Marta Wise, who was pictured in famous photo of children behind barbed wire, is one of the few remaining survivors who were actually there when the terror in Auschwitz finally ended.
Marta Wise was ill and emaciated when she heard the distant sound of soldiers marching toward Auschwitz. The 10-year-old Slovakian Jew assumed it was German troops coming to get her but once she saw the red stars on their uniforms she realized they were Russian. Her nightmare was over. She was liberated.
More than a million Jews died in the infamous Nazi death camp, but on Jan. 27, 1945 only a few thousand sickly inmates remained at the most vivid symbol of Nazi cruelty after most were marched off to die elsewhere. Now, 70 years later, as the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Wise is one of the few remaining survivors who were actually there when the terror in Auschwitz finally ended.
A famous black-and-white photo of about a dozen children in rags standing behind a row of barbed wire, taken by the Russian liberators, has become one of the most iconic images of the Holocaust. Among the children featured is a rail-thin Wise, who weighed just 17 kilograms (37 pounds) when the Russians arrived, and her older sister Eva, whose sunken cheeks gave her a deathly gaze.
"That I survived and my sister survived is beyond me. I\’ve never been able to work it out," said Wise, now 80 and living in Jerusalem. "To me, as far as I am concerned, the 27th of January is my second birthday … because that\’s when we got another lease at life."
More than any other locale, Auschwitz has come to represent the horrors of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically killed by Nazi Germany and its allies. Its name has become synonymous with the Nazi genocide as it reflected the meticulous German effort to exterminate Europe\’s Jews — a plan dubbed the "Final Solution."
Along with 1.1 million Jews, more than 100,000 prisoners of war, Poles, gypsies and other minorities also died in Auschwitz and the adjacent Birkenau death camp in gas chambers, crematoria, or from starvation, disease and forced labor.