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« Personal StoriesMagda H. László: Keepsake Album from the 20th Century
The Keepsake Album
My grandmother had a younger brother named Mór Rosenberg. Our family used to call him Uncle Muci. Of all my relatives I liked him best. He was a particularly nice person, and interested in literature. Every Saturday afternoon he would come from Budapest by boat to visit us in Szentendre, and stayed until Monday morning. We would play cards and talk a lot. He used to say “a Zsabinec panther doesn’t give birth to a rabbit.” It turned out that he was born in Zsabinec, and that’s how I realized that my grandmother and her family came from Zsabinec, Moravia to Trencsén and Orecho. Uncle Muci was keen on joking. When I was eight years old, he gave me a book, a keepsake album. Children would write in it. I had a good friend and I gave it to her to draw something in it. She didn’t give it back right away – and that’s how the book was saved by chance. I got it back when I returned from the deportation. I got the book back, but nothing else. She had a lot of other things with her as well, but that’s the only thing she gave me back. But perhaps that book made me happier than anything else could. Family
My family arrived in Hungary from two directions, the north and the east. My father was from Felvidék born in Trencsén, and his parents lived and ran a farm in the village of Orecho near Trencsén. My great-grandfather was the first to arrive there from Moravia; he was the one who built the big house, with walls 70 cm thick. They had to build them so thick because the river Vág often overran its banks and flooded the house. My great-grandfather brought up eight children, one of whom was my grandmother. My grandfather stems from Trencsén. He was a young child when his mother Róza died. His mother left her to marry a girl called Róza. That’s how he married my grandmother whose name was Róza as well. They had three children: Samu the eldest, who became a vet, Sandor, my father, and his sister Regina, who died at the age of 36. My father completed his high school studies at the Piarists’, then continued at the trade college of Budapest where he graduated. Then he was a trainee at the Flax, Hemp and Jute Factory in Pesterzsébet. He worked there until the crash. My mother came from a family with ten children from the South, from Croatia. They moved to Pest from Lipik. She met my father in Pest, and they moved to Szentendre during the Commune in 1919. We lived there until the deportations. I was born in Budapest on the 19th of May, 1919.
School
I completed my primary schooling at the Jewish school in Szentendre. The school was given a place in the same large building with the synagogue, the cantor’s apartment, a community room and the janitor’s apartment. The building was left to the Jewish community by a Christian craftsman. Our teacher lived there too. Each tenant had its own little garden and there was a courtyard for us to play in, with boys on one side and girls on the other. The classroom was about as big as two rooms. There were about twenty of us, with only a few girls, perhaps three or four. Not just Jewish children attended the school: there were Catholics, Protestants and Greek Orthodox pupils as well. Our teacher, Mr. Tolnai, was quite well known, and that’s why Non-Jewish parents sent their children to that school too. The weekdays passed as in any other one-room school with six grades: our teacher passed out assignments for the classes, and one group would write while another answered the teacher’s questions, and a third one solved math problems. Our teacher did his job very well, and the pupils learned their part of the syllabus but also reviewed and continued studying at the same time. It wasn’t a bad education. Sometimes the head of the school committee would come. Most of them were doctors, first of all Ármin Weisz, the Chief Medical Officer. He was a handsome, tall man who administered vaccines to children. At ten I was really proud to go get vaccinated against the measles on my own. He praised us and gave each of us a slice of chocolate. After his death, Dr. József Óvári, the respected and beloved doctor of Szentendre, became the next head of the school committee. He was selfless: no weather was bad enough to prevent him from visiting his patients, even as far as Szentlászló. He would always ride his bicycle, and in stormy or snowy weather he would walk it, if necessary, to get to his patients. He was taken to the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz together with his son. That was the end of his life. On schooldays we spent the breaks playing in the courtyard, and sometimes we made a trip to the bank of the Danube. I was a fourth- grade pupil when our teacher took us to