[eerie music] - [VO] Those who survived could answer the roll call of all the nations of Europe.

They had been beaten down to live like animals or worse for fewer animals had lived in the terror, hunger and filth of these victims.

People who once had been human beings like you and me.

- Who would have even suspected in the 20th century of such a thing that it can be done.

The things that the Nazis did Auschwitz, I say that Satan would have been envious.

[eerie music continues] [eerie music continues] - Well, that crazy band as we were we survived!

I mean, the moment they don't want music, we go in the gas chamber And now I think I'm the last person left who was there.

[eerie music continues] but in this particular situation, we needed it to survive.

[tense orchestral music] [train brakes hissing] - We were walked to Auschwitz.

Suddenly I thought, ‘I'm hallucinating' because I heard Eine Kleine Nachtmusik from Mozart.

["Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" by Mozart plays] [Renée scoffs] - They had such nerve.

We were greeted by a band.

- There was a band playing; the finest musicians in the world.

These were all prisoners from all over occupied Europe.

[music continues] - There was an orchestra playing, so we thought it cannot be that bad if they have concerts here.

- As we notice, I hear I say ‘who needs music here?'

I say I mean, they're crazy.

[music continues] - There was music.

That threw me.

I mean, what's going on here?

It's really enough to make you lose your sanity.

- I sometimes think of this as being very strange to have fine music play in a death factory.

[foreboding music] - When people find out the music was being made in Auschwitz, it is a shocking realisation that music and the extermination of human beings can be connected in any way at all.

But it's something that I knew about because my mere existence is thanks to my mother's survival, because she played the cello and was in the women's orchestra.

[dramatic music] [light orchestral music] - My father was a lawyer of some repute.

And my mother?

Apart from being very beautiful, had many accomplishments.

[light orchestral music continues] But most important, she was a fine violinist.

She would usually begin her practicing routine with the opening octaves of the Beethoven concerto.

[violin soars] It was a lovely, lovely childhood.

My mother was a very good violinist, and it was normal that there was new music, you know, that was pre television and all that.

You can see.

In one of the photographs, I was sat on the floor with a broomstick and a comb, and my parents saw this child looks as if she wants to play the cello.

So they bought me a cello.

[violin continues] Life was pretty good and it seemed inconceivable that it should not go on like that forever.

I suppose ours was a typical middle class, assimilated Jewish family.

[cello plays] - Make sure that you hear the next... the second note.

Dah dee dah dee da.

[cello plays] - The first years of the 20th century, Jewish life existed across Europe.

But to be Jewish in Germany was the best place to be a Jew.

They were successful, they were established, and a kind of a marker of their admission into German life was music.

They had made a contribution in the form of Mendelssohn or Mahler, that they would be in the audience at the great opera houses and concert halls.

They were embracing high culture, art and all of it quintessentially German.

It was a very core part of their identity.

- Jewish, not Jewish, didn't seem to be a problem in those days.

We had a Christmas tree and we had Hanukkah, you know, a menorah it was normal, but one had no idea what was going to follow.

[soldiers shouting] [street noises] - Once the Nazis had seized power in 1933, they moved in increments to isolate Jews into ever narrower parts of social life.

[soldiers shouting] - Children would spit at me in the street and call me a dirty Jew.

Since we had been scarcely aware of our Jewishness at hom, I found this all very bewildering and was full of envy for those people who did not have this mysterious stigma.

[sombre violin music] - There were laws passed against what they would have seen as racial mingling.

There were travel restrictions.

Jews couldn't own businesses.

They couldn't own property.

They were evicted from their homes.

As time would go on, they had to be distinguished from the rest of the population and forced to wear the notorious yellow star.

They were squeezed out of German life, stage by stage.

[sombre music] - Suddenly everything got restricted.

Not allowed to sit on a bench in a park, you know?

It was an atmosphere of fear suddenly.

[tense music] [birds squawking] [bell tolls] - [Ilse] Over here a storm is gathering.

[radio announcer speaks in German] We listen to your news because ours is dictated and false.

[button clicks] [tense music continues] It looks very much like there is going to be war.

and as though our children wo't be able to reach a safe haven.

