Bernard Ores

Bernard Ores

Bernard Ores was born in Poland in 1922 into a Jewish family of four children. Trapped in the ghetto during the war, he lost almost his entire family in the Holocaust, except for one brother who had left for France before the conflict.
For months, Bernard survived in hiding under extreme conditions, at one point living in a hole dug beneath a street and surviving only on flour mixed with water. Eventually arrested, he was deported to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was forced to work in the camp’s quarry, climbing the “Stairs of Death” every day while carrying heavy stones on his back.
At Mauthausen, he witnessed the daily horrors of the camps: prisoners pushed into the abyss by SS guards, dying men abandoned in the barracks, and the suicide of a young prisoner who asked Bernard to recite the Kaddish before hanging himself. After the war, Bernard devoted his life to bearing witness and passing on this memory.