Holocaust survivor recalls cart of bodies 80 years on

STORY: It's been 80 years since Greek holocaust survivor Rina Revah was sent to a concentration camp.

It was 1943 and she was four, but she still remembers the hunger.

[Rina Revah, Holocaust survivor]

“There was a piece of bread I would leave permanently rotting in my mouth, I would never swallow it, and my dad would bring me a new piece of bread to replace the old one. I don’t know how I survived, because I truly never ate anything, nothing at all.”

Revah and her parents had ended up Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she would remain for two years.

"One day outside the camp I saw a huge, deep cart with wooden side panels that were being pulled by horses. Underneath, two workers were throwing naked bodies of workers into the cart. At some point, the cart overflowed with bodies, and an officer with long black boots climbed onto it and started to stomp on the bodies in order to make room for more. I don’t know what a four-year-old child understood from such a scene but I remember that I started to cry.”

Revah is one of the last survivors of some 50,000 Jews who lived in the Greek city of Thessaloniki where a thriving Jewish community once existed before WWII.

Every year the community is honored in ceremonies around the 15th of March, when in 1943 the first train left the city for the concentration camps.

Of those deported only 1,950 returned to Thessaloniki alive, according to the community’s website.

Revah's parents, one set of grandparents, and an uncle made it back, but several of her other relatives were lost.

“It must not be forgotten. I think we owe that to those people who died, six million people died.”