we — we didn't. no, we didn't. we just went through the main gate, and the sight that greeted us beyond the selection gate will stay with me for the rest of my life. there were watchtowers with machine—guns pointed at us, and there were corpses everywhere, and these emaciated looking men walking around in striped

clothing, dragging those... they were like trolleys, full of these skin—and—bone bodies. so after we were collected, a whole train of people, we were marched to be stripped naked, our hair shaven, and to be tattooed with a number. from then on, we have no name. nothing. you were given that advice which probably saved your life, because you were regarded as useful. as useful, yes. and you survived for several months in auschwitz. yes, idid. before being sent to a slave labour camp. correct. looking back, when so many did not survive, what do you think gave

you the strength to get through it? was it luck, or was there something more? well, it is a known fact that people survived in packs. my sister — you lived for each other, to have had a sister. and the second stroke of luck was my mother's older sister, who was a very beautiful lady, had already arrived in auschwitz, and she came to find us in block 14. and she decided — i mean, we were so terribly tearful and distraught, and we said this man promised we will see our mother, and she is not there. what happened ? and somebody shouted in, can you see the smoke, and all this terrible ash?

they are already possibly burnt. and we never heard of crematoria. i didn't know the word crematoria. nor — who has ever heard of people being burnt? can you imagine it? anyway, she did some kind of exchange, i think it was possibly a day or two later, with another cousin or some relatives that wanted to be with their relatives, and took us into her block to take care of us. and yes, we lived for each other and we cared for each other. and that was the reason i survived. and she was all the time, with her daughters, looked after us. it is almost surreal to sit here in this comfortable home of yours, which you have

lived in for decades in the english midlands, and for your extraordinarily expressive memory, to take us back to auschwitz. and when you talk as you do with me, again, do you sort of smell the sights? how hard is it for you to conjure up these images? once i started speaking, can i tell you, i had to dig deep into my subconscious to think what happened. because, let's face it, once we survived, we wanted to get on with our lives. in a sense, you wanted to bury it. we wanted to bury it. we wanted to bury it, get on with our lives, and not live in the past. possibly that is why i am, i think, reasonably normal — because i didn't live in the past.

because a lot of the people that lived in the past and could never get it out of their minds ended up on psychiatrists‘ couches, and so on, and they were sick people, right through life. it was understandable. a lot of young fathers and mothers who have survived, and they have lost all their family, they were the only ones who survived, they couldn't come to terms with anything. it seems to me the extreme trauma that you went through and, let's not forget you were just 13 years old, it involved seeing the absolute worst of your fellow human beings. and i just wonder whether, as you think back, for example, to the way that man, drjosef mengele was in your camp

and walking up and down the lines virtually every day selecting children such as yourself for the most horrifying experiments. he was called the angel of death. that is what we called him. did you use that phrase even at the time? yes, we did. we called him the angel of death. in the end, these were nazis, fanatical people who we cannot quite understand or get inside the heads of, nonetheless, they are human beings. you have seen human beings at the very worst and yet you clearly, as you have said, you emerged and you were not consumed with anger orfear or damage. you got beyond it. we had damage. we had plenty of damage. we had nightmares, terrible nightmares for years afterwards. and in the nightmare you thought to yourself "well, this could not have happened again".

you woke yourself up in the nightmare to, to convince yourself that you are dreaming, that it is not happening again. we had terrible nightmares for years. it was notjust me, i think. most people who survived auschwitz and the terrors of the cruelty of the german soldiers... i mean, how they could stoop to such cruelty is beyond anyone‘s imagination. they were cultured, germany was the most cultured nation in europe. how could they stoop to such inhumanity? of course, more than 1 million people died in auschwitz and the vast majority werejewish. not all but the vast majority

were because hitler's plan a comfortable place for yourself in this new country. was that easy? has it been a process? it was definitely a process. because i came to england with the last youth transport in 19118. so i went back to prague for three years because the russians were closing the borders and the family and the few people that survived were emigrating to australia and to israel and so on.

and to help my aunt, i had an aunt and uncle here in england who were very orthodox and they had a traditional home. so to be quite honest, when i got back to prague i did not think we were the chosen people. religion did not mean anything to me.