Tag #136239 - Interview #78490 (Katalin Kallos Havas)

My sister-in-law was working in one of the barracks opposite, the Rewier. This was the barracks for the convalescents. I was able to go there just a few times. Even she, as doctor, couldn’t move around freely, she had to stay in the Rewier barracks. She was very pessimistic. After a while I didn’t even want to meet her because she kept saying, ‘Why are you struggling? Can’t you see there’s no end to this, nobody will leave here alive?’ But there one needed all the optimism one could get to try to live, and she always demoralized me. She became obsessed with finding my brother, and left slips everywhere she went and asked everybody about him who came to her for examination. Of course, he was nowhere to be found. There was an SS hospital corpsman who went from camp to camp, inspecting them; he was responsible for the entire district, including Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. I don’t know if my sister-in-law and he became friends or what happened, but she asked this man to take with him some slips, which said, ‘I’m looking for Gyorgy Havas.’ My brother was working in Niederorshel, a smaller camp in Buchenwald. One day the corpsman found him, and my sister-in-law was beside herself with joy, and from then on she sent a package to my brother every month – because this corpsman made his tour monthly. So they knew each other’s whereabouts. I only found this out later, after we came home. By the way, a French man included this story in his book as an interesting case to prove that not every German was a murderer, even if they wore SS uniforms.