Tag #133112 - Interview #78115 (Magda Frkalova)

After being jailed at the Gestapo in Bratislava, my mother, my brother Imrich and I were transported to Sered [9]. That was 15th October; we'd been in jail for two days. At the time my brother was only 15. He was still this half-child. We were in the Sered camp for only two days, because the transports were constantly departing from there. So they sent all three of us to Auschwitz. But there they didn't accept us. They loaded us into cattle wagons again and sent us to Berlin. In Berlin they separated us. The men and women were separated. That's the last time in my life that I saw my brother Imrich. It was horrible.

We were in the wagons like that for eight days. The conditions were horrible. Many of our fellow sufferers already went insane on the way there. Older people were already dying during the trip. Some people threw us bread as the train passed by. At the border, when the train was standing still, they stuck a piece of bread through these little windows, and that's all we had to eat. From Berlin they transported us by train to the Ravensbrück concentration camp [10]. There our suffering continued. It was a concentration camp, where they also cremated. Every night the chimneys there were burning. Dead bodies were being burned in ovens, and there was a terribly sweet smell. Once, a transport from Hungary arrived. People arrived on that train in desolate shape, barefoot, and right away they sent them to their deaths.