Tag #133854 - Interview #78150 (Magda Fazekas)

So the way it happened was that they gathered us. They came into each house and told us: pack up and let's go. We had nowhere to escape. Those who were wealthy, the great manufacturers, the millionaires, bought their freedom. We were gathered in the riding-hall of Kaposvar. In other towns they gathered them in brick factories, but in Kaposvar we were gathered in the riding-hall. It was large, but one couldn't think of escaping from there. A mother saved two girls from there, because their father was Jewish, and she was Christian. We lived in the same yard with them. The father of the girls was either dead, or doing work service. I don't know how their mother arranged for them that they let out these little girls from there, where we were already gathered. But after they gathered us, one had no chance to escape at all.

While we were in the ghetto, it occurred that people were tortured - but we weren't among the tormented - in order to make them tell where they had put their jewels. Not the gendarmes tormented them, but there were persons fit for this, for not everybody could do this. These were bouncers; they were trained for torturing people. There were gentle people too among the gendarmes.