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The person in question has given us the following information: In 1941, I lived in Kőrösmező, my parents owned land, and even two houses, I had three brothers and sisters. My father was taken into Poland, later they also took me, my older brother, and my older sister. They left me on a cornfield, from where I managed to escape and came back to Kőrösmező crossing the Dnyeszter. I went into hiding for nine months on the attic. Once an Ukrainian woman noticed how much my sister cooked and baked and got suspicious. In the meantime my mother died and as it started to be very dangerous staying on the attic we came to Budapest. As far as I know, it was a Hungarian shoemaker who denounced us claiming that someone was hiding on the attic. Gendarmes searched the house. Here, in Budapest the Jewish Supportive Office put me into an orphanage where I stayed for two years, when I was summoned for labour service in June of 1944. I got to Budafok where they took all my belongings, my watch, and my money. There was a Hungarian warrant officer who beat us up terribly. He made the people from the orphanage standing aside and he meant to send us home, but later changed his mind. From here we got to the brick factory of Budakalász and with the ghetto for the people from the agglomeration of Pest we were entrained, 74 of us in a car. We got water at departure and were escorted by Hungarian gendarmes till Kassa where the train was handed over to Germans, who gave no water but shot into to the freight cars all the time. The 3rd of July, at 10 am we arrived in Auschwitz, where prisoners in striped clothes were waiting for us. We had to leave our luggage in the cars, and to queue up men and women separately. I was selected for the group for work, and was taken into a baths where they cut my hair off and gave me striped clothes. We were put into a barrack where they ordered us to present all our valuables because they claimed they had a machine that could see through us and if they found anything on you, you were going to be hanged. We got into Camp A, where there were around 600 people in a block. I saw the crematorium and often felt the smell of burnt bones but they told us they were burning old clothes. Every day twice there was a roll call that lasted for hours; food was scarce. After a selection I was sent to Buchenwald. The journey was around four days long, we were 50 of us in a freight car, they gave us nothing to eat although there was food in the car but they kept it, so we had to starve all the way. When we arrived we had a bath and received a loaf of bread, margarine, jam and sausage. They put us up in the tent camp which was a concentration camp, and they sent us from here to Remmsdorf for work. The journey lasted again three days, we were 50 of us again in a car and received two third of a loaf, margarine and jam. The day after that we arrived, I was selected for work in a petrol company called Brabach where I worked 12 hours a day. The lager lay approximately 2 kilometres away from the plant. 650 of us stayed in a barrack, two in a bed. Hungarian speaking SS men guarded us in the camp, and often beat us up. If they simply did not like someone they made him get out of line and killed him. I saw once that they killed someone with a blow in the outlying kommando. Every day in the winter there were 40-50 dead bodies, food was scarce and it was very cold. Death found a fertile soil here. Before Christmas, Americans bombed the plant but lowered yellow lamps from the aircrafts to indicate the place of the lager, as a result, no one got hurt. For a while I served a Capo as his servant. Remmsdorf is next to Leipzig. Later, our lager started to clear debris, that was what I did, too. We got food in the houses but we also stole when we could not get hold of it otherwise. At the end of March, American troops were only 3-4 kilometres away. That night at 1 am they quickly entrained us and we started off in the direction of Theresienstadt. We came till Tarienburg by train when low-flying airplanes bombed two of our railway engines. We had 350 sick people. Those who were not sick tried to ran away; we went to the village, and by the time we came back we saw that dead bodies were being carrying: three cars were full of dead bodies. We asked what had happened and were informed that the Gestapo had shot those unfortunate. At this point we started walking. Those who could not keep pace and sat down at the sides of the road were cruelly shot by the guards. When we started our journey we were in 3,800 in the camp, when we arrived to Theresienstadt, there were only 800 of us alive, but around the half died of typhus in Theresienstadt. The 9th of May, the Red Army liberated us in the town. I stayed three weeks in Theresienstadt before we left for Prague already in a bigger group. In Prague I spent three weeks at the Red Cross, where we were disinfected and provided with everything good. I came home through Prague and Pozsony. My future plan: I return to the orphanage.

Labour Service