I observed the Jewish holidays during communism. I was at U.F.D. and when the autumn holidays came, I dressed up, I went to our secretary, who was our leader and I said: 'I have a Jewish holiday, the biggest holiday, Yom Kippur, I couldn't celebrate it in the concentration camp and I want to celebrate it at home.' 'Go home nicely, and go to church and come back when the holidays are over.' This secretary, Magdalena Vas was her name, was very nice. She had been a colleague of my younger sister, Edit, and she knew me since then.
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Gotterer Borbala Piroska
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When my husband was deported he was young, he wasn't into politics, and when he came back, he was labeled as a communist, although he wasn't a communist, he was a social-democrat. He was a party member, and for a while he was a member of the World Jewish Council, he was the leading member from Sfantu Gheorghe, and when the party purification [17] was made, they found out and kicked him out of the party. The one who kicked him out was the biggest fascist, Magyari was his name, I knew him personally, he was part of the Hungarian fascist party that deported us.
Romania
After the forests were nationalized [16] my husband was first hired at a coop, there was no state commerce back then, there were coops. At the coop he was director at the biggest unit in Sfantu Gheorghe for a while, and after that he worked for a while at O.Cl [The Commercial Organization] in commerce, at a commercial unit. When the state commerce was introduced he was commercial director.
I worked at the community in Sfantu Gheorghe for a year, but after that I wanted to make some money and you couldn't do that at the community. And then I wanted to go to the textiles factory from Sfantu Gheorghe, because the director there was our godfather at the wedding. He told me to go to the factory because he would hire me. And when I got to the factory he signed all the hiring papers, and when I got out of the gate a woman from U.F.D. [Uniunea Femeilor Democrate, ‘The Democratic Women’s Union’] and told me I was taken out of the production and that from the next day I would work at UFD. I didn't work in the factory for one day, and that’s how I got to UFD. I was an accountant, a cashier and a secretary. When I was in UFD, a lady from Bucharest came and wanted to take me to the Women's Central Committee in Bucharest, but I wanted to stay with my sister, who was all alone, and with my husband, I didn't want to move from Sfantu Gheorghe and I said that. She said she understood and she didn't promote me.
He had come on the same train from Timisoara to Sfantu Gheorghe as me, but we didn't meet on the train, I tracked him down after that. We knew each other well, since 1938, from Covasna, he was adopted by some business partners of my father's. We went together to Sfantu Gheorghe, we thought we would receive some more substantial help from the community, but they didn't give us anything, there was no hostel made for us. In Arad there was a very beautiful and well-attended hostel, and food, and all who had come could stay there for a month, or two or three. What could we do? We had no money, my poor aunt didn't have any either because they too were evicted during the war by the legionaries, but they still said that we should stay in Timisoara with them if we could, because whatever they had they would share with us. And so they did. We stayed there for two weeks, until we recovered a bit, especially me. And then we went to the community in Sfantu Gheorghe and my husband said (he was part of the community) that I should remain there as a secretary, and we would see, they would give me a salary and food as well, so I stayed there. I stayed there and I worked in the office in the community and next year, in 1946, we got married. We had a religious ceremony as well, the rabbi from here, from Brasov, Deutsch, came. There was a canteen at the community in Sfantu Gheorghe, and my husband hired a can manufacturer from Bucovina, Zisu Percel was his name, he was a Jew. My husband went to him and told him about our wedding and asked him to send some food. And he sent lots of cans, but I didn't receive anything, not a piece of bread, nothing. Everything was stolen. Ferencz sent food, he sent canned meat for cooking, ham, the most beautiful meat. Everything was sent to the community's canteen and when I asked for the food to be brought, they said that 'everything has already been eaten’. It wasn't true, I found that out after a long time that they sold everything, they stole it and sold everything for money in town. A month after that we came to Brasov.
My first husband, Francisc Pollak, was a Jew, and he was born in 1914 in Serbia, in Novi Sad. His mother was from there, but his father was from Sfantu Gheorghe. He grew up here, in Romania, in Sfantu Gheorghe, and his mother came after her husband here; he studied in Timisoara, at a French school for priests, but the school had nothing to do with Judaism, he studied together with everyone else. Then he went to high school there. His parents, his father, his brothers, had land, they worked at a lumber station, in forestry operations. After that, when he was 14 years old, his father died and he remained an orphan. He had a brother who was drafted in the army during World War II and who died at the bend of the river Don. Francisc was in the second largest camp after Auschwitz, where the political members were sent, at Buchenwald.
