Search
Main page
On DEGOB
The Survivor Witnesses
Encylopedia of Camps
Supporters

The persons in question have given us the following information: As a cow merchant our father earned a lot. We lived in our own house and had no financial worries. The above-mentioned Hajnal Jung: When the Germans invaded the country I happened to be in Budapest. That day, the 19th of March, I wanted to travel home and went to Keleti railway station, where they captured me and put me in detention, later sent me to Kistarcsa, from where I was deported with the first transport. On the 19th of April, we were already in Auschwitz, where later I met my mother and younger sister. Our train arrived still at the railway station of Auschwitz and we were those who constructed the rail to Birkenau for the others. Aforementioned wife of Eisik Jung: the documents of my husband and father were not all right. Probably because they had been denounced they had to report every Sunday still before the Germans arrived, therefore we went to the brick factory, the ghetto of Munkács even earlier. Richer men and politically unreliable persons were crammed into a lock-up, where they made them do “sport”, and beat them. They kept searching us in the brick factory, and soon they entrained us. 70 of us travelled in a freight car. At departure they gave us water and buckets for the toilet. Gendarmes escorted us till Kassa, where the Germans took charge of the train. In Kassa we once again received water from labour servicemen. On the way, no one died in our freight car, and I do not know of anyone who escaped. We travelled for three days before we arrived in Birkenau, where Polish prisoners in striped clothes helped us get off. Men and women had to line up separately, and they marched us to the baths, and cut our hair off. The two of us went to Camp A. There were 1,320 of us in a block, 14 of us on a bunk. Three weeks later, they gave us tattoos and we started to work in various commandos, among others we worked in Brezinka sorting out clothes and luggage for 6 weeks. We could have easily obtained here food but we could not eat because of what we saw every day and the anxieties we felt about it. At the two sides there were the two crematoria, in the middle there was the road and we had to walk on this road to our workplace. Going to work or coming from work we often saw transports of people from a distance of only 200 steps. We saw undressed men who were already in the courtyard; their clothes were in a bunch on the ground. We heard crying children from the courtyard, and sometimes we saw naked people also through the open gates. Coming from work we often saw also cars carrying naked people; and these cars were going at a high speed. Often, transports of people were brought here also from Camp C. They were still dressed. On these occasions there was always a block curfew but nevertheless we saw them and we were also often lined up in front of Camp A for roll call. The aforementioned Hajnal Jung: when I arrived I worked on road construction for three weeks. Reveille was already at 2 am, and at 2.30 we were already working till 4 or 5 in the afternoon without a lunch break. We got the small portion of bread together with some jam in the evening, and when we returned from work we got some soup. Three weeks later they took us to the baths. There were selections and I went for a transport and became part of the Kanadakommando. I worked here until ca. the 15th of October. We sorted out things that arrived from the crematoria. Once, we saw the gas chamber, where the luggage that was tied together was disinfected. The windows got bricked up and we started having evil forebodings. The following day we indeed saw names written up, names of members of the Sonderkommando, who were done in still that day, but we saw them also on the road when two cars carried them into the gas chamber. Our workplace was far away; the road was very bad, it was muddy; our shoes were ragged, and we had to go to bed in wet muddy stockings, otherwise we could not have put the shoes on the following morning. We were already so desperate that we were close to wishing to die. We worked also in the Aussenkommando, and when we finished our daily work we carried wood into the courtyard of the crematorium. They had already started to dismantle the crematorium. We saw the sign “To disinfecting,” and when we went out during the night we often saw huge flames and continuously felt the stink of burnt flash and bones. We also worked in the weaving mill. We worked there ca. 12 hours a day. Although it was not hard work, demands for work efficiency were high. We prepared fuses out of dirty rags. It was a dirty job. Selections were quite frequent in September-October, but people were separated also without selections. The three of us managed to stay together till the end. On the 30th of December, they put us in a transport and we went to Bergen-Belsen. We arrived on the 2nd of January. There were ca. 800 people in a block, three of us slept in a bed. Rations comprised one sixth of a loaf of bread, three quarters of a litre of turnip soup, margarine, and coffee. We spent a week in this camp before we were moved into another one, where we lay on the floor, and became full of lice. We did not even work here. We did not get bread in this camp. Earlier, we got one twelfth but later for two weeks we saw no bread at all. In the end, we had to carry to the kitchen the quantity of water that we got as soup from a distance of around two kilometres. We have heard that there was also a crematorium here, but they burnt corpses also in the open. Cadavers were piled in a way that a row of bad old shoes was followed by a row of wood and a row of corpses. Directly before liberation we saw that Muslims were pulling by ropes the cadavers that had been carried out of blocks towards the crematorium. All three of us lay sick with typhus for three weeks. After the 15th of April, which was the day of liberation, we got into a clean block, where we recovered. Liberating English soldiers carried us to Bergen, where we stayed for 3-4 weeks before we moved on towards Cell, from where we returned to Budapest with a Czech transport via Pilsen, Prague and Pozsony.

Looting