“At the end of the war I wanted to commit suicide. I didn’t do it because I still had to tell my mother what had happened to my sister. She died in the final days at Bergen-Belsen.”

Esther Reiss, born 1923, survived the Lodz ghetto and the camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen

“Following liberation it was like I was made of stone. I did not feel anything. Then came feelings of pain and mourning for all those who had gone.”

Halina Birenbaum, born 1929, survived the Warsaw ghetto and the camps at Majdanek, Auschwitz  and Neustadt-Glewe

“I felt as if everyone should ask us questions, read from our faces who we were and humbly listen to our story. But no one looked us in the eye, no one took up the challenge. They were deaf, dumb and blind, shut inside their ruins as if in a fortress of deliberate ignorance, still strong, still able to hate and to despise, still trapped and caught up in a web of arrogance and guilt.”

Primo Levi, born 1919, survived Auschwitz

“It was at least six months after I was liberated before I could say, ‘Yes I am free’. I wore different clothing. I got my hair back. I wasn’t hungry. But I didn’t trust anybody.”

Alfred Silberstein, born 1927, survived the camps at Auschwitz and Mittelbau-Dora

“In the district we lived in no one talked about it at all. Why not? Because we lived in the Marais, the Jewish district of Paris, and all of my friends had been through something. Even if we had not all been through the same thing, I never talked to my friends about it. I had friends who did not even know that I had been in a camp.”

Alexandre Halaunbrenner, born 1931, survived in hiding in France

“I only grasped the true significance of liberation with the Fischer trial in 1966. The crimes dealt with there made me realise just what a horrific fate I had actually been liberated from.”

Willi Frohwein, born 1923, survived the camps at Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen

"I have published 18 books here about the Third Reich, but this had no impact. You can publish things for the Germans until you’re blue in the face, there may be the most democratic government in Bonn, but the mass murderers wander about freely, have their little houses and grow flowers."

Joseph Wulf, born 1912, survived Auschwitz

“If I had constantly lived with those thoughts I would perhaps not have been able to keep living – certainly not in Germany. Many survivors and their children felt the same as me. Keeping silent and the repressing of what they had experienced became a form of self-protection for them, that was presumably necessary to survive.”

Ignatz Bubis, born 1927, survived a labour camp in Tschenstochau

“Yet (...) this possibility of direct compensation is limited in the sense that valuable assets such as life and freedom are irreplaceable, and others such as honour and health can only be restored to a certain extent. Indeed, nowhere is it possible to return things to exactly the way they were before the violation.”

Lothar Kreyssig, born 1898, a judge who carried out resistance against the “euthanasia” murders

“I don’t know, sometimes I try not to think about what my father could have been part of.”

Gunter Demnig, born 1947, son of a Wehrmacht soldier

“One evening– I was five or six – my father wanted to eat something and got some bread.  He never cut bread but instead tore off large pieces and stuffed them in his mouth. This was a habit he had taken with him from Auschwitz, the concentration camp. That evening he choked on the bread. He started to go blue in the face. My mother sent me to the doctor. I ran there thinking the whole time that he would be dead when I came back. Since then I have had a stammer.”

Yehuda Poliker, born 1950, son of a Greek Auschwitz survivor

“If I got bad marks or did something bad she (my mother) would say: ‘It’s a pity that I got out of Auschwitz to experience that.’”.

Yaakov Gilad, born 1951, son of a survivor of the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Neustadt-Glewe camps

“After the Shoah it cannot really be possible to be Jewish and German. And yet it is. I am the daughter of a German Jewess and her German gentile partner. My parents survived the Nazi period together and taught me not fall out with the other Germans. The descendants of the perpetrators, bystanders and those who knew about it have really tried to do everything right, from their “mastering the past” to klezmer music.”

Viola Roggenkamp, born 1948, daughter of a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father

“Yes, my father’s guilt is part of my life. I live and therefore I bear responsibility. I can only stand it by being prepared to keep confronting this past and by taking these horrific events seriously. It was about killing people in a physical and a psychological way. My challenge is to implement this awareness in my everyday life and to try to do something to combat prejudices, disrespect and the destruction of humanity.”

Ulrike Krüger, born 1944, daughter of Wolfram Sievers, Director of the SS “Ancestral Heritage Research Society”

“Whether we have directly experienced it ourselves or else through our parents, the past overshadows everything and faced with the horror even the slightest feeling of privacy and inwardness falls completely silent.”

Gila Lustiger, born 1963, daughter of an Auschwitz survivor

“National Socialism is a burden for all of us. It does not disappear and in some dark corners you can see that the notion of the Volksgemeinschaft still has an appeal. The crimes are part of general memory, the question ‘how was it possible?’ will not fade with the years and any shift to “normality” is in vain.”

Fritz Stern, born 1926, managed to escape with his family by emigrating

"When I was a  three or four year old, and I would get hit very hard or suffer any pain, I would never cry because I would say, you know, I shouldn't. What is it? It's nothing compared to what my parents have been through, and I didn't want to make them sad."

Etgar Keret, born 1967, son of survivors of the Warsaw ghetto

“When I was fifteen, one of my classmates asked me in the history lesson whether I was in fact related “to that Himmler”. I said yes with a lump in my throat. It went so quiet in the classroom you could hear a pin drop. They were all alert and curious. But the teacher became nervous and carried on as if nothing had happened. She missed the chance to make us understand just what continues to link us, the descendants, with these “old stories”.

Katrin Himmler, born 1967, Heinrich Himmler’s great-niece

“When we spoke with right wing oriented pupils at school I always felt personally offended. With many of their comments I often thought that they did not know what they were saying. Moreover, I had the sense that I had to defend my grandfather.”

Anke Knitter, born 1977, granddaughter of a survivor of the camps at Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora and Bergen-Belsen