John Chillag, an Auschwitz survivor and long-time member of the survivor speakers team at The Holocaust Centre – where Aegis is based – passed away on 22 March following a short illness. He was 82.

Born in Vienna, John was just seventeen when the Nazis occupied his homeland, Hungary. Within a fortnight of the occupation, all the anti-Jewish laws implemented in the Third Reich and the countries occupied by the Nazis became fully operational.

“We were completely ignorant of what was happening to Jews throughout Europe,” John wrote in ‘Survival’, published by The Holocaust Centre in 2003. “The country’s Jewish population, unaware of the realities of the Final Solution, moved to the ghettos resigned to a disagreeable, but hopefully short, period of a difficult fate.”

A far grimmer fate awaited them. In June 1944, John became one of the 400,000 Hungarian Jews sent to Auschwitz, along with much of his extended family. On arrival, he and his father were selected to work. His mother and thirty of his relatives were sent straight to the gas chambers.

“We were in shock and incredulous at first, but the smoke from the crematoria and the smell of burning flesh soon convinced us,” he said.

After about a month in Auschwitz, with his father and 270 others, John was “selected” to work in the steel plant of the Bochumer Verein in Bochum (Westphalia), the largest armament works of the Third Reich...