Holocaust survivor Philip Riteman speaks about Auschwitz

A Halifax man spoke today about the Nazi death camp Auschwitz, 70 years after Soviet troops liberated that landscape of horrors.

Philip Riteman grew up in rural Poland. As a teenager, the German government captured his Jewish family and sent them to Auschwitz.

Riteman's prisoner number was tattooed onto his wrist and, after he lied to say he was older, he was sent to hard labour. If he had revealed his true age, he likely would have been killed the same day.

But living appeared worse than dying once the scale of the atrocity settled in.

"Mountain of bodies there in the barracks. The smell almost killed you. One on top of each other. We had to burn the bodies," he said.

His descent into the nightmare didn't end when the Soviets liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. He had already left the death camp, walking with a group of prisoners that the Germans moved out as the Russian army advanced.

His liberation day came in May 1945, delivered by American soldiers. He weighed just 75 pounds.

"There were maybe a few hundred of us lying there next to the tanks. They were yelling to us: ‘You are free, free, free.' I didn't speak English, I didn't know what he said," Riteman remembers.

“Believe me, I never thought it was going to happen to me."

In 1946, Riteman emigrated to Newfoundland and Labrador. He started with nothing, selling goods door to door, and built a business and a family. Most of his wide network of friends, colleagues and customers knew he was Jewish, and knew he came from Poland. But almost no one knew he'd survived the Holocaust.

Four decades passed before he felt he could speak, even though he suffered regular nightmares hauling him back to Auschwitz.

“For forty years, I never spoke about it. Now I'm speaking out. I worry for the young generation," he said.

He's spent the last twenty years talking to students, reporters, business associations and many more, ensuring that the brutality of what he endured — and that took so many lives — is not forgotten.

'Innocent'

Riteman now lives in Halifax, and is in his 90s.

His book is called Millions of Souls, and he says he continues to speak today, because he feels obliged to speak for those millions of dead people.

"I want you people to know about what did happen. What human beings could do, and how low the human beings could go and do this. To men and women and children. Innocent."

Those millions of victims included Riteman's mother and father, and his seven brothers and sisters. He alone escaped.

Riteman's greatest fear is that something like the Holocaust will happen again, but that the different names and motives will hide the repetition from people until it's too late.

So he speaks, despite the pain.

"I'm the only survivor and many times I wish I wouldn't survive. But maybe I survived to tell. I don't know."