Rachel Roth, 94, suffers from dementia and sometimes can’t quite remember where she is. But when the Upper East Side resident saw the barbed-wire fences at the Nazi extermination camp she visited last month, her mind’s clarity was restored: she had no doubt where she was.
“This is Auschwitz,” she pronounced.
She surveyed the fence and the grassy trenches that surround the site, now a museum, and remembered arriving there in 1943.
“She definitely knew where she was,” said her son Ram Roth, who accompanied his Polish-born mother along with 39 other family members for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, where more than 1 million Jews were killed.
Roth was part of a contingent of 200 elderly Holocaust survivors from around the world who traveled to Poland and the death camp for ceremonies marking the Jan. 27 event.
Bundled in a down parka, Roth toured the camp in a wheelchair, and showed her family members the barracks where she slept on a concrete slab huddled with dozens of other emaciated girls, Roth told The Post.
“She said she always tried to squeeze into the middle of the girls because it was the warmest place to sleep,” said Roth’s son.
Zahava Ungar, who is 89 and lives in Brooklyn, also recalled her time at the camp, arriving for the ceremony accompanied by her family– “my private support system” — for the first time since the end of World War II.
Roth shows her prison camp number “48915.”Helayne Seidman“Everything was the same except the dogs were not there, the soldiers were not there and the screaming was not there,” she told The Post.
For the first time, Ungar was able to tour the ovens and crematoria where her whole family was killed. “It doesn’t leave me,” she said. “Whoever saw the ovens was gone.”
Like Ungar, Sally Yassy, 93, returned to Auschwitz for the first time.
Yassy, who lives in Queens, lost 40 family members during the Holocaust.
“It was very emotional for me,” she said, adding that she and her only son, Leo, said Kaddish at the camp and lit a candle to remember the dead, including her mother.
“I saw the barracks, I saw the piles of shoes and the glasses,” she said. “I cried a lot, a lot, a lot.”
