Elizabeth Wenham, the former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, told a group of Holocaust survivors who gathered about a half-hour after the shooting to share their own memories of life in Poland and of the Holocaust as a whole.

“Everyone was a little bit shaken up and all of the survivors who are sitting here with us were, in order, children, adults and senior citizens who made up more than half of the survivors,” said Wenham, who lives in Toronto.

One survivor said, “This doesn’t feel right. This doesn’t feel right,” while another had two distinct memories of being in the Auschwitz gas chambers.

“They were just terrible places, terrible,” the man said of the gas chambers. “I remember being in there. It was the worst place I ever heard about. The walls were slippery. You couldn’t breathe. … I just don’t understand it.”

One man said it “smells like death.” Another woman remembered: “It is horrible. You just go in and you never leave.”

“Some people got through, but a lot of people could not have,” she said.

At least 15 survivors said they remember being in the gas chambers, and another 11 said they know people who survived but are only partially in the dark. Several noted that their relatives are alive, but those members are not on record.

The survivor who was present when the gas chambers were filled described it as “this huge big hole, it takes up all the time I can find the time to sit and watch when I had my chance to look at things.”

This survivor saw children being pushed into chambers, the woman said.

Another survivor said he never saw children or adults get into the chambers, something other survivors said they heard and saw.

The witnesses said they only spoke in Polish, not English, and there was no translation.

But one survivor, a 65-year-old woman from Montreal, said one thing was clear: “The gas chambers were not gas chambers. Everything is in a mixture, it was not gas,” she said.

The Auschwitz death toll rose to more than 700,000 people when the Red Death arrived in July 1945.

Auschwitz survivors, who are now in the United States, remember the horrors of the camp under Nazi rule, as the Nazis put thousands of people in gas chambers and crematoria