The diet at the camp was so meager that it consisted of watery coffee and one piece of bread made mostly of saw dust, she said.
Rapidly losing weight, soon weighing no more than 27kg, the young Ban was too hungry and emaciated to even have the strength to hate.
? was just trying to exist,?she said. ? was too hungry to blame.?br />
The day-in, day-out abuse, however, did not break Ban? spirit. When Josef Mengele ?the notorious Nazi doctor known as the Angel of Death for his horrific human experiments ?chose Ban as one of 25 苑omb-making 胄ungarian girls, she saw her chance to undermine the Nazi war effort.
?hen we heard that what we made was going to be put together with other pieces ?to be used to kill the Allies, the Americans, we were desperate,?she said.
The Nazi guards in the other room spoke no Hungarian and Ban got an idea. Instead of following the instructions of color-coding the wires and the boxes, the girls thought, ?et? make a little sabotage,?she recalled.
?e made a mess! We took the green and connected with the red, the brown with the yellow. We were giggling and laughing that finally, we are making something against that terrible power,?she chuckled.
Ban spoke of her Auschwitz experience in vivid detail, but with little animosity in her voice.
Instead, she punctuated the interview several times with warnings of the destructive nature of hate.
?f I had hate in my heart, I would be a prisoner and I wouldn? be free,?she said.
However, she said she was still working on forgiveness for some of her suffering and that she believed those who had a hand in the genocide must be punished.
The retired teacher said she would like nothing more than to see Mengele eye-to-eye and to tell him the atrocities and pain he had caused her and so many others.
? would also like to face those who deny the existence [of the] Holocaust and say: ?hat are you talking about? I was there and my family was killed in the concentration camp.?
Ban has since returned to Auschwitz six times, most recently with a group of history teachers, to witness the symbol of one of the greatest human tragedies in recent history.
?haring [my story] is healing,?she said. ? walked and lived through it, but sharing still gives me some kind of peace.
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