At the beginning of 1942, in the German town of Wannsee, there were discussions about what to do with the Jews in the countries that were under the control of Nazi Germany. It was decided that there would be an internationally coordinated mass murder of European Jews, the so-called 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question'. Although the Jewish population had already been shot en masse during the advance of the armies to the east, it was only at this point that a unified course of action was agreed upon. Such that the Jews were to be forcibly transported to camps in Eastern Europe, where they were to be worked to death or murdered. The murder was to take place in gas chambers and the bodies were to be removed in huge crematoria by the prisoners of the camps themselves.
999 of them arrived there, but only 20 of them lived to see the end of the war. On their forearms were tattooed numbers from 1000 to 1998.
The Holocaust process had four stages. The first was the definition of people who were undesirable, the second was the confiscation of their property, and the third was their subsequent concentration in one place. The last, fourth stage was forced eviction, called deportation. This is how the Holocaust took place in Germany, in France, in Romania and in many other countries. The first deportation from Slovakia took place on 25 March 1942. At 8:20 p.m., a train with a cattle car containing 1,000 young unmarried women and girls set off from the Poprad railway station in the direction of the Auschwitz camp. 999 of them arrived there, but only 20 of them lived to see the end of the war. On their forearms were tattooed numbers from 1000 to 1998.
My father did not hide me and my youngest sister with words: ´They will not take such children!.´ On Saturday morning a fireman from the next street came for me, but in a Guards uniform. We were the first ones to get from Prešov to Poprad and then to Auschwitz.
We were so poor that I actually went on the train for the first time when we went to the concentration camp. Until then, I hadn't even sat on a train.
The worst thing was the hygiene. Because there was no water in the barracks, there were some two or three latrines (...). And so many prisoners. Most of us got dysentery and now without that hygiene, that dysentery is something terrible. (...) at night there was one wheelbarrow in front of the house for the toilet and it was soon overflown. Honestly, the bowl I was eating out of, (...) I was also using to go to the toilet.
And then when we got to Auschwitz, they just opened the carriage, but we still didn't know what was going on. We came to these blocks and there were scraps on the ground, straw in a thick cloth, and we sat down on that and immediately we were covered with fleas.
Well, when we woke up in the morning, we saw something strange walking around, it didn't even look like people anymore, they were in striped clothes, they had no hair and they were barefoot and they only had those clogs, those Dutch clogs. (...) We thought we were in a lunatic asylum, but in a very short time we also became lunatics like them. That was the first part they managed to do during the daylight, to bring us to the state of prisoner. That is, they shaved off everything that was on us. Every hair without any special razor change, and when it didn't go they'd rip it out. And not only did they shave us, but they started gynecologically examining us. And after a hundred or two hundred like that he threw up his hand and said "Die sind doch alle Jungfrauen", they are all virgins, there's no point in examining."
Those clogs were clicking too much and it bothered those delicate German ears of theirs, so we had to hold them in our hands and walk barefoot. On the 25th of March the snow was up to our knees. Barefoot and we got those clothes on our naked bodies and it was made of that drelich stuff and it itched so bad, we went crazy, but we had nothing underneath.
When winter came, we were given one blanket. It was terribly cold in Upper Silesia and the winters were harder 70 years ago than they are today, we girls used to steal blankets. You know how many times it happened that we slept there without a blanket. (...) And when there were 16 of us on the bunk and those girls' feet were rotting (...) the pus was just pouring out of it and we were sitting there with them and living. That was the experience of our first year.
all chapters
Remembering the HolocaustHungary
Return and emigrationHungary
LMBTQHungary
History of the HolocaustHungary
Fascist ideologyHungary
The HolocaustHungary
The HolocaustSlovakia
Slovak StateSlovakia
IdeologySlovakia
PersecutionSlovakia
AntisemitismSlovakia
AryanisationSlovakia
PorajmosSlovakia
PorajmosHungary
LGBT minoritySlovakia
First transportSlovakia
DeportationsSlovakia
Life in the campSlovakia
Slovak National UprisingSlovakia
HomecomingSlovakia
EmigrationSlovakia
