« Personal Stories

Erdélyi Lajos: Survival

Memories of a Photographer

Background to the Biographical Dialogue

I was visited by students from Budapest’s Lauder High School who were

making a documentary, bringing film recording equipment and

microphones. As a Holocaust survivor, I was to tell them about my

deportation experiences. Those ten years that – in a sort of warping of

our former family life – had been once, twice and tenfold defined by my

singular bond to Judaism.

They asked, and I answered. Satisfying my tale-telling urge, I recited my

thoughts and memories separated into different times and places, yet

they made up a unified and interpretable whole.

Months later I was handed a typed script of what had been recorded by

the cameras and microphones. I was frightened. Had I really aged so

much as to become so vague and disjointed? They explained how the

written and spoken word were different, without the gesticulation and

emotional expressions to aid interpretation. I haven’t seen the film, so

I’ll have to trust their competence and enthusiasm.

The following pages are an edited version of that addled tale. To

supplement the young ones’ questions, I have attempted to sort my

stories into chronological and thematic order using subtitles.

I’m happily awaiting the publication of that slim volume. Of my four

grandchildren, two already speak Hungarian. They’ll probably read it in

English – if not now, then decades from now. I know from experience

how we eventually want to descend into that deep well of our

ancestors’ experiences as we grow old.

Born in Marosvásárhely, May 1929

My childhood was like any other kid’s in our part of town. Back then

Marosvásárhely was a large middle-class town of about forty thousand.

There were comparatively few Romanians living there. After the changes

following World War I (Transsylvania was annexed to the Kingdom of

Romania) our population rose. The new state functionaries – judges,

lawyers, teachers, officers – came and settled in. Besides the Hungarian

majority, a significant Jewish community thrived. Maybe five thousand or

more, mostly Hungarian speakers. They moved into town during the

decades before and after the turn of the century. Many arrived from

neighboring villages, the hills of Transsylvania and the small towns of

the lower Maros region. Some came from further out, from other areas

of the empire, and they brought with them their Yiddish mother

tongue.

My parents were from villages near Torda and Déva respectively,

belonging in language and culture to the first and second generation of

assimilated Jews. Neither spoke Yiddish, in contrast to those immigrants

of the 19th century’s final decades, who for the most part never got

further than assimilation’s waiting room. On the right bank of the river

Maros bordering the town, there is a quarter that used to be connected

to the settlements of Transsylvanian Mezőség via a wooden bridge.

Well, it was on the near side of that bridge that the first streets were

settled mainly by Jews. It was an area that frequently flooded. Here the

Jews from the nearby villages Názna and Szentkirály as well as the

Mezőség – tenants, artisans, masters and merchants – ventured to

enter. That was no ghetto; all the town’s poor residents lived there.

North of the main square, on the gentle hillside was where the well-to-

do bürger lived. The many-towered Castle stretches there, the Gothic

church, the House of Law, the elegant Officers’ Quarters. Also the well-

off class of Jews: wealthier merchants, the up-and-coming intelligentsia,

doctors, lawyers, engineers, and the entrepeneurs of medium and large

industries.  During the first half of the twentieth century, the

assimilation process affected an ever-widening circle. It was

exceptionally rare, though, that this should lead to a public separation

from the Jewish community, in becoming Christianized. In our

neighborhood of Kossuth Lajos, Lajos Király, and Arany János Streets, I

knew of no such family. 

We lived down near the river Maros. About where the very poor, mostly

Orthodox, Yiddish-speaking Jewish light-industry workers lived in their

one or two-roomed mud-brick dwellings with their six to ten children. In

their close proximity was the already growing, prosperously assimilating

Conservative, status-quo Jewish community. At the High Holidays, the

Yiddish-speaking Jews in their caftans and shiny shoes, and their

younger contemporaries already learning and speaking Hungarian

would sit next to each other at the huge red-brick, never plastered,

huge Orthodox synagogue. Around the corner from us, at the

Conservative synagogue in Iskola Street, they would pray in Hebrew

and speak in Hungarian. Most of them would be artisans, merchants, all

well-trained and studied burghers. The wise head rabbi Ferenc Lőwi

preached in Hungarian. Some, though very few, of the Conservative

children attended the heder in the extension to our building, keeping

tradition in their clothing too. But most learned their letters in the

Jewish elementary school – in Hungarian.

Childhood

I have a strange medley of recollections from my first four years of

school. Most of our teachers followed leftist morals – some of them also

had commitments to the Zionist movement. I entered elementary school

in 1936, another notable year. Hitler already in power, the Iron Guard

arranging pogroms, Mussolini’s Italian fascists invading Abyssinia. My

lovely childhood, lovely as any of my Christian Hungarian friends on

Arany János Street, was somehow overshadowed by the oncoming of

war. Our lives were yet untroubled – but we sensed the smoke of

distant fires.

I remember my first public success. (I was in need of it: as youngest and

perhaps shortest student of my class I was eager for attention.) With

encouragement from my father and my teacher, I read Tivadar Herzl’s

seminal Zionist book Ősújország (Alt-Neuland)  in which the Jewish

homeland is declared in a literary context. I gave a talk on its contents

in the school’s biggest hall. I had an active political life by then; they

treated me like an imaginative kid. One notable memory I have to this

day is this: My mother sent me down to the little Jewish grocery shop on

Arany János Street to buy a bottle of ink. There were two steps leading

up to the mud-brick shack. I paid two leis for the ink and ran home. But

when I stumbled on the stair, the inkbottle smashed and left great blue

stains on my trousers. I went home crying, and told my mother that I

bought the ink, but there were fascist Italian bomber planes overhead,

and as I hid from their bombs, the inkbottle broke.

Nearly fifty years later my daughter, who emigrated to Israel, found

some family relics to confirm my bizarre memories. She found my

mother’s letters to her parents in Tel Aviv. I quote a letter written on my

father’s Ideál Perfumery’s stationery and dated 1936, an account of the

growing fear of a pogrom threatening our town. The Iron Guard’s

student organization held its annual congress in Marosvásárhely.

“Targu-Mures; 7th April, 1936. Dear Mother, Father, the student congress took place without incident… All the panic in town was simply terrible. Day and night they were nagging Emil on the phone, as company vice president (the president was away…) whether they should close up, to leave any goods in the storefront, what news there was, etc.; bringing rumours (…) they came on a Saturday afternoon to „give accurate information” about a coming demonstration, but there turned out to be nothing. The swastika boys all bought film and we talked to them with angelic smiles. But I sensed the horrible vulnerability, waiting to find out their intentions that contained no human dignity. Laló [my nickname that my friends still call me by] is such a bloody-mouthed politician that he would go to the German Empire’s capital (his words) to bribe Hitler’s cook and put poison in his food to stop that miserable bastard persecuting the Jews. But Laló dear, they’ll have you shot, to which Laló replied with his eyes shining pathos: it doesn’t matter if I die, but so many people will be saved from Hitler’s torchers! While the students were here, I had to lock him up because he’d shoot his mouth off something terrible, he’s got strong self-esteem and he’s proud, can’t imagine anyone beating him on the street, ’by what right would someone attack me while I’m walking?’ This is the self confidence and faith in justice they destroy in us by age 7. Quite sad.” 

In another letter, she writes about my attitude to the German language.

In order to teach us German, a nanny or Fräulein was hired from a

neighbouring Saxon village. Nevertheless, I hated taking lessons. I

would argue that it was Hitler’s language, and I flat refused to learn

Hitler’s language, from Hitler’s kind. I quote a letter of my mother’s,

presumably from  l937 or 1938:

“The German Fräulein arrives this Sunday, a Jewish girl from a noble Cohenite family of Beszterce. I wouldn’t dare employ Gajte to work with the politically adept Mr Laló, as he is informed of the Germans’ cruel persecution of Jews, the concentration camps etc. And hates everything German .”

The Fräulein didn’t have much success. I am not good at languages: even my Romanian is shaky. No less interesting is the fact that even in these „years of peace” the elementary students knew about concentration camps.

At the Jewish elementary during recess – like every other school in

Marosvásárhely – the children played cops and robbers. Except that we

called robbers Italian fascists, while good cops were freedom loving

Abyssinian heroes. According to our teacher’s instructions, bad students

were to be the Italian fascists.

All in all, my recollections of my childhood years before the war are

happy. The home atmosphere around me was warm and I felt safe. My

father, a Main-Square merchant with a legal degree, was beloved and

respected by all. We were not isolated. We could visit the neighborhood

Hungarian families’ children and play and have dinner with them just as

with our Jewish classmates.  At Christmas we sang, at Easter we

sprinkled water and collected red Easter eggs. Mornings my mother

would work the small vegetable garden with the maid, and sit on the

kitchen threshold stuffing the goose. Afternoons when was busy at the

Ideál Parfumery she would sit at the till to help my dad. Evenings she

read Thomas Mann and went to concerts. We led normal philistine lives,

belonging to a class of Jewish society that was completely divided from

ghetto living while at the same time retaining a distinct Transylvanian

Hungarian-Jewish identity. My father was a Zionist, one of the central

figures of the movement as it unfolded in Transylvania. He tried rallying

supporters for Zionism from all walks of the Jewish community. Perhaps

it was due to this that we led a double household, also relating to

Jewish religion in a double way. We had a cupboard in our kitchen for all

the kosher dishes and utensils. But there was also another, somewhat

smaller cupboard beside it, where we kept the treyf, forbidden things:

bacon, ham and meats. The kosher set was important, because if

religious Zionists came to visit, we didn’t want to offend their

sensitivities. Our relation to the public practise of religion was

something similar. It was expected to observe the main holidays, Rosh

Hashana, Yom Kippur, and Passover. So we closed the shop on these

days. My father sat in the seat he rented in the front row of the prayer

house. However much I hated going, my father took me along to the

synagogue. I had to dress up nicely when I would have preferred

playing soccer in the synagogue yard. Attending the temple on holidays

was an expression of national solidarity. At the time I didn’t really

understand. I do now, but this has brought me no closer to my

ancestral faith.

There are pretty, happy memories from temple too. As a dedicated

Zionist, my father insisted that during prayer I should walk around the

synagogue, to the ladies’ balcony as well, with a purse to raise money

for the national land procurement fund. Of course it was forbidden to

handle money during holidays. There was a carton for every family by

name, and each donation was indicated on a ticket you could fold, these

I collected and attached to the purse. I was proud that I persuaded

most donors to fold the more valuable tickets. In an atmosphere so

permeated with Zionism, it should seem natural that at such a young

age – being privileged, I could say – I could participate in the youth

organizations’ summer jamboree. Camping was arranged on the bank of

the Maros, and later the Szamos: we lived in tents, cooked for

ourselves, went hiking and studied – discussing plans for a future

Jewish independent nation. At night we sang by the campfire and

listened to recitations. These are really intensely Jewish memories, but

not religious ones.

