Selected text
My youngest sister, Sarika, was a delicate creature. She married Eugen’s brother, Maximilian Schön. We called Maximilian Mishi. I still remember their wedding. The dance for the young people that came to the wedding took place in a pub in Inacovce. Pubs in these small villages served as social gathering places, cultural centers of sorts. The day of their wedding, there was a lot of mud in the village, and so that the wedding guests wouldn’t get dirty, they hired some gypsies. Their task was to carry the young people on their backs to the pub, for which they got paid. This was because at Jewish weddings, young Jewish people that knew the bride and groom also participated.
My brother-in-law Mishi, a healthy, strong fellow, a vulcanizer by trade, got into the ‘Sonderkommando’ in Auschwitz, which means that he carried the dead from the gas chambers to the crematoria and put them onto the grates. One day he got my oldest sister, his sister-in-law, Malvinka, to cart over. Then he had to cart over his dead brother, Eugen. One day he got his own wife, Sarika, to take over. That finished him off, as two people told me independently of each other. The ‘Sonderkommando’ were preparing to bring in explosives and blow up the crematorium sky-high. But one fellow prisoner, a Pole, betrayed them. The Germans burned that Pole alive. They said that anyone who betrays his own will betray them as well. On the basis of the Pole’s testimony they then hung my brother-in-law and the others.
My brother-in-law Mishi, a healthy, strong fellow, a vulcanizer by trade, got into the ‘Sonderkommando’ in Auschwitz, which means that he carried the dead from the gas chambers to the crematoria and put them onto the grates. One day he got my oldest sister, his sister-in-law, Malvinka, to cart over. Then he had to cart over his dead brother, Eugen. One day he got his own wife, Sarika, to take over. That finished him off, as two people told me independently of each other. The ‘Sonderkommando’ were preparing to bring in explosives and blow up the crematorium sky-high. But one fellow prisoner, a Pole, betrayed them. The Germans burned that Pole alive. They said that anyone who betrays his own will betray them as well. On the basis of the Pole’s testimony they then hung my brother-in-law and the others.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Bernard Knezo Schönbrun