Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

SURVIVORS AND LIBERATORS | SPEECHES   133 Survivors and Liberators ©Dachau Memorial I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr Hammermann for inviting me to speak today at this milestone event, the 80th commemoration of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. I extend a good afternoon to all the dignitaries, officials,   liberators, survivors and their families and guests. Ladies and Gentlemen, My name is Leslie Rosenthal and I would say that I am here as both a survivor and a descendant. The two are inextricably linked… because, you see, between December 1944 and   February 1945, I and six others were born in a concentration camp about 65 km from here. This is my sixth visit to Dachau. I will continue to make this trip with as many of my children and grandchildren as possible. About this time two years ago, I had the honour and privilege of cutting the ribbon marking the opening of the museum at theWeingut II Memorial Site, exhibiting the 11 Kaufering concentration camps, all subcamps of Dachau. I speak to high school students and the first question I ask them is “with a show of hands, how many here have a birth certificate?”. Invariably, everyone raises their hands…   “Well”, I continue, “I don’t have one. You see, I was born in a concentration camp. Not only were the Nazis not issuing birth certificates, they weren’t issuing death certificates either”. My passport has as place of birth: Kaufering, DEU, 28 February 1945, DEU standing for Deutschland. But what is missing from that description is very telling: Lager 1, Kaufering Concentration Camp No. 1. My mother, Miriam Rosenthal, of blessed memory, was brought to Kaufering Lager 1 in the winter of 1944 after her pregnancy was discovered. She was a prisoner in Augsburg, labouring in a Messerschmitt factory. My mother’s unbeliev- able journey of horror and unrelenting fear began when she Leslie Rosenthal 80th anniversary  of the liberation of Dachau  4 May 2025 was separated from her newlywed husband of 3 months. He was taken as a slave labourer to the Carpathian Mountains. She was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1944 , then a short time later, moved to another concen- tration camp, Plaszow, where she realised that she was preg- nant. From Plaszow, she was sent back to Auschwitz, each time forced in line before Josef Mengele to undergo the selection process, and then to Augsburg, all the while hiding her preg- nancy. In Augsburg, her pregnancy was discovered and she was taken by two SS officers back to Auschwitz on a regular pas- senger train for extermination. A well-dressed lady passenger, seeing my mother’s shaved head, wearing a prisoner’s striped gown and thin as a skeleton seated between two SS officers, asked, “vos passirt?” (“What happened to you?”). My mother told her, “Don’t you know they are killing Jews?”. The lady had no idea. Auschwitz was being attacked by the Allies, and when the train stopped in Landsberg, my mother was handed over to the commandant of Kaufering Lager 1. There she was put in a bunker with six other pregnant Hungarian mothers who had been brought there from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Miraculously, all seven mothers delivered their healthy babies, beginning in December 1944 and ending with my birth on 28 February 1945. Parenthetically, it was later discovered in the Bad Arolsen archives that a signed order by the Dachau camp doctor, Fritz Hintermeyer, on 13 March 1945, authorised that   the seven mothers and their babies were to be sent to die in Bergen-Belsen… Thank God that order never materialised. Toward the end of April 1945 , the Nazis began emptying the subcamps and forced the prisoners to march to Dachau, where the plan was to mass execute them. After a two-day death march from Kaufering, the seven mothers arrived at Dachau, where the camp was liberated by the American army on the morning of 29 April 1945. In 2010, at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau, an exhibition