Romania
They gave us something in Sfantu Gheorghe, from the Jewish community there, very little money, 50,000 lei, you couldn't buy a pair of socks with it; money were sent, but the money got lost on the way somehow and didn't get where it was supposed to, the money was stolen until it got here. And then my first husband came (we weren't married, not even engaged, at the time), but we were good friends.
After World War II, we kept in touch with Ignac because he was all we had left, the rest of the family died. During the Holocaust he had been in Budapest, in the ghetto. He took care of us, he helped us, he did everything he could from Hungary. When we came and didn't have as much as a nail in the walls, he helped us as much as he could. And then, after the borders were opened, after we returned from deportation, he invited us to spend each vacation with them in Hungary. And I went every year, together with my sister. After that, under communism, he was a clerk at CEC [Casa de Economii si Consemantiuni, ‘The Loan Bank’]. [Editor’s note: Mrs. Gotterer was using CEC which is in Romania, however the identical loan bank in Hungary is called Takarekszovetkezet.] Ignac was a kind man indeed, honest and warm-hearted like my father. I loved him very much.
Only my sister and me came home, from a family of 8; only my brother Francisc came after us, who had been to Mathausen in November 1946; that was all.
I was left without a mother when I was 23-24 years old, it shouldn't have happened to a woman of that age, I needed my mother to tell me how to do this and that, what to do...she was to me anything she could after my mother died. We came home to Covasna, where we left from, but we didn't find anything there, not even a nail in the walls.
On August 16th I got home, I came through Arad by train, I don't know the exact itinerary. There was a hostel specially for us Jews in Arad and I made a phone call from there. I was the only one who had a relative in Romania, in Timisoara. I phoned, I had an aunt, my mother's sister, Laszlo Juliana and a cousin, Laszlo, who hadn't been deported. I went there and I found my sister Livia there, who had come since April; I should have been home by then too, if it hadn't been for all that mess. I met my sister and I was very happy because I wasn't alone anymore, I had been desperate before that. I have always been close to my sister Livia. She had been like a mother to me, this is what this sister had been to me.
We stayed there in Slucak until August, three months, because there weren't any railways, we needed papers, one couldn’t send 2,000 men just like that, without anything, without checking. They checked us, and in the meantime we were very well treated, Americans sent us cans with ham every day, in a cart for us and we had some other food except the macaronis one could find during the war, they had some concerts arranged for us, some performances to make us feel better. We were allowed to go in town, but not somewhere else, because we had no papers and we could get lost anywhere, or we could get shot by any security guard. We stayed there calmly, and recovered a little.
The memorial was sent to Moscow, and the next day a plane was sent for Berger and took him. Five days after that, Mihai received a letter from Berger, from Budapest, with the diplomatic mail, in which he said that he got home and that he was alright, that the whole affair had been cleared and that we would be set free: the memorial was taken to Stalin's office, and there it went to the secretariat, where the general staff was, and there, the general, that soldier, knew one of the secretaries, went to her and gave her the memorial. The woman looked at the memorial and told him: 'this is my husband’s handwriting!', imagine that, she recognized her husband Berger by his handwriting. She had been a Moscovite: during the war communists were called Moscovites. And she ran to Russia, but her husband was deported. Mihai told me this story, we met after the war, he was a receptionist at Coroana hotel, here in Brasov.
,
1945
See text in interview
here was a canteen in front of the train station and we went in to eat; next to the station master there was a soldier. And our Jewish girls cried out from one wagon to the other: 'Come, let's go eat, wash ourselves a bit!' in Yiddish. And that soldier came, looked at them and went up to the one who cried out and asked her: 'How come you know Yiddish?' 'how could I not know, I am a Jew, I speak my people's language ', 'Are you a Jew? What are you doing on this train?' 'We are all Jews and we come from Auschwitz.' 'And where are you going?'. She answered that were going to Romania. The man didn't say anything, but asked who the leader was, there had to be someone to coordinate everything for so many people. The leader was someone we called Mihai, a Jew, but a Romanian, who knew Russian well. And he took the Hungarians' leader, a man Berger, as well, and asked them to write down everything they knew, where we came from, why, and where we were going. Berger wrote that, he knew Russian as well, and gave it to that soldier, and we stayed for one more night in the train, but after that we went on, not in the original direction however, we were told that we were going to Slucak, which is now in Belarus, 20 km away from Minsk. There we were taken to a large garrison. Italian prisoners were with us as well, an entire detachment, soldiers who had surrendered, they had to be sent home with the same train we were supposed to get home. We were told that everything would be all right, and we were given good food. That’s where we found out that because of that Ukrainian an entire train with SS soldiers got away.
