Agnes Darvas narrowly avoided immediate death at Auschwitz in 1944, thanks to her coat being stolen in the ghetto and her mother cutting off her braids to prevent lice. Her altered appearance, including a borrowed coat and cropped hair, deceived Joseph Mengele, known as Auschwitz's "Angel of Death," ultimately saving her life. Now 92, Darvas recounted her experience at her home in Budapest as the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation on Jan. 27 approached.
Following her escape from immediate death, she and her mother endured harrowing conditions in various camps, including Plaszow and Mauthausen, before reaching the Bergen-Belsen camp. By then, she could only crawl due to illness contracted from contaminated water, depicting the camp as the epitome of suffering.
Darvas vividly recalled the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops in April 1945, where she described the dramatic announcement of freedom amidst the stark reality of piled corpses. Reflecting on the atrocities faced by millions, predominantly Jews, at Auschwitz and other Nazi camps, she highlighted the extermination of half a million Hungarian Jews in 1944, which tragically included her extended family.
Despite surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, Darvas emphasized that the world has yet to grasp the profound lessons from such atrocities. She lamented that cruelty persists globally and cautioned against forgetting such tragedies, warning that "this happens every day, perhaps not with Jews but some other ethnicities ... there has never been so much cruelty in the world."