In November 1944 my sister Livia was taken from where she was, from Stutthoff, to Bergen-Belsen. I know that the allies' army advanced and surrounded Germany, and they started to evacuate the prisoners from different factories, and then she was taken to Bergen-Belsen. Until the liberation, I had absolutely no news from her.
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Displaying 46351 - 46380 of 50826 results
Gotterer Borbala Piroska
There were women prisoners, Jews from Czechoslovakia and Poland, who had to show the way for the new comers. I and my younger sister, Edit, were taken to some place and my elder sister, Livia, was immediately taken somewhere else, to a armament factory, where bombs were made, in the town Stutthoff, in Poland; there she had the number 39401. She was assigned there and that's where she remained. She made bombs, the poor soul, and the gas she worked with ate up her organism, her bones, and she suffered the consequences of that all her life.
I know we arrived to Auschwitz, Oswiecim it was called, at some time, after an hour or two. They told us we had to get off the train and leave everything there, although there was nothing to leave behind. I kissed everybody and I didn't know it was for the last time, and we got off. Mengele and all his curs were there, may they still be cursed, and they lined us up. And there they separated us, they separated us immediately, from mother, father and my little brother Otto. I think Otto went with my father, I don't know for sure to this day, because I never heard of him again after that. My father never had a missing tooth, he didn't know what a headache was, he had never been ill in his life until he got there.
Before we got to Kosice the train stopped and I asked him where we were and what was going on, and he said: ‘we are 10 km away from Kosice, and the SS guard waits for you at Kosice, you will be turned over to the SS. That’s it.’ And then, as a kind and decent and merciful man that he was, I say that to this day, he left his rifle next to me in the wagon and said: ‘Look, I will let my rifle here.’ He wasn’t allowed to leave his rifle, he was a militiaman. ‘I’ll go, he said, up to the last train wagon and we will stay here for at least an hour or two, and there’s nobody, they are all with me in the last wagon.’ He did anything but telling me outright to run where I wanted, that’s why he left his rifle, so that I could run. And I didn’t. I said, how could I leave my parents and leave alone? Nobody could come with me and even if I ran away, we were already in Czechoslovakia, I didn’t know a word of Czech. Whe he came back and saw me there, he said: ‘Why didn’t you run away?’, he said: ‘I gave you the opportunity to run.’ I couldn’t, it wasn’t possible and God wanted it like that and that’s how it happened. The guard changed, we were turned over to the SS, and from there on I don’t know how much farther we went on, because the doors weren’t opened after that. Until then, we traveled with the doors of the wagon open.
I think it took us five days to get to Auschwitz. We went in a cattle wagon, but there were no chairs, absolutely nothing to sit on, very little place, no food, no water, no toilet. He, the boy, was very nice. I remember I looked him up when I came home, I wanted to thank him at least for his help, but I didn’t find him. He brought us a bucket, a clean one and a dirty one and he stopped the train where it was possible, he took care and gave us water at least, because we couldn’t get off the train. I don’t know where he got a peasant’s bench from, and my mother had that bench to sit on, and we could at least sit down, not stand the whole way.
We left everything there, we couldn’t take anything with us, no food, no jewelry, no coats, they said we wouldn’t need anything; they knew why we wouldn’t need anything because the gas chamber waited for us there. There was a militiaman there, a Hungarian boy from Zabala, very kind, Goncz, who was the leader of the train which took us to Auschwitz, and he told me: ‘Don’t be afraid, Miss’ we were terribly worried, you can imagine the situation, my brothers were in the army and we were all going where we were going. The told me that the young would be taken to labor and that if we made it there, we still had a chance. He was right and at least he comforted me.
They did that for a month, and when they finished the enquiries, we were taken to Auschwitz, I don’t know the exact date, the 10th of June I think it was.
I know there was another woman, a doctor, whom they took there and I saw her when she came out, I was still a young woman at the time, and I got sick from the fright when I saw that woman coming out of that room so badly beaten; my father had to take me to a doctor, an acquaintance from the ghetto there, who gave me some sedatives. It was the first time I got sick because of all these things I knew were going to happen.