The next chapter in my childhood began with the autumn of 1940. I can

clearly remember the announcement of the Vienna Award.

Marosvásárhely waited for the Hungarian forces with flying banners. My

father worked from early morning to make sure his shop window was in

order for the big celebration. We were Hungarian Jews, and for twenty

years of Romanian rule we had preserved our Hungarian culture and our

solidarity with the Hungarian minority.

Only a week after Hungarian troops moved in, a celebration was held

exceeding anything before. Regent Miklós Horthy arrived. He rode in to

the Main Square on a white horse. But I never saw this, and neither did

my father. A week was enough to confirm that these who came in

weren’t who my father had spent twenty years waiting for. Horthy and

the Hungarian administration brought the Jewish laws, that is, state-

supported antisemitism. Within a short week they took my father twice

to the counter-espionage offices, where instead of being seen as a man

who stuck to his Hungarian culture, he was interrogated as a second-

rate Jewish citizen curtailed in his rights. On the day the town

celebrated the Regent’s arrival, with a broad gesture my father gave me

his best shoes, saying to hide them in a corner of the back garden, so if

he would feel inclined to attend the Main Square festival, he couldn’t for

lack of appropriate shoes.

For me it was this autumn I encountered the life of persecution and

minority. I wouldn’t gain entrance to the best high schools, the

Reformist College or the Catholic Main High School. This was impossible

on account of the numerus clausus. Some strings were pulled, and I

was admitted to Körösi Csoma Sándor boys’ school. It was a school with

low standards, the sort of place where the dregs of youth all gathered.

Badly schooled workers’ kids, Roma and Saxon villagers, and of course –

up to the legally permitted percentage – young Jews. There were eight

Jews in my class.  Four of us survived Auschwitz.

In this school we were above all and downright Jewish. Not Lajos

Erdélyi or Laló, but „Little Jew.” I couldn’t say this was uttered by all in a

hateful, scorning voice or manner. I didn’t find it in any way objectable.

It was a regular ritual for my classmates to „christen” me before the

school bell went, that is, to splash my head from the air-raid water

barrel using their hands and christening me after the name of the saint

for that day. This took place on cold winter mornings too. Times were

like that. To be fair I must admit: they did this to all those they could. My

heavy-fisted classmate Raymi Naftali struck down before they could

finish their rave which started with „stinking Jew.”

The premilitarist youth organization of the day, called the Levente

League, had Jewish student members wear a yellow armband. At least

my sister Juci didn’t have to go through this. She was enrolled in the

Jewish school, founded in 1941. The students there were a year or two

my juniors. Perhaps four or five kids made it back out of several

hundred.

While our classmates gained extracurricular military experience – if I

remember right, they were trained with wooden guns – we Jews were

separated. For us, the Levente activity was a sort of training for ourlater

labor service. The center of Marosvásárhely is dominated by the castle,

or Vár. Its towers are connected by massive walls. The age-old walls

were crumbling. We were issued here in yellow armbands to collect the

broken bricks that lay around the building, placing them on bits of plank,

or carrying them on our arm to the nearby tower. The next levente-

assignment was just the same – except in reverse: we took the bricks

back. Often in frogsteps. And by order singing this chiding song all the

while:

“On the streets of Vásárhely the Jews are whistling, oh they’re whistling, the Jews are whistling…”

The levente-leaders were appointed by the school board, and were

preferably the rabid antisemites. I guess those who had a different

outlook would shun the job altogether. We had a homeroom teacher

who would always point out that eight members of the class were Jews,

disloyal to national duties. She married after the war, incidentally to a

Jew. She gave him a son, and he grew to be a well-known, gifted artist.

Decades later I did an interview with her. My former head teacher

thanked me for my work with tears in her eyes.

„I’ve always liked you Jews”  she said. I’m afraid she even believed it

herself.

After the occupation Hungarian authorities outlawed Zionist

organizations. They closed down their houses, the Ulams. Of course we

would still gather when and where we could. I myself, being a member

of the leftist Hashomer Hatzair, would usually attend the meetings at

the oak tree under Mount Somosdi. That is where we met on May 1st of

1942 or 1943. The older boy in charge hung a red scarf on a low branch

of the oak tree, and we sang some sort of song, like a march, with the

words in Hebrew. Our leader strictly forbade us to sing it in front of

anyone else, because it could get us in trouble. I have a good ear, and

the melody had stuck. I didn’t know it was the Internationale. All I knew

was the bloody Fascists were angry at it. 

Two, maybe three years later a related incident took place. We were in

the barb-wired yard of the Dörnhau lager in Silesia. The date is May

2nd, 1945. The war was still on, a race for survival. An old German

Scharführer, a medical officer who probably liked me, and sometimes

gave me bread or potatoes, waved me over to the fence. This time it

wasn’t a slice of bread I got but a big parcel wrapped up in newspaper.

There was bread inside, but more important was the newspaper itself,

with a large blackframed picture of Hitler on page one. I ran up to my

friends with the newspaper and the picture and I don’t know why, but I

was whistling the tune of the International quite loudly. In the guard

tower facing me was an SS officer with a machine gun. I whistled until

Fidzsi, a Slovakian Communist, came up to me and struck me down with

a great horrible smack.

„You fool, do you wanna die now?” he asked.

But I have skipped forward in time; I’ll return now to my Hungarian

school years, and try to remain neutral as much as I can. In the Horthy

world, politics was banned from school. High school students were

officially prohibited from entering political parties. Two classmates of

mine – Jóska Henter and Miklós Bartha -  were much older, and they

joined the Arrow Cross movement. Both were expelled immediately from

every high school in Hungary. In the Székely region and

Marosvásárhely, even in the darkest times, the mood was dominantly

moderate. Few joined the Arrow Cross, and people were generally

neutral. Some Main Square shops would display the „Original Christian

Hungarian business” signs, but this practice was avoided by more

serious businessmen.

The memories I recount here are somewhat out of context, so it might

seem as if we commiserated being Jewish day and night. That is not

quite the case though. We were young, and able to enjoy the beauty of

every minute of our lives. For instance, we would attend movie theaters,

albeit in some fear. (At the time, one could only attend theaters and

movies with a teacher’s permission slip.) True, these joyous experiences

were marred by general widespread antisemitism. The film Őrségváltás

(Changing of the Guard) was playing, starring Antal Páger. Páger was a

great actor, playing an impressive figure who provokes antisemitism.

After the movie someone called me a Jew, and I didn’t even have time

to run away. I got a few punches, and some kicks. My father had a

lighter time of it – he went to see a movie about his childhood’s

legendary musician, Pista Dankó, but even as he entered the hall he

was cast out: „What’s this Jew want here then?”

Danger Signs

For sixty years we’ve pondered how we could have been so blind. A

small chapter in our family history, like a drop in the ocean, mirrors the

tragedy of Transylvanian Jews. In 1942 or 1943 a Jewish immigrant, a

chemist lady from Krakow, Poland, was seeking refuge in

Marosvásárhely. She arrived on her own, having lost her family,

probably due to extermination. The wealthier citizens gave aid to

refugees. My parents did so by employing her as a private tutor: she

taught us German. She had lunch with us on Saturdays.  I repeat, she

kept warning us to flee across the nearby Romanian border, the other

side of which we had relatives we could stay with. Or arrange for a

hiding place in the mountains. Because the fate of Polish Jews –

extermination – awaited us too. Like images in a film, our table

conversations are vivid in my memory. Of course we believed her

account. My father explained that what happened over there was

horrific, but the war had taken a turn and that here in Transylvania, in

Székelyföld, where they had established the Székely Regiment, such a

thing could not be repeated; Transylvania would never let that happen.

Nobody from Marosvásárhely – not a soul – escaped. Some did,

however few, from Kolozsvár and Nagyvárad, but at least a few rose

against their fate. Nobody from Vásárhely did. Even though my mother’s

quoted letters, sent to Palestine via the Red Cross in the war years, do

reveal that we had sensed the danger, and we definitely knew about

the existence of concentration camps.

In 1944 the Germans Came…

By then I was studying at Kolozsvár, in the fifth form of the Jewish

Lyceum. After I completed the four-year civil school, education

opportunities were closed to me in Marosvásárhely. My parents had to

decide my fate. Either I would apply for an apprenticeship somewhere

and learn a trade, or they could send me off to Kolozsvár and accept the

financial expenses. They couldn’t make up their minds. True, I was a

sharp-witted kid, but also quite lazy. In defense of my mediocre grades

I claimed that I couldn’t get better marks as a Jew. Using various

pretenses (parcel delivery, stamp exchange, a football gift) my father

sent me to three of his serious, intellectual friends. After they’d talked

with me, the committee gathered and made a decision: Laló must study.

So they enrolled me at the Jewish Lyceum of Kolozsvár. I was a

boarding student with the Jewish Elementary principal, Árpád Bihari.

That is where I was on the infamous day of March 19th, 1944. We had

news from the radio of Germans occupying Budapest. From childhood I

had been thought a political kid, and I declared that in the

circumstances my place was with my parents. This stance was decisively

influenced by an upcoming math test I definitely wanted to avoid.

Lucky choice? Premonition? I do not know. But only a week on, early in

the morning on the first of April, an SS officer and a Hungarian policeman

escorted my father to  police headquarters. I followed them, so I saw

where he was taken. That morning some thirty respected and wealthy

Jews were arrested and stuffed into the two basement police cells. They

were hostages in the hands of the Germans. Demands arrived daily at

the Jewish Council: 50 well-furnished living quarters were to be

submitted to the Germans in 24 hours. If they delayed, two hostages

were to be executed.  Next day: one million Pengős in cash and 150

radio sets delivered to German headquarters. If they delayed... But

there was never any delay. The Jewish community obeyed their

demands for fear of death.

Our shop was soon placed under seal. I was smart enough to retrieve

the credit ledger. The Ideál Perfumary gave credit to every customer.

With no other resource at hand, I based our daily existence on this

book. I visited our debtors. I remember different experiences. Many paid

up right away, to demonstrate their friendship, the most they could do

for us. Others laughed in my face: „When that shop is yours again,”

they’d say.  

