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The persons in question have given us the following information: There were thirty Jewish
families living in
Csepe, they were farmers, craftsmen, tradesmen; most of them lived in
financially sound circumstances. We had land and we also lived in wealth. One day after
Passover the Jewish inhabitants of the village were driven to the
synagogue, but we were sent home from there and we were told to collect our most
necessary
clothes, underwear and
food,
then we were locked up in a barn. Two days later they took us to the
ghetto.
In
Nagyszöllős
we spent the first 2-3 days in the
synagogue, where they
deprived us of all our more valuable belongings, then they took us to the
ghetto
where we stayed for five weeks.
József
Jarusil, village
notary
reported against our father and based on that he was interned in the
synagogue as a
communist. He was locked up there for five weeks, during which time
he was
beaten very much and a stripe had been cut in his hair already in the
ghetto.
We set off to
Auschwitz together with our father. As far as we know, nobody
escaped from the
ghetto
and those who
died,
died of
natural causes, although they
beat us
very cruelly in the
ghetto, especially the wealthier people. The
gendarmes invented all sorts of tortures, they found fault with everything and
they took every opportunity to treat us cruelly. So, for example, on one occasion the
men
tried to get some dry wood and the
gendarmes, having noticed it,
beat
them up brutally. They cut the hair of many
girls
completely; the
women were
stripped
naked and
men bared their heads.
They lined everybody up already on the first day in the
synagogue. We were not allowed to look back; they threw stones at those who did.
It was
Hungarian
gendarmes who did all of this.
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They beat up even those who could not jump up from
the stool when a
gendarme came by. No complaint was taken against the work of the
members of the
Jewish council. We did not have a
communal
kitchen, but those who ran out of supplies were given uncooked
food.
After five weeks we were always told that we would go to
work on
Transdanubia, more precisely all the
men would. Before the
deportation they had taken away all our papers in the
synagogue, they searched us and entrained us. They crammed 80 people in a
cattle
car. They gave us some water and a bucket for a toilet too. Nobody
died in
our
cattle
car and nobody
escaped from it either. When the
Germans took over us in
Kassa we understood the
situation already. After a three-day-long journey we arrived in
Auschwitz on 7th May. We were still in the
cattle
car when
Polish
prisonersdressed in striped clothes told us to get off and leave all our
baggage there. After that they lined us up in rows of five and formed groups of us, one of
which was
sent on the left, the other on the right hand side. They took us in the bathhouse
and stripped us; they gave us grey
prisoner‘s
clothes and sent us to
Camp B.
700 of us were put in a block, 12 of us on a
bunk.
Our provisions were the well-known
campprovisions, and we had to line up for
roll
call for hours in the morning and in the evening. We worked in a warehouse of
clothes; we were the ones to dress the
transports. We took off the shoes of those who were
selected out from
Camp
C and if a person showed obstinacy or insisted on his
shoes very much we had
to hit him, because if we did not, we were beaten up. We
worked
in day and night shifts; the
transports came to be dressed at night, but even from those
transports the weaker people were picked up and lined up naked in the courtyard.
There was a strict block curfew when the
transports were
selected; we had to switch off the light and trucks came from the
crematorium on which the naked people were put. We worked some metres away from
the
crematorium; from there we saw as the trucks were turned over and people were
spilt from them to the burning pit like bags of potatoes. We often heard shouting, crying
and moaning especially at night, when the voices reached us more easily, but we also saw
fires and flames frequently. When a
transport from
Theresienstadt arrived in September they took
away
men,
women and
children together. They led them to the
crematorium in groups of five. In September there was
a huge traffic there anyway;
transports came to
Auschwitz from other
camps
too and those people were also quickly thrown into the
crematorium. There were
transports coming from
Slovakia still in
November; these were not
killed
by
gas but the
mothers with their small
children were sent away and older boys and
men were assigned to
do some work. In November, the
crematorium was dismantled; we also worked there for a week. They wanted every
sign of the
crematorium to disappear: even the bricks were carried away. In
December, we were put in a
transport as well and they took us to
Hundsfeld near
Brezlau. It took us one day
to get there. We did somewhat better there, since it was a little
camp
and the
factory provided us with
food,
so the
provisions were naturally better. Although we stayed there only for two weeks,
then, as the
Russian troops were approaching, they formed a
transport from us again and sent us to
Gross
Rosen.
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The
march lasted for three days since it was January; there was a great snowstorm and it was terribly cold. We had to push big
carts in which we were taking the belongings of the
overseers. One night we slept in a chamber; the
ill and
weak
people were taken after us on trucks, but we heard that some of them were taken
off the truck to be
shot dead. They were buried right there in the snow. We had to help
the
ill people to be taken off. We were very weak, we had nothing to
eat and
we were not able to pull the carts. We had to leave the
ill
people’s cart there, so we left the
ill and
we were being chased along. We were so exhausted already that we were not able to go any
further; we would not have minded if they had shot us dead immediately. At last they took
pity on us and, since we were not far away from our destination, they had the carts pulled
to the
camp by horses. The
SS
women
shot
down those
women who collapsed from weakness with bone chilling coolness. 1,200
people started with the
transport, but by the time we arrived our number had been reduced to
700. The
Gross Rosen
camp was only for
men; there we received
clothes and we had a rest for two weeks, then we continued our journey to
Mauthausen. There they took us to a bath for
men, male
prisoners disinfected us, then we were given a pair of long
underpants and a
shirt.
There were no
women’s
clothes
there. After three days we got our disinfected
clothes
back, but in the meantime the
Russians came
closer and there was no time to give everybody her own
clothes. We picked up
the clothes at random and so we ran away like that,
dressed improperly. We
arrived in
Bergen-Belsen ten days later. On the way we lived on a little
amount of
food that we had managed to bring with us. Several
air
raids reached us on the way, but many of us
died of
hunger too. We stayed in
Bergen-Belsen for three months. It was a collecting
camp
and everybody was taken there from before the
Russians. 1,200
of us were crammed in a block. We
slept
on the ground in filth and lice; we did not have blankets. We were given half a litre of
soup twice a day and a thin slice of
bread
once in a while. At the end we did not even see a piece of
bread
for weeks. We worked in the kitchen 18-20 hours a day, so we sometimes managed to get hold
of a few pieces of raw
carrots. The
English troops
liberated us on 15th April and soon they took us to
Bergen. They
accommodated us in a garrison of the
SS.
There we had a good place, nice treatment and proper
provisions. The
ill people received medical treatment. From there they took us to
Celle, then with a
Czech transport we came
home. Two
men were assigned to escort us in
Pozsony, thus we came
home through
Komárom. Our plans for the future: we would like
to go
to
Palestine soon.