In 1960 I left the United Lamp Factory because I earned very little money, about 1250-1300 forint. In 1960 this wasn’t much at all. There was an opening for an overseer with a salary of 1600 forint per month, which I applied for, since I was a technician already at that time, but they told me that the 1600 forint jobs were not kept for me. I went to the Beloiannisz Factory [Beloiannisz Telecommunication Factory], I introduced myself, showed them what I had, that I had worked for 10 years at the Lamp Factory. And that I was looking for a job. They said that I couldn’t handle the telephone exchange, but they would employ me to the technical inspection department as a so-called foreign goods inspector. My task was to control the parts and goods bought from other companies according to certain parameters to see if they met the Hungarian and international standards, and if they met the conditions stated in the contract between my company and the seller. There I started at a commencing salary of 1600 forint.
- Tradíciók 11756
- Beszélt nyelv 3019
- Identitás 7808
- A település leírása 2440
- Oktatás, iskola 8506
- Gazdaság 8772
- Munka 11672
- Szerelem & romantika 4929
- Szabadidő/társadalmi élet 4159
- Antiszemitizmus 4822
-
Főbb események (politikai és történelmi)
4256
- örmény népirtás 2
- Doctor's Plot (1953) 178
- Soviet invasion of Poland 31
- Siege of Leningrad 86
- The Six Day War 4
- Yom Kippur War 2
- Atatürk halála 5
- Balkán háborúk (1912-1913) 35
- Első szovjet-finn háború 37
- Csehszlovákia megszállása 1938 83
- Franciaország lerohanása 9
- Molotov-Ribbentrop paktum 65
- Varlik Vergisi (vagyonadó) 36
- Első világháború (1914-1918) 216
- Spanyolnátha (1918-1920) 14
- Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920) 4
- Nagy gazdasági világválság (1929-1933) 20
- Hitler hatalmon (1933) 127
- 151 Kórház 1
- Thesszaloniki tűzvész (1917) 9
- Görög polgárháború (1946-49) 12
- Thesszaloniki Nemzetközi Vásár 5
- Bukovina Romániához csatolása (1918) 7
- Észak-Bukovina csatolása a Szovjetunióhoz (1940) 19
- Lengyelország német megszállása (1939) 94
- Kisinyevi pogrom (1903) 7
- Besszarábia romániai annexiója (1918) 25
- A magyar uralom visszatérése Erdélybe (1940-1944) 43
- Besszarábia szovjet megszállása (1940) 59
- Második bécsi diktátum 27
- Észt függetlenségi háború 3
- Varsói felkelés 2
- A balti államok szovjet megszállása (1940) 147
- Osztrák lovagi háború (1934) 9
- Anschluss (1938) 71
- A Habsburg birodalom összeomlása 3
- Dollfuß-rendszer 3
- Kivándorlás Bécsbe a második világháború előtt 36
- Kolkhoz 131
- KuK - Königlich und Kaiserlich 40
- Bányászjárás 1
- A háború utáni szövetséges megszállás 7
- Waldheim ügy 5
- Trianoni békeszerződés 12
- NEP 56
- Orosz forradalom 351
- Ukrán éhínség (Holodomor) 199
- A Nagy tisztogatás 283
- Peresztrojka 233
- 1941. június 22. 468
- Molotov rádióbeszéde 115
- Győzelem napja 147
- Sztálin halála 365
- Hruscsov beszéde a 20. kongresszuson 148
- KGB 62
- NKVD 153
- Magyarország német megszállása (1944. március 18-19.) 45
- Józef Pilsudski (1935-ig) 33
- 1956-os forradalom 84
- Prágai Tavasz (1968) 73
- 1989-es rendszerváltás 174
- Gomulka kampány (1968) 81
-
Holokauszt
9685
- Holokauszt (általánosságban) 2789
- Koncentrációs tábor / munkatábor 1235
- Tömeges lövöldözési műveletek 337
- Gettó 1183
- Halál / megsemmisítő tábor 647
- Deportálás 1063
- Kényszermunka 791
- Repülés 1410
- Rejtőzködés 594
- Ellenállás 121
- 1941-es evakuálások 866
- Novemberpogrom / Kristályéjszaka 34
- Eleutherias tér 10
- Kasztner csoport 1
- Jászvásári pogrom és a halálvonat 21
- Sammelwohnungen 9
- Strohmann rendszer 11
- Struma hajó 17
- Élet a megszállás alatt 803
- Csillagos ház 72
- Védett ház 15
- Nyilaskeresztesek ("nyilasok") 42
- Dunába lőtt zsidók 6
- Kindertranszport 26
- Schutzpass / hamis papírok 95
- Varsói gettófelkelés (1943) 24
- Varsói felkelés (1944) 23
- Segítők 521
- Igazságos nemzsidók 269
- Hazatérés 1090
- Holokauszt-kárpótlás 112
- Visszatérítés 109
- Vagyon (vagyonvesztés) 595
- Szerettek elvesztése 1724
- Trauma 1029
- Beszélgetés a történtekről 1807
- Felszabadulás 558
- Katonaság 3322
- Politika 2640
-
Kommunizmus
4468
- Élet a Szovjetunióban/kommunizmus alatt (általánosságban) 2592
- Antikommunista ellenállás általában 63
- Államosítás a kommunizmus alatt 221
- Illegális kommunista mozgalmak 98
- Szisztematikus rombolások a kommunizmus alatt 45
- Kommunista ünnepek 311
- A kommunista uralommal kapcsolatos érzések 930
- Kollektivizáció 94
- Az állami rendőrséggel kapcsolatos tapasztalatok 349
- Börtön/kényszermunka a kommunista/szocialista uralom alatt 449
- Az emberi és állampolgári jogok hiánya vagy megsértése 483
- Élet a rendszerváltás után (1989) 493
- Izrael / Palesztina 2190
- Cionizmus 847
- Zsidó szervezetek 1200
Displaying 22831 - 22860 of 50826 results
Ferenc Leicht
![](/themes/custom/centro/flags/hu.svg)
At that time I enrolled to the university, because I had graduated the technical school and I wanted to continue my studies. For half a year, while I went to the university, my wife had to take care of the child and of me, because I went to the university after work, and I didn’t have time to cook, to do the shopping or anything. I expected my wife to serve me lunch at half past 2 because university started at 4. In half a year my wife lost 9 kilograms, and despite the fact that I was good at mathematics they kicked me out, because I didn’t remember some high school material because I was too nervous. I quit the university and also because I didn’t want my wife to lose more weight than the 9 kilograms, because she wasn’t that big anyway.
She went to work at a Vasedeny store as shop assistant, thanks to my mother.
There were all old women in the shop, my wife had to climb up and down the shelves, pack down the delivered goods. They made her work terribly much.
There were all old women in the shop, my wife had to climb up and down the shelves, pack down the delivered goods. They made her work terribly much.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
So when they left we moved here, but at that time there was an ordinance that 2 persons were allowed live in a one-bedroom apartment at the most, and this was a two and a half bedroom apartment. Then I talked with my parents on the phone and asked that at least one of them should come to Pest. Both of them came, because my mother and my father were party members, my mother was also a lay judge and they had a lot of hen thieves and others imprisoned. And those vowed vengeance against her, that if they came out of the prison they would slay my mother or do I don’t know what to her. And really, in 1956 the criminals were also released from prison. My mother was frightened and they left the apartment in Nagykanizsa together with my father and came to live with us. So there was enough of us in the apartment. They allocated it to us, we got the paper on my wife’s birthday, on the 22nd February 1957. My parents lived here until their death, until my mother’s death I mean, which happened in 1970. My father died in 1974, but he lived with us until 1972 because he remarried.
Not long after my parents had come here with two truckloads of furniture, and a piano, which they brought for someone as a favor and it stood in the middle of the room, and we didn’t have enough room to move because of it until it was taken, both my mother and my father got a job. My father was 52 years old, my mother was 51. They couldn’t be bakers anymore because the doctor had forbidden it, but my father went to work at the Chinoin [Factory of Medicines and Chemical Products], as a warehouseman, and my mother went to the Vasedeny [hardware store chain] as a inventory maker, because its chief accountant was the second husband of my father’s sister. My parents were physically extremely strong, my father knocked me down so at the age of 56, when I was 32 that I thought the floor would break in. And my mother was very good at counting, but she only knew the four sums. At that time there wasn’t a calculator to make the inventory, so what they did was that they looked at how much an item costs and how many items were left and multiplied the number of items with the price. If they took an inventory in one of the shops there was an entire group of inventory makers, my mother among them, who was by far the best. She added up four digit numbers amazingly fast, and later when the Holerit, the punchcard computer was introduced they kept her in her job for another year so that she could check if the Holerit functioned well. She usually finished before the Holerit. She could have become a mathematician if she had studied it. Otherwise they were fine here. Juliska and Olga [Editor’s note: The sisters of Ferenc Leicht’s father.] still lived at that time, and they used to get together. Budapest was full with people from Nagykanizsa whom they knew. They went to play cards, and people came to play cards at our house. So they had a good time. Only my mother was already ill at that time. We had to take her to the hospital for a control every 2-3 years. She had organic heart trouble and she had a lot of illnesses, aortic stenosis and other things. But if she was healthy she was the most pleasant person in the world.
Not long after my parents had come here with two truckloads of furniture, and a piano, which they brought for someone as a favor and it stood in the middle of the room, and we didn’t have enough room to move because of it until it was taken, both my mother and my father got a job. My father was 52 years old, my mother was 51. They couldn’t be bakers anymore because the doctor had forbidden it, but my father went to work at the Chinoin [Factory of Medicines and Chemical Products], as a warehouseman, and my mother went to the Vasedeny [hardware store chain] as a inventory maker, because its chief accountant was the second husband of my father’s sister. My parents were physically extremely strong, my father knocked me down so at the age of 56, when I was 32 that I thought the floor would break in. And my mother was very good at counting, but she only knew the four sums. At that time there wasn’t a calculator to make the inventory, so what they did was that they looked at how much an item costs and how many items were left and multiplied the number of items with the price. If they took an inventory in one of the shops there was an entire group of inventory makers, my mother among them, who was by far the best. She added up four digit numbers amazingly fast, and later when the Holerit, the punchcard computer was introduced they kept her in her job for another year so that she could check if the Holerit functioned well. She usually finished before the Holerit. She could have become a mathematician if she had studied it. Otherwise they were fine here. Juliska and Olga [Editor’s note: The sisters of Ferenc Leicht’s father.] still lived at that time, and they used to get together. Budapest was full with people from Nagykanizsa whom they knew. They went to play cards, and people came to play cards at our house. So they had a good time. Only my mother was already ill at that time. We had to take her to the hospital for a control every 2-3 years. She had organic heart trouble and she had a lot of illnesses, aortic stenosis and other things. But if she was healthy she was the most pleasant person in the world.
We got married on the 13th and on the 23rd they started shooting [see 1956][15]. I didn’t feel like getting involved at all. Everyone knew that I had been an Israeli soldier, that I had been a Hungarian soldier. I was 27 years old and well trained, I must say. I played all the instruments from the anti-aircraft gun onwards to everything. And when the civic guard was formed in the Lamp Factory they came and brought me the machine gun and the submachine gun and what not, asking me to go with them. I apologized and said that I had gotten married 10 days earlier and I wouldn’t leave my wife. And I didn’t go. But the son of the family where I lived came home from Taszar on foot. They said, ’we are sorry Ferike, vis maior, move out. At that time fights had already been going on in Ujpest, too, and everyone lived in the cellar.
In the meantime, on the 25th October when the fights hadn’t started in Ujpest yet, we were all at the United Lamp Factory and when we finished work my boss and the party secretary called me in and said: ‘Look, Feri, you are a trained soldier. Here is this engineer called Lali E., who is a very smart man, a genius and we need him, he wants to go home to his parents, opposite to the Houses of Parliament, on Alkotmany Street. In that district there are a lot of fights, try to escort him home safely.’ Then we set off with Lali on foot and I was his guide, his mentor. What I did was, that acquaintances of mine lived in different places. From Ujpest I phoned one of my acquaintances who lived on the corner of Dozsa Gyorgy Street and asked what the situation was there. He said nothing, we could go safely. Then we went up to his place. From there I called my acquaintance on Marx Square. He said that there were heavy fighting from the Danube until there, but after Szondi Street there weren’t. Then we didn’t go there, but took the backway to Szondi Street, we looked round, it was relatively calm there. Then we walked on the boulevard, it was calm in that part. Because that certain demonstration, on which ten of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated on the 25th in front of the Parliament, was at that time. In the end I took Lali home, then I set off to go back to Ujpest. In the meantime there was a lot of shouting at my back, a Soviet combat car came from Kossuth Square to Alkotmany Street. When I said to myself that I wasn’t going to wait for this, and I ran in to the Unitarian church on Marko Street. There 2 young men surrounded me at once and asked me who I was. They made me sit among the others, there were already X plus N armless men there, who were waiting for the Russians to move along. And when they continued on their way they let us out. Then I went back to Kossuth Square to see what the news was there. The demonstration had ended already, it was something terrible, it turned my stomach, though I had seen a couple things in the war. But this was too much for me, too.
My mother-in-law, my father-in-law and my wife lived in the big yellow house called Mefter-house at the corner of Arpad Street. They lived in the apartment overlooking the square, from where one could see the Northern Railway Bridge, where the combat cars fired a lot. Everyone had moved to the cellar. I also went to the cellar where everyone from the approximately 20 apartments of the house was, on mattresses and everything put down along the wall. There wasn’t any more room, only in the middle, we put clothes on the ground with my wife, we lived together for the first time there in that cellar. One day a Russian combat car came in front of the house and started to fire at it. I counted 19 hits. And one blew away the main water-meter next to the apartment of the caretaker, and the water started pouring into the cellar where the people lived. There was a tap outside which had to be turned off, but the combat car was standing there. Then the caretaker and I stuck out our nose waving big white sheets, a grouchy Russian came there and pointed to the roof that someone had shot from there and one of their officers died. I told him that everyone was in the cellar. He insisted, but he let us turn off the main tap and then we went back. But they shot at everything that moved. I went up to cook in the apartment of my mother-in-law on the first floor. But they didn’t dare to come out, they were in the cellar night and day. And I cooked out of what they had at home. But my mother-in-law was a negligent housewife, they barely had anything. Carrots and apples. I made carrot sauce, simmered the meat well, baked it in the oven and took it downstairs with the carrot sauce. My father-in-law said that he had never eaten anything that delicious. We were down there for about 3 weeks, and I cooked throughout. The braver ones from among the others also went upstairs to cook. This house had back exits, too, and when the geese for export were taken to the Ujpest market so that they wouldn’t go bad, because they couldn’t export anything, there was no train traffic either, one could buy a whole geese, I went and bought one, too. One could buy bread and geese. On the 4th November at dawn the radio said that everyone should go to work. By that time the Soviet tanks were in Ujpest and they lumbered and shouted everywhere. I said that as I saw we wouldn’t set off for work.
