A Train Near Magdeburg

by Matthew Rozell

  Parents also worried that brutal Nazi soldiers would harm their unmarried daughters. My father proposed that I fictitiously marry a local boy, but I became suspicious and did not consent. I also told my father that I could not marry this boy, as I already put my eyes on the boy's younger brother. My father thus abandoned his plans to find me a husband. He continued to fear that German soldiers would attack me and suggested I stay indoors. I could not do that—I just had to walk about outside and feel the atmosphere.

  I promised my father that I would not let anyone harm me so long as I was alive—just over my dead body. Thanks to the Almighty, nobody harmed me this way. I once had a close call when a childhood archenemy of mine came to enjoy the sight of Nazi invaders in our town and noticed me near an SS soldier who stood guard by city hall. He tried as hard as he could to get the SS soldier to harm me, but being a stupid ignoramus, this teenage boy did not know German. So all he could do was point at me and repeatedly yell, ‘Juda, Juda.’ The Nazi soldier completely disregarded the peasant boy as I quietly walked away.

  The Allied air forces started conducting air raids since the Nazi occupation began. Looking up at the planes in the sky, I wondered why the free countries don't do something to help us Jews before the Nazis exterminate us. We were innocent victims, and they could have helped us if they wanted to. My soul directed a silent prayer to them—please help us escape the devil's clutches.

  Leslie Meisels

  Near the end of April 1944, my father was instructed to report for forced labor on May 1. At this same time, all the Jews of Nádudvar were ordered to abandon our homes, take whatever we could, and move into a ghetto. All young gentile men born before December 31, 1926, were called up for military service, and all Jews born before that date were ordered to report for forced labor. Since I was born in February 1927, those two months saved me and made it possible for me to stay with the rest of my family in the ghetto.

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  Another anti-Jewish law shortly passed, forcing us to leave our homes and be concentrated in a ghetto. On that very same day, my father left us forever. The army called him up, and he had to present himself at the army headquarters for forced labor service. This was a very distressing period for us. Jewish men had been called for this purpose several years back; most had already died from hunger, been beaten, or froze to death.

  Unspeakable sorrow filled our deeply shocked hearts as we left our warm homes. With a gloomy face that reflected how we all felt, my father put on his backpack and said his last farewell to us. I silently escorted my father to the train station. We walked side-by-side for thirty short minutes before he arrived at the appointed place. My father met other forced laborers there, including a childhood friend of his. A pair of local gendarmes yelled at me and told my father to board the train which was already waiting. I choked back the tears as I parted from my father. I stayed on to see him take a seat in the train, a cigarette in his mouth and his reddish-brown face with a very sad expression. This was the last time I ever saw him. He was transferred to Debrecen, where he met his tragic death.

  Restless and depressed, we could not stay at home. I tried to think if there was some way to stop the pending disaster. But I could not come up with any comforting answers as I walked the familiar streets of Püspökladány.

  Why is the sun not shining in my soul anymore?

  Why can't I feel what happiness means anymore?

  Why has darkness struck at my world?

  Why is the devil ruling human souls?

  Why is he turning them into cruel forces?

  Why are the hopes of innocent people being shattered?

  Why has the world kept silent at our loss?

  *

  Peter Lantos was a four-year-old boy living with his parents in the town of Makó in southeastern Hungary. His brother, fourteen years his senior, had also just been called up to serve; Peter would never see him again. In his 2005 memoir, he recalled the trauma in the days that followed from the perspective of the small child that he was.

  Peter Lantos

  Unexplained activity in the house was a sign that something was afoot. My mother was carrying out what appeared to me to be a second spring cleaning, systematically going over the rooms, turning out wardrobes and rummaging through drawers. The whole exercise was unnatural since the annual spring cleaning had been completed only a few weeks earlier, and I expected some explanation, but none was forthcoming. I found my father's involvement even more ominous, since he never showed the slightest interest in any domestic work. Now, he stood by mother’s side, and although he was doing very little, I could hear him saying: 'Take this coat' or ‘No, I do not want this jacket.' After a while, I realized that this was not spring cleaning but a careful process of selecting clothing. My mother pulled out each drawer, emptied its contents and, lifting each item, paused for a moment, as if assessing each garment for its quality. A few items were collected in a small pile, ready to be packed, while the rest were hastily replaced in the drawers. My first thought was that we must be going away for a summer vacation, although summer had not yet arrived. My hopes were shattered and replaced by suspicion, however, when I noticed a couple of the items earmarked for packing: they were heavy winter overcoats rather than flimsy shorts and cotton shirts for a summer holiday. I plucked up my courage and asked: 'Are we going on a holiday?’ 'Yes,' said my mother, ‘we are going away, but not for a holiday, and we are not going very far either.'