[dramatic music] Nothing but swastikas everywhere.

[dramatic music] It's like dancing on a powder keg.

[gentle music] - Ilse was a multi-talented, cosmopolitan young woman.

She wrote poems and short stories, but the most important images focus on music.

She had two children Hanus and Tommy.

and the letters throw a blunt light on the antisemitism and Nazi terror that increasingly poisoned the Jews' life in Czechoslovakia.

- The worst is for us Jews.

How Hitler must fear us that he persecutes us so.

[Hitler speaking German] - Germany had been defeated in the First World War.

The country was on its knees financially.

A myth developed that Germany had been the victim of the so-called stab in the back.

And along comes the Nazis with a narrative which says the people to blame for bringing mighty Germany to its knees are the Jews.

And you can see here on the cover of Der Stuemer, a Nazi propaganda paper, hideously caricatured Jews.

Nazism uses that to advance its theory that there is a racial war going on, pitting Aryans against Jews, and that only one of these two races can win.

- Up to this day, I have believed in God, but if he doesn't give us a token of his existence soon, I can no longer.

This persecution of Jews is inhuman.

What should we do?

Where should we go?

[tense music] - In this desperate situation Ilse heard about a rescue operation that was planned by an English stockbroker.

Mr Nicholas Winton, for 669 children, and Hanus was one of them.

- Some Mr Winton in London is running a children's child support.

So my older boy is going to England perhaps for a long time.

It won't be easy for us to part from him, but nevertheless, we'll be happy when he gets away from the bad atmosphere here.

- [Ulrike] When she put Hanus on the train, she was a desperate mother, being aware that she might not meet her son again.

She had to send him away to save his life.

But music gave her the strength to survive without him.

[train rumbling] [sombre music] [Ilse singing in German] [bell tolls] [explosions boom] [cannon fires] - [Reporter] War.

Precisely at dawn on September first, without warning, the German Wehrmacht rolled over the Polish border.

[suspenseful music] [train brakes squeak] [suspenseful music continues] - The deportations began.

And my sister and I were determined not to wait till somebody comes and takes me away in order to kill me.

We said, we are going to run away.

We were teenagers and it was a crazy idea.

We got ourselves false papers and tried to get to the unoccupied zone of France.

But we didn't get there, we were arrested already at the station.

And then my big odyssey started in prison, and I was very lucky to be in prison.

It's much better to be in prison than to be in a concentration camp.

It took about a year before the court case came up.

But as soon as the sentence had been announced, the Gestapo came up again and we were sent separately to Auschwitz.

Auschwitz was a yeah notorious.

[tense music] There were all sorts of rumours about the conditions of the camps and especially about Auschwitz and the gas chambers.

I now had to come to terms with the bitter truth.

This was precisely what was ahead of me.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I was not scared.

But in an odd way, one can become so accustomed to being scared that it becomes part of one's makeup.

We had lived in fear for so many years that it had merely become part of the background.

And now I was being confronted with the real thing.

[music intensifies] [train rumbling] [eerie music] - At this point, the overwhelming majority of Jews who arrived in Auschwitz believed they were going to form the new community together.

That is why they had brought with them suitcases, pots, pans.

They believed that this was some kind of fresh start.

- They took all our luggage right away.

And they make us give all our jewellery.

- [Reporter] Every murder mill had its storage room.

Each contained jewellery, watches, wedding rings, heaps of eyeglasses.

[tense music continues] - We arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the evening.

I don't know what time it was, but it was dark.

When I try to recall my first impressions of Auschwitz, what comes to mind is black figures in capes, dogs barking, and a great deal of shouting.

We were taken to a barracks and there we had to wait.

I was not aware that I had already passed the first hurdle... selection.

[tense music continues]= - A trainload of Jews would arrive and there and then, on the railway platform, they would be selected, To the left you would be sent immediately to the gas chambers.

But if you were chosen to go to the right, that meant you were of an age and a level of fitness where you might be useful as a worker.

[tense music continues] - At the first light of day we were taken to a different bloc.

There the welcoming ceremony took place.

- We were naive young people.

