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The Survivor Witnesses
Encylopedia of Camps
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The person in question has given us the following information: The 23rd of May, 1944, two detectives came to fetch me following the denunciation of two of my Christian “good friends.” They came up with a fictional charge against me. They took me into the interment camp in Rökk Szilárd Street, and seized all my valuables. A week later, I arrived in Csepel, where I worked in the Tsuk fur plant until the end of July, when the whole group – there were around 600 of us – was moved to Békásmegyer with the escort of gendarmes. We were lodged here in the open, in the brick factory, which was a collecting camp. A week later, they entrained us. Meanwhile, we got to know the brutality of Hungarian gendarmes. They said we were going to do labour service in Hungary. We travelled for three days, 70 of us in a closed freight car without water, food or a bucket for the toilet. They handed us over to the SS in Kassa, and we carried on towards Auschwitz. When we arrived in Auschwitz they used whips to chase us off the cars, while we had to leave the luggage on train. They said they would later carry them to our place, what of course remained an empty promise. Selections followed: men, women, young and old were separated. Members of families could not even say goodbye to each other, everyone had to pursue the path that was destined for them: one led to the right, the other one led into the gas chamber. They sent me to the right side. We entered the baths, where they seized also the stuff we had on our bodies. They shaved our heads bald and gave us shabby skirts and pyjama tops and led us into a toilet barrack. We spent here the whole day and night without any food. The following day we entered block no. 32, where there were more than a thousand women crammed in a space designed to lodge 400. As we had no beds we slept on the dirty floor. Ten days later, they transferred us into block no. 21, where luckily I knew the block leader. Thanks to her support I received a position in the office under more tolerable conditions and became a "Schreiberin.” In September, they started to select “Muslims,” this was the first time I heard about the horror of gas chambers. Now, I understood what the columns of flames and smoke meant: the crematorium functioned day and night. German doctors headed by Mengele selected people every week and as a result those unfortunates, who had been previously chased to a frazzle, who had been made sick and rendered unfit for work were carried into the gas chambers. Sometimes having a pimple was enough to be sent to death by a move of Mengele’s hand. At the end, if the number of selected people was not sufficient they sent the inhabitants of the extermination camp into gas chambers without selections. This was what happened in our block, too. During the night of the 30th of November they switched off the light and Mengele arrived with two of his companions. Soldiers encircled the block and everyone was chased out to the street. Unfortunate women had to line up five in a row, and they were carried away like cows to the slaughterhouse. Only those could remain who had some kind of assignment like me. They moved us into the former “Familienlager” having already massacred its inhabitants. They set up an infirmary here, and I applied to be a nurse. I only spent a day here, and during this day the SS Aufseherin kept beating me. On the 1st of December, after they executed also the inhabitants of the so-called "Zigeuner Lager" I was sent here to clean up together with a few companions and then we furnished it also as an infirmary. We worked in the open dressed in light summer dresses. Our bodies became numb with cold and we were starving. I applied for the job of a washerwoman to be in a warm place. We woke up at 6 am and worked from 7 am till 7 pm. The 5th of January, I was transferred into the Czech camp, where I worked for four days continuously. The 18th of January, I was taken with a transport of four thousand people into Bergen-Belsen. We set off at 3 am and walked for four days, mostly slept in the open, at the best in stables or on attics. We started marching every day at dawn and walked 34 kilometres a day having five minutes breaks three times. Our provisions were half a kilo of canned food, two kilos of bread and 40 grams of margarine given us for six days. We strained every nerve to keep on marching. SS men would shoot whoever fell a little behind because of the extreme weariness without thinking twice. After four days of walk they entrained us: 80-90 women were crammed into an open freight car. We arrived in horrible conditions in Bergen-Belsen the 24th of January. We were taken into a horribly squalid block full of rats, bugs and lice. Provisions meant turnip soup and coffee. For three weeks we did not see bread and for 10 days we had no water. Naturally, hundreds of people perished under such gruesome conditions. Death was caused by starvation, exhaustion, inanition, and typhus. They did not even clear the corpses out any more. There were four-meter-high heaps of cadavers in front of the infirmary. At the end everyone got typhus including me and we were close to inanition when the English liberated us, who gave everybody careful hospital treatment and everything we needed.

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