There was another operation in Reghin, which was meant to rip us off, some SS soldiers came together with Hungarian policemen, that I don’t know fore sure, and they built up a room and they started making enquiries there. And they enquired, who was rich, where the money was, they tortured people, they did everything a SS soldier did to make them confess where was the fortune and to make them give it up, what factories they had and where. For example, the director who was my father’s colleague at that factory was taken there with his daughter and they abused the daughter in front of her father to force him to say where the money was. But his daughter was a very smart woman, already a woman, and very decent, and she didn’t speak at all. The money is still in a bank in Switzerland today, because he made the deposit under somebody else’s name, for fear the SS would find that money: Irina Magyary, a teacher from Covasna who was their friend.
The SS was already there, the SS had taken over us from Sfantu Gheorghe. And some people from the convoy slowed down, and the SS militaries started to yell: ‘Loss, loss!’ [‘Faster, faster!’ in German]. They took everything from us, the clothes, the jewelry and the money and all we had.
We were all gathered there in the farming school, together with those from Sfantu Gheorghe. This farming school was still in construction, it wasn’t ready, it had no windows, it had no doors, it had no stairs, we had to go up to the first floor on a board, which was very difficult for my mother and other elderly persons. It was miserable. And we slept on the ground, one next to the other, packed like sardines, without water, without food. We had food, thanks to that soldier who took everything from the pantry and put it in the cart; my poor younger brother, Otto, and my father carried everything along so that we wouldn’t be left without food, they wanted to carry the food as long as they could. There was nothing, no sanitation, what can I say, filth. We stayed there like that for a week. There were Jews from all Haromszek (Trei Scaune) county, as it was called back then, the present Covasna county, even from other places. We stayed there for a week until they gathered the Jews from all over the county and then we were transferred to Reghin.
When they came to take us out of the house, Mr. Uhl, who lived next door, came and went to the militia man and shook him and said: ‘I am a German and you want to take these people away in the name of all Germans? But as a German I say that they are the best and the most honest people and that you can’t take them away.’ That he said, I remember, in the last moments when we were forced to get on the train. And the militiaman said this: ‘I am a militiaman. I receive orders only from my superiors and I can’t do anything else because I received this order.’ Mr. Uhl had courage, no one else had courage. He was brave enough to come there and shake that militiaman to leave us alone. He was a very kind and honest man. But all others helped us as well, they put in the cart everything we had in the pantry, all the food, flour and lard and everything we had, and a counterpane and a pillow and everything we could carry and they transferred us to Sfantu Gheorghe.
In the morning, on May 4th 1944, the military police came and took us out of the house. They were Hungarian soldiers who were conscripted at the time. And one of them was a boy who knew me very well from the office where I had worked. The militiaman behaved, he told us to carry along all the food we could because they wouldn’t feed us, and that he couldn’t say more except the fact that we were taken to the ghetto and that we wouldn’t receive any food there, and that we could starve if we didn’t bring any with us.
It was in the spring of 1944, in May, on May 3rd, in the evening. This friend of my brother’s came during the night, it was after 10, and showed us a paper which summoned him to the city hall: he had to be at 5 o’clock at the city hall with the horses because he had to take part in the transportation of Jews. And he came to tell us that if we wanted to, he would take us over the border, he knew the roads very well, and he would take us to Romania. He asked us if we had anybody in Romania to go to, if not, he would take us to his relatives. He was an extremely good man. Can you imagine that he risked his life with this, but my father said: ‘I don’t want to risk your life because you are a young and decent man and heaven forbid something should happen to you, and I don’t want to risk my family’s life either, because if we are caught there, we will be executed o the spot. ’ Whoever was caught at the border was shot. We didn’t go and we lost the opportunity and it was a wrong choice to make, because it would have been better for us to go: we could have gone to Romania, there were Jewish institutions there and maybe they would have helped us. We had relatives in Timisoara, but they too had been evicted from their home by the legionaries [13]. So we stayed home.
We had just one nuisance in Covasna. We stayed in the house together with a kindergarten teacher, and she was a big Hitlerite, an elderly woman. There were two apartments, they lived in one apartment and we lived in the other. But she was so ill willed, she caused quite a row, said that we didn’t leave her alone there…and she went and complained until she had us kicked out of the house. But my father had a friend, a lawyer, whose mother had a big house, and he said: ‘move to my mother’s and live there in peace’. So we moved there.
