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This week marks 80 years since the Auschwitz death camp was liberated and as the years pass the importance of gathering and keeping survivors' stories is felt more and more keenly. At Outlook we’ve spoken to many incredible people who personally experienced the holocaust, and so in this edition we bring you some of those voices and testimony.

Dita Kraus was only 14 when she arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Nazi-controlled Poland. She found some escape from the daily horror by working in the children’s hut, looking after a small collection of books. She has written her own book about her experience entitled A Delayed Life: The True Story of the Librarian of Auschwitz. This interview was first broadcast in 2020.

Deported from Hungary when he was five, Peter Lantos spent time in the forced labour camp Bergen-Belsen. 21 of his relatives were murdered. Peter became a successful neuroscientist and has also written about his experiences but from the perspective of his five-year-old self, his book is called The Boy Who Didn’t Want To Die. This interview was first broadcast in 2023.

When she was 11 Eva Mendelsson’s mother Sylvia Cohn gave her a book of poems that she had written. It is her most treasured possession – her mother’s words following Eva throughout her life. Sylvia gave up her daughters so they could be smuggled out of Nazi-controlled France while she herself was sent to Auschwitz. This interview was first broadcast in 2021.

Henry Wuga was a teenage apprentice chef when his mother managed to get him a place on the Kindertransport, a scheme through which thousands of Jewish children were able to escape Nazi-controlled countries just before the outbreak of World War Two. Following a series of misunderstandings Henry found himself temporarily locked up in internment camps in Britain, however his cooking skills helped him make the best of the situation. This interview was first broadcast in 2023, sadly Henry passed away last year (2024), aged 100.

Presenter: India Rakusen
Producer: Julian Siddle

Get in touch: outlook@bbc.com or WhatsApp +44 330 678 2707

(Photo: Children leaving Vienna on the Kindertransport. Credit: Imagno/Getty Images)