By Krisztina Fenyo and Krisztina Than
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - When Agnes Darvas was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944, she escaped being sent straight to the gas chambers with other children largely because her coat had been stolen in the ghetto and her mother had cut off her braids for fear of lice.
The coat borrowed from her mother and makeshift hairstyle made her look older to Joseph Mengele, Auschwitz's "Angel of Death" who chose who was fit for camp labour and who was to be killed, Darvas, now 92, told Reuters.
"During the selection, Mengele was misled by my short-cropped hair and the coat, even though I was only 12," she said at her home in downtown Budapest ahead of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Jan. 27.
She and her mother were sent to the Plaszow camp to work in a quarry with a pickaxe as heavy as she was and then moved on to another concentration camp, Mauthausen. By the time they reached the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp, she could no longer walk, only crawl, due to typhoid and cholera caught from filthy water.
In the days before that camp was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945, there was no water at all. She described it as the "hell of all hells".
"The Brits came in ...they used loudspeakers from cars saying you are free now, and we will take you out from this hell," she said. "There were piles of dead bodies around."
More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, perished at Auschwitz, the death camp set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland to carry out Hitler's "Final Solution" to exterminate European Jews.
Half a million Hungarian Jews were murdered there and in other Nazi extermination camps in 1944, including all of Darvas's extended family.
"We had a fairly large family, 72 of us close relatives, cousins, aunties," Darvas said, going through photos of her happy and, she says, spoilt childhood in the family villa.
The world still has not learnt the lessons of the horrors suffered by so many people, she said.
"People believe that if they commemorate, then these things would not happen. Well, this happens every day, perhaps not with Jews but some other ethnicities ... there has never been so much cruelty in the world."