A survivor responds to the question "How do you feel about people who say the Holocaust never happened?" Henryka Schermant Shaw, b. 1927, Krakow, Poland. Immigrated to Australia 1953.

Henryka Shaw was born in 1927 in Krakow, Poland. Her maiden name was Schermant. With her mother, Mina, she was taken to a concentration camp and and later they were forcibly separated. Her father, Ignatzy Schermant, was also interned in a camp, but did not survive the incarceration. Henryka's sister, Francuszka, was in her early twenties and survived by living illegally in Budapest. The only male sibling, Szymon, perished during the war. Noone from Henryka's mother's family, the Pleisners, survived. There were eight siblings, some married with children. This whole family group perished during the war.

Henryka Shaw in 1939 "My father came from a family of four children, two sisters and two brothers. Both brothers and one sister were married with children. There were no survivors," says Henryka. "Now my mother's maiden name, Pleisner, and my father's name, Schermant, have ceased to exist. Two whole family names and their respective family trees and history will end with my passing. Henryka Shaw with her family today

From the beginning I was in the ghetto in Krakow. My parents were constantly fearful that I would be taken off the street and placed in a transport. This was due to the fact that I was tall and quite young. If you were young you were issued with a blue work permit, but being too young to work meant being sent away to die. Death was constantly with us. I spent time in several camps: Plaszów, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Venus-berg and Mathausen. I worked as a slave labourer and I was whipped in front of the (Plaszów) camp commander Amon Goeth and its 10 000 inmates. I have a number tattooed on my arm - it is A-26538. How can anyone deny this happened?

My whole life is affected by my camp experiences. I suffer the effects to this day. The suffering in the camps taught me how to survive life's difficulties! When I see injustice, I am compelled to speak out. These injustices incense me. I automatically react to it. Any injustice, unfairness or prejudice - I can't take it. All those millions who perished are the witnesses to my rage, my grief, my distress. I lost all. My family and my extended family, my friends, but also life's opportunities: a formal education and a sense of one's peaceful existence. A normal life.

I stand alone like a tree with no roots. I sleep with the radio on to drown out my thoughts at night. These memories of the camps destroyed my soul, my inner peace. To deny the holocaust is to deny my existence and my suffering.

If on the radio I hear of people, and especially Jews, being spoken about in a derogatory manner, I become alert and tense and the night is finished for me. I have to reach for a sleeping pill in order to get some sleep. I see statements of Holocaust denial in books or any form of literature, and I feel these statements are directed at me personally. I would like these people to change their point of view; for the denial to stop. All the great deniers should visit the places where the atrocities occurred; that would curtail their outright lies, their denials. What drives these denials? These attitudes only promote racism and that is dangerous in our world.

I am now in my seventies. There are not so many of us holocaust survivors left to counteract those lies. You young people can make a difference by reading our stories and teaching your own children tolerance. In many cases the horrors of the holocaust go far beyond words and we have struggled with our demons to tell our stories. When I find myself with some of my contemporaries who also survived the Nazi atrocities, our conversation invariably goes back to the camps; to the witnessing of hangings, shootings, being in a death march and the smell of burning flesh. How can anyone deny this, the Holocaust? For all of us, the ultimate enjoyment of our lives has been destroyed.

The deniers need to witness the sites where our youth ended and our emotions calcified; a time out of time where there was nothing beyond humiliation and suffering. Today as I walk around our beautiful city of Sydney, I see the beauty and the sun. There was no sun in the camps. Although the seasons changed I did not see the sun or feel its warmth. When my memories of these years come flooding back, the sun goes down."