The month and a half that my father was held hostage by the Gestapo

somehow matured me. Informally, I became head of the family. A

seemingly insignificant little scene made me realize this. An

announcement came on May 2nd to pack one suitcase each and wait for

the police and gendarme officers, who would come and collect us. Late

that afternoon, I took my little sister by the hand and took her to Miss

Gombos’ confectionary, telling her to eat all she wanted, and take some

home with her too. On the way home we were still licking our well-

packed cones when we were shouted at from the window of a flat in

Knöpfler street, where a crippled (and thus always severe) relative told

us off: “Licking ice cones at a time like this? If your father could see

you…” I felt proud of myself.

I selected most of the gear we took in our three suitcases. I don’t know

why, but my mother insisted on the two silver candlesticks. I packed

them. But I thought the big, rubber-lined sheet was more important.

After some argument, we took it along. I have nothing to recount of the

march of the 3rd of May. Almost six thousand marched, in sight of the

gawkers. With or without sympathy, I don’t recall. But I do remember

recognizing a classmate among those standing on Hosszú Street. I

asked him for a bottle of drinking water. He brought me one. And before

handing it to me, he asked for ten Pengős in return. I hadn’t even

passed the ghetto gates, and already I was learning.

The ghetto was in a state of utter chaos. At first I found shelter for my

family in the dark brick-baking furnace. We abandoned it soon enough,

as the stale air was unbearable. The places under the brick-drying press

were all taken – I got four sticks, stuck them in the ground and raised

the sheet between them. Later we had to disassemble it by order of the

Jewish Council. They were assigning the alleyways in the ghetto. If I

remember right, I had to set our tent up some five different places. The

first rainy day showed us how useful that rubber-lined sheet was. It

was a rainy May in 1944. Those with just a sheet over their heads

instead of a roof remember it as a flood. I learned to steal. A load of

planks was brought in from the  Váradi and Serbu wood depots; the

latter one was Jewish owned. I didn’t know why but I took two pieces

unnoticed. And a handful of nails. That time I got caught. They gave me

some hassle:  if your dad knew this... But I wasn’t punished.

Life in the ghetto soon took its course. Children lined up for running

water; one or two running taps served the 6500 people crammed into

the camp. I tried to get a place next to Lia Serbu. My friend Raymi also

cued in line next to Tusi Aba. They kissed. I was yellow and didn’t have

the nerve. Neither of the girls made it back from deportation.

A few days later our schoolmistresses arranged for the children to be

taught. When the rain stopped we’d sit along the hillside, the

schoolmistress up center, and lessons continued where they had left

off. The best minutes of my ghetto life took place around the 12th of

May: my father was released from imprisonment.  We had no way of

knowing how short our time together would be before being wagon-

packed off to Auschwitz. But on the 17th of May my father was there,

after a gray dawn when he ducked under the barbed wire unnoticed by

his dozy guards, and brought me three yellow dandelions to mark my

birthday. A horrible thought: one might risk the barbed wire for three

little flowers – and nobody during three weeks of ghetto living even

attempted an escape, to flee from our approaching tragedy. We

believed the lies of being taken to a town called Kenyérmező in

Transdanubia to labor. In fact I don’t know if we believed them or were

simply paralyzed.

Three or four days later the „gold beatings” began. In the former brick

factory office they set up an interrogation room. Agents from

Counterespionage used truncheons and lashes to extract confessions

of any conceivable hidden gold or jewelry, and those who had none

were no exception. My father was arrested too. He had nothing to

declare, and quite enraged his torturers. Only the wedding rings were

hidden away; this he wouldn’t give up despite the beatings. After half

an hour they brought him out, and he could barely stand. They beat the

soles of his feet, and two of his ribs were cracked. We eased his pain

with cold foments. That night I took the silver candlesticks and some

spoons, and buried them in the soot of the brick kiln. After our

homecoming my father asked me if I could find the valuables inherited

from my grandparents. I said maybe, but I didn’t look. Anyway, we

learned how, the day the ghetto was evacuated, the „treasure hunt”

began. They scoured the latrines for hundred-pengő banknotes used for

toilet paper („sooner wipe my ass with it than give it to the gendarme

detective”). They drained the little lake that people threw valuables in

for fear of torture.

Auschwitz

I don’t know the exact date of our arrival. The ghetto’s 6500 inhabitants

were transported in three groups. We were in the second. The family

was in the wagon together. I only remember a few details from our

„geographers” as they peeped out the cattle-wagon window to see

what stations our train passed. Perhaps by day two we knew the

Kenyérmező stories were false. The train headed north, to Slovakia,

then Poland – and we remembered the warning from the chemist lady

from Krakow. The wagon was terribly crowded, all accounts agree on

this. I will keep to describing a few events that occurred in our wagon.

The first: my father gave his niece, Annuska Farkas, a slapping because

she used the scarce drinking water to wash with. Another memory is of

a brawl. My father was elected „wagon leader.” The first thing he did

was divide the space. Sitting space for children, the elderly, and

pregnant women. Men took turns for standing and sitting spaces. An old

family friend, Mr. Pali Rothbárt disagreed with this: „Everyone equally,

no niceties.” There in the dark, stuffy wagon the argument came to

shoving. Both survived the war and met afterwards. I found their teary-

eyed embrace of reconciliation hard to bear.

The events of my first few hours at Auschwitz station (or Birkenau, to be

exact) are impossible to reconstruct. My memories are so mixed up with

other peoples’ accounts that I find them undistinguishable. What I’m

sure I remember is noticing where my mother and sister stood. We

waved. The other memory is of reaching Mengele (I know it was him,

not one of his aides). I passed in front of him perhaps two more times

during our stay at Birkenau, (when prisoners were selected for labor)

and he asked my father, being short and still limping from the beating:

“Können Sie zehn Kilometer laufen?” “Jawohl, auch zwanzig” -, came his

disciplined reply. That saved his life. How did I escape? Maybe Mengele

was careless. Or perhaps the gas chambers were momentarily

overloaded? I didn’t look bigger than a 12 or13. I remember prisoners in

striped uniforms shaving our hair in the building they called the baths,

and when they shaved my pubic hair I was cut on my skin. On the way

out of the baths I noticed a container hung up with clothes, among

them the ones my mother and sister were wearing when we last saw

them. I pointed this out to my father. So much for my personal memories

of the first hours. Others might remember more.

We had nine days in Birkenau.  (The destruction of Hungarian

countryside Jews took place at Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, about 2-3

kilometers away from the camp we know today as Auschwitz I. This was

the site of the enormous gas chambers, crematoria and hundreds of

wooden barracks, originally designed to shelter horses). I have clearer

memories of these days, but in essence they are identical to hundreds

of others who shared my fate. But I think it is important to explain how

our stay came to be so brief. On the second or third day, a Polish kapo

took a liking to me. It happened when after a dreadful punch, I asked

crying:

"Why?"

“Die, brutes. We told you to run away, but you waited like sheep, so die.”

Then he took pity on me, sat me down and gave advice for my survival.

Volunteer for any work groups as soon as possible. If I stayed there, I

would be sent to the gas chamber for sure. I was in Barrack 9 of the so-

called “Gypsy Camp.” Later those children deemed unfit to work were

taken from here to the gas chambers. It has been written how the

children went to the chambers singing the Israeli anthem Hatikva. They

had spent a long time in Birkenau, and knew where they were being

taken. That is the barrack I fled from – not that I knew what was

waiting. My single aim was to join my father, and attempt to leave

Birkenau together with him. Escape was dangerous, but I was prepared

to take the risk. One could get away with just a severe beating, like

those we had to face here every day. One episode illuminates a basic

fact of lager life: a survivor always survives at the cost of someone

else’s life: at roll call that evening, they noticed someone was missing

from Barrack 9, with one person extra in Barrack 15. So someone was

moved there in my place, most likely a young person my age.

We volunteered each time a work transport was arranged. Both my

father and I were occasionally rejected for one reason or other. In that

case I would sneak back so we could stay together. On the ninth day,

we managed to get into the same company. We walked six or seven

hours in merciless rain to the Auschwitz loading ramps. At each gate

they re-counted us and put our ranks in order. I made sure that we

always stood in the same column of five so as not to get separated. It

worked. When we were all lined up before the open wagon doors at the

station, the order came: Links um! – Left Face! – and from then on we

were not arranged in rows of five, but it was those standing on either

side that were crammed into wagons together. We were separated. My

nine days of scheming were undone by a single order. It was terrible.

Nine days in Birkenau. Are the memories gone?

I never believed those who claim to have complete memory lapses, who

haven’t discussed what happened for over sixty years within their close

family. Silence can have deeper reasons. Of course I remember the nine

days, though not everything, and with varying detail and clarity. I could

talk for a week about those days. About the shared experiences with

my Birkenau comrades as well as those I might claim a „copyright” to. I

will tell you one of these, because it would otherwise go with me to the

grave.

It happened on maybe the second day that during the endless roll calls

(Appel), the Gypsy Blockältester went up to a Häftling standing next to

me and hit him over the head with his club. He wasn’t standing straight

enough. He fell like a stunned ox. We were new, and weren’t quite used

to fellow prisoners behaving this way. I later recognized the man as he

staggered to his feet, Pubi Vancea from Marosvásárhely. The key player

of our national champion waterpolo team. How did he end up here, I

wondered – everyone knew he was a Christian. The Jews who used to

compete within the Marosvásárhely Sport Club and won many national

championships were barred from the team during the war. Laci Békés,

short distance champion, swimming in Hungarian colors on the

Romanian scene and undefeated for years, proceeded to sell his

champion’s cups in protest after being removed from the Club on

account of his “race.” Pubi Vancea’s long story was, to put it briefly, that

he had a Jewish fiancée who was taken to the ghetto. And he escaped

there to her voluntarily. Inside! He was hoping to break her out of

there. It didn’t happen. They arrived at Birkenau together, and were

separated on the selection ramps. Pubi survived his deportation and

went home to Marosvásárhely. He waited for his bride-to-be, but only

heard rumors. She was liberated by the Americans, fell in love with an

officer, got married and lives in the States. A real story for a movie. Last

time I saw Pubi was in 1951. He was studying Hebrew, waiting for his

passport so he could live in Israel. Living in the lager had bound him to

the Jews.

There is another line to this story that’s also worth attention. The labor-

worthy Hungarian Jews – the men – were shacked together in the

barracks called the „Gypsylager”.  The wooden barracks, originally

designed as stables and capable of holding 300-400 people, were used

to house 1200-1300 prisoners. One could more or less sit down for the

night, but there wasn’t room to lie down. We spent our days at the

Appelplatz. Excellent authors have tried to convey how these repeated

headcounts were among our most challenging trials, so I will not even

attempt to. Let’s just say the gypsy Blockältester came with his goons,

and they beat us – half dead, or often to death. So our days passed:

headcounts, beatings, food, beatings.