Once the fights stopped for a while, then I went immediately to the United lamp Factory and the first engineer, Vaszily was very frightened and didn’t know what to do. I told him ‘Comrade first engineer, in my opinion you should first have all the depots locked, because they will take away all the goods’. We locked everything and the United Lamp Factory wanted me to be part of the armed guard. At the first gunshot the guard changed sides. Weapons remained, but no guard. I apologized and said that I wouldn’t spring to arms. The situation was chaotic for a long time, because the demonstration was about to end, but the United Lamp Factory kept demonstrating and the revolutionary committee of the factory didn’t let the work be started until the members of the AVO [see AVH][16] and the Russians broke in by force, they took the committee, then work started.
At the time when they were still shooting, on the 5th or 6th November, our relative, Istvan Mate Lusztig, who had lived in this apartment, he was the husband of one of my mother’s sisters who was killed, called me on the phone and asked me to visit him. We appreciated our very few relatives so much that after the blood-relation who linked us died, we still kept in touch as relatives and still loved each other. He married a widow in Nagykanizsa and in 1947 they came to live in Pest, because an uncle of the wife, a reputed lawyer died here. And when I came here, Istvan Mate Lusztig put a rental contract in front of me in which it was written that I had been living there for 3 months, and that my wife was also going to move there, and wanted me to sign it. I asked why. He said because they were going to go abroad [Editor’s note: In the weeks after the 1956 revolution about 200000 people left the country, defected.] So when they left we moved here, but at that time there was an ordinance that 2 persons were allowed live in a one-bedroom apartment at the most, and this was a two and a half bedroom apartment. Then I talked with my parents on the phone and asked that at least one of them should come to Pest. Both of them came, because my mother and my father were party members, my mother was also a lay judge and they had a lot of hen thieves and others imprisoned. And those vowed vengeance against her, that if they came out of the prison they would slay my mother or do I don’t know what to her. And really, in 1956 the criminals were also released from prison. My mother was frightened and they left the apartment in Nagykanizsa together with my father and came to live with us. So there was enough of us in the apartment.
In the meantime, on the 25th October when the fights hadn’t started in Ujpest yet, we were all at the United Lamp Factory and when we finished work my boss and the party secretary called me in and said: ‘Look, Feri, you are a trained soldier. Here is this engineer called Lali E., who is a very smart man, a genius and we need him, he wants to go home to his parents, opposite to the Houses of Parliament, on Alkotmany Street. In that district there are a lot of fights, try to escort him home safely.’ Then we set off with Lali on foot and I was his guide, his mentor. What I did was, that acquaintances of mine lived in different places. From Ujpest I phoned one of my acquaintances who lived on the corner of Dozsa Gyorgy Street and asked what the situation was there. He said nothing, we could go safely. Then we went up to his place. From there I called my acquaintance on Marx Square. He said that there were heavy fighting from the Danube until there, but after Szondi Street there weren’t. Then we didn’t go there, but took the backway to Szondi Street, we looked round, it was relatively calm there. Then we walked on the boulevard, it was calm in that part. Because that certain demonstration, on which ten of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated on the 25th in front of the Parliament, was at that time. In the end I took Lali home, then I set off to go back to Ujpest. In the meantime there was a lot of shouting at my back, a Soviet combat car came from Kossuth Square to Alkotmany Street. When I said to myself that I wasn’t going to wait for this, and I ran in to the Unitarian church on Marko Street. There 2 young men surrounded me at once and asked me who I was. They made me sit among the others, there were already X plus N armless men there, who were waiting for the Russians to move along. And when they continued on their way they let us out. Then I went back to Kossuth Square to see what the news was there. The demonstration had ended already, it was something terrible, it turned my stomach, though I had seen a couple things in the war. But this was too much for me, too.
My mother-in-law, my father-in-law and my wife lived in the big yellow house called Mefter-house at the corner of Arpad Street. They lived in the apartment overlooking the square, from where one could see the Northern Railway Bridge, where the combat cars fired a lot. Everyone had moved to the cellar. I also went to the cellar where everyone from the approximately 20 apartments of the house was, on mattresses and everything put down along the wall. There wasn’t any more room, only in the middle, we put clothes on the ground with my wife, we lived together for the first time there in that cellar. One day a Russian combat car came in front of the house and started to fire at it. I counted 19 hits. And one blew away the main water-meter next to the apartment of the caretaker, and the water started pouring into the cellar where the people lived. There was a tap outside which had to be turned off, but the combat car was standing there. Then the caretaker and I stuck out our nose waving big white sheets, a grouchy Russian came there and pointed to the roof that someone had shot from there and one of their officers died. I told him that everyone was in the cellar. He insisted, but he let us turn off the main tap and then we went back. But they shot at everything that moved. I went up to cook in the apartment of my mother-in-law on the first floor. But they didn’t dare to come out, they were in the cellar night and day. And I cooked out of what they had at home. But my mother-in-law was a negligent housewife, they barely had anything. Carrots and apples. I made carrot sauce, simmered the meat well, baked it in the oven and took it downstairs with the carrot sauce. My father-in-law said that he had never eaten anything that delicious. We were down there for about 3 weeks, and I cooked throughout. The braver ones from among the others also went upstairs to cook. This house had back exits, too, and when the geese for export were taken to the Ujpest market so that they wouldn’t go bad, because they couldn’t export anything, there was no train traffic either, one could buy a whole geese, I went and bought one, too. One could buy bread and geese. On the 4th November at dawn the radio said that everyone should go to work. By that time the Soviet tanks were in Ujpest and they lumbered and shouted everywhere. I said that as I saw we wouldn’t set off for work.
Once the fights stopped for a while, then I went immediately to the United lamp Factory and the first engineer, Vaszily was very frightened and didn’t know what to do. I told him ‘Comrade first engineer, in my opinion you should first have all the depots locked, because they will take away all the goods’. We locked everything and the United Lamp Factory wanted me to be part of the armed guard. At the first gunshot the guard changed sides. Weapons remained, but no guard. I apologized and said that I wouldn’t spring to arms. The situation was chaotic for a long time, because the demonstration was about to end, but the United Lamp Factory kept demonstrating and the revolutionary committee of the factory didn’t let the work be started until the members of the AVO [see AVH][16] and the Russians broke in by force, they took the committee, then work started.
At the time when they were still shooting, on the 5th or 6th November, our relative, Istvan Mate Lusztig, who had lived in this apartment, he was the husband of one of my mother’s sisters who was killed, called me on the phone and asked me to visit him. We appreciated our very few relatives so much that after the blood-relation who linked us died, we still kept in touch as relatives and still loved each other. He married a widow in Nagykanizsa and in 1947 they came to live in Pest, because an uncle of the wife, a reputed lawyer died here. And when I came here, Istvan Mate Lusztig put a rental contract in front of me in which it was written that I had been living there for 3 months, and that my wife was also going to move there, and wanted me to sign it. I asked why. He said because they were going to go abroad [Editor’s note: In the weeks after the 1956 revolution about 200000 people left the country, defected.] So when they left we moved here, but at that time there was an ordinance that 2 persons were allowed live in a one-bedroom apartment at the most, and this was a two and a half bedroom apartment. Then I talked with my parents on the phone and asked that at least one of them should come to Pest. Both of them came, because my mother and my father were party members, my mother was also a lay judge and they had a lot of hen thieves and others imprisoned. And those vowed vengeance against her, that if they came out of the prison they would slay my mother or do I don’t know what to her. And really, in 1956 the criminals were also released from prison. My mother was frightened and they left the apartment in Nagykanizsa together with my father and came to live with us. So there was enough of us in the apartment.
My wife’s parents had a two-bedroom-apartment in Ujpest, with interconnected rooms, and she had a 6 years old sister, too. She stayed with her parents and I lived one corner away, not in the staircase leading to the loft, but in a belvedere on Arpad Street, in a house which has been demolished since then. The son of the family lived there, who was serving his 2 year military service and I rented the room until he was going to be demobilized. So my wife and I lived separately. We got married on the 13th and on the 23rd they started shooting [see 1956][15]. I didn’t feel like getting involved at all. Everyone knew that I had been an Israeli soldier, that I had been a Hungarian soldier. I was 27 years old and well trained, I must say. I played all the instruments from the anti-aircraft gun onwards to everything. And when the civic guard was formed in the Lamp Factory they came and brought me the machine gun and the submachine gun and what not, asking me to go with them. I apologized and said that I had gotten married 10 days earlier and I wouldn’t leave my wife. And I didn’t go. But the son of the family where I lived came home from Taszar on foot. They said, ’we are sorry Ferike, vis maior, move out. At that time fights had already been going on in Ujpest, too, and everyone lived in the cellar.
Then they were deported to the Czech-Moravian Protectorate, to Frain [today Vranov, Czech Republic] and from there to a place called Znaim [today Znojmo, Czech Republic], and the parents worked at the brick factory and did debris carrying. And there they didn’t hurt the children or the elderly, they even entrusted the grandmother of my wife, who was a teacher and nursery school teacher to look after the children. During the day they went up to the attic of the brickburning oven because the weather was nice there and she taught them there. My wife wrote in one of her short stories that the Czechs were very kind to the deportees. Then when they were liberated they went back to Szeged and my mother-in-law joined the communist party, and she kept nagging my father-in-law until he also joined. In 1947 or 1948, I don’t remember exactly, there were the purges, they were both excluded and also fired from their workplace. My mother-in-law had been a clerk, my father-in-law had worked in his profession. They were there at a loss, and in Szeged they couldn’t find a job anymore. Then they came to Pest in 1950 or 1951, I don’t remember, and found a job at the United Lamp Factory, my father-in-law as an electrician, my mother-in-law as an editor at the newspaper of the United Lamp Factory.
Vera, my wife comes from Szeged, she was born there in 1937. They were deported in quite a ‘lucky’ way in 1944. At that time they took a trainful of prominent Jews from Budapest, with the permission of the Germans and in exchange for 20 million pengoes, to Switzerland. [see Kasztner-train][14]. The very rich Jewish families gathered the 20 million pengoes with the condition that they and their families would also go with the train. So there were some intellectually prominent people on the train like Lipot Szondi for example [Editor’s note: neurologist, psychiater, the authot of the fate analysis and the Szondi-test] or the rabbi from Szatmar [today Romania], who was the most famous Jewish scholar in Hungary and who was an anti-Zionist all his life [Editor’s note: Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979): Between 1929–1944 he was the rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish Community from Szatmar. He fled to Switzerland with the Kasztner train, from where he went to Palestine in 1946, then to the USA, and with the members of the Szatmar Jewish community who survived founded the Szatmar Hasidic community.]. I don’t know by name but there were more than a 1000 people who were accommodated in a separate camp in Bergen-Belsen for a while, then they were put on a train, and they were really taken to Switzerland. And 4-5 trainful of Jews from the country were deported not to Auschwitz, but to a concentration camp near Vienna called Strasshof. 3 trains left from Szeged, 2 two Auschwitz, 1 to Strasshof. [Editor’s note: According to Randolph Braham’s researches the first two transports were directed to Auschwitz, but ‘only one of them got there. The Germans directed the other one to Strasshof, in exchange for the trainful of Jews from Kecskemet, who were supposed to be deported to Austria, but because of negligence and routine they were commanded to Auschwitz.’ The third transport was directed to Strasshof originally, and most of the 5739 people in it survived the deportation.] My wife was on this latter train. But all her relatives were on the first 2 trains, they were all killed. But her father, who was an electrician and an X-ray specialist the director of the hospital on Szeged didn’t want to let to be taken, because there were very many injured at the hospitals and the X-ray had to be used all the time. But her father didn’t agree that his family be deported without him, so in the end they deported him, too, with the last train to Strasshof. And my wife’s grandmother and grandfather, too. In Strasshof they didn’t kill anyone, they got accommodation, they got food. And from there they sent them to work, mainly agricultural work. The peasants took a Jewish family, who worked for them from morning until dawn in exchange for food and accommodation in the stable.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
There was 40 of us technicians on that floor of the Lamp Factory, and 800 young women made the electron tubes. And among that 800 women there was always one who was my actual girlfriend, so to speak. First name informality was general there, but I usually addressed everyone formally. And at that time I was still called Feri, Feri, please, this was my title. I only said hi to those girls with whom I was on good terms. And there was a lot of them, one was nicer than the other. Once they ran out of some piece and they sent those who made fluorescent lamps to other departments. They sent a girl to me to teach her to work in the electron tube making. She was a typical Jewish girl, and it turned out after 2 minutes that she had graduated high school. There were a lot of breaks, and during breaks we played that one said a poem or a quote, and the other one had to guess where the quote was from. Then I thought that I was an adult man, I was 27 years old and I had to find someone for good. Then I started to pay court to this girl, and then she went back to the fluorescent lamp department, and sometimes I brought her a book to read.
Then we started to date. I was in my last year at the technical school, so in the last year she accompanied me to school almost always when I went there from work. All her family worked at the United Lamp, her father worked as a foreman at the development department, her mother was some kind of a journalist of the journal called ‘Izzo’ [Lamp]. Then once she wanted to introduce me to her parents, and the 4 of us sat to the table for lunch in the canteen. Then her mother and father looked at me carefully, and her mother whispered to them ‘unsereins’. The kitten of our cat. I don’t know how she knew, because I’m not a typical Jew and my mentality is even less so. The point is that the United Lamp had an excursion to Belatelep near Fonyod that year. I went, and the girl and her father did, too. Then when we went down to bathe we discussed that we would get married. The truth is that I didn’t think she was very pretty, but she was very intelligent, she seemed a rough diamond so to speak. True, that she kept saying about herself that she was an atheist and progressivist, but I thought that may this be our biggest problem in life. And on the 13th October 1956 we got married. We only had a civil marriage, my wife wore a nice red costume, because by the time the rabbi would have had the time the 23rd October came, and by the time things got calmed we would have been ashamed to stand in front of the rabbi. We went on honeymoon to Csucs mountain, we were there for 3 or 4 days in a tourist house, I think it’s not there anymore, it had been demolished I think. We went to gather fallen wood and there was an iron stove and we heated for ourselves. We had an excellent time.
