Brussels, 2019
Then they led us on foot to the port, they loaded us onto boats
My name is Alberto Israel, I was born on the island of Rhodes, I was born on August 3, 1927. We suffered throughout the war… until 1944. In 1944, the Germans came and asked us to go to the Air Force (the Air Force building) in order to check our identity card, but they lied to us. They put us in there but there was no way out. They took [our documents] and held us for two days. Then they led us on foot to the port, they loaded us onto boats, six hundred people in each boat. It took us four days and four nights to reach Greece, Piraeus, Haidari.
[…]
From that moment on, after we left for Auschwitz, they transported us to Charlottegrube in Rideltau. There we worked in the mines, I worked until January 18. On January 18, 1945, the Russians were advancing. When they [the Russians] approached Auschwitz, they [the Nazis] forced us to evacuate the camp. The temperature was minus twenty-two, we walked on foot one hundred kilometers, the “death march”.
Then they put us for four days in open railway wagons until we reached Mauthausen. We reached Mauthausen on January 25 [1945], after four days in the railway wagons. Inside the train there was nothing…The only thing we could drink in the wagon was our urine, it was the only warm thing that was there that we could drink. Yes. Then we went to Ebensee, to a cement factory and I worked there until May 5, until the Americans came and liberated us. This is the story.
When the Americans came, I weighed twenty-nine and a half kilos. I was over seventeen; I was almost eighteen years of age. We stayed for a month in Mauthausen. In Ebensee we stayed because the Americans started giving us food to eat, little by little. In any event, within a month I had gained ten kilos, I weighed forty kilos. Then I could finally walk, run even. They put us in [a train], took us to Innsbruck and from there they sent us to Italy. You know, we had to return to Greece that was liberated, but we were scared to go to Greece because they told us that the Greeks would send us to fight. So, you see, as soon as we left Auschwitz, we were not going to fight… So, we all set off to Italy. We reached Modena and from Modena we went to Bologna. We stayed for a while in Bologna and then I left for Rome. I had two brothers in the Belgian Congo, and one year later, in June of 1946, I left for the Congo. And we lived in the Belgian Congo. There I got married, started working and built my life until 1960, when independence was declared in Congo and we came to Belgium.
In 2008 the book Alberto Israël. Je ne vous ai pas oubliés, with a prologue by Simone Veil, edited by Stipan Bosnjak was published (Brussels: Editions de l’ Institut Sépharade Européen).