I must talk about the Gypsies and Birkenau. Those living in the barracks

across from us were German and maybe Austrian Gypsies. Not

Hungarians. They were collected too. We had reason to hate and envy

them. They could live with their families, children and elders. They were

better fed – they could “arrange” plenty of food from the camp kitchens.

It was from them the KZ management picked sadistic, murderous block

leaders. They were monsters. Perhaps taking revenge for their

centuries of abuse and humiliation? Had they the time there by the gas

chambers and crematoriums to become so bestial? I don’t know. There

at the Appelplatz I had other concerns. I hated them, and tried to lay

low so I wouldn’t be noticed. I won’t say anything more about them, but

just recently a Hungarian Holocaust historian approached me and asked

me to put these memories on paper for the complete picture.  Because –

so the historian thought – after revealing how the Nazis planned a

similar fate for the Gypsies, we shouldn’t deny that in practice there was

a world of difference between that and the Jewish Holocaust. I denied

his request. For one thing, because there is no such thing as a Gypsy in

general. I was talking about specific sadistic Gypsies here. Also, those

gypsies in Birkenau weren’t deported from Hungary. They were collected

from their homes in Germany and Austria. And finally – this was most

important for me – those Gypsies, together with their children and

women, were dragged to the same gas chambers as we were. Our fate

was the same.

I must account of another experience of mine. It haunts all my memories

of the 365 days I spent in forced labor camps.

I believe the only ones who can judge camp-dwellers’ morals are those

who have been through all that influenced our morality. I hated our

Polish-Jewish kapos’ cruelty. I despised my comrades as we shared a

narrow bunk or swung our picks in labor, as they shed their final

remnants of human dignity. With my lager experience of a few days and

my immature adolescent head I was trying to form judgements of the

Polishe who spent years in Polish ghettos and German extermination

camps. Such ill-will is of course always mutual. I only knew two of the

five hundred labor camps belonging to the Silesian Gross Rosen KZ.

Schotterwerke and Dörnhau. My personal experiences stem only from

there. But because we had contacts with people from neighboring

camps, even then in Silesia we already had a general idea of how

survival was organized within the camps. Many are, understandably,

silent about this. Wherever Polish Jews made up a camp’s internal

management, Hungarian Jews would have even worse chances of

survival, and vice versa: the Hungarian Jews got (and helped each other

to) positions of „lager-aristocracy” in Dörnhau. So here the Poles got

the worse deal. Judge us, I’ve been saying for sixty years now since our

liberation, only if you’ve experienced this. Time spent in the camps didn’t

just proportionately diminish our bodyweight. It took three or four years

of „wear” to make the Polish Jews we met the way they were. We were

corrupted – most of us, if not all – in a matter of five or six months, that

is to the point of completely giving up our traditional standards or

values. A few months of lager experience made me understand: the

window-dresser from Pressburg, Muki Klein the Lagerältester, the

Lagerkapo Mr Scheffler from Nagyvárad, the Lagerarzt Doctor Sólyom

from Transdanubia, and Lax the Kapo from Máramarossziget are not a

whit better than our whip-kapos from Krakow and Lodz. I could tell you

about Doctor Somlyó, our lager hospital’s head medic. On our morning

roll-call in the freezing Silesian November, he would pour an icy bucket

of water over anyone who reported sick. Who would dare a medical

examination? Whoever did, had the chance to get admitted to the

infirmary. Most of them died there of pneumonia. I will also tell you

about Mr. Lax. In 1946, the time of post-war tribunals, my father was

summoned before the Military Tribunal in Kolozsvár. He was to testify in

the trial against the kapo Lax, accused of war crimes. This man was a

butcher from Marosvásárhely, and a real monster. He used stick

beatings to hasten our work. At lunchtime distribution he’d steal food

from us. He had sadistic fits, and anyone who caught his temper could

expect the worst. A murderer. I saw him in Dörnhau, at the entrance to

the second level quarters, when he beat a man to the ground, my

comrade from the commando. He kicked and trampled until the man died

on the spot.

My father appeared before the court and asked to read a declaration

before his testimonial.

“Here I must thank Mr Lax for giving the children, including my son on several occasions, bread and soup. Perhaps he gave them a few days longer to live, helping them survive.”

This is true, because he really did love and help children. This also had

to be told. After this announcement he testified under oath how he beat

and murdered people. Kapo Lax was sentenced to 12 years’

imprisonment. I don’t know how many he served – such is unpredictable

in Romania.

But I could recount other similar experiences. A good ten years after the

liberation, a friend of mine from the Dörnhau lager visited me. Out of

regard for his children and grandchildren I will only refer to him as S. He

asked me to testify on his part that he worked as a medical orderly in

humane fashion. He was in trouble because – by his account – his

former lager mates spread false allegations about him.  I told him he

should be glad I didn’t press charges against him. Not out of some

humanitarian consideration, but rather so that he shouldn’t be judged

by a court unfamiliar with internal lager affairs. S. as a medical orderly

treated the dying on the ground floor. Before the corpse commandos

took the dead laid out before the bunks, it was his duty to search them

for gold teeth, crowns or bridges. If he found any, he was to crack them

loose. The gold was for the Lagerführer, the SS guards – but some

always got round to our Häftling-executioners as well, the

Lagerältester, Lagerkapo, all rank holders, including the medical orderly.

S., practical man that he was, simplified his job. It was difficult to pry

open the mouths of corpses and smash out the bridges and crowns, so

he performed these tasks on the still living, or living dead.

We were human too, and fascism did everything to purge the last trace

of it from us. Sometimes successfully.

It would be best to forget all that I’ve been talking about. I don’t even

understand why it all came out. Perhaps those who suppress their

memories and remain silent for half a century are just fighting such

recollections.

Escape from Birkenau

…Links um!. I was on the loading ramp watching helplessly as my father

disappeared into the third or fourth wagon. Links um, forward march!,

then it was us walking up the plank into a dark wagon. A shapeless

mass like modeling clay pressed into the wagon’s dark bowels. We

knew nothing could be worse than Birkenau. All I could think was that

they separated me from my father, though I can’t be sure if I was still

thinking by then. A German soldier entered the wagon and was handed

a stool to sit on in the middle of the wagon with his gun held between

his legs, ordering us to pull back. He didn’t need to. Soaked to the skin,

we huddled together shivering, warming ourselves from each other. We

slept through the long journey standing on our feet.

I awoke to loud shouting. The train stopped, the soldier had the wagon

door open. Barking orders, they had us out of the wagon. Lineup,

headcount. In a daze I tried to figure out where we were and what was

happening to us. Dazzling sunshine, sloping hillside, wheat fields; a

watch house, two pairs of tracks, five wagons separated from the train.

The rest were rolling away already. The stream of people from the other

wagons were being led up the hillside path. Hardly ten minutes passed

when, around the bend, we saw the barb-fenced camp with its round,

green buildings. They must have been made of wood or plywood, about

thirty in all. Beside them were two regular barracks, like in Birkenau. We

knew at first glance that everything here was brand new; most of the

huts hadn’t been lived in. After another headcount, we took our caps off

(Mützen ab!) and marched in to the little Appelplatz. We knew this from

Birkenau. A ramrod-straight officer walked out of the barracks, a cut on

his right cheek and riding crop in hand: Oberscharführer Weingartner,

„Muzzlecut”. Our escorting officer made his report, and the SS officer

instructed the sergeant behind him. He produced a box and proceeded

to give each prisoner a round piece of canvas on a string to hang

around his neck. There was a five-digit number on it. Mine was 43083.

They found someone to translate the officer’s barking orders into

Hungarian and Slovakian. Everybody learn their number in German –

from now on this would be our name. We must report accordingly. Ich

melde gehorsam, Häftling Nummer dreiundvirzignuldreiundachtzig.

Obediently reporting prisoner number forty-three-o-eighty-three. They

tested us on the spot. Lifting up their right arms, the whole line had to

repeat their number and status. That is how I learned my father was

there among those in the first wagon, number forty-three-o-twenty-

two. I was aware of him, but he was unaware of me until it was my turn

to report. I raised my arm nice and loose, as I learned during the

anthem at the Romanian Lyceum. Ich melde gehorsam… That’s as far as

I got before the crop cracked on my skull, once, twice. The officer said

something, sounding more educating than enraged – the interpreter

behind him translated: „Lift your arm up taut, you wretch, before he

batters you senseless.“ My scalp split and blood trickled from my

forehead as I happily bellowed out my report. Now my father knew we

were still together.

In this sense, our lives at Schotterwerk, the forced labor camp, started

favorably.

Forced Labor

The nature of the construction labors that the 70,000 slaves of major

and minor labor camps of Grossrosen KZ were intended to execute was

only first publicized in the nineties. Since then, several people have

been engaged in revealing the story of the military installations planned

for deep inside the Owl Mountains, the „Eule-Gebirge.” There are plans

for a new museum displaying the details, as they have been forgotten

for long decades together with the terrible human sacrifices their

realization entailed. This was the highly confidential Rieseplan. Jews

were transported here from just about every European country as well

as Russian POWs and abducted French and Dutch forced laborers. They

were to manufacture the infamous V-1 and V-2 rockets, and allegedly a

new research institute for nuclear arms was also planned for the site. It

is said Hitler’s headquarters were to be relocated to the mountain

caverns. Since the publication of this, the Owl-peaks have become a

tourist attraction. Dozens of German tour buses transport visitors to see

the remains of the last, half-completed subterranean labyrinth. In 2003

and 2004, guiding my grandchildren, who live in the States, I looked for

our old lagers, but only found the nearly two-hundred year old building

in Dörnhau. The forest had taken over the transit station in sixty years’

time. The ruined concrete of the broken rocks are all that are left to

remind me of my former labor camp, like an expressionist sculpture

interrupting the surrounding landscape of fresh vegetation. Polish

guides recite the story in the underground passages – of things they

have no idea of. I spent over an hour slinking after them, thinking of

those tens of thousands resting in marked and unmarked mass graves

in the vicinity. The graves of Dörnhau’s four thousand dead are marked

by an austere memorial.

While working in the two camps only four or five kilometers apart, I had

vague notions that an underground airplane factory was under

construction. The starting point was the transit station. Wide track

freight wagons had to be reloaded onto the mountain railroad’s five-ton

wagons. I carried tracks, bricks, bags of cement, sleepers, concrete

irons. Later on we dug a ditch two meters deep for pipes. When I was

transferred to Dörnhau and closer to the labyrinth under the Owl

Mountains, we were assigned to road and rail construction. I knew

about the factory hidden under rock, but I myself never even got near

there.

