Poland – A Holocaust survivor whose name was found in a bottled message on the grounds of Auschwitz this week said the discovery was a “mystery” to him.
Subscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Museum officials said on Monday that workers demolishing a wall that was once part of the Nazi death camp in Poland had found a hand-written message apparently signed by seven prisoners, only two of whom survived.
“I am a little shaken up by this bottle business – it’s a mystery,” Albert Veissid, now a sprightly 84-year-old, said at his home in Allauch in southeastern France.
“It’s incredible. I remember everything from the camp, from A to Z. As I speak to you now, I can see the images before my eyes.
“But this bottle business is an enigma. The biggest surprise of my life,” said the former fairground worker, who was arrested by collaborationist French authorities in 1943 and deported to Poland the following year.
Dated September 20, 1944, the message listed the names and camp ID numbers of seven Auschwitz prisoners aged 18 to 20, all Polish nationals except for Mr Veissid, who worked together on the construction of an air shelter.
Workers found it packed inside the mortar of a wall of a building in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim that served as a warehouse for the camp’s Nazi guards during World War II, now part of a local high school.
Mr Veissid said he remembers meeting the six Poles in question while working as a builder at the camp.
“It’s true I did them some favours. There was food supplied upstairs and they used to steal tubs of marmalade, which I would hide downstairs,” he said.
“Maybe they wrote my name in the bottle as a way of thanking me.”
Further details about the message are expected to be made public in the coming days, the Auschwitz museum said on Monday.
Mr Veissid said he had spoken little about his experiences at Auschwitz, declining to give speeches in schools on his time there.
“But since this story intrigues me, I decided to play the game for once. It’s a revolution for me,” he said.
Born into a Jewish family in Istanbul in 1924, Mr Veissid arrived in the southeastern French city of Lyon as a baby.
As a young man he worked as a musician and a sweet-store vendor, before being deported.
He survived until Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945, when he walked across Germany to France, arriving in a state so emaciated that his family struggled to recognise him.
“I was a walking skeleton. One more week and I wouldn’t have made it back,” said Mr Veissid, who took up work as a musician then as a salesman after recovering his health.
More than one million people, most of them European Jews, died at the twin Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi camps during World War II. In total, six million Jews died in the Holocaust.
Others who died at Auschwitz included tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Romas and anti-Nazi resistance fighters from across Europe.
the other names found are six of the prisoners who were from Poland. The note gives the names as: Bronislaw Jankowiak, Stanislaw Dubla, Jan Jasik, Waclaw Sobczak, Karol Czekalski, Waldemar Bialobrzeski.
What does born into a jewish family? Wasn’t he jewish?
I knew this was from BBC before even reading the credit.
Read This quote: ‘More than one million people, most of them European Jews, died at the twin Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi camps during World War II. In total, six million Jews died in the Holocaust.’
Can someone tell the BBC that Auschwitz was an extermination complex. People didn’t ‘die’ . . . . they were murdered!!!!
For comparison this is quote about Cast Lead battle in Gaza: “The Israeli offensive in Gaza killed about 1,300 Palestinians, of whom 412 were children; “
# 2, you are an “observant” Jew! The BBC has a long history of being blatant anti semites, sometimes just cloaking themselves as being anti something else or another.
pls tell me wat the prisoners comments were