Promise to a girl doomed to die: Holocaust survivor breaks 70 years of silence to tell of teenager's last words before she and twin were taken away for Auschwitz experiments
Iby Knill promised teenager she would tell everyone the evil of Auschwitz
But when the death camps were liberated it 'didn't feel right'
Now aged 90 and in Leeds, she found the courage as a mature student
By Dan Bloom
PUBLISHED: 13:04 GMT, 5 December 2013
A grandmother who survived the Holocaust has finally spoken about the horrors of Auschwitz 70 years after promising a girl she would tell the world what she had witnessed.
Iby Knill, 90, recalls how on the first night she spent at the death camp in July 1944 a frail teenager crawled over to her and begged 'if you live, please tell our story.'
Four years ago Mrs knill took a course in theology and it was during one of the group sessions that she finally revealed she was sent to the concentration camp when she was 20.
In a moving testament she describes the realisation that she faced being gassed like six million others.
Traumatising: Iby Knill, pictured after Auschwitz was liberated and as a Leeds grandmother today, has fulfilled a promise she made to a dying girl to tell the world about the horrors of the death camps. It took almost 70 years
Survivor: Iby Knill, now 90, is the subject of a documentary. She said: 'The girl told me that her and her sister were going to be experimented on. She said they were then going to be gassed and therefore exterminated'
She explains in a new documentary that during a session on her course a group at Leeds University, in the city where she now lives, was discussing whether the Holocaust was a result of evil or sin.
The tutor said that 'only a person who was there could answer that question'. Mrs Knill responded simply with 'I was there'.
For Mrs Knill it was like the floodgates had been opened and, fulfilling her promise to the unknown girl, she decided to write her memoirs.
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| Horror: Iby Knill spent six weeks at Auschwitz. Pictured is the famous inscription 'Work makes [you] free' |
Remembering her terrible first night at Auschwitz, she said: 'The girl told me that her and her sister were going to be experimented on.
'She said they were then going to be gassed and therefore exterminated. She made me promise to tell the story of the camps, if I were to live.
'Of course I said yes, but after the war was over it didn’t seem right to talk about what had happened.'
Death camps: Iby Knill was at Auschwitz, which comprised two separate camps, for six weeks
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| nstrument of death: One of the surviving gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camps |
She said: 'There, you were one of a number, and it came down to how long you could survive.'
After the camps were liberated, she was too traumatised to tell her story but has finally broken her silence.
Mrs Knill, who went on to marry British Army major Herbert Knill, was born in Czechoslovakia but escaped to Hungary in 1942 when the SS began rounding up Jews.
Two years later, when Mrs Knill was 20, Hungary was occupied and she was transported to Auschwitz where she spent six weeks before being transferred to the German labour camp Kaunitz, which was eventually liberated.
Mrs Knill later moved to Britain where she had two children, Christopher Knill, a psychiatrist, 65, and Pauline Kilch, 58, a teacher.
A film was made out of Iby's memoirs, The Woman Without a Number, by film and television student Robin Pepper, 22, at Teesside University.
He and fellow students Mark Oxley, 26, from Darlington, and Ian Orwin, 22, from Sunderland, made the documentary for a final year project after he read her book in just one day.
Mrs Knill said: 'Robin has done a marvellous job, and I am very happy with the film. It goes some way towards fulfilling the promise I made to the twin all those years ago.'
Robin added: 'It was an honour to work with Iby. She is an amazing lady, and we are really pleased we have helped her keep that promise she made so long ago.'
GRUESOME EXPERIMENTS
The Auschwitz death camps played host to some of the most gruesome Nazi medical experiments, which few survived.
Professor Carl Clauberg oversaw the mass sterilisation of hundreds of Jewish prisoners by putting chemicals in their fallopian tubes and exposing their genitals to X-rays. The procedures were brutal, often causing infections and radiation burns.
Some ‘patients’ were used for human medical trials of the drugs Rutenol and Periston, reacting with bloody vomiting and painful diarrhoea.
Other experiments had no apparent purpose and were done merely for practice - or pleasure.
Doctors deliberately made the lungs of tuberculosis patients collapse and killed others by injecting lethal phenol into their hearts.
One of the most infamous doctors, Josef Mengele (above right) infected different races with contagious diseases to see how their survival rates compared.
Source: Auschwitz.org
She said: 'There, you were one of a number, and it came down to how long you could survive.'
After the camps were liberated, she was too traumatised to tell her story but has finally broken her silence.
Mrs Knill, who went on to marry British Army major Herbert Knill, was born in Czechoslovakia but escaped to Hungary in 1942 when the SS began rounding up Jews.
Two years later, when Mrs Knill was 20, Hungary was occupied and she was transported to Auschwitz where she spent six weeks before being transferred to the German labour camp Kaunitz, which was eventually liberated.
Mrs Knill later moved to Britain where she had two children, Christopher Knill, a psychiatrist, 65, and Pauline Kilch, 58, a teacher.
A film was made out of Iby's memoirs, The Woman Without a Number, by film and television student Robin Pepper, 22, at Teesside University.
He and fellow students Mark Oxley, 26, from Darlington, and Ian Orwin, 22, from Sunderland, made the documentary for a final year project after he read her book in just one day.
Mrs Knill said: 'Robin has done a marvellous job, and I am very happy with the film. It goes some way towards fulfilling the promise I made to the twin all those years ago.'
Robin added: 'It was an honour to work with Iby. She is an amazing lady, and we are really pleased we have helped her keep that promise she made so long ago.'