Then we started to date. I was in my last year at the technical school, so in the last year she accompanied me to school almost always when I went there from work. All her family worked at the United Lamp, her father worked as a foreman at the development department, her mother was some kind of a journalist of the journal called ‘Izzo’ [Lamp]. Then once she wanted to introduce me to her parents, and the 4 of us sat to the table for lunch in the canteen. Then her mother and father looked at me carefully, and her mother whispered to them ‘unsereins’. The kitten of our cat. I don’t know how she knew, because I’m not a typical Jew and my mentality is even less so. The point is that the United Lamp had an excursion to Belatelep near Fonyod that year. I went, and the girl and her father did, too. Then when we went down to bathe we discussed that we would get married. The truth is that I didn’t think she was very pretty, but she was very intelligent, she seemed a rough diamond so to speak. True, that she kept saying about herself that she was an atheist and progressivist, but I thought that may this be our biggest problem in life. And on the 13th October 1956 we got married. We only had a civil marriage, my wife wore a nice red costume, because by the time the rabbi would have had the time the 23rd October came, and by the time things got calmed we would have been ashamed to stand in front of the rabbi. We went on honeymoon to Csucs mountain, we were there for 3 or 4 days in a tourist house, I think it’s not there anymore, it had been demolished I think. We went to gather fallen wood and there was an iron stove and we heated for ourselves. We had an excellent time.
Then I went back to the United Lamp and after work I attended the Ujpest Industrial Technical School which I graduated in 1957. First I lived in Ujpest in tenancy in a stairway. In the one-storied houses one couldn’t go to the attic from the apartment, but from a small room, like a small hall. And under the stairs there was enough room for a bed. And I rented that because I didn’t have enough money for something better. At that time my salary was about 800-900 forint, part of which was so-called peace loan and other things.[Editor’s note: The peace loan was a peculiar form of taxation introduced in Hungary in the first half of the 1950s. The government issued government bonds for ’building peace’, which it had to pay back to the citizens only after 10 years without taking into consideration inflation. The total value of the peace loans, issued on was 6,7 billion forint. People did not really need these bonds, but they were expected by the party to buy them nonetheless.] The peace loan for a year was a month’s salary. I didn’t go home to my parents in Nagykanizsa often, but we wrote each other letters and my mother was so kind that I sent her my laundry in a box, and she sent me back my clothes washed. I didn’t have the possibility to wash. It wasn’t easy to have a wash either, when the family didn’t use the bathroom they let me in. They even let me in to the kitchen to cook sometimes.
And then in October they drafted me and on the 5th November I became a soldier of the Hungarian People’s Army.
At that time military service lasted for years. I was ruined. I had about enough. Otherwise I was a lot better trained than the officers of that time, who had been trained in 6 months, 6 weeks. I was soldier in Zahony, because it was a new Hungarian custom to take those who were from Nagykanizsa to Zahony, and those who were from Zahony to Szombathely, those from Szombathely to Szeged, and those from Szeged to Gyor and so on. I was a soldier for 2 years, I was bald for 1 year out of these 2, and I couldn’t leave the barracks for 6 months because they didn’t let the recruits to go out. When I could have gone out after half a year I had to wait another 6 weeks to have my name changed, because they couldn’t spell my name on the leave-pass. They had drafted me for 3 years, but Imre Nagy came with his 1953 program when they said that they had to economize on everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. And they let one third of the army leave, they demobilized us.
At that time military service lasted for years. I was ruined. I had about enough. Otherwise I was a lot better trained than the officers of that time, who had been trained in 6 months, 6 weeks. I was soldier in Zahony, because it was a new Hungarian custom to take those who were from Nagykanizsa to Zahony, and those who were from Zahony to Szombathely, those from Szombathely to Szeged, and those from Szeged to Gyor and so on. I was a soldier for 2 years, I was bald for 1 year out of these 2, and I couldn’t leave the barracks for 6 months because they didn’t let the recruits to go out. When I could have gone out after half a year I had to wait another 6 weeks to have my name changed, because they couldn’t spell my name on the leave-pass. They had drafted me for 3 years, but Imre Nagy came with his 1953 program when they said that they had to economize on everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. And they let one third of the army leave, they demobilized us.
But I knew that she worked at the United Lamp Factory, and I decided to try to make peace with her, and I went to work at the United Lamp as an unskilled worker, and I worked at the electron tube manufacturing. Because I could certify that I had learned to be a mechanic for a while, and they employed me as an unskilled technician. Then I never made it up with that girl, even though she was there and we saw each other daily, she didn’t care about me.
My starting salary was 680 forint, and I had to live off this. I lived in a room in Ujpest, the landlady was a very old woman, who had an antique teenage daughter. As far as I remember I paid 100 for the room, for 5 forint I got a tram pass, which was good from my apartment to the United Lamp Factory and back, once a day. And everything was very cheap. I ate lunch at the canteen of the factory. At that time there were different canned foods: cholent with sausage, stew, and I don’t remember, perhaps goulash. There were 3 or 4 kinds, which I bought alternately for dinner. If I worked the night shift by chance, then I passed down the lunch ticket, and I ate these bottled foods during the night. They gave me a very bad salary, and I didn’t have any free time. I worked like a madman all summer, and at that time they were recruiting working class cadres to continue their studies. And at that time I already counted as a cadre, despite the fact that it was written in my curriculum vitae that I had come home from Israel. Then I applied to the evening technical school, the Landler Jeno Industrial Technical School, which was in Ujpest. They enrolled me and I started studying in September.
My starting salary was 680 forint, and I had to live off this. I lived in a room in Ujpest, the landlady was a very old woman, who had an antique teenage daughter. As far as I remember I paid 100 for the room, for 5 forint I got a tram pass, which was good from my apartment to the United Lamp Factory and back, once a day. And everything was very cheap. I ate lunch at the canteen of the factory. At that time there were different canned foods: cholent with sausage, stew, and I don’t remember, perhaps goulash. There were 3 or 4 kinds, which I bought alternately for dinner. If I worked the night shift by chance, then I passed down the lunch ticket, and I ate these bottled foods during the night. They gave me a very bad salary, and I didn’t have any free time. I worked like a madman all summer, and at that time they were recruiting working class cadres to continue their studies. And at that time I already counted as a cadre, despite the fact that it was written in my curriculum vitae that I had come home from Israel. Then I applied to the evening technical school, the Landler Jeno Industrial Technical School, which was in Ujpest. They enrolled me and I started studying in September.
My mother, who had been a party member for a long time, since 1945 (and this was in 1951, in January perhaps), went to the party secretary of the town and told him what the problem was. He said that it was quite dangerous, because those who came home from abroad were usually caught, but in the previous year on the 1st May I was at the 1st May march in Israel, where the company where I belonged to carried the pictures of Stalin and Lenin with a red flag and a communist banner in Hebrew. And I had sent home earlier the picture which was taken there, and my mother showed it to them so that they would see what my opinion was. Then they went with this to some local or other authority with the party secretary. It didn’t even take 10 days and I got the notification that I was free to go home.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
My friend’s uncle had an acquaintance who rented us a room, and the 2 of us paid for it, about 10 pounds a month as I remember, which was a lot of money. But we made that much in 1-2 days. And besides that we both got a weapon, because there was watch in the village, the peasants had to guard their own lands and crops. But they didn’t like to stay awake at night, because they worked a lot during the day, we also worked when we cut pruned the vines, but we were young, and we took on the guard for money. So I worked during the day, and from sundown until 2 in the morning I was on watch. I made a lot of money but we didn’t have an apartment. We were considered night lodgers, because the 2 of us slept in a room. If the girlfriend of one of us was there, the other one went on watch. I would have wanted to get hold of an apartment. At that time quite small houses were being built, with one and a half rooms, with not many modern conveniences, but there was a kitchen, a shower and a toilet in them. And I wanted to buy one of these on the installment system, because I had enough to pay an advance, but it turned out that these were only for families. Then I thought that I would bring my parents here, because there was a family uniting action at that time. The Israelis gave money for the family members to be brought to Israel. But they still couldn’t take me on at the construction. I went to another village, too, where those who wanted to work there got approximately 5 acres of land, a similar house, a carriage, a mule and a cow with calf. They sent me away from there, too, saying that I would have needed a family. I was angry and I went to Tel-Aviv. The army had an office there, which administered the affairs of demobilized soldiers. I went there and said that I needed an apartment. Jaffa was empty at that time. The Arabians had run away and it was full with empty apartments. But there I was told again that unfortunately they couldn’t give me an apartment because families from Yemen were coning there with as many children as stars on the sky, and they had to accommodate them first and couldn’t solve my case. And they also told me that either I got an apartment or not I could go home because there was communist regime at home. I got very angry at them. I gave my blood and life to Israel, but I didn’t want to be a fool. Then I wrote my mother and told her to arrange it so that I could come home to Hungary and suffer no harm.
I was demobilized exactly after 2 years, on the 17th September 1950. In the meantime I regularly went on holiday with my friend with whom I had gone there, and when they broke up the unit, we still remained in the same unit. Some of his relatives lived in a village called Hadera, we were about 15 kilometers from there, and if we went on leave we hitchhiked there, and his relatives gave us to eat and accommodated us. They accepted me as the buddy of their relative, in Israel I didn’t have anyone. And when we could leave for more than 1 day we went to work either to a construction or to prune vines. We made a lot of money with this kind of occasional work, because there weren’t many people there who knew how to prune vines. We were in Hadera starting from the 17th September, and we worked. The cutting back of vines paid the most, and we were good at it. If there wasn’t work, we poured concrete, molded, so we did all kinds of construction work. It also happened that we built roads, like the road-makers here. Until January, in 4 months I made as much money as in 5 years in Hungary when I used to work here. At that time they still paid with English pounds, and well.
Miklos, the child of my father’s sister, Frida Leicht, my only cousin who survived, was also in Israel. We liked each other with Miklos, because we were very similar in thinking. He also had a strong Jewish identity, even though later he had a Christian wife. He went to Israel already in 1946 at the age of 16 with a youth group and he lived for a while in Pardes Hanna [town in Israel] in a kibbutz. When I was on holiday I visited him. In 1951 he returned and at a course he met a girl who had already had a child, but she was a very nice and pretty girl. They got married and lived together until 1956. They were like doves all the time. Once one of them flew out, then the other one. Miklos left his wife and child at home in 1956 so that they would go after him, and he went back to Israel to the same kibbutz. He lived there until 1962 or 1963, but he couldn’t live without his family so he came back again. So he was there two times. When he first came home he magyarized his name to Revesz. He died as Revesz in 1992 in Debrecen where they lived.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
As soon as the Jewish state was voted the fights started in Israel. [see 1948 War of Independence in Israel][13]. And then boys and girls of my age volunteered immediately, we wanted to go to fight, and in that fall, at the beginning of the fall 1947 we enlisted to the Haganah and waited to leave. But they didn’t set us off, because the English were still there. But it was to be expected here in Hungary that after March 1948 the events would ‘swing to the left’, and there would be no possibility to leave, so sometime in the winter, at the end of January or beginning of February, we went to Austria. The entire company, about the 40 of us. We got a so called collective passport, in which it was written X.Y. and 38 people. So practically we crossed the border legally, with collective passport.
They took us to Vienna where a vacated school was the refugee camp. We were there for 6 weeks, partly because they didn’t know what to do with us, there was too many of us, and partly to rest, and so that they would clothe us. We left with the clothes we had on us, we couldn’t bring anything with us. Then the drillmasters of the Israeli elite army arrived, and they started to train us for armless, as they say man against man fight. There was a small young girl there who trained us, she was as small as a sitting dog. Then she showed a grip, which she should have warded off by grabbing me, but she couldn’t hold me, and I fell on her knees with my back, fortunately not too fast. I didn’t get very hurt, but for a while I was invalid. After 6 weeks they took the entire company to a place, where a former Lager was already full with volunteer Jewish young people, who had been gathered to one place from all kinds of movements from all Europe. And there they continued the drilling, but in bigger formation.
I had a great time there. That was the happiness of my adolescence. I also have to mention that the fact that there were girls there, too, didn’t mean anything special to me. When I should have learned how to handle women I was in the Lager. Simply I didn’t care about this, because I mourned for my childhood love Irenke for years. So I didn’t care even about the most beautiful girl, I didn’t care about girls at all. And everyone was astonished that I was so withdrawn. They thought that I liked boys or I don’t know what. In this regard I became mature at around the age of 20. Though girls fell for me.
We had retraining there for 2 or 3 months, then we went from there to Italy on foot through the Brenner Pass, in big snow, with smuggler leaders. They took us to Meran, the Italians call it Merano. They accommodated us into an empty sanatorium. They started feeding us, and so to speak nursing us, and we were there for about 2 weeks. Then they took us to an Italian refugee camp called Chiari. We were in Chiari on the 15th May when they proclaimed the State of Israel. Then we held a big celebration. We put up the white-blue flag, and did other things. Let’s go, off we go! But this wasn’t that simple, because the entire Italy was full with such camps where there were young Jews, volunteers. There was 5000 of us only from Hungary. And before we had left Austria we went to I don’t know how many refugee camps with the blue and white flag and recruited the young Jewish kids to come and defend the country. There were some who came, and some who didn’t, but we did grow in number in the meantime.
They took the entire company from Chiari to a port called Fano, which is between Rimini and Ancona in Italy. Fano was an ordinary small fishermen’s village at that time, today it is a tourist paradise. They told us that the Israeli army needed sailors, too, and we should get used to the sea, and go to sea with the fishermen. And that’s what we did. We got uniforms, it was written on them Scuola Marittima Ebraica [Italian: Jewish Sailor School]. But of course it was far from it, we only went on cogs. In a proper sense they got us used to the sea. I was unlucky with this again, because I had an accident and my leg got injured again. They excluded me from the training, the drilling. Also because I was seasick many times. The cogs rocked like a nutshell, I helped how I could, but most of the time I couldn’t, because I was sick.
In the middle of September they took us to a camp, near the harbor called Ostia. 700 of us joined a small cargo-boat, which was about the size of a barge on the Danube. After 4 days we arrived to Haifa, exactly on the 17th September, when Bernadotte, the UNO mediatory was shot by the Jewish extremists in Jerusalem. [Editor’s note: Count Folke Bernadotte (1895–1948) Swedish diplomat commissioned by the UNO to mediate in the armed conflict between the Arabs and the Jews after the proclamation of the State of Israel. None of the parties accepted his plan according to which Israel would get the northern and western part of Palestine and the Arabs the eastern and southern parts, and both parties would acknowledge each other. The Jewish extremists considered him a threat to the existence of the country and they killed him.] They immediately gave the volunteers on the ship army ID cards, and we signed it on the ship that we had joined the Palmach [Editor’s note: These were the shock-troops of the Haganah during the British mandate, then during the war of independence.] These weren’t only trained for defense but also for the break-through at all costs. But at that time we hadn’t been trained at all, not with guns, but only for hand to hand fight. And they took us to a camp called Tel-Mond, and the combats were about 8 kilometers from these. They drilled us there in 12 days. This means that we did no formal training at all, like attention, hold on, right turn, give a salute, there wasn’t anything like these. But everyone got a rifle, I got a German Mauser made in 1942, on which there was a swastika. And they showed us where the sight and the butt was, where to load the 5 cartridges, where to cock it, and how to fire it. But they didn’t give us any cartridges, because there weren’t any cartridges, they were happy if there were enough for the front. And we learned to use the gun in theory, we learned how to cover ourselves, and they made us exercise a lot. At that time I was still in a good condition, but it was a custom that we ran almost until the front line and we shouted three times in Hebrew, that we were there and they should shiver, ‘we are the Palmach!’, ‘hinenu haPalmach!’, because the Palmach was famous and the enemy was afraid of it, and then we ran back. This meant 14 kilometers of running every morning.
