German Occupation, Hungarian Ghettoization, Deportation, and Arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau (March to Late May 1944)

German Occupation, Hungarian Ghettoization, Deportation, and Arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau (March to Late May 1944) - Chapter 2

March 19 to early April: the occupation and the state that carried it out

The occupation did not begin in her village. It began on March 15 to 18, 1944, when Admiral Horthy was summoned to Schloss Klessheim near Salzburg. Hitler confronted him with evidence that the Kállay government had been feeling out the Western Allies for a separate exit from the war. As Horthy was returning, German forces crossed the frontier in Operation Margarethe, on Sunday, March 19. Hungary was thereby occupied by an ally. Horthy remained head of state, the Hungarian civil service and gendarmerie stayed in place, and a new cabinet under Döme Sztójay, the former minister in Berlin, was installed within days. The Germans did not replace the Hungarian state. They bent it to their purposes, and this fact explains most of what happens to Lanka Ilkow in the next two months.

The German side of the machinery was strikingly small. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a Sondereinsatzkommando of perhaps 150 to 200 men, working alongside the Reich plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer and the Higher SS and Police Leader Otto Winkelmann. Its senior men included Hermann Krumey, Otto Hunsche, and Dieter Wisliceny. Wisliceny had run the Slovak deportations in 1942 and was closely involved in the operations in the northeastern Hungarian lands. That staff could not have emptied villages across a country of some eight hundred thousand persons classified as Jews under Hungarian law. The work was done by Hungarians. The deportation program was run by László Endre and László Baky, the undersecretaries in the Interior Ministry, under Minister Andor Jaross. The physical work fell to the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie, a rural police force of roughly twenty thousand men, with municipal police and local officials. Lt. Col. László Ferenczy served as the gendarmerie liaison to Eichmann’s staff. The Hungarian state railways ran the trains inside Hungary.

Lanka’s sentence “I never saw a German” is therefore not naive. It is close to a precise description of how the persecution of Subcarpathian Jews was organized. Germans were in Budapest, at the planning table, and at the frontier handover. Her further judgment, that the Hungarians were worse than the Germans, is the near-universal verdict of survivors from this region. It is also the verdict of Eichmann’s own men, who admitted after the war that they could not have done it without Hungarian zeal. That is a statement about who put hands on the Jews, not a moral ranking of the regimes. It does explain why survivors from the Carpathian region recall betrayal by neighbors and gendarmes rather than by uniformed Germans.

One more strand of context explains why her region went first. In March and April 1944 the Red Army was closing on the Carpathian passes, and Subcarpathia was about to become a military operational area. Both German and Hungarian authorities used this to justify treating the Jews there as a security risk, supposed Soviet sympathizers and spies behind the lines. The practical result was that Zone I, Carpatho-Ruthenia together with northeastern Hungary, was the first area scheduled for ghettoization and deportation, with the rest of the country following in sequence toward Budapest, which was done last. The Subcarpathian Jews, who were among the poorest, most religious, and most rural, were handled first.

Immediately after the occupation came a rapid flood of decrees. Jewish leaders in Budapest were summoned by Eichmann and made to form a Jewish Council, a device Eichmann’s office used everywhere to get Jewish communities to administer their own concentration. Jewish professionals were pushed out of their occupations, and telephones, radios, bicycles, and cars were confiscated. Travel and movement were restricted, and Christian domestic servants were barred from Jewish households. The decree requiring the yellow Star of David was issued around March 31 and took effect on April 5.

A small observation about her testimony is warranted here. She says nothing about the star, the confiscations, or the restrictions, and moves from Passover directly to the day after. Whether she was wearing the star in her village in April is something the transcript does not tell us. The omission is common. In survivor memory the months of legal degradation often collapse into the single event that followed. It also reflects that in a village of four Jewish families the decrees would have felt like a final turn of the screw on a population long stripped of its rights, which Phase 1 covered. The star, in other words, may have registered as the least of what was coming.

April: planning the Subcarpathian ghettoization

Through April, German and Hungarian officials worked out a schedule dividing Hungary outside Budapest into operational zones, beginning with Zone I in the northeast. Braham dates a conference at Munkács to around April 12 at which the details of ghettoization for the Carpathian region were fixed, with Baky, Ferenczy, and Wisliceny among those involved. I’d treat that date as approximate. The plan was a sequence of local concentrations. The Jews of villages and small towns would be gathered at nearby district seats, moved to a small number of central ghettos, and then loaded onto trains. Ghettos were to be sited, wherever possible, in brickyards, mills, and warehouses, usually on the edges of towns near rail lines.

