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The person in question has given us the following information: At the beginning of last April, leventes came to our flat and ordered us to go immediately with our bags to the courtyard of the school. There they took away all our valuables, money and documents, and drove us by trucks to the Beregszász ghetto. Most of the locals were sympathetic towards us. In the ghetto we lived in a brick factory, we lay on the ground for weeks; there were no beds or bunks. We had provisions from a communal kitchen. People above 16 had to work, namely, they had to carry bricks. Three weeks later, we were entrained while gendarmes beat us. We travelled for three days and nights to Auschwitz. Here the first thing was selections done by camp doctor Dr Mengele, who separated us from our parents, unfortunately, they were sent to the right side, that is, into the crematorium. I did not work at all for three weeks before I was assigned to the baths – to Brezsinka – where we sorted out the clothes taken from the transports. We saw horrible things in the baths, because we were very close to the crematorium. Last summer, when Hungarian transports kept arriving, we also saw how they made old people and young mothers with their children undress, and they gave them towels as they went into a large bathroom. These were taken into the gas chamber and burnt the very same day. There were so many dead bodies that the oven could not burn them any more, so the Jewish prisoners put the corpses into a large pit, placed a row of timber on them and burnt them there. I worked in the baths for two months. Later, I was assigned work in the weaving mill. This work was not hard, because we were doing the work of women, but we had to work a lot, ten hours a day, and whoever did not work properly had to do hard physical work as a punishment. At work, we were guarded by German capos, who treated us inhumanely. I was in Auschwitz for 8 months, and when Russian troops were approaching us, the camp was evacuated. We travelled in freight cars, but there were transports that had to set off on foot. Sick people lagged behind, I do not know what happened to them. We travelled for two days and two nights and arrived in Bergen-Belsen. The journey meant horrible suffering to us, because 60-70 people were crammed into closed freight cars. We got bread and lard for the journey. We arrived after two days. We had no work to do; the whole day consisted of roll calls. Although we had coats, in the beginning we were very cold during roll calls at night. Rations were very meagre; in the beginning six of us got a kilo of bread, later twelve of us. As a result, many people grew weak and hundreds of them starved to death. We had absolutely no opportunity to wash; therefore almost everybody was scabby and full of lice, so typhus started to spread, which also claimed many victims. It happened that some people recovered from typhus, but there was no food, so their bodies, which were already weak from high fever, had no stamina any more. They gave us no drinking water either, so we suffered from horrible pains. At around the middle of this April, suddenly American cars appeared in the camp, most of the SS escaped, and we were finally liberated from our suffering. The German SS women were caught and Americans made them work to death in the pouring rain. Just like the SS tortured us in the previous days, they had to struggle there out in the open. I came to Budapest with the Czech transport.

Labour Service