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The person in question has given us the following information: We stayed in the ghetto of Munkács for 4 weeks and in the brickyard for one week. When they took us away from the ghetto everybody was very lethargic because they had always promised that we would stay in the ghetto once and for all. On the way the policemen beat the people with whips until they bled. When my elderly father collapsed and he could not march any further, a policeman shouted at me not to be standing there, saying: “The old guy can die alone just as well”. They whipped our 85-year-old mother until she went along the whole way to the brickyard and then to Auschwitz, where the crematorium was waiting for her anyway. Would it not have been easier to let her die here? 75 of us were crammed in a cattle car on the way. In our cattle car, 2 women gave birth on the first night. Although we had warned the guards in advance that there would be deliveries, they did not allow us even to light a lamp. There were 34 people of our family travelling in the cattle car and only 11 of us survived. When we arrived, we were separated from everybody else. We were taken to the bath and then we were taken completely naked in front of SS men, who stripped us. From there they took us to a hall, where we received prisoner’s clothes, then we got to the camp. 13 of us slept on a berth, so we could not even move. We did not work, but we starved and suffered a lot. We got up at 3 o’clock at dawn and then we were lining up for roll call for hours. If only one person was missing all 30,000 were punished. We also suffered much from the weather. We were standing in sweltering heat and a number of people died from sunstroke, while it was so cold in the evenings that a large number of us got cold, dressed in light clothes and with bare heads; they got pneumonia and tuberculosis. There was no medicine, diarrhoea was raging and that claimed victims too. There were 1,000 women in our block and we were given 50 pots of food. We did not have even a spoon. Plenty of people had to eat from one pot and we did not know how to eat even that little poor food we received. We were taken to Unterlüss with a transport of labourers. We had to do very hard work there: we built a road and cut down a forest; a lot of people worked in an ammunition factory. We received very little food and the treatment was cruel. The Lagerführer gave us 25 strokes for the smallest offence. Such things as warning people in advance did not exist there. They came with unbending rigour right away and they were happy to see us cry and suffer. We worked in one single thin dress in terrible cold, in the harshest winter. They searched us everywhere everyday and on whom they noticed the thinnest rag under the dress was punished with deprivation of food and beating. When Allied troops were approaching, the SS escaped and the Wehrmacht took over. They took us to the death camp in Bergen-Belsen. That could only be called a death camp and nothing else. We were not given even a bite of bread; all our food was half a litre of soup a day. There were people who had been suffering there for months and they received only that much throughout the whole time. People died from hunger according to their strength, slowly or quickly one after the other. If the liberation had come 2 weeks later, they are not likely too have found any more people alive there. Meanwhile, typhus was raging too. The heaps of cadavers grew bigger and bigger every day and we had to clear them away. We were not allowed even to put on gloves for this work and there was no water to wash with. The English liberated us on 15th April. We were and still are unspeakably grateful to them for that.

Labour Service