Tag #142355 - Interview #78223 (Henrich Zinger)

In 1939 Germany began World War II. Hungary was an ally of Germany during the war. Mobilization to the Hungarian army began. In 1941 Germany attacked the USSR [this was the beginning of the so-called Great Patriotic War] [5] and I was mobilized to a forced labor battalion in the army. At the beginning we had German commanders that were later replaced by Hungarians. We were sent to excavate trenches along the Don River in the USSR [Don is a big river in Central Russia]. Hungarian officers were commanders of the Don front. They behaved brutally. We were ordered to do all kinds of hard work. We had no right to refuse and they shot people for disobedience. Our task was making trenches. All roads were covered with snow and we had to clean the snow for the army troops. Frosts were so severe in January - February 1942 that people froze to death within a few minutes if they fell down. We were given spades and if someone dropped his spade he died. There was a strong wind blowing and it was only possible to walk with a spade. I had a woolen mask that my sister had knitted to cover my head and face. There were only Jews recruited to labor battalions. There were about 1,000 Jews in our unit. I don't know how many survived, but I don't think there were many survivors. I believe, about 1%. Besides inhuman work conditions Jews were shot by Russians while they didn't have any weapons to defend themselves.

In February 1942 our battalion was attacked by the Soviet troops. The Hungarian military ran away. There were nine of us left and we were wandering about not knowing in what direction to go. We bumped into a house at the border of a forest with a kitchen where they cooked meals for Hungarian soldiers. We asked them if they wanted to hire us in exchange for food. We had to chop wood and peel potatoes. Soldiers got some black coffee and rum or cognac to cheer up before combat action. We also got some coffee or rum occasionally. Regretfully, we didn't stay there long. One night some drunken German officers broke into the room where we slept. They yelled, 'Wake up, communists!'. They thought that all Jews were communists for some reason. We couldn't understand what it was all about when we were told to get dressed, take our rucksacks with our belongings and go to the kitchen. When we came there the food stock supervisor began to yell at us, 'You, dirty Jews, communists, drank the cognac and rum that our soldiers need so much!' It was the Germans that drank it, but they blamed us. The officers began to beat us. I bowed down protecting my head and they kept hitting me on my rucksack. They wouldn't have been held responsible if they had killed us. When they got too tired they told us to go into the yard.

The snow around was so deep that we couldn't run away. We were lying in the snow. When we pulled ourselves together we moved on. We were looking for our fellow comrades. We couldn't speak Russian. I spoke Ruthenian, but this was the dialect of Ukrainian hutsul people, the language that we spoke in the village. We finally found our headquarters and were sent back to work. We did the hardest work, but we didn't have a choice. There was no escape from there. People got shot for attempting to run away. So, we would have been shot by the Hungarian, German or Russian military if we had tried to escape and were captured.