Tag #138221 - Interview #77963 (laszlo nussbaum)

Many things became naturally to us step by step, because we couldn't defend ourselves. This is the process of thinning out an ethnic group. They trained us through many years to stand the blows. The highest point of this was the confinement to the ghettos. It's very important that the confinement wasn't enforced by Germans but strictly by the Hungarian administration. At that time there were only a few hundred SS soldiers in the whole of Hungary. The administration was unbelievably exact: who lived in which house, who was a Jew and who was not. There were exceptions, for example, if somebody had a Christian wife. It happened that they came in searching only for the Jewish member of the family, and took him away.

The ghetto was actually on the grounds of the brick factory in Kolozsvar. Every brick factory has big depots where they put the bricks. These are many hundreds of meters long, roofed but open on the lower part for the wind to blow through and dry the new bricks. They put us in those parts without walls, in the ghetto of Kolozsvar. Separation was just that we starched out bed-sheets; it couldn't be any more, that was all there was between us.