The horrors of concentration camps

Seventy years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, Roman Kent, who was 12 when he was sent there, wept as he implored the world not to allow anything like that to happen again. ‘How can one erase the sight of human skeletons – just skin and bones, but still alive?’ he said. ‘How can I ever forget the smell of burning flesh?’

Paul-Emile Seidman was working as a doctor in Bichat hospital in Paris when the survivors of the concentration camps began to arrive.

In a few days our beds were occupied by skeletons…They all seem to be of the same age, whether they are twenty or sixty. Their heads appear tiny—nothing but a fragile skull in which the eyes seem to occupy the whole face. There are bald spots on their heads; you take a strand of hair, you barely pull it, it remains between your fingers like the coat of an old diseased animal.