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Bartnikowski, 82, who was registered with camp number 192731, holds a family photograph as he poses for a portrait in Warsaw. /Kacper Pempel/Reuters
Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops, some of the dwindling band of survivors have traveled back to the Nazi death camp in Poland to commemorate the anniversary.
Survivor Bogdan Bartnikowski was one of those in attendance, alongside world leaders, in what will likely be one of the last such gatherings of those who experienced its horrors.
Born in Warsaw in January 1932, Bartnikowski and his mother were expelled from their home during the Warsaw Uprising. The Uprising was an insurrection in the Polish capital that took place in the late 1944 and saw Poles unsuccessfully try to oust the German army and seize control of the city before it was occupied by the advancing Soviet army.
The Nazis initially sent the pair to a transit camp in Pruszków before deporting them to Auschwitz, where they were separated.
On January 11, 1945, both were evacuated to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where they were imprisoned until their liberation on April 22, 1945. After this, they returned to Warsaw where Bartnikowski wrote a memoir entitled Childhood Behind Barbed Wire.
Urszula Bartnikowska wipes a tear alongside her husband Bogdan Bartnikowski near the death wall at Auschwitz on January 27, 2013 during a ceremony marking the 68th anniversary of the camp's liberation. /Peter Andrews/Reuters
The 93-year-old sat down with CGTN correspondent Aljoša Milenković to talk through his memories of life at Auschwitz, one of more than 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland.
Bartnikowski also recalled the day of his liberation aged 13 and how he learned to overcome his fear of Germany. He explained why future generations must continue to be taught about the horrors of more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, perishing in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease at Auschwitz.
Bartnikowski sits down with CGTN to tell his story. /CGTN
This is Bartnikowski's story in his own words.
"My name is Bogdan Bartnikowski. I was born in Warsaw in 1932. I found myself in Auschwitz Birkenau after the Warsaw Uprising on August 12, 1944 and was evacuated to the second camp on January 12, 1945. My camp number in Auschwitz was 192731.
"In August 1944, I lived in Warsaw in the Ochota district with my parents. In our Ochota district, in the Western District of Warsaw, the uprising only lasted until August 10, when the insurgents had to retreat and soldiers from the 29th SS Waffen Division broke into our house.
"I was forced out of my home and after being transported on foot and by train, not far from Warsaw, to Dulag 121 (a Nazi transit camp), I was transported together with my mother on a freight train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on the evening of August 10. I found myself there after a 24-hour journey, on the night of August 11-12, 1944.
First impressions
"My first memory, when the doors of the freight car in which I was brought to Auschwitz slid open, was the glow of the headlights directed straight at us.
"It was the middle of the night, but I noticed after I was pushed out of the car, a lot of lit, barbed wire, electrified, and roofs of single-story barracks plus a line of SS men with dogs and a great shout of 'Get out.'
"Families were immediately separated. Men were sent separately to the men's camp, women and children to the women's camp.
"I was shocked by the sight of this place. I realized that I was in a very dangerous concentration camp. I tried not to lose contact with my mother because I was with her all the time,
"I already saw right there, although it was the middle of the night, two huge chimneys on the side, from which flames were shooting out, and the air was filled with such a stench that it was hard to breathe.
"I did not know at that moment that these were murdered prisoners being burned. I found out about it only after two or three hours.
'Arbeit macht frei' (Work sets you free) gate is pictured on the site of Auschwitz prior to the 80th anniversary of its liberation. /Kacper Pempel/Reuters
The men's camp
"In the men's camp, there were about 150 of us Polish boys from the Warsaw Uprising, aged between 10 and 14 or 15.
"In those first weeks it was what our kapos (prisoners assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks) called gymnastics. It was simply doing physical exercises until you were out of breath. Fall down, rise up, leapfrog, squats.
"All the time they were shouting that we were 'kleine polnische banditen aus Warschau' - little Polish bandits from Warsaw - and that is how we should be treated.
