MOSCOW: When Irina Ivannikova arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in April 1943 she felt a pang of envy for the sick, the elderly and the young who were loaded onto trucks and thereby spared the exhausting trek to their barracks.

Only later did she realize they had been sent directly to the gas chambers.

A Soviet spy, Irina was captured by the Nazis in 1942 and sent to the death camp in Nazi-occupied southern Poland, where at least 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, died between 1940 and 1945 although she herself is not Jewish.

Branded prisoner number 39952, Irina was housed in a barracks next to a towering three-storey building, its walls made of red bricks blackened by the thick smoke that spewed out of its tall chimney day and night.

"We started asking around to find out what was made in this factory, which smelled so strange," recalled the elderly lady, who now lives in Moscow.

"One day, all the gypsies who had so made us laugh with their singing out under the stars were taken inside, and were never seen again.

"Each of them had been given a number at the entrance to pick up their clothes again after the 'shower,'" recalled Irina, her voice betraying no emotion as she told of the horror.

During the 33 long months she spent at Auschwitz, Irina learned to digest non-comestible roots and berries, foraged on her way back from working in the fields, 8 kilometres away.

After falling sick with typhoid fever, the young woman was assigned to work in the medical barracks, where she witnessed the atrocious experiments that were carried out on the camp inmates.

She described how she had looked into the eyes of "women emptied of their insides during the terrible experiments of Doctor Mengele," the camp doctor who left his patients to die after he had finished with them.

"The weakest, selected at regular intervals to be exterminated, were locked inside and left for days without bread or water.

"Their terrible screams ripped straight through our hearts, but anyone who approached Block 25 was shot dead on the spot.

"Beyond a certain limit the suffering starts to fade," she said.

"The Soviets were the most resilient and our neighbours, the Greek Jewish women, were the least, they suffered greatly from the climate and fell dead during the roll calls held outside, which lasted for five hours," Irina recalled.

"Who were the bravest? The Frenchwomen who sang the Marseillaise in the trucks carrying them to the gas chambers," she added, suddenly breaking into a smile.

Irina and a young Moscow friend, Vika, had both dropped out of university to enroll at a Soviet espionage school during World War II.

(China Daily 01/26/2005 page6)