I wouldn't have taken my clothes off in front of my mother.

And we were ordered to take our clothes off.

Everything.

- They shaved our hair, everything was shaven off.

- [Reporter] The Death Mills were made to pay in many ways.

Thousands of garments were stripped from prisoners.

Human hair.

Women's hair methodically packed, it was ready for sale to manufacturing - Another crew came in and put numbers on our arm.

- In that moment, my name and my life became a number.

- First thing I had removed when I came to the United States.

Right there.

- I felt this was the last stripping away of my identity.

[sombre music] - In the space of a few minutes, I had been stripped of every vestige of human dignity and become indistinguishable from everyone else around me.

There is a sort of welcoming ceremony, and all this is done by prisoners.

We started this conversation and she asked me, ‘What did you do before the war?'

I said, ‘I used to play the cello.'

And she immediately said, ‘There's an orchestra here.

They need a cellist and to stay here.'

And so she went to find the conductor.

The last thing I had imagined when going to Auschwitz is that I would ever have a conversation about playing the cello.

There I was stark naked and she was asking me, ‘Who did you study with?'

[Anita scoffs] it was somehow rather incongruous.

- I heard the words, ‘You will be saved.'

She said someone would come for me and I would have an audition.

I wasn't exactly on top form, but it was good enough.

They didn't have a bass instrument.

They were very happy to have me.

[tense music] - My name is Adam Kopycinski.

On the 6th of January, 1942, I was transported to Auschwitz.

I became a member of the orchestra and then the conductor.

The high voltage perimeter fence cutting us off from the outside world marked the boundary of our existence.

Cast out beyond the margins of society, we were able to create a new world.

Those who inhabited this bizarre world who wanted to live and vegetate within those narrow confines had to forget about freedom and attempt to create at least the semblance of a normal life and the things you could find there.

By the end of the second year of the camp's operations, there'd be beautiful music and fine performances from first-rate vocal artists for residents to enjoy, just a few days before they forfeited their life.

[tense music] - There's a big, huge gate with a sign up on top.

Arbeit Macht Frei, work will make you free.

- For the Nazis there were two projects.

One was a final solution to the persistent, stubborn presence of Jews in the world, which was their wholesale elimination and murder.

But another was to turn the Third Reich into an economic superpower.

[eerie music] They envisaged Auschwitz and the area around it as an industrial hub.

They invited the big industrial giants IG Farben and Siemens to build big factories there.

But there would be one advantage the advantage that all empires have had for thousands of years, namely slave labour.

[sombre music] And part of the process was to drill them with almost military-like efficiency.

So these working units would leave the camp at dawn each morning and to accompany them, there would be music.

- What they wanted the orchestra to play were marches.

[orchestral music plays] We had sheet music for over one hundred.

They filled up two closets which stood in the music room in Block 24.

[music continues] We played out of doors, even in temperatures down to minus five degrees centigrade.

Pain forcing tears from our eyes.

[music continues] Well, we had to play marches every morning and every evening because Auschwitz, surrounded with factories, and people should march nicely in step.

So we had to sit by the gate and play marches for about an hour or so till everybody was out, and the same thing in the evening on the way back.

But we were scared stiff to play wrong notes.

It was just better to be scared stiff than to look out of the window and see the smoking chimneys.

- There were tens of thousands of prisoners who were working as slaves.

Their life expectancy was rarely more than two or three months.

And it became this kind of black hole in the heart of Nazi-occupied Poland into which Jews from all over Europe were disappearing.

[tense music] [typewriter keys clacking] - Auschwitz was a certain kind of negative world to which we were abducted.

White became black and black white.

Values were turned around one hundred and eighty degrees.

- My father, who was Jewish, was very musical and so ended up in Paris, which was the great place where artists concentrated.

[traffic rumbling] [tense music] Then came the war with the German invasion of France.

He was arrested.

And then deported to Auschwitz.

[orchestra warming up] - The first questions I asked myself were, what kind of a world is this?

What sort of creatures are those zebra-like beings with shaved heads, swaying on their feet, emaciated like skeletons?

I tried to shake off this nightmare.