I had found a job in the meantime, at a lawyer, on the black market, who hired me as a secretary and typist, and who gave me a salary better than the one the county chief had, it was such a salary he gave me between 1942 and 1944. He knew that we were in an extraordinarily difficult situation and he had a lot of money, he collected a lot of money, and he trusted me and let me and not some other employee – because he had two more employees - handle the pay office; he trusted me and wanted to help me. He sometimes paid a fine for me, every month, to his friend, the county chief, so that I could remain in his service, because I was a Jew. He was an extraordinarily kind man. After the war ended, he went to Sweden.
From 1942 to 1944 we stayed in Covasna. It was a so-called house arrest, that’s what we had, forced residence, until the police deported us. It was the same house where we had stayed before. We couldn’t go anywhere: we could go out of the house, but not out of the town. We were good friends with Ovidiu, the prefect there. And when we were sent home from Budapest, his first question was: Did they hurt us there? That man was a real human being, and very kind. And nothing bad happened to us in Covasna, we just had house arrest and that was all. But my brothers, Emil and Francisc, who had been drafted in the army before we left for Budapest, were brought back to Covasna and then again they were taken in the army. They weren’t soldiers, they were in the fatigue parties, at forced labor for Jews. That was in 1942.
Ignac had an acquaintance, a good friend of a counselor who was an important person there, at the Ministry of Justice, and that person could solve what was almost impossible, he arranged that we wouldn’t be sent to Auschwitz after three weeks. The rest of the people there, the other Jews who were found without approval to stay in Budapest were sent immediately, in 1942, to Auschwitz. But rumor had it, that Hungarians didn’t actually want to send Jews to Auschwitz, they wanted them to stay. They enforced all sorts of punishments in return: they confiscated firms, houses, radios, but they didn’t want to let the people be deported. [Note: Piroska refers here to the anti-Jewish laws in Hungary.] [11] And we stayed there for three weeks, Horthy still ruled and he didn’t allow us to be deported and then my uncle arranged with this counselor that we would be sent back to Covasna.
It was a separate room for the Jewish prisoners and another for those who were thieves or who know what else. And there was a poor girl, who had run from Czechoslovakia, who was also in hiding. But they had found her, and I don’t know how, through some miracle, she had been kept there for over a year, and she was praying to God to keep her there, where we were too, in ‘tombhaz’, even in that jail [Editor’s note: the actual meaning of the word in Hungarian is block], only not to be taken to Auschwitz. That’s where I first heard about Auschwitz. And she knew many things. Her parents, her family were executed there, and she was left all alone. I heard those things from her. But, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t believe that such things could happen to us as well. I thought they happened to her, in Czechoslovakia.
We stayed in Budapest for half a year, we stayed until fall, but we couldn’t get an approval to stay in the city of Budapest, and without that one wasn’t allowed to stay there. I don’t know how the police tracked us down that we were Jews and that we stayed in Budapest without the necessary approvals. The problem wasn’t that we came from another country, but from another city. At first we were taken to jail. We stayed there for about three weeks, not in the actual jail, but we were forced to stay where all those without their papers in order had to crowd in.
The Russians defeated the Germans and the German defensive and the Russian offensive began. So the political life changed, but we didn’t feel that change because the hortists [those who made common cause with Horthy’s regime] [10], the Hungarian authority remained Germany’s allies.
And I made up this plan in 1942, to go and hide, to move to Budapest, we had all our relatives there, there were my father’s siblings, my mother’s siblings, and we wouldn’t have been so alone. I thought we might hide better there, we wouldn’t have been so conspicuous. We were too visible in Covasna, and at that time Jews had to hide. So then we moved to Budapest. My father’s brother, Ignac, also had a house in Budapest, but it wasn’t empty, but he had a good friend who had a very beautiful house, which was temporarily uninhabited and he didn’t want to rent it or give it to anyone who wasn’t a Jew. So they settled that we would go in that house and live there. We went, it was a very beautiful house with a garden, in the center of the city. It was located where the embassies were. It was close to some movie studios, it was a nice place. The rent wasn’t a problem, we paid what we could and wanted. And because it was very beautiful, we accepted. And in the spring of 1942 we received the approval and moved to Budapest.
