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The person in question has given us the
following information: My
father was a grocer in
Kassa. He had two houses, the
third one had just started to be built then. We lived in a five-room flat with my parents
and my two siblings; my father was definitely considered a rich man. He buried somewhere a
lot of
money, jewellery and receipts written by his Christian friends stating what and
how much they had accepted from him for safekeeping. He, the poor man,
died in
Auschwitz. I am the only one at home as yet and I do not know where he buried
those valuables, so I do not know if I can ever get hold of them. My father was, on account
of his decorations earned in the other war, exempt from
Jewish
law together with his whole family. We did not have to wear the
yellow
star and when all the other Jews from
Kassa were sent to the
ghetto, we were
told we did not have to go there. Yet, this was the time when my father tried to find a safe
place for his valuables. Although, some days later a
gendarme appeared and said that we had to go. After half an hour another one came
and said we could stay. It went on like that for days, we lived in continuous anxiety;
finally one day they
took us to the ghetto nevertheless. We had to get ready within an
hour, and we could take with us what we wanted. I could have escaped but my parents insisted
on our staying together. If they had suspected that our being together would last for such a
short time, they might have let me
escape.
They crammed the Jews in the brickyard of
Kassa, plenty of people in a
very small place. We stayed there for four weeks. We lived mostly on what we had brought
with us. Chief inspector Dr
Csatári was
continuously beating
people with a dog whip. When it came to his mind, he went in the
block and he
hit whomever he found there with the dog whip. On one occasion he
ordered through a microphone every young
girl to
come out. He took them out and forced them to dig out thick wooden stakes from the ground
with their hands. Even the
SS
soldiers were scandalized by this; they said that for them, such things are done
with spades. Many
peopleescaped
from the brickyard. We were told that we would be taken to do agricultural
work
but we would stay in
Hungary.
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We would have liked to believe this, but we
found it suspicious that
German soldiers were there with us. One Sunday morning, they woke us
up at 4 o'clock in the morning.
Policemen occupied the brickyard. We all had to gather at a large place and stand
there in the blazing sun till 3 o'clock in the afternoon. They did not let us
eat or
go for water. A friend of mine
escaped
even from there. We were allowed to take a pillow and a duvet with us in the
cattle
car. 72
people were in our
cattle
car together with plenty of bedclothes and packages of
food.
It was terribly hot in the
cattle
car and we were horribly thirsty. After a three-day journey we arrived in
Auschwitz on 21st May. We had to jump out of the
cattle
cars and we were told to leave our baggage there, they would be sent after us. They
lined us
up and by the time I became aware of what was happening I had been in a group with
one of my younger brothers but without my father. We who were able to
work
were taken to the bath; they stripped us naked and bathed us, then they took us to block No.
13. 5
people had to find space on one berth. We made a lot of noise and then the
overseer came in and struck us with a truncheon. That was the first beating. We
lined up twice a day for
Appell
and if somebody was not standing as upright as a ramrod, they struck
him. Those who went out to the toilet were also
beaten
up. Three days later we were taken to
Wolfsberg. We
were put in
tents made of cardboard, 3 metres in diameter, 20
people
in each. We did a very hard
work
there, first at road construction, then chiselled concrete in a tunnel. Our provisions
consisted of 1/3 of a loaf of
bread,
some black
coffee in the morning and some
soup
without any content. We
starved terribly and became very weak. If they saw somebody getting
hold of a raw
potato, he received 25 strikes on his soles and they took the
potato
away. One of their favourite punishments was that when we came back from
work
and were tired, they made us do somersaults, or we had to be crouching or jumping for a
quarter of an hour. They called it doing sports. After 12 hours of hard
work
and being provisioned like that it was difficult to survive. 10-12
peopledied every day. My leg developed a
tumour
and I had already been very weak then, so I was taken to
hospital. I spent four months in
hospital and my leg was operated on but I could not regain my strength after that.
It happened sometimes that the leader of the
hospital did not give the patients
food
for a day. I was discharged from
hospital on 15th January and they took me to
Wüstegiesdorf.
800
people lived there in a big
building. I was very glad, because that
camp
was clean and washing in hot water was a daily obligation. The provisions were better in the
sense that we could go to the city and there we could acquire some
food. I
was a gatekeeper and for this I received double
rations. Much to my delight I met one of my uncles there, who worked at the kitchen
and always gave me a little
food.
When the
Russians were approaching, two of our comrades
escaped. We were packed up and we
marched
70 kilometres within 2 days in terrible cold. We arrived in
Qualisch on a Monday, but
we were given something to
eat
only on Friday. We suffered terribly from
hunger.
What the peasants threw away, like rotten
potatoes or
turnips, we picked up from the rubbish pile and ate them. We already
looked so bad that we did not even like to look at each other. Finally they put us in open
freight cars, 60
people in each. We were travelling for six days; it was snowing and
we were suffering terribly from cold too. 6 people
died in
my freight car during that journey. Many
people
went mad. 800
people started from
Wüstegiesdorf and 500 of
us arrived in
Hildesheim. And from those only 400 were able to
work.
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We had to rebuild a train station destroyed by
bombs. It was very hard
work to
carry rails and sleepers when we had already been almost unable to drag ourselves along. The
provisions were getting worse and worse every day. We received 1/6 of a loaf of
bread
and some
soup once a day, but it often happened that the
bread
was omitted. The following case made a terrible impression on me: a freight car containing
food destroyed by a
bomb
was standing on the train station. Those who could tried to get some
food
from it. One of the
Scharführers saw when a
boy of
14 hid a tin of
food under his jacket. He ordered the
boy to
sit down on the ground and pressed his gun to his temple. The
child
began to beg, so he removed the revolver from there but he put it back in a minute. This
game repeated again and again and it was awful to hear the fear of
death
in the
child’s voice, he was practically howling and whimpering of fear. When the
German
soldier became bored with this amusement, he grabbed both hands of the
child
and
shot
him in the head. There was another case when a
prisoner
escaped from the
camp
but he was caught. The whole
camp
had to appear at the
hanging and the
boy's
father was placed in the first row, right next to the gallows; he had to watch his
son’sdeath till the end. In
Belsen the whole
camp got
typhus. We had to carry or pull the
corpses
in our arms to the place of collection. In
Hannover, we
worked all the time at night in a tunnel; they said they were building an
underground airplane factory. They beat us awfully there. Hits were raining upon us
practically every minute.
People
were falling down like flies in the autumn. We received half a litre of
soup
every other day. We were suffering from
hunger.
It happened there that one wretch cut some flesh out of the thigh of a
dead
man and he also took his lungs out. The
dead
man’s fellows saw that and they took the man to the back and they beat him until he
collapsed full of blood. When he recovered consciousness, they began to beat him again until
he
died. I will never forget that horrible episode. An
SS man
shot
dead a
physician called
Schönstein, because he had gone out to pick some
carrots. When the English
came
in, they only found skeletons in our
camp.
We belonged already to the
dead,
rather than living people.