Sztaravoda, where the open air folk museum is now. At that time there was no museum, only the spring and the forest. Parents would accompany us too, and our teacher came up with various games for us. We had to run with a spoon in our hand, with an egg in it. Then we had to walk on rows of tin cans, in a race. Another task was to eat a slice of bread with plum jam, hanging from a rope – as fast as possible. We observed the holidays too, Chanukah Eve for example. I can still remember our teacher telling us that G-d created the world in six days, but he always reminded us that this didn’t mean literally six days. He said we should imagine it to mean millions of years. Another time he taught us the national anthem of Israel and we also sang at Chanukah. I had a bad voice, so at the end of the year when I was tested on singing, all I could do was gape. Mr Tolnay hadn’t noticed it before, but then it became clear to him that I really had no voice. He said it was a real shame. So the bad mark I got in music haunted me my whole life. Although I got an “A” from the nun in the fifth grade, she added a note by the grade: “singing theory.” I had always gotten worse grades before that. In elementary school we had classes from eight till ten o’clock, then a break, then some classes again. I arrived home by lunchtime. We lived quite far: it took twenty minutes to get home. On Thursdays we had lessons in the afternoon as well, but in fact we would just play, and our teacher taught us a bit of German then. Mr Tolnay had a very tragic fate. He got divorced and arrived in Szentendre from somewhere in Eastern Hungary, in the Sub- Carpathians. Unfortunately he was a hard drinker. He got acquainted with a woman who owned a bar in Pest and he married her later. The woman had a good dowry, so they could buy a nice house. Everything might have gone well, but the marriage was unsuccessful. I do not know if it was because the woman wasn’t intelligent enough or because he drank too much. He was finally dismissed from the school for his drinking. He moved to Pest, received a lump-sum settlement and opened a small stationery store. At that time I already attended high school in Pest. He must have lived somewhere nearby, because I ran into him several times. He soon died of liver disease. A sad end. After elementary school I went to the to the so-called Archiepiscopal Girls’ School for the middle school years. We were taught by nuns. I liked it because they were very good at teaching us, and there was a good atmosphere as well as discipline. I can only say good things about them. There were four years of middle school, and then came high school in Pest. I was a mediocre student at high school, though at elementary and middle school I had been the best pupil. High-school was a sudden change for me then. I only managed to survive the German classes because my father studied with me mercilessly every single evening. Unfortunately he couldn’t speak French, so I had to go over that alone. I was good at Mathematics, but not at Physics. I liked both Latin and Literature. We had a particularly strict History teacher: students even wrote a play about her. She was extremely rigorous. I can remember her walking with us in the courtyard at the time of our final exams when she told us: “Girls, I can only advise you to go and get married!” She committed suicide during the war, in old age. Then we had a famous teacher named Amália Arató – “Mrs. Ami.” She taught us Latin and French. She lost both her legs from a grenade during the war and died soon afterwards. Our Mathematics teacher always came to our annual class reunion. Our class met every year, even for the sixty-second reunion, though by that time there were only four or five of us. We had a classmate in Switzerland who also came back for that. There are only a few of us still alive, perhaps five of the forty-seven. I wanted to become a doctor, but I couldn’t, so after the deportations I studied History and Geography in evening classes. It wasn’t easy to work, bring up my little child and attend college night classes at the same time. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone without a family to help. It’s a pity I didn’t manage to finish medical school. Very few people in our family survived. Two nephews of mine came back. One of them became a doctor and the other one graduated in engineering, then studied medicine for two years. Now he is the director of a research institute in Vancouver. My other nephew was a university professor as well, now retired. He recently returned home and settled down. There had always been some inclination towards the medical profession in our family: my poor grandmother was well known in the village town for being able to turn a calf around when it was in the wrong position in the womb.