The order to begin in Subcarpathia took effect on April 16, 1944, a Sunday. This is where her testimony does something remarkable. She states, without being asked to calculate anything, that they were taken “the day after Passover.” The eighth day of Passover in 1944 fell on Saturday, April 15, so “the day after” is April 16, precisely the date that Braham and others give for the start of ghettoization in the Carpathian zone. Her memory anchors the start of the process to the day. She also remarks that her mother had baked bread because bakeries were not available and everyone was baking at home, which fits a household still in the first hours after the holiday. The Jews of Ung county did not learn of their fate until the gendarmes arrived.

April 16 onward: the gathering of the villages

The roundups in villages followed a recognizable pattern, and her account fits it closely. Gendarmes and local officials arrived on the appointed day with little notice, ordered families to assemble with a limited amount of food and clothing, and sorted out any who would be spared, which in practice was almost no one. Houses were sealed. Neighbors often watched, and sometimes plundered once the Jews were gone. Before moving the Jews on, gendarmes frequently searched them for valuables, in schools, synagogues, or town squares, and in some places used violence against those suspected of hiding money or jewelry.

Her description of the intermediate stage, the march on foot to the next town with a horse and buggy for those who could not walk, and the assembly in a school at a place she names as Dubranich, matches this two-step pattern well. I take Dubranich to be a district-level or nearby market town in the same county, though I’d want confirmation of its exact identity. The search there, where jewelry and money were confiscated, is documented across the entire region. Her small act of concealment, the banknotes wrapped in newspaper and corked inside a coffee bottle brought in by a Christian woman, is a typical detail of this stage, as is the kindness of the woman who brought coffee. Both the brutality of the search and these isolated acts of help are recurrent in testimonies of the region.

The same episode contains the offer of a Christian acquaintance, a seamstress who had trained her sister, to hide them. Hiding was nearly impossible for Subcarpathian Jews. The population was overwhelmingly Ruthenian and Hungarian peasantry, villages were small and everyone was known, Jews were registered, and the countryside was thick with gendarmes. Rescue offers existed, but they were rare, and acceptance was rarer still. Her mother’s response, the reproach “you will go and hide and leave us?”, belongs to a recognizable pattern. Family obligation, not ignorance, is what kept most people from separating. Her own statement that she did not run because she wanted to be with her parents is the single most important explanation survivors give for why nearly all Jews of the region stayed together.

The Ungvár brickyard (late April to late May)

The central ghetto for Ung county and its surroundings was in the brickyards at Ungvár, as she says, using the Hungarian name for what became Uzhhorod after the Czechoslovak period. The brickyards of the region were attractive to the authorities because they had large open drying sheds, they sat by the railway, and they were easy to guard. Conditions were severe. People slept on bare ground or on the clay floors of the sheds under roofs that kept off some rain but not the cold, with almost no sanitation and water drawn from a few sources. Her statement that they brought no bedding and were freezing is exactly what the documentary and survivor record show for the brickyard ghettos of Munkács, Ungvár, and Kassa. The cold in the foothills at that season is real, and the wait lasted weeks.

The ghetto population at Ungvár was large. I can’t give a precise figure without checking Braham, but it was in the range of ten thousand or more people, drawn from the town itself and from the rural communities of the county. The Jewish Council, appointed by the authorities, ran kitchens and tried to maintain order, and the gendarmes controlled everything else. Her recollection that she carried dough in her brassiere to feed people who would not eat the ghetto kitchen food, and that people cooked noodles in small pots over two bricks, is a vivid example of the improvised life inside. Many observant Jews refused to eat kitchen food they could not be certain was kosher, so private cooking of this kind was common.

Several of her details concern forced work and contact with the outside. She describes sorting clothes taken from Jews and being searched because people found money and gold in them, and she describes a police escort permitting a trip to a well-known Jewish delicatessen in the town. The first is consistent with the practice of using ghetto inmates to sort confiscated belongings. The second is plausible but I can’t confirm the arrangement at Ungvár. It fits ghettos where escorted work details gave inmates a chance to buy or smuggle things, with the escort guards sometimes bribed and sometimes not. The whiskey episode, in which she labeled cases of liquor with her father’s name so that he could distribute it to religious Jews, belongs to the same informal economy of the ghetto, in which supplies moved through guards and workers by barter.

