12—Liberation of concentration camps.

The first camps were liberated by the Soviet army. In July 1944, they reached the Lublin area and the already evacuated camp of Majdanek, where they found only a few Soviet prisoners of war: their accounts made it possible to reconstruct the workings of the death camp. Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated on 27 January 1945. Six thousand people remained here, the majority having been sent on death marches to German areas. Sixty years later, this day was designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The American army occupied camps such as Buchenwald, Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, while the British occupied Bergen-Belsen. The soldiers found appalling conditions: the emaciated, diseased human wreckage, the total lack of hygiene, the depressing bleakness, the stench and the mass graves were a phenomenon even for the soldiers who had been in combat. Soon the Allies were receiving groups of politicians and journalists in the camps to tell the world of the horrors hitherto unimaginable.

Despite careful medical care, the survivors died en masse in the following weeks due to their physical condition and various illnesses. The physical and mental recovery of many was prolonged or incomplete, and they never recovered from their injuries.

BERNÁTH GÁBOR-BRASSÓI VIVIEN-ORSÓS JULIANNA

The European Roma Holocaust. Public Foundation for Research on Central and Eastern European History and Society, 2015, 102.

Recollection of Mrs Rudolf Krasznai, Friderika Kolompár in 2000: 

There, on a big board, their names were lined up, all the way down. I found them both. My father's name was Rudolf Kolompár, he died at the age of thirty-six, my brother was nineteen (...). We went down to the cellar, because there was a bunker where they burned the people. (...) I looked into the furnace (...) I wanted to reach in, if a gypsy man from White Hungary didn't catch me, I would reach into the furnace and take a piece out, I thought: I'll take it out and bring it home as a souvenir. And my son Józsi says to me: mother, don't touch it, you might get an infection. "I don't mind, my son," I said. "How do you know if it was your brother's or your father's?" he asked back. I fainted, they took me out of the incinerator.

Lakatos Ferenc (1912-1945) Kiscsehiből, 1945. január 12-én halt meg Buchenwaldban [Fotó: Arolsen Archives]

According to researchers, about 200-250 thousand Hungarian Jews survived the Holocaust. This means that about 2/3 of Hungarian Jewry was exterminated, most of it in just a few months. 

The extent of the losses of the Hungarian Roma population is not known precisely due to a lack of sources. If we add the number of people murdered in the camps and the total number of victims of executions in Hungarian territories, then historical research, supported by serious documentation, puts the number of dead at between one and two thousand, while those who suffered persecution of some kind because they were Gypsies numbered around five thousand. 

Wedding photograph of Ágnes Kis and Dezső Róth with a yellow star (Budapest, 1944) - The older daughter of Budapest photographer Pál Kis (studio: VII., Király u. 51.), Ágnes Kis (1924–1945) married Dezső Róth, a leather craftsman born in Vásárosnamény, in the summer of 1944. He later escaped from labor service and joined the resistance; he was captured by the Arrow Cross and shot into the Danube. Three members of the Róth family survived the Holocaust. Pál Kis' daughters, Ágnes and Marianne (1928), survived the Holocaust by hiding with false documents. Ágnes was a qualified photographer, so after the liberation of Pest on January 18, 1945, she and her sister repaired the ruined studio apartment that had been damaged during the siege, and in March 1945 they started working; in the meantime, they waited for their parents to come home, but in vain: Pál Kis died in Buchenwald on January 24, 1945, his wife, Ilona Klein, probably died during deportation in November 1944. At the end of July, Ágnes Kis contracted meningitis and died within a few days. Her sister gave up the studio in 1946 and went first to Munich, Paris, and then to Palestine, where she lives in Israel under the name Shoshanna Shofrony. Pál Kis's diary, written during labor service, along with his drawings and numerous photographs, was published in 2016 in the series Seeding Facts and Witnesses. [Photo: Shoshanna Shofrony (born Marianne Kis, 1928)]