To tell myself that it was a dream, but an awakening did not come.

- My father doesn't expand on what he describes as the horro.

Well, there is one sentence: “It's indescribable.

And so I won't describe it.” But the horror is there.

- I remember every day marching out to work, and there was this orchestra playing.

I remember how ironical it was.

- We left the camp every day with the soldiers and the tommy guns and the dogs.

We built a road that somehow, it seemed to me, was going to nowhere.

- [Szymon] The work group that I was part of went out every day with a strength of six hundred.

Only half of whom returned to the camp in the evening on their own two legs.

It consisted of loading a sort of wheelbarrow with earth.

It was carried by two people and emptied 100 metres away.

Now imagine, if you can, that we had to run all day long under an uninterrupted hail of blows.

Unbelievable as it may seem, after twenty days of this work, I was still alive.

[eerie music] - Who can do this job with no food in their stomach?

Every time we see them coming back, they were holding three dead people.

- In Auschwitz, we had a collection of the greatest musicians entertain us as we were walking out the gate to work and when we coming back.

Now, who the heck thought we needed entertainment?

We needed food.

I cannot explain this any other way but sadism.

[orchestra plays] - German nationalism in its Nazi form took as read that German culture was the highest form of culture.

Just as they believed the greatest literature ever written was by Goethe, they would insist that the greatest music ever written was by Beethoven or Bach.

Germany and Germans were better than everyone else.

There was a movement against degenerate art, so-called.

As part of that, the music of Jewish composers long dead was banned.

So you would not be able to hear the music of Mendelssohn or Mahler in a concert hall in Nazi Germany.

Because the sound of the Jew was to become forbidden, even if that Jew was long in the ground.

- [Reporter] In Hitler's Germany, the music of any Jewish composer is outlawed.

Masterpieces the world has lovd are confiscated as unfit for Nazi ears.

[classical music plays] [speaking in German] [musician plays piano] [Goebbels speaking in German] [musician plays piano] [crowd applause] [tense music] - [Anita] Apart from our twice-daily outings to the camp gate to play marches for the outgoing and incoming commando, we had other functions.

We gave concerts most Sundays.

We also had to be ready to play for any SS personnel who came into our block for some light relief after selecting who should live and who should die.

[Raphael plays cello] - During the internment of my mother, Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor who used his qualifications for experimentation on inmates, for his light entertainment entered the barrack where my mother was and requested a performance of Traumerei, part of Schumann's beautiful Kinderszenen which depicts idyllic scenes of childhood.

[Raphael continues playing] A great irony considering what was happening around and what he was busy doing.

So, it's a very poignant moment for me to play the same music.

[music continues] - They could come in any time to ask for a nice tune.

When Mengele came in, he wanted to hear the Traumerei by Schumann, and it was my repertoire, so I played the Traumerei by Schumann.

[sombre music] People asked me, “How did you feel?” I said, "I didn't feel anything.

I played it as fast as possible.

That's it.

Get out.

[sombre music continues] - This kind of classical music was the lifeblood of the German people.

But there are many examples of these very cultured people doing the worst atrocities ever known to humankind.

- [Szymon] There really is no doubt the Germans are music lovers from birth.

Their insistence on having music at a place like Auschwitz is only one example of this passion.

How could people who love music to this extent, people who could cry when they hear it, be at the same time capable of committing so many atrocities on the rest of humanity?

- It's just an extremely striking paradox, which implies that culture does not protect one from being a beast.

[tense music] - No one has any idea how difficult it is to write about Auschwitz without being misunderstood, especially when it comes to a discipline of the arts such as music, which, in the eyes of most, sadly always has been a source of entertainment.

So for many people, it will seem strange that music helped to fulfill such an important role.

After all, for us musicians, it is our livelihood.

We need it to live, but in this particular situation, we needed it to survive.

[sombre music] - One evening, like every evening, I was lying on my pallet, wondering how much longer I would last, when the barracks chief called out, “Is there someone here who speaks Polish and plays bridge”" A few minutes later, dirty, unshaven, not believing my eyes and ears, I was sitting at a bridge table in the private room of the barracks chief in the company of two other VIPs in striped clothing, playing like an equal with equals.