She also says that about every week people were selected out, that the rich were sorted out and taken first to the transport, and that the man named Steiger was lost without his wife. I can’t confirm a weekly selection of this kind at Ungvár. There are three ways to reconcile it with the record. In many Hungarian ghettos the wealthy and prominent were interrogated and beaten, since gendarmes were convinced that rich Jews were hiding valuables, so she may be recalling the removal of such people for interrogation. The deportations from a given ghetto were also carried out in a series of trains over several days, so the sense of a weekly sequence may reflect the actual staggered departures once they began. Finally, the first transports out of the country in late April were small and drew from internment camps, and rumors of such departures may have circulated in the ghetto. I would treat her statement as a faithful impression of a period in which people were disappearing in batches, without taking the weekly rhythm literally.

One passage describes a wedding, a funeral, and a circumcision, all in one day in the ghetto, and she ties it to a belief that the Messiah would come with that conjunction. I can’t document this particular event, but it expresses a recognizable tradition. Rabbinic literature describes the period before redemption as one of catastrophe, the “birth pangs of the Messiah,” and in deeply pious communities facing disaster, people sometimes sought to hasten redemption through ritual or to read events as its signs. The population of the Ungvár ghetto included many Hasidim, the long-bearded men in fur hats whom she recalls from her husband’s town of Berezny. Her bitter gloss, “Meshiach didn’t come,” reflects her later loss of faith. The matter-of-fact tone of the testimony should not hide how desperate such moments of ritual were.

The decision to begin deportations and what was being prepared at Auschwitz

The ghettoization was completed in the region by about the first days of May, and then came a pause of roughly two weeks. The pause was not an accident. It reflected the time needed to get the railway schedule agreed between the Hungarian authorities, Eichmann’s staff, and the German Reichsbahn, and to prepare the receiving end. The first mass transports left Hungary on May 14 and 15, and from then until about July 9 some 437,000 people, in roughly 147 trains, were sent to Auschwitz by Braham’s count. The trains typically carried about three thousand people each, with about four trains a day from the zone being cleared, so the daily rate was on the order of twelve thousand.

At Auschwitz the preparation was extensive. Rudolf Höss returned in early May, around May 8, to take charge of what is sometimes called Aktion Höss, the plan for the Hungarian Jews. The rail spur was extended inside the Birkenau compound, completed in the first days of May, so that trains could run directly to a new ramp between the crematoria, where before they had stopped outside the camp at the old Judenrampe. The Sonderkommando, the prisoner unit that worked the gas chambers and crematoria, was enlarged to some hundreds of men, and the crematoria were repaired and readied. The gas chambers and ovens were still not enough for the pace of arrivals, so in addition a small installation known as Bunker 2 was brought back into use and bodies were burned in open pits.

Another piece of the context matters for a village like hers. Auschwitz was no secret to some people. Two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped on April 7, 1944, and their report on the gassing of Jews reached Slovak and Hungarian Jewish leaders in late April. Two more prisoners, Czesław Mordowicz and Arnošt Rosin, escaped in late May. Jewish leaders in Budapest, notably in the circle around Rudolf Kasztner, had some of this information. It did not reach the rural Jews of Subcarpathia in any usable form, and the authorities actively deceived them. Deportees were told they were being resettled for labor, with the destination given in some places as a camp or work site in Hungary. Later, under SS direction, some arrivals were made to write reassuring postcards, dated from a fictitious “Waldsee,” to be sent home to calm the Jews still waiting. Her statement that “nobody dreamed” they would be gassed, and that she had never heard of Auschwitz, is exactly what the record would predict.

Loading and the journey

On the departure day, gendarmes marched the Jews from the brickyard to the rail siding and loaded them into freight cars. The norm was seventy to eighty or more per car, with the doors sealed from outside and a bucket or two as latrine. The windows were small and barred or wired. Water and food were limited, with the deportees mostly eating what they had brought. Her description of a pot in the car and then a hole cut in the floor or side for relief, and the shame of using it before everyone, appears in virtually every testimony of this deportation. Her remark that people who had lived comfortable lives now had to relieve themselves in front of others is one of the most common observations in these accounts.