This lasted for 12 days exactly. You can imagine that in 12 days we couldn’t really become experts without any cartridges. And besides there was another problem that in our platoon of 40 nobody spoke Hebrew. And I was the only one who spoke Yiddish. The other ones were from Pest, so how would they had known? I had only learnt it in the Lager, it wasn’t my mother tongue either. So it functioned so that the drillmaster said in Hebrew that ‘this is a gun’. Then someone, a man with a loud voice shouted in Yiddish ‘this is a gun’. Then I told my own company ‘boys, he is saying that this is a gun’. Then they explained all the parts of the gun in Hebrew, then in Yiddish, then I explained them in Hungarian. So all orders or commands had to be interpreted twice so that our ordinary citizens would understand them. I knew Yiddish ‘thanks to’ my connections in the Lager, my life.
They took us to Vienna where a vacated school was the refugee camp. We were there for 6 weeks, partly because they didn’t know what to do with us, there was too many of us, and partly to rest, and so that they would clothe us. We left with the clothes we had on us, we couldn’t bring anything with us. Then the drillmasters of the Israeli elite army arrived, and they started to train us for armless, as they say man against man fight. There was a small young girl there who trained us, she was as small as a sitting dog. Then she showed a grip, which she should have warded off by grabbing me, but she couldn’t hold me, and I fell on her knees with my back, fortunately not too fast. I didn’t get very hurt, but for a while I was invalid. After 6 weeks they took the entire company to a place, where a former Lager was already full with volunteer Jewish young people, who had been gathered to one place from all kinds of movements from all Europe. And there they continued the drilling, but in bigger formation.
I had a great time there. That was the happiness of my adolescence. I also have to mention that the fact that there were girls there, too, didn’t mean anything special to me. When I should have learned how to handle women I was in the Lager. Simply I didn’t care about this, because I mourned for my childhood love Irenke for years. So I didn’t care even about the most beautiful girl, I didn’t care about girls at all. And everyone was astonished that I was so withdrawn. They thought that I liked boys or I don’t know what. In this regard I became mature at around the age of 20. Though girls fell for me.
We had retraining there for 2 or 3 months, then we went from there to Italy on foot through the Brenner Pass, in big snow, with smuggler leaders. They took us to Meran, the Italians call it Merano. They accommodated us into an empty sanatorium. They started feeding us, and so to speak nursing us, and we were there for about 2 weeks. Then they took us to an Italian refugee camp called Chiari. We were in Chiari on the 15th May when they proclaimed the State of Israel. Then we held a big celebration. We put up the white-blue flag, and did other things. Let’s go, off we go! But this wasn’t that simple, because the entire Italy was full with such camps where there were young Jews, volunteers. There was 5000 of us only from Hungary. And before we had left Austria we went to I don’t know how many refugee camps with the blue and white flag and recruited the young Jewish kids to come and defend the country. There were some who came, and some who didn’t, but we did grow in number in the meantime.
They took the entire company from Chiari to a port called Fano, which is between Rimini and Ancona in Italy. Fano was an ordinary small fishermen’s village at that time, today it is a tourist paradise. They told us that the Israeli army needed sailors, too, and we should get used to the sea, and go to sea with the fishermen. And that’s what we did. We got uniforms, it was written on them Scuola Marittima Ebraica [Italian: Jewish Sailor School]. But of course it was far from it, we only went on cogs. In a proper sense they got us used to the sea. I was unlucky with this again, because I had an accident and my leg got injured again. They excluded me from the training, the drilling. Also because I was seasick many times. The cogs rocked like a nutshell, I helped how I could, but most of the time I couldn’t, because I was sick.
In the middle of September they took us to a camp, near the harbor called Ostia. 700 of us joined a small cargo-boat, which was about the size of a barge on the Danube. After 4 days we arrived to Haifa, exactly on the 17th September, when Bernadotte, the UNO mediatory was shot by the Jewish extremists in Jerusalem. [Editor’s note: Count Folke Bernadotte (1895–1948) Swedish diplomat commissioned by the UNO to mediate in the armed conflict between the Arabs and the Jews after the proclamation of the State of Israel. None of the parties accepted his plan according to which Israel would get the northern and western part of Palestine and the Arabs the eastern and southern parts, and both parties would acknowledge each other. The Jewish extremists considered him a threat to the existence of the country and they killed him.] They immediately gave the volunteers on the ship army ID cards, and we signed it on the ship that we had joined the Palmach [Editor’s note: These were the shock-troops of the Haganah during the British mandate, then during the war of independence.] These weren’t only trained for defense but also for the break-through at all costs. But at that time we hadn’t been trained at all, not with guns, but only for hand to hand fight. And they took us to a camp called Tel-Mond, and the combats were about 8 kilometers from these. They drilled us there in 12 days. This means that we did no formal training at all, like attention, hold on, right turn, give a salute, there wasn’t anything like these. But everyone got a rifle, I got a German Mauser made in 1942, on which there was a swastika. And they showed us where the sight and the butt was, where to load the 5 cartridges, where to cock it, and how to fire it. But they didn’t give us any cartridges, because there weren’t any cartridges, they were happy if there were enough for the front. And we learned to use the gun in theory, we learned how to cover ourselves, and they made us exercise a lot. At that time I was still in a good condition, but it was a custom that we ran almost until the front line and we shouted three times in Hebrew, that we were there and they should shiver, ‘we are the Palmach!’, ‘hinenu haPalmach!’, because the Palmach was famous and the enemy was afraid of it, and then we ran back. This meant 14 kilometers of running every morning.
This lasted for 12 days exactly. You can imagine that in 12 days we couldn’t really become experts without any cartridges. And besides there was another problem that in our platoon of 40 nobody spoke Hebrew. And I was the only one who spoke Yiddish. The other ones were from Pest, so how would they had known? I had only learnt it in the Lager, it wasn’t my mother tongue either. So it functioned so that the drillmaster said in Hebrew that ‘this is a gun’. Then someone, a man with a loud voice shouted in Yiddish ‘this is a gun’. Then I told my own company ‘boys, he is saying that this is a gun’. Then they explained all the parts of the gun in Hebrew, then in Yiddish, then I explained them in Hungarian. So all orders or commands had to be interpreted twice so that our ordinary citizens would understand them. I knew Yiddish ‘thanks to’ my connections in the Lager, my life.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
From my relative I would have also gone to [Nagy]Kanizsa, but I didn’t start off without knowing what I would find there. Because I was afraid, and my foot wasn’t that perfect either. It took several years until it healed completely. I said that I would wait until there was some train. At that time there weren’t trains yet, because the Germans had taken up the rails, they had bombed them, all kinds of things had happened. On the 27th April I found out that a test train was going to go to Nagykanizsa. This meant that the engine pushed a truck in front of it, and two cattle cars were hooked on at its back, and this was the Nagykanizsa test train. I got on after some arguments, because they didn’t want to let me on it without a ticket. And my uncle, Feri Schnitzer, about whom I had already known that he lived, was on the same train. We were happy to meet and we went home together. I arrived back on the 29th April 1945, exactly one year after I had been deported.
My father was last a forced laborer at the Veszprem Railroad Building Company, and he didn’t build railway but he baked bread. He escaped relatively well. He couldn’t work in a bakery at the Tattersal for the first time, and he didn’t work in the ghetto either. Otherwise he was a ghetto policeman [see Budapest ghetto][12], who patrolled during the night so that they wouldn’t wander about, he watched the order in the ghetto, more or less, so that the Jews wouldn’t take others’ things, and if someone got ill or fell to the ground, he picked them up so that they wouldn’t freeze. He was in the ghetto from the 25th December until the 18th January. During that time he lived with his sister Frida, whose husband was also a forced laborer, he died. And her son, Miklos, who is my only cousin from the paternal side who survived, also lived there. None from the maternal side survived. Then my father moved to our Christian relative on Visegrad Street, to whom I also went. So he was among relatively human conditions, because the forced laborer bakers didn’t only bake for the forced laborer units, but for the Hungarian army, too. They baked enormous amounts of bread, night and day in shifts, and they mobilized all the bakers. The butchers, too. And because of this he never starved of course, to his luck. Except in the ghetto, where he didn’t have to bake anything anymore, he just tried to endure.
In the first week of March they told those who could move to go to Katowice [today Poland] with the local train and to have themselves registered according to nationality so that they could be transported home. I went to Katowice with my friend from Ungvar [today Uzhorod, Ukraine], with whom I had been together in the Lager and we had shared everything. He was more to me than a brother. He still lives, I found him after 38 years, and we continued our conversation from where we had left off. In Katowice we found a school yard, and 2 armed guards in front of it, who wore armbands made of Czech flag. He went in, we said goodbye, and I went to look for the Hungarian camp. The several barracks surrounded by wire fence was a former camp, not of the Jews, but of the prisoners of war. A guard was standing in the gate, I registered myself and I saw that they still guarded the people. I was very bored of life behind the wire fence, and I went back to the school where the Czech camp was, I asked my friend out and told him that I wasn’t going to go into the Hungarian camp. Then what should we do? On the one hand I said that I was one year younger, because I had heard that they were mobilizing the Czech young people from the age of 16, on the other hand I made up a name for myself telling them that I was from Csap [today Chop, Ukraine], I only spoke Hungarian and I had never learned Czech And besides that Yiddish, of course, because I had gone to Jewish school, but not to Czech school. And the Czechs hated me, but they received me in, if I was from Csap, I was a Czechoslovakian citizen. And I was there in the Czech camp until the 25th March. Then on Annunciation Day [Editor’s note: Catholic holiday on the 25th March] my friend, one of his cousins and I took our stuff what we had, and we sneaked out of the camp straight to the railway station. We waited for a train to set off towards the East and we got on a car in the back and lay on top of the coal. By the morning of the 26th March we arrived to Krakow [today Poland]. I had my 16th birthday then. In Krakow there was a market and we sold one of my shirts, I don’t even remember what the currency was at that time. I bought plum jam, we had brought bread from the Czech camp, and on the steps of the Krakow railway station I celebrated my 16th birthday with plum jam and bread. At that time hair started to grow on me, a hair then a long break, then another hair, and long break, and then I went and I shaved solemnly. For the first time in my life, on my 16th birthday.
By the time we arrived to Lemberg [today Lvov, Ukraine] the sores on my leg recrudesced. There were already about 50 Jews in Lemberg who had returned. There were 100000 Jews there before, and about 50 returned. They gathered in the synagogue, in an office. We told them who we were, what we were, and that we were trying to get back to Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. They gave us some food and accommodated us. We slept in the attic of the synagogue on the Torah scrolls, which had been gathered there from everywhere. We became lousy there, in Lemberg. I never had any lice before. But the sores on my feet restarted, so I had running sores and I needed medical care. Then the Jews from there told us that we could go to the Soviet military hospital, where a Jewish doctor was the commandant, and then we were in the hospital for about a week. Then we went to Munkacs [today Mukachevo, Ukraine] by train, there I said good-bye to my friends and the train took me nicely to Miskolc, from where it didn’t go any farther. I saw that they made everyone get off the train and lined everyone up. Jesus Mary, what is going to happen? It was delousing. They checked everyone to see who was lousy. I had huge lice, so I stepped among the lousy voluntarily, they disinfected me, sprinkled DDT on me, they put my clothes and shoes in some kind of a steam disinfection, because of which I could hardly put them back on, because they became as hard as stones. I had Soviet boots, which I had got in Lemberg from the commandant of the hospital.
In Miskolc I went to the Jewish community, which already existed. From my arm and the circumstances they could tell who I was. I arrived to Miskolc exactly on the 15th April, where I got a good dinner, but I don’t remember anymore what, some good food, and 100 pengoes. With the 100 pengoes I went right back to the railway station, because I had seen earlier that they sold pancakes with poppy seed for 5 pengoes. And I invested the 100 pengoes in 20 pancakes with poppy seed, which I ate after dinner. At that time that didn’t make me ill anymore, of course. On the next day I went to Budapest by train. The city was mere debris, it was terrible. The ruins of the bombed buildings were one story high. On the territory of the ghetto, on Akacfa Street 64 or I don’t know where, one of my father’s sisters, my Aunt Frida lived who didn’t have to move, but I wasn’t looking for her, because I had no idea whether any Jews had survived in Budapest, but I visited one of my distant Weisz relatives, who had a goy husband.
But before that I had to go to the DEGOB [National Committee for the Treatment of Hungarian Jewish Deportees][10] for registration. Those told me this, who distributed food at the railway station and asked everyone if they had been prisoners of war, where they had come from and what they had done. I told them that I was Jewish and I had come from Auschwitz. They told me to go to Bethlen Square 2, to the DEGOB and check in. As I found out one had to register there, because the names of those who had returned before me and knew whether anyone had escaped from the family were written on a board there and one could read ‘X. Y. lives’. On the other hand they wanted to ask me the names of those whom I knew that survived. At the DEGOB they asked my name, my number, what had happened to me. And I could enumerate 20 or 30 names, the names of those whom I knew in the Lager, some from Nagykanizsa, and some who weren’t from Nagykanizsa, about whom I knew that they were survivors. They wrote it on a long list, which they posted in several copies, that: ‘X. Y. lives, Ferenc Leicht notified us’. And for example the name of Feri Schnitzer, Etelka’s husband was written there, that he was a survivor. He had returned from forced labor or he hadn’t, but someone told them that he survived. Those who returned stood in line to register. And if someone rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and there was an Auschwitz number on his arm, they let him in out of turn.
From Bethlen Square I went straight to Visegrad Street 66, to my relative, where everyone lived to my great joy, and they told me that I could have gone a day earlier, because my father had gone home to Nagykanizsa on foot the day before. Before they took my father to Germany as a forced laborer, drove him to the Tattersal [11]- that’s what the racetrack from Pest was called. But in the meantime the Russians encircled Budapest, and they couldn’t deport them because of this and took them to the ghetto. My father was liberated there, among quite bad conditions. His sister lived there, so he could move there easily. And my relative also told me that my father knew that I was coming, because my name had been posted out on Bethlen Square, because a shoemaker from Nagykanizsa, called Kluger had come home before me from where I was, too. He told them my name, but I didn’t notice that I was written there. So my father knew that I had escaped, he waited and waited and waited, and he got bored of it and set off for home. He traveled for 4 days with all kinds of vehicles, he hitchhiked, traveled by horse carriage, and he arrived home to Nagykanizsa on the 18th or 19th April.