During one of the hands, I managed to mutter to him that I was a violinist and composer.

He looked at me with a bitter, honest reproach.

“Why didn't you tell me this sooner?

Tomorrow you'll stay in the barracks and I'll take you over to the orchestra.” A second companion added, choking with laughter, “And if you're accepted, maybe you'll live a little longer!” [gentle music] - My father had abilities as a real composer, and one day he is chosen as the director of the orchestra.

Musicians had a better chance to survive, and being in the orchestra, that was what one would call a relatively safe place.

Not really safe, but somewhat safer.

I have some picture after the war, sitting at the piano in this very apartment.

If you are interested actually, I could play it for you.

[Andre sighs] [piano tinkles] [gentle piano music] In order to survive there, you had to compromise.

Either you place yourself on the side of the torturers the best example is the Jews that saved their own life by burning their companion Jews.

Or you can compromise by accepting to be a musician and to be part of the Nazi politics against your will.

Best way of describing this is the expression of Primo Levi, which speaks of a grey zone where moral values and so on are so shaken that it affects your own world view.

Music became a means of surviving.

And my father was self-conscious about the way that he didn't have to suffer from hunger in a way that his companions couldn't.

[piano continues] - If they wanted to punish you, “Today, no food.” Simple as that.

- The starvation was just terrible.

And hanging and beating.

Living in constant terror and fear for your life.

- In the morning, some of them ran out over the back and we could see them holding the electrical barbed wire in their hand.

That's how they committed suicide.

- I saw a girl die.

She touched the electric wire.

And you know, we don't feel sorry for her.

We thought she was free already.

We thought she was lucky to die.

[piano continues] - My experiences were, of course, different from those of the vast majority of prisoners, for the simple reason that I was lucky enough to be in the orchestra.

I had not lost my identity totally.

I may no longer have had a name, but I was identifiable.

I was the cellist.

It helped me maintain a shred of human dignity.

However, the background was the same for all of us.

We must not forget that outside our little world, the gas chambers were working non-stop.

- One can get used to anything.

To the most monstrous things.

Habituation to everything that is going on around us, I personally believe that music was simply one of the parts of camp life.

And that it stupefied the newcomer in the same way as everything he encountered in his first days in the camp.

Music kept up the spirit, or rather the body, of of only the musicians, who did not have to go out to hard labour and who could eat a little better.

Some people thought they could shut their eyes and listen to some music and dream themselves out of the situation they're in.

And others found it offensive.

And I can understand both.

But nothing took you away from Auschwitz.

You know Auschwitz it's there.

Auschwitz.

If for half an hour you can think of something else.

- It's very powerful.

And I made some mistakes.

But you have an idea of what it is.

[eerie music] - The Nazis operated on a system of racial hierarchy.

The Aryan race, the master race, was at the top, and Jews were at the very bottom.1 But there were other groups that they categorised as racially inferior.

Among them were the Roma people, the Sinti people, people who Germans would call by their word for gypsies who had their own cultures and traditions that the Germans deemed polluting of the purity of the German race.

They too, were victims of Nazism.

- For my family, Auschwitz is primarily related to my maternal grandfather's family.

Most of the people in that family who died, which was a lot of people, died at Auschwitz.

[eerie music continues] And he had this repeated phrase until his death by suicide, which was, “They burned my whole family.

So let me be burned too.” Which is really significant because you do not get cremated if you're Romany.

It's not a thing.

And for him, it was the statement you know, that's a memorial to the Holocaust.

The term gypsy is a tricky one because it has all these negative connotations.

But then most English-speaking Romani people refer to themselves as gypsies.

You can't sort of will it out of existence.

Before the war, there was enormous discrimination for hundreds of years.

Around the 18th century, there were gypsy hunts.

And you could just legally go and just hunt down and kill Romani people.

So there wasn't this sort of nothing, nothing, nothing and then suddenly Hitler and Holocaust.

It wasn't like that at all.

It was a much kind of smoother transition.

And then there was a decree made by Himmler.