The route is also consistent with the record. Trains from Zone I ran west through Hungarian territory to Kassa (Košice), where, as a rule, guard duty passed from Hungarian gendarmes to German police, and then north through Slovakia and into Poland by one of two lines, one by way of Žilina and the border at Zwardoń, the other by way of Prešov and Muszyna. Her sense that they traveled “through Poland” and heard from a Polish railway worker that the destination was Auschwitz matches the second half of the journey. The trip took two to four days. That first stage, in Hungarian hands, was the only part during which escapes were at all plausible. She remembers that a man named Zwi Kalstein cut a hole in the car and escaped, reaching Palestine by way of Romania. Escapes from the Hungarian stages did occur, though they were rare, and Romania, an ally of Germany until August 1944 but with a very different treatment of Jews, was a known destination for runaways from the northeast. Her explanation of why no one went with him is the same one she gives for not hiding: family bonds, fear of reprisals, and the absence of any idea of where the train was going.

One of the saddest elements of her account, her regret at rationing bread to her eleven-year-old brother on the train because she believed they would return, illustrates something the historical record explains. Hungarian authorities told deportees they were going to work and to bring food for a few days, so people rationed. The deception worked through ordinary prudence.

Arrival, the ramp, and the selection

Because of the schedule of Hungarian trains, with several arriving each day, her description of the ramp as daytime with no immediate sense of what was waiting is consistent with the record. Arrivals were around the clock in this period, so night arrivals are described by many survivors, and Elie Wiesel’s Night, set in the Máramaros ghettos of Sighet, features flames in the sky on arrival after dark. Hers was a daytime arrival.

Her date for the last sight of her father, the second day of Shavuot, falls on Monday, May 29, 1944, since Shavuot began on Sunday, May 28. That would mean her transport arrived at the late end of the Zone I schedule, in the last days of May. I can’t tell you from memory exactly which Ungvár transport this was. The schedule had trains leaving the northeastern ghettos from mid-May into early June, so a late-May arrival is plausible, but I’d want to check Braham’s transport tables or the Auschwitz Chronicle before treating the date as settled.

Her description of the unloading includes the doors opening, the order to leave belongings, and being taken in groups on trucks. By late May the trains ran onto the new ramp inside Birkenau, and arrivals walked from the ramp. Trucks were used chiefly for the old, the sick, and small children, and later for the many who were simply driven toward the crematoria. That she recalls trucks suggests either that her group was moved by them in some stage, or that she is recalling vehicles that were visible during the processing. The recollection of being brought to the camp in groups by truck from the station does not contradict the record, but it is not the typical image.

At the ramp, SS men and prisoner details shouted and drove the arrivals into lines. The Rampenkommando and the prisoners of the “Kanada” detail, who sorted the luggage left behind, worked at the ramp in striped clothes. They were forbidden to speak to arrivals, yet many managed to whisper warnings. The man in stripes she recalls, who answered her question about where they were with “Arbeit macht frei,” told her to try to go to the right, to give the children away, and not to ask questions because he was not allowed to talk. This is a nearly textbook instance of such a warning. Survivors across many transports recall prisoners whispering to leave small children with older women, to say they were older than they were, or to try for the right. The slogan, “Arbeit macht frei,” was on the gate of Auschwitz I, not at the Birkenau ramp, and her mention of it is a common conflation of the camp complex’s best-known symbol with the place where she actually arrived. It matters because it shows the symbol absorbing later knowledge into the memory of the first moment.

The selection was conducted by SS physicians, with Josef Mengele among those on ramp duty, along with others rotating in the Hungarian period, such as Fritz Klein, Heinz Thilo, and Hans König. Her image of Mengele as a handsome man standing and directing “go, go, go” with a gesture matches many survivors’ descriptions of his elegant, almost casual manner. Eager to avoid disorder, SS men generally kept the proceedings calm and rapid, and a brief farewell was sometimes tolerated if it caused no delay. Her father asking permission to kiss them and being allowed, and his blessing, is not unique among the testimonies. It is also not verifiable. I’d regard it as a memory that may well be accurate and that is told in the form that has held it for forty-seven years.

The logic of the selection explains how her family was divided. For women, the SS generally sent to the left, and so to the gas chambers, women with small children, the visibly ill, and the elderly, and sent to the right those between about sixteen and forty-five who appeared able to work. For men the rule was similar, with the work age somewhat broader. Of the Hungarian Jews who arrived in this period, a large majority, around three quarters, were killed within hours. Roughly a quarter or fewer were admitted to the camp, though percentages varied by transport. Her mother, at forty-four and without a small child at her side, was allowed through, and the daughters, in their twenties and late teens, were obvious workers. Her father, at forty-five, was at the margin but could probably have passed, and she says outright that he would have survived had he not gone with the old people. He chose to go with her eleven-year-old brother, whom the SS would have sent left. This father-and-child pairing recurs throughout testimonies. Edith Eger, deported from Kassa in the same weeks, describes Mengele sending her mother to the left and telling her the mother was going for a shower. Gisella Perl, the Sighet physician, and Miklós Nyiszli, the physician from Nagyvárad who worked with Mengele, describe the same ramp. Lili Jacob Meier found the album of SS photographs known as the Auschwitz Album, which documents the arrival of a Carpatho-Ruthenian transport in late May or early June 1944, with the lines, the selection, and the processions toward the crematoria. Those images are the closest thing we have to a visual record of what Lanka describes.

