I searched body mountains in horror camps as Nazis killed my family one by one & set raging bull on my mother for ‘fun’

AT 96, Renee Salt’s life has been marked by unimaginable horrors.

She is one of only two people still alive in Britain who survived both of Adolf Hitler’s death camps Auschwitz and Belsen, where millions of Jews were exterminated.

During World War II, every close member of Renee’s family was murdered – her beloved young sister, mother and father as well as both sets of grandparents.

She watched as her 11-year-old sister, Stenia was taken away to be killed in their home town of Zdunska Wola, Poland.

At Auschwitz she watched her mild-mannered accountant father, Sazja Berkowitz, disappear into crowd – without a hug or a kiss – never to be seen again. 

It would be 80 years before she found out he had been worked to death in Kaufering IV, a sub-camp near Dachau, his body dumped in a mass grave.   

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And Renee watched as her beautiful mother, Saba, was reduced to a badly-injured skeleton who died of illness and malnutrition 12 days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops in April 1945. 

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day, marking the 81^st anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, and Renee will attend a reception at Buckingham Palace with King Charles and Queen Camilla.

She was so traumatised by her own tragic experience, that for half a century Renee did not talk about her experiences.

But for the last 30 years she has told her story of survival hundreds of times in schools throughout the UK, in order to keep the memory of the horrors alive.

Renee tells The Sun: “I had a very lovely childhood but unfortunately it didn’t last very long when the Germans occupied Poland. 

“As soon as they came into our town, they took over our apartment and immediately we lost everything, all our possessions. My father, who was a chief accountant in a very large textile firm, lost his job. We were like refugees from day one.”

Stolen sister

Renee was just 11 when more than 20,000 Jews were rounded up and crammed into a ghetto in their hometown of Zwińska Wola, south-east of the capital Warsaw. Her family lived eight to a room for two years.

Permanently hungry and cold, Renee worked as a slave in a clothing factory making socks for the German Army. 

On the way there, she was forced to walk past Jewish men who had been hanged on wooden gallows for stealing food, and dead bodies wrapped in newspaper, laid out on the pavements.

In the early hours of one summer morning all Jews were rounded up in the market and parents were ordered to hand over children up to 18 years old. Renee’s mother Saba tried to hide both her daughters with her coat. 

Renee says: “I can still hear the mothers screaming ‘Almighty God, help us. Where are you?’ It still ring in my ears today. Children were weeping, reaching out for their parents. It’s unforgettable.

“Stenia looked up at our mother. I’ll never forget what she said next. ‘Mummy, are they going to kill us?’ 

Mummy, are they going to kill us?

Renee’s sister Stenia

“My mother lied to her ‘No, darling, you’ll be together with your grandparents.’ What could she tell our little girl? She knew perfectly well what they were going to do to the children.

“The Germans got hold of Stenia and my mother got a beating. A guard was hitting her everywhere. My sister begged him: ‘Please stop. Please don’t hit her. That’s not my mother.’

“She was so brave. Then she ran away from us with tears running down her face. We never saw her again. Somehow, I was left. I don’t know how or why.”

Stenia was taken away in lorries with nearly 20,000 other Jewish men, women and children and killed. Renee was one of only three youngsters from the ghetto who survived.

Along with her mother and father, she spent the next two years, imprisoned and starving, in another ghetto 30 miles away in the city of Lodz.

She says: “It was awful. It was almost as awful as the camps. Except that the families were still together.”

Last glimpse of dad

In the August heat of 1944, Renee and her parents arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where dad Szaja vanished into the crowd.

Renee recalls: “Without a kiss, without a goodbye he disappeared. I never saw him again.”

Under the menacing gaze of the Dr Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, Renee and her mum miraculously avoided being sent to the gas chambers. Each day in Auschwitz felt like a year. 

In the depths of winter, dressed only in a man’s filthy pyjama jacket and a skirt so big it was held up with a strip of material ripped from the hemline, Renee was sent with her mum to Hamburg.

They weren’t human beings – they were monsters

Renee on SS

As slave labourers they demolished bombed-out buildings with their bare hands, raw with frostbite – Renee was so hungry she would have eaten anything, even wood.

One morning, the pair were split up and her mum was sent to a site near a slaughterhouse.

Renee says: “For ‘fun’ the SS opened a gate, let a bull out and it attacked my mother. She was trampled and torn, her face ripped open. No one treated her wounds.

“There was no wickedness or evil to which the SS could not sink. They weren’t human beings – they were monsters.”

‘Don’t cry when I die’

On April 7, 1945, the SS evacuated the Hamburg camp. Renee and her mother, carried on a stretcher, were loaded into different parts of the freight train and became separated when they arrived at Bergen-Belsen – the Third Reich’s darkest secret.

Separated from her mother, 15-year-old Renee was marched through forests littered with bodies to the disease-riddled concentration camp where 50,000 inmates died.

For two days, she searched for her mother among the walking dead and walked past two ‘mountains’ that turned out to be bodies piled high, with no one to bury them.

I’ve cried a lot of tears for her over the years, and I still do

Renee

Finally, Renee spotted a body lying on a stretcher on the rough wooden floor in the corner of a hut.

She says: “It was my mother. She was alive, but only just. I could see she was dying. My mother’s gaze slowly turned to me. 

“It took her a long time to find the strength to speak. Finally, her voice barely above a whisper, she said ‘Don’t cry when I die’.

“I think she didn’t want to me suffer. I’ve cried a lot of tears for her over the years, and I still do.”

History repeating

Renee’s traumatic memories are now tinged with fear at the rise in antisemitism around the globe in recent years.

When attackers began shooting at dozens of Jewish people on Bondi Beach, last month, Renee watched in absolute horror at 80 wasted years.

Renee sobs as she recalls seeing innocent people being gunned down in cold blood, killing 15.

She says quietly: “I felt pain, real pain. I couldn’t believe it. The world didn’t learn any lessons from the Holocaust. 

“We survivors never expected to see things like that happening again in our lifetime. I despair. Antisemitism is like a disease.”

For eight decades, Renee believed that God had spared her from death so she could tell her story and warn future generations never to make the same mistake again.

But seeing TV coverage of attacks at Manchester’s Heaton Synagogue and at Bondi Beach, on two of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, Renee was catapulted back to her life as a young girl in Poland.

She says: “The Germans would deliberately target us on holy days like Yom Kippur and Passover. Days when they knew Jewish people would gather in large numbers. It is happening all over again.”

She is also dismayed that the number of British secondary schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has fallen by more than a half since the October 7 attacks in 2023, when Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 Jewish men, women and children.   

As she prepares to meet the King and Queen today, Renee says she already has one royal supporter, in Prince William, who she met at the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London in 2024. 

She says: “What a lovely young man, so gracious and natural, just like his mother used to be. 

“I was nervous to begin with, but he held my hand. ‘Don’t be nervous,’ he said, smiling. 

“I began to talk to him, telling him a little of what I had experienced, and he listened in silence.

“Prince William was 15 when he lost his mother. The same age I was when my mama died. 

“We talked about how antisemitism is worse than ever. I never imagined that within my lifetime there would once more be an explosion of hate-fuelled antisemitism.’ 

“Prince William shook his head and told me ‘Antisemitism has no place in this country. Prejudice has no place in society.’ He’s right. It doesn’t.

“He urged me to carry on sharing my testimony so that the next generation could understand what it was really like.”

*A Mother’s Promise: My true story of surviving Auschwitz and the horrors of the Holocaust, by Renee Salt and Kate Thompson, is published by Orion.