It was basically just, everybody who's Romani in any way, shape or form half, quarter, or whatever they're just all going to die.

[eerie music continues] The Gypsy family camp was situated right next to Mengele's lab.

He was very interested in twins, and a lot of the images that people actually might recognise are actually Romani children.

And we have unspeakably horrific testimony of these children who were just tortured, alive.

[eerie music continues] But it's impossible to imagine a group of Romani not singing.

I mean, people absolutely would have been singing to their last breath.

I think.

Ausvicate hi kher baro, which means “There's a big building in Auschwitz” is a song entirely in the Romani language.

We don't know who originally wrote it.

And I've tried to ask my grandmother, where did you first learn this?

And she says it was just in the family.

It talks about the blackbird, which is a symbol of death.

Then it talks about the hunger, the beatings.

And it has a very roundabout way of talking about rape.

But it really is the best example of folk poetry that we have to give testimony.

[cockerel crows] [singing in Romani] It does take a lot to sing the song because I owe it to the song and to the history to really connect to the imagery.

But I sang it a bunch of times and people would clap.

I was so uncomfortable.

So I always now say, please do not clap.

This is not a performance.

This is a testimony.

[sombre music] [eerie music] - I was very grateful, as I am to this very day, for the love of music.

We had a little group, we just got together and we sang and we hummed.

I used to whistle very well.

[singing in a foreign language] - In the block inside we used to have groups.

We sang together.

Yiddish songs, Polish songs, any song.

[singing in a foreign language] It gives your self-respect.

You are somebody.

You still didn't forget yourself.

You're still retaining your Yiddish God.

[gentle music] - We cannot explain what happened in the camps with logic.

The war is a negation of logic.

But gradually, day after day, week after week, year after year, in the camp a great music literature was born.

[cannons boom] While the world was failing, musicians realized that they had the duty to save the civilization.

[explosion booms] This music doesn't belong to the past.

This music belongs to the future.

[gentle music continues] In the face of death.

And this is how we lived every day in the hell that was Auschwitz.

Why did so many people search for support in music?

For a crushed man overwhelmed by the struggle for everyday survival, he could find more in music than just temporary relief, but a clearer solution to many problems and a deeper sense of harmony to save and restore his nature.

That was indeed a huge help, something which sometimes was a cure for prisoners' damaged psyche.

[gentle music continues] The author was the great Adam Kopycinski.

In '41 he wrote this little Kolysanka, ‘Lullaby'.

The dedication is in Polish: ‘For the memories of nice discussions about home and our sons.

I dedicate this lullaby to the lovely and the nice Leon with request for memory.

Adam.'

The fact that it is a lullaby is surely dedicated to a child.

And no lyrics.

It's just a piano solo music.

And it's a very bright and optimistic piece.

[bright piano music] - [Adam] Speaking to prisoners or prisoners getting themselves organized wasn't allowed.

But we could speak out.

We had a voice and we could act because music is a non-verbal and profound form of speech.

[eerie music] [wind howling] - We had no vodka, so we sought forgetfulness in the music.

- I have composed my own four-part piece for this group, which we rehearsed when conditions permitted.

[sombre music] Jewish music and Polish music was forbidden.

[lock rattles] So this piece had to be practiced in secret because it would have been considered as an act of resistance, and that was dangerous.

What I think is that the piece that was performed at that time was a draft of what was to become the third quartet.

You'll see that there is the title in French and in Polish: ‘Third string quartet based on Polish popular tunes'.

This third quartet is entirely based on pretty well-known Polish tunes.

It looks as a kind of national hymn, something to the glory of Poland, and it can be easily felt as a kind of assertion of Polishness.

[birds singing] [orchestral music plays] One day we were playing in a strange concentration when suddenly a completely unknown SS man entered the room.

We jumped up like one man.

He asked, ‘What was that?

Whose music was it?'

[music continues] I could not say that I was the composer.

In panic, I quickly raced through my memory and suddenly got the idea of mentioning an Austrian musician who isn't very well known.

‘A very beautiful quartet.

One could tell right away it was German music.'

Out he went.

