CRI听力:Survivor Recalls Memories in Dachau Concentration Camp

For more on life inside the Dachau concentration camp, we turn to the story of one of its survivors who has shared his experience.

The survivor calls on younger generations to prevent history from repeating itself.

CRI's Huang Shan reports.

Bernard Marks was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1932.

When he was seven years old, he was sent to the concentration camp along with his family, as Germany occupied the country.

At that time, children under the age of ten were sent directly to the gas chambers, rather than being worked to death as slave labor.

To avoid being killed, Marks' father changed his son's year of birth when they were registered in the camp. But the heavy labor was overwhelming to the then 8-year-old Marks.

Marks has recalled that he and his father had been transferred to five different concentration camps.

"At Auschwitz I was working building a road. Sometimes we would take stones from one side, in the heat, and carry them to the other side. And then some people would take it from this side to put it back over there. Another way to exterminate you, because they used the word 'arbeit macht frei', work makes you free. Actually that was not the case, they should have used 'work will exterminate you'. Instead of putting you into the gas chamber, they just worked you to death without giving you any food."

In 1944, Marks and his father were sent to build air-raid shelters and arsenals for the Nazis in a sub camp of Dachau.

According to Marks' memory, during that time, if they fell ill, they would be locked in a hut with window nailed shut. The Nazis would often splash the huts with gasoline, and then set the sick people inside on fire.

Marks says he and his father were later transferred to a "death train".

The train serves as a target to draw firepower from the allies.

"It could have been military, they didn't know it was just us, slave laborers, on that train. So we jumped out into the forest, and we were greeted from the top by machine guns by the allies, from machine guns from both sides from the forest by Nazis, that was on the 26th of April. And we survived, wounded as we were, we survived overnight in the forest. And they collected us again the next day and took us back to the camp. The day after, we were liberated by the United States Army 12th Armored Division."

After Marks and his father were set free form the camp, they moved to the United States, with hopes to start a new life.

About 200 people in his extended family were sent to the camps, but only five survived.

Since 1995, Marks has worked as a volunteer to tell people what he has gone through and what he witnessed in the concentration camps.

By doing this, Marks hopes the younger generation can learn from history, and prevent it from repeating itself.

For CRI, I'm Huang Shan.