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The persons in question have given us the following information: There were thirty Jewish families living in Csepe, they were farmers, craftsmen, tradesmen; most of them lived in financially sound circumstances. We had land and we also lived in wealth. One day after Passover the Jewish inhabitants of the village were driven to the synagogue, but we were sent home from there and we were told to collect our most necessary clothes, underwear and food, then we were locked up in a barn. Two days later they took us to the ghetto. In Nagyszöllős we spent the first 2-3 days in the synagogue, where they deprived us of all our more valuable belongings, then they took us to the ghetto where we stayed for five weeks. József Jarusil, village notary reported against our father and based on that he was interned in the synagogue as a communist. He was locked up there for five weeks, during which time he was beaten very much and a stripe had been cut in his hair already in the ghetto. We set off to Auschwitz together with our father. As far as we know, nobody escaped from the ghetto and those who died, died of natural causes, although they beat us very cruelly in the ghetto, especially the wealthier people. The gendarmes invented all sorts of tortures, they found fault with everything and they took every opportunity to treat us cruelly. So, for example, on once occasion the men tried to get some dry wood and the gendarmes, having noticed it, beat them up brutally. They cut the hair of many girls completely; the women were stripped naked and men bared their heads. They lined everybody up already on the first day in the synagogue. We were not allowed to look back; they threw stones at those who did. It was Hungarian gendarmes who did all of this. They beat up even those who could not jump up from the stool when a gendarme came by. No complaint was taken against the work of the members of the Jewish council. We did not have a communal kitchen, but those who ran out of supplies were given uncooked food. After five weeks we were always told that we would go to work on Transdanubia, more precisely all the men would. Before the deportation they had taken away all our papers in the synagogue, they searched us and entrained us. They crammed 80 people in a cattle car. They gave us some water and a bucket for a toilet too. Nobody died in our cattle car and nobody escaped from it either. When the Germans took over us in Kassa we understood the situation already. After a three-day-long journey we arrived in Auschwitz on 7th May. We were still in the cattle car when Polish prisoners dressed in striped clothes told us to get off and leave all our baggage there. After that they lined us up in rows of five and formed groups of us, one of which was sent on the left, the other on the right hand side. They took us in the bathhouse and stripped us; they gave us grey prisoner‘s clothes and sent us to Camp B. 700 of us were put in a block, 12 of us on a bunk. Our provisions were the well-known camp provisions, and we had to line up for roll call for hours in the morning and in the evening. We worked in a warehouse of clothes; we were the ones to dress the transports. We took off the shoes of those who were selected out from Camp C and if a person showed obstinacy or insisted on his shoes very much we had to hit him, because if we did not, we were beaten up. We worked in day and night shifts; the transports came to be dressed at night, but even from those transports the weaker people were picked up and lined up naked in the courtyard. There was a strict block curfew when the transports were selected; we had to switch off the light and trucks came from the crematorium on which the naked people were put. We worked some metres away from the crematorium; from there we saw as the trucks were turned over and people were spilt from them to the burning pit like bags of potatoes. We often heard shouting, crying and moaning especially at night, when the voices reached us more easily, but we also saw fires and flames frequently. When a transport from Theresienstadt arrived in September they took away men, women and children together. They led them to the crematorium in groups of five. In September there was a huge traffic there anyway; transports came to Auschwitz from other camps too and those people were also quickly thrown into the crematorium. There were transports coming from Slovakia still in November; these were not killed by gas but the mothers with their small children were sent away and older boys and men were assigned to do some work. In November, the crematorium was dismantled; we also worked there for a week. They wanted every sign of the crematorium to disappear: even the bricks were carried away. In December, we were put in a transport as well and they took us to Hunsfeld near Brezlau. It took us one day to get there. We did somewhat better there, since it was a little camp and the factory provided us with food, so the provisions were naturally better. Although we stayed there only for two weeks, then, as the Russian troops were approaching, they formed a transport from us again and sent us to Gross Rosen. The march lasted for three days since it was January; there was a great snowstorm and it was terribly cold. We had to push big carts in which we were taking the belongings of the overseers. One night we slept in a chamber; the ill and weak people were taken after us on trucks, but we heard that some of them were taken off the truck to be shot dead. They were buried right there in the snow. We had to help the ill people to be taken off. We were very weak, we had nothing to eat and we were not able to pull the carts. We had to leave the ill people’s cart there, so we left the ill and we were being chased along. We were so exhausted already that we were not able to go any further; we would not have minded if they had shot us dead immediately. At last they took pity on us and, since we were not far away from our destination, they had the carts pulled to the camp by horses. The SS women shot down those women who collapsed from weakness with bonechilling coolness. 1,200 people started with the transport, but by the time we arrived our number had been reduced to 700. The Gross Rosen camp was only for men; there we received clothes and we had a rest for two weeks, then we continued our journey to Mauthausen. There they took us to a bath for men, male prisoners disinfected us, then we were given a pair of long underpants and a shirt. There were no women’s clothes there. After three days we got our disinfected clothes back, but in the meantime the Russians came closer and there was no time to give everybody her own clothes. We picked up the clothes at random and so we ran away like that, dressed improperly. We arrived in Bergen-Belsen ten days later. On the way we lived on a little amount of food that we had managed to bring with us. Several air raids reached us on the way, but many of us died of hunger too. We stayed in Bergen-Belsen for three months. It was a collecting camp and everybody was taken there from before the Russians. 1,200 of us were crammed in a block. We slept on the ground in filth and lice; we did not have blankets. We were given half a litre of soup twice a day and a thin slice of bread once in a while. At the end we did not even see a piece of bread for weeks. We worked in the kitchen 18-20 hours a day, so we sometimes managed to get hold of a few pieces of raw carrots. The English troops liberated us on 15th April and soon they took us to Bergen. They accommodated us in a garrison of the SS. There we had a good place, nice treatment and proper provisions. The ill people received medical treatment. From there they took us to Celle, then with a Czech transport we came home. Two men were assigned to escort us in Pozsony, thus we came home through Komárom. Our plans for the future: we would like to go to Palestine soon.

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