[music continues] - I always thought that the Polish side of the third quartet really fits as an act of resistance against the annihilation of Poland and of Jewish music at the same time.

So I interpret it as an expression of: we are there, here is our culture, and we won't give it up.

[music continues] - If this episode could be regarded as a sign of resistance, it's the only one I can boast of during my rather long stay at Birkenau.

The rest was a struggle for survival.

[eerie music] - [VO] Gas chambers were the principal agent of death, and their use was admirably organised.

Prisoners were told to prepare themselves for a shower bath.

They were even given towels to make them believe this story.

[eerie music continues] When the doors of the bathroom were closed behind them, poison gas, Zyklon, was released.

- The gas chamber was about as far away from me as... You could see it.

You could see it.

You could see the smoke.

You could hear it.

You could see the people walking in and coming out in smoke.

And it was a matter of time in when we are going to go in there.

I mean that was the thing — we are still alive today, but tomorrow we may be in smoke.

- When we found out what they do with gas.

Can you just imagine those people?

[Renee sighs] Keep hearing the scratches.

[eerie music] [Renee sobs] - Being on the campsite where I was, one night we went to sleep and next to us there were 10,000 gypsies.

The next day, the campsite was empty.

- On the night between August second and August third of 1944, what remained of the entire ‘Gypsy family camp' those people were killed.

They were put into the gas chambers and that was the end of the camp.

We thought it was maybe around 3,000, now it's closer to 4,000, Roma and Sinti who were killed in that one night.

[eerie music] And overall, there are several countries, and over 80 percent of the Roma and/or Sinti there were killed in the Holocaust.

[child singing Romani] People ask me why I teach my kids Romani.

It's a language that's definitely on the decline.

It's very much an endangered language, but one of the major reasons is because it was supposed to be exterminated.

The Nazis were trying to exterminate that whole culture.

[both singing in Romani] And for me, it's a form of resistance.

And I think it's a way for me to honour all of the people who didn't make it through the war, all the people who, you know, would have still been speaking Romani after the war, and they couldn't.

- [VO] Cremation was the cheap means of disposal of the great mass of bodies.

Having been put through all this expense of murder, the Nazis were determined to make a profit.

The charred remains were ground up and sold to German farmers as fertiliser.

[eerie music] - I saw this huge, huge chimney and I was standing there mesmerised.

I said, my God, these flames are reaching the heavens.

And I didn't know what it was.

- We see not so much flames, but smoke.

Aaaaaaah — now we know why the smell.

It's a bakery.

They were baking bread.

Strange smell.

- We were told that this building was a bakery.

Only it didn't smell like a bakery.

We found out what it was.

Took us a while to believe it.

And the stench.

Oh, the stench.

- [indistinct] Do you see that cloud there?

Do you smell the smell?

And then she said, “Here are your relatives.

Here they go.” That's how we learned.

- The smoke was so thick, burning ten to twenty thousand human beings a day.

The stench — fifty years later.

You do not know what is lodged in my nostrils.

Unbelievable I can recall the stench of burning flesh from this distance.

I not only can recall it, I cannot not recall it.

[eerie music] [explosions boom] - One of the strangest things about this whole period is that at the moment the Nazis are losing the war in the summer of 1944 is actually when the Holocaust reaches its darkest phase.

The Nazis bring in on those trains 437,000 Jews.

The overwhelming majority of them murdered in Auschwitz.

They reach a level of efficiency that they have not been able to match at any other time.

[people singing in foreign language] If you visit Auschwitz-Birkenau now you just see rubble.

That's because, as the Nazis knew that the Russians were coming, they wanted to destroy the evidence.

So these pictures do show the way the process worked.

They showed a train arriving.

It's not a passenger train, it's a goods train.

These would have been people from the Hungarian provinces.

And there's a child being held by its mother.

The whole process would happen extremely quickly.

The people would have to be disembarked.

Their possessions taken from them and sorted for what the Nazis wanted to keep.

Then they would have been corralled into columns.

And the rest would be a job of herding those people in big numbers to the gas chambers.

As soon as one transport would come in and was cleared, a train would be arriving bringing a new load.

