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The nightmare of what that could mean! Mother sat down, and began, ‘Imagine that, Kozinka told me we should go home and disappear, because the Germans are invading us.’ That’s how it happened; we quickly dressed and went home. We started to worry – the three of us women there – about what would come next.
My father was at home, he didn’t have to go to Novaky. We successfully got my brother-in-law home early by getting him a work permit as a mason at a construction company. Exactly one week before that, before that incident with Kozinka, we succeeded in getting my husband out of Novaky, so that he also had a physical labor job at a construction company. Actually, there were a few of us home. Now, naturally, the problems were what we could live on. Jewish people could only buy food after ten o’clock; this was what they allowed us because of the war.
It’s true that here in Slovakia, there was still something to buy. Though, after ten the stalls were a lot emptier than before ten. There, where my mother shopped everyday, the business was German, a German woman’s. Once she said to my mother, ‘Miss Vidor, listen here, leave your shopping basket here, put a list of what you want in it, and come back for it in the afternoon.’
That’s how it happened. From then on, whatever we really needed, we got. Because the lady always packed in whatever it was we needed, vegetables or anything Mother wrote down, flour, sugar or bread. That happened with the Germans, too. I want to mention that, because you can’t put all members of any nationality in one basket. Any nationality can have decent and honorable members, and there can be evil ones and murderous ones.
The Germans invaded us and we lived in great anxiety about how it would continue. In the meantime, we listened to the news, and we knew that the Germans were suffering very, very big losses. We kept on living in anxiety, and then, one night, the [Hlinka] guards came for us.
They took us in on 27th September 1944. The guards took us to the Jewish Center – this was where the center is now, the building constituted the Jewish religious community’s property. They took us there, I don’t know how many of us, about 1,500 or as many as they could successfully round up in the city.
In 1940 there were 15,000 Jews living in the city. There were only about 1,500 left which could be found in their apartments. We spent the entire night standing on the two stories of steps there.
Quite early in the morning, before eight we then had to march off. The Germans ordered everyone into rows of five, the so-called ‘Funferreihe,’ and we had to march through the whole city like that, to the called Nove Mesto Station. This station has been gone for a long time.
It was at the end of Dunajska [Danube] Street. A lot of people were standing outside on the street; they saw what was going on there. They stopped and watched. Some stood around with fallen gazes. I saw a lady who cried when she saw this.
There wasn’t any rejoicing, they were really, really sad standing there, quite ashamed. We got there [to the station], and stood in lines of five all day long. We were lined up; me, my mother, my father, one of my aunts and another person – that was our line of five.
At every pole stood a Freiwilligenstaffel [FS – German volunteer corps]. The local Germans, who weren’t SS, were Freiwillige; it was an organization similar to the SS, just a local Slovak organization. Everyone had a machine-gun in his hands, pointing at us.
The guy across from me was an old schoolmate of mine from the Lyceum. His father was the mathematics teacher. This schoolmate of mine was called Ede [Eduard’s nickname] Ulreich. He stood exactly in front of me, pointing with his machine-gun at us.
My parents were healthy, but the terrible anxiety was hard to bear for them in their fifties, and my mother got sick. She asked for a glass of water, she said, if she could get one she’d be much better right away. We stood there, it was very warm, the sun burned down. So I called out to Ulreich in German, ‘Magst du mir ein Glas Wasser fur meine Mutti bringen?’, that is, could he bring her a glass of water. To that, my ex-classmate said, ‘Kusch, oder ich schiess’ – Shut up or I shoot.
I’ll say one more thing in connection to this Ede Ulreich. He had a little sister, who was very nice, a very pretty creature, whom I ran into two or three years after the war. We greeted each other, then I said, ‘and your brother?’ ‘He’s in Vienna, I’ll write him to tell him you’re here, he’ll be so pleased.’ I said, ‘Well, he sure will be pleased! And what’s Ede doing in Vienna?’ ‘Well, he’s a religion teacher in a Lutheran lyceum.’
A good couple of years later, I’m going up the steps and I see this strange figure. Oh my god, that’s Ede Ulreich! He left with very quick steps towards our apartment, where my younger sister lived. I ran after him, but he went faster than me, and I only caught up with him at the gate. I called out, ‘Ulreich’!
He turned with an unearthly smile, happiness, to see me. For the first time in my life, I gave him such a terrible slap that I couldn’t feel my arm. I said, ‘You dirty, lowest of killers, villainous trash.’ The slap was so strong, though he was much taller than I, that his glasses fell on the ground and broke.
He didn’t say a word, just stood there, like a petrified statue. Meanwhile, the gate had opened, and a man living there had come in, and watched what was going on. Ulreich stood there ashamed, because he [the man] had seen the end. I got myself together, and like I’d just finished a job well done, I left.
