Notification of exclusion from the casino issued to Judita Sendrei's father, Matija Bruck

This notification of exclusion from the Civic Casino of Szabadka (Editor's note: Subotica, in Hungarian) was issued to my father in 1941 in Subotica. My father was excluded from the casino because of his non-Aryan origin, as was decreed by the 1939 anti-Jewish law issued by the Hungarian authorities. On March 19, 1944 the Germans arrived and I had to start going to school wearing a yellow star. My father convened a family assembly and asked his closest relatives whether they wanted to try and save their lives by converting to Catholicism. I was the most vocal with my answer. I said that it was not even a consideration: 'Never! I will remain a Jew until the end.' Very quickly after that my father was taken to a camp in Backa Topolo, and they put our whole family in the ghetto. After a short time we were loaded into wagons headed for Bacsalmas, Hungary. My grandmother was put in a hospital, and my mother and I took shelter in a mill where we slept on the bare ground, and I contracted an inflammation of the lungs. Through one young soldier, to whom I gave my ring, I managed to send a letter to my father to tell him where the family was located. My father in turn used the first opportunity to volunteer to register and set out in our direction, towards the first wagon. We were quickly transported to Szeged and later to the Strashov camp. From the moment that my parents and I arrived in the Strashov camp we were no longer separated. We went from there to a work camp in Austria, where we awaited liberation. A little on foot, a little by horse drawn carriage, and we managed to make our way to Bratislava.