Tag #115863 - Interview #78642 (Ferenc Leicht)

My father was last a forced laborer at the Veszprem Railroad Building Company, and he didn’t build railway but he baked bread. He escaped relatively well. He couldn’t work in a bakery at the Tattersal for the first time, and he didn’t work in the ghetto either. Otherwise he was a ghetto policeman [see Budapest ghetto][12], who patrolled during the night so that they wouldn’t wander about, he watched the order in the ghetto, more or less, so that the Jews wouldn’t take others’ things, and if someone got ill or fell to the ground, he picked them up so that they wouldn’t freeze. He was in the ghetto from the 25th December until the 18th January. During that time he lived with his sister Frida, whose husband was also a forced laborer, he died. And her son, Miklos, who is my only cousin from the paternal side who survived, also lived there. None from the maternal side survived. Then my father moved to our Christian relative on Visegrad Street, to whom I also went. So he was among relatively human conditions, because the forced laborer bakers didn’t only bake for the forced laborer units, but for the Hungarian army, too. They baked enormous amounts of bread, night and day in shifts, and they mobilized all the bakers.  The butchers, too. And because of this he never starved of course, to his luck. Except in the ghetto, where he didn’t have to bake anything anymore, he just tried to endure.