By the time we arrived to Lemberg [today Lvov, Ukraine] the sores on my leg recrudesced. There were already about 50 Jews in Lemberg who had returned. There were 100000 Jews there before, and about 50 returned. They gathered in the synagogue, in an office. We told them who we were, what we were, and that we were trying to get back to Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. They gave us some food and accommodated us. We slept in the attic of the synagogue on the Torah scrolls, which had been gathered there from everywhere. We became lousy there, in Lemberg. I never had any lice before. But the sores on my feet restarted, so I had running sores and I needed medical care. Then the Jews from there told us that we could go to the Soviet military hospital, where a Jewish doctor was the commandant, and then we were in the hospital for about a week. Then we went to Munkacs [today Mukachevo, Ukraine] by train, there I said good-bye to my friends and the train took me nicely to Miskolc, from where it didn’t go any farther. I saw that they made everyone get off the train and lined everyone up. Jesus Mary, what is going to happen? It was delousing. They checked everyone to see who was lousy. I had huge lice, so I stepped among the lousy voluntarily, they disinfected me, sprinkled DDT on me, they put my clothes and shoes in some kind of a steam disinfection, because of which I could hardly put them back on, because they became as hard as stones. I had Soviet boots, which I had got in Lemberg from the commandant of the hospital.
In Miskolc I went to the Jewish community, which already existed. From my arm and the circumstances they could tell who I was. I arrived to Miskolc exactly on the 15th April, where I got a good dinner, but I don’t remember anymore what, some good food, and 100 pengoes. With the 100 pengoes I went right back to the railway station, because I had seen earlier that they sold pancakes with poppy seed for 5 pengoes. And I invested the 100 pengoes in 20 pancakes with poppy seed, which I ate after dinner. At that time that didn’t make me ill anymore, of course. On the next day I went to Budapest by train. The city was mere debris, it was terrible. The ruins of the bombed buildings were one story high. On the territory of the ghetto, on Akacfa Street 64 or I don’t know where, one of my father’s sisters, my Aunt Frida lived who didn’t have to move, but I wasn’t looking for her, because I had no idea whether any Jews had survived in Budapest, but I visited one of my distant Weisz relatives, who had a goy husband.
But before that I had to go to the DEGOB [National Committee for the Treatment of Hungarian Jewish Deportees][10] for registration. Those told me this, who distributed food at the railway station and asked everyone if they had been prisoners of war, where they had come from and what they had done. I told them that I was Jewish and I had come from Auschwitz. They told me to go to Bethlen Square 2, to the DEGOB and check in. As I found out one had to register there, because the names of those who had returned before me and knew whether anyone had escaped from the family were written on a board there and one could read ‘X. Y. lives’. On the other hand they wanted to ask me the names of those whom I knew that survived. At the DEGOB they asked my name, my number, what had happened to me. And I could enumerate 20 or 30 names, the names of those whom I knew in the Lager, some from Nagykanizsa, and some who weren’t from Nagykanizsa, about whom I knew that they were survivors. They wrote it on a long list, which they posted in several copies, that: ‘X. Y. lives, Ferenc Leicht notified us’. And for example the name of Feri Schnitzer, Etelka’s husband was written there, that he was a survivor. He had returned from forced labor or he hadn’t, but someone told them that he survived. Those who returned stood in line to register. And if someone rolled up the sleeve of his shirt and there was an Auschwitz number on his arm, they let him in out of turn.
From Bethlen Square I went straight to Visegrad Street 66, to my relative, where everyone lived to my great joy, and they told me that I could have gone a day earlier, because my father had gone home to Nagykanizsa on foot the day before. Before they took my father to Germany as a forced laborer, drove him to the Tattersal [11]- that’s what the racetrack from Pest was called. But in the meantime the Russians encircled Budapest, and they couldn’t deport them because of this and took them to the ghetto. My father was liberated there, among quite bad conditions. His sister lived there, so he could move there easily. And my relative also told me that my father knew that I was coming, because my name had been posted out on Bethlen Square, because a shoemaker from Nagykanizsa, called Kluger had come home before me from where I was, too. He told them my name, but I didn’t notice that I was written there. So my father knew that I had escaped, he waited and waited and waited, and he got bored of it and set off for home. He traveled for 4 days with all kinds of vehicles, he hitchhiked, traveled by horse carriage, and he arrived home to Nagykanizsa on the 18th or 19th April.
,
1945
See text in interview
The Russians arrived there on the 27th January 1945. First they only went into the factory, I saw the strange uniform, and they kept shooting wild. And by that evening the combatant German formations left the surroundings and they liberated Birkenau and Auschwitz, and the prisoners who survived in the hospital. Then we simply cut up the wire fence, and I, who could walk, and some others helped some of our comrades who spoke Russian go out. They produced an officer from somewhere, whom we called in to see the conditions there. By that time about 200 of the 740 had died of starvation or froze, or died of their illness. About 540-550 of us survived, I don’t know exactly. Famished, loafers, skinny, scraggy fellows. The man was completely thunderstruck. He sent a guard for a political officer. The political officer came and he was also astonished. The first thing he did was that he had some film people brought there, who filmed us as we were liberated. I’m sure that these recordings still exist somewhere, not only at the Russians, but I’m sure that they gave copies to Hungary, too.
The Russians gave us 3 bags of mush, a quarter of an ox and 4 bags of saccharin, which I didn’t know what it was at first, and that square bread, which was completely dry, and the soldiers got it instead of rusk. The political officer arranged that the inhabitants of the closest town, Monowitz, the men and women were brought there for malenkij robot[9]. They told the men to rub off with snow those who couldn’t walk and take them to an empty barrack, where there were straw mattresses, but no blankets, so they covered them with another straw mattress. Those who could wall washed by themselves and everyone moved to a clean barrack. Then the Polish men had to take the bodies and pile them up, so to pile them up in the Lager, which they also recorded. There were 240 bodies, which looked good. They had to women cook soup. The Russians got hold of some mess-kettles, and they cooked beef stock with mesh. Doctor Vass and the other doctor cautioned everyone to eat soup, only a little bit of it, and not eat any meat. And the famished flock dashed at it, and another 250 died in a very short time, because of the sudden eating. This required self-discipline, which I had at that time. I didn’t eat any mesh either, I ate 8 spoonfuls of soup, and I kept starving. On the next day I ate 8 spoonfuls of soup with a little mesh, and I starved on. Otherwise it was winter, and the stock could be kept safely, it didn’t go bad, only the ice had to be broken on the top. We kept eating this for several days, and I first tasted the meat after 8-10 days. We were in the camp until the 13th February, and when we ran out of food the Polish women came to cook again, they hated us, but they had to cook.
When the Russians took us to the Auschwitz main camp I could already walk and I wandered the entire camp. I went into the depots, which today in the museum are the hair storage, glasses storage, shoe storage, clothes storage, and such things, with a small part of the stolen things, which hadn’t been transported from there. There were a lot more things at that time. One of the first things I did was to change my clothes, because I was in a light striped coat, a shirt and pants. I didn’t find any shoes because they had taken my civil shoes, and I found a gum-boot for one leg and a boot for the other. I walked very smoothly in them. But I also found a lot of shirts of good quality, and I put half a dozen of those away.
The Russians gave us 3 bags of mush, a quarter of an ox and 4 bags of saccharin, which I didn’t know what it was at first, and that square bread, which was completely dry, and the soldiers got it instead of rusk. The political officer arranged that the inhabitants of the closest town, Monowitz, the men and women were brought there for malenkij robot[9]. They told the men to rub off with snow those who couldn’t walk and take them to an empty barrack, where there were straw mattresses, but no blankets, so they covered them with another straw mattress. Those who could wall washed by themselves and everyone moved to a clean barrack. Then the Polish men had to take the bodies and pile them up, so to pile them up in the Lager, which they also recorded. There were 240 bodies, which looked good. They had to women cook soup. The Russians got hold of some mess-kettles, and they cooked beef stock with mesh. Doctor Vass and the other doctor cautioned everyone to eat soup, only a little bit of it, and not eat any meat. And the famished flock dashed at it, and another 250 died in a very short time, because of the sudden eating. This required self-discipline, which I had at that time. I didn’t eat any mesh either, I ate 8 spoonfuls of soup, and I kept starving. On the next day I ate 8 spoonfuls of soup with a little mesh, and I starved on. Otherwise it was winter, and the stock could be kept safely, it didn’t go bad, only the ice had to be broken on the top. We kept eating this for several days, and I first tasted the meat after 8-10 days. We were in the camp until the 13th February, and when we ran out of food the Polish women came to cook again, they hated us, but they had to cook.
When the Russians took us to the Auschwitz main camp I could already walk and I wandered the entire camp. I went into the depots, which today in the museum are the hair storage, glasses storage, shoe storage, clothes storage, and such things, with a small part of the stolen things, which hadn’t been transported from there. There were a lot more things at that time. One of the first things I did was to change my clothes, because I was in a light striped coat, a shirt and pants. I didn’t find any shoes because they had taken my civil shoes, and I found a gum-boot for one leg and a boot for the other. I walked very smoothly in them. But I also found a lot of shirts of good quality, and I put half a dozen of those away.
Otherwise the Germans had a sense of humor. I found out from my mother later, that when they separated the women and assigned them to work, they said that 400 young, possibly pretty girls should step forward, but only those who were virgin. Everyone was scared to death that they were going to be taken to the brothel. Of course, because there wasn’t any information. The humor of the Germans: they took them to Gleiwitz, to the soot factory, to one of the most difficult physical work. They took there expressly pretty, young, virgin girls. And in our camp, when we had been already there for several months, they once said that those who had gardener training should step forward. The son of our rabbi, the rabbi from Nagykanizsa, whom I will never forget that he taught us so that we wouldn’t know that we were Jewish and different from the majority, who was one year older than me and worked at a horticulture every summer, stepped forward saying that he was a gardener. He wanted to work outdoors, to be a gardener, about 30 of them stepped forward and they took them to the coal-mine in Jaworzno. [Editor’s note: Jaworzno – town 20-30 kilometers south-east from Katowice [today Poland], according to the memories of a former concentration camp inmate they mined the coal with bare hands. (Simon Rozenkier: Let Courts Give Closure To Holocaust Victims, in „Forward”, 12 December 2003]. This was the German humor. And the rabbi’s son died, the poor thing, he didn’t come back.
In the Lager there was no typhus, not even petechial typhus, because there was delousing every week. And generally, they didn’t bring in epidemics. They did bring in scabies, but there wasn’t any among us. There was bathing monthly, but every morning we had to wash with cold water down to our waist. One couldn’t exist without that, because it was obligatory. So the scabies spread, and a disease called ukrainska, because that also came from the Ukrainians. That was like a choleric diarrhea. A diarrhea which came out of one just like water or coffee. One couldn’t hold it back, everyone crapped himself, I did too, when I got it. Simply there wasn’t enough time not only to go to the toilet, but to take off one’s trousers. Everything came out of us. One could get dehydrated because of this, it was very dangerous, but the old prisoners told us that there was one way to get better, otherwise most people died of it, namely to not eat and drink at all for 24 hours. A complete Yom Kippur.
The Germans were very afraid of the petechial typhus. Every Saturday afternoon there was lice control, and they gave us new shirts and underwear. One couldn’t get some wonderful shirt or underwear. Some old ones, it wasn’t always clean, but it had been disinfected. They brought them from the disinfecting room, the smell of the chlorine could be still felt on them, and we could rip them off safely, because after a while we got another one. Otherwise we learned it from the old prisoners, that that was the way to solve it. There wasn’t any toilet paper and handkerchief. The handkerchief was the inside of my cap, and the external part was my shoe polisher.
After cleaning our shoes we got breakfast. We had to go to the block-stube, or to the tagesraum – that’s what they called the 3 by 8 meter small room which was separated in the front of the barrack, where the barrack commander and the Stubedienst [Editor’s note: inmate responsible for the order of the block.], namely the room servants lived, and there the room servants stood on two sides: one gave ma a piece of bread, the other one put that small thing on it, a third one poured half a liter of coffee into my mess-tin. Which was otherwise sweet, warm and bad, but we weren’t allowed to drink water. We drank coffee, and the next time soup. When everyone got his food then there was roll-call right away, because before marching out they counted everyone in front of the barrack. And at the gate again. When they counted us, we had to stand there with smeared shoes, and eaten breakfast. Those who couldn’t eat their food, it was their problem, or they had to put it away. There was no pocket on our clothes, was there? One had to position it so that it wouldn’t fall. We either ate the marmalade, or cut the bread and put the marmalade between the two pieces and held the bread with our shirt, we pressed it with the sleeve of our jacket. We lined up in front of the barrack, and the capo counted and checked who was missing. It was forbidden to stay in the barrack, because they beat up those who did, but if someone was ill or had some problem could go to the doctor. The only person who was a doctor at the hospital officially was doctor Konig [Edmund König], he was an SS doctor, he didn’t stay there. But the ex-director of the medical clinic in Vienna, doctor Vass from Kolozsvar [today Romania], the director of the dental clinic were there as prisoners, the most excellent doctors were there under the pretext of being hospital attendants, who could treat us the way they could, and with what they had. There was no penicillin yet at that time. Those who had some kind of disease got Ultraseptil, and they either got better, or they didn’t. And for example in case of injury there were four kinds of unguents. Boric Vaseline, zinc Vaseline and that black ointment which smelled like tar, called Ichtiol, and there was a brown one, which smelled a little bit like chocolate called Pellidol. At the hospital there wasn’t selection once a month, but once a week. And if someone spent 2 weeks at the hospital, in whatever shape he was, even if he would have gotten better the next day, was gassed.
