Selected text
The thing that is most touching is that my mother, who had been in a work camp in Austria, had also been brought to Theresienstadt, and she was working as a volunteer nurse (even though she did not know anything about medicine).
She wore a band which allowed her to move between the quarantined buildings. One day, a few days after we were liberated, she came across a woman. She old my mother that she remembered her when she was still a child, and she said her that her daughter and parents were there. My mother was shocked.
She found us and she immediately took me and somehow smuggled me into her barracks because they were a bit better equipped, there were medicines and better food. I contracted pneumonia and immediately I received American penicillin. Problems concerning the transport home arose, because the majority of people in Austria were from Hungary or Vojvodina. We received a specific time period when we had to start home, but grandmother and grandfather had to go to Szentes and mother and I to Novi Sad. Since all the tracks were bombed we traveled five or six hours and then we transferred to another track. In general the whole trip, which today would take 18 hours at the very most, took us three weeks. On the journey we contracted lice and scabs and toward the end we traveled by horse drawn wagons, but this time, we were no longer sealed off, we received water to drink and food to eat, and we could go to the WC, to get out when the train stopped.
We were allotted a small place to stay in the car, as was everyone, and our place was near the door. Since my pneumonia still had not passed, my grandfather laid against the door to protect me since I was fragile. When I woke up I wanted to wake my grandfather but I saw that he was dead. This is something that very seriously influenced me.
There, in Galanta where the Jewish community was already formed, they took grandfather off the train and buried him according to the Jewish customs. Afterwards grandmother went to visit his grave.
We continued the trip. When we came again to the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary my grandmother got off at Szentes thinking that she would find her house and all the things that we hid in it, but as I said before she found it burned, so that she was alone, homeless and broke in Hungary. We went to Budapest with that transport before we went to Novi Sad. In Budapest aunt Irma Hacker, from my father's side of the family, lived and she still had her apartment and all her things, because she was not deported. She fed us, dressed us, we were literally infested with lice and scabs, she brought us back to order.
She wore a band which allowed her to move between the quarantined buildings. One day, a few days after we were liberated, she came across a woman. She old my mother that she remembered her when she was still a child, and she said her that her daughter and parents were there. My mother was shocked.
She found us and she immediately took me and somehow smuggled me into her barracks because they were a bit better equipped, there were medicines and better food. I contracted pneumonia and immediately I received American penicillin. Problems concerning the transport home arose, because the majority of people in Austria were from Hungary or Vojvodina. We received a specific time period when we had to start home, but grandmother and grandfather had to go to Szentes and mother and I to Novi Sad. Since all the tracks were bombed we traveled five or six hours and then we transferred to another track. In general the whole trip, which today would take 18 hours at the very most, took us three weeks. On the journey we contracted lice and scabs and toward the end we traveled by horse drawn wagons, but this time, we were no longer sealed off, we received water to drink and food to eat, and we could go to the WC, to get out when the train stopped.
We were allotted a small place to stay in the car, as was everyone, and our place was near the door. Since my pneumonia still had not passed, my grandfather laid against the door to protect me since I was fragile. When I woke up I wanted to wake my grandfather but I saw that he was dead. This is something that very seriously influenced me.
There, in Galanta where the Jewish community was already formed, they took grandfather off the train and buried him according to the Jewish customs. Afterwards grandmother went to visit his grave.
We continued the trip. When we came again to the border between Yugoslavia and Hungary my grandmother got off at Szentes thinking that she would find her house and all the things that we hid in it, but as I said before she found it burned, so that she was alone, homeless and broke in Hungary. We went to Budapest with that transport before we went to Novi Sad. In Budapest aunt Irma Hacker, from my father's side of the family, lived and she still had her apartment and all her things, because she was not deported. She fed us, dressed us, we were literally infested with lice and scabs, she brought us back to order.
Location
Serbia
Interview
Suzana Petrovic