  She looked at my father and asked me to sit next to her. She explained that the following day we would have to leave the house and that we were going to live, for a short time, in another house with some other people, also Jews, but we would not have to leave the town. Other people, many we knew, including my grandmother and other cousins and relatives, would also be leaving their houses. She consoled me with the promise that the three of us would remain together and that I would be able to play with other children. But I would not have any of it; I was adamant that I was going to stay and would never leave our house. I wanted to play with other children in our garden, not in some other place I did not know. Nor did I want to share a house with other people, even if I knew them. And to give weight to my objection I started to howl—my ultimate act of disobedience, but used this time to no effect. My father put his hand on my head and said, ‘We do not want to go, but we have to.’ I did not understand why we had to leave the house where we had always lived. I did not understand who had ordered us to do so, and I did not understand what wrong we had committed, to be punished in this way. But I knew that further protests would be in vain.

  My mother finished selecting the belongings we were allowed to take and prepared everything for the next day. My whole world seemed to come to an end. The everyday routine and the security of our lives, all of which had been taken for granted and never questioned, had gradually been undermined by forces I neither knew nor understood.

  The increasing tension at home, the secret sessions of listening to the radio, the deterioration in our food, the wearing of the yellow star, the departure of my uncles and my brother all had increased my suspicion, which gradually turned into fear that despite the protection of my parents something terrible would happen. And now this fear grew into terror, prompted by this latest catastrophic event: we were leaving our house, the final anchor of certainty that tied us to the world we knew. And in the morning we left—a short, bald man of fifty-one, an elegant woman of forty-four, and a boy not quite five years old.

  Life in the ghetto for Meisels and Bleier was crowded, as it was only a few dozen fenced-in houses and a synagogue, 250 people in all, guarded round the clock by police. It would also be short-lived. A few weeks later, deportations would begin. Irene Bleier was working with other girls from the ghetto as a farm laborer when the order to return to the ghetto came.

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  An order to pack our belongings and return to the ghetto came suddenly one afternoon. We had to quit work and go right away. Some of the gir
ls cried hysterically, fearful that we would now all be taken with our families to Hitler's death camps. I was scared stiff and overcome by tears, my brain stiffened by the worry. With great pain, we boarded the horse-cart.

  Six horse-carts filled with fifty young Jewish girls made their way through town. Some of us cried uncontrollably, the tears streaming down our faces. The others just cried inside in their hearts. Starting at the outskirts of town, we passed by the Jewish cemetery. Two girls wailed bitterly at this point, bidding farewell to their dead—one to her late mother, the other to her late father. Many people stared at the pitiful sight. If they felt sympathy to the humiliated girl prisoners, none showed any signs.

  June 18, 1944

  Early afternoon. All the Jews of the ghetto stood by the gate in the schoolyard. Those of us who owned goats had to hand them over to the gendarmes—I still recall how our goat cried. Even animals have feelings.

  A local Christian midwife had to undress all us women over 16 years old and check our bodies for hidden gold or jewelry. We all crowded into a classroom for this degrading event, but the woman did nothing to us. We just lingered there for a few minutes without being molested. Girls with long hair had to have their hair cut.

  We stood in the courtyard with our meager possessions in the one backpack we were allowed to take. The gendarme officer asked if anyone still had any valuables—there were none. Then he shouted that if one person tried to escape, ten people would be shot dead. An old man cried out, ‘Someone please give me rope so that I can hang myself and die here. I do not want to go to a death camp to be killed by Hitler. I would rather do it with my own hands.’ Mrs. Grunfeld, a mother of four small children, quieted him down and asked him not to stir up a panic.

  Contradictory thoughts overtook me. On the one hand, I very much wished to disobey these inhuman decrees, run away and hide somewhere. On the other, strong fears stifled my feelings and paralyzed my body, leaving me unable to resist those devilish decrees. I am sure that many others also felt this dissonance. We lived under great mental pressure, paralyzing fear. Our feelings were stifled, and our brains were unable to think clearly—as if dark clouds floated in our heads.

  Leslie Meisels

  At the end of the day, when we were marched from the ghetto to the railway station, I was unprepared for what I experienced out on the main street. It was lined with people, several dozen of whom were members of the Arrow Cross and were laughing and clapping loudly, showing their happiness that the Jews were being taken away and yelling insulting, derogatory remarks. Perhaps they were already thinking how wonderful it would be the next morning to loot our abandoned houses. Behind them, hundreds of people stood silently, which was painfully disturbing. Up until then, I had thought better of most people in my hometown. In central Hungary, there was no uprising against the Nazis or their collaborators, not like there was in Slovakia or Poland. Since the beginning of the 1920s, Hungarian society had been a regulated police state, and people probably didn’t dare to risk the wrath of those loudmouth antisemites. Even with that in mind, this behavior was still a blow to us; their silence was a shock that has stayed with me all my life.

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  We arrived at the railroad station where empty cattle cars waited for us. Ninety people had to crowd themselves into each car. We had to jump down from the platform into the car, and many people badly hurt themselves in the process. It was so crowded that we had to sit on each other, unable to move our legs. The heavy doors soon closed, and we were locked in. An eerie quiet encompassed the gloomy situation.

  Our transport traveled swiftly. We had no idea as to our next destination. The following day, a black Monday, at around 5 p.m., the train came to a sudden halt. We heard some cries, fear creeping under our skin. My mother ordered me to get rid of the photographs of friends and family that I brought along. The gendarmes may beat me up if they find them. I promptly hid the photos between the side and the ceiling of the boxcar. I wonder if anyone ever found them.

