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Concentration camp survivor recalls the horrors of the Nazis

Lilli Gottschalk is 88 years old and has lived in the canton for almost 60 years. She owes her life to the American troops who arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on Friday 13 April 1945 and released her and all the other inmates.
 
As a Jewish girl born in Berlin in 1923, Gottschalk recalled the shock of being suddenly told at the age of ten that she would no longer be able to attend school nor play with her friends ever again. Hitler's 12-year pogrom against the Jews had started. "Out of fear for our lives, my mother, stepfather and I fled to Amsterdam in 1939," she said.
 
Then, following the German invasion of the Netherlands in June 1943, she was sent to the Westerbork transit camp. Not long before, she was greatly shocked when a parcel she had sent to her father in the Jewish ghetto in Lodz was returned to her marked "receiver deceased".
 
As a twenty-year-old in 1944, Gottschalk was struck down with jaundice at Westerbork and sent to hospital. One day, when a high-ranking Nazi officer saw the 1,000 or so sick people, he shouted, "Off to Auschwitz with them," though at the time Gottschalk was not actually aware of what this meant. She had heard about gas chambers from illegal radio stations but she could not really believe it. Before long, her name, too, was on the list for transportation to the death camp. "It was the most dreadful feeling, just indescribable," she said.
 
However, she was incredibly lucky in that a Jewish man, with whom she had worked at Westerbork before she had become ill, helped her by persuading the camp commander to delete her name from the list of those destined for Auschwitz and instead she was sent with her mother and step-father to Bergen-Belsen. It was here, too, where Anne Frank, who became known for the moving diary she kept of her times under the Nazis, was being held.
 
Initially, Gottschalk was set to work sewing but later she asked if she could work in the kitchen, which enabled her to have as much swede soup as she wanted, allowing her mother to have the share allocated to her daughter. However, Gottschalk was caught stealing a spoonful of salt and was removed to other duties.
 
"I, myself, was never actually beaten, nor did I see others being beaten, but it was terrible having to walk over dead bodies as we left the huts in the morning. One day I had to carry some to a mass grave." In the four weeks between March and April of 1945, 35,000 of the 45,000 people interned at Bergen-Belsen perished. "My step-father was struck dead at an early morning roll call simply because he did not hear the officer's commands as he had become deaf," she recalled with horror.
 
How is it possible to come to terms with such atrocities? "Well, I was still quite young and I needed a grim sense of humour in those days to be able to look at things with a certain distance," she explained. "Then I have talked about it all a lot and just had to accept what happened in those dark days." It was very fortunate that the American troops arrived in April 1945 and freed us from the camp."
 
After the war, Gottschalk returned to the Netherlands and then went to the United States, where she met her future husband, a commodity trader, who brought her to idyllic Zug in the Sixties. "I feel very happy here," she said," but it is important that what happened to six million Jews during the Second World War must never be forgotten." Indeed, she feels it her duty to talk about the Holocaust and is often invited to speak to schoolchildren about it.    


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