On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the site of the greatest mass murder in human history, where over 1 million of Hitler’s 6 million Jewish victims perished. As the world commemorates the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the film tells the moving stories of six Holocaust survivors, as they revisit that pivotal moment in their lives, when Allied troops overran Nazi Germany’s death camps, and gave the survivors the freedom they so deeply yearned for.
“Our Liberation” is directed and produced by award winning filmmaker Naomi Wise. The Holocaust survivors featured in the film are all connected to the March of the Living. They are: Miriam Ziegler, Faigie Libman, Robert Engel Z”L, Ernest Ehrmann, Howard Kleinberg Z”L and Joe Mandel.
The first of the six stories, features the poignant return of Toronto resident Miriam Ziegler, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the infamous Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele performed medical experiments on her when she was just a child. Pictured in the photo (second from the left) at nine years old, she is holding her arm out with her Auschwitz tattoo number, because the Russian soldier asked her for her name and she instinctively showed him the number on her arm – That was her natural reaction in Auschwitz.