The Town
We moved to Szentendre in 1919. There were many boys who couldn’t find a job so they just hung around making trouble. They even stole things sometimes. My father told me that, as he headed home up our street in the evening – at that time there was no lighting in the street – the boys would stretch out a rope and hide, then laugh when somebody stumbled over it. But they liked my father, so when they saw him coming, they always shouted to him: “Watch out, Uncle László!” About sixty or seventy Jewish families lived In Szentendre with not too many children as a rule. Only the greengrocer Kohn had numerous children, but otherwise there were only one or two children in each family. Apart from the the Kohn’s, the Weisz family had six children. How did people live? In great poverty, with a crisis after the war leaving many people unemployed. Szentendre was a town of night-lodgers. Impoverished people moved out there but left town as soon as they could find a job. There were still some locals, the Grenédels, for example in our street, Swabians. We lived in their house originally. They were really nice folks. I suppose they came back from the States with some money, so they bought a house. They had a little apartment in it for themselves and there were two others, furnished, to rent out. We lived in one of them. The man had a small mill too, turned by a narrow stream flowing nearby. Moreover he was a blacksmith too, so they had several different ways to earn a living. He was also a bit of a drinker, so when he came home at night, he would awake us all and sing “Me and the moonlight …” His wife would always take me for walks. They didn’t have children and I was just a little girl. We lived there until I was four. I was told not to accept food from strangers, advice that had a lifelong impact. She had a nice vineyard. One day the grapes were laid out nicely in a room. She took me in secretly and made me eat a whole unwashed bunch. As a consequence I got such a case of gastroenteritis that it almost cost me my life. The poor woman really regretted it afterwards. The only photo that remained from my childhood was the one we gave as a present to that woman. When I came home from the deportations, I got it back from her relatives. The couple had died long ago and those relatives inherited the house. Another miller, by the name of Gyenge, lived in our street. Then there was Aunt Hoecker who grew vegetables. They had returned from the States as well. They bought a bit of land and tried to live on it. There was a man named Mr Wallner who owned the electrical works with his partner. At that time the company was still in private hands, and when the city bought it he received a lot of compensation, and bought all the plough-lands in the vicinity, planted them with fruit trees, and sold the fruit in Pest. He went bankrupt later. Then another couple from Budapest, the Fodors, settled down there. They brought money too, and furnished their house beautifully. They were employed at the dairy farm. My father told Mr. Fodor not to undertake anything here. He replied it was not advice he needed, but money. Within a year he went bankrupt too. That’s how it was during the depression.
Judaism
My parents lived in a very reserved way. My father was religious. When staying at home, he prayed in the morning, at noon and in the evening and also attended synagogue. We kept a kosher house. When my grandmother visited us that became particularly important. We even bought special dishes for Pesach. They brought me up in a religious way, but I’m not religious, although I still have the memories. There was a conference room in the school building, which I think is still there, though it is now a factory. In the front there was the cantor’s apartment, then the synagogue followed by the entrance to the school, the conference room and the caretaker’s apartment. Our cantor, Béla Stern had a wonderful voice. He got married when he came to the town. He and his wife had great difficulty having a child. We ended up in the same railroad car to Auschwitz together with the child and the cantor’s wife. The cantor himself came back and became the cantor of the synagogue in Pest. In the synagogue women had to stay in the balcony, while the men sat downstairs. I remember peeping in through the window to see my father sitting there. There may have been a long table in the conference room. The school was furnished in an old-fashioned way, with age-old desks covered with carvings of names and initials. There was an iron stove, some historical maps on the wall, a podium, and a small desk on the side. We sat there when we were tested or when we had to read. When the first-grade pupils were called upon, they had to read there. In the first grade we learned both the Roman alphabet as well as Hebrew. Besides the blackboard we had a calculating machine, so I guess everybody knows how to multiply even today – I mean the ones still alive. There are only few of us left. From my school, it’s Juci Vass, sister of Éva Vass, Lívia Perlusz, Robi Krausz living in the States, Ernő Fürst, and the Falk boy, who are still alive, but he attended a lower grade, not mine. I don’t know anybody else who is alive… Our teacher always explained to us what holiday we were having. We only had a celebration at Chanukkah. He assigned us prayers to practice at home. We celebrated all the holidays in my family, we had lovely Seders, and my father led them perfectly. After the war I once asked a relative to invite me for Seder, but other people celebrate it differently. We always invited a boy to join us on those evenings. He learned to walk late and walked with difficulty even at six or seven. He also had water on the brain. My