‘THIS IS AUSCHWITZ. YOU WILL NEVER GET OUT
Nazi guards sent Paul Herczeg’s mother with the elderly women she was helping. He never saw her again, but he did survive the notorious death camp.
Freight trains were used to ship Jews from ghettos across occupied Europe to extermination camps such as Auschwitz. Around 80 people, with their belongings, were crammed into each of these freight cars, and the journey could last multiple days, said the Auschwitz museum.
Paul Herczeg was 16 years old when he was crowded onto a train car in his native Hungary in 1944, destination unknown. He was with his mother and father and a friend his own age.
“The trains were cattle cars. We were crammed in. It was July and it was hot. We still had some food with us, but little water. As the train finally jerked forward we had no idea where we were going or how long it would take to get there,” he said.
He was on one of the last German transports clearing out the Hungarian Jews, taking them north. Three days later it stopped.
“The doors slid open and we poured out into the fresh air.”
On the rail platform, Nazi guards shouted commands, dividing the men from the women.
“We were close enough to see my mother in line, approaching the German soldier who was making the selection of the women. Because she spoke German, she was translating and helping the older women. The German soldier waved his hand — to the left, to the right — and my mother was sent with the old women she was helping,” he remembers. At the time, he didn’t grasp what that wave meant.
“It was the last time I saw my mother,” he said.
The men were also divided, between the seemingly strong and seemingly weak.
“We were taken to Compound B1. There were already inmates there and I questioned them: ‘Where are we?’
“‘ This is Auschwitz,’ they answered. ‘ You will never get out, but you are lucky you were selected to work. Those who were not — look over here, see the chimney, that long chimney with smoke coming out? They are already burning.’
“It had taken a while for us to get to the barracks, enough time for our fellow travellers to be burning.”
He realized his mother was among them.
“I’m convinced my mother would have survived had she been standing alone. She was fairly young, fifty years old, and in good health, yet she was sent with the old women to the trucks going to the gas chambers.”
He was given prisoner number 108641.
“Auschwitz was a huge place,” he said. “The next morning we got a piece of bread and the starving began.”
Now 90 and living in Montreal, Herczeg is one of a dwindling number of eyewitnesses to the horrors of the Auschwitz death camp in German-occupied Poland.
His mind was drawn back to his experience in Auschwitz as the world marks the 75th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, on Jan. 27, although those dark days are never really far from his thoughts.
Herczeg is warm and energetic despite his declining health. He offers a bright smile and waves f rom his bed. He is anxious to talk so people remember, not so much remember him, but what he saw, what he experienced and the importance of it.
He is also concerned, he said, that he is one of the last eyewitnesses to the extermination of the Roma in Auschwitz. He wants people to remember others were killed, as well as Jews.
“In the barrack across the road from ours, there were about 23,000 Roma — families with children — living in ‘ the Gypsy camp,’” he said. “One night after dark, we were woken by a huge noise of kids and adults screaming. We watched through the wooden slats as the SS officers loaded everyone from the barrack into trucks. That was the last of the Roma.”
He was in Auschwitz for two months before he was sent to Mühldorf, a labour camp in Germany. He was forced to work on a bunker in the forest to be used as a jet fighter factory, he said.
His father was worked to his death at Mühldorf. Herczeg made it out alive. He said he survived because after his father died, he was caught trying to escape and the guard, instead of shooting him, let him work in the kitchen rather than the grueling work on the bunker. In the kitchen, the boys stole potato peels to supplement food in their barracks.
Herczeg has told his story to schools and community groups over the years. He told it as a witness, as well, to a prosecutor from Germany who was gathering evidence against Oskar Groening, the so- called “Accountant of Auschwitz,” who would be convicted in 2015 of being an accessory to murder of 300,000 Jews at Auschwitz-birkenau.
He has also been working on a remarkable memoir, with his daughter, Lynn.
Herczeg arrived in Canada as a war orphan in 1948 and settled in Montreal.
“It’s been a happy day every day since,” he said.
The next morning we got a piece of bread and the sta rving began.