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The person in question has given us the following information: Most of the Jews living in Dévaványa, were poor. They worked in the industry or in the agriculture. When we heard that the Germans occupied Hungary, we knew that hard times were in store for the Jews. We trusted in that the Russian army would forge ahead quickly. The peasantry, listening to the odious hype behaved in a very explicitly antisemitic way all the time. We were obliged to wear a yellow star, it was not wise to go out to the street, because we were subject to different insults. It was an everyday occurrence that our windows were broken with stones. One day gendarmes appeared at us. They were amazingly nice; we could take with ourselves everything we wanted. They took us to the ghetto they had marked out and accommodated us in houses there. At least 6-7 people lived in one room, in quite a small place. We ourselves provided our families with food, we could go shopping at noon, so we were not short of anything. They took the young people to work with the peasants, we mostly did earthwork. They pushed us to work very hard and behaved like Jew-haters even more. Generally, it was said that we would stay in the country and would work. Maybe this was the reason why nobody escaped. On 26th June they took us to the sugar factory of Szolnok. They searched us and took away our money, jewelry and other valuables. We were in an awful situation there. We did not have a peaceful minute; they were nagging us continuously. They kept shooting in, the heat was also unbearable and thousands of people were crammed in a medium sized hall. They tortured the rich people to force their confession out of them. A large number of people were beaten to death. In the evening they took away the nice young girls, because the Arrow Cross men wanted them. One night a young woman attempted to escape but they shot her dead. We spent ten days there, and when they entrained us, we gave a sigh of relief. We had already been in poor shape, because we had had nothing to eat, we got pea soup and bread to eat. Before they started us, they began to search us again. Finally, we were past that too. They put 75-80 people in a cattle car. They did not give us water. We arrived in Auschwitz on 1st July. At the train station they separated me from my parents, I do not know what happened to them; or rather I do not want to know. In the bath after the disinfection, they depilated me and they gave me clothes instead of my own. I was taken to a horrible block. There were no beds there, the roof was in a bad state of repair, the rain run in. We lay on the dirty, muddy floor. We suffered in several ways: we lined up for roll call, exposed to the changes of the weather, from the dawn. I did not work in Auschwitz at all. The provisions were very poor: black coffee, soup full of dust, small pieces of wood were floating on its surface. We had no plates and spoons, so we drank one after the other from the big bowl they brought in at noon. I was taken to Bergen-Belsen with a transport on 18th September. It took us 5 days to get there; we got some bread and salami for the journey. I did not work during that six weeks; we had a rest there. Only very few people stayed there that time, so the treatment was not worse than in Auschwitz. In the beginning of November we were taken to Duderstadt. I worked 12 hours a day in an armaments factory, alternating in day and night shifts. The work was very hard and exhausting. The Aufseherins beat us a lot, but the SS soldiers treated us well; they were old and not so enthusiastic as the former. We received some soup, black coffee and 200-250 grams of bread daily, sometimes some margarine and some kind of sausage. That camp was clean, we slept in separate beds and we could wash. If somebody was caught at stealing a turnip, they cut her hair again. This was one of the most serious punishments. The days went by like that, nobody died there. One night in the beginning of April they woke us up, they put us on trucks and sped away with us. The Americans were already very near and we were running from them. They entrained us in Essen and kept pushing our train back and forth for two weeks. A large number of us were crammed in the cattle car without any food. It is due to the Czech that we are still alive, because it was they, who helped us. When nobody looked, they threw us bread, fruits and bacon in the cattle cars. We were stuck at the train station for a week; they kept pushing our train car off one pair of rails, up onto another pair. We arrived in Theresienstadt on 26th April. There we were doing well; we got food. The Russians liberated us on 10th May.

Labour Service