The next day I saw a sentry by the train, who wasn't there until then. We knew we were free, but the sentry said that no one could come get in or get off the wagon. What had happened?! Someone from CFR [‘Caile Ferate Romane’, ‘The Romanian railway company’], an Ukrainian, took the sign off the train. Next to us there was another long train on the other line, and he took off the sign from that train and put it on ours, and ours on that train. We didn't know what it said on the sign, it was in Russian: it said that the train had to go to Siberia, because it was full of German, fascist prisoners. The other train left, and the next day we left as well, and we saw that we were crossing the Niester, which we weren't supposed to cross if we were going to Romania! After that we found out that we weren't going home, but to Russia, and we didn't know where! We were miserable, in grief, to see that after Auschwitz we still wouldn't get home! Two or three men jumped off the train when they saw we were heading for Siberia.
After a month or two passed, at the end of April, the red cross took us to Cernauti [14], so that we would be taken to Romania from there. I was there on the day the peace was signed, on May 9th [Victory Day] [15], and rumor had it that we would get in train wagons and we would all go to Romania, we were about 2,000 people who made it from Auschwitz alive: we were Romanians and Hungarians who had to got to northern Transylvania.
Then the Russian soldiers came, and said: 'you're free', and when they came in all the patients ran to them and kissed them. They only knew Russian, but they had some bread, which they gave to the prisoners; they told us to be calm because the next morning the red cross would come and bring us food. And so it was, in the morning the red cross came, and after two-three days a group of doctors from USA came with the red cross and they made a record of everyone who was there, and they tried to persuade us to go to USA. There was a doctor Schmidt, who spoke in German and I understood him, 'Miss, come to USA, I can tell you still have to go to school, if you want to study for 10 years you don't pay anything for 10 years, for food or for housing, you'll have everything you want for as long as you go to school, and we will help you after that.' But I wanted to meet my brothers at least, with my sisters, because I knew my parents were dead.
The nurse came at 5 o'clock, when it dawned, took my blanket and bed sheet and folded them, made a pack and sat next to me. I said: 'Niuta, what do you want, what are you thinking, what are you doing?', 'I don't want anything, my fiancee is coming at 12 o'clock!' I looked at her and I said to myself, 'how could her fiancee come after her during the night?', but she didn't leave, she just sat nicely on the bed. But she knew what she was talking about, because she had contacts with the Polish resistance who worked wonderfully in Krakow and here as well. All the merit for the Polish resistance. When the camp was mined, the Polish prisoners, not by the Jews, mined it; they were forced to plant the mines all round the camp, therefore they knew where the mines were. And although they were locked with us, they sent word to the resistance and when they got out they defused all the mines. I didn’t know about that, but Niuta knew. And at 12 o'clock her fiancee was there, a pilot, a handsome and strong man, and Niuta said: 'look, there's my fiancee', and he waved her and they left.
There were some clues while I was in the camp that the allies would come. A soldier from Wehrmacht, who guarded us while we carried the rocks, when I was still in Krakow, said: 'Now I sit in the armchair, but believe me, in two months I will carry the rocks and you will sit in the armchair!'. He said that in September; October, November passed, the man wasn't mistaken a lot, in January the red army surrounded Auschwitz. The red army was also in Poland when Krakow was evicted, but they didn't make a move then, they waited for the allies, although they could have got to Auschwitz, but they didn't have guns, or back-ups, I don't know what. On January 27th they came with the allies.
In January my arm froze as well, and the next day it started swell, it was hot and the swelling went up to the heart. Then I said I had to go to the sickroom about my arm, and when the doctor saw me – she was a Russian, not a Jew, she was a political prisoner; her name was Lubova or Lobovaica or Lubovita, an elderly woman, but strong and fit – she started cursing in Russian, I don't know what she said. She said 'to surgery', that I understood, and she showed me a bench where she performed the surgeries; she brought chlorine and she used that to put me to sleep, she didn't have anything else. I didn't feel anything, I just counted to thirteen, I remember that, until I fell asleep, and I only felt when she touched me with the knife. When I woke up, she was slapping me to wake me up: 'Wake up, I want to tell you something!', and she joked: 'Do you want to write your will, do you want to write your will?' She took me as I was, just in my shirt, to a cot, she lied me down and wrapped my arm in toilet paper, there wasn't anything else. That woman operated very well: from the frostbite the arm was full of liquid, she had to drain it.
