- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Robert B., who was born in Budapest, Hungary, an only child. He recalls his large, close extended family; living with his mother; attending a secular school; adoption by a paternal uncle; his uncles and mother apprenticing him as a car mechanic; working in a garage; draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion in about 1943; transport to a munitions factory; assignment to the garage; receiving a permit to visit home; assignment to another camp; slave labor digging trenches; a three-week visit to Budapest; inhuman slave labor pulling a floating bridge in early 1944; believing he would die; escaping with a friend; hiding with local strangers; reporting themselves to the police as lost; walking to join their company that was en route to Ukraine; escaping with another friend in March, posing as Hungarian soldiers; returning home by train; imprisonment; his mother's visit; hospitalization for two months; release in October; learning his mother had been deported (she did not survive); staying with an aunt who was married to a non-Jew; hiding in a factory with an uncle until February 1945, then in a physician's home; liberation by Soviet troops; opening a garage with a friend; smuggling people to Austria for Beriḥah and also for payment; arrest in December 1948; imprisonment for about eight months; restarting his smuggling business; arrest; escaping with a friend to Austria; living in displaced persons camps; traveling to Brussels via Luxembourg under a false name; marriage in 1954; the births of two children; building a successful business; and writing a book about his experiences. Mr. B. reads his poem based on his experiences at the end of 1944.
- Author/Creator
- B., Robert, 1922-
- Published
- Brussels, Belgium : Fondation Auschwitz, 2000
- Interview Date
- 2000.
- Locale
- Hungary
Budapest (Hungary)
Austria
- Cite As
- Robert B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4248). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Other Authors/Editors
- Draschan, Jürgen, interviewer.
Dippold, Michael, interviewer.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in German.
Related publications: Doktor Gorilla / Róbert Bauer. -- Tel-Aviv : R. Bauer, 1982.
