Tag #138669 - Interview #78499 (Bernat Sauber)

We had to join up in Nagybanya, our battalion was there. We rented a carriage, that's how we traveled to Nagybanya, just like 4 or 5 months earlier, when the counter-espionage agents took us there. They assigned us to different companies, we weren't in the same company. We ended up around two of us in each company. I was in Nagybanya for some 2 weeks, and then I was transferred to Disznajo, near Szaszregen [15 kms from Szaszregen]. The forced laborers worked there at the Deda–Szeretfalva railroad line. Hungarians worked there, as well, because there were these famous Hungarian construction workers. They had special pushcarts, in which one could put some half a cubic meter. Its two wings were tied with a rope, and the man only had to guide it. We had some good meals there, we got the usual army food. Already when we joined up, we got uniforms. In 1942, for I don't know how long, we had the regular Hungarian soldier uniform, with that three-colored rose in the national colors removed. The captain, Antal Alsopathy, was a hard drinker, that's exactly why he was sent there. These people were usually sent to the forced labor companies. Beside work we had 3 days of field exercise weekly, just like the draftees: crawling, lying down and double march. When it was mud, after 20 meters of crawling we looked like pigs. Fortunately the Maros was near, and it was already early spring or summer. We took a bath in the Maros and washed our clothes without taking them off. There was some landowner there, and the captain courted his daughter. When it came into his mind to court her, he woke us up in the middle of the night and called us out to sing serenades – we sang marching songs. This happened several times, and we sang 'Horthy Miklos katonaja vagyunk, a legszebb katonaja...' (We are Miklos Horthy's soldiers, the most good-looking ones...' As forced laborers we sang these kind of songs, among others. We had to sing for him all the time, when we went to work we had to sing, the whole company. You can imagine he was drunk when we did this.