Tag #140637 - Interview #78529 (J.D.)

Once during the war, two people came out of the house and approached me. They whispered something to a gun-toting Arrow Cross [Arrow Cross Party] [9], who was making a raid on the street. This happened on January 8, 1945 at about ten in the morning. They came straight over to me, that I’m surely a Jew, and what am I doing there. I begged their pardon. I said, I’m not a Jewish, and I took out my papers, which said I was Jeno Dioszegi, born in Debrecen. I’d bought the papers from an acquaintence for a fortune, who mostly sold them to Slovak Jewish refugees. The identification was in order with all the official stamps. They didn’t accept it anyway, and took me away by car. I was forced to obey the two men armed with machine pistols. They shoved me in the cellar, and interrogated me until five in the evening. I said that I was a Protestant, and a soldier. I had a fake letter that said I came out of the hospital from the military. We came up out of the cellar at exactly five in the evening, five or six of us, so we could go to the toilet, for the first time since the morning. When they took us up, we went through a dark basement space, where I slipped into a really hidden corner.