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As the war approached its conclusion and Germany was surrounded by the Allies, Hersh and the other Jews at Auschwitz were transported across the country. He was eventually liberated at Theresienstadt (Terezin, Czechoslovakia) on 8 May 1945 by the Soviet Army.
Arek was not yet 16 when he was liberated and had witnessed some of the worst horrors in human history. The only remaining member of Arek’s family was his older sister, Mania, all of the others had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Arek was placed in a children’s barrack for a few months before he and three thousand others were loaded onto open wagons on 7 April 1945. Only 600 survived the month-long journey to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Arek was liberated by the Russian army on 8 May 1945. He remembers being given rice pudding to eat.
Arek was just ten years old at the outbreak of the Second World War. By the time he was liberated by the Soviet army from the ghetto at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia on 8 May 1945, he had endured suffering and brutality of unimaginable magnitude.
On 8 May 1945, he was liberated by the Russians and by 14 May he was on a Lancaster bomber heading for England. He settled in the UK and made Yorkshire his home with his wife Jean. He later discovered that only 40 people from his hometown survived the war.
Arek survived his time in two ghettos and several Concentration Camps, before being liberated at age 16. Almost all of his family were murdered. Arek now shares his testimony and does everything he can to counter assertions that the Holocaust was just a ‘detail of history’.
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Arek Hersh MBE, aged 94, from Leeds, is a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who was aged 11 when he was first taken to a concentration camp, experiencing horrors in multiple camps - including...