father took to him very much, so he always celebrated Seder with us. He was killed as well. His name was Pista Perlusz, and came from a large family whose three brothers had a butcher’s shop on the main square. The fourth one became a dental technician. They had a sister as well; she was overweight. One of them was the mother of that Pista, who spent the holidays with us whenever he could. Kids from the boarding school went there for religious education too. They stayed on for the middle school years at the Protestant School. There were lots of Jewish high school students there, some twenty of them, staying at the boarding school. They would come over for religion classes. Although I grew up in a religious family, I never became religious myself. My husband was a very observant Protestant and was convinced that I was a real materialist. Even as a two-year-old I refused to believe in Santa Claus, and never believed that babies are brought by storks. I saw the cats getting fatter and fatter. My mother tried to hide them, but I followed them waiting for the kittens to be born. But I do respect religious people. My father was very religious and so was my husband. Before he died he was sitting in the armchair with a French and a Greek Bible in his lap: he was comparing the texts. When we got married, he tried to educate me: he gave me a book which I gave back to him without a word after reading one page. He was silent too. He realized this would not work out. My mother was born a Catholic and converted to Judaism. She kept the house kosher, learned the prayers, and even lit the candles on Friday evenings. But she didn’t want to get more involved in the religious way of life. Neither of my parents ever told me I should not do something because “You hurt God and he will punish you.” Nothing like that was ever said to me. It was only too obvious I should not lie, or hurt anyone’s feelings, or steal – that I ought to be honest.
Communities
The Jews and Non-Jews of Szentendre kept only a loose acquaintance. Our neighbour Pál Kovács was a counsel at the Foreign Ministry, and a retired doctor general lived next door. We had a nodding acquaintance and daily conversations by the fence. At Christmas time we went over to take a look at their tree. That was our relationship. At the beginning of the Fascist era though, our neighbour worked as a messenger. He was on duty to Prague, and when he returned he came over and told my father privately what he had learnt there. He heard that the Germans tried the gas on Czech partisans and also learned that when Germans arrested the wife of a Czech partisan, they cut her breast with a sword. That was what he told us. And he also said that the bombing of Kosice was just a cover. He told us a few things of this kind, yet this was still far from a real, heartfelt relationship. One day an army officer, a colonel perhaps, moved into our street. It was customary for the newcomers to pay a visit to the neighbours. When they learnt that we were Jewish they immediately doubled back. The odd thing is that when we were already in Auschwitz and my parents no longer alive, people of Jewish origin were gathered in Szentendre. They were staying in a cellar and that very same colonel’s wife was there as well. She turned out to be Jewish. There were several other people acting like aristocratic Christians who ultimately turned out to be Jewish. They could get acquainted there, in the cellar. I first perceived that the situation had changed when the yellow stars had to be put on. When I met a former classmate, he looked the other way. It had not been like that before, when we had greeted each other and spoken. There was no sign of anti-Semitism until the yellow star. For instance when the policeman heard what was going to happen, he came by and warned the Jews. He was a person of good will. Our school was attended by Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Orthodox pupils as well. They went elsewhere for religious instruction, each one to his own denomination. Our religion classes took place on Sunday morning so it didn’t disturb them. Apart from that, we were all equal.
Friendship
Juci Erdélyi was my friend in middle school, and then I had a good friend in high school, a girl from Nagyvárad named Trudi. I met her again in Auschwitz. After our arrival, a woman in the C-Lager gave me a glass of water. It turned out that she was from Várad too, and knew my friend who was also there in the C-Lager – she even told me which block. I soon went to that block and found my friend Trudi with her mother and her sister. Their block leader was also from Varad and she hated them and treated them badly too, because they had been very well-off back home. That was the last time I saw Trudi. I haven’t heard anything about her ever since. They owned one of the most beautiful houses in their town. There is a memorial plaque on it, but I still have no idea of what happened to the two girls. I am not very sociable, and had few friends. At school I got on well with everybody, but I did not really have any close friends.
Father
When I was a little girl and my father wanted to give something to a person, he always asked me whether he should do it or not. He did so to make me feel used to giving and I always told him he should. Likewise when he was typing something, he would call me over and ask my opinion about how to write something: he got me into the habit of thinking. We took walks together: he took me to Pest and showed me the statues. He was highly cultured. He knew a lot about when buildings had been built, and who the owners had been. For me, the greatest gifts in life were my father and my second husband. I couldn’t have received anything greater.