Numerous accounts have been made of Dörnhau, which even then had

been dubbed the „Dry crematorium” because mass destruction was

carried out without gas chambers or furnaces. I have read dozens of

them, and knew some of the authors from back in the camp. I won’t

repeat them here, but will describe our life there, and survival of the dry

crematorium by recalling a few faces.

The factory had once been built for Silesian weavers as a carpet factory

before the war. When the Riese-plan was hatched, it became a labor

camp. There were double bunks on the top level of the three, where we

slept two to each, head to foot, yet at least these were beds of a sort.

Those fit for work were stationed here to be ordered out on the building

sites at five in the morning. A majority were Hungarian, mostly

Transylvanian Jews. For three to six months the attitudes of home

would hold out. There were examples of solidarity. My own little story is

this: during the rail construction, the way had to be blasted into the

rock wall. We carried the scattered rocks away in our hands. In those

worn, often wood-soled shoes it was awful hard work. Hands and feet

were bruised, not to mention the sciatic hernias. My posting as

storeroom assistant was lucky. During lunch break the Nagyvárad

surgeon Dr. Éliás looked at his wounded hands in despair: „How will I

ever operate with these again?” I offered to swap places with him. This

was in the summer of 1944, when we’d occasionally get one-third bread

rations with margarine and a slice of salami. We had no lice yet, and we

knew of the Allies’ landing and the Romanian desertion, so we still had

real hopes of survival by avoiding the gas chambers. Two or three

weeks on I would have probably been incapable of such a gesture. By

then the fight had set on even among the „newly” deported: a

favorable workplace and possibly better food rations could mean one’s

life.

The first floor below us was the Schonung lodgings. My father and I only

made our descent in December, maybe January of ’45. We were

crowded onto the double bunks. One-quarter rations, then later just a

slice or two of bread and watery beetroot soup. The Schonung only

worked on lager premises, in the yard. We all hoped to get strong

again, to get well and fit for work. This was our only hope to avoid some

unknown death camp. There was a separate Revier hospital room on

this floor. Phlegmonae and pneumonia brought people here, and pulling

some strings the doctors even tried treating some heart patients. With

no medicines or the few they had mysteriously acquired. The typhoid

camp-fever hadn’t yet set in. I had been in there with pneumonia, and

overcame it easily. I saw the famous heart specialist Doctor Zinner

praying at a patient’s bed for lack of instruments. A little luck could still

get one back fit for work.

A common aim of those on both floors was to avoid descending to the

living-dead of the ground-floor ward full of dysentery and skeletal,

starving people on plank-beds, without strength left to drag themselves

to the corner barrel to defecate. I seldom ventured down to the ground

floor underworld; the sight of it traumatized even the veteran lager

dwellers. I only went down there to visit a prisoner I knew, or a good

friend. If I could spare it, I tried helping them, with some soup or a few

boiled potatoes. From late autumn, more and more top floor residents

„went under.”The „dry crematorium’s” traffic increased. From our lager

population of 1000-1200, some 40 corpses daily were taken to the

mass graves by the death commandos.  The infirm from neighboring

camps were constantly swelling our numbers.

The former carpet factory’s machines were operated by a huge steam

engine’s transmission facilities. When the building was converted to a

concentration camp, they kept the boiler room and the steam engine.

The steam was the basis for Dörnhau’s becoming the region’s

disinfection center. Prisoners were occasionally brought over from other

camps, bathed and shaved, their lice-infected rags disinfected in high

pressure steam. Hot water poured from the shower heads – it was

sheer bliss. It eased the itches of our louse-bitten bodies. It’s difficult

for me to impress what lice infection really meant. I’ll have to use my

imagination. There were light colored, hand sized blotches on our

blankets’ grays. These were lice. They sort of huddled in clumps like

sheep in the winter. Nobody ever counted the hundreds or thousands

of lice gathered in those clumps. We did count the ones collected from

our armpits. We had a sort of gambling game, no money involved; we

used bread. We were young, and sometimes – even there! – we

played. Reaching under striped clothes, shirts, we tried gathering as

many lice from our armpits as we could, then we counted them on our

open palms. Odd or even – that was what we bet on.

I will elaborate on the disinfecting plant, scene of our happiest

moments, to give an idea of how everything in that world got distorted.

I mentioned that Häftlinge were brought over from other camps for

disinfection.  Some among them were from Polish ghettos, and they

were familiar with everything. They knew that tall, smoking chimneys

over a low building, and the inscription „Waschraum” over the entrance

meant a gas chamber or a crematorium.  They brought them to our

barbed-wired factory yard, counting them for the umpteenth time. Then

came us, the stripe-shirted prisoners who operated the bath, telling

them it was time for de-lousing and disinfecting, and to go to the

undressing room and hand over their clothes. We tried calming them as

best we could, explaining things to them. But they were experienced

lager dwellers and they knew it was our job to calm them down before

the gas chamber doors clanged shut. They would throw themselves to

the ground, pray, weep, rant, and curse. It was terrible.

I keep trying to get to what I still see as beautiful or uplifting from those

times. It’s not easy. When one has to lay one or two corpses a week

from their bunks onto the floorboards, to wait for the corpse carriers,

after having delayed this operation a couple of days to grab soup and

bread rations from the dead, it is difficult to let go of these memories.

(We never used the word „deceased” over there. The dying would

eventually „croak”).

I survived almost ten months in Dörnhau – on the second and first

floors, in that order – and those who weren’t dragged down to the

ground floor’s death row had, or must have had, some experiences I

still call beautiful or even uplifting. It was up to us to acknowledge these

respites.  I feel it is worthwhile to give an account of these too.

“Nice Breaks”- Though Rarely
Perceived as Such

We seldom remember „uplifting moments,” but there were some. Many

people think that acts and experiences reminding us of home and our

humanity aided our survival. Considering things rationally, it was more a

matter of calories and luck – which floor of Dörnhau one could escape.

Anyone getting to the ground floor had no part in „nice breaks.” Most of

those who survived the war died in the days following liberation.

What was beautiful? The early autumn when we were working in the

Butzer-Holtzmann Kommando, we had every other Sunday off to rest.

After we had food, my father and a doctor from Nagyvárad, Dr. Barát,

gathered the young ones around them, including kids from Máramaros

who once wore sidelocks, in our group. My father recited Ady, and the

musical Dr. Barát sang opera arias. And the children waited patiently

through to the end of culture hour, when a few slices of bread were

shared by the audience.

I myself was a „student” of the geographer Gyöngyössi, whose tales

took me on a journey around the world. I got a bowl of soup from short

Herr Otto, formerly an actor with the Burgtheater, who conjured up the

theatre world of Vienna.

Or I could tell you exceptional stories from our dreadful days at the

Becker Kommando. We were paired with a doctor named Csillag from

Transdanubia: we drew groundwater from a two meter ditch using cans.

Whenever we could, when we thought our work overseer wasn’t

around, we would slack off and „have some fun.” Doctor Csillag would

whistle a tune, and I’d have to guess what it was. Then I, recalling

sometime violin lessons, would jog his memory with a Händel air. We

had an older overseer, a sadistic murderer. The „Lamer.” We knew he

crept up on people and spied on them surreptitiously – and anyone

caught shirking would have their head smashed in with a stick. Always

the head. It was easy for him, hitting us from above while we were

down in the ditch. We were careless and only noticed him when he was

already standing over us on the mound. I put my hands up to protect

my head – but Lamer didn’t strike.

„Was pfeifst Du, Junge?”

„Ich melde Gehorsam… I obediently report, it is Judas Maccabeus, from

Händel“.

„Nein, das ist Tochter der Zion!”

I didn’t argue. For days after this incident, the Lamer gave me his soup,

sometimes his bread and Zulage – and otherwise kept up his reign of

terror as before. This was also a part of our lives in the lager, and the

distortions of German mentality.

We had a choir organized by Mr. Schwartz, a chemist from Budapest. He

often invited young choir members over to talk and have dinner, and

then to his bed. I was lucky to follow my father’s advice and avoid this

final honor. He knew Kodály personally, maybe even Béla Bartók too. 

He taught us their folk-music adaptations. Who would believe it? Us

singing Bartók in the „dry crematorium!”

Yet better things also happened. We got rid of that murderous camp

overseer (he stole more than his share) as he was sent to the eastern

front, and his succesor Oberscharführer Mucke had a different attitude

toward handling the camp. He was more patient. Still his Häftling

population was weakened by hunger, dysentery, and later by louse-

borne typhus. Those in better physical condition on the second floor

rehearsed an Operetta called Weisses Rössl (The Little White Steed).

Our violinist Sándor Fejér Lavan accompanied the songs. We invited

commander Mucke and some of his colleagues. We had a full-scale

cleanup for the visit to eliminate louse infections. Our actors and

“actresses” were a roaring success. Oberscharführer Mucke awarded us

a generous dinner for the exceptional event. There was an air we

added to the original operetta. „Dear Doctor Sir, Good Doctor Sir, fix me

up please / So I can live some more, but not on the ground floor...” – we

sang there on the second.

Our whistle artist... I remember his final „gig.” He was lying on the

Schonung floor. While he still had the strength and lungs he was glad to

use his gift to entertain. He would whistle anything on request, and his

repertoire was formidable. When he had become very weak, he called

his faithful audience to give a performance of his favorite pieces. I never

heard him whistle again.  

It was the March of 1945 and I was leaning against a wall and watching

some healthier comrades kick around a rag soccer ball. They had a

former first-league player leading the game. The younger soldiers of the

guard were up for it too. The deported and their German guards played

without any dramatic outcome and this time, the ball wasn’t a rag one.

There were good minutes, hours, perhaps days even. I’m sure the

Polish or Greek Jews can tell of their similar experiences. The question is

how long had they spent previously in concentration and extermination

camps? Five months, or five years? Had they any spirit left in them to

acknowlege the fleeting beauty and joy?

He spoke of „Human-faced” Germans…

I’m sure the reason I remember them so well – all of them,  without

exception – is that during the one year I spent in the lager it was

exceptionally rare for me to meet a „humane” German.

Strangely this is the first occasion after all that time that I remember my

schoolboy hatred for Germans and the teenage youth’s more subtle

attitude simultaneously.  I can’t pin down the exact moment when the

term „fascist” became separated from „German”. Despite all doubts

though, I’m certain that even back there in Dörnhau I could distinguish

between them. In light of my experience I associated cock-feathered

gendarmes with fascist Germans, as well as SS-uniformed Ukranian and

Kraut murderers. I hated them. But I saw that there were quite a few

murderers present among our own ranks. The separation of fascists and

their ethnicity took place almost unnoticeably. At ten, I obviously didn’t

conceptualize this as such.

