Tag #135355 - Interview #101499 (Gotterer Borbala Piroska )

Before we got to Kosice the train stopped and I asked him where we were and what was going on, and he said: ‘we are 10 km away from Kosice, and the SS guard waits for you at Kosice, you will be turned over to the SS. That’s it.’ And then, as a kind and decent and merciful man that he was, I say that to this day, he left his rifle next to me in the wagon and said: ‘Look, I will let my rifle here.’ He wasn’t allowed to leave his rifle, he was a militiaman. ‘I’ll go, he said, up to the last train wagon and we will stay here for at least an hour or two, and there’s nobody, they are all with me in the last wagon.’ He did anything but telling me outright to run where I wanted, that’s why he left his rifle, so that I could run. And I didn’t. I said, how could I leave my parents and leave alone? Nobody could come with me and even if I ran away, we were already in Czechoslovakia, I didn’t know a word of Czech. Whe he came back and saw me there, he said: ‘Why didn’t you run away?’, he said: ‘I gave you the opportunity to run.’ I couldn’t, it wasn’t possible and God wanted it like that and that’s how it happened. The guard changed, we were turned over to the SS, and from there on I don’t know how much farther we went on, because the doors weren’t opened after that. Until then, we traveled with the doors of the wagon open.