Alice Newman (Sala Karpman) 

Born 14 May, 1928 Warsaw, Poland

I remember playing in the back yard of our home in Warsaw.

Suddenly I heard a woman’s voice and a lot of screaming.

Nazi soldiers were beating the woman’s son. He lay bleeding. 

It was then that it started. All Jews had to leave.

I put my things into a doll’s pram. We were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto.

Food was so scarce. Many lay in the streets, asleep or dead.

One day mother took me to the ghetto gate and pushed me out.

“You’ve got to go. Go straight and turn right,” she said.

“I promise to come for you after the war.”

I found my way to the home of a Catholic friend and was immediately hidden.

“Don't sneeze, don't cough, don’t move,” she said.

I was taken to a Catholic priest to get false identity papers.

He taught me to repeat, “Holy Mary, mother of God”.

I didn’t know who Mary was.

I went from place to place. Eventually, after the war, I was sent to New Zealand.

I felt abandoned. When someone put a hand on my shoulder, it meant so much.

In the 1960’s, when I realised mother wasn’t coming for me, I would cry for days on end.

Years later, I heard David Irving deny the Holocaust on radio. 

So I went to his meeting at the university.

I stood and said, “I was there, you were not”.

Irving was abusive and I was treated rudely by security.

“The worst thing that happened is that you had to peel potatoes,” said Irving.