It wasn’t necessary to use weapons to destroy the Jews in those dozen

camps in our area; there were other ways as well. I hardly have

memories of SS soldiers turning a gun at a victim point-blank. But I did

encounter German soldiers murdering perhaps not out of hatred but

pure boredom even in my first weeks at Schotterwerke. My ghetto

comrade Sammy Goldschlag was murdered right in front of me. I will

now tell of his death.

After the stifling air of Birkenau, death stopped being an everyday

concern at  Schotterwerke. There was sunshine, fresh air and at night

we could stretch our legs out and sleep. Our energy reserves from

home were still sustaining us. Most of us wore our ragged, but well-

fitting shoes. Everything is relative. In the labor camp, as long as we

worked we could feel secure.

I worked on the loading station with Sammy as part of the Krauze

Kommando. It was hard work, and unusual for many of us. We carried

ties and twelve-meter tracks, laying them down, fixing them in place and

filling up the gaps in between with gravel. When they brought out

steaming pots for our lunch break we’d line up for the food. Watery

soup was rationed in our tin canteens. Sammy sat beside us on a pile of

bricks. We stirred the soup, evaluated its contents and began to eat. A

soldier from the guard sat down a few steps away from us. Maybe he

was having his lunch; we paid no attention, until he motioned for

Sammy to go over to him. He could have ordered anyone, even me, but

he chose Sammy. He put his canteen aside. There may have been some

soup still in it. He went up to the guard, and started his report: Ich

melde gehorsam… The soldier did something unusual. He took his cap

and threw it – over the tripwire perimeter. He ordered Sammy to

retrieve it, like a dog. He obediently crossed the wire, and made a few

steps toward the cap lying in the grass. He was going to pick it up, but

it never happened. The soldier had his gun at his shoulder, aimed and

fired. He went up to the prisoner collapsed on the grass, picked up his

cap and ordered my comrades to dispose of the body next to the

storage building. They covered him in crumpled cement bags. We took

him to the camp gate on a makeshift stretcher after our work shift.

There the commandos were counted as they marched in rows of five,

finally the four men and the corpse. The count went in order: the regular

count of the living, plus one dead. There was no fuss over a corpse.

There were reserves in the camp. The Krauze got its hundred men the

very next day too.

After the war I had to recount what happened to my surviving cousins

in  Marosvásárhely. The fact that I remember the layout of

Schotterwerke, even where we sat for food, is due solely to responding

to repeated, continuous questioning.

Another of my memories illustrating the inexplicable German mentality

relates to the loading station again. Traffic at the loading station was

busy, with whistles from the shunting little diesels. A lager comrade, a

Polish Jew, was run over by a shunting engine, though we didn’t know

how. It crippled his leg. The victim was taken into the lager. The patient

must be saved, came the order.  An impromptu operating table was set

up on the first floor, and a surgeon serving as a medic was found for the

job. He was head doctor of the Amsterdam Royal Surgery Clinic in civilian

life. The victim had one of his legs amputated below the knee. Without

anesthesia, of course. Bandages, medication and pain killers were

dispensed from the SS storeroom for the purpose. An investigation was

called for to find out who was responsible for the accident, whether it

was the German train driver who had broken regulations or the Jew

that was careless. The investigation took weeks with specialists,

witness accounts and typed records. Meanwhile the crippled Jew had to

be kept alive. When the driver’s innocence had been proved, our

unfortunate comrade became expendable. He was taken to another camp „for appropriate treatment.” Obviously by gas.

I was surprised by this almost lunatic „Ordnung muss sein!” on

countless occasions. In the winter of 1944-45, during his rounds

surveying the medical situation of the camps, Dr. Thilo, the selecting

doctor beside Mengele on the ramps of Birkenau, came to Dörnhau. By

that time we were tithed by deaths. Doctor Thilo was quite unconcerned

by this. But when he found out the German kitchen chef was plundering

the food supplies – stealing meat, synthetic honey and margarine, and

romping with his Ukranian whores – he was punished immediately: like

the former camp commander, he too was redirected to the eastern

front. Ordnung muss sein.

My last memory of armed SS soldiers is from the 8th of May, 1945. The

ceasefire was already signed, but the Russian army still hadn’t reached

Dörnhau. The Germans still wore their uniforms and hadn’t yet thrown

down their arms. They packed their cases and crates of food on horse-

drawn wagons, and were making an escape, hoping to be captured by

Americans. They ordered some of us to their quarters to help load their

things. We were in good spirits, for by then we were hopeful that the

terrible end – mass execution – was off the agenda. One of us, carrying

sacks of sugar, stumbled. Sugar spilled from the sack on the ground. We

pounced on it, licking it from the ground, stuffing handfuls in our

pockets. This only lasted seconds. The guard at the gate could have

ordered us off and scattered us, but no. He set his trained German

Shepherd on us. It attacked the child kneeling beside me. It knew

where to bite: it went for his neck. He bled to death. The boy was my

schoolmate, a student of the Kolozsvár Jewish Lyceum. I was kneeling

beside him stuffing myself, just like him. But I didn’t die just hours

before the liberation. Luck was a necessity of survival.

It is more complicated remembering any Germans whose humanity I

could truly believe in. (It wasn’t easy. When one guard or other treated

us humanely, a comrade asked him: was he tamed before or after

Stalingrad?) This is so because we only ever saw our guards and

overseers. A group from the Butzer-Holtzman Kommando was led by

construction commander Jakob Stöhr in the late summer of 1944. Taking

over his new squad, he began by getting to know his men. He asked

whoever spoke German what he did in civilian life. We felt human in his

presence. He conversed with my father, the „Herr Doktor“ during lunch

breaks or the frequent air-raid alerts: about the war, our prospects and

perseverance. (Never about Auschwitz. Didn’t he know, or did he just

not want to know about it? Afraid to call up the memories of its victims?)

On the 24th of August 1944 in the early dawn, he didn’t wait for a

headcount, just hurried to us saying half-aloud: „Herr Doktor, Romänien

kapituliert.”

Mornings he would load his bags up well with food: bread, margarine,

summer apples. With few exceptions, he would pass these out among

the young. Those who talked to him often were convinced he was an

old social democrat.

There was another German, a woman whose goodness I could thank

personally on the first day of the ceasefire in Silesia.

We were digging the pipeline ditch on the main street in

Oberwüstegiersdorf. This was late autumn of 1944. A woman was

watching us from the first floor window across the street. She waved. I

soon realized she was waving to me. She came out of the house and

put a small paper-wrapped bundle by a pile of stones. Inside was bread

and salami. She watched me eating it from the window. The next day

we went to work and she was waiting at the window. She soon brought

out a bundle and put it down by the stones. This went on for days.

When I was reassigned to another stretch of the ditch, she took the

food to me there. The Silesian winter drew on unusually early and

harsh. Snow was abundant in mid-November, and we still wore our thin,

striped clothes. The following day this woman came out to the pit and

threw down an old winter coat. She watched as I donned it. But she

wasn’t the only one: our escorting soldier also watched as I put on

civilian clothing. He hurried over to us, berating the German woman. I

had to give the coat back.

The story doesn’t end there. Early morning on May 9th, 1945, I crawled

off my bunk. My father wasn’t up yet. Strange. Just now, as I write

these lines I wonder why we had slept through that all-important night.

There was no music, no tears of joy, at five in the morning the folks

bunking on the Schonung floor were quiet. I set off to investigate

matters by myself. The guard tower looked empty. I went up to it,

stepping into the three-meter proximity where otherwise I could have

been shot. I ventured out on the road. Until then, I could only get out

there in guarded groups. The roadway through the village center was

perhaps two kilometers away. I headed that way, and meanwhile had

food at least five times, but I don’t remember how. From a bottle

labelled Weisswein I drank – cooking oil. It helped my overworked

stomach. I reached the village main street, which was a roadway. There

was a dreadful chaos. The Soviet army was passing through. It wasn’t

what we later saw on films. There were a few motor-drawn cannons,

but the rest were horse-drawn wagons and foot soldiers.  In well-

organized squads, sometimes in smaller groups, tired, maybe drunk, the

Soviets headed west. Close beside them, as if they belonged together,

the Germans were fleeing as well, planning to be taken hostage by

Americans. The chaos was immeasurable. Trucks abandoned for lack of

petrol, a camp kitchen left behind. The latter grabbed my attention. It

was loaded with half-kilo canned hams, maybe even bigger. I got a sack

somewhere and filled it up. It was heavy for a frozen-boned kid to lift.

But it was ham, so I lifted it and hauled it off. I was close to where we’d

dug the pipeline ditch. There was the house the German woman

brought me the coat from. I shuffled up to the door and knocked. She

was home and recognized me. I told her not to be afraid, that I didn’t

need anything, I only came to thank her. I had my umpteenth breakfast

there; I wasn’t counting. I should have gone back to the camp but I was

horribly tired. Then there was a knock at the door. It was my father. He

was looking for me, afraid that we might lose each other now, at the

very end. Of course, he hadn’t found me in the roadside chaos. Being

close by, he thought to thank the German woman who had helped his

son.

The woman later told me they took her teenage son off with the

Hitlerjugend. They later told her the child had died on the Eastern front

somewhere. It was his coat she’d wanted to give to me.

This meeting with my father was accidental. Later, we were both proud

that our first minutes were guided by gratitude for our exceptional

helpers instead of revenge.

We didn’t return to the camp. We tried to get our bearings on Dörnhau’s

main street. We asked lager residents, Germans, and Russian soldiers

in our search for ways to travel. We heard conflicting reports. I distinctly

remember two pieces of advice. One was to get on a train at nearby

Wüstegiersdorf towards Breslau. But – so the polische said – he

wouldn’t recommend it. There was fear that solitary Jewish travelers

were being hunted and murdered by Polish nationalists. Our next

advisor was a beautifully decorated Russian officer. He approached us

and spoke in Yiddish. He asked about our lager life, and my father about

our further plans. When he heard we were going back to Transylvania,

he fell silent, then in a low voice said only: „Avek fin danet. Avek fin

danet”. Away from here. Away from here.

We understood as much Yiddish ourselves. He was a major, or maybe a

lieutenant-colonel, and to judge from the stars shining on his chest, a

hero of the Soviet Union.

It was late afternoon on the first day of peace. For a whole year we

fought doggedly to avoid separation. Now, on the 9th of May and free,

we nearly lost each other, but this time it was no accident. My father

wanted to start off home immediately. And I thought, since the world

was free, I could finally see Paris and Rome. My father wouldn’t yield.

