Mirage Publishing Presents ... Azriel Feuerstein - Author of:
The Tumbler: A 16-year-old Boy’s Live Chronicle of Auschwitz, Belsen, Hanover, Hildesheim, Wolgsberg and Wüstegiersdorf Nazi Death Camps
Publication date: 9th October 2007

EXTRACTS FROM THE BOOK 
Copyright Azriel Feuerstein 2007
 

Sunday, 19 March 1944. The Germans occupy Hungary to ‘secure their lines of supply’ with the full cooperation of the Hungarian Army. The next day, going to school, we see three smiling German soldiers with heavy machineguns on every street corner. The people on the street are smiling too. After two hours of hanging about, we are sent home and the Germans occupy the school. It is an annoyingly beautiful spring day, with a festive air in the city and Main Street is full of people. From time to time, specially selected German units march along, singing. In every troop there are some whistlers who accompany the singing and give a solo once in a while, which really sounds very good. They get applauded too. Here and there, some people raise their arm in a Hitler-salute. People look musingly at the Jewish stores. In the evenings some neighbours and ‘good friends’ come to visit and, after some casual conversation, they offer to take care of our property, ‘if you should have to leave, God forbid’.

******
6 April 1944. Every Jew has to wear the yellow star. It is not very pleasant, but today we have to go to school to get the record-card as the school year is over. Instead of the anticipated mockery, there are some in the street who greet us first, and some who turn their head, not wanting to notice the yellow star. In the school, the situation is the same. The most pitiful are those who were born as Christians, because although their parents had converted to Christianity now they have to wear the yellow star because of the racial laws. They are not able to look into the eyes of neither the Jews nor the Christians.

******

Saturday, 14 April. As usual we meet in the grandparents’ garden. Everybody knows that it is the last time we would meet before the war ends. Nobody imagines that it would be our last meeting and that I would be the only one to survive. As usual, there are five families there: Grandma and Grandpa, Father’s sisters, Schapira Manyi and her little daughter, Goldberg Aliz and her two daughters, Boehm Elek and his daughter Zsuzsika, Father, Mother and I. Everybody has brought something to hide, that, above its real value, has some sentimental value too. You cannot hide everything because you have to leave something for them to confiscate, so as not to be tortured, and some valuables we hope to take with us, sewn in our clothing. Take with us…where?

******

Next day is Sunday, 23 April 1944, one month and three days after the German occupation. At ten o’clock there is a knock on the door. It is Kovacs in his uniform and with a threatening face. The official accompanying him sees that we are ready and asks how we knew that they were coming. Father explains that the Jewish council told us. We beg them to take any keepsakes they fancy. They do us the favour. We give them the keys. They close the doors and put on them and on the windows a broad red band proclaiming ‘Jewish property. Seized by the state’. Kovacs and the other man help us to take the packages down to the gate. From there the waiting coachman helps to load them on the carriage. 

******

We arrive at the gate of the brickyard. The police at the gate want us to load off the suitcases and take them ourselves all the way in. Kovacs speaks with them, and they allow us to take them in by carriage. Not too far away from the huge brick drying sheds, two cock-feathered gendarmes stop us and we have to load off everything, say goodbye and thanks to Kovacs. Some friends see us and they come to help us to take the packages up to the sheds. 

******
Monday, 15 May 1944, fifty-seven days after the German occupation. The suitcases are repacked. Mother prepares a canteen of water. Father tells me in secret that everyone has two tubes of ‘toothpaste’, but not to open them when anyone is near because there is money in them. In every coat, there is some jewel or money sewn in. We get to the gate before the wagons where there are two gendarmes with a big basket, enjoying themselves and demanding the engagement rings and the earrings too. After all those years, they don’t come off easily. One of the gendarmes wants to amuse himself and tells a young woman to take off her blouse because he wants to see if she does not have a necklace hidden there. At the last moment an SS officer, who is observing from the side, tells the police officer to replace the two gendarmes with policemen to speed up the process.

******

Around the wagons there are policemen, gendarmes, armed soldiers and a few SS men who push people without mercy and without end into the wagons. We see that it is better not to be the last one, climb onto an empty wagon and occupy the corner at the far end from the window. That is what Father wanted and he knew why. It seems that the wagon is full already, but it is not enough for these beasts in human shape. With hands, truncheons, rifles, they force in more and more. Shouting and crying. People tread on each other. There is no place for the packages. There is barely place for standing. At last they push in one bucket of water and an empty one for the needs of some eighty people. They close the door with deafening noise, chain it from the outside and seal it with a lead stamp of the SS. The train stands there in the hot May sun. The women swoon. The children seek their parents and in this hell there is no need for devils, the lost souls torment each other and themselves with their own hands in their hard packed misery.

******

In the early hours of the afternoon our train began to move at last. The bucket of water was empty already and the other one full. There was a small opening between the closed door and the wagon and the men peed through it, but it did not help much. The urine, and more, spilt over and spread around. Luckily, we were far away. There was no way to avoid it, and somehow they made an opening wider in the wire that closed the window and the disgusting overflow made its way in some kind of vessel from hand to hand all the way to the window where they poured it out. They tried to do it in such a way that half of it should not be blown back and in the packed wagon, and that was neither easy nor nice. I don’t want to go into detail about what happened to the rest, but all this, the inhuman conditions, the disgust and the shame, had their well-planned purpose: to crush and destroy individuality and self-respect.

******

Everything has to come to an end eventually, and so does this journey. The train slows down. It is evening. Those who stand near the window say that we have stopped before a huge camp. There is a great hullabaloo around. We hear the rattle of chains, the clang of the doors of neighbouring wagons being opened. The door of our wagon crashes open too. In the door stands a man, clad in blue-white stripped pyjama-like clothes and a service cap who shouts at the top of his voice, like everyone else around, ‘Los, los, alle heraus!’, which means everyone out, at once, leave everything in the wagon, even the coats! I ask him, in Hebrew, where were we, and he whispers, ‘Auschwitz. Everybody young, everybody healthy!’, and throws out the people who hesitate in the door. 

******

Those of us directed towards the right were lined up in threes with much shooting and beating. I was in the first row, at the platform’s edge. Suddenly, we see a group of older women and women with children nearing the road, under the platform. In the first row I see my mother supported on both sides by two friends. She too becomes aware of me. And out of the throat of this reticent, soft-spoken woman who I don’t remember ever raising her voice, breaks out a terrible, desperate, piercingly loud, howling shout: ‘GYURIKA!!!’ 

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AND THEY SAY IT NEVER HAPPENED!