Tag #137130 - Interview #78419 (Ferenc Pap)

On the 3rd of May 1944 a Romanian peasant from Tordaszentmihaly raised the price for a family – the Stossers – whom he wanted to evacuate to Romania. And so they were taken away – they were deported – and none of them came back. They found the price the man asked too high. My mother used to visit these Stossers, their ex-neighbours, and that’s how it was revealed to us what they wanted to do. The Romanian man came to us very angrily and told us that if these people didn’t want to save their necks he would help us flee us for nothing. It looks as if that man knew more than we did. That is how it happened that he took us for nothing. We lived in Zapolya Street at that time. We started from there. We hid in an attic until it got dark, then late night, we met this man at a given place and he took us over the border. There was my mother, my younger brother and I, and a woman from the neighbourhood who found out somehow what we were up to and pleaded to come along. The woman’s husband was in forced labor service as well; he didn’t come back but died there. They had no children.
I remember that we went through the forest a lot and it was very tiring. We went by horse and cart until the end of the Gyorgyfalvi road where we met this man and from that time on he took us on a very remote road. This whole thing made us more mature than we should have been at this age (I was just nine years old and my brother was just six). We remember quite a lot of details. For example we remember very well that before the end of the Gyorgyfalvi road they took us into a watchman’s house in order to use up some time. The landlady was the sister of the man who took us over the border. At one point she told us: “Children, hide under the bed quickly, because the wolves are coming!” in fact there was some sort of patrol, some kind of control by the gendarmerie. After they noted that everything was okay and they didn’t find us, we could come out. The lady gave us each a soup plate of “krumplipaprikas” [stewed potato with sour cream, seasoned with red pepper] with the words: “Eat, just eat, children; this may be your last supper…” To the left, at the end of the Monostor [today: Manastur] neighbourhood there is the Gorbo valley; somewhere there we got across [into Romania]. So it was not at the usual crossing-place, at the Felekteto [today: Feleacu], where they tightened control and caught many people fleeing, but we went somewhere else. This man knew the area. He took us over the border and left us before Tordaszentmihaly. Once we got there we entered a Romanian peasant house, completely at random. The man there probably guessed what it all was about. My mother asked him to take us to Torda. In Torda she had an acquaintance, we stayed there about seven or eight days then we went to Temesvar by train.