I lost a lot of weight, because since September, when we came back from Krakow, there were rainy cold days, and it was cold in that forest in Auschwitz, and I had nothing to wear, and I fell ill with pneumonia. We had to carry wood, to break rocks for the railway. The selection for the gas chamber was made daily. I went to the sickroom, but they had no medicine, the doctor did what she could and then said: 'Only God can save you.' And God saved me then as well from a serious illness, I wasn't aware of anything for two weeks, I was unconscious, I didn't eat. I know that at some point another patient came to me and forced some food in my mouth and forced me to drink some coffee, so that I wouldn't starve to death. In the end I recovered, but I was a wreck. After a month I had to go to work again in that forest that was 10 km away; if I didn't go I didn't get any food. Sometimes I didn’t go, when it was cold I would have rather not eat, but that meant ruining my health even more. Christmas passed, New Year's Eve as well. I got sick because of the cold, I had no shoes, I wasn't dressed and I ended up being unable to move my leg; it was sciatica, but I had to go with the others in the forest and thy told me, 'you will freeze here, it's cold, you have to come', but I couldn't move my leg. And then those girls, weak as they were, carried me in their arms, and carried me like that for 10 km.
After I was taken out of the gas chamber, SS soldiers didn’t guard the camp. And then the Czech and Polish prisoners came, they had more strength, those who had been there for a while, the poor souls endured many things we don't even know about, they didn't even have a roof over their heads when they were taken to the camp, they built those barracks where we lived. They said that we, all those who were in the waiting room, should be taken to a barrack and that there we should be given something good to eat to recover; if God saved our lives, they would see to it that they save us from there on. There was a leader in that barrack, a Greek woman, Dezi, I remember, and she went to the kitchen and got from the cooks buckets full of boiled potatoes. A boiled potato there was more valuable than a million lei is here, and they gave us ten boiled potatoes each, twice a day. And we got more bread, a quarter of bread and soup, so that we somewhat recovered in a month, though not fully.
Around 3 or 4, it was still dark, it wasn't even morning, a heftling came ['prisoner' in German], a messenger, one who ran and delivered the news immediately. It was a very beautiful 'heftling', a pretty 16-year-old French girl, and the poor thing came with joy and brought news. The telegram from Himmler, who was Hitler's deputy, number two in Germany, had come, and it said: 'stop all executions immediately', signed by Himmler. That was it, nothing more. Everybody cried, they said no one who had been in that room where we stayed until morning ever came out alive, and we, those who were there, were set free. It was a great thing, God, God made this miracle happen, that this piece of news came in the last moment, not too late, just in time to save me! Not only me, there were others there as well, but I know it saved my life.
I was completely crushed, I was so thin that nobody could recognize me, I didn't have a strong organism; my sister did better, she was stronger and younger, at 17. Mengele came and selected people, those for the factory to the right, those for the gas chamber to the left. I was selected for the row to the left, and my sister cried and screamed...I just sat there and I couldn't cry. Somehow, somebody came to me and asked: 'What's going on?', 'I was separated from my sister.' My sister went and talked to Mengele and signaled me to run in the other group and I did it. [Note: it is a presumption it was Mengele, but it is not likely.] The people from the other group hid me among them and no one saw me running. I thought I had made it, but those selected for the factory weren't enough, so the next day Mengele made another selection: he came to see the others again, and I don't know how, but from all those people he saw and selected all those months, he recognized me and said to me in German: 'I selected you yesterday, how did you get here?' Of course I pretended I didn't understand, although I did, and I didn't say anything. 'Ready, who's in this group is off to the gas chamber!' he said, and my sister screamed, and cried, poor thing, and I said 'Whatever happens, it will be as God wants it.' And I was taken to the waiting room of the gas chambers, where we all had to take our clothes off and had to go in like that. But there was a certain number of people needed for the gas chamber so that they would turn on the gas, and we weren't enough, and I saw him with my eyes when he said: 'They are not enough, I will make another selection in the morning and then we gas them.' I spent one night there. What can I say? Can I say what happened that night? I only thought that it should be as God wants it, and I prayed to God to watch over my sister, to keep her healthy and help her get home.