  Leslie Meisels

  The next morning, we arrived in Debrecen, where the gendarmes were concentrating the Jewish people from the smaller ghettos before deporting them somewhere else by train. These larger ghettos were brickyards or similar establishments on the edges of the city; we were put into a hide-processing plant, a tannery that was worse than a brickyard would have been. Because the hides were processed by soaking them in bins of water until the hair fell off, the place had only outer walls; it didn’t have a roof because rain or snow was a welcome addition to the processing operation. For the Germans and their Hungarian associates, it was a good enough place to keep us in. I cannot recall how many roofless buildings there were, but between three and five thousand people had been amassed. The one we were forced to stay in was so crowded that the five of us were only able to put down our belongings. At night, my grandmother and my little brothers crouched down on them, trying to sleep. My mother and I had to stand, planting our feet among them, leaning against each other to try and sleep or nap, whatever we could manage. On top of this inhumane compression, it started to rain on the first night and continued to rain steadily for two days and nights. We stood in mud, soaked to the skin.

  In the daytime, we were permitted to roam within the enclosed area. I saw terribly sadistic gendarmes, strangers who had been brought in from other parts of the country to eliminate the possibility of leniency toward people they might know. They beat people, punishing them for even the slightest infraction. On the first day I saw one of the oldest people from my town, a man I knew who was very hard of hearing, feeble, and near-blind, walking with a white cane in the middle of the yard where freight cars stood with open doors. While he shuffled around in the yard, a guard yelled at him to stop, but since he didn’t hear, he kept walking. After the third yell, they grabbed him, beat him, and hung him up by his wrists from the corners of one of the freight car’s doors. He lost consciousness within minutes and they didn’t even take him down. They left him there to show others what would happen to those who didn’t obey orders. They did this only because we were Jews.

  Irene Bleier Muskal

  A gendarme, shouting and cursing, greeted us as the heavy doors opened. He ordered us to quickly get out with our backpacks. We then witnessed a bloodcurdling sight; a gendarme was brutally beating up a good friend of my father, and his sister-in-law.

  The gendarmes ordered us to line up five to a row to be counted. Then we marched into a big building with no roof. A young girl from our town was being hanged from the building by her hands and legs. A couple of gendarmes beat her all over her body with their hands and guns. The girl screamed and cried bitterly. The gendarmes poured many liters of water over her so that she would wake up after fainting, and then kept beating her. Blood and tears streamed down her crucified body all the while. Oh, those barbaric, ruthless beasts. It was a miserable sight.

  We crowded into the roofless building, sitting on top of each other and stepping on each other's legs as we tried to walk around. As we all took our places, a heavy rain poured down on us, soaking us down to our bones. Our belongings were also soaked, spoiling the food and leaving us with almost nothing to eat for the next two weeks.

  Agnes Fleischer Baker was ten years old and was to be taken with her mother and younger sister.

  Agnes Fleischer Baker

  When the Germans came, within a month and a half we were in the ghetto, then we were assembled in the place that turned out to be worse than everything that came after. That's when the suicides started, because people realized what's going to happen to them. Our doctor had a six-year-old daughter, so he killed himself and his wife, and the little girl threw up, so she somehow survived. My father was very sick, and I still remember the little suitcase that we had with his medication. My mother said to my father, ‘We actually have enough to end it all now,’ and my father said, ‘No, if anybody will kill these children, let the Germans do it.’ He was the first one that really saved our lives. He later died; it was the
heat that killed him.

  Leslie Meisels

  On the third day, there was an announcement that families with five or more children had to report to the railway track, where a group was being assembled for transport. We knew that people were being taken away, but the government’s propaganda emphasized that any rumors we heard about Jews undergoing cruelty at the hands of the Nazis was just that, a rumor; they made us believe that for the remainder of the war, which we hoped would be short, we were being sent somewhere for slave labor. As bad as that seemed, we still thought that if they wanted our labor, they would have to give us food and shelter. At the tannery we had nothing, and so we believed that anywhere else would be better. We didn’t know at that time about the Nazis’ unparalleled, unimaginable annihilation plan, already working full blast in Auschwitz and the other death camps.

  Later, there was another announcement calling for families with four children to report to the train. One of my best friends, who had four siblings and was going to be on that transport, came to me saying that they had heard that they needed eight more families with three children to make up the quota and asked if we wanted to come along with their group. I went back to my mother and told her this, even though nobody knew where the people on the transport were going or what would happen to the rest of us. My mother said we shouldn’t go because they hadn’t called for families with three children. I have to explain that in those days, a seventeen-year-old never, ever said ‘no’ to his or her parents. Up to that moment, I, too, had never spoken back to my mother, but this time I said, ‘We’re not staying! We’re going!’ We argued back and forth until I grabbed my belongings and started to walk. She had no choice but to follow. My father had already been taken away to the unknown, and she didn’t want her family to be broken up any further. I didn’t know then, and I still don’t know now, what made me defy my mother, but it was the first miracle of my survival, [for this was a transport that was shunted away from Auschwitz towards Austria].