Patriotism
I got a serious patriotic education, not only at school but at home too. My father’s sister died because of Trianon: it was too much for her that part of the country had been taken away and she was supposed to stay there. In primary school, Mr.Tolnai taught us patriotic poems and songs. Actually the Hungarian poets made me come back home: Petőfi, Arany and Vörösmarty above all. I could have gone to the West. I knew that my parents had died and that difficult times were to come. The only thing I didn’t know was that I would not find anything at home.
Deportations
The Nuremberg Laws would have originally excluded my mother, but she was converted. After the anti-Jewish laws, my father’s niece invited us to go to Pest. My father decided to stay, saying that if others were suffering, we should suffer too. I agreed. The possibility of escaping wasn’t even brought up. It was the only conclusion: if others were taken away, we would leave with them too. My father commuted to Pest even after the anti-Jewish Laws. We did not see the situation so tragically. His boss offered him to get a false birth certificate. Dad could have chosen from three different religions. He, most naturally, did not even want to hear of that. Someone offered to hide our belongings but we did not accept that either. It happened on a day in April, after that certain March 19. It was a Sunday when somebody told us that the Germans had come in. For the time being, we carried on working; I worked in a war factory. We were sewing overalls, working clothes and hunting coats. The radio was on all the time. The situation was quite bearable until we were taken to the ghetto in Szentendre. For a while my father went to work from the ghetto too. The Jews in the ghetto tried to ignore what was going on. Jews from the country had already been deported by then and things were approaching Pest, but it was forbidden to talk about it, not even privately. It was still forbidden on the afternoon of July 29, when the gendarme came to take our census, but the three of us – Juci Erdélyi’s sister, István Perlusz and myself – , discussed things. We agreed that the census meant we were going to be deported very soon. Then I secretly collected some of my belongings in a little basket: the money I had earned in the war factory, a pair of scissors, and a sewing kit, but I kept quiet about it, even in the presence of my parents. After four o’clock the following day the gendarme came and told us that we had half an hour to pack. Everybody was in a fluster. It was Friday; we didn’t have anything to eat as it was just time for baking the bread and buying food for the weekend. We were taken. We had no idea about the destination. We were only allowed to walk by the wall. They threw us a loaf of bread. We got to Monor in wagons, where we had to lie down on the ground in the brick factory. It was July 30. The conditions were rough in Monor: the bare ground and the clayey water of the freshly dug wells. Next Friday, a week after having been deported, the gendarmes took us to the station. My grandmother was eighty-five years old, heavy, and broken from working hard; she could hardly walk. Then the gendarme went up to my father and told him to carry her on his back. All my father could say was: ‘how could I?’ The gendarme took his gun and hit my father on the chest. We arrived at the railway station of Monor, where we got into the cattle cars already there. The cattle car was always closed. It was dreadful. There were 97 of us inside on the way to Auschwitz. I had to crouch. Somehow everybody hunched up and the gendarmes didn’t leave the door open even a crack, but closed it tight. We could hardly breathe. In wartime they fit six horses or forty people in a cattle car; we were ninety-seven. There was one bucket; we had to pour the contents out through the small window of the car. One bucket for ninety-seven people: imagine how it was. We arrived in Kosice, where the Germans opened the door and a soldier entered. He said we should give him all the valuables we still had, as they would be seized anyway. My grandmother had a very old silver goblet with a Hebrew inscription. She gave away what she had kept so carefully up to then and what she had hoped to be able to return home with. Whoever had a pot or a dish got some kind of soup. We didn’t have one. I remember that I didn’t eat. We were actually happy when the Germans took us over, because the Hungarian Gendarmerie had been very cruel. The Germans left the door of the cattle car slightly open, so when we passed through the Carpathians we could smell the fresh air. We arrived in Auschwitz at dawn, with the very last transport. Although Horthy had already stopped the deportations, the authorities still continued them; we actually got to Auschwitz illegally. I only learned this later. We were deported on June 30 and arrived in Auschwitz on July 9 together with my parents and my grandmother. It was a Sunday, at dawn. We saw the lights and