After they counted us, as many as we were out of the 500, with the exception of the sick ones, we set off, walking in step, in rows of five, because the SS counted us again at the gate. And so that we would walk in step, there was a band, a brass band, I think with 8 or 10 musicians, who happened to be gypsies, and the band was called Music Capo. They played the best light opera tunes, and there was a small stand inside the gate, and they stood there and played until everyone marched out, and they always marched out the last, and marched in the first. They worked just like everyone else, but they were careful so that their fingers wouldn’t get hurt. There was a trumpet player, a cymbalist, a small drummer, a big drummer, but it was a brass band and it functioned. On the way the vorarbeiters, that is, the foremen, who were the alternates of the capos, kept running next to us and in front of us and they kept shouting ‘in straight lines’. This meant that we had to align ourselves with the one in front of us, because they could only count the people easily by fives. Because the Lager was on the other side of the road in comparison to the factory, they simply blocked the Krakow-Auschwitz main road with a chain of guards while we marched in and out. The chain of guards was made of two rows of guards with a rifle or a submachine-gun, and dogs, they stood there about 100 meters long, at 5 meters from each other. At noon we got a half an hour lunch break, I think, perhaps at 1, I don’t remember anymore. And we worked until dusk. The workday wasn’t determined in hours, but it depended on the daylight. Because by the time it got dark, even the last person had to be in the camp. So in the winter the workday was shorter than in the summer. And we set off later, because in the dark, until day-break none of the prisoners was allowed to leave the Lager. And when we marched it, we marched the same way, with music.
In the Lager we talked very much about food at first. About what we were going to eat at home. Then we got out of this habit. The truth is, that after I had had a good cry when they took my cap, and after I had experienced what my life in the camp was like, from then on I focused on starving the least possible, on not being very cold and to be beaten rarely. It didn’t matter to me anymore whether I would be liberated or would die, what happened to my family. Because, how should I put it, one couldn’t do anything with these thoughts. And I feel ashamed forever, and I will never forgive the Germans for this, that during these 2 months they made me accept it as an order. I mean that if I would have tried and survived for a couple years, then I would have become a vorarbeiter or a Stubedienst. I imagined a Lager career for myself, and nothing else outside the Lager. Apart from the fact that I could have died any time. How should I say it, that wasn’t a topic in itself. Who lives, lives, who has died, died. They selected someone, oh well, they did.
We had loss regularly, and the selection was ordered by the IG monthly, because most of the people, usually 10 percent, was in poor health. And they usually selected 1000 people each month. Those who were selected were gassed, and after that they brought another 1000, so the people shifted about continually. Until the 20th August I was in this so called Werkstatt [German for workshop]. The schedule was so that we worked until noon on Saturdays, and we got the afternoons off, so we were in the Lager. Louse control, cleaning, straw mattress filling, such activities. And among the Sundays there were so called free Sundays, but then we couldn’t live social life, but rested in the barrack and were happy that we were alive. On the other Sundays all the Lager had to go to work. Well, the 20th of August was a free Sunday, and the Americans, who had never bombed neither Birkenau, nor the rails, attacked the IG Farben, and they plastered the workshop where I had worked with bombs, nothing remained of it.
I was desperate, I thought I was going to commit suicide, that they would send me somewhere to work, and I said that I would rather run against the wire fence instead of struggling with the cable commando, here and there, outdoors. Because cable-laying was a very difficult work, it was the most difficult. At that time there were only leaden cables, one meter of that weighed 120 kilograms. First that had to be pulled out, unrolled from the drum, and before that the cable trench had to be dug. When they dug the cable trench the cable commando was happy, because that was an easy job. Because when the cable had to be pulled out, it was inhuman, very few survived it. I knew someone, he was from Nagykanizsa, who survived the cable commando. Everyone admired him. And I knew that I couldn’t endure this difficult work only for a couple weeks, and that they would select me for gassing, and I could go to die. Then 3 of my schoolmates from Nagykanizsa grabbed me, they simply sat on me and started to explain me that I shouldn’t be stupid, that I would endure and they would, too. Not everyone worked among such conditions as I did. And that I shouldn’t fool about but keep quiet. They sat on me during a half night. They saved my life, but unfortunately none of them lives anymore. On the next day they made new commandos, and they assigned me to the warehouse commando. This meant that I had to work in a warehouse. The warehouses were half roofed barn-like buildings, open on the side. And it happened that they found out that I could write and read in German. They assigned me to the gas-cylinder warehouse, to the hydrogen, oxygen, acetylene gas, and all kinds of huge cylinders, and I gave them out, and I kept a record of the number of cylinders each commando took, and as physical labor I loaded, I thought I would shit in my pants, because a cylinder weighed 80 kilograms, and I might have been around 50. And finally one of the workers from there realized that it was stupid to lift them, I only had to tilt them a little bit and roll them. They taught me how to roll a cylinder and how to keep the record, and everything.
Once, when there was lineup for the march back from work, the submachine-gun of one of the mad SS discharged, probably not on purpose. Three bullets went into my right leg, I sat down and said, ‘Oh my God’ and when we marched in I limped and went straight to the hospital. They treated my leg nicely, smeared it with one of those four ointments, and bandaged it with a bandage like crepe paper. They put gauze and cotton on it, bandaged it in all three places, and sent me back to the barrack, saying that I couldn’t stay in the hospital. I said I didn’t even want to stay there, because I knew what was what already. I went to work with my injured leg, I limped a little bit, but I still went, and because I didn’t really strain myself, because I only had to roll about 25 cylinders there and back each day, and I mostly sat and wrote, it didn’t really affect me. But the wound became poisoned and it became swollen. Then they told me that I had to stay in the hospital, otherwise I would have died in 4 days if they had left it so. People died of blood-poisoning. They operated it and I was admitted into the hospital.
In the Lager there was no typhus, not even petechial typhus, because there was delousing every week. And generally, they didn’t bring in epidemics. They did bring in scabies, but there wasn’t any among us. There was bathing monthly, but every morning we had to wash with cold water down to our waist. One couldn’t exist without that, because it was obligatory. So the scabies spread, and a disease called ukrainska, because that also came from the Ukrainians. That was like a choleric diarrhea. A diarrhea which came out of one just like water or coffee. One couldn’t hold it back, everyone crapped himself, I did too, when I got it. Simply there wasn’t enough time not only to go to the toilet, but to take off one’s trousers. Everything came out of us. One could get dehydrated because of this, it was very dangerous, but the old prisoners told us that there was one way to get better, otherwise most people died of it, namely to not eat and drink at all for 24 hours. A complete Yom Kippur.
The Germans were very afraid of the petechial typhus. Every Saturday afternoon there was lice control, and they gave us new shirts and underwear. One couldn’t get some wonderful shirt or underwear. Some old ones, it wasn’t always clean, but it had been disinfected. They brought them from the disinfecting room, the smell of the chlorine could be still felt on them, and we could rip them off safely, because after a while we got another one. Otherwise we learned it from the old prisoners, that that was the way to solve it. There wasn’t any toilet paper and handkerchief. The handkerchief was the inside of my cap, and the external part was my shoe polisher.
After cleaning our shoes we got breakfast. We had to go to the block-stube, or to the tagesraum – that’s what they called the 3 by 8 meter small room which was separated in the front of the barrack, where the barrack commander and the Stubedienst [Editor’s note: inmate responsible for the order of the block.], namely the room servants lived, and there the room servants stood on two sides: one gave ma a piece of bread, the other one put that small thing on it, a third one poured half a liter of coffee into my mess-tin. Which was otherwise sweet, warm and bad, but we weren’t allowed to drink water. We drank coffee, and the next time soup. When everyone got his food then there was roll-call right away, because before marching out they counted everyone in front of the barrack. And at the gate again. When they counted us, we had to stand there with smeared shoes, and eaten breakfast. Those who couldn’t eat their food, it was their problem, or they had to put it away. There was no pocket on our clothes, was there? One had to position it so that it wouldn’t fall. We either ate the marmalade, or cut the bread and put the marmalade between the two pieces and held the bread with our shirt, we pressed it with the sleeve of our jacket. We lined up in front of the barrack, and the capo counted and checked who was missing. It was forbidden to stay in the barrack, because they beat up those who did, but if someone was ill or had some problem could go to the doctor. The only person who was a doctor at the hospital officially was doctor Konig [Edmund König], he was an SS doctor, he didn’t stay there. But the ex-director of the medical clinic in Vienna, doctor Vass from Kolozsvar [today Romania], the director of the dental clinic were there as prisoners, the most excellent doctors were there under the pretext of being hospital attendants, who could treat us the way they could, and with what they had. There was no penicillin yet at that time. Those who had some kind of disease got Ultraseptil, and they either got better, or they didn’t. And for example in case of injury there were four kinds of unguents. Boric Vaseline, zinc Vaseline and that black ointment which smelled like tar, called Ichtiol, and there was a brown one, which smelled a little bit like chocolate called Pellidol. At the hospital there wasn’t selection once a month, but once a week. And if someone spent 2 weeks at the hospital, in whatever shape he was, even if he would have gotten better the next day, was gassed.
After they counted us, as many as we were out of the 500, with the exception of the sick ones, we set off, walking in step, in rows of five, because the SS counted us again at the gate. And so that we would walk in step, there was a band, a brass band, I think with 8 or 10 musicians, who happened to be gypsies, and the band was called Music Capo. They played the best light opera tunes, and there was a small stand inside the gate, and they stood there and played until everyone marched out, and they always marched out the last, and marched in the first. They worked just like everyone else, but they were careful so that their fingers wouldn’t get hurt. There was a trumpet player, a cymbalist, a small drummer, a big drummer, but it was a brass band and it functioned. On the way the vorarbeiters, that is, the foremen, who were the alternates of the capos, kept running next to us and in front of us and they kept shouting ‘in straight lines’. This meant that we had to align ourselves with the one in front of us, because they could only count the people easily by fives. Because the Lager was on the other side of the road in comparison to the factory, they simply blocked the Krakow-Auschwitz main road with a chain of guards while we marched in and out. The chain of guards was made of two rows of guards with a rifle or a submachine-gun, and dogs, they stood there about 100 meters long, at 5 meters from each other. At noon we got a half an hour lunch break, I think, perhaps at 1, I don’t remember anymore. And we worked until dusk. The workday wasn’t determined in hours, but it depended on the daylight. Because by the time it got dark, even the last person had to be in the camp. So in the winter the workday was shorter than in the summer. And we set off later, because in the dark, until day-break none of the prisoners was allowed to leave the Lager. And when we marched it, we marched the same way, with music.
In the Lager we talked very much about food at first. About what we were going to eat at home. Then we got out of this habit. The truth is, that after I had had a good cry when they took my cap, and after I had experienced what my life in the camp was like, from then on I focused on starving the least possible, on not being very cold and to be beaten rarely. It didn’t matter to me anymore whether I would be liberated or would die, what happened to my family. Because, how should I put it, one couldn’t do anything with these thoughts. And I feel ashamed forever, and I will never forgive the Germans for this, that during these 2 months they made me accept it as an order. I mean that if I would have tried and survived for a couple years, then I would have become a vorarbeiter or a Stubedienst. I imagined a Lager career for myself, and nothing else outside the Lager. Apart from the fact that I could have died any time. How should I say it, that wasn’t a topic in itself. Who lives, lives, who has died, died. They selected someone, oh well, they did.
We had loss regularly, and the selection was ordered by the IG monthly, because most of the people, usually 10 percent, was in poor health. And they usually selected 1000 people each month. Those who were selected were gassed, and after that they brought another 1000, so the people shifted about continually. Until the 20th August I was in this so called Werkstatt [German for workshop]. The schedule was so that we worked until noon on Saturdays, and we got the afternoons off, so we were in the Lager. Louse control, cleaning, straw mattress filling, such activities. And among the Sundays there were so called free Sundays, but then we couldn’t live social life, but rested in the barrack and were happy that we were alive. On the other Sundays all the Lager had to go to work. Well, the 20th of August was a free Sunday, and the Americans, who had never bombed neither Birkenau, nor the rails, attacked the IG Farben, and they plastered the workshop where I had worked with bombs, nothing remained of it.
I was desperate, I thought I was going to commit suicide, that they would send me somewhere to work, and I said that I would rather run against the wire fence instead of struggling with the cable commando, here and there, outdoors. Because cable-laying was a very difficult work, it was the most difficult. At that time there were only leaden cables, one meter of that weighed 120 kilograms. First that had to be pulled out, unrolled from the drum, and before that the cable trench had to be dug. When they dug the cable trench the cable commando was happy, because that was an easy job. Because when the cable had to be pulled out, it was inhuman, very few survived it. I knew someone, he was from Nagykanizsa, who survived the cable commando. Everyone admired him. And I knew that I couldn’t endure this difficult work only for a couple weeks, and that they would select me for gassing, and I could go to die. Then 3 of my schoolmates from Nagykanizsa grabbed me, they simply sat on me and started to explain me that I shouldn’t be stupid, that I would endure and they would, too. Not everyone worked among such conditions as I did. And that I shouldn’t fool about but keep quiet. They sat on me during a half night. They saved my life, but unfortunately none of them lives anymore. On the next day they made new commandos, and they assigned me to the warehouse commando. This meant that I had to work in a warehouse. The warehouses were half roofed barn-like buildings, open on the side. And it happened that they found out that I could write and read in German. They assigned me to the gas-cylinder warehouse, to the hydrogen, oxygen, acetylene gas, and all kinds of huge cylinders, and I gave them out, and I kept a record of the number of cylinders each commando took, and as physical labor I loaded, I thought I would shit in my pants, because a cylinder weighed 80 kilograms, and I might have been around 50. And finally one of the workers from there realized that it was stupid to lift them, I only had to tilt them a little bit and roll them. They taught me how to roll a cylinder and how to keep the record, and everything.
