brother and his cossacks. alina peretti, now in her brother and his cossacks. alina peretti, now in her 90s, - brother and his cossacks. alina peretti, now in her 90s, has. peretti, now in her 90s, has had the most remarkable life. but like many of her generation she was real reluctant to talk about her past. 50 she was real reluctant to talk about her past.- she was real reluctant to talk about her past. so that is uuite a talk about her past. so that is quite a rare talk about her past. so that is quite a rare photo, talk about her past. so that is quite a rare photo, isn t- talk about her past. so that is quite a rare photo, isn t it, i quite a rare photo, isn t it, you and mum and.- quite a rare photo, isn t it, you and mum and. her son, jack, you and mum and. her son, jack. is you and mum and. her son, jack. is an you and mum and. her son, jack, is an investigative - jack, is an investigative reporter. tt jack, is an investigative reporter- jack, is an investigati
the camp was being dismantled. but medical experiments were still happening. alina was given a series of injections. i asked them what the injections were for and you are in a camp, you are in a situation of illness, there are a lot of people, we have to protect you. so, you know, iwent willing to have one, to be protected, you know. the injections were actually part of a mass sterilisation programme, a failed attempt to makejews and ethnic poles infertile. the doctor who infected alina called her his little bird . it is the title of alina and jacques book. tomorrow is holocaust memorial day. 77 years since auschwitz was liberated. well, i think it s important that we remember to do anything, so it doesn t happen again, to prevent it happening. you just said, you know, bloody hell, you know, i m very lucky that i came
been to meet them. this is a great one, this one. yeah. that s my mother, brother. and he s cossacks. alina peretti, now in her 90s, has had the most remarkable life. but like many of her generation she was reluctant to talk about her past. that s quite a rare photo, isn t it, of your mum and your.? brother. yeah. alina s sonjack is an investigative reporter. it was sort of the biggest story i d ever come across, and yet it was lying right in front of me and i d never bothered to investigate it. and then, my mum was diagnosed with dementia. and so we started we started. ijust got my phone out, pressed record and started talking to my mum, and it alljust came flooding out. september 1939, and germany invaded poland, the start of the second world war.
every day. alina, her mother and sister were put on a train to auschwitz. they were questioned by a german officer. it would be the last time alina saw her sister alive. he ask who speak german. and my mother said, my daughter does. she shouldn t have opened her mouth. it is still difficult to fully comprehend exactly what happened at auschwitz. more than a million people were killed. almost all were jews. but some 13,000 ethnic poles were also transported to the camp after the warsaw uprising. you know, death was around us, so we were not surprised to see somebody being killed. by the time alina arrived at auschwitz at the end of 19aa, the mass killings had stopped.
in the chaos that followed, families became separated, flung to all corners of europe and beyond. this is alina with her parents. her dad michael, part of the polish resistance, ended up in london. alina, with her mother olga, was deported to a labour camp in siberia. i didn t feel. ..frightened. i think it was an adventure. alina s mother was determined to get back to poland to find her other children, a girl and two boys, stuck in occupied warsaw. she paid smugglers to get them back. and she was saying, if we are going to die, we die together. it was. ..it was her decision. warsaw was a devastated city, invaded, bombed, occupied by the germans.