The smell she and her mother noticed was real. With the crematoria overloaded, bodies were burned in open pits, and the smoke by day and the glow by night were noted by nearly everyone who arrived in the Hungarian period. Her mother’s remark that people were being burned, and her own refusal to believe that one human being could do that to another, is typical of how new arrivals tried to rationalize what they smelled. The exchange she remembers, in which a veteran prisoner told a crying girl that her mother was in the smoke from the chimney, matches the blunt style in which long-term prisoners often confronted new arrivals, a harshness she herself says made them angry at the messenger.

Processing and the first days in C Lager

After the ramp, those admitted were marched to the camp’s Zentralsauna, where they were stripped, shaved, showered, and given whatever clothes were available. Her account is characteristic: heads shaved, a single dress and no underwear, no stockings, and in her case the shoes her father had made, which she was allowed to keep. The loss of the hand-knit sweater her brother had paid for is a small, concrete instance of the dispossession.

Her account of seeing her mother naked for the first time deserves mention for its cultural meaning. In an Orthodox household of that region, modesty was strict, and married women covered their hair with a wig, a sheitel. Her mother had worn one, and the shaving revealed hair gone gray beneath it. Her mother’s response, that God had punished her daughter’s hair by taking it, and her daughter’s blunt reply asking where God was, is a vivid scene. It shows a break between devout parent and a child already losing faith at that moment, and it prefigures the grayness that would later mark her mother for selection.

She was sent to what she calls C Lager, the sector Birkenau BIIc. In the spring of 1944 it began to receive large numbers of Hungarian women. Her description of the barracks, with three-tiered wooden bunks packed with twelve, fourteen, and fourteen women on the three levels, and splinters working into the flesh, is consistent with the conditions in these overcrowded barracks, where women slept packed together and turned as a group. She notes that no one had blankets. She is also right that many women in BIIc were not tattooed. Large numbers of Hungarian women passed through in the summer of 1944 without being registered, because the volume overwhelmed the registration process and because many were destined to be shipped to labor sites in the Reich. Those chosen for particular work, such as kitchen duty, were registered and given numbers, which fits her account that she could have had a tattoo and better food by taking kitchen work but declined so as not to be separated from her mother and sister. Her description of C Lager as an extermination camp where people were being destroyed all the time reflects her later understanding, but its substance is right. BIIc was a place of constant selections.

The routine she remembers includes the Zählappell, the roll call, with standing in the cold in the early morning, a slice of bread and black coffee, a half liter of soup once a day, and hours on end with nothing to do. These are the standard rhythms of the women’s camp in this period. The camp as a whole was in a state of overload, with tens of thousands of new women crowded into barracks never built for them. I leave the stone-chopping detail, the Blockowa, the Kapo incident, the later selections, and the removal of her mother for the next phase.

One further point concerns her narrative technique and bears on how to read the first interview day. In the first session the departure from the family at the ramp and the scene of her mother’s removal at a later selection are told in close sequence and partly overlap, so a reader could take them as simultaneous. The second session, on October 19, separates them clearly. The mother was with the daughters for months and was taken only in October. This matters for Phase 3, and it warns that the two interview days must be read together.

Overall assessment of the testimony for this phase

On the large structure, her testimony is reliable and in places remarkably precise. The no-Germans-in-the-villages observation, the “day after Passover” start of the roundup, the two-stage concentration, the brickyard ghetto, the confiscations, the deception about the destination, the conditions in the sealed car, the passage through Poland, the daytime arrival, the ramp prisoner’s whispered warning, the selection into lines of five, the father and child going left, the smell of burning flesh, the shaving and the single dress, and the tiered bunks of C Lager all match the documentary and survivor record. Where she departs from it, the departures are the usual ones, such as the “Arbeit macht frei” conflation, the possible compression of the ghetto’s sequence of departures into weekly selections, and the trucks. The Shavuot date is a strong anchor that points to the end of May. She is least specific, as most survivors are, about dates in the ghetto and about the numbers involved.