Once, when there was lineup for the march back from work, the submachine-gun of one of the mad SS discharged, probably not on purpose. Three bullets went into my right leg, I sat down and said, ‘Oh my God’ and when we marched in I limped and went straight to the hospital. They treated my leg nicely, smeared it with one of those four ointments, and bandaged it with a bandage like crepe paper. They put gauze and cotton on it, bandaged it in all three places, and sent me back to the barrack, saying that I couldn’t stay in the hospital. I said I didn’t even want to stay there, because I knew what was what already. I went to work with my injured leg, I limped a little bit, but I still went, and because I didn’t really strain myself, because I only had to roll about 25 cylinders there and back each day, and I mostly sat and wrote, it didn’t really affect me. But the wound became poisoned and it became swollen. Then they told me that I had to stay in the hospital, otherwise I would have died in 4 days if they had left it so. People died of blood-poisoning. They operated it and I was admitted into the hospital.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
In the hospital they changed my bandage every other day, they smeared my leg with unguent, and the swelling went down, only the running sores were on it. When I could already walk the Stubedienst put me to work, to help him. I had to carry bed-slippers and to help the new patients use it. At that time they brought in a lot of non-Jews, but French, who, I don’t know why became suspicious, they put them into the Lager and got a red triangle, they became political prisoners. One day the Stubedienst asked me if I wanted to get half a liter soup more daily. Of course I did. One was always hungry, especially because we didn’t get the bread zulag. He told me, ‘here’s a wire brush and some grease, and out there is the chimney for disinfecting’. It was a huge iron chimney, about 10-12 meters high, which was tied with cables, on a concrete ring put into the ground. They screwed it up, and the bolts were rusty. He gave me a wrench so that I would move the bolts, clean them, grease them and twist them repeatedly. This meant that I had to twist 6 bolts a day, and for this I got half a liter of soup, I was very happy about it. It was a very good job, and though I only had a shirt and a pair of trousers at the hospital, they lent me a striped jacket, so I wouldn’t freeze outside while I did this work. I did it diligently until the 18th January. I only found it out recently, in 1998, at the first reunion of the former Lager inmates, why I had to do this. I had to do it, because the substitute of the barrack commander and some others planned that they wouldn’t let everyone be killed. Because they thought that if the Russians came there, then the Germans would encircle us with machine guns, there were many of us in a small place, and they would have killed us all. And these few people planned that since the 10-12 meter high chimney of the disinfectant stood at 6 meters from the fence protected with current, they wanted to blow it down on the fence and then there would have been a short-circuit, and that would have also torn the fence, and we could have ran away. They made me do this, so that the bolts would have been easy to screw off.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
From the first time when they robbed me of my identity, so to speak, I didn’t try to be in Hungarian company. I mostly made friends with Polish Jews, or Greeks, French and German Jews. And I had a lot of friends among the old ones. I knew one of the Stubedienst at the hospital, we talked a lot, I could say that he was a pal. He might have been twice as old as I was, maybe about 30, 25, he was a very decent German Jew. I told him that this wouldn’t get healed in 2 weeks. He told me that we would solve it. And in 2 weeks there was selection. To my biggest surprise I passed, nobody made me step aside. I asked the Stubedienst how this was possible, and he told me to go and ask the clerk. The clerk was a Belgian Jewish boy, about 18-19 years old. And he showed me that I had a brand new record. On the 13th day they threw my record out, and on paper they admitted me to the hospital again. They did this several times, I got injured sometime in the middle of November, and in January I was still at the hospital. But unfortunately I wasn’t doing very well, because even though I could walk already, I still had running sores. While I was at the hospital, they selected my Uncle Eisinger unfortunately, they gassed him. There wasn’t anyone to go through the selection instead of him. I only found it out later, it was terrible, but I had to accept it, I accepted the German mentality: poor Eisinger, was nothing but skin and bone, he would have suffered for a certain time, in the end this would have happened to him anyway. I felt sorry for him, I was sad, but at the same time I understood the situation that this had to happen. I will never forgive myself for this. That I accepted this. This is an awful thing. At the age of 15!
,
During WW2
See text in interview
When they assigned me to work they transferred me to barrack 30, the ones who lived there worked in commando no. 90, in a group of workers. They assigned many young men there, because they taught that it was easy to make skilled laborers, or at least trained men out of the young students. They called us „umschüler”, that is, on retraining. I happened to become a schlosser, so I got to locksmith re-training, which practically meant a huge closed workshop, and there everyone worked. German civilians, English and American airmen prisoners of war, Polish volunteers, French volunteers and civilians, who had been brought there by force. It’s difficult to imagine the chaos that was there. But during work everyone was equal. They assigned me next to a German lather, who called me Franz. I don’t remember anymore what his name was, Herr something, but he never hurt me, I never had any problems with him. Even when the toe-cap and the heels of my boots started to wear out, he showed me where I could find an iron plate, and taught me how to use the drill, and let me make iron toe-caps on my heels, and he even got hold of some nails, so that I could nail it up on the toe-cap, too, so that my shoes wouldn’t wear out. I couldn’t have learned lathing, because I am left-handed, and the lathes were all right-handed. He told me to bring this material, he gave me a caliper square, bring this many and this kind of poles, take them here and here. So I was a kind of do this and do that man. And I was assigned to this man. There were 500 men in the commando, who worked in different buildings on the territory of the factory, they were building the factory of the IG Farben. The IG Farben was building an extremely big chemical factory. And all the 10000 people worked there. [Editor’s note: The IG Farben didn’t only operate one factory, it’s possible that this one was built by 500. In the biggest IG Farben factory, in Monowitz (Auschwitz III) about 10000 people worked in January 1945.]
And I worked in this workshop with a couple of my acquaintances, friends, in commando no. 90. Commando no. 90 had an obercapo, who was a German criminal, and if someone asks me whether the German criminals were good or bad people, I can say it depends. Once the master didn’t give me anything to do, and so to speak I was slacking about. And he sneaked to my back, and beat me up with a thatch. He knew me by name, and said ‘Franz, you know why you got this, don’t you?’ I said ‘I know, because I wasn’t working’ He said ‘No, not because of that. But because you weren’t working, and you didn’t notice that I was coming. What would have happened if an SS had come instead of me, what would have happened to you, what do you think?’ And otherwise he could have beaten me with an oaken cane, because he had one of that, too. He could have broken my arms and legs, because we were completely defenseless. But he told me this. What was I supposed to say?
If someone did a good job in principle, but in reality was friends with the capos [Editor’s note: Capo – concentration camp inmate appointed by the SS to be in charge of a work gang.], got voucher to the Lager mess, where one could buy cigarettes, Majorca tobacco, pickled cabbage – which was vitamin – and mustard, nothing else perhaps. Out of the 500 people in commando no. 90 nobody ever got a voucher like this, but the obercapo kept all the „premier-schein” for himself, then he bought cigarette in the mess of the Lager and exchanged it with the English prisoners of war, who didn’t have enough cigarettes, for the soup that they got at noon. We also got soup, it was called ‘buna’ soup, turnip-tops, nettles cooked in water, it was warm, and very bad, it was tasteless, but we ate it with our leftover bread. And after a while we didn’t get ‘buna’ soup, because the capo regularly exchanged the cigarette with the prisoners of war for the much thicker and better soup which they got, so we got that so called „engländer suppe’, namely the English soup. And this capo was a German criminal. Who, when the SS saw him, he beat barbarously everyone he could reach, and at the same time he didn’t distribute the vouchers, though he could have done it, but exchanged it for soup for us. Otherwise they handled the prisoners of war much better than us. There were Americans, English, Australian, New Zealander, South African, whose airplanes were shot. They were in a POW camp 2 kilometers away, and they worked at the same place we did, only their food and the way they handled them was different.
And I worked in this workshop with a couple of my acquaintances, friends, in commando no. 90. Commando no. 90 had an obercapo, who was a German criminal, and if someone asks me whether the German criminals were good or bad people, I can say it depends. Once the master didn’t give me anything to do, and so to speak I was slacking about. And he sneaked to my back, and beat me up with a thatch. He knew me by name, and said ‘Franz, you know why you got this, don’t you?’ I said ‘I know, because I wasn’t working’ He said ‘No, not because of that. But because you weren’t working, and you didn’t notice that I was coming. What would have happened if an SS had come instead of me, what would have happened to you, what do you think?’ And otherwise he could have beaten me with an oaken cane, because he had one of that, too. He could have broken my arms and legs, because we were completely defenseless. But he told me this. What was I supposed to say?
If someone did a good job in principle, but in reality was friends with the capos [Editor’s note: Capo – concentration camp inmate appointed by the SS to be in charge of a work gang.], got voucher to the Lager mess, where one could buy cigarettes, Majorca tobacco, pickled cabbage – which was vitamin – and mustard, nothing else perhaps. Out of the 500 people in commando no. 90 nobody ever got a voucher like this, but the obercapo kept all the „premier-schein” for himself, then he bought cigarette in the mess of the Lager and exchanged it with the English prisoners of war, who didn’t have enough cigarettes, for the soup that they got at noon. We also got soup, it was called ‘buna’ soup, turnip-tops, nettles cooked in water, it was warm, and very bad, it was tasteless, but we ate it with our leftover bread. And after a while we didn’t get ‘buna’ soup, because the capo regularly exchanged the cigarette with the prisoners of war for the much thicker and better soup which they got, so we got that so called „engländer suppe’, namely the English soup. And this capo was a German criminal. Who, when the SS saw him, he beat barbarously everyone he could reach, and at the same time he didn’t distribute the vouchers, though he could have done it, but exchanged it for soup for us. Otherwise they handled the prisoners of war much better than us. There were Americans, English, Australian, New Zealander, South African, whose airplanes were shot. They were in a POW camp 2 kilometers away, and they worked at the same place we did, only their food and the way they handled them was different.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
As we were walking there the old prisoners shouted us to throw them everything we had in our pocket, because they were going to take them from us anyway. We didn’t do it, we had no idea whether they would take it or not. We didn’t know what to think. But I didn’t have anything valuable on me. And when we got there they took off everyone’s clothes. I was wearing a winter coat and a nice pair of ski boots, even though I never knew how to ski. I was dressed properly, not elegantly, but the way the farmers from Zala dress: with boots, trousers and a sleeve-waistcoat. I had a pair of mittens, but the point is that they took everything, shirt, underwear, socks. I still had the Bocskai hat on my head, and they wanted to take it by force, aggressively. And I opposed it that they shouldn’t take it because it was my school cap and it wouldn’t hurt anyone if I had it. I realized it afterwards why I was so attached to it. Because that gave me the identity, that I belonged to that school, to Nagykanizsa, and to Hungary after all. But then they took it by force. And then they said ‘every Jew was made of a piece of shit’, and then I started bawling. I realized then that I wasn’t Hungarian after all, even though I felt so, I thought so. Then I realized that the way I lived and thought wasn’t real, and that I had to face that I belonged to another ethnic group. My original environment didn’t love me, they handed me over to the Germans who stripped me of my clothes, cut my hair bald, they even cut off me what was barely there, because at the age of 15 there wasn’t much to cut. I didn’t even shave at that time.
They took us to a shower, where there was water for about 2 and a half seconds, everyone had to wash quickly. They gave us soap with the inscription R.I.F. I found it out later that it meant Reine Jüdische Fett.[Pure Jewish Fat] It was made out of pure Jewish fat, so it was cooked out of humans. [Editor’s note: According to our present information soap made of human fat is a legend based on misinterpretation. In the Polish ghettos the German occupiers distributed bars of soap with the inscription ‘RIF’. The Jews in the ghetto interpreted it as ‘Rein jüdisches Fett’, namely ‘pure Jewish fat’, and that’s how the belief that the Germans made soap out of Jewish bodies spread. In reality RIF means ‘Reichstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung’.]. Then cold water for a couple moments, then running across the free ground, to the supplier barrack, where they gave us each a pair of underwear, shirt, as it came. With striped pants and striped jacket. Nothing else. We didn’t get any shoes. But they did take ours. They lined up everyone, 400 of us stood there barefooted. The SS came and asked ‘where are your shoes?’ It turned out that they had forgotten to order wooden shoes for this many people, they had only ordered the clothes. He beat up the prisoner who was responsible for this in front of us, and then he said that everyone should put on his own shoes. My former schoolmate, a certain Gyuri Nandor took my ski boots under my nose. I was very angry because of this, but I got a pair of little bit smaller, but brand new boots. There were all kinds of shoes, good ones, bad ones, boots and high legged shoes and normals shoes, and everyone took whatever hecould lay hands on. I hung on to the boots, and the leather shoes were life saving, because the wooden shoe was something cruel. Those whose leather shoes wore out got wooden shoes, and very few of them survived.
In the bath we got a tattoo, too. The prisoners tattooed us, the old prisoners. By the time we got the striped clothes we were already tattooed. I got number 186889. So I don’t have an A-B number, because after the 15th May they recorded every Jew with A or B. They started with one and numbered until 20000. And when there were 20000 A-s, they started the B-s until 20000 as well. But they didn’t get to 20000, because in the meantime January came, and they evacuated us. I got very exasperated that I am not a cow after all, to get marked, but the one who tattooed me told me that I shouldn’t regret this, because it was almost a life insurance. Those who weren’t tattooed got to the gas chamber more often than those who were tattooed. Because that meant that they worked somewhere.
We lined up again, and they took us to the quarantine block, which was block number 44. There were 56 blocks, and the auxiliary buildings, the showers and toilet. In block 44 there wasn’t any bathroom or toilet. During the two weeks of quarantine they didn’t do anything but taught us how to line up for the roll-call. And they also taught us that if we saw a German we had to take off our cap five steps before meeting him, and after five steps we had to walk past him in stand-to, however faint we felt. And that at the counting there was line-up, and that lasted for a long time, because there were about 10000 people, and until they had counted all of them, none of the blocks could move. Everyone had to stand. They were obsessed with continual roll-call. And with the way we had to eat the food. The instructor, the block ältester [Editor’s note: German for block elder, the prisoner in charge of the block/barrack/] happened to be a German criminal, on his clothes there was a green triangle pointing down, which was usually the mark of the criminals. In our block he had such power, that he almost had the power of life and death over us. His and all block commanders’ superior was the Lager ältester [German for camp elder] –, who was also a German criminal, and always wore nice polished boots.
There weren’t any knives, there wasn’t any cutlery. They told us that everyone was supposed to get a quarter of a loaf of bread every day, half a loaf, which was oblong, twice a week. They made it out of sawdust, bran, and who knows what. It was terrible, but when someone was hungry, it was good. They also said that we would only get the ‘zulag’, the additional food, if we worked. This meant a spoonful of ‘hitlerbacon’, that is, marmalade. If not marmalade, then black pudding, and if not black pudding, then margarine. The margarine, and everything else was the size of a cube sugar. They gave these out in the morning, one ate it or not. That was everyone’s own business. They gave half a liter of coffee, made of caffeine substitute of course, and I think it was full with bromide. [Editor’s note: There is no factual evidence of administering sedatives (bromide), though many from different places affirmed that the prisoners were given bromide. But it is probable that bromide wasn’t even needed: the small amount of food, the beating, the cold or the heat, the little sleep and the terrible work exhausted the prisoners very quickly and bore down their resistance.] Nobody felt any lust, so to speak. And they strictly forbid drinking water. We were allowed to wash, but not to drink. It was placarded on huge placards that a ‘sip of water could cost your life’.
