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The person in question has given us the following information: In 1941, I lived in
Kőrösmező, my
parents
owned land, and even two houses, I had three brothers and sisters. My father was taken into
Poland
1Note 1:
The testimony is not precise. The survivor was taken to the
occupied zone of the former Ukraine, later they also took me, my older brother, and
my older sister. They left me on a cornfield, from where I managed to
escape
and came back to
Kőrösmező crossing the
Dnyeszter. I went into
hiding
for nine months on the attic. Once an
Ukrainian
woman noticed how much my sister cooked and baked and got suspicious. In the
meantime my mother
died and as it started to be very dangerous staying on the attic we
came to
Budapest.
As far as I know, it was a
Hungarian shoemaker who
denounced us claiming that someone was
hiding
on the attic.
Gendarmes searched the house. Here, in
Budapest the
Jewish Supportive Office put
me into an
orphanage where I stayed for two years, when I was summoned for
labourservice in June of 1944. I got to
Budafok where they
took
all my belongings, my watch, and my money. There was a
Hungarian
warrant
officer who beat us up terribly. He made the people from the
orphanage standing aside and he meant to send us home, but later changed his mind.
From here we got to the brick factory of
Budakalász and with the
ghetto for the people from the agglomeration of
Pest we were
entrained 74 of us in a car. We got water at departure and were escorted by
Hungarian
gendarmes till
Kassa where the
train
was handed over to
Germans, who gave no water but shot into to the freight cars all the
time. The 3rd of July, at 10 am we arrived in
Auschwitz, where
prisoners in striped
clothes
were waiting for us. We had to leave our luggage in the cars, and to queue up
men and
women separately. I was
selected for the group for
work,
and was taken into a baths where they cut my hair off and gave me striped
clothes. We were put into a barrack where they ordered us to present all our
valuables because they claimed they had a machine that could see through us and if they
found anything on you, you were going to be
hanged. We got into
Camp A,
where there were around 600
people
in a block. I saw the
crematorium and often felt the smell of burnt bones but they told us
they were burning old
clothes. Every day twice there was a
roll
call that lasted for hours;
food
was
scarce.
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After a
selection I was sent to
Buchenwald. The
journey was around four days long, we were 50 of us in a freight car, they gave us nothing
to
eat although there was
food in
the car but they kept it, so we had to
starve
all the way. When we arrived we had a bath and received a loaf of
bread,
margarine,
jam and
sausage. They put us up in the tent
camp
which was a
concentration camp, and they sent us from here to
Remmsdorf for
work.
The journey lasted again three days, we were 50 of us again in a car and received two third
of a
loaf,
margarine and
jam.
The day after that we arrived, I was
selected for
work in a petrol company called
Brabach where I
worked
12 hours a day. The
lager lay approximately 2 kilometres away from the plant. 650 of us
stayed in a
barrack, two in a bed.
Hungarian speaking
SS men
guarded us in the
camp, and often beat us up. If they simply did not like someone they
made him get out of line and
killed
him. I saw once that they
killed someone with a blow in the outlying
kommando. Every day in the winter there were 40-50
dead
bodies,
food was
scarce
and it was very cold.
Death found a fertile soil here. Before Christmas,
Americans
bombed the plant but lowered yellow lamps from the aircrafts to indicate the place
of the
lager, as a result, no one got hurt. For a while I served a
Capo as
his servant.
Remmsdorf is next to
Leipzig. Later, our
lager
started to clear debris, that was what I did, too. We got
food in
the houses but we also stole when we could not get hold of it otherwise. At the end of
March,
American troops
were only 3-4 kilometres away. That night at 1 am they quickly entrained us and we started
off in the direction of
Theresienstadt.
We came till Tarienburg by
train
when low-flying airplanes
bombed
two of our railway engines. We had 350
sick
people. Those who were not
sick
tried to
ran away; we went to the village, and by the time we came back we saw that
dead
bodies were being carrying: three cars were full of
dead
bodies. We asked what had happened and were informed that the
Gestapo had
shot
those unfortunate. At this point we started
walking. Those who could not keep pace and sat down at the sides of the road were
cruelly shot by the guards. When we started our journey we were in 3,800 in the
camp,
when we arrived to
Theresienstadt, there were only 800 of us alive, but around the half
died of
typhus in
Theresienstadt. The 9th of May, the
Red Army
liberated us in the town. I stayed three weeks in
Theresienstadt
before we left for
Prague already in a bigger group. In
Prague I spent three weeks
at the
Red
Cross, where we were disinfected and provided with everything good. I came home
through
Prague and
Pozsony. My
future plan: I return to the
orphanage.