Then something happened to me, that I can’t explain to myself: as I went down the street, I sobbed. I thought later, that maybe because my fate had brought me to such a humiliating situation that I had struck out at another living being. But I’ve never killed [sic] anything, not even a fly. I saw such monstrous things in the camp, that I can’t cause the end of any living thing, not even a flying bug.
Now I’ll continue with my own life. So we stood there at the station until noon. Then at noon, they put us in the boxcars. We ended up in Sered [27], which was already a collection camp by that time. We were there in Sered for three days; that was something horrible. Due to the lack of space, they crammed us horribly together; it was monstrous. The boxcars came, again they packed us in for the first round. In the freight cars, there could have been seventy of us, or maybe more. When we reached Cadca, then we knew we were going towards Auschwitz.
I knew exactly what there was in Osviencim [Slovak name for Auschwitz. The Slovaks and even Hungarian-speakers rarely use the German name], and that Osviencim existed. It was known, because two prisoners had successfully escaped in March 1944 [see Auschwitz Protocols] [28], and my husband at the time had met one of them.
They had prepared a huge file – made maps of Osviencim and Brezinka. They marked where the gas chambers were, where the crematoriums were – there were four crematoriums, gas chamber, C-barrack, the men and women’s barrack, as well as the gypsy [Roma] barrack. Vrba and Rosenberg, who’d gotten away, gave my husband the scroll [rolled up documents]. Everything was drawn there precisely – this had to be passed on to Dr. Tibor Kovacs, who was the unofficial director of the Jewish Center [29].
I lived on Simoniho Street then, it doesn’t exist today – it was there, where the Devin Hotel stands now. We lived there, but I brought it here to Kozia Street from there. The UZ – Ustredna Zidov [Jewish Center] was there. Somebody had to take the map over, it was a terribly long roll of paper, at least as long as a table [longer than a meter] and it was rolled together.
The question came up of how to deliver this by hand [to the Jewish Center] without attracting attention. Unbelievable, but the choice fell on me, which today is a little miracle. My husband, Oskar Klopstock, was a member of the underground movement, he recommended me.
They knew that I was pretty bold, that I didn’t get scared and more than that, I was still quite a pretty woman. They also knew, that they had to do something quickly, so I did it. For example, there was an immediate death penalty for those who listened to London radio, I listened to it every day, and every day I listened to the German one, too.
So I wasn’t scared. When they asked me, whether I would accept [the assignment], of course, I accepted. And it got there [to the Jewish Center] without a problem. Of course, that day that I took the roll, I didn’t pin on the star. Afterwards I went home. That was my only role in it, nothing more.
Dr. Kovacs’s task was to get it to Hungary, to Horthy [30] and the papal nuncius. As I understand, the scroll was put in the hand of the papal nuncius, to pass on to the Vatican. They gave a copy to Horthy. The papal nuncius reported this to the Vatican, and Pius XII, the pope at the time, condemned the events [the camps] only in writing. That’s why when I first saw Auschwitz, it wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me.
We had just arrived, and of course not there, where it said ‘Arbeit macht frei’, but in Birkenau, where the gas chambers were. It so happened, that the first female doctor in Bratislava, who was a surgeon, was in the boxcar with us and her mother.
The mother was maybe a very strong seventy years old. She gave her mother a lethal injection, and then gave one to herself. We had these two corpses already when we arrived. Supposedly there were more in the other boxcars – older people, small children, babies, people who had killed themselves or died from the rigors of the trip.
We had to get out, they were yelling: ‘Raus, Raus!’ The rucksack wasn’t allowed to be taken, we had to leave it inside [the boxcar], we had to leave everything, we came out, and they separated us. The women separate, the men separate. I saw my father and my husband for the last time then.
Again we were lined up in fives. Again, it was my mother, me, my aunt and two unfamiliar women. We were very far in the back, the line shuffled forward. I never saw Mengele in my life. We were far away from him, I didn’t get over there, because at every fifth step there was an SS-man standing with a machine-gun pointing at us.
The line moved with difficulty, sometimes stopping. I was crying bitterly. My mother consoled me, ‘Don’t cry, my Kato, this is the kind of life we’ve been living in the last years, it’s nothing to cry about. Don’t cry about this, it wasn’t a human life anymore.’
An SS-man who was standing not far from there, was from here, from Forev. He understood what my mother said. He looked at me, grabbed my arm and asked, ‘How old are you?’ Everybody whom they asked said, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, because they thought then that those older than thirty were gassed. I answered honestly, I’m thirty-four. He said, ‘You’re still strong, you’re going to work.’
I stood with my arms around my mother, but somehow they shoved me over to the other side. I almost fell over, two Bratislava ladies standing in line, grabbed me: ‘Come on, we heard your name is Kato, come along.’ That’s how I got on the side of life.
