‘Warehouse of the living dead’

They survived Hitler and the Holocaust – but these Jewish New Yorkers never imagined they’d witness images evoking the horrors they experienced 80 years after liberation.

Aron Krell, a 97-year-old survivor of Auschwitz and other camps who was liberated nearly 80 years ago at 18, said the images of the three Israeli male hostages released from Hamas’s clutches looking weak and malnourished after 491 days in captivity, evoked painful memories.

“You could have lifted me up with one finger,” Krell told The Post on Sunday of his own liberation as a “weak” and “feeble” survivor from the “warehouse of the living dead.”

The chilling footage of the three released hostages, Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami and Eli Sharabi, revealed their dangerously gaunt and hallowed features.

For Krell, their photos brought rushing back painful memories of the darkest days of his life and moved him to tears.

“When I saw their pictures coming out of captivity, they looked so emaciated and so sick,” he said. “And the world doesn’t care. I can’t understand — where is the outrage?”

“It breaks your heart to see how Jews are being treated today. And no one says a word,” blasted Krell, echoing the cries of Jews who took to social media to lambast the apparent apathy.

“It’s a sorry sight to look at, and even sorrier we have to discuss it. It evokes so many things when you think about it,” he added. “It brings back the memories you try to forget, but you can’t forget.”

Another point of connection the Holocaust survivor shares with the liberated men is the bitter reality they came home to — as each improbably survived hell not knowing the fate of their loved ones.  

“It’s a tragic moment when you find out you have no one — no mother, father, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins. Everybody is gone,” said Krell, noting that Sharabi only learned that his wife and two teenage daughters were brutally murdered during the October 7 Hamas attacks upon his release on Saturday.

“What kept me alive was being an optimist — thinking that one day that things will end and we’ll come out free,” Krell said, hoping he would see his remaining family after the separation.

“It’s the only thing left — maybe I’ll meet somebody again,” he recalled some 80 years later of his mindset to stay alive.

Though 6 million Jews were killed in the camps, antisemitism has survived — and mutated all these decades later.

“We thought of what had been done to our people – that was supposed to be history,” lamented 91-year-old Lucy Lipiner, a longtime Upper West Side resident who’s lived in New York City since she was 16 when she arrived as a stricken, 90-pound Holocaust survivor from Poland in 1949.

“The horrible images of the hostages pale and starved that were released yesterday brought me back to a very dark time in my life,” Lipiner wrote on X.

The emaciated hostages held captive in tunnels, looking listless and lifeless, evoke classic Holocaust imagery.

“The three men look like they came out from Auschwitz,” she said.

“It breaks your heart — how can this be happening in 2025, 80 years after the vow, ‘Never again’?” Lipiner asked incredulously.

The images of the three Israeli hostages looking like shells of their former selves pierced Lipiner to her core.

“I saw almost skeletal men walking. The worst thing about them was the depression that was written on their faces – the hollowed cheeks, sunken-in faces… can you imagine this emotional torture, on top of physical torture?” she said of the painful parallels between past and present.

President Trump also pointed out the disturbing resemblance between the hostages and victims of the Holocaust.

“They literally look like the old pictures of Holocaust survivors. The same thing,” he said on Sunday.

For Krell, the fresh images evoking Holocaust survivors put a modern color patina on what should have remained in black and white.

“The whole world doesn’t really care. When it comes to the Jews, the Jewish question, everything is moot,” said the survivor of Poland’s Lodz Ghetto, followed by multiple camps – including Mauthausen in Austria and Auschwitz.

The Upper East Sider, who has accused leaders failing to condemn antisemitism of having “a case of laryngitis,” admitted that when tearing up over Saturday’s images, he thought to himself, “It’s a sorry thing, but history does repeat itself. It’s not very pleasant to revisit.”

After living in a German DP camp for displaced persons after the war and learning that one-third of the world’s Jewish population was annihilated, Krell said wearily, “I didn’t expect antisemitism to exist to such a high degree again — I figured the world has learned something.”

“And it’s like nothing happened.”

The deafening silence since the three hostages were released, is a bitter pill to swallow for Krell.

“There’s very little hope — you can see that the world is ambivalent.”

Lipiner, who moved to Tel Aviv weeks before October 7, summed it up: “After the Holocaust, we always said, ‘Never again.’ And I believed that.

“I never believed there was something like a Holocaust. But this was.”