At least one million people, mainly Jewish people, were murdered there as the camp became a symbol of the Holocaust.
50 survivors returned to Auschwitz Monday to mark the solemn milestone.
As time passes, the number of survivors is dwindling, so the remaining ones are on a mission to keep their stories alive.
“When the war started, 1939, I was 12,” Zimm said.
At 97 years old, her memories from WWII are as sharp as ever.
“I believe in people. I believe that people still are good at heart,” Zimm said. “Absolutely, because I experienced that. It happened to me.”
She was living in Poland when war broke out and said she and her two sisters were the only members of her family to survive the Holocaust.
They escaped life in concentration camps by getting fake papers, assuming new identities, and pretending to be Christians.
But there was always that constant fear.
“A Nazi stuck a gun in my back,” Zimm recalled. ”There was a German and a Pol. The German couldn’t speak Polish, and he interrogated me. ‘Ask her questions. What’s your name? You’re only 15 years old. What do you do here?‘”
Zimm recalled when her identity was almost blown while living and working for a wealthy young couple in Warsaw.
Zimm’s husband spent time in several concentration camps, and her brother-in-law was sent to Auschwitz.
“When he arrived at Auschwitz, the smell was so horrible, and he asked people, tell me, what is the smell coming from? And they told him they [are] burning human bodies. They [are] burning human bodies there. Horrible,” Zimm said. “That’s why we have to remember it. Hoping, educating young people they should know about the Holocaust, hoping that it should never happen again.”
“You can never win with hate,” Zimm said. “Don’t hate. In spite of all what I went through in my life, lost my parents, lost my whole family, but I never hated. Never.”
Zimm’s mission is to spread love and awareness everywhere she can.
She says one of her favorite pastimes is going to schools and sharing her story with young people.
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