Magdalena Seborova with her parents, Maximilian Klein and Edith Kleinova

Magdalena Seborova with her parents, Maximilian Klein and Edith Kleinova

In this photograph you can see my parents, Maximilian Klein and Edith Kleinova. The baby is me. The photograph was taken in 1941 in Sered. My father said that when I was born, that day was the first time they drove Jews out to clear snow from the railroad tracks. Up to then it was more or less all right. I don't know how much snow had fallen, maybe even two meters, apparently there was so much on the tracks that the locomotive couldn't get through it. I wasn't my parents' only child. My brother was born in the concentration camp, but died in four days. It was in Sered. [Editor's note: there was a labor camp in Sered; Mrs. Seborova uses the term concentration camp to refer to it.] I remember it, it was in 1944. His name was Peter. We erected a symbolic tombstone in the Sered graveyard. All I remember from the Sered concentration camp are the roll calls, but I can't say for sure whether it was there or in Terezin. As I've already mentioned, my brother was born in Sered. They put him in my arms, he had infant jaundice. I remember that moment when he died. It was drastic. A person remembers such things, even when he was very small. My brother died, and my mother had that dead brother of mine with her all day and thought that because of that she'd save us, and that they wouldn't deport us. When they saw that he was dead, they loaded us on as well. My father always told me that Czechs are decent people, because they brought us food and water when those trains were sidelined. We left Sered for Terezin. As I later found out, it was the last transport from Slovakia that aimed for Terezin. Terezin is about sixty kilometers from Prague. The trip to Prague takes about 6 hours by express train, but for us it took several days. The conditions in those cattle cars, freight wagons, were horrible, so some already died during the trip. They gave us some pail for feces, and that was it. I was with my parents until the end of the war, because at that time the selections weren't going on anymore. I don't think that my father was there, but I used to sleep with my mother on those plank-beds, that I remember.
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