Tag #135343 - Interview #101499 (Gotterer Borbala Piroska )

It was in the spring of 1944, in May, on May 3rd, in the evening. This friend of my brother’s came during the night, it was after 10, and showed us a paper which summoned him to the city hall: he had to be at 5 o’clock at the city hall with the horses because he had to take part in the transportation of Jews. And he came to tell us that if we wanted to, he would take us over the border, he knew the roads very well, and he would take us to Romania. He asked us if we had anybody in Romania to go to, if not, he would take us to his relatives. He was an extremely good man. Can you imagine that he risked his life with this, but my father said: ‘I don’t want to risk your life because you are a young and decent man and heaven forbid something should happen to you, and I don’t want to risk my family’s life either, because if we are caught there, we will be executed o the spot. ’ Whoever was caught at the border was shot. We didn’t go and we lost the opportunity and it was a wrong choice to make, because it would have been better for us to go: we could have gone to Romania, there were Jewish institutions there and maybe they would have helped us. We had relatives in Timisoara, but they too had been evicted from their home by the legionaries [13]. So we stayed home.