smelt the smoke. The train stopped. We heard people speaking Italian. The prisoners next to the train in striped clothes were Italians. We later learned they were members of the so- called Sonderkommando. They worked for a while around the deportees and the gas chambers. For the meantime, they were well-fed, but after a few months they were executed as well. They worked there fully aware of what awaited them. We got out of the cattle car. They did not help my grandmother get off. I don’t know what happened to her. I only know that my friend’s grandmother, who was also heavy, was simply thrown off the car. Not lifted, but thrown. The men were separated. We said goodbye to my father. We were going with my mother. She was on my arm. Then Mengele said: “You’ll see each other anyway in the afternoon.” Then my mother went left, I went right and I didn’t look back. I didn’t look back. We got into the disinfecting room. We received a shirt and a dress. I received a white print dress with Hungarian motifs. We were sheared and left for the lager. I was taken to the C-Lager. It read: ”Arbeit macht frei” over the gate. We entered the block; mine was number three, with a few others from Szentendre. There were plank beds three-high. One of them had collapsed. I had to sleep on that one on the first night as there was no place on the regular plank beds. The rain had dripped in and the plank was damp. That is how my first night was. Later I got a place on a normal plank bed. When someone wanted to turn round, she had to warn the others, because we could only all turn together. We lay with our clothes and shoes on. We got up at dawn, around four o’clock, which was when roll-call began. This lager had thirty blocks; there were a thousand people in ours, and perhaps not so many less in the rest. We stood in rows of five, at a certain distance from each other. Then came a German who counted and checked us. We had to stand motionless until he went past all the thirty blocks. We got something to eat after that, but in any case we had to go back to our plank beds. We were not really allowed to walk about; we could go to the toilet only if taken in groups. Lying on the plank beds, we were so tired that we usually just fell asleep. Then it was time to distribute the food: they dispensed in pots. It was something that was supposed to be soup, with no spoon. Three or four of us had to share a pot. We simply had to drink the contents. If we found a piece of potato, we had to take it out with our hands. We hardly had any chance to wash. For six weeks we could not eat the food there. We were warned to eat the bread and the Zulage, the margarine or the marmalade, even if we refused to eat the main course. They said we would be so hungry then that we would be willing to lick the food off the ground. And indeed that is what happened . The food contained some potatoes, as well as nettles, pumpkin seeds and pieces of charcoal. After six weeks we did eat it. You were so hungry after six weeks. After a time some of us were taken to B3, the extension of the C-Lager, which was a so-called extermination camp. There were no plank beds there. This lager contained the hospital where women gave birth, newborns were killed and the mothers sent to the gas chambers. Morning coffee was never brought here. One morning I heard someone shouting that we should go and fetch coffee. I volunteered to help carry the pot. In the kitchen we did get some pots of coffee, but as soon as we entered the lager, the order came to pour it all out. At that moment I realized the reason why we never received anything to drink. I still keep telling my family that whoever hasn’t been to Auschwitz can never really appreciate what a glass of water means. In October we got back to the C-Lager. My friends and I had the third plank bed. The five of us really stuck together: besides me, there were the two other girls from Szentendre, Vera and Bözsi, a girl from Budakalász, and one from Pesterzsébet. Three of us are still alive. Vera is in Israel, and Bözsi lives in Pest. Often we heard voices shouting: “Transport, transport!” One day we decided to join. There was another line of five people standing behind us. They would always stand nearby at roll-call too. This time they took two-hundred people, and we were the very last five in that transport. The five women from Erzsébet didn’t make it into that transport. When I returned home I learned that not one of them came back. If they had joined us, they could have come back too. We were taken to Kratzau, somewhere in Sudetenland. The fresh air and the plants delighted us immediately there. We got into our lager, in a two-storey building with an attic. There were two hundred Hungarians, two hundred Poles, two hundred French and a few Dutch people in the lager. It struck us straight away that we got an iron soup- plate, a spoon, and turnip soup, which seemed to be delicious then. The next day we started working in the factory. Those who knew German