My sister Edit and I stayed until November together, I don't know how we got in the group that went in the gypsies’ camp – because they too had been deported. On November 27th, Mengele came and asked for workers from Auschwitz; the Pauline army [Note: the German 6th army, led by the marshal Friedrich Paulus (1890-1957), which had been defeated at Stalingrad on February 2nd, 1943.] had been defeated, 200,000 men, and the factories were left without workers.
We stayed in Auschwitz, and from October it started getting worse. The rainy season came and the cold and we weren't allowed to wear clothes, if they found somebody wearing a topcoat or some clothes they were forced to throw them away. We had the call at 5, 6 o'clock in the morning, although it was still dark, even in summer, and they counted us after blocks, it had to be the exact number of the block and we had to stay for the call. Men and women were separated. That’s what killed us, the calls, we had to stand for three, four hours, whether it was cold, raining, snowing, and having to stand there, thin and starving as you were, it was terrible. There was some sort of a sickroom, and if someone fell ill and could be cured without medicine, because there weren't any, then the people working there helped as much as they could.
We stayed in Krakow until September I think, we left in June and we stayed for about three months: June, July, August. In September we came back to Auschwitz, because that's when the red army surrounded Krakow. Then we were quickly evicted and the SS soldiers ran with us to Auschwitz. When we came back to Auschwitz in September we were all taken to roads and railways constructions, but we didn't go up in the mountains, we went on a field, but we had to go through a 10 km long forest, we had to go there, carry the rocks from there here and back again, that was our job, it was only meant to get us tired as soon as possible and finish us. The second time we were in Auschwitz we were mixed with those who came from Holland, Greece, Italy and France, and some of them were Jews and others weren't.
We had to carry rocks to a big hill and my shoes were torn in the first weeks and I was left without shoes. There was a shoemaker's for the SS, but for whoever didn't have shoes, they made some with wooden soles, some sort of slippers; it was something to cover your feet in and that's what we walked in for three months. For as long as we were there, in these three months, I climbed those hills 10 times, 15 times every day, in those shoes which didn't hold onto the foot, I ruined my feet, that's why I have arthritis now.
I was in Auschwitz two times. The first time I only stayed there a week, I think, they put us in some barracks, and after a week we marched to the doctor. We went to the train station, and from there we were transferred to Krakow. The camp there didn't have a name. Everybody told us we should be happy, because there was no gas chamber there and they didn't kill people. They told us to go there and stay there for as long as we could. It wasn't ok there either, but there was no gas chamber and there were barracks and there was better food than in Auschwitz. They cooked some surt hay soup, from thorns and thistles, and that's what we had. In the evening we had a small slice of bread, but very-very thin, bread made from bran: it was about five cm long and 5 mm thick. That was the bread for all day; except that we had coffee, a black liquid which contained who knows what. They put bromide in the water we drank, so that we would be calm and not rebel. We only found out that after the liberation. All people were like animals, passive. In Krakow, we sometimes had a teaspoon of marmalade on the slice of bread, and we had a soup in the after noon, made from cabbage and margarine, and it wasn't bad, it tasted like soup and it was food after all. This is what we ate very day, it was autumn and the cabbage was in season. The camp had connections with the Polish resistance from Krakow and they sent this and that with the carts with the hay for the militiamen's, the camp's general staff, horses, who enjoyed riding: of course, they had horses, just as fat as they were, only we were so thin. And they sent hay from the city and under it they hid sugar, flour, marmalade. They cooked and gave us to eat very quickly so that no one would see anything.
My mother and my father were immediately taken to the gas chamber, and I remained with Edit. Otto went with my father, I don't know for sure, I couldn't find out anything about Otto, nobody found him, none of my acquaintances knew anything about him. Only Edit and me remained from this large family, the rest were scattered and none knew anything about the others. I didn't know anything about my brothers Emil and Francisc, and they didn't know anything about each other, each one of them was in a different place with the army. I was left with my younger sister, we were taken to the bathroom and tattooed. When my sister saw that my number was thirteen, she started crying, because I let it be thirteen. It was 20513A. She thought something bad would happen to me. She watched over me more than I did over her. I was older than her, but she was more careful. I told her that if no one else came home, she definitely would come home, she was so enterprising, and she didn't come home after all.