(Transcript from World News Radio)
Seventy years ago Moshe Fiszman believed he was about to be killed by his Nazi captors.
Laying facedown in the snow with a group of men who had walked to the Austrian border from the Dachau concentration camp, a machine gun was loaded, then aimed... and at the last minute a German woman intervened.
She saved their lives, telling the soldier that the Americans were coming and that they should flee.
It was the first of May 1945.
Abby Dinham reports.
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Moshe Fiszman was born in Radon, 100 kilometres south of Warsaw, Poland.
At 18, he'd completed high school and had started doing night classes.
But all that ended when he was forced into labour by the Nazis, delivering supplies to troops around Warsaw.
"I never carried more than a few books, and here were carrying sacks of rice and flour up to the second floor, we had goons with whips behind us. You were beaten and insulted and so forth. So I had to somehow adjust."
The workers were given a cup of soup and small piece of bread, for their shift that began at 5am and lasted until dusk.
Moshe Fiszman endured daily beatings from the guards, but he describes this as the good times of the Nazi occupation.
Two years later, the bad times would begin.
"I lost my family, they murdered them in 1942 in August. They took them away to Treblinka, they gassed them to death like sick animals. I was left on my own. I became a member of the concentration camp of Majdanek. Was given a prisoner number 25627."
He no longer had a name, just a number.
One pair of clogs, and one pair of pyjamas were his only possessions.
Moshe Fiszman worked making weapons for one and a half years, before July 1944 when he was taken on a death march.
He and hundreds of others, walked for six days on foot to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
"If I had any hope that anyone of my family were still alive, watching the trains coming in, 60 cattle trucks, 3000-4000 people sent into the gas chambers I just lost all hope. I still can't bear a bbq today because the smell of the burnt bodies down there left a mark on me."
From Auschwitz he was taken to Dachau.
Only the prisoners who were able to work were transferred, he says.
They left behind a mass grave containing the bodies of 1600 people.
Then in 1945, three days before the liberation of Dachau, a group of prisoners were walked to the Austrian Alps.
It was the middle of winter.
They wore nothing but their thin striped suits.
He believed this is where he would die.
"They couldn't take us any further because the Americans bombed the railway line. So they put us back in the cattle trucks and back into Germany. They lie us down near a lake and zeroed in the machine guns and I thought this is the end. A German woman appeared. She spoke to the commandant there she knelt before them asking them not to kill us. The Americans were already not far away. Finally he decided to let us go."
It was the 1st of May 1945.
Moshe Fiszman was a free man.
"All 48 kilos of me. No family, no home, no country to go back to. But I was free and I vowed that I would never forget that I would never let the world forget us."
Over the duration of the war, he'd lost his father, his two younger sisters - who were just 12 and 13 years old - his elder sister and his brother.
"Why didn't the world just do something, say something, drop one bomb on the tracks at Auschwitz to stop the trains at least for a week? They were bringing in 12-thousand human beings a day to murder. Men, women, children, babies, pregnant women, old people the lot."
Just 18-years old when the war started, Moshe Fiszman was now in his 20s but he was a broken man.
He spent years waiting to be resettled.
He had nothing.
"Do you think the world wanted me? No one wanted me. I was a man without a passport, I was a man without a piece of paper or without a pot. They didn't want me. England didn't want me, France didn't want me, Germany didn't want me for sure. I had no where to go. It took me another four years before I was able to migrate to Australia. 10 years of my life I have spent behind bars."
Now he lives in Melbourne.
He's raised two daughters, and now aged 93 he teaches at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick twice weekly, speaking to about 20-thousand students each year.
It's a job he vows to continue until his final day, to keep the promise he made 70 years ago.
"In the dungeons of Europe, you can find written in the last second of their lives 'don't forget us'. I won't."
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