were sent to work at a machine, and that’s how I got to the machine room too. We worked twelve hours a day, from six o’clock in the morning until six o’clock in the evening with a half-hour break, or from six in the evening until six in the morning with the same break. We produced hand grenade fittings in the factory. We had some nice foremen, and some others who treated us badly. I had a German one called Maxwell who hated Jews and he made me work even when I was already very ill. What is more, he made me dismantle the machine during the lunch-break. His was so cruel that even the German female Kapo went up to him telling him to leave me alone. When my shoes ripped off, I went up to our chief, the Unterschaftführer, an old man who had been the caretaker of the city cemetery. I asked for another pair of shoes. “You were born barefoot and you will die that way too!”, was his answer. I had no shoes. It was winter then, snowy and muddy, so I tied the torn soles onto my feet with a rag. It was no use of course, and the rag soon ripped off too. Meanwhile, oil spots appeared on my toe. There was oil circulating in the machine, and dripping from it. I had no chance to wash or treat it and all of a sudden I noticed an abscess on my leg. Nevertheless, I kept working in the factory until one day I could not even walk any more. Two people supported me. One of my friends took me to the sick-room, where the woman doctor cut up the abscess. The pus was just squirting. I had to stay in the Revier. I got washed, which made me feel very good. They laid me on a normal plank bed, with a blanket under me. I lay there with high temperature, but was afraid of recovering still being too weak to work. I had a very high fever. The Jewish woman doctor (she deserves to be named: doctor Klimkó) diagnosed pneumonia. I got a plank bed on my own – up to that time I had to share one – and they began to treat me. They had a strong medicine from Switzerland, I had to take that twelve times a day. I was unable to eat while taking those tablets. There was a chief inspector, the wife of the local baker, who visited the Revier regularly. A Dutch girl was lying on one of the plank beds. She was so frightened of this woman that when she entered, she immediately started screaming and jumped onto the head of the bed. The woman knew how much the girl feared her so she told her repeatedly “You are ready for the chimney!” Of course the girl was even more terrified of her then. There were three pregnant women in the lager: a Hungarian, a Pole and a Greek. The above-mentioned chief inspectress spoke to them. She tried to persuade them to give premature birth, in which case they could go back to work on the next day. Otherwise they would have been taken to the gas chambers. The Hungarian and the Polish woman gave in; but the Greek woman said that she wanted to keep her child. The premature birth was conducted on the Hungarian and Polish women and the two little babies were placed on a table in the middle of the Revier. The tables were covered with a blanket but the babies were naked. The German woman, the inspector, watched them, listened to their heart through a stethoscope to observe how long they would survive. When the babies were still alive the next day, she commanded them to be killed. The doctor protested: her oath forbade her to kill children. There was a Dutch woman who finally undertook to kill the two babies by injection. The two women went on working in the factory while the Greek woman was taken away from our lager. We got to know after the liberation that she had been transported to Zittau, where she gave birth under normal conditions and both she and the baby returned to France. In the bed next to mine was a Polish girl named Henrietta Bornstein. She arrived in the ghetto in 1939 and it was now 1945. She had lost her mother. She had been in ghettos and lagers for seven years. Her body was swollen . We became very close friends, I told her about Szentendre, about our house and garden. For her that all was like a fairy tale, because she had lost her home at the age of nine. Her mother had taught her how to knit stockings, which turned out to be very useful as she knitted stockings for German women, for which she got a plateful of potatoes or a bowl of soup. When the Germans realized that the war was about to end, they became very angry. We were blamed for everything. But there were nice people too. Some girls volunteered to check our work. The daughter of an SS officer worked at our department. When the shoes of a friend of mine were torn, that girl brought her own father’s shoes to her. I was liberated by the Soviet Army on the 9th of May.
The family photos were sent back from the USA after 1945. Having returned home from the deportation Magda Laszlo found noone of her beloved ones and nothing of her belongings. Her relatives in America sent her back the photos her mother had sent them before the war.
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