Sandor Gunst’s last postcard from deportation

Sandor Gunst’s last postcard from deportation

This is the last postcard my father, Sandor Gunst, sent to my mother, after he was taken away from Szentes. A Szentes resident of the Israelite faith, he was taken into custody in spring of 1944. My father had to be arrested and deported before the construction of the ghetto because he was the president of the religious community at the time. This happened directly after 19th March 1944, when the Germans occupied Hungary.

My father was deported shortly after the Germans entered, on 19th March 1944. He was the chairman of the Jewish community at that time, and he and other notables were rounded up at the Szentes police station. He managed to submit an appeal against his internment, naturally he thought he was innocent, and he knew that they only rounded him up because it was easy to find him through the Jewish community. Well, you can imagine what happened to that appeal, and the following week they deported him to Auschwitz, to be more precise, he was taken from Szentes first to Budapest, from there to Sarvar and then to Auschwitz and there he was exterminated. It is very hard to distinguish what I heard at first. But at the time, I think we didn't really know about Auschwitz. My father wrote postcards from Pest and Sarvar, which my mother didn't only keep and take to the ghetto and into deportation, but also managed to keep and bring back home.

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