"Then the older boys in this group and I were assigned to pull a horse-drawn cart, which was supposed to be pulled by two horses. There were no horses, and we, a dozen or so boys, pulled this cart, pushed it, and played the role of internal transport in the camp, carrying various luggage of prisoners who had been murdered earlier.
Medical experiments
"After a few weeks, notorious SS doctor Josef Mengele took us under his care and chose candidates from among us for pseudo-medical experiments.
"For us, it consisted of putting some liquid in our eyes, which made our eyes water and sting a lot. After a dozen or so days, as luck would have it, the doctor was promoted and left for Berlin, so the command and the experiment were interrupted.
"I stayed in the camp with my mother for two weeks, and was evacuated to Germany to another concentration camp, Zakrzyn Hausen, near Berlin.
"There, I was sent, still with my mother, in a group of about 100 people, i.e. 50 women, each with a child, to work clearing the rubble of the city of Berlin, which was systematically bombed day and night. We had to clear this rubble from the streets that were being covered.
Two children in the medical station at Auschwitz five days after the camp's liberation. /Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images
Worst thing
"For me and my peers, the worst thing was that we were expelled from our family home, placed in a camp and had no contact with our mothers, who were in the women's camp, literally a few dozen meters away from us.
"We didn't know anything about them, whether they were alive, whether they were healthy, whether they had been deported or murdered. We were very close to each other, but we had no contact with them. Nor did they know anything about us.
"Only after three months of our stay, already in late autumn, we were directed to the women's camp and there I managed to meet my mother for a few minutes. I managed to meet my mother for a few minutes, hug her, convince myself that we were alive and that maybe we would survive.
"The hardest moments were when we were led to the baths, very rarely, only a few times, but we didn't know if it was really a bath. When we stood naked under the showers, where the water was supposed to come, we waited for a moment looking into the showers to see if there would be water or gas.
"We felt great happiness when the water splashed on us and we knew when we were returning to our barracks that we were still alive.
Victims
"I saw gassing victims when, in the men's camp, we were driven out to the square next to the barracks every morning where we had to sit all day,
"Right next to us, by the wall, there was a pile of murdered and dead prisoners, arranged five on top of each other, heads to one side, so that when the SS man came to count us during roll call, he could also count exactly how many prisoners had been murdered.
"For several weeks we literally had to sit one or two steps away from these murdered prisoners.
"We saw how bodies were being collected all the time from our sector, prisoners who had died of hunger. Others were literally skeletons, just wandering around the camp. No one abused them anymore because it was known that they would die in a day or two.
"We watched as a cart pulled by two or three prisoners came for them. They threw them not like people, but like goods on that cart and they were taken to the crematorium.
"I also saw those who made up their minds that they did not want to live any longer and they went to the wires and grabbed them to die from electric shock.
Soviet Red Army soldiers of the first Ukrainian front with liberated prisoners at Auschwitz. /Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images
Liberation
"The Auschwitz camp was liberated two weeks after our evacuation to Germany, but my mother and I were liberated by the Russians only on April 22, 1945.
"The first years after the war, already free in Poland, were a time for me when I deeply hated our torturers, the Germans. Hearing the German voice, the German language, I went numb with fear that captivity would return again and I would end up in a camp again.
"Of course, this was changing, the world was changing. I grew up, I came of age, I finished school, I got the beautiful profession of a military pilot.
"I realized that my experiences in the camp, mine and my friends, my mother, can never be forgotten. They stayed with us forever, but the world has changed, our torturers are no longer alive, and the contemporary citizens of Germany, with whom I have frequent contact, are different people.
"You can't hate me, you have to know about what happened, you have to remember it, but we live for a different world and we live for the future. We are together citizens of Europe , the European Union and our task is to build a good future for the world and Europe together."
At least 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, perished in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease at Auschwitz.
More than 3 million of Poland's 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe.
Interview by Aljoša Milenković