„Your mother and sister might be home already.” We never discussed this

in the lager. Their fate was taboo. „But you know, and you saw their

clothes – they are no more” – I said, to nobody. As a free man, my

father was independent. He headed to where he hoped to find his wife

and daughter, far away, and I towards the West, in line with the

marching Russian troops and fleeing German civilians. After about two

hundred meters I turned around and, as well as I could, ran after my

father.

For close to a year, without ever acknowledging it, I was in control of

both our lives. On the first day of freedom, the normal father-son

relationship was repaired. How and why? I don’t know.

Tasks

I was very small, very young. For boys my age, getting slave work was

a real career. We could serve the SS lads who guarded and directed the

lager, or the Häftling „aristocracy.” I couldn’t manage this. But there

was a time or two I got close to enviable positions. In October 1944, I

got into the potato-peeling boy squad, a prestigious child job. I felt I

was the center of the world. Luckily – though I thought differently at the

time – my kingship lasted only three weeks. It’s frightening how one is

confused by a position one thinks of as exceptional. No, I never acted

against anyone. Evenings it was on the bed-lined, four-foot wide

corridor – the Platz – that people gathered to trade and gossip. They

were from Felvidék, Munkács, and Huszt. They were selling the Zulage,

bits of margarine, salami slices, or boiled potato. Occasionally, when a

trade was obviously pointless, they did this perhaps for their own

entertainment. Practicing, as if we were at the market in Munkács. It

was through this moving, seething, dense crowd that I had to push my

way. I stretched my arms forward and shouted sharp and loud: „Platz,

make way, make way!” – I felt like I was somebody there, facing the

faceless crowd. I had privileges. I don’t know if I felt any shame there,

or if that only came later, with my freedom. The image has haunted me

for sixty years now, and has helped me somewhat navigating through

life.

The lucky chosen ones of the Kartoffelschälerei, the potato peelers,

peeled good Silesian spuds in a spacious barn. There was a cast-iron

oven in the center, and it always burned warm with coked coals. On its

top and sides slices of potato were set for baking. We ate, glutting

ourselves all day. We sometimes let potatoes burn to ashes, and took

them to the Schonungs as medicine. We had two ways of peeling

spuds: there were the Germans’ potatoes, beautiful half-kilo pieces, and

for the prisoners the small leftover ones. We had to clean the Germans’

so they were spotless, otherwise they turned you out of the group.

Nobody risked that. We didn’t bother with the deportees’ potatoes

though; the rotten bits were removed, and the rest were left

haphazardly peeled.

Everyone stole. It was risky, but we dared it. The peeling shed was

outside the barb-wired camp yard – as we came back in after work, the

Germans would sometimes check us. We took baked potatoes and raw

onions if we could get them. One time I got bold and tied up my trouser

legs, filling them up with the finest German spuds. If I got caught, it

would be twenty-five blows to my backside. I already got ten once, but I

knew what I was risking. I trembled in excitement as I unloaded them

one by one to my father on the first floor. I counted: 37 pieces. I was

proud of myself. Late at night I was preparing to sleep, when I saw that

father had passed around half of the stash to our neighbors, our

kommando comrades. I cried in rage, and kicked his ankle. I hit my

father. I could, because I got those potatoes, not him. I should be

ashamed to say this, but I’m not. That is how the lager was.

Otherwise ours came to be an enviable father-son relationship. We had

an unspoken agreement that remained intact until our liberation.

Whoever finished first with the soup, food, or bread could ask for some

of the other’s last bites, and got some. Mutually. In hindsight, I guess I

was the one who often finished first.

I soon fell out with the spud-peelers. Mister Reiter, the potato Kapo,

didn’t like me. I didn’t speak their jargon, didn’t pray and I was different

from the other children, who were mostly recruited from Máramaros and

Szatmár. Still, this was where I came in contact with those who had

tried doing something for our community’s survival. Perhaps elsewhere,

others would call this a resistance movement. Perhaps it was. If so, I

had no role in it whatsoever. But as a sort of reserve helper I got

acquainted with some of them, and received – often through begging –

some small extra food rations.

The spudders’ shed was opposite the camp kitchen’s roomy barracks. In

the cold kitchen, where bread was sliced, and the Zulag of margarine,

salami, cheese, chunky jam, there was a young man working who was

rather chubby by lager standards.  This was Feri Vadász. He stopped

me and asked me to take a bowl of soup and some bread up to

someone on the Schonung level. I did. He asked me again, and a third

time, until I became his regular delivery boy. I slaved for him – and

afterwards got a portion of soup and salami for myself. I got closer to

an in-circle held together with food extras. Eventually, I realized he was

sending food to those he had been with in the Hungarian internment

camps. He helped his communist comrades and anyone else he knew

from home.

As food-boy I got to know the director of the carpentry shop, Mister

Glatz from Pozsony. Sometimes he let me help clean up. It was warm in

the workshop, and people working there were usually better fed. From

their conversations I could tell they all knew each other from the

internment camps. For me all these connections meant some extra food,

extra days of life in the struggle for survival. I repeat: Dörnhau, the dry

crematorium, could only be survived at the price of others’ lives. The

calories we were given through proper feeding weren’t enough to last

us to the 9th of May, 1945. What we begged and stole through our

connections was all from other people’s calories.

From the carpenters’ workshop sometimes they sent me over to the

smithy as well. That was where the Dutch Jews – former Philips factory

employees – had hidden a home-made radio set. The German officers

and nearby village officials brought in their sets for the Dutch to repair.

Under pretext of repairs, they stole enough parts to build a set of our

own. It was kept in a cubicle under the floor. Sometimes I got to hear

broadcasts from London.

We had no resistance movement like the one in Buchenwald. One night,

quite by accident just days before the liberation, I spotted a friend at

the ground-level window, one of those I had brought extra food for. He

waved me over. Then I saw he was standing guard with a gun. There

was fear the camp would be burned, and we with it. For the time he

spent taking a leak, he handed me the gun. So there must have been

something up. There was a sole weapon in the inmates’ hands.

Afterwards of course, many things came to light. But it was at home, in

peace, in Budapest that I came to know these things. That there had

been negotiations with the authorities, the armed forces guarding us.

Feri Vadász and company were in touch with commander Mucke, the

mayor of Dörnhau. The deal was, if they spared the lager inmates’ lives,

refusing the orders for their annihilation, then the communists in the

camp would clear them with the Russian army’s authorities – their

comrades. Whether this promise was his only motivation or not, it is

true that Oberscharführer Mucke didn’t flee the camp but stayed there

with his prisoners, who did put him in the clear. The tailors had

prepared his civilian suit by then. On the day of the cease-fire he was

rid of his uniform.

Free, Homeward

After sixty years, I have again considered what could explain the

undelaying speed that we made our way on our own, on foot along an

unknown way that led home. We didn’t stop for a minute to go back to

the lager and discuss how and which way we should go. That first

moment when we weren’t taken, but went on our own will, was itself an

eternity. The heroes of historic legends might have made such

decisions, by divine suggestion.

So far I have been accounting strictly those things that happened to

me, to us. The 9th of May is a turning point, I will violate the rules of the

genre. Let my sin be forgiven. I am trying to understand what I was,

what we were at the time.

On the day of liberation we simply made a choice from the possible

alternatives. Perhaps we might have returned to our dwelling a few

kilometers away, back to our spot to discuss and to plan. But no. The

only question was: West or East?  My father took control: we would go

home. But by road or rail? We also decided this without delay in favor of

the road,  due to news and stories we heard. My father kept a sort of

diary log on three sheets of paper, listing our Calvary stations up to

Marosvásárhely. From this I know we slept somewhere different every

night. That Laló – that is me – had a fever. That on my birthday in

Morava Ostrava we watched a Czech movie, and on the way to Tessen I

blacked out.

Not a single word about emotions, crisis situations, or plans. As if that

diary had been our guide. Each town or village, if only ten or so

kilometers closer to our home, like the split times of a long distance

race, credited our victory. A matter-of-fact record without commentary.

The adolescent 43083 was no longer what he had been in Dörnhau – a

fit, resourceful, useful partner and steady aid to his father. On our

liberation, the wheel of time snapped back into place. All the maddening

problems of real life burdened my father. How could we, who had

survived the war, resume normal life? He kept his tortured thoughts to

himself – beside him walked an inexperienced, vulnerable little boy too

weak to handle his horrific visions.

We started walking on the road to Braunau on our first afternoon of

freedom. We couldn’t journey far, but had to stop quite often, and we

wouldn’t leave the sack of canned hams behind. We rested at a farm,

asking a Silesian farmer for shelter. He gave us dinner and gave us

room in a hayloft. We woke up at dawn to find there were more guests

in the loft’s opposite corner: men – Germans, in uniform, but without

ranks or arms. One we recognized as the head of the local Gestapo,

who we sometimes saw on the main street of Oberwüstegiersdorf. We

were scared. They might even kill us in the loft... They must have been

scared too. It would be enough to find a Russian soldier, point them out

and say: „fascists!” Nobody could tell what might await them. But

nothing happened. They soon disappeared.

My father had a look around the stable. From our host he „borrowed”

two beautiful, huge Mecklenburg foals and a cart. The German sensed

the spirit of the times. Without a word he led the horses out and

teamed them. We tied red ribbons on their necks and set off. I had filled

the cart up that day with inconsumable amounts of food: a sackful of

sugar, potatoes, even biscuits, dried vegetables, and salami – anything

I found on the way in abandoned vehicles by the road.

On the third day we reached a small town train station, and there was a

train heading East towards Czech territory. There, before the station we

searched for someone to take the cartload of supplies off us. We

succeeded. I only hung onto the sackful of hams. We boarded the train.

In the car we saw the first survivors from Marosvásárhely, Jewish girls.

Younger than my mother, but women from the Vásárhely ghetto.

Surviving women. My father didn’t say anything, but his hopes increased

after seeing them: maybe ours had made it too… We arrived in Ostrava

together. We found the local office of the Jewish Committee. They gave

us ID cards (after a year without, we had our names again!) then

assigned us to accommodations in a former classroom. There were well-

stuffed pallets for all. On May 17th, my birthday, the girls arranged a

cake from somewhere. We went to the movies. We couldn’t understand

a single word, but we were free. I think that was when I first caught the

taste of civilized life. On my birthday, the women invited me to sleep

with them. We had dinner, and I fell asleep quite contentedly. I hadn’t

the slightest idea about sexuality.