My father was at home, he didn’t have to go to Novaky. We successfully got my brother-in-law home early by getting him a work permit as a mason at a construction company. Exactly one week before that, before that incident with Kozinka, we succeeded in getting my husband out of Novaky, so that he also had a physical labor job at a construction company. Actually, there were a few of us home. Now, naturally, the problems were what we could live on. Jewish people could only buy food after ten o’clock; this was what they allowed us because of the war.
It’s true that here in Slovakia, there was still something to buy. Though, after ten the stalls were a lot emptier than before ten. There, where my mother shopped everyday, the business was German, a German woman’s. Once she said to my mother, ‘Miss Vidor, listen here, leave your shopping basket here, put a list of what you want in it, and come back for it in the afternoon.’
That’s how it happened. From then on, whatever we really needed, we got. Because the lady always packed in whatever it was we needed, vegetables or anything Mother wrote down, flour, sugar or bread. That happened with the Germans, too. I want to mention that, because you can’t put all members of any nationality in one basket. Any nationality can have decent and honorable members, and there can be evil ones and murderous ones.
The Germans invaded us and we lived in great anxiety about how it would continue. In the meantime, we listened to the news, and we knew that the Germans were suffering very, very big losses. We kept on living in anxiety, and then, one night, the [Hlinka] guards came for us.
They took us in on 27th September 1944. The guards took us to the Jewish Center – this was where the center is now, the building constituted the Jewish religious community’s property. They took us there, I don’t know how many of us, about 1,500 or as many as they could successfully round up in the city.
In 1940 there were 15,000 Jews living in the city. There were only about 1,500 left which could be found in their apartments. We spent the entire night standing on the two stories of steps there.
Quite early in the morning, before eight we then had to march off. The Germans ordered everyone into rows of five, the so-called ‘Funferreihe,’ and we had to march through the whole city like that, to the called Nove Mesto Station. This station has been gone for a long time.
It was at the end of Dunajska [Danube] Street. A lot of people were standing outside on the street; they saw what was going on there. They stopped and watched. Some stood around with fallen gazes. I saw a lady who cried when she saw this.
There wasn’t any rejoicing, they were really, really sad standing there, quite ashamed. We got there [to the station], and stood in lines of five all day long. We were lined up; me, my mother, my father, one of my aunts and another person – that was our line of five.
At every pole stood a Freiwilligenstaffel [FS – German volunteer corps]. The local Germans, who weren’t SS, were Freiwillige; it was an organization similar to the SS, just a local Slovak organization. Everyone had a machine-gun in his hands, pointing at us.
The guy across from me was an old schoolmate of mine from the Lyceum. His father was the mathematics teacher. This schoolmate of mine was called Ede [Eduard’s nickname] Ulreich. He stood exactly in front of me, pointing with his machine-gun at us.
My parents were healthy, but the terrible anxiety was hard to bear for them in their fifties, and my mother got sick. She asked for a glass of water, she said, if she could get one she’d be much better right away. We stood there, it was very warm, the sun burned down. So I called out to Ulreich in German, ‘Magst du mir ein Glas Wasser fur meine Mutti bringen?’, that is, could he bring her a glass of water. To that, my ex-classmate said, ‘Kusch, oder ich schiess’ – Shut up or I shoot.
I’ll say one more thing in connection to this Ede Ulreich. He had a little sister, who was very nice, a very pretty creature, whom I ran into two or three years after the war. We greeted each other, then I said, ‘and your brother?’ ‘He’s in Vienna, I’ll write him to tell him you’re here, he’ll be so pleased.’ I said, ‘Well, he sure will be pleased! And what’s Ede doing in Vienna?’ ‘Well, he’s a religion teacher in a Lutheran lyceum.’
A good couple of years later, I’m going up the steps and I see this strange figure. Oh my god, that’s Ede Ulreich! He left with very quick steps towards our apartment, where my younger sister lived. I ran after him, but he went faster than me, and I only caught up with him at the gate. I called out, ‘Ulreich’!
He turned with an unearthly smile, happiness, to see me. For the first time in my life, I gave him such a terrible slap that I couldn’t feel my arm. I said, ‘You dirty, lowest of killers, villainous trash.’ The slap was so strong, though he was much taller than I, that his glasses fell on the ground and broke.
He didn’t say a word, just stood there, like a petrified statue. Meanwhile, the gate had opened, and a man living there had come in, and watched what was going on. Ulreich stood there ashamed, because he [the man] had seen the end. I got myself together, and like I’d just finished a job well done, I left.
