Tag #115793 - Interview #78642 (Ferenc Leicht)

In Nagykanizsa there was an internment camp in the former coffee factory. There were leftists there, too, and all kinds of people, and a lot of Jews. But because the internment camp was small, there were only a couple truckload of Jews, they came to the small synagogue and the big synagogue and selected men and women between the age of 15 and 65. Among others, they selected me, my mother, my Aunt Bozsi [Erzsebet] and her husband, but they didn’t select the neighbor girl for example. They didn’t deport those either who had small children, even if they were of this age. They lined up those who fit into this category  on the 29th in the afternoon, escorted them to the coffee factory near the railway station, and the train came. But we didn’t know that at the front of the train there were a lot of cars full with the people from the coffee factory, nobody told us. They put about 80 of us on the train. Then they filled that long train with who knows how many Jews from Nagykanizsa, Csaktornya and Murakoz, relatively not old men and women. I got into the same car with my mother, my Aunt Bozsi, her husband, and quite a few of my schoolmates. I had never seen the policemen who put us on the car before, I only found it out about 10 years ago that they were from Szombathely.

And on the 29th the train set off, but nobody told us where we were going. But since it was the first train, everyone was optimistic, nobody thought that there might be a problem.