Indeed, Mr Kleinman saw Dr Mengele, the “Angel of Death”, who chose children, women, the old and the sick for the gas chambers. At the age of just 14, he watched one day as Mengele arrived on a bicycle and ordered a boy to hammer a plank of wood to a post. Here, for the record, is part of Kleinman’s testimony at the Eichmann trial:”We weren’t told what was to happen We knew The boys who couldn’t pass under the plank would be spared. Those boys whose heads did not reach the plank would be sent to the gas chambers.

We all tried to stretch ourselves upwards, to make ourselves taller But I gave up. I saw that taller boys than me failed to touch the plank with their heads. My brother told me, ‘Do you want to live? Yes? Then do something.’ My head began to work I saw some stones I put them in my shoes, and this made me taller. But I couldn’t stand at attention on the stones, they were killing me.”Mr Kleinman’s brother, Shlomo, tore his hat in half and Josef stuffed part of it into his shoes He was still too short. But he managed to “infiltrate” into the group who had passed the test.

The remainder of the boys – a thousand in all – were gassed. Mengele, Josef Kleinman remembers, chose Jewish holidays for the mass killing of Jewish children. Mr Kleinman’s parents, Meir and Rachel, and his sister had been sent directly to the gas chambers when the family arrived at Auschwitz from the Carpathian mountains, in what is now Ukraine. He survived, along with his brother – who today, a carpenter like Josef, lives a few hundred yards away in the same suburb of Givat Shaul/Deir Yassin.