Mrs Slonim, now 88, still has nightmares from those days, and in previous years has been physically ill after re-telling her story on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27. But with anti-Semitism again on the rise around the world, she feels compelled to attend this year’s event, marking the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz Liberation, on Monday night at Malvern Town Hall. Eva Slonim at the Jewish Holocaust Centre with the photo of herself, aged 13, in 1945, on liberation from Auschwitz concentration camp. Credit:Simon Schluter She says she owes it to those at Auschwitz, who “with their last breath” urged survivors to tell the world about the atrocities to prevent them repeating today. Mrs Slonim has seen how easily disrespect of others begets hatred, leading to mass murder. And she’s afraid it could happen again.

Her testimony will play to an expected crowd of 600. When the photo was taken, the Jewish sisters had been imprisoned in Auschwitz for four months. On arrival, they had been assigned to sadistic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who thought they were twins. Mrs Slonim was injected with an unknown substance and she saw the bodies of children that Mengele and his staff had fatally injected and mutilated. She saw a girl of about 12 years old hanged for trying to escape. Inmates had to stand in the snow for three days while she was missing. Two years earlier, to save their lives, their father had sent Eva and Marta from their Nazi-occupied city of Bratislava, in Slovakia, to the town of Nitra to live in a one-room flat and act as Catholics. But a suspicious neighbour reported them to the right-wing Hlinka Guard militia, who tortured them. The militia hanged a boy for warning the sisters that a spy was trying to expose them as Jews.

The guest speaker at the Holocaust Remembrance Day event will be The Alfred hospital neurosurgeon Jeffrey Rosenfeld, who witnessed the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide as an Australian military surgeon there in 1996. Neurosurgeon Jeffrey Rosenfeld. Credit:John Woudstra Professor Rosenfeld said he treated civilians with machete and landmine wounds. ‘‘I did a lot of amputations – on children and adults.” In an echo of the Nazis, who de-humanised Jews by calling them “vermin”, Hutus in Rwanda had labelled the rival Tutsi people as “cockroaches”. “It gives people a cop-out,” Professor Rosenfeld said. “They say, ‘I’m not killing human beings, I’m killing cockroaches.’ ”

Mrs Slonim and Professor Rosenfeld are alarmed at recent race-related incidents, including a man breaking into a rabbi’s home north of New York City and allegedly stabbing five people. In Bratislava, in about 1939, Nazis and local racists broke into Mrs Slonim's grandfather’s flat below hers, bashed him and threatened the family that if they didn't toe the line, the same would happen to them. Jews were banned from hospitals and trams and from mixing with non-Jews. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video In a Victorian country town recently a household flew a swastika flag, sparking condemnation from Premier Daniel Andrews and others. “Seventy-five years, and nothing has changed,” Mrs Slonim says. “The world is still very cruel.”