The Holocaust, which killed millions of Jews, now seems like a story from a distant, brutal past. Yet some survivors live on. In the first of a three-part special, Owen Amos meets a North-East man who survived Hitler’s genocide

IN a quiet cul-de-sac near Newcastle Airport lives Harry. Harry has neat, silver hair, his front room is filled with pictures of grandchildren in graduation gowns and the Olympics is on the telly. In short, Harry is like any 80-something Geordie. Until, that is, he rolls up his sleeve.

There, tattooed on his forearm, is a blue, fading reminder of Harry’s part in history.

A-19879. It is Harry’s Auschwitz prisoner number, still stark 64 years on. His real name is Chaim Nagelstein.

Funny, isn’t it? You read books, watch films, see harrowing pictures of haunted Jews. But only when a Geordie called Harry rolls up his sleeve and shows you his Auschwitz number, does it become real. Only when you see a forearm, still scarred by 64-year-old Nazi ink, does 1944 seem recent. Amazing what history hides in quiet cul-de-sacs near Newcastle Airport.

Harry is from Hrubieszow, in eastern Poland, near the modern-day Ukrainian border. War broke out – that is, Germany invaded his country – when he was 13.

“It was terrible – we had seen how they treated Jews,” says Harry. “Unless you made way for them, or took your cap off, they would shoot you. They treated Jews like muck, like they were not human beings.

We had to wear a yellow Star of David, so they knew we were Jews.”

The yellow Star of David.

I remember learning of them in GCSE history; bands of branded Jews shuffling in black and white pictures. Now, before me, in 21st Century Newcastle, is a man who wore one. It’s strange hearing these tales in this Polish-Geordie, Krakow-meets-Kenton accent.

Harry’s “ye knaas”

and “likes” echo Auf Wiedersehen Pet, not Auschwitz survival.

Nazis scarred Harry’s life early. He was banned from school and his eldest brother, Ely, was killed by Germans in 1940. Did Harry, as a 13-year-old, understand why he, his family and fellow Jews, were targeted?

“We thought, what have we done to them?”

says Harry. “We couldn’t understand. We just had to do what they told us. Bow, take our caps off.”

Harry’s father, Schlomo, was a skilled bricklayer, valued by the Gestapo that occupied Hrubieszow.

His skill gave the family time. While he worked, other Jews were “resettled”.

“They started deporting people,” says Harry.

“But, at first, people didn’t think they were going to concentration camps to be gassed and burnt. How could they think that? They thought they were going for a new life. There were women, little children. How could they think such bad things?

“But the second time people were rounded up, we started thinking ‘We have never heard from the last group. They would have written.’ Then people started protecting themselves.

Even though he knew the Gestapo, my father didn’t trust them. He built a hideout in the cellar. Instead of going downstairs into the cellar, we entered through a hatch.”

In October 1942, more and more Gestapo came to Hrubieszow. The Wannsee Conference, which confirmed the Final Solution, had been held eight months earlier. “They did not just want 1,000, 2,000,” says Harry. “It was 8,000 – everyone.

My father decided we should live in the cellar.

But my sister, Manya, who was 17, had a boyfriend, Meyer. His family had built a big, hollow haystack on a farm nearby. Manya wanted to go with him.

“My mother started crying.

My father said ‘Let her go. You never know, maybe some of us will survive.’ He knew by then what was going on. I said ‘I will go with her’. She was three years older, but I said I would take care of her.

Meyer said we could all live in the haystack.

So I went, and that’s how I survived – by leaving my family and hiding in the haystack.”

Harry stayed in the haystack for two weeks, surviving on food brought by the farmer. As he looks up, hands on his chair’s arms, I ask if he can still see the haystack and still remember those two weeks.

“Oh, I can still see it,” he says. “In the middle, you could stand up. I can still see it in my mind’s eye. We couldn’t go out in the day in case someone saw you. We sat round all day with nothing to do. We had to whisper to each other – there were 11 of us in total.”

After two weeks, the farmer reported Jewish boys and girls working in the village. Harry and his sister left the haystack – it was, after all, a cell – and looked for work in Hrubieszow.

While there, they went home.

“The cellar was wide open and my family were gone,” says Harry, breathing deeper. “I started crying. My sister said ‘Maybe they’re somewhere else, you don’t know.’ But we found out they had been shot by the Germans.” One of Harry’s sisters had been given the chance to live. She chose to die with her family.

Today’s 16-year-olds usually worry about GCSEs and football. When he was 16, Harry had lost almost all his family, his friends and his town. He had his sister, yet they – because of race – were earmarked for extermination in history’s deadliest regime. All this, remember, less than a lifetime ago.

For Harry, orphaned by Nazis, it was work or die. Not work or starve: this was work, or the angry German will notch another with his gun. Harry’s job? Throwing neighbours’ corpses, German bullets wedged in their brains, into mass graves. Some, the unfortunate few, still gasped with life: the gravediggers were ordered to snuff them out.

“We didn’t want to do it, but what can you do?” says Harry. “Did you give up? You wanted to survive and wanted to tell the whole world what the Germans had done, about the innocent women, the children. I didn’t want to be sad because of what happened to my family.

I wanted to survive.”

When there were no bodies to bury, Harry and the survivors were made to ransack Jewish homes, emptied by brutalism and bullets, for valuables. After six months, there were no bodies and no loot. The remaining were lined up in fours and taken away, destined for the concentration camp.

“We were lined up – I was in the front four, and my sister and her boyfriend were in the back four,” says Harry. “I went by myself. When they took us away, I turned. I could see my sister crying, because they had taken me away.”

■ Tomorrow: Harry’s life inside Nazi concentration camps. Plus, Phil Wilson, MP for Sedgefield, visits a former concentration camp and reports on the haunting scene.