The person in question has given us the
following information: About 25,000-30,000 Jews lived in Nagyvárad; tradesmen, physicians, lawyers, craftsmen etc. Most of them were wealthy people. My husband
was a cabinetmaker, he earned a very good living. Furniture worth 30,000 pengős according to
the contemporary value of the money was stored in his warehouse at the time of our deportation. Our own flat and its furniture is worth around 100,000 pengős.
According to the general decrees people began to be moved into
ghettos from 5th April on. A part of the city, about 25 streets, was
marked out to make a ghetto and the gendarmes took us there on trucks. We could take with us whatever we wanted. We
were not allowed to walk in the ghetto.
About 12-15 people lived in one room
and we slept on the ground in a very small place. A communal kitchen provided food
for us. Some of us worked at the communal kitchen, the others did not work at
all. They were guarded by gendarmes. They were told that they would work in
fields in Hungary
and that they should not be afraid, since they would not be taken to Germany. Many people tried to escape
through the drain, and a number of them managed. A large number of people
committed suicide in the ghetto: Dr René Gal,
Mrs Simon Klein and Dr Polacsek, together with his whole family. A large
number of people died in the ghetto
otherwise too, there were 10-12 funerals every day.
The wealthier Jews were accommodated in the brewery. They were beaten all the time; the
guards used a variety of torments to force them to confess where they had hidden their
valuables. My sister-in-law was beaten so much that she could not walk, because her
soles were hit. They conducted electric currents into the women’s wombs. A
feather dealer called Notzen, who was extremely
rich, was tortured so much that they took him back from the brewery on a stretcher. These
torments were executed by people from Budapest, who were dressed
like civilians. Once there was a looting in the
ghetto when the gendarmes took away every valuable, watches and food from us. We were allowed to
take only one knapsack with us in the cattle
car and they said if they find money on somebody, they would shoot
down 10 Jews for it. They put 80
people in a cattle car, a small jug of water and a bucket to serve as a toilet. We
arrived in Auschwitz on 5th July, after 5 days of travelling. They gave us
water on the way in Debrecen and Kassa, but we could not get off. In Kassa, Hungarian
gendarmes searched the cattle
cars and they took away everything we still had: money, clothes, blankets,
shoes, etc. SS soldiers took over in Kassa and one of them
addressed a speech to us saying that we should not be afraid, because we would work
and he who works would receive food.
Our arrival in Auschwitz was horrible. We arrived in the evening in heavy rain and we had to
leave the cattle car very quickly. They told us to leave our baggage there, they would take
it after us. They selected us immediately. They bathed us in hot water and put a
single ragged dress on us, then they
chased us in an enormous toilet building where we were terribly cold after the hot bath,
standing on cold stone ground in a single dress at night. A large number of us were crammed
there and we were terribly tired, we could not even sit down. Many people
died there that night. On the next day they made us line up for roll
call, they put our names down and put together a transport. On the third day they sent us to Riga. From there they took 500 of us to a village called Urbe,
where we cut down a forest and built a
railway. For us women, the work
was terribly hard. I had to carry beams, so heavy that my neck became twice thicker and it
will have to be operated on. We lived in a camp in Urbe, 14 of us
slept in a tent on the bare ground. We picked moss in the forest; that was our pillow. Our
provisions consisted of some souponce a day and half a loaf of bread,
later only one quarter of a loaf.
Very few people survived the hard work.
In the beginning of September they took me with a transport to Magdeburg. There I worked
12 hours a day in an ammunition factory. I worked
one day at daytime, on the other day at night. The work
was not hard, only the workday was very long and the night shift was especially difficult to
endure. They did not harm us, moreover, the civilian overseers sometimes gave extra food to
a woman. However, I had already been so weakened by then that sometimes I could
hardly walk. That was caused by the prior events and the overwork. When the American were coming closer
to Magdeburg,
soldiers from the Wehrmacht took us
to a village called Nedlitz. We had to leave everything there and we had to march very fast. They
put down the whole camp on a square. Later we learned that square was an airport and
there was an air raid that night, on account of which about 4,000 peopledied. The Wehrmacht soldiers
had escaped from us before the air raid and those who survived met the American troops already on the next day.
One of my most terrible experiences was in
Auschwitz. A woman
of about 50 did not want to leave herdaughter at the selection. Then an SS
woman began to hit her. The woman
was already quite beside herself and she hit the SS
woman back. Then the SS
woman took a dog whip and looped it around the woman’s
neck and she dragged her like that along the whole long way. The woman’s
screaming was horrible and unforgettable. When she was barely alive, two other SS
soldiers shot at her. The corpse was left before us all the time, so that we learn from the
case, because that is what happens to those who contradict them
. The suffering of an
acquaintance of mine, a young girl,
was also terrible; they took her insulin away in Auschwitz, so she
died there, in Auschwitz.