They made all the Hungarian Jews who arrived to Auschwitz write a letter, a preprinted German postcard. It was written on it ‘I am in Waldsee – this was resort in Switzerland – I am fine, greetings to everyone’, and we could sign it, address it, and send it home. [Editor’s note: They required of the deported Jews, many of whom the gassed immediately, to write home that they were doing well, indicating a place-name, Waldsee, made up by them.] Those who were in the gas chamber 5 minutes later also wrote it. But they gave one to everyone so that we would let people know that we were alive. In the Lager [German for camp] where I was they also distributed the Waldsee cards, and I wrote one to one of my neighbors who lived in Nagykanizsa, next to our bakery. And my mother also wrote from where she was, from the women’s camp. At that time they had taken her with her commando to the StammLager, she went to work from there. [Editor‘s note: StammLager: Auschwitz I, because the Hungarian deportees didn‘t arrive to Auschwitz but to Birkenau.] And the neighbors got these cards. They knew my father’s address on forced labor, and they sent him both versions in an envelope. Unfortunately I don’t have either one of them, because at that time nobody thought about keeping them. They would be historical relics now. And my father wrote a reply addressed to Waldsee, because when the neighbors got the cards they were told that if someone wanted to reply should write in German, put it in an envelope and send it to the address of the Budapest Jewish community. Because these cards were brought to Hungary with a German military van to the Jewish leaders appointed by the Germans, and they had to send them out. And they sent them out and collected the replies, which arrived. When the German car brought cards again, grabbed the replies, put them in the car and took them. And in the Auschwitz stammlager they brought out these letters one day at roll-call and distributed them after the list. My mother got the reply. I don’t know of anyone else besides her who got a reply. Because most of them had been killed by that time. In the letter it was written that everything was alright etc, and my father wrote in German that Feri had also written. From this my mother found out that I was alive somewhere, she didn’t know where, but that I was alive. She knew this already sometime at the end of June, beginning of July.
But from the end of August I also knew that my mother was there somewhere, because even though it was strictly forbidden to send word from one camp to the other, and they sentenced to death and hung those who did it, I also saw a lot of hangings, news still spread. They took the women prisoners from Auschwitz to work somewhere by truck in the morning, and brought them back in the evening, and that was to the east from our camp, too. So the women knew that there was a men’s camp. And the route on which we went to work crossed the Krakow-Auschwitz main road. A brave woman dropped a paper ball at the crossroad, and an even braver man bent down and picked it up. And he took the paper to the Lager and it went round. It was written in Hungarian, and among many other names it was written, I recognized my aunt’s handwriting, that Erzsebet Eisinger and Terez Leicht were looking for Jeno Eisinger and Ferenc Leicht. We knew out of this that they lived, otherwise any other news. But the fact that someone lived in August didn’t mean anything among those circumstances.
They took us to a shower, where there was water for about 2 and a half seconds, everyone had to wash quickly. They gave us soap with the inscription R.I.F. I found it out later that it meant Reine Jüdische Fett.[Pure Jewish Fat] It was made out of pure Jewish fat, so it was cooked out of humans. [Editor’s note: According to our present information soap made of human fat is a legend based on misinterpretation. In the Polish ghettos the German occupiers distributed bars of soap with the inscription ‘RIF’. The Jews in the ghetto interpreted it as ‘Rein jüdisches Fett’, namely ‘pure Jewish fat’, and that’s how the belief that the Germans made soap out of Jewish bodies spread. In reality RIF means ‘Reichstelle für Industrielle Fettversorgung’.]. Then cold water for a couple moments, then running across the free ground, to the supplier barrack, where they gave us each a pair of underwear, shirt, as it came. With striped pants and striped jacket. Nothing else. We didn’t get any shoes. But they did take ours. They lined up everyone, 400 of us stood there barefooted. The SS came and asked ‘where are your shoes?’ It turned out that they had forgotten to order wooden shoes for this many people, they had only ordered the clothes. He beat up the prisoner who was responsible for this in front of us, and then he said that everyone should put on his own shoes. My former schoolmate, a certain Gyuri Nandor took my ski boots under my nose. I was very angry because of this, but I got a pair of little bit smaller, but brand new boots. There were all kinds of shoes, good ones, bad ones, boots and high legged shoes and normals shoes, and everyone took whatever hecould lay hands on. I hung on to the boots, and the leather shoes were life saving, because the wooden shoe was something cruel. Those whose leather shoes wore out got wooden shoes, and very few of them survived.
In the bath we got a tattoo, too. The prisoners tattooed us, the old prisoners. By the time we got the striped clothes we were already tattooed. I got number 186889. So I don’t have an A-B number, because after the 15th May they recorded every Jew with A or B. They started with one and numbered until 20000. And when there were 20000 A-s, they started the B-s until 20000 as well. But they didn’t get to 20000, because in the meantime January came, and they evacuated us. I got very exasperated that I am not a cow after all, to get marked, but the one who tattooed me told me that I shouldn’t regret this, because it was almost a life insurance. Those who weren’t tattooed got to the gas chamber more often than those who were tattooed. Because that meant that they worked somewhere.
We lined up again, and they took us to the quarantine block, which was block number 44. There were 56 blocks, and the auxiliary buildings, the showers and toilet. In block 44 there wasn’t any bathroom or toilet. During the two weeks of quarantine they didn’t do anything but taught us how to line up for the roll-call. And they also taught us that if we saw a German we had to take off our cap five steps before meeting him, and after five steps we had to walk past him in stand-to, however faint we felt. And that at the counting there was line-up, and that lasted for a long time, because there were about 10000 people, and until they had counted all of them, none of the blocks could move. Everyone had to stand. They were obsessed with continual roll-call. And with the way we had to eat the food. The instructor, the block ältester [Editor’s note: German for block elder, the prisoner in charge of the block/barrack/] happened to be a German criminal, on his clothes there was a green triangle pointing down, which was usually the mark of the criminals. In our block he had such power, that he almost had the power of life and death over us. His and all block commanders’ superior was the Lager ältester [German for camp elder] –, who was also a German criminal, and always wore nice polished boots.
There weren’t any knives, there wasn’t any cutlery. They told us that everyone was supposed to get a quarter of a loaf of bread every day, half a loaf, which was oblong, twice a week. They made it out of sawdust, bran, and who knows what. It was terrible, but when someone was hungry, it was good. They also said that we would only get the ‘zulag’, the additional food, if we worked. This meant a spoonful of ‘hitlerbacon’, that is, marmalade. If not marmalade, then black pudding, and if not black pudding, then margarine. The margarine, and everything else was the size of a cube sugar. They gave these out in the morning, one ate it or not. That was everyone’s own business. They gave half a liter of coffee, made of caffeine substitute of course, and I think it was full with bromide. [Editor’s note: There is no factual evidence of administering sedatives (bromide), though many from different places affirmed that the prisoners were given bromide. But it is probable that bromide wasn’t even needed: the small amount of food, the beating, the cold or the heat, the little sleep and the terrible work exhausted the prisoners very quickly and bore down their resistance.] Nobody felt any lust, so to speak. And they strictly forbid drinking water. We were allowed to wash, but not to drink. It was placarded on huge placards that a ‘sip of water could cost your life’.
They made all the Hungarian Jews who arrived to Auschwitz write a letter, a preprinted German postcard. It was written on it ‘I am in Waldsee – this was resort in Switzerland – I am fine, greetings to everyone’, and we could sign it, address it, and send it home. [Editor’s note: They required of the deported Jews, many of whom the gassed immediately, to write home that they were doing well, indicating a place-name, Waldsee, made up by them.] Those who were in the gas chamber 5 minutes later also wrote it. But they gave one to everyone so that we would let people know that we were alive. In the Lager [German for camp] where I was they also distributed the Waldsee cards, and I wrote one to one of my neighbors who lived in Nagykanizsa, next to our bakery. And my mother also wrote from where she was, from the women’s camp. At that time they had taken her with her commando to the StammLager, she went to work from there. [Editor‘s note: StammLager: Auschwitz I, because the Hungarian deportees didn‘t arrive to Auschwitz but to Birkenau.] And the neighbors got these cards. They knew my father’s address on forced labor, and they sent him both versions in an envelope. Unfortunately I don’t have either one of them, because at that time nobody thought about keeping them. They would be historical relics now. And my father wrote a reply addressed to Waldsee, because when the neighbors got the cards they were told that if someone wanted to reply should write in German, put it in an envelope and send it to the address of the Budapest Jewish community. Because these cards were brought to Hungary with a German military van to the Jewish leaders appointed by the Germans, and they had to send them out. And they sent them out and collected the replies, which arrived. When the German car brought cards again, grabbed the replies, put them in the car and took them. And in the Auschwitz stammlager they brought out these letters one day at roll-call and distributed them after the list. My mother got the reply. I don’t know of anyone else besides her who got a reply. Because most of them had been killed by that time. In the letter it was written that everything was alright etc, and my father wrote in German that Feri had also written. From this my mother found out that I was alive somewhere, she didn’t know where, but that I was alive. She knew this already sometime at the end of June, beginning of July.
But from the end of August I also knew that my mother was there somewhere, because even though it was strictly forbidden to send word from one camp to the other, and they sentenced to death and hung those who did it, I also saw a lot of hangings, news still spread. They took the women prisoners from Auschwitz to work somewhere by truck in the morning, and brought them back in the evening, and that was to the east from our camp, too. So the women knew that there was a men’s camp. And the route on which we went to work crossed the Krakow-Auschwitz main road. A brave woman dropped a paper ball at the crossroad, and an even braver man bent down and picked it up. And he took the paper to the Lager and it went round. It was written in Hungarian, and among many other names it was written, I recognized my aunt’s handwriting, that Erzsebet Eisinger and Terez Leicht were looking for Jeno Eisinger and Ferenc Leicht. We knew out of this that they lived, otherwise any other news. But the fact that someone lived in August didn’t mean anything among those circumstances.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
On the 29th November the UNO voted that they would divide Palestine in two, and the Jewish state would be established there. All the Zionist movements and the Jewish communities, at that time still united, organized a meeting, a celebration at the Erkel Theatre (which was Municipal Theatre at that time), so that everyone would hear the news and rejoice. At that time we had already learnt to sing in Hebrew we had started to learn to speak Hebrew. The religious traditions were only kept by those movements which belonged to the religious party. My movement was strongly social democrat, so much so that there were pictures of Stalin and Lenin on the walls. There was an even more leftist movement than ours, it was completely red, it was called Hashomer Hatzair, 'The Young Watchman' [Editor’s note: The left-wing Zionist youth organization was created by unifying various Zionist groups of Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1910s. It developed its own educational and kibbutz system. In Hungary, the organization appeared towards the end of the 1920s and soon recruited 1,000-2,000 members.] There was another social democrat movement, but it was of different orientation, they were called Makkabi Hatzair. [Editor’s note: Leftist Zionist youth association, which appeared in Hungary in the second half of the 1930s, mainly in Jewish higher education institutes.] Besides these there was the Hanoar Hatzioni [Zionist youth organization, part of the General Democratic Zionist Block. One third of organized young Zionists belonged to it in Hungary.] and there was the Bnei Akiba, the sons of [Rabbi] Akiba, who were religious. [Editor’s note: The youth ‘division’ of the religious-Zionist Mizrachi association. These young people were one third, one quarter of the Hungarian Zionists.
This was like an irradiation for me, and right there and then I joined one of the youth Zionist organizations of social democrat character called Habonim Dror. They told me in this movement that it wasn’t enough if one kept talking and stood at home, but that we should move in and declass ourselves deliberately. Namely to learn manual labor and practice it, because they did not need as many intellectuals as there were among Jews. I joined the movement, I said good-bye to my mother and said that from then on I would act according to my convictions.
Then I went to Pest for 6 weeks’ training, to a seminar. The Zionist movement was still legal at that time, we were in a Jewish villa, its owner had been killed. We lived there, too, there was about 40 of us, 20 boys on bunk beds in one room. There were girls there, too, they were equal with us, moreover they were often the cleverer, they were often the bosses. Otherwise very famous people taught us, psychologist Ferenc Merei lectured to us and Albert Molnar, who was an excellent social democratic social scientist. The Joint supported us, just like they had supported my parents at the beginning, but they rather supported movements than private persons.
After 6 weeks I went to Szeged, to Szeged-Algyo. There was also a villa, where there was an orchard, and they taught us how to look after fruit trees. There was a gardener who knew how to do it, and he taught us how to cut back the vines and fruit trees, and how to do the agricultural, horticultural work. And I was there until the end of 1947, when one of the inheritors of the villa turned up, and he sold the villa and the garden to someone and we had to leave. Then I came to Budapest with the group, which was broken up again. They sent me to a villa, where I didn’t have to learn what I had learned in Szeged, but I became a mechanic apprentice. I stayed there, I lived there, and I was a mechanic apprentice until the beginning of winter 1948. In the meantime I visited my parents regularly, and because I didn’t have money for a winter coat my parents had a winter coat made for me.
Then I went to Pest for 6 weeks’ training, to a seminar. The Zionist movement was still legal at that time, we were in a Jewish villa, its owner had been killed. We lived there, too, there was about 40 of us, 20 boys on bunk beds in one room. There were girls there, too, they were equal with us, moreover they were often the cleverer, they were often the bosses. Otherwise very famous people taught us, psychologist Ferenc Merei lectured to us and Albert Molnar, who was an excellent social democratic social scientist. The Joint supported us, just like they had supported my parents at the beginning, but they rather supported movements than private persons.
After 6 weeks I went to Szeged, to Szeged-Algyo. There was also a villa, where there was an orchard, and they taught us how to look after fruit trees. There was a gardener who knew how to do it, and he taught us how to cut back the vines and fruit trees, and how to do the agricultural, horticultural work. And I was there until the end of 1947, when one of the inheritors of the villa turned up, and he sold the villa and the garden to someone and we had to leave. Then I came to Budapest with the group, which was broken up again. They sent me to a villa, where I didn’t have to learn what I had learned in Szeged, but I became a mechanic apprentice. I stayed there, I lived there, and I was a mechanic apprentice until the beginning of winter 1948. In the meantime I visited my parents regularly, and because I didn’t have money for a winter coat my parents had a winter coat made for me.
My parents joined the communist party at that time and they wanted me to join a leftist organization called MADISZ [Hungarian Democratic Youth Organization].
But I was still very Jewish. I don’t know if you can imagine how confused a 16 year old boy can be, who had had such experiences. I simply didn’t know what to do. At the beginning of 1946 a young man called Frici Lusztig (he is now the director of the Safed Hungarian Museum in Israel) came to Nagykanizsa. This Frici Lusztig was the organizer of a leftist Zionist movement, who called together all the Jews he could in Nagykanizsa and explained that not those were the Zionists who wore a badge, but those who were willing to risk their lives so that the Jewish state would be built. At that time it was called the ‘national home’. Because in the original ‘Zionist Declaration’ it is written ‘a national home guaranteed by international law’ [Editor’s note: The interviewee refers to the Balfour declaration.] They didn’t speak about a state at all. And he explained that if someone was Jewish and felt Jewish should take part in this and help. This was like an irradiation for me, and right there and then I joined one of the youth Zionist organizations of social democrat character called Habonim Dror. They told me in this movement that it wasn’t enough if one kept talking and stood at home, but that we should move in and declass ourselves deliberately. Namely to learn manual labor and practice it, because they did not need as many intellectuals as there were among Jews. I joined the movement, I said good-bye to my mother and said that from then on I would act according to my convictions.