My parents also felt anti-Semitism, in 1940. People were laid off at the factory where my father worked. The Hungarian authorities forced it, they were Hitler’s allies and they pushed for these dismissals; and my father was laid off from the factory where he had a good job and a nice salary; I got fired too, my brothers as well, and Emil and Francisc were drafted in the army.
So I went home and in 1940 I got a job there, in Covasna. I started working something at the forest ward, but I had only worked for two months I think, when the Vienna dictate came and northern Transylvania was given to the Hungarians and those offices were closed down.
The first time I came across anti-Semitism was when I wasn’t allowed to go to school. When I was 17 years old, in 1937, numerus clausus was enforced. I would have liked to go, but I saw it was impossible. My parents, what were they to do… it bothered them, of course. I wanted to go to Timisoara, at the convent school, the French Institute, but one couldn’t go there either.
In 1942 a delegation came at his office, and usually if there were delegations from abroad my father attended them, because he spoke German perfectly, he had gone to high school in Vienna. And then again a group of three men came but my father told us at home that he didn’t know why they came because they weren’t talking about commerce; instead, they wanted to see everything there was, everything that belonged to the factory and the garden. They wanted to go to the forest, to see the factory. They had come all the way from Germany, but back then Nazism was already in power in Germany, and Hitler already ruled. They wanted to see the estate, the fortunes, probably to get their hands on them. Although my father had been fired in 1940, and the liquidation of his position lasted until 1941, he remained in good relations with the management of the factory, and that is why they asked him to attend that delegation.
My best friend was a German girl, Clara Uhl. She was about my age and we lived close to each other. And her father, a German, Mr. Uhl, Austin Uhl, was my father’s best friend. He wasn’t from Brasov, but from the actual Germany, from Bayern. And I remember, he was a very honest man. And since my father couldn’t make friends with his Jewish colleagues at work because they were dishonest he felt more close to him because he was honest. He was a German, but an honest one. My parents were good friends with all our Hungarian and German neighbors. My father was like that, he was an honest man. And I’m not saying that there weren’t honest Jews as well, but there, in his office, there weren’t any.
My mother liked politics and my brother enjoyed reading terribly. I sometimes heard him read about Iuliu Maniu [Editor’s note: Maniu Iuliu (1873–1953) was a Romanian politician who served three terms as a Prime Minister, being a member of the National Peasants' Party.] and about Nicolae Iorga [Editor’s note: Iorga Nicolae (1871–1940) was a historian, university professor, literary critic, memorialist, playwright, poet, and Romanian politician. He served as a member of parliament, as President of the post-World War I National Assembly, as minister, and (1931-32) as Prime Minister. He was co-founder (in 1910) the Democratic Nationalist Party and was ultimately assassinated by fascist legionnaire commandos.], about them, about what they did in the parliament. I only remembered the names. After he graduated from high school, my brother Emil got a job in Cluj; he also worked at a timber factory that belonged to Groedl, at the lumber station. My brothers learnt this forestry trade from my father.
Armin, born in 1870, was a timber trader and he lived in Debrecen; I don’t know where he got the wood from, he was buying it and selling it. He too was married, but I don’t remember his wife’s name; he had however four children, Rozalia, who died in 1986, Maria, who lived and died in Debrecen, Julia, who died in a concentration camp, and Iosif, who ran to Spain and from there to USA. He has children there, but I don’t know more. One of his children, Gyuri is his name, works at an astrology institute somewhere, I don’t know where. Armin lived until World War I, and he died of natural death, from sickness, in 1918. My father also had a sister, Charlotte, who was married to Sandor Markbreit. Charlotte lived in Karczag. They had a son, Geza, who was married to a woman called Maria.
Hungary
My father, Solomon Lowi, had two brothers, Ignac and Armin. Ignac, my father’s younger brother, went to high school in Vienna; he was a grain dealer, and he was a very well off man. He lived in Kalocsa, a city in Hungary, and he was married to Ella, who was a housewife; he had three children, Agneta, born in 1923, Edit, born in 1920 and who died in 2000, and Tibor. Ignac was very religious, he regularly went to the temple in Budapest, where he was specially invited. He died in 1984 and his wife in 1981.
Hungary