We started off again on May 18th, on foot once more – traffic on this rail

line was suspended again. The Czech-Polish border town of Tessen was

just thirty kilometers away. We thought we would walk that far and

catch another train from there, perhaps to Budapest. It was an eventful

trip. First there was a German soldier offering me a hatful of jewelry and

gold for my striped, probably lice-infected camp uniform. It was life-

saving attire – or could be – in those days. I didn’t budge – jewels

meant nothing to me. We met some Hungarian troops in the stream of

traffic going East. Some of them were neighbors, from the banks of the

Maros. We decided to journey together, all the way home if we could.

They were strong young men, and we could count on their support

when needed. Our path led by a scanty forest. A Russian armed with a

machine gun stepped out of the bushes. „Stoj!” He beckoned us to

follow into the forest. Soviet troops were guarding a large group of

people, most of them unarmed German and Hungarian soldiers. But

there were civilians there too. A transport of POW’s bound for Russia.

Some had escaped, and the ranks had to be filled. We explained

frantically: we were Jews, prisoners, just escaped. We pointed out our

striped clothes – they ignored us. They didn’t believe us because we

were arrested in the company of homeward-bound militia. I dropped my

pants to show them: I really was a Jew. We were lucky. He could have

been an anti-semitic Russian, but he wasn’t. They let us go.

Shortly before we reached Tessen I was completely spent and weak. My

father sat me down by the road. I lost consciousness. A Czech peasant

stopped his cart, threw me on the hayrack and took us straight to the

hospital. I was diagnosed with typhus. My father had typhoid fever, and

we were admitted to two separate wards. The hospital had a wide,

shrubby yard right on the Polish-Czech border. I was treated on Polish

soil and my father was on the Czech side. I lay semi-conscious on my

bed for weeks. The nuns serving on the epidemic ward had no way of

knowing my father was alive in the neighboring Czech ward. Our lager-

found luck helped us out yet again. We didn’t lose each other.

We got on a train at the end of June, and arrived in Budapest riding the

roof of a cattle car. We got off at Nyugati station to find our relatives in

the Józsefváros district. We hoped they could tell us about our family.

We too experienced what Imre Kertész has described with such

inimitable art. At the National Theatre stop, the tram conductor asked

for our tickets.

“We don’t have any.”

“Why not?”  - he asked.

“We just don’t. How could we buy any??”

“Then please get off the tram.”

“But I am on my way to József utca.”

A terrible ordeal followed. Passengers accused the conductor of fascism,

others defended him, and someone payed our fare. We arrived at 40

József Street, home of the Mózes family. They sat us down in their large

foyer, but didn’t invite us in. They gave us coffee and sandwiches. They

hadn’t heard from our family. They didn’t ask us to stay. I can

understand them now: they feared the typhus, the diseases. After the

conductor on Tram 6, this was the second sign that our homecoming

wasn’t such a happy event for everyone.

We stepped over the Romanian border and were supplied with yet more

documents. I got paralysis at Nagyvárad. It must have been my joints,

but I was like a wooden plank when they took me to the Jewish

hospital. Two days’ delay, no telephone connection, no news of what

might await us at Marosvásárhely. We met an acquaintance at the

Kolozsvár station. He told us our family hadn’t returned – „so far.”

Someone allegedly saw my mother after the liberation in a camp.

Nobody could confirm the news.

Conflict awaited arrivals at the Central Station in Vásárhely. My father

was called to by familiar drivers: „Come along Emil, old man, we’ll take

you in to town” – but chose to walk with me to Main Square instead,

just as we were walked to the station a year before. There may have

been an element of stagemanship, who knows? We went together. By

the time we got to Main Square there were almost a hundred people

following us. My father was a popular figure. Mr Kántor the

photographer stopped us and asked permission to take our picture. We

soon ended up at the home we left behind, our house on Rózsa Lane. It

was inhabited by relatives from South Transylvania. They came from

nearby Marosludas with the Soviet and Romanian forces, to preserve

the family estate. They knew nothing of my mother or sister. „Some say

they saw them.”

Interestingly, I don’t recall any emotional shock on returning to our

family home.

Our calvary of Auschwitz ended here.

The End?

Of course, our ordeal didn’t end on July 2, 1945. For long years

thereafter, every night on a precise schedule I would return to Birkenau

and Dörnhau, or worse, to the pre-ghetto Marosvásárhely. I would run

lead-footed from gendarmes and SS selection officers. I knocked on

familiar doors in Marosvásárhely, asking for shelter and always being

refused. The scary thing about my pursuit-dreams was the fact that

friends and acquaintances turned me out from doorways for reasons

that, in my dreams, I had to agree with.

That was exactly sixty years ago. The nightmares have thinned out and

become less frequent. But they still visit me.

I should tell of my first days at home. It’s as if they’d been erased –

nothing, a black patch, probably an after-effect of my lingering typhus.

My father also had a hard time adapting. I can’t and won’t say anything

against the relatives who’d moved in and run our shop. But they had

lived there almost a year, and lived off the restarted business. Nobody

thought this short, aged man, my father, would return. Likewise, few of

my age ever returned. They didn’t expect us home.

Our relations squeezed some room for us in our (!) home. The Ideál

Perfumeria was registered under their name. After some argument, they

agreed to adopt my father as co-owner.          

The months passed, and survivors kept turning up – we knew nothing

certain about my mother and sister. My father couldn’t acknowledge

their death. He snuck away secretly to Mrs Csejdi, the fortune-teller on

Main Square. Gypsy ladies went to her, to read cards. My father clung

fast to the impossible... Most of his friends had started new families by

then, as this was the best way to accept survival. Widowers, men and

women, orphaned youngsters – they made up most of the Jewish

community in Marosvásárhely. Starting a family, starting new, that was

in the air. They urged my father to do so. Perhaps he wanted to, but I

gave him no chance. I was jealous, and I wanted him for myself.

„Every whore would love to move in with my father!” – I told an attractive

woman, an excellent writer. She backed down, startled by my rampant

hatred. I was seventeen, with the experience of an old man and the

selfishness of a pre-teen child.

I enrolled in the Catholic high school and graduated from there. It was

an unfortunate choice. The teachers and students weren’t ready to

acknowledge what had happened in 1944, after the ghetto times. That

every seventh Marosvásárhely resident, neighbor, was dragged away

and they made no gesture of protest. On the contrary. Their suppressed

guilt broke out in hatred. There were some really good people on the

teacher’s board, but they were powerless to change the school spirit.

Several classmates called me „Hitler’s folly”: I could only have avoided

the gas chamber so young out of folly. Even now I can’t really judge my

fellow students. They were told by parents and teachers that we were

liabilities of society; that is why we were segregated. The rest was the

Germans’ sin. It was difficult enough for Hungarians to be back under

Romanian rule.

In the eight high school classes, three of us were Jewish. One of us

came up from South Transsylvania. For two years I only made friends

with young Jews. I met my wife-to-be in a Zionist organization in l946.

Her family fled to us from Tschernowitz, from the Soviet Union. She had

three years behind her in a Transnstrian ghetto.

In 1947 I went to Kolozsvár and applied to the Economic Faculty of the

Bolyai University there. My new life started there.  I readjusted, for

better or worse, to community life.

It isn’t difficult to talk about these times. Rare are the days since my

return without some memory of the brick factory, or the rooms at

Dörnhau overcrowded with bunks. Some have buried their memories

deep inside, and they’re only tortured now, in their old age. I live with

mine, regrettably even in my sleep. Wide awake, as you can read, I

have occasional nice, positive recollections too. I’d always talked to my

children about my lager life, and taken them to see Auschwitz at an

early age. So they would be inured. So in another, figurative Auschwitz

they could stand their ground. For a long time they couldn’t forgive me.

They said they live in a different world, that I’d spoiled their youth for

them.

And I think anyone who withholds or discards these experiences is

really embittering the future. I know there will be no other Auschwitzes;

there can’t be. But inhumanity, indifference, impassiveness – these can

recur. They do.

Let us talk about our memories!

To the drawings of Imre Holló

The artist of the graphics in the text is dentist Imre Holló, my fellow-

prisoner deported from Sátoraljaújhely. His extraordinarily valuable

bequest, a collection of artwork drawn by himself and consisting of

about fifty pages records the history of the period between May 3, 1944

– when they were forced to move to the ghetto – to May 13, 1945, a

few days after the liberation. The drawings are completed with the

bare, factual texts of the artist.  The collection is a rarity all over the

world. Unlike many similar drawings, it was not done by memory in the

years after liberation. The drawings were made in Dörnhau, known as

the “dry or cold crematorium” with the well-defined aim: to genuinely

record the unbelievable to future generations.

Imre Hollós and myself worked together in the Becker commando. I

could name the places as well as some of the SS and Todt organization

members and “Häftling”-officers  in the drawings and could write a

detailed report on their fate and behaviour. (I actually partly did so in

the album  - “Bottle message to the Future” The Drawings of Imre Holló,

written by Lajos Erdélyi, published by Balassi Kiadó in 1988. Instead of

my vague memories, however, I rather quote Imre Holló himself, when

he gave the saved drawings to the Association of Hungarian Anti-

Fascists in Budapest, in the years following the war.

“(…) after a few days in Auschwitz I accidentally got into a transport of workers… and was taken to Dörnhau (Silesia, 2 kms from Oberüstegiersdorf)… The Germans made us work 12 hours a day…The energy in the food we got daily was less than 1000 cal…. People, this way, were systematically and with exactitude shagged towards defatigatio… We were slowly coming back from the terrible shock. It was clear we primarily had to fight against demoralisation and apathy… A small comrade community tried to fight for the maintenance of human consciousness. One of us wrote poems, the other prose… I remembered I had sent letters with drawings to my friends in my younger years…I should write that kind of diary in case it remains and gets somewhere as a message in the bottle… One of the members of our little group – due to his position – managed to get pencils, then pens and clack ink… The first half of the diary is retrospective, the drawings of Dörnhau – except for one – were made in the evenings after sketches hidden in our palms… We had to be very inventive to hide them.”

Let me add that the drawings were hidden into the straw full of lice

spreading typhus. The regularly checking SS soldiers did not dare to

check that. A few pages of the graphic diary was first published by ex-

fellow-prisoner Tibor Spitzer from Bratislava at the beginning of the

1950s. The copies of the drawings were exhibited in the museum of the

Auschwitz lager. After a rearrangement however, these drawings

disappeared. Tibor Spitzer exhibited the copies he had in 1994 in

Montreal and said that the originals had been lost.

Luckily he was wrong. The drawings are kept at the Hungarian National

Museum but it is true: no exhibition had been organized or no copies

had been published for about half a century. A lucky coincidence helped

me trace them. I managed to publish some of them but they still did not

get into the perspective of historians studying art in the Holocaust. The

Holló-album, which came out in three languages, has been completely

neglected (apart from a short television interview) by national or

international papers and periodicals.