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The person in question has given us the following information: My husband was born into a purely Christian family and became a Jew only for me. He committed suicide because of the Jewish Laws. As a woman dressmaker I worked till the very end. When Germans arrived I began to wear the star. I moved into a starred house, from where the Arrow Cross took me away the 10th of November, 1944. They came at dawn, and gave us 10 minutes for packing, so I had to leave my little son at home. Later, he was taken into a boys’ orphanage, from where he was moved as a Christian into the protected house “Munkácsi Mihály.” The Arrow Cross learnt that these children there were Jews and went to fetch them at one point. They made them walk barefoot to the bank of the Danube, where they started to shoot them. They shot four children, and when the rest started to scream and cry terribly they let them go. At this time one of the feet of my son got frozen and all five toes were cut off. The Arrow Cross took me into the brick factory of Óbuda, from where we walked till Hegyeshalom crossing Pilisvörösvár and all the other places. In some villages they gave us some loaves of bread or some soup. They did not treat us very nicely but assaulted us quite a lot. Many people died on the way, some ate poison, while others got such a big blow that they were unable to carry on, and died there. They took us into Germany at Hegyeshalom, but got on train only in Zürndorf. Here Germans gave each of us a mess-tin of soup and a loaf of bread. We had to get on train and we travelled all night long. Next morning, we woke up in Sopron. We left Sopron for Koppháza, where we stayed till the 27th of March. We dug trenches and worked in the kitchen. The Arrow Cross guarded us and treated us in a horrible way. Also Germans in yellow uniforms guarded us, I believe they were so-called “political leaders”. They beat us a lot, and they also shot at us sometimes. We worked from 6 am till 6 pm. We got coffee in the morning, and bean soup for lunch at around 4-5 pm together with a little bread. In December, they took 1,500 women into Germany, and 120 of us remained for the kitchen. Many committed suicide. Others got lice and died because of them. They shot several men and only one woman, and also in her case their reason was that she had received too much information from a German soldier. The 27th of March, we left this place for Germany. We walked on foot for around 10 days before we arrived in Mauthausen. It was a horrible trip. First, we crossed a mountain and a bog, we believed it was the end, and there was no way out of it. At Sankt Margareta, at the end of the mountain, the SS attacked us and seized the women of the queue. We crossed Loretto, where the SS shot 360 women and men from among us. It was at night. They grabbed everything we had leaving us only a piece of cloth. We had to cross the village running; we were chased. We got on a train here and continued by train. We did this trip in 10 days – all the time hungry and thirsty. We cooked grass, rape, and ate clover and turnip. We got nothing else to eat. They had food in their sack and obtained some from the houses. We arrived in Mauthausen, where we lived in a tent, which was full of lice and corpses. Later, they carried the corpses out. Life was horrible here. 120-200 people died every day because of hunger and exhaustion. We shared a kilo of bread full of mould among 12-16 of us. Daily rations were a decilitre of coffee in the morning and one and a half decilitres of dense soup at noon. A sergeant declared that it did not matter to him if Jews survived: it was up to him whether he accounted for them or not. We left this place on foot for Gunskirchen. This trip lasted for 3 days. We got nothing to eat only some bread and margarine the last evening before Gunskirchen. They lodged us in wooden barracks in Gunskirchen. There was no water close to the barrack, only a stream nearby, and we could drink its water. In one evening a woman went out to the toilet and got shot by an SS man. Rations were scarce also here. Mortality was around 250 a day. Bodies were lying out there for days before they got buried by Jews. There was a terrible typhus epidemic. I saw a boy cutting a piece of meat out of the thigh of a corpse, which they cooked and sold. Women lived in separate barracks but we stayed together with men in the area of the camp. The 4th of May, 1945, Americans liberated us. We had a good life afterwards. These were my experiences.

Labour Service