It was the height of German industrial efficiency like you would see in an assembly line, except the product in this case were human corpses.

- Thousands upon thousands of Hungarians poured into the cam.

The death machinery was totally unable to cope with the influx.

Gassing, murdering and burning, the crematoria worked around the clock.

In the end, people were thrown into the flames alive.

[eerie music] - In Theresienstadt she made it her mission to set up a children's infirmary.

She cared for her little patients during the day and during her night watches she made up lullabies to take them to a world of happiness.

Moments of happiness, at least.

And all the time she was thinking of her son Hanus; the first son she had to send away she saw him, little Hanus, in all of the children.

So, when the children of Ilse's infirmary came on the transport list to Auschwitz, Ilse couldn't but sign up, also, and so she accompanied the children together with her younger son, little Tommy to Auschwitz.

[bell tolliing] When they came to Birkenau they had to wait in front of the gas chamber where you could see a sign.

Disinfection.

They were approached by a member of the Sonderkommando that was a commando that had to pull the corpses from the gas chamber after the death of the people.

A man that recognised Ilse from Thereisenstadt, he gave her advice.

[somber music] "Go as quickly as possible into the chamber.

Sit with the children on the floor and start singing.

Sing what you always sing with them.

That way you will inhale the gas quicker.

Otherwise you would be trampled to death when panic breaks out.

[somber music continues] This guardsman he testified that when they were in this room, he heard her sing the lullaby Wiegele So that the pain of dying for the children will be alleviated.

[singing in German] [eerie music] - [VO] Death mills had ground out their dead until the very day allied armies broke through their gats [eerie music] Now they were free.

Most of them couldn't even walk or crawl.

Everywhere was the repeated monotonous sight and stench of corpses, shrivelled bodies like old bones picked over by dogs, piles and heaps like the litter of a boneyard.

- The bodies was a mountain two storeys high with dead people.

- When you ever saw these mountains of bodies, you always saw somebody you knew.

Best friend of mine I saw.

- Nobody thought you'd get through the gate alive.

[somber music continues] It is so disgraceful what happened there.

[eerie music] [somber music] - My father, Alexander Kulisiewicz after the war he believed that his life, and not his family unfortunately what was important for him was his mission, to show the people we were there in the camps, and our friends died because they were murdered.

And this is the music they wanted to give us.

And I want to give it to you.

Part of the music was a form of resistance, created to show that we are not cows We are not sheep who say nothing, who cannot leave the testimony.

It was resistance.

And the message was: you should never surrender, even if you are in hell like they were in Nazi hell, even if you are not sure if you survive, if you see that other people die, you should not surrender.

Never.

My father was inspired by his great friend Rosebery D'Arguto a Jewish composer and choir director.

Rosebery wanted to keep this information for the future, so he created the Jewish Death Song.

He chose a Jewish folk song about brothers who were selling wine, and the number of these brothers was smaller and smaller.

He wanted to show the people that the Jews, this was exactly what was happening, they were smaller and smaller.

The number of Jews was becoming smaller and smaller.

[somber music continues] My father promised D'Arguto that he would do all his best to go around the world and sing this song.

And my father did it until the very end.

He always told me, when a nation has its music, then it has something.

It has culture.

[birds singing] [singing in German] [singing in German] [singing in German] [singing in German] [somber music] - The headline account of the loss of the Holocaust that we give is that figure of six million.

But in a way, it doesn't convey the full depth of the tragedy, because there was a whole world that has all but vanished.

There was a language — Yiddish.

There was a civilisation and a culture.

There were books written.

There were forms of music, forms of religious study, costume, humour.

Herded into those gas chambers were poets and writers and artists and who knows what those people would have done.

And then when you look at these photographs and you see that baby, you think of not just that life, but there was also the potential for future generations that went with them.

Because every one of those people did not have a child, or a grandchild, or a great-grandchild.

And when Jews mourn the Holocaust, I think that is partly what they mourn not just the lives, but the world that was lost.

[somber music continues] - I'm just appalled what we are going through now again, with senseless, stupid antisemitism.

And how badly everybody is behaving.

So what have we learned?

[singing in Yiddish] [singing continues]