Then something happened to me, that I can’t explain to myself: as I went down the street, I sobbed. I thought later, that maybe because my fate had brought me to such a humiliating situation that I had struck out at another living being. But I’ve never killed [sic] anything, not even a fly. I saw such monstrous things in the camp, that I can’t cause the end of any living thing, not even a flying bug.
Now I’ll continue with my own life. So we stood there at the station until noon. Then at noon, they put us in the boxcars. We ended up in Sered [27], which was already a collection camp by that time. We were there in Sered for three days; that was something horrible. Due to the lack of space, they crammed us horribly together; it was monstrous. The boxcars came, again they packed us in for the first round. In the freight cars, there could have been seventy of us, or maybe more. When we reached Cadca, then we knew we were going towards Auschwitz.
I knew exactly what there was in Osviencim [Slovak name for Auschwitz. The Slovaks and even Hungarian-speakers rarely use the German name], and that Osviencim existed. It was known, because two prisoners had successfully escaped in March 1944 [see Auschwitz Protocols] [28], and my husband at the time had met one of them.
They had prepared a huge file – made maps of Osviencim and Brezinka. They marked where the gas chambers were, where the crematoriums were – there were four crematoriums, gas chamber, C-barrack, the men and women’s barrack, as well as the gypsy [Roma] barrack. Vrba and Rosenberg, who’d gotten away, gave my husband the scroll [rolled up documents]. Everything was drawn there precisely – this had to be passed on to Dr. Tibor Kovacs, who was the unofficial director of the Jewish Center [29].
I lived on Simoniho Street then, it doesn’t exist today – it was there, where the Devin Hotel stands now. We lived there, but I brought it here to Kozia Street from there. The UZ – Ustredna Zidov [Jewish Center] was there. Somebody had to take the map over, it was a terribly long roll of paper, at least as long as a table [longer than a meter] and it was rolled together.
The question came up of how to deliver this by hand [to the Jewish Center] without attracting attention. Unbelievable, but the choice fell on me, which today is a little miracle. My husband, Oskar Klopstock, was a member of the underground movement, he recommended me.
They knew that I was pretty bold, that I didn’t get scared and more than that, I was still quite a pretty woman. They also knew, that they had to do something quickly, so I did it. For example, there was an immediate death penalty for those who listened to London radio, I listened to it every day, and every day I listened to the German one, too.
So I wasn’t scared. When they asked me, whether I would accept [the assignment], of course, I accepted. And it got there [to the Jewish Center] without a problem. Of course, that day that I took the roll, I didn’t pin on the star. Afterwards I went home. That was my only role in it, nothing more.
Dr. Kovacs’s task was to get it to Hungary, to Horthy [30] and the papal nuncius. As I understand, the scroll was put in the hand of the papal nuncius, to pass on to the Vatican. They gave a copy to Horthy. The papal nuncius reported this to the Vatican, and Pius XII, the pope at the time, condemned the events [the camps] only in writing. That’s why when I first saw Auschwitz, it wasn’t totally unfamiliar to me.
We had just arrived, and of course not there, where it said ‘Arbeit macht frei’, but in Birkenau, where the gas chambers were. It so happened, that the first female doctor in Bratislava, who was a surgeon, was in the boxcar with us and her mother.
The mother was maybe a very strong seventy years old. She gave her mother a lethal injection, and then gave one to herself. We had these two corpses already when we arrived. Supposedly there were more in the other boxcars – older people, small children, babies, people who had killed themselves or died from the rigors of the trip.
We had to get out, they were yelling: ‘Raus, Raus!’ The rucksack wasn’t allowed to be taken, we had to leave it inside [the boxcar], we had to leave everything, we came out, and they separated us. The women separate, the men separate. I saw my father and my husband for the last time then.
Again we were lined up in fives. Again, it was my mother, me, my aunt and two unfamiliar women. We were very far in the back, the line shuffled forward. I never saw Mengele in my life. We were far away from him, I didn’t get over there, because at every fifth step there was an SS-man standing with a machine-gun pointing at us.
The line moved with difficulty, sometimes stopping. I was crying bitterly. My mother consoled me, ‘Don’t cry, my Kato, this is the kind of life we’ve been living in the last years, it’s nothing to cry about. Don’t cry about this, it wasn’t a human life anymore.’
An SS-man who was standing not far from there, was from here, from Forev. He understood what my mother said. He looked at me, grabbed my arm and asked, ‘How old are you?’ Everybody whom they asked said, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, because they thought then that those older than thirty were gassed. I answered honestly, I’m thirty-four. He said, ‘You’re still strong, you’re going to work.’
I stood with my arms around my mother, but somehow they shoved me over to the other side. I almost fell over, two Bratislava ladies standing in line, grabbed me: ‘Come on, we heard your name is Kato, come along.’ That’s how I got